T w e n t y S i d e d
More Balders Gate 3.
Mostly running around doing random side quests, and stabbing cultists. We’ve finally been getting through a bit of the gold we’ve accumulated in the past two acts but not as much as I expected, it doesn’t help that we’ve been robbing every place we go, including a factory, a wizards tower, and a bank.
I have no idea how far through the third act we are, but I assume we’re at least half way through.
Also peen spending the past few days doing a puzzle, not exiting or anything, but it is a good puzzle.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
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.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Quakecon Keynote 2013 Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
Brotato got an update, which added pets, basically mobile turrets. It also added a character that doesn’t get weapons but all the pets scale with all damage types. It’s a pretty hit-or-miss class; if you don’t get enough pets then there’s nothing you can do, but if you do then you stand in the middle of them and your fortress of cats eliminates the field. It’s the least I’ve ever moved a character, including the “don’t move this character” characters. Not my favorite, but way better than the worst classes, and beat both maps in only a couple of attempts.
4TheWords managed to juke me; the main quest needed thirty Yellow Bug Butts, and I thought it would be efficient to start a sidequest that needed Yellow Bugs killed. But upon killing the Bugs and turning in the Butts for the main quest, I realized the sidequest also needed the Butts, and my efficiency was a mirage.
Apart from that, still being dragged forward by the Daily Streak requirement. Over the thickets and through the coals, to grandmother’s couch we crawl.
The Hundred Line is threatening to become interesting. Reached Day 10 of 100, and have actually hit game mechanics. Quite a lot of Persona in it, with the day/night activities and the full day explorations and the character mental stats that are split into two substats for some reason, I assume I need both halves to increase them, and the substats increase by amounts that don’t show on the progress bar. Weapons need crafting parts, as well as mental stats, and at first glance daily exploration is finite; you’ve got a gameboard and each square is one-time use, so no P5-style grinding out enough keys to make the unbreakable lockpick during the third cycle. Also of note; my controller turns off after a bit of inactivity, and pretty much every cutscene has turned it off. Welcome Back to Visual Novels.
The memes in this game are, like, well-curdled. There’s been leet-speek, there’s been a This Is Sparta reference. It’s reminding me of Liam Neeson’s Naked Gun, which also had a weirdly high number of references to the ’90/’00 era. Does it count as future-proofing if the milk arrives spoiled?
Fights are fun. It’s got some Valkyria Chronicles blood in there, where you can spend all your turn energy on the same character if you want but their movement drops way off after the first time. You’ve got a Special bar that can be used for either limit breaks, or battle-long stat increases for individual characters, which is a fun tradeoff. Still early, still heavily limited on which characters can be brought into fights.
The cast is, shall we say an acquired taste. Heavy on the anime cliches. Ima is still the worst character I’ve ever seen, and bear kid is getting pretty close to joining him. One character is just there to bring up Dangan Ronpa constantly. Good times.
With Hotshot and 1/900 I nailed two of the more obnoxious achievements in the Outer Wilds, and in Hollow Knight I think I “finished” the crossroads as far as I currently can and shall pass onwards to some greener pastures now xD
Also, in KCD I have finished the Madonna of Sasau-sidequest and will now, at least briefly, look at the main quest until new distraction markers pop up xD
Mewgenics continues. There’s a lot of game in this game. It’s nice that it occasionally has bosses attack you at home, which gives you a chance to use your favorite cats from previous runs (and a reason to keep them around). It also provides a reason to go on runs with fewer than 4 cats, because levels get distributed evenly so fewer cats means higher levels. I’m curious if a one cat run is possible, you’d end up absurdly high level but it would be quite difficult and some fights I think would be just impossible, there are a few miniboss/boss enemies who will perma CC one of your cats, but you could pick areas without those.
The music really is a highlight. You get the instrumental version throughout the area and then the boss fights bring in the lyrics, and they’re generally quite catchy, albeit disturbing. The boneyard song is about pets dying and it managed to hit me kind of hard. The boneyard boss is annoying, though – it dodges all of your attacks so you literally need to surround it to be able to do any damage.
Playing Suikoden II. I’ve made a bit of progress but was proud of myself for finally kitting out characters with runes — which is the magic system of the game — and then realized that the number of spells you can cast is not per rune, but is instead per character, and so having multiple runes with different spells is good for flexibility but doesn’t let you cast MORE spells, which is what I wanted. I also found that the “dungeon” areas — which are often outdoor areas like forest or mountain paths — tend to be aimed more at whittling you down by making you use resources — spells, healing potions, etc — after every battle so that when you hit the boss you don’t have much left. On Easy, I can beat every battle without much risk — and can often just pound on them — but I’d need to use healing potions and abilities to bring up my health after, which might mean I run out since I can only hold so much in my inventories at a time.
