T w e n t y S i d e d
More Balders Gate 3.
Finally after a few weeks of trying to get past act two, we’ve finally made it to act three. I’ve been way to busy to get into act three, but there are some highlights from this current run so far. Right after the last post, we were going through the Crèche, and apparently neither of us knew that if you mock Vlaakith too much she will kill everyone on the spot. So, we technically lost our run, but due to the fact that neither of us wanted to restart again, we force closed the game. If you close it normally or through the task manager, the game will save first regardless of what you do. But if you turn the power off on your computer, the game can’t save. It’s not ideal, but it seemed fair enough due to the circumstances.
We also had to restart the game another time, but not because of a party wipe out. Halsin died during the same big side quest as last week. Not that he got killed by any story choices or anything like that. We finished part of the quest where you fight off a bunch of enemies while protecting a portal, and to make it a bit easier on ourselves, we cast Spike Growth around the area. After the fight he apparently he decided the best path to leave the area was directly through the spikes, I don’t know if we could’ve continued the quest without him, but it felt bad that he died like that. So we’ve loaded twice in honor mode, where you can’t load. I’m fine with it, but I’d like it if we don’t have to again.
How’s everyone else doing?
Quakecon 2012 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Brotato. I finally realized that I’m going to have to consciously stop playing if I actually want to play anything else. I uninstalled it a couple of times, before deciding that wasn’t going to work and would be bad for the SSD, but it’s still slowed down Brotato looping so I’ve actually managed to play other things a bit. Anyway, I’ve started playing other characters again; I actually really like Glutton, the guy that gains explosive damage whenever he gets a potato.
Demonschool, finally, continues. I’m still only in Week 2, but am still enjoying the charm of the weirdo party members (“there’s no spine I can’t kick!”) I turned the music back on, but am not impressed by it, and will probably turn it back off soon. I’m enjoying this game, and am thinking the only reason I wasn’t playing it before is because Brotato is just too easy to pick up.
Hundred Line continues, very slowly. After a few hours, I have not reached the second fight. I have reached a cutscene of our
heroprotagonist as a child, in which he promises to be another child’s daddy. It’s made creepier by the voice actor being the same post-pubescent person playing Adult Protagonist, they should have got a child for those lines. There’s also a few mysteries unfolding that may or may not be predictable, time will tell. So far it’s more a game in genres I enjoy, that I hope to enjoy once it gets rolling, rather than a game I’m enjoying. But it’s not making me want to actively stop, so at least there’s that.4TheWords. I realized if I’m going to bring up Brotato every week I might as well bring up 4TheWords every week too. (Not sure whether I plan to talk about both or ignore both. This week it’s talking about both.)
Closing in on six months of daily writing, and my initial four long stories have been whittled down to a more manageable… seven. Eight if you count the Short Story file. Quantity has taken a big hit; gone are the 2,000 word daily averages with 8,000 word spikes, here are the 500 word barely-keeping-the-streak-alive lurches and the maybe-today-I’ll-break-1,000 weekend “pushes”. But words continue to be 4’ed, and in-game quests continue to be continued. It’s the most writing I’ve ever done, and the best I’ve felt in a long time.
Underground Garage 1.0 is still a buggy mess of a game. Races that do not unlock even though the requirements are met. Missions that cannot be completed because even with the best tuning parts the required horse power is not reachable with the this really big engine that fits in the car. And driving physics are laughably bad. Touch the rear end of an opponents car and fly away.
On the other hand: Palworld. I didn’t expected much after playing Craftopia from the same developer. But the early access of Palworld is so much more polished than its predecessor in every aspect. I have a second base running now and reached level 30. So it might be a good idea to tackle the next story boss. But I want to unlock crafting lv4 pal-spheres first, which needs me hunting electro pals to harvest electro essence. Finding electro pals is the challange. There are some in the red and yellow forest, but they are rare and I need at least fifty of those essences to research electro engineering and build a generator.
Well, at the end of this month there’s a new Resident Evil launching, so in preparation for it I’m replaying the older titles, so that’s pretty much where all my free time is going. One criticism I have about the modern games in the series is that once you unlock guns with infinite ammo they become super boring. The older games had them too, but they were much harder to unlock and they were generally more cumbersome to use, so they didn’t feel as OP. In the new games they make it all so easy that there’s no challenge whatsoever. That’s why I prefer to ditch those in the item box and leave them around perhaps for an annoying boss or two.
