T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been surprisingly busy, so not much Baldur’s Gate 3.
Out of the Baldur’s Gate we did play, the only real thing of note was going through the House of Hope, which went ok, I guess. There were no party wipes, but we did reload a few times because we wanted to keep an NPC alive. If we weren’t trying to keep them alive, I don’t think we would’ve needed to reload. That said, there was only one iffy encounter, and that was the two Spectators with the group of Imps, the Spectators weren’t that bad, the main reason it went poorly was the Imps kept pushing everyone into a chasm.
That’s about all that happened this week. So how’s everyone else doing?
Project Button Masher
I teach myself music composition by imitating the style of various videogame soundtracks. How did it turn out? Listen for yourself.
Good Robot Dev Blog
An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
The Witch Watch
My first REAL published book, about a guy who comes back from the dead due to a misunderstanding.
The Biggest Game Ever
How did this niche racing game make a gameworld so massive, and why is that a big deal?
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
The Hundred Line has been a firsthand reminder of the concept of Gell-Mann Amnesia. I liked Dangan Ronpa 1, and I liked AI the Somnium Files, and so I picked up the game on sale despite hating Ima more than any other fictional character in my life. But as the game goes on, the characters gain more unlikable traits, and the plot starts getting off the rails, and I slowly remember the guy who wrote The Somnium Files also wrote Zero Time Dilemma.
But, after adjusting my expectations down to “anime Jersey Shore”, the game is continuing to entertain. We’ve got a new Persuasion mechanic, that was introduced by a conversation that was 70% about vomiting. We’ve got a repeating plot beat that I’m currently referring to as “a clown car of corpses”. We’ve got Ima being marginally less awful. And we’ve jumped straight from defending one location, to defending three at once with all fronts undermanned, reminiscent of something like The Last Spell. Fights are easy but fun, and the characters have managed to capture a bit of that trainwreck-can’t-look-away energy. And with the gap in quality between Somnium Files and Zero Time Dilemma, I have utterly no clue what’s ahead. It’s one of those Wild Magic games.
Demonschool continues, and I’m realizing just how many fights there are in this. I think I’ve advanced the story one day this week, and fought about ten fights in main quests and sidequests. Fights are fun enough, but I actually think I like the characters more, and would like to see less gameplay and more story. I’ll say it’s pretty depressing that this game’s Steam Achievements have a drastically lower completion percentage than Hundred Line’s. I’m four hours ahead in Hundred Line and the cheevos are still around 80%, while Demonschool’s are already below 30%.
4TheWords crosses the 182-day streak mark, over half a year and nearly six months of daily writing. I’m pretty sure the first two months produced more words than the next four, and that I pretty badly need a break from writing to recover some vim. If a month off routinely got me writing like the first two months, I would come out ahead word-wise. The trick now, though, is that I’m going to have to actively break the streak, or else be pulled forward zombielike in perpetuity, like what happened at 90 days. But my gaming instincts recoil at deliberately making the number go down.
Brotato had an update and I have no idea what they updated.
Interesting that ZTD is your low point there – I played through that game and enjoyed but but just could not get into the story for Hundred Line.
More Ruined King and PalWorld. I’m at the boss in the underwater Buru temple now and everyone except Braum has their third Ultimate now. I’ve seen Pykes, for everyone else the battles were over before I could reach ultimate bar lv3.
In PalWorld we reached the second tower, while ourselves being Lv21 and Lv24, we didn’t do enough damage output tow down the boss 98k healthpoints within 10 minutes. Maybe with better weapons and more fire Pals it might work.
After Ruined King is done, I’m debating between Horizon: Forbidden West, Hellblade 2, MGS3 Delta or Kiwami 3. Or I give Kena: Bridge of Spirits another go – If my 10yo PC cannot handle the aforementioned.
I have 100%ed my Achievement Hunt in the Outer Wilds, and some of those fuckers were A Pain, especially those that had a larger luck component in the expansion.
I am now on the look-out for the last few endings I have not yet seen, even if they are usually just a screen with words on it. Still wanna do that.
Not much time for anything else besides that.
I finished Suikoden II. I think the story was better in Suikoden II than in the first game, although since I didn’t get all the Stars of Destiny — 108 characters that you can recruit — it ended up ending a bit vaguely, and I BARELY managed to beat the last boss on Easy mode (I ended up physically attacking the last head with my last two characters which did enough damage to finish it off, or else it would have hit me with three full out attacks that would have finished me off). But overall, it was all right, and unlike the first game this is a game that I’d consider replaying at some point when I’m not feeling like I’m rushing through it to finish it off, to explore more of the mechanisms and doing a better job of recruiting characters.
