T w e n t y S i d e d
This week we finally beat Baldurs Gate 3.
Even though we beat the game in honor mode, we didn’t get the achievement for it due to having mods. It makes sense for that achievement to be disabled with mods, but it’s a little sad that we didn’t get it. Most of our mods were cosmetics and quality of life, so nothing too crazy. The last few fights we did weren’t too bad considering it was the end of the game, it probably helped that our huge collection of scrolls and potions finally got some use after hoarding things the entire game. I don’t have anything to say about the end because anything I say would be spoilers for the end of the game, that said, good game. probably will play another run in a bit.
Other than that, not much going on. Just waiting for Slay the Spire 2 to go into early access. Probably will play some Terraria soon since it updated recently. Was waiting to finish Baldurs Gate first.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
Bowlercoaster
Two minutes of fun at the expense of a badly-run theme park.
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.
What is Piracy?
It seems like a simple question, but it turns out everyone has a different idea of right and wrong in the digital world.
Secret of Good Secrets
Sometimes in-game secrets are fun and sometimes they're lame. Here's why.
My Music
Do you like electronic music? Do you like free stuff? Are you okay with amateur music from someone who's learning? Yes? Because that's what this is.
The Hundred Line, at forty hours, finally crossed the Hundred Line. The characters continue to be stupid and unlikable, but (eventually) it’s a charming kind of stupid and unlikable. There’s definitely something appealing about our Anime Trash Brigade facing an army of Nier Automatas. These characters really are dumb and distracted enough to miss the obvious, and leap to wrong conclusions, and I can sit here and watch them and accept that.
(Horrible Bear Boy actually got a solid payoff for his grating personality; meanwhile, in the opposite direction, I seriously enjoyed the game finding a way to make Ima, the worst character, Even Worse.). But I will say, it’s really annoying when the protagonist refuses to go into people’s rooms even thoughthey’ve been missing for two months. For all I know they’re right inside their own door. One character was confirmed dead, and he still thought it would be rude to check their room. It’s hardly even their room at that point.I knew it had
the Zero Escape mentality of needing multiple runs to explain everything, but the first ending was surprisingly explanation-dense; Somnium didn’t explain a third as much on any of its starting routes. And then the credits roll, and there’s censor bars across several of the characters because we haven’t seen them yet, which is a really fun touch. The initial ending leaves about seven major mysteries to solve, and then the first route I took ignored all of those for a new, eighth mystery. Wild, Magic.The mechanics continue to be fun, although the shared turn system incentivizes focusing on the strongest character and giving them all the turns, especially once you get the items that eliminate the downsides of doing that. But
the second route I took ended up being heavily combat-focused, while also locking me out of all the upgrade options, which is infuriating. I’ve finally got the stats and the resources to get The Good Upgrade, and have been stuck without it the entire run for lack of opportunity. It’s enough to make me want to drop the route entirely and go find one with a usable upgrade table. Which sucks, because the route itself is a hell of a thing and I hate to knock it off its pace. But seriously, nearly halfway through the hundred days already, with zero opportunities to upgrade anything.Demonschool crawls along. The combat is strange and non-standard, and I think the game could have done with less of it; you get like fifteen fights between major plot beats, and that’s a lot of strange non-standard fighting. It’ll get finished eventually, but, I feel like it’s going to slip further and further down the priority list.
4TheWords is on break, and immediately upon taking the break I got sick and had to take a week off work. I don’t know if that was a coincidence, or if the writing process has actually been load-bearing up to now.
Brotato. Yep, sure is still Brotato.
I have by now also seen all the endings of the Outer Wilds, and now maybe I can put it to rest. Maybe.
And hopefully I’ll find some time for gaming again in the near future, there’s sidequests to complete xD
Mewgenics continues. Not much to say, I like it.
I played through the demo of Alabaster Dawn. It’s an action game, seems pretty fun so I’ll wishlist it for later. I do like that the intro is a default fantasy village and suddenly a calamity strikes… and they knew it was coming so they retreat underground to their fantasy cryo chambers. Not entirely the usual premise.
Well, I started and played Resident Evil Requiem‘s campaign to completion. Currently on my third playthrough, ticking down achievements. Overall I enjoyed the experience quite a bit even if the game has a massive identity crisis issue
(if anyone’s interested in a bit more in depth, no spoilers review, it’s here https://backloggd.com/u/MacJunegrand/ ). For a celebration of the history of the franchise this game is way too focused in honoring the Resident Evil 2 Remake. It’d be nice if it gave some more respect to the rest of the series, especially the games that started it all. Still, like I said, I enjoyed the game a lot. I have no problem with the tonal shift that happens when you switch protagonists, though I would prefer if there had been some more balance between those sections.
