T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was Slay the Spire 2.
It released into early access a few days ago, and even though it’s in early access, I’m greatly enjoying it. All of the playable characters return except the Watcher, and there’s the addition of two new characters, the Necrobinder, and the Regent.
The Necrobinder’s gimmick is having a minion that takes damage instead of you, and you can use cards to increase it’s health. Her other gimmick is doom, it kills enemy if there current health is below the amount of doom. I haven’t played her much yet, but I did play her more than the Regent. His gimmick is having a second pool of mana called stars, they don’t get removed by the end of a turn, and you don’t get more by the start of a turn, you only get them through cards as far as I know, His other gimmick is forging. Forging creates a special sword card that deals damage based on how much forge you have, and it uses stars to play it. That’s all I know about him.
The game itself is good, there seems to be just more of everything, including power. It feels like enemies and the player is stronger, as a result the Silent gets a power card that makes her do double damage to enemies with the weak debuff, on the other hand you can get an enemy that debuffs you so that every card you play, you will lose 1 strength and 1 dexterity for that turn. It seems moderately well balanced in the end, but the highs and lows of how strong you feel are definitely more extreme.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about everything having animations, but they just fits right in. I love most of the creature designs, the card art, and the event backgrounds.
Instead of getting a choice between three buffs at the beginning of a run like the first game, you now get a choice between three buffs at the beginning of each act. These buff can be the standard upgrade a card or get a rare card but you lose your money, but sometimes it can be a new feature, card enchantments. Card Enchantments can get added to a card to give buffs ranging from add two block when played, or add two damage, to the first time that card gets played it gets replayed once per combat.
It also has co-op as well. It works fine, if you can’t agree on who gets what relic from a chest, then it chooses randomly, the gold and shop are different for each player, and there are a handful of co-op exclusive cards.
So, I’ve been enjoying it so far. what’s everyone else doing?
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Final Fantasy X
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Crash Dot Com
Back in 1999, I rode the dot-com bubble. Got rich. Worked hard. Went crazy. Turned poor. It was fun.
I’ve also been playing Slay the Spire 2. It is very good. It is also very, very similar to Slay the Spire 1, which was an excellent game, but I do wish they’d innovated just a bit more. The fact that 3/5 of the characters are returning ones and they start with exactly the same decks and passives as they did before really contributes, even if they have new cards and some have been updated.
The animations are a massive improvement. More sound effects will hopefully be added over Early Access, I know I just whined about it being too similar but dangit I want my cacaws. Boss relics have been toned down (that’s the buffs at the beginning of act 2 and 3, now) and you’re less likely to just be taking “one extra energy a turn with minor downside”, which was pretty much always what you wanted before. Getting variety in powerful relics is appreciated, though some of the choices currently seem, uh, bad.
I like the new characters. Doom is a powerful mechanic but you do need to defend for one crucial extra turn. The power that does damage every time you inflict a debuff does crazy things if you also have the skill that applies doom every time you play a card… or really in general, it’s very good. For the Regent I’ve just done blue star build, haven’t tried big sword. Also, they should look up what a Regent is because he sure does talk about inheriting the throne and that’s… really not involved.
All this being said, it’s Early Access and I’m going to try to stop because I don’t want to overplay it and lose interest once the game truly releases. I’m not even sure what they’re really planning to iterate on, there’s some placeholder artwork and some “to be added” lore in the Epochs (oh, Epochs are the minor StS meta progression but with art and a bit of story added in to the unlocks, I like it), and I have no idea if they have act 4 in yet, but it seems like a very nearly complete game already. In the game blurb they mostly talk about balancing stuff and adding more, which, fair enough. I hope they change the normal enemy who only lets you play one skill a turn because that’s a much harder counter than the game needs. And while several of the bosses have interesting mechanics, some of them, like the door guy, are really bland. The test subject is kind of cute since it reprises 3 elite mechanics from StS 1 but the most dangerous one is phase 1 and it has 100 hp, which is just nothing at the end of Act 3.