But both of the games kept making me want to play Suikoden III, so I dug out the old PS2s I have and set one of them up to see if it would work, and so far everything seems to be working, so I’m going to play that game now and maybe V afterwards. Let’s see if it was nostalgia that drove my desire to play that game or a proper memory of how good that game was, relatively speaking.
Blah, I spent the weekend chasing slug trails and filling gaps, and finding damp and airing it, only for the slug to use the new path created behind the kallax unit. I believe I managed to finally find the entry point, under the threshold strip of the front room, which has been progressively pushed up by the rubber “You Shall Not Pass” mat my gf got (I find it a bit ugly) jamming underneath it. Pulling up that part of the carpet a little reveals a slight recess where the front room floorboards meet the hallway tiles (and the nicer old black and white tiles underneath them) and a some slight gaps at the interface, which must lead underneath the floorboards. Thus, I filled in as much as I could with household filler, in the recess, to close said gaps. And then also a bit of adhesive to try to stick the threshold stip back down more closely. Well… Tuesday morning and again this morning, I have seen no new slug trails, hooray! But it will be a little longer searching the place with a torch to make absolutely sure.
So naturally, the
double Rancorfight from Jedi Survivor has had no time spent on it since the previous weekend when I tried to take my saves over to the PS4 Pro at my mother’s house for some better framerates, and had a whole palaver with that… my normal PS4 somehow managed to corrupt its own saves when copied to a USB drive, presumably as a result of its internal battery having died, and some nonsense of having logged me out / disconnected from the internet, and so the saves having temporarily been dated 01/01/1970. Whatever the case, I couldn’t get them to work on the PS4 Pro. They’ve been fine in the past.Just out of curiosity, is this your first time playing through Jedi Survivor? Because – without getting into spoilers – as I got close to beating it, there was a moment in the story where I felt like I finally got a glimpse of what Shamus must have felt as he was writing some of his video game retrospectives. The story and characters are otherwise extremely good, and if you like the gameplay, you should be happy. Just be prepared for that…
Uh oh, I’ll be on my guard! But I think I can guess what you mean. I know a couple of very vague spoilers one of which I discovered when looking up how to get through a door on the desert planet (
I know that Vader turns up in some way shape or form, and that you get through that door when apparently you play as Cere for a bit), but other than that I have no spoilers thankfully. Yep it’s my first (and very likely only) time. I’ve actually got into the characters a bit more this time than I did in the first one (where I really didn’t find myself interested in them, other than the second sister who was pretty great). That is until we metCereandMerrinagain, blandness incarnate, and the likes of Zeke. But you know what, Bode, Turgle, Moran, the fish guy, and the baddies, I do rather enjoy. That hologram game master with the inexplicably sultry voice. Survivor has really surprised me with its gameplay and world breadth and depth, it’s like the realisation of what Jedi Faller Order was the concept for. Pyloon’s, the various minigames, Perks, the stances etc. Much more than I was expecting.But hey that’s what we consume media for now isn’t it? To be able to understand the YouTube videos and blog posts criticising them :D
Pretty much, yeah :D For the record, I did enjoy Fallen Order more. Partly because the story felt more focused, and you got to explore more planets. I just felt like it managed to do more with less. Even though it, too, fell very short of the combat system in Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy…
No argument on that last point, Jedi Outcast been my favourite game ever since I played it, and easily the best lightsaber combat. Survivor has surprisingly impressed me enough to be vying for second place next to Episode III and its fairly satisfying combos.
As a person with a fairly completionist approach to games, I did not bother with that fight. It was way too much for me and way too lethal (on max difficulty). Good luck!
Haha yes, I played Jedi Order at Jedi Master difficulty and never really got the into the parry system, so decided to go Jedi Knight on Survivor. But that made the game a bit too easy, felt like the combat was cursory, so I cranked it up to Jedi Grandmaster. So a lot of one hit kills as you’ll know (including those little chickens!)… the Mire Terror was a real pain until I started mind-tricking his friend to attack him. And I’d just done Rayvis after goodness knows how many tries, and decided to clear out more of the map, and came across this :D I think I’m getting the hang of it, I’ll give it another 50 tries or so no doubt. Just need to avoid the grab, and the double swipe!
More Mewgenics. Game good. Soundtrack full of bangers. Cats also banging, constantly. I’ve been gated on Act 3 for a while and I actually think it’s because I got through Act 2 too fast, which is funny. Need the invading bosses to show up at my home faster, they have quest items!
I hope it is not rude to point this out, but the game is Baldur’s Gate 3, with a u instead of an e, like the Norse God.
(Maybe I am overly sensitive about this because I am balder than most people…)
Thank you for pointing this out. I would have fixed it sooner, but every time I remembered I was busy, and when I had time I forgot.