Played through The Drifter. It’s an adventure game. In it, the main character gets the ability to travel back a few minutes in time after dying, so whenever you fail badly enough it’s diegetic. A lot of the story is about this, as well as trying to track down a serial killer and maybe resolving some of his many family issues the original reason he’s in the area is to go to his mom’s funeral after spending years away from his mom and sister and ex-wife. I found the story to be pretty compelling, overall.
As I said, it’s an adventure game, so the puzzles involve rubbing the correct object on the correct other object. Generally the answers in this one actually make sense, not a lot of absurd moon logic, but I still did get stuck a few times figuring out what particular choice I could make from what was available. Still, generally a good example of the genre.
Also, despite what I said last week I played more Diablo IV. I did try changing classes and I’m not sure it really helped, though the Sorceress flamethrower feels very powerful. I can’t imagine it scaling well into higher difficulties because you have to stand still for a while to use it but whatever, it’s fun now.
And Mewgenics came out today. Cat breeding simulator/roguelite turn based tactics game by the creators of Binding of Isaac. I predict that this will eat all of my free time for quite a while in the future. It seems to have a lot of depth to it. Also, it is deeply, deeply weird, which is not surprising. If you haven’t seen any of the ads for this, well, they’re a heck of a trip. I did not expect the game to contain songs with words (but some of them were in the trailers so maybe I should have). Also, if you idle the cats will meow along.
Your cats have active and passive abilities, stats, equippable items, classes, and sometimes depression. A lot of the stuff you get is pretty limited time use – each cat can only go on one mission, and while you keep items after each mission, you have limited storage space and items don’t last forever. It looks like the main meta progression system involves giving people cats. A lot of cats. Makes sense.
Adventures in Hollow Knight.
I’ve nailed the big guy on the top right of the crossroads, guarding the grub, first try after spending two hours running back and forth and then taking a break for a week or so. Seems to be important, to take breaks.
I also got the Gruz Mother in a few tries, and am now bashing my head against the False Knight. I also lost 250ish moneys bc I insisted trying to nail the big guy on the way back there, and failed every single time I tried, and AAAAHHHHHHH.
Anyway. Let’s see how much longer I can stand this.
Playing Suikoden II and getting in a few runs in the morning with the Olympics on while I’m off. I can still pretty much only tolerate it for an hour or two a day, although it varies, as after a big battle or sequence I’m usually tired of it and want to quit but this morning I wanted to get to the next city and had some stuff to do before then and so was more willing to play it, but quit anyway. And today there was a “boss” battle which was basically just a blocking boss and not related to the story at all but I got slaughtered the first time and managed to survive the second time using my Water runes for protection and healing instead of going all out on attacks, and still had one character knocked out. But then the battles against the soldiers soon after were trivial. I might be underlevlled a bit, I guess?
This time around I’m putting more emphasis on kitting my characters out with runes, which is the magic system of the game. Instead of learning spells from a spellbook or something, you buy and attach runes that do various things, like Water for healing and Fire for group attacks, and so on and so forth. These runes are in fact key components of the world, as there are the 27 (I think) True Runes which extend the bearer’s life and play a key role in the plot, as the main character usually ends up with one of them and others are borne by the antagonists and sometimes by allies.
The army battles are different here than in Suikoden, as you don’t have the rock-paper-scissors model and in general only control your own unit, which makes them a bit easier to manage. I think the story here is a bit better, with a few more emotional hits, but each segment of it still moves as quickly as it did in Suikoden. They also added a detective here to help you figure out how to recruit people, which is nice. But I still feel that Suikoden III did almost everything better.
Breaking Rimworld, in an enjoyable way.
See, I’m well into mods now. Which isn’t hard, because there are so many, and some of them are really fantastic. There’s a whole series called Vanilla Expanded that is almost on a par with the DLC in terms of quality; not always adding content, but expanding greatly on what’s in the base game.
Actually, scrub that, one of the earliest mods the Vanilla Expanded guys made simply ended up being integrated into the game after negotiations with the devs, because it was so popular and enhanced what was there.
Anyway. Some time ago, they made a mod called Operation Deadlife, which offered a new series of quests: travel to an old military bunker full of resources, venture inside and get out with what you can safely carry away…but the bunker is pitch black and full of endlessly-spawning zombies, there’s way more resources than you can carry on a reasonably-sized caravan, and no food stores.