Mewgenics continues. Runs are long enough that I can’t really see getting some of the meta progression unlocks. I guess the one that wants 50 cats does just care that they’re retired so you could rush and just do the first area of act 1, but that sounds tedious, honestly. So I’m mostly focused on doing hard mode stuff with all the classes and fighting the invader bosses for the main quest. I appreciate that the unlocks for Collarless cats are strong, good reward for bringing a junk character along.
A Regent can inherit the throne. Prince George became Regent in Britain when his dad (George III) went mad, but succeeded to the throne as George IV on his father’s death. The “Regency era” takes its name from that whole series of events.
Also, this is a regent from an alien world. It’s not inconceivable that fantasy alien monarchies work differently than they do on Earth…
The Hundred Line has a pretty clear “second” route. It’s got the characters reacting to new events, it’s got the mechanics the game has been telling me about for sixty hours, it’s got direct follow-ups to the questlines the first route brought up. And I’m seeing it fourth, because I find the choices leading into it to be the least intuitive options. The other two routes didn’t have the reactions or the mechanics, and referred to a couple of events offhandedly as if it assumed I’d already seen them. I’d say it’s a mark against the game, the revelations are deflated in this order.
I feel like the mechanics side of the game is pretty much over, I’m severely overpowered for the fights at this point. That said, I wish they’d stop asking me if I wanted to skip fights I haven’t fought yet; I missed a bossfight by saying yes, thinking it would only skip repeats.
Demonschool chugs along. I’m trying to figure out the proper comparison point for the combat. There’s some Into The Breach in it, but there’s often more combat in a single day of Demonschool than an entire (short) run of Into The Breach. An in-game week has had more fights than Triangle Strategy. (They each only take, like, a minute, but still.) It’s almost RPG random encounter pace, except all its fights are set events. Do I compare it to Bravely Default 2, where the wandering monsters kept blocking routes unavoidably? Maybe, but Demonschool’s fights aren’t repeatable. Should I compare it to, like, Baldur’s Gate? But that would require actually playing Baldur’s Gate.
I guess the current comparison is to Fae Tactics: The Girl Who Destroyed The World. I never finished that one either.
(We’ve recruited a dog, and at the home base the dog is just in a perpetual Screw Attack animation. I love this game’s style.)
In Horizon: Forbidden West I reached the forbidden west now. Every once in a while the game crashes on me, which is annoying, of course. Also annoying is that the world is too detailed (cluttered) for its movement system. Within the first ten hours it happened several times that Alloy leaps over a rock or something and jumps of a cliff. The rock isn’t a barrier anymore it is an animation trigger. And there are tons of animation triggers for tons of different animations, but also tons that don’t. Those stop Alloy dead in her tracks and movement feels clunky. Comparable with Assassins Creed 3, where Connor also often did not do what the player wanted him to do, because of all this clutter.
But other than that: Facial expressions, this living world and the machines are awesome. The story so far … could be better.
Coop play is dedicated to Palworld. We reached the volcano tower but were slightly underleveled. The boss beating us was not so much of a problem than, we didn’t do enough damage to defeat him within the ten minute time frame.
Analog I bought ito. I haven’t had the chance to play it yet. All I’ve heard is that it should be good.
I also acquired Tag Team a short 1 vs 1 game, each player controlling 2 characters. Battles are done via a deck of cards. That deck starts with just two cards and each round one out of three cards is added somewhere in between without shuffling. There are twelve characters to choose from, each with their own available cards and mechanics. Pretty fun.
Marvel Rivals continues. Remember that bit I said about team vs team balance being better than it used to be? Yeah that was complete bs, just a lucky fluke, which team wins is still massively dependent on where the top players end up. On the other hand, it turns out they actually added damage to Jeff’s healing spray, so the nerf was more of a lateral move which has made him even better most of the time, now that he also contributes damage to the scrum and can pressure low-hp targets. I even killed a tank once while they were ignoring me to fight everyone else. This does tie in to the “extremely identifiable” weakness though, since the healing hose marks your location perfectly, there’s no question as to where that damage is coming from, so they start targeting you even more.
I have successfully completed Resident Evil Requiem. Cannot use the word “platinumed” because that’s specifically a Playstation thing, but I’m done with all the challenges and unlocked everything there is to see. I might give the game one last playthrough before uninstalling for the foreseeable future. These games do have a lot of replayability. We’ll see.
