T w e n t y S i d e d
More Balders Gate 3. So far things are going significantly better than last time, we managed to save the kid surrounded by Harpy’s. Unlike our last honor mode, where he died on the first turn, and everyone kept getting stunned by the singing, and for some reason someone from the grove, who is not supposed to be in that area, got into the fight, wild shaped into a badger, and got stuck on a tree.
We got some extra time to play this week, due to a snow storm, so yesterday we went through all of the underdark and even “fought” Grym by hanging out on the stairs above, and throwing random garbage at him, and since he’s weak to blunt damage, and physics is a little goofy, throwing a piece of rotting cheese did 32 damage, and a heavy crossbow does 2.
After I’m done writing this, we’ll be off to the Crèche, and hopefully not dying.
What is everyone doing this week?
Steam Summer Blues
This mess of dross, confusion, and terrible UI design is the storefront the big publishers couldn't beat? Amazing.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.
The Brilliance of Mass Effect
What is "Domino Worldbuilding" and how did it help to make Mass Effect one of the most interesting settings in modern RPGs?
Played a bunch of Deadzone: Rogue. It’s a roguelite shooter and it is generally pretty fun but some areas are lacking. The writing is… not good. The protagonist definitely wants to be taken seriously and I just can’t. You find logs, and some of them are the standard apocalypse log and some of them are… influencers whining that the coffee isn’t working or whatever. Presumably those are meant to be funny but they didn’t land for me. I did enjoy the reveal that
you’re just a cloned brain in a mechanized suit.The meta progression system also has some issues – there’s some “advanced items” that you can upgrade, but there are 40 of them and each has their own separate upgrade material, which means that I just went to the page and hit “upgrade all” and didn’t really get any positive feelings from it. There’s also other upgrades to health and damage and so on, and you do actually have to make some choices there at least, but the game did something that probably annoyed me way more than it should have – there’s a terminal you can go to in the hub to open the upgrade window, but also every single time you die it popped up a window saying “you can upgrade stuff, do you want to?” And that just… really irritated me. Either open it by default (because I always hit yes) or let me go to the terminal myself. At least once you cap things out it stops.
The gunplay is fun. There’s a broad variety of enemies, some of whom are way tougher than others. The shield guys are jerks. Your guns all do elemental damage, and early on you get an augment that pushes you towards various ways to play – crit focused, headshot focused, elemental focused, and all of those have variants based on aiming, not aiming, using a lot of ammo, short range, or long range. Aiming and long range feel a bit redundant. You also get items that give a wide variety of bonuses, and perks that focus on a specific element or give you a helper bot or buff melee.
Speaking of which, the melee build is incredibly satisfying and probably overpowered. The melee perk adds extra melee damage and gives you stealth every time you kill an enemy. On hard difficulty (there are higher difficulties but you have to do hard first and hard is rough enough), you can one shot basic enemies trivially, 2 shot most things that aren’t elites, and there are a lot of damage buffs you can stack on top of that. Which means you can just kill everything except the toughest enemies (and exploding or aerial enemies) without ever being in any danger. So yeah, kind of busted. But fun!
The Colonies expansion for (the digital version of) Terraforming Mars released this week so I’ve been giving that a go. Colonies is one of my favorite TM expansions and I’ve been waiting literally years for this to happen (I actually racked up what is probably my highest score ever on my second playthrough with it). Mechanically it adds ways to swap (some) resources for others, which can help with the particular engine you’re trying to build (though there’s some randomness as to what’s for sale each game). It’s not a major game-changing expansion like Turmoil, but I like it as a sort of light, thematic one.
The digital version of TM has a certain infamous reputation for gaining a bunch of new bugs of various degrees of game-breakingness with every release so I was a bit trepidatious trying it out, but I haven’t actually run into any yet for once. (Some reviews of Colonies have listed others so it’s not bug-free, but it’s nice not to have encountered any so far.)