So yes, there’s lots and lots of valuable loot, loads of potential wealth…but gathering it is dangerous, slow, and dispiriting for your colonists. As you search, you can hear groaning and banging as the zombies batter through walls to get at you – and if you overreach, you *will* starve to death or get killed. And then you’ve got to bring all that loot back home…
…thing is, that mod was made before the Oddysey DLC, where your base can now be a starship. Bunker-delving is a much better prospect when you’ve literally got your base and all its resources parked at the bunker entrance. Hellooo wealth!
Not that it’s all been going my way. I did have to reload a save at one point because there were just SO MANY zombies, and even with healthy, calm, well-armed colonists I got overwhelmed. The undead are remarkably smart about running past the melee frontline to go for my ranged colonists so they can’t shoot…or maybe there’s just so many undead that they know they can’t get at the frontline and were looking for other targets.
Still, it’s been fun, very different from the standard Rimworld gameplay, and of course being this rich does affect the base game quite a lot. And the best bit is that there’s hints of there being more to Operation Deadlife, that I haven’t discovered yet. Yep, this mod comes with a story, apparently.
I played a smidge more Grounded at one point, but I’ve been real close to the end for a while now. Entire yard has been cleared aside from a couple caves with Black Widows, just need to beat the boss in the last lab, then whatever final tasks the game might give me after that.
Instead I’ve been collecting mods for Cyberpunk 2077. Which, spending hours flipping through mod after mod after mod, I realize is a bit like reading DnD books: checking out every possible addition in detail, even if you know you’d never really use it, just because. And slowly building a collection of small tweaks that customize the game to your liking without doing things you dislike, essentially a minor form of game design. Of course this still has the usual problem of computer game mods vs “pen and paper” DnD, where you’ll have the infuriating problem of people making *almost* exactly what you want, but tied to something you hate, for no reason, why are those not separate things? And why did the guy making visible weapon holsters only make spots for three weapons when you equip *four* weapons in this game? The backpack literally has room for two large weapons! (Actually I think I figured that out, ’cause the backpack is only one item, but that just means you split it into two items. Maybe there’s not enough slots in the extended equipment?). I think I found a knife sheath that goes low enough on the leg I could carry a knife, which I’d never use. . .
As for BG3 reloads: as I’ve mentioned, that’s exactly how I actually managed to enjoy Noita for a while and Tales of Maj’Eyal in the first place (well they didn’t require hard resetting the computer but still). I also frankly don’t see how you’re supposed to play Ironman seriously anyway, because the normal hard mode already gives all enemies bogus bonuses- I guess the point is supposed to be that their extremely not-5e items and the extra mind flayer powers and rest spamming are supposed to make up for it, but none of that adds up until you’re significantly into Act 2.
And of course, in the modding spirit, after the post about wacky characters I’ve been sitting here going “ya know, they have tentacle assets in there, I could in theory with who knows how many hours figure out a way to have a character with visible added tentacles. IIRC there’s actually several abberant-themed things in the game already (usually making a number of bad choices I’d also want to mod out), the big problem would be the set of summon spells: BG3 has plenty of cool things you could in theory summon, but their implementation of summoning is completely broken and held back only by the sheer lack of individual variety in summon spells you can cast (instead of being concentration with max 1 hour, each summon spell just lasts forever and only conflicts with itself). So first you’d need to nerf the summons into the ground, and then figure out what’s actually appropriate, and hey look its the same reason I stopped any significant work on my 3.x stuff: in order to balance summon spells you need to first re-confirm the balance of the entire rest of the game, at all levels, which requires establishing the standard for the entire rest of the game, which requires defining at the absolute minimum the standard party at all levels, and oh look MM1 doesn’t even *have* standard monsters past 12th level or so. No wonder people who only play at those levels say CR is unworkably broken, it by definition can’t work because there was no body of monsters made as a baseline in the first place!
BG3 doesn’t have the latter problem of course- more than a full set of monsters, it’s an entirely predefined module. But it remains that I find BG3’s summons both pleasantly convenient, and inarguably overpowered in that convenience, which I don’t want to get rid of because it’s more fun. But they basically do just go back to the classic “high level spellcasters have minions stronger than animal companions and possibly even the Fighter, because spells” problem. Actually making them Concentration (still a terrible word choice) for 1 hour precludes using Haste, but then the game does give you plenty of ways around that. And of course there’s a good chance one or more of the large mechanical overhauls already messes with that, so one would need to decide on those first, . . .