In any case, it’s finally time I put my attention on other games. Now playing through Planet of Lana 2, as I enjoyed the first one. Nice puzzle platformer with a beautiful art style. The sequel is very similar so far, and familiar puzzles are used to introduce new mechanics, which is nice.
Also playing Prison City, a pixel art retro platformer styled like a NES title, with all the good and bad that comes with it. Fun to play, for sure, but difficulty is high, and of course it had to come with a bullshit ice level. I haven’t ran into an underwater stage yet, so here’s hoping there isn’t one.
Still playing Suikoden III. I ended up putting in another two relatively long sessions in because I was doing Thomas’ chapter and didn’t finish it the first session, mostly because I spent a fair bit of time recruiting characters, because he is relatively weak — he and the main guard character start at level 1 — and will have a battle in the next chapter. Which meant that I spent a lot of time trying to win the lottery so I could recruit the ninjas. But in doing that, I accrued more skill points and started using them, which made the one character with a lightning rune more powerful, which meant that when I went to face one of the dungeon bosses it ended up being: Thomas cast a spell to raise defense, the other four characters attacked, the boss randomly decided to heal, and the lightning rune character cast his most powerful spell, and the boss was killed, and then I looted the treasure.
I was getting a bit annoyed by the game early on in the chapter because it fell into one of the issues the earlier games had, as I had to wander around and talk to people to advance the game and it wasn’t always clear what I had to do to move things along (in one case, I looked for one character who wasn’t there, talked to everyone else, and then suddenly he was back, which I only caught because I was checking everything else, and at times the game makes you go to a specific place to trigger things which means running around the castle hoping that something will get triggered). But once I settled into the recruiting part, things worked better, even though eventually the fights became trivial. So I still like it better than the previous two games.
I got the STAR WARS™: Bounty Hunter™ remake back when it came out in 2024 because I remembered playing it at a friend’s house as a kid back in the 00’s and enjoying it. (It’s the one where you play as Jango Fett prior to the events of Episode II.) It ran on my Steam Deck but not my Debian gaming rig where I wanted to play it*, so I let it sit to see if future Proton advancements would get it working. I noticed it this week while scrolling through my library, decided to try firing it up, and lo and behold, it worked!
I’m about two hours into it at this point and having a lot of fun with it; it’s kind of a good old-fashioned Lucas Arts romp, just running around through distinctively “Star Wars-y” locations and using an array of gadgets to navigate the map and fight off everything intent on killing me. I just re-acquired my jetpack after losing it in the opening cutscene, and I do remember there are some levels later on that require it to get around which can be potentially frustrating, but for now I’m enjoying the vertical mobility it brings to the game.
*I never had a console growing up so I’ve never gotten good at using a controller for fast-paced games, and I don’t have a dock for my Deck where I could plug in a mouse and keyboard.
It’s a fascinating game, and brutal at times! (The grey bit in the base…). I was blown away at the time, at some of the platforming it got me to do relatively early on – as you say, the verticality. Maybe my inexperience, but it almost felt like I was breaking the game at one point, in a “surely you don’t have to do that?!” way. I remember those enemy death animations, the classic fall-spin. Gosh and the flamethrower! None of this “you can’t attack non-enemies” business. Or happy-go-lucky goodie-two-shoes ‘scoundrels’. Some of the cutscenes with Montross were almost disturbing to young me. I do distrinctly remember having a friend over and playing this game together – I’m trying to think if it was this game where one of us would use the binoculars to pinpoint an enemy across the map, and then the other taking the shot by quickly switching out and firing the weapon, maybe that was Project IGI on the PC though, makes more sense with a mouse and keyboard than a controller.
2002 was an insane year for Star Wars gaming. Clone Wars, Jedi Starfighter, Jedi Outcast, Racer Revenge, Galactic Battlegrounds Clone Campaigns expansion, Bounty Hunter. And then Mace Griffin Bounty Hunter came out the next year to confuse matters.
Oh man, I posted that having stopped playing just before Montross’s introduction, and seeing it again unlocked a childhood memory I’d forgotten.