Continuing Ruined King. I’m now at the underground temple in Graywater. I wish the dungeon abilities of the different characters would find more use. Until now I used Braums ability once and none of the others.
And I started Palworld. Much less jank than Craftopia from the same developer. And now that I have a rare crossbow I finally do some damage myself to bosses. Not needing to rely on my Pals.
Also Underground Garage got its 1.0 release, so I restarted that. The differences to Early Access are not easily visible. The story is still not presented well, the environment is empty. The racing is better implemented, with mission related races. Repair jobs now need you to drain and replace fluids. There is one new car (VW Golf IV) And that’s all the differences I could see within 2 hours.
In coop StarRupture continues. Now we are in desperate need to find blueprints to advance in the game. So exploration is key now.
Analog I did a “real” mission in MIND MGMT. Much more advanced and difficult for the agents. Now I could teach it to others, but soloing it to learn the rules – its not easy to manage anymore what one side or the other should know or not.
Grounded continues. I’ve finished all four of the labs and now the game continues into the Upper Yard with tier 3 gear finally opening up. I keep having not-fun exploring at night because I’m at the opposite end of the map from my base and even though I could try making a lean-to and just skipping the night, that burns so much more food and water than running around doing stuff it makes no sense. Got some ziplines set up, but my base is still on the opposite end of the map from the area I’m supposed to be clearing now (termites).
Did one of the Mixr events, turns out those are no joke. Been a while since I’ve had to defend something against waves and waves of bugs, what is this, DRG? I’ve started seeing some trap schematics though so that should help, particularly since the gas arrows only have so much DPS and enemy hit points will just keep getting higher- there’s 8 to clear and open a door for something.
I’m sick to goddamn death of fighting antlions and ladybird larva. I also found out that the ‘flavored’ (think elemental) weapon upgrade materials are not made from high level bars, they have to be infused before that, so my entire stock of materials which I’d converted into bars is now nigh-useless. Guess which enemies I have to fight through to mine out more stuff?
Not a lot of actual gaming, but I have dug up an old laptop and threw Linux Mint on it, in an attempt to check if maybe now the time has come to abandon Windows (gesticulates vaguely to the ongoing enshittification of MS and the overall political situation), and… it’s a mixed bag.
Things feel a lot easier than during my last attempts in university, many years ago, especially with regards to gaming. And there one runs into a “typical linux issue”, where things are suddenly so utterly convoluted that one thinks “yea maybe not”.
But anyway, a new drive is coming to back up windows onto, and then I’ll probably attempt the Very Scary Move of moving my desktop…
Good luck! I made the move back in 2014 from Windows 7 and have generally not regretted it. It hasn’t been (and won’t be) completely smooth sailing, but with everything I’ve heard about Windows in the past decade I think I’ve had fewer computer-related headaches on the whole. (I’ve had to start using it again for work this past year and it’s been culture shock coming back to it with all the changes.)
I do think that we tend to underestimate the effort it takes to learn a new operating system; it’s really more akin to learning a new language (maybe one from the same language family, but still). For those who (like me) grew up “monolingual” in regards to operating systems, the amount of work it took to learn one in the first place is mostly invisible, same as how we don’t remember the work it took to master our mother tongue. But from personal experience I think you’ll find the awkwardness is worth it in the end, and it does get easier the longer you keep at it.
Tiny bit of Demonschool. It might be easier than I was giving it credit for; I accidentally skipped one of my three turns because I forgot which buttons did what, and it turned out that was fine and I still got the high rank for the fight with only two. Still only made it half an hour and two fights, and still don’t know why. It did occur to me that I have the game muted, which I probably shouldn’t. Is that enough to kill the compulsion? I doubt it, I think it’s the silliness; you need a serious world to contrast the weird characters. If everyone’s weird it’s just mush.
(Did I mention I watched the recent Superman movie? Didn’t care for it. Everyone’s weird.)
