T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was just Slay the Spire 2 and Terraria.
So far the update for Terraria is their normal array of additions, quality of life improvements, rework of old items, and new items to fill out the more sparse parts of the game. I don’t have much to say, I like Terraria, the update is good.
Slay the Spire 2 is good. Still playing it this week, I finally got some good runs with the Regent, I got a good star based build going with the main highlight being an X cost card that uses stars instead of energy, it deals 5 damage to a random enemy, but I got enough boosts to that cards damage to get it to 11 damage, and I got to use it with thirty stars. I also got a forge build working. It definitely takes some time to get it going, but it does so much damage once it gets going.
I’ve learned that just was the case with the first game, I am terrible at playing as the Defect.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Crash Dot Com
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This is Why We Can’t Have Short Criticism
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Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
The Truth About Piracy
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Trekrospective
A look back at Star Trek, from the Original Series to the Abrams Reboot.
This week has been Final Fantasy 7: Rebirth. I played it previously but never finished, and I started over from scratch. The combat in this game is really fun, leveling materia is satisfying, and the story is generally fine but I’ve seen it before (but a while ago) so I appreciate the 2x speed fast forward cutscene button. It does make the voices kind of autotuned for some reason, Square Enix just isn’t as good at it as Youtube I guess. Game is big.
Not much for me this week when it comes to gaming. I’ve been mostly reading a couple books. I did get to play a bit of A Game About Digging a Hole, which certainly is a way to make something intriguing with a very simple premise.
The crashes of Horizon: Forbidden West annoyed me so much, that I bought and installed Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrale. So far: I hate the real time combat and the German dub is unbearable. The voices are way off and maybe the translation is bad as well. There is a lot of veeery awkward dialog. Switching the voice language ingame didn’t do shit. It might work after a restart, but I haven’t had time to test that yet.
The coop Palworld run continues. Level 41 now with a lot of the map uncovered and over 100 Pals discovered. I think it’s time to attempt a second go at the volcano boss.
Analog Chang an got delivered, after almost 3 years in Kickstarter development hell. The play to learn without any of the 5 modules is done. It might be an interesting eurogame with some variety.
The Hundred Line continues. The game has various choices that split into different paths, but it seems like the various routes are decided early; after that, the choices become “continue the route, or see an ending”, which is a bit disappointing. There’s also an annoying tendency to hide information at the end of a route with no good reason given;
lots of routes end with a journey to the horizon but none of them have shown what’s in it.(Also everyone keeps kissing the vomit girl and I wish they’d stop.)
Triangle Strategy got dusted off; I’m much more tolerant of the visual novel pacing now that I’m coming off a game that will spend literal hours on cutscenes. That said, the story is still weak; I remembered
“the obvious main villain” suddenly dying in the opening, to be replaced by “the obvious secondary villain”, but I forgotthey made you spend a whole fight protecting him, only for him to immediately die in a cutscene at the end of the fight. While my healer stared off into space. And he used his dying breath to say he regretted his choices, but not to tell us what they were.Plus the enemy army is seemingly teleporting around. But, the gameplay is still fun, and I’ve only seen one route so far so there’s more to do.Demonschool continues. Turns out playing the game in longer intervals makes it move more quickly, who knew. The story is still about fun weirdos fighting other fun weirdos, and it’s fun and weird.
4TheWords upgraded their free accounts; they’ve gone from four active quests to eight, and from fifteen daily battles to twenty-five. I still haven’t gotten back into it after the illness; it’s looking like it might actually become a full month off, but it’s looking less like that’s going to lead to any higher output than the streak crawl was. I’ll probably finish some of these games and then make a concerted effort to get back into the groove, I really want to finish at least one long project.
Brotato, of course, continues. I’d say I like about a third of the characters, and that’s plenty now that everything’s unlocked. Glutton, Brawler, Ranger, Doctor, Builder, and Renegade are getting quite a lot of play, with Gangster and Buccaneer remaining “the easy run”.
Caught a cold, so I’ve been playing “alternate between sleeping and staring at random youtube videos” for three days. Was good enough today to go back to trawling mods for Cyberpunk, I’ve apparently decided on absolute maximum thoroughness. In fact, getting close to finishing that is. . . making me want to start trawling mods for BG3, though that rabbit hole must immediately go to making mods for BG3, because I have much stronger opinions on those mechanics.