The plot is a bit deeper and a bit more emotional than “Suikoden”, but it still moves rather quickly. The world is also far more open with more to do in it, but like with “Suikoden” I find that I’m getting a bit tired of the game and don’t really want to explore the trading or recruitment that you can find in the open world. A big part of that might just be my mood: if I had more time I might be more willing to explore it, but with less time I more want to get through it than explore that. And the game STILL makes me want to play “Suikoden III” more than this game.
I have finished Encased some two weeks ago. It ended up being a bit of a disappointment. Perhaps the reason lies in it being a Kickstarter game but after the first few locations built up the range of sidequests, the multilayered reputation system, the many dialogue options and different (including some more creative) ways to approach the quests… it is very obvious the studio ran out of either drive or money to polish the second half of the game to anwyhere near that level and it turned out rather bare bones, particularly unfortunate since it’s only in that part that you get to really interact with something like half of the game’s factions. To be fair the ending offers a wide variety of choices, even if some of them are head-scratchers in how they work out and I very much respect that until the very end the game respects the player enough to let them use their skills and I essentially stealthed the whole final gauntlet. I still do not regret playing it and I would rather take four or ten of these games over something focus group driven, just unfortunate this one turned out undercooked.
I have also finally played Firewatch. Which is a game you’d think I’d have played already seeing how I generally like walking sims but it was somehow never “the right time”. I can definitely see it being born of the walking sim trend, if this game was made today it would probably have more of the “job sim” elements. Like, you’d actually be doing more things relating to cleanup and securing the forest from fire hazards with the story being spread a bit thinner. But, talking about the game as is I liked it a lot. The exploration was enjoyable (and very good use of light, filters and effects to make the map feel different in different stages of the story), good voiceacting, nice building of tension even if I didn’t love the resolution of the big mystery. I can see why it is one of the big names in the genre.
Last but not least started Kingdom Come: Deliverance (the first one). I feel like I do not know enough about history to fully appreciate everything the game is doing but it has that delightful Eurojank feel, like, I can smell the original Gothic underneath it all. I’m a bit surprised it caught on as much as it did because the mechanics initially feel a bit clunky and hostile, even if a big part of it is on purpose seeing how you are meant to start largely unskilled and even a few levels in a skill make a difference. Anyway, it’s still a bit early for me to say much so I’ll probably have something more to share in a couple of weeks.
Gathering of Cyberpunk 2077 mods continues. Folder is approaching 400 files, though some of those are overhead rather than individual things, and actually that’s not counting one of the sub-folders. Point is it’s a lot of stuff. I’ve got one more author on the list of connections (people linking other people’s pages thanks to collabs and help), at which point I’ll change tracks from clothing and whatnot and see about quests and mechanical changes. I’ve already seen the survival and cyberware/humanity mods, which are more hardcore than I’m looking for, and the one that makes gangers roam the world and occasionally have fights break out in other territories (but I like nice peaceful drives and have several gangs that I refuse to not antagonize), but there could be more. I did add one that makes people react to you running into them sooner, and you to them, which could be neat or tiresome.
I robbed the bank in BG3 as well. Absolutely cleaned it out; emptied every vault and got away clean. Then, days later, when I was exploring the city, I jumped from boat to boat in the harbour and somehow ended up at the bank’s back door, and they immediately raised the alarm and sent the guards chasing after me. I was so amused that after I escaped I left the angry guards roaming the city for the rest of the game.
So it wasn’t too long ago that I was wondering if my experience of Silksong might not end at the Last Judge as I put it down in frustration and never got around to picking it back up again. And now here I am in Act 3.
It’s been a wild ride. There have been times when all I could do was clap my hands to my face in rage (especially with Trobbio; I hate Trobbio), but even with some of the nastier bosses taking over an hour to get past… I have somehow managed to eventually get that finishing blow in on boss after boss, and escape by the skin of my teeth from some truly gut-twisting platforming sections.
I’m not sure I actually like the game, on account of how ludicrously stressful it is at times, but at least that finishing blow actually feels nice and cathartic, and now that I’m in the endgame I’m feeling like I would really like to be able to see things through if possible.
Absolutely zero interest in Steel Soul mode or speedrunning, though. It would probably kill me to put myself through that much stress.
Ruined King – The party is complete now and the real main antagonist has shown his face. The League of Legends universe is quite interesting in everything that I encountered, which does not include LoL itself. Arcane of course being the best till now.
In coop we probably played the last session of StarRupture for quite some time. Either until I get me a new PC, or the game gets significantly patched to prevent all those game freezes. But we upgraded one core (before having automated turrets) and seen one all out bug attack. There wasn’t a chance in hell to survive that with just hand- and shotguns.
Visiting family we played Just One and Bomb Buster for a few short rounds. Bom Busters will be the second game I will upgrade the components.