I do have a couple of other issues, though. For one, the way the game handles new playthroughs is very messy. In your very first playthrough (in the Leon section) you find new guns as you play, and then in the middle of the game you can start using a special vendor machine to purchase more or customize the ones you have. But in every subsequent playthrough you no longer find the guns in their place. They are all in the vendor, which is accessible now from the start and you’re given some extra cash from the get go to purchase them from the start. If you don’t notice this you might reach a couple of sections at the start where you’ll need those guns if you didn’t think of getting them from the vendor you won’t have them. Yeah, you can just restart an autosave, but you shouldn’t have to. Plus, every new playthrough after the first one is like this, so if you want to experience the original ever again you’ll have no choice but to delete your save data.
Also, and this is really a problem for the whole series, ever since RE7 nearly every new game in the franchise has one sequence that’s scary the first time and becomes increasingly unbearable every new playthrough due to how slow and uneventful it is, and this game might have the worst one of them all. They really should make those sequences skippable.
After slug chasing the previous weekend, this weekend was one of work on Saturday because I was (am) stressed about a calculation that I’m doing and keep being pestered for, Sunday we watched a double bill of 3 Musketeers D’artagnan, and Milady, the recent french films with Eva Green, which I picked up on DVD recently. They were hiding in the foreign film section of HMV, which surprised me – I saw them at the cinema, and not some arthouse cinema either, the biggest cinema chain here, and in a backwater area. Then my Monday off, I spent on the conservatory roof and stepladders, cleaning out the gutters. So once again no gaming, alas. Apparently I’ve become someone who looks forward to The Apprentice coming out on a Thursday. My 100 games in 2026 plans are rapidly becoming impossible with this month lapse, 8 games in January but only one game completed in February. Need to get back to enjoying Jedi Survivor. I’ve ended my lapse in catching up on My Hero Academia at least, I’m back onto Series 6, well under way. The episode I watched last night made me tear up at the same time as the characters.
I started Suikoden III on the PS2. I was curious to see if my constantly wanting to play it instead of I or II was nostalgia or if it really was better, and I can say that it’s not nostalgia. One of the most interesting things about it is that it went with a Tri-View system, where for half of the game you have three protagonists, and you switch between each of their stories, with some optional stories added in later as well. You have to play through the first three chapters of each protagonist, but after that you pick one of them to be the main character and then follow on with them for the rest of the game. Their stories also intersect at various times, and if you went through the scene with one protagonist you get to choose your responses, but then when you get there the second time it just plays out the way it did the first time. So if, say, you play as Hugo first and get to a scene with Chris, when you come back to the scene with Chris the scene plays out according to the choices you made as Hugo, but if you played as Chris first she’d make the choices and Hugo would just see the results of that.
The other thing that is changed is that the world map isn’t completely open anymore, as you move to connected areas with short open world — for random encounters — areas that connect you to the main city and village areas. This makes exploration easier and so makes it easier to run around looking for the Stars of Destiny, which is probably why it’s the only game in the series where I’ve gotten all of them. It also allowed me to take Geddoe to the main castle earlier and unlock the optional Thomas story, which is what I’ll play next, and I also recruited a couple of characters already, because for one he managed to pick up the plot element early — a screw for her mechanical companion — and because the duel point kicked off for him when he went to the one city — looking for deer antlers — and then it just made sense to recruit the minstrels that it was attached to. You can’t use characters recruited by one protagonist with other protagonists, so it pays to be careful who you recruit, especially since Thomas is a bit weak and has an invasion plot, so if you want to win it you want to try to recruit some powerful characters with him to do that. It helps that Geddoe pretty much has a set team, Hugo builds in most of his team for plot reasons, and Chris has a full set of knights with her most of the time until her last chapter.
I ended up playing it twice — when my schedule only has a timeslot set aside to play once — and for longer than I planned to both times, mostly because unlike the previous two games this one has set chapters and so I wanted to finish the chapter and save at the hub, but it isn’t always clear how long a chapter will take. For the last play, I played Chris’ chapter which was pretty short, and so decided to play Geddoe’s, which was a longer chapter and was one where I also did more exploration so it all took longer. But so far, yeah, I’m DEFINITELY enjoying it more than the previous two games.
Fighting the good fight against claims of nostalgia :) Believe in your past self’s opinions! :D
Trying out new Rimworld mods. Some of them are very combat-heavy, which I don’t really get. Rimworld is not a good system for tactical combat. Real-time fighting with pause is fiddly enough when there’s too many moving parts, but having to switch between two modes of controlling your pawns (neither one perfect) in order to get them to do precise moves under pressure is really annoying. They’ll either literally do nothing unless you tell them (and might black out from hunger or bleed to death in silence), or the AI takes over and you realise they’ve abandoned their post to go swimming, are throwing a tantrum because they’re too stressed, or ran blindly into danger and got themselves mortally wounded so now you need to rescue them from the other side of the map.
