T w e n t y S i d e d
This week is more Balders Gate 3.
We started a new honor run because there was a bug with one of the big side quests in act two, where you’re supposed to help break the curse on the land. It’s completely optional, but it seems weird to not do it. Unfortunately one of the NPC’s that is needed was buggy, and in an attempt to fix him, he perished. He’s not supposed to be able to die. We also messed up a small interaction in act one, that apparently leads to less of the tieflings making it to act two. So we decided to restart again.
We have been playing with mods, mostly just cosmetics, but last run and this run we’ve had a mod to increase the party size, so we can have five people. The fifth person isn’t there to do anything, just to be there in case something unfair happens and wipes the party out. So far only one fight needed a res. One fight in the underdark, where you’re on a boat to get to the forge. One of the duergar apparently get’s a smoke powder bomb, which he proceeds to throw on our small raft leading to a (unfair, in my opinion) party wipe. We also got a mod to make oath braking not really annoying. For some reason it’s an oath breaking action to kill a Duergar that was has been actively abusing animals and whipping slaves, but it’s not an oath breaking action if you aggro them in dialog first(?). Anyway we’ve just finished the Underdark and are in the exact same place as last week. Onwards towards the Crèche, third times the charm. Sharee! That’s infernal for cheers, or possibly turnip
What’s everyone else doing?
Footnotes:
[1] That’s infernal for cheers, or possibly turnip
Programming Language for Games
Game developer Jon Blow is making a programming language just for games. Why is he doing this, and what will it mean for game development?
Mass Effect 3 Ending Deconstruction
Did you dislike the ending to the Mass Effect trilogy? Here's my list of where it failed logically, thematically, and tonally.
Silent Hill Turbo HD II
I was trying to make fun of how Silent Hill had lost its way but I ended up making fun of fighting games. Whatever.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Still not done with Avowed, but I have more thoughts. Nothing has changed in regards to exploration. I think it’s simply fantastic. You can get to complete sidequests’ objectives without acquiring them just by reaching the necessary areas, as almost nothing is inaccessible once a map is reached (new maps do need story missions to be completed to be reached) and once you find the place where you acquire the sidequest the game reacts to you having completed the objectives ahead of time. One thing I like is that there are conversations you can have with NPCs where you can give different opinions or advice and it doesn’t really carry any reward, it’s there just to add flavor to the world, which goes a long way into making this place feel more real and less gamey. The main story still remains uninteresting, but these interactions add a lot.
Combat is a lot of fun and much deeper than it looks at first. There’s a large number of approaches, but I’ve mostly settled for the wizard path, as this game genuinely makes me feel powerful as a wizard instead of useless like other games do. There’s a lot of incentive on selling or scrapping your gear instead of hoarding it when you don’t need it so you get to upgrade the one you’re actually using. And upgrading it goes a long way into making you stronger and more resilient. The game has a system where you get two weapon loadouts to change from at the push of a button, but I wish you could change your whole equipment this way and not just the weapons, since a lot of the gear affects your stats.
The game has a bunch of companions. A couple of them are temporary but the rest stay with you from the moment you meet them. I’ve seen some dialogue choices implying you can let them go at some points in the story, but I’ve never taken them, so I don’t know if you can get rid of them. I like the companions. They all have different personalities and they might be the only characters in the game who prefer to talk about themselves. NPCs still mostly suffer from an excess of loredumpitis, but companions are more fleshed out the more you talk to them.
One thing I’ll say for this game, it does have a sense of humor. Most of the story is taken seriously, but there are a few characters, quests and background conversations that have elicited a smile, chuckle and even a burst of laughter out of me.
Started the recently released MIO: Memories In Orbit, a cute metroidvania title to continue my ongoing trend. Combat and exploration are fun so far, and you already start with a double jump, which is a nice bonus. It has a couple of interesting ideas. Platforming is a bit on the challenging side, which reminds me of the latest metroidvania I played before this one. The map system is odd in that it’s a normal map but you can so far only access it when in a certain room. That said, the menu implicates you might be able to access it normally later. The game does this thing where you lose currency when you die, which I’m not a fan of, but there’s also the implication there’s a way to skirt through that, still not sure. Not much of the story so far, so I can’t comment on it. We’ll see how it goes.
Also, couldn’t help myself and started another NG+ playthrough of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. I’m not even going to keep mentioning it after this point, I just can’t get sick of this game.
Not that much of gaming, but I have moved both my Desktop and my Surface Go 2 over to Linux (Mint Cinnamon), and boi is it a smoother experience than on my last attempt (15 years ago, to be fair). There were some hitches, some related to installing the right software from a wrong source, some related to bits and pieces missing, but google was mostly helpful in solving those.
My current primary issue is that Discord on the Surface says it’s running in a browser and I cannot change the video input, which is A Problem. The cameras on the surface hardware are not optimally supported, but I can’t even get to a point where shitty image quality would be a problem. If someone knows anything about this general issues… do let me know pls.
What little gaming I did went (a) into the demo of Ad Fundum, which is from the first moments of gameplay pretty much exactly Motherload (a flash game from way back when flash was still a thing. the youngsters don’t know what they’re missing.). I’m not sure I have it in me to run that gameplay loop for an extended amount of time, but it does seem neat.
And also (b) in TR-49, which is a deduction puzzle placed inside a microfilm reader. It’s a cool concept, and I made some progress, and then I ran into a wall. I shall revisit the issue once I am more awake, as all my attempts were made pretty late xD I really like the concept of the thing, but I have absolutely no clue at this point where the story would go. I shall keep you updated, once I am in deeper.