Metaphor got dusted off for a bit; my new two-screen setup lets me watch TV while playing games, so now I know that in the time it takes to watch two full episodes of Castle, I can very nearly get out of the prolonged opening cutscene of Brilehaven and back to the part where the game remembers the gameplay. That game. Loves. Its cutscenes.
Got in another short run of Suikoden II. This time I ended up volunteering to infiltrate the enemy camp because the only uniforms they had were the Youth Brigade ones that I used to wear, and ended up meeting the princess or whatever and then losing the best friend who wears the other half of the rune I wear when he stayed behind to delay the enemy and, at least so far, hasn’t returned. The game is again pretty bad at telling you what to do, as when we were made and had to flee what I had to do was enter the princess’ tent which was only one tent of a few tents that had an opening that you could try to enter but was the only one that you COULD enter, and doing that was the ONLY way to advance the plot, so it took me a while to figure that out.
The personality of the best friend is actually somewhat interesting, because for reasons given in the game he’s much more vengeful than you at least can be and so it seems like that is setting up for something. I’ll have to see how it progresses as the game goes on.
Still going through Avowed. I maintain that the exploration is fantastic and the combat is really fun (though I could do with less spongy enemies), but the writing is certainly a major issue. It feels like every single character’s dialogue is nothing but lore dump with little to zero characterization. I hear this game is set in the Pillars of Eternity universe, so maybe if you’ve played those games all this will be fascinating to you, but I find it excruciating. I’ve heard hours upon hours of lore and I have yet to retain any of it. At this point I might as well start skipping the dialogue because it’s pointless to listen to it.
I have officially 100%ed Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I have scoured every area, defeated every enemy (including the hidden ones), solved every puzzle, obtained every weapon, pictos, cosmetic, collectible and achievement, including the ones from the DLC. Despite all that I still sort of feel the urge to replay the whole thing. It’s very rare that a game does that for me. What an experience.
I also, just out of curiosity, tried the just launched infamous Highguard. I’m not big on PVP games, but I’ve had some fun with a few in the past. This is not one of those. I find the whole experience a mishmash of disparate elements that wouldn’t go well together even if they weren’t undercooked, but they are. This game really needed a couple of years of beta-testing and as far as I know it had none.
Still filling out more corners in Silksong. I want to say that I could head into the Act 2 endgame any time I wanted, but the truth is that there’s apparently an utterly brutal gauntlet room that you have to pass through for one of the three melodies and I’m not feeling up to it yet. Maybe another mask and a little more room on the silk spool, if I can find them. And some more tools. And anything else I can lay my hands on that might give me an edge.
Also still noodling around a bit with Dungeons of Dredmor. I beat the game on easy mode again, but with permadeath turned on; I also filled in a couple of skill achievements. Glad to be done with the inventory-juggling of my Rogue Scientist run, although the death ray was definitely a big plus in the final fight against Dredmor himself.
Oh, and yesterday was a snow day here, which is an amazing stroke of good luck, because it was also the day that the new Terraria 1.4.5 update came out. I’m trying the skyblock seed and it’s a bit of a grind, to be honest, but I am enjoying the new slime varietals and the QoL upgrades to stuff like the crafting menu. I might leave off the skyblock run for a bit and just go work through a bunch of the new achievements with a “normal” run or two… although it looks like a couple of them will demand using specific game modes rather than just a “standard” run through one seed or another. That said, it’s back to regular work tomorrow, so Terraria might have to go back to being an occasional reward for myself on evenings or weekends.
I do find it a little weird that both Silksong and the new Terraria update were long-anticipated products that dropped almost without warning on a seemingly-random day. I guess the commonality is that each is produced by a wildly successful team that doesn’t really need to put much effort into marketing or PR, and which has been prioritizing the quality of their product over any given release date?
I have been playing a metric tonne of Darktide since a friend got me into it. I’ve almost maxed out the base levels for all 4 of the main classes and I’m engaging with some of the trickier difficulties and mechanical aspects now.