These scenarios would be great in, say, an XCOM game – as in, a system where you don’t have to worry about your soldiers neglecting to sleep or eat for inscrutable AI reasons, getting bored (or stressed) during a 1-hour missions, or the f******g kids running into active battlefields and getting shot.
Nonetheless, I found a good (combat-lite) prospect called The Ancients, which has a new starting scenario: you’re survivors of horrible science experiments designed to create superhuman abilities centuries ago. All the scientists are gone, and you’ve just crawled out of cryostasis into a rusty, abandoned vault. Different, and a lot of your pawns start with a great (maybe unique) ability, but also a very nasty side-effect or downside.
So, kinda like Worm, or a grimdark version of the X-men.
The RNG messes this up a bit, though. One of my pawns has the backstory ‘got brain-probed repeatedly, in order to enhance his cognition’ which led to him growing a cat tail, angel wings, and having a…genetic alcohol dependency.
Notably he didn’t get any psychic powers or enhancements to his learning ability…
…instead, the guy who had plasteel surgically implanted into his skin got the increased learning ability. And darkvison. And no natural armor.
He did completely lost his immune system though, which…that one makes sense.
…I think I’ll be using the character editor to juggle some of these abilites and downsides around…
Is The Ancients this one? https://store.steampowered.com/app/1769130/The_Ancients/
No, it’s a Rimworld mod. Guess I should have made that clearer: Vanilla Quests Expanded – Ancients.
One day I will play something that is not more Rimworld…but today is not that day.
(That’s a lie, I have played through a lot of Hades 2 recently)
I should have known by how crazy the description was. Or by reading the first half of your post :D Rimworld sounds too crazy to be real, how can people have programmed something with so much complexity of outcome.
No one person did, that’s how. It’s ~10 years of modding and development on show.
Rimworld came out, then added mod support. Then it made a DLC with genetic modifications that was popular. Then several people made mods that added new and weird genes. Then someone else made the Ancients mod, and because they knew/liked the person who made the gene mod, they programmed it to draw randomly from that. Then another DLC comes out, and all the mods get updated with new features, which all get integrated with each other…
…and so on and so on.
Ironically my Ancients playthrought could be even more complicated and crazy, but I just don’t like Alpha genes, one of the popular Rimworld genetic mods. So even more random stuff could be happening.
I started The Last Spell, I very much like it.
It’s a defense tactical (roguelite ?) where you get un bunch of heroes and must survive a number of enemy waves, alternating with construction phases where you buy gear and build defenses and buildings with different effects (mines get you gold, shop build items, the temple heals heroes, and so on).
There are a lot of things to unlock, from straight bonuses to different kind of weapons and buildings and options to make the game more difficult in exchange for rewards.
I liked this one too. Even picked up a couple of the expansions (for loose change), which add more unlockables, mostly.
I bought the game with all 3 extensions. I like that there’s a little warning “This item category is difficult to master. do not unlock unless you know what you’re doing” when unlocking weapon types specific to the extensions.
As did I, posting about it here previously. The expansions also add entire new maps (one each), and while the dwarf map wasn’t too crazy, the elf map has a pretty significant complication and dramatically different boss from usual. The devs have done truly excellent work balancing the game over time, mostly using small changes that result in big effects, and just put out what is meant to be the final one alongside the final dlc. I’ll definitely be coming back to it at some point, as that last dlc is basically meant to give it more life even after you’ve beat the game and some of those fixes addressed some of my only remaining complaints.
Some of the guys from work told me when they were playing Marvel Rivals, so I reinstalled. And man, I will never stop laughing at the people who lost their minds when TF2 added a couple hats and made it “impossible” to tell what your enemy was playing, because they had *no* idea. Is it a Hulk, a Thing, a Wolverine, a Strange? Is that giant butt Emma Frost, or one of the poof-rear’d ‘wedding’ outfits on someone else? Is that darkly clothed female frame with jagged accents a Scarlett Witch, an an Invisible Woman? There are outfits that I’m pretty sure are deliberate and direct costume change/cosplays to intentionally look like other characters. It’s completely ridiculous, you spend the first half of the fight just trying to figure out what the enemy team is even playing, and then a bunch of them will suddenly switch in the last quarter, quite possibly even intentionally as an obfuscation tactic. People who actually have to play the default outfits are at a distinct disadvantage, and if anything Jeff the Landsharks’ biggest weakness might not be that they nerfed his attacks into the ground, but the fact that you can actually tell who he is no matter what.
And of course, since cosmetics are how they make their money, and even reward competitive mode players, there will never be any option to squelch viewing them.