So, apparently GOG isn’t part of CD Projekt anymore? I don’t know if that means I need to make a point of downloading all the games I’ve bought on there.
Panzer Dragoon‘s main thing is it’s a rail shooter where you can shift the camera into the four quadrants around you, and enemies can attack from all sides. I assume it was originally an arcade game, by how difficult level 6 becomes; you’re attacked from every direction, enemies start shooting basically as they appear, and the camera starts making wonky moves that negate your attempts to dodge. Doesn’t help that I keep trying to barrel roll like in Star Fox, which instead spins the camera twice and ends with me facing away from all the incoming damage. At least the game’s got a continue feature. Like, not attached to the credits feature; if you let that run out, you can still continue from the main menu.
Generally the whole thing compares poorly to Star Fox 64; the plot, while kind of fun in how weird it is (as far as I can tell, a floating alien fortress is sending a steampunk army to kill a dragon) has no characters to speak of, and is missing both the banter of teammates and the threats of bosses. The dragon takes up a lot of the screen, and moves slowly, making it hard to see attacks and dodge them. Which you have to do, because apart from shooting things down there are no defensive maneuvers; no barrel rolls, no somersaults, and as far as I can tell no healing. Likewise attack-side, you’ve got a lock-on but no bombs, and with enemies on all sides you’re relying on the radar quite heavily.
(Also the intro sequence is needlessly complex; a nomad watches a dragonrider fly by, then the rider dies and magically fuses the nomad to the dragon. We could have just played the dragonrider.)
One of CD Projekt’s founders bought GOG in December; taking it out of the CD Projekt group.
I didn’t play anything this week, due to there being curling on that I wanted to watch and the fact that I’m taking some time off while the Olympics are on and so will get some time to play then while having the Olympics on in the background. I figure that I’ll finish Suikoden II and then maybe start Persona 3 Reload during that time, and want to create a new character in Dark Age of Camelot and try that out a bit, too.
The cheer of “turnips” reminds me again how disappointed I was that Jan Jansen wasn’t one of the companions brought back from Baldur’s Gate 2. Gnomes have long lives, so it makes more sense than Minsc, and Jan’s humor is very much in line with Larian’s style.
Surprisingly, I’m still playing Silksong. I almost certainly should play less; my sleep has actually suffered a bit. But I’m pretty close to the end of Act 2 and have been able to enjoy another long stretch of the part I actually enjoy: exploration! I’ve found a few bosses (First Sinner, Second Sentinel, Lace) and just didn’t feel like bashing my head against those particular brick walls yet when I prefer scouring the corners for breakable walls, just-barely-manageable jumps, rare NPC interactions, and other fun little secrets. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind if they scaled the boss battles way back and made this stuff into the undisputed focus of the game.
The other big thing is a new playthrough of Terraria to check out the new content now that the long-awaited 1.4.5 patch has come out. It’s okay. Terraria remains one of my favorite, and most-played, games of all time, and it’s nice to have an excuse to revisit it (in unmodded form) while still having some things feel fresh.
Ruined King – A League of Legends story – I’m about to leave the island for the first time. Miss Fortune joined the party and we got the crew to man the ship.
In Underground Garage I sold the VW Golf to buy and rebuild a broken Mustang. So now I own a good ride and have some money left, because repairing parts doesn’t have a cost in this game.
In Palworld I think I hit the grind wall. The next quest leads me to an area of the map where aggressive mobs of pals patrol and human enemies are armed with stun weapons. I’m dying a lot on my way back from the corpse run I discover interesting stuff and die again.
Coop StarRupture continues for now. But my buddy doesn’t like the building/manufacturing side of the game as product lines loose most of their value once a goal is completed. So he wants to explore a lot and as we are undergeared we die a lot, which lead to a lot of even more undergeared corpse runs. And I don’t like the constant freezes and crashes the game has on my 10 year old PC, whenever I open a menu or zoop build platforms. And the game ignoring resurrection chambers for me as not-host and reviving me on the drop pot is also not in favor of my mood.
I finished Deadzone: Rogue. By which I mean I completed the last story level, there’s loads of other levels and difficulties but I’m happy to declare victory. The core gameplay loop continued to be fun, the writing continued to not be. Chapter 4 had a bunch of optional platforming puzzles, which is where I realized that the game had a double jump and an omnidirectional dash (being able to dash straight up really does not matter much in the not particularly vertical rooms that make up the vast majority of the game). And your reward for dealing with first person platforming is… some guy’s logs about eating rocks. Woo.
I also played a bit of Diablo IV. It didn’t really click for me. I wasn’t really interested in the writing, I didn’t feel like I was making strategic decisions in combat, and loot doesn’t mean much when you’re replacing it constantly. I guess Number Go Up just doesn’t mean as much to me as it used to. I’d rather find something that actually affects how I play the game. Possibly all of these things change later in the game (probably not the writing). Being able to respec freely is cool, but I suspect I’m sabotaged there by my choice to play barbarian. It’s hard to distinguish “hit guy with two swords” from “hit guy with a big mace” when you’re just holding down a mouse button, really.
The entire Diablo franchise was ruined for me back in Diablo 2 when a friend wired up a mouse (or possibly it was the driver) to just click continuously, and the whole game became this zenlike activity of slowly pushing a firehose around the screen.