This results in a situation where teammates having voice chat is reversed from the TF2 days: back then, if you didn’t have at least one other person talking, your chances of winning were much lower: a microphone indicated both willingness to communicate and a certain level of competence via investment. But in modern Marvel Rivals? The only time you hear anyone (in “Casual”) is when there’s suddenly a 3-4 stack of tweenagers on console, with constantly hot mics, continuously shouting over each other like they’re high or think they’re from da ‘hood or both. And this is a *handicap* for the entire team (in addition to said players obviously not giving their full attention), because with the basic identity of your foes often impossible to discern until you’ve seen and heard their attacks, *every audio cue matters*. Yes, I can and do mute them almost immediately myself, but you can but most players either don’t know how, or have responded by turning off voice receive for *everyone*, making it impossible to communicate with them.
Playing with the friends from work, I actually got *worse* when one of them un-muted his mic after being on mute the whole first match. I felt like I was half-blind and just couldn’t tell what was going on, which I later realized was in fact true, because their constantly stream of cursing and complaining meant I was limited to visual information so muddied I could barely even tell who half my own teammates were, let alone the enemy. Later I’m playing by myself and can finally put together who’s playing what fighting who and lock in enough to do more than shoot into the crowd and pray.
Oh, but you should simply be able to tell based on what the foe’s attacks look like? With this many characters, there are several duplicates of every attack style, often across multiple class types- and actually the three ‘class’ types are beginning to matter less as sub-categories like “flying” or “grab and separate” become more common. There used to be only a couple area damage over time effects, so when that sound went off you knew it was time to exit. Now there are so many and with so little visual effect I’m often walking into a hot zone having no idea why or how fast my health is going down just for being there. And of course this is on top of multiple knew quasi-sniper/gun characters who leave no tracer round effects to indicate that you’re being shot, and even the aforementioned Emma Frost’s basic attack is a thin little continuous laser that can be blocked by the third-person-ness of your own model (you’ll find out it’s her when you’re suddenly chokeslammed out of nowhere).
Despite all this, continuing on playing myself, it does seem a bit more enjoyable than before? Jeff did kinda need the nerf, and the overall skill balance of pub randos on casual at that time of night seems more even than it used to be. This could be anything from the tryhards moving on to other games, or an influx of returning players increasing the skill floor, or simply that most of the kiddies have achieved basic competence. Or maybe I’ve just got lucky and has a run of mostly decent games. After a year of cranking out cosmetics they’ve finally got enough they’re offering up some choices on their free rewards at least. Though these are buried in like six different ongoing ‘events’, one of which is the all-paid ‘battlepass’, and another is a daily login that spams a reminder when you try to exit *even when you already claimed it*. This might not be the *most* free-to-play game, but if not then it’s gotta be close.
I played Far: Lone Sails last week, and really enjoyed it. So this week I played Far: Changing Tides, and really enjoyed it too. Super-atmospheric low-key puzzle games, with good music. Sizeable dollop of Willing Suspension of Disbelief necessary for attaching a hot-air balloon to a submarine _while it is underwater_ and getting anything but a soggy hot-water balloon, but it was cute, and I _was_ willing.
Other than a couple quick skirmishes in Battle for Wesnoth, my spare time the past couple of weeks have been largely a re-enjoyment of Terraria, with a few side trips to make sure I pick up some of the new achievements. It really is an amazing game. Given that a couple of the achievements are very long projects and several require entirely different play modes / world seeds, by the time that’s done with I’ll probably take a break for a while, then come back to see what the things are like in the with-mods side of play.
The other big thing is a painful inching forward in Act 3 of Silksong. I’ve managed to defeat two of the memories, and am very grateful that secondary weapons used within the memories don’t use up any of your shards in the real world, because otherwise I’d have run out several times over and massively increased my time investment running around to gather enough resources to refill — and I’m saying that even with a pocketbook full of far more beads than I need for anything other than buying shard packets.
I’ll be honest; the expansive exploration phase of Act 2 was definitely the highlight of the game for me, but at least I’m feeling like with enough persistence I can actually get to the end. We’ll see.
Ruined King: A League of Legends Story is completed. Braum is back in Frelyord together with Yasuo and I remember that the LoL world is quiet fun. Maybe I’ll try to play 2XKO, but as that is mostly competitive, maybe not.
Then I started Horizon: Forbidden West. The story hook of the plague because an error in Gaia is a bit off for me. It might get better. I’m less than an hour in and still in the tutorial section. But it runs smoothly and looks great.
Coop continues Palworld. The world get bigger and bigger, but there are so many low level areas in it that it is more of a shock, when you enter an area with high level mobs. We reached tier 3 equipment now and beaten even Lv38 bosses with us ten levels lower. The right Pal does all the damage, but an epic crossbow might pack a punch as well.