Haven’t opened Satisfactory in ages either, but in new news, apparently they’ve *finally* added tanker trucks to the game. Which I was basically letting slide as what apparently must have been a design choice, but no, *now* we get them? That’s a critical piece of infrastructure for smoothly transitioning into liquid management, one of the main stupid hurdles of the game was having to either build a package/unpackage factory to use dry trucks or jump straight to massive and complicated trains. I’m more excited than mad, but I feel like I should actually be furious ’cause these should have been in for at minimum the 1.0 launch, really since the start of the game.
Went to the new arcades in the Chinese Quarter here and tried a VR headset game, shooting dinosaurs, and a 5D cinema ride, and a similar VR ride. The graphics don’t seem to have developed since the 90s! The rollercoaster experiences were very tame indeed, not like the old ones you’d get at the arcade, where you sat in a car thing that was mounted like a mechanical bull, with a screen at the front, which I remember were quite a bit more violent in their g-forces. The VR game was fun certainly, you paid for the time, rather than a certain amount of health, as far as I could see, or maybe I just didn’t die. But again, the graphics were practically like house of the dead etc. back in the day. I must admit I was expecting a bit of 1080p, or 4K even. Not huge polygons / obvious triangles and edges. Again, I was under the impression that ‘back in the day’ arcade machines were fairly cutting edge in terms of their power, sometimes with better graphics than home consoles. Clearly not so today.
Still playing Suikoden III. As usual, I ended up with a longer session than I had planned because Hugo’s second chapter was really short and so I moved on to Chris’ when it was done, which was quite a bit longer. I’m still enjoying it more than the previous two games, as the Tri-View system gives more time to get to know each individual protagonist and work out their stories, and the chapter model allows for a sharp distinction in their stories whereas in the first two games the plots ended up ending somewhat quickly and abruptly. So the reason I kept comparing the previous two games unfavourably to my memories of this one wasn’t just me or my mood, but really was that the game, at least, fits me better then the previous ones.
I played co-op Slay the Spire 2 with my son, that was pretty fun and we got to the end.
Cool! How long did that take?
Some more Star Wars: Bountry Hunter, some more RimWorld, and some more Ark Nova where I remarkably managed to beat two of the advanced challenges in a row. It’s spring break at the university I teach at this week, so I’ve been enjoying the free time and playing a little more but also using it for other hobbies and projects around the house. (Like having a bunch of friends over on the weekend for a game of Blood on the Clocktower.)
I also tried out the new demo for the digital version of Twilight Imperium, which turned out to be something between a combat simulation and a tutorial. You get given a budget to put together a fleet which is then thrown into combat with an enemy fleet (you’re the Emirates of Hacan, they’re the Universities of Jol-Nar) until one or the other is destroyed. You get some action cards to use, rinse and repeat for three rounds. Space combat and fleet composition is certainly an important aspect of Twilight Imperium but it’s a little like a demo for a chess game where all you do is practice the physical act of capturing pieces rather than all the strategy around it, so I got through it in 20 minutes and will await the full game’s release.
Still noodling around with snatches of Terraria and Battle for Wesnoth, and for a change of pace I got out puzzle game Strange Jigsaws and it’s been very good so far. I thoroughly recommend it if you’re up for some mind-teasers that, to be honest, have almost nothing to do with actual jigsaw-puzzling.
The main thing has been slow but steady progress through Act 3 of Silksong. After spending far too long on the gauntlet ascending his tower, I beat Crust King Khann on the third try, then took care of the Watcher at the Edge and the Pinstress in relatively short order — although note that the latter was a rematch; she trashed me repeatedly on my first attempt to the point where I had to leave to gather more shell shards. I went into the red memory and got the flower, too, so technically I’m all ready for another stab at the Abyss and ending the game.
That said, I would like to wrap up some loose ends so that I can just leave it there with a sense of real closure, at least until the DLC comes out, instead of having to noodle around more even after the ending. Which means that next up is Tormented Trobbio, whom I hate with a burning passion even before entering his room but who appears necessary to fill out the Hunter’s Journal. And to be fair, he even went to the trouble of calling me out with a quest notice, so I guess killing him to death is only polite. After that, Lost Verdania? Maybe a smidge more noodling around to fill out the Materia shelf in my house, if I really really feel like it? We’ll see.
Somewhat ironically, my son is definitely better than me at the boss fights, but while I’ve been able to push through them with sheer spiteful grit, he got fed up with the exploration and side-questing necessary to unlock the requirements for Act 3 and shifted his focus from Silksong to They Bleed Pixels, which he noticed in my Steam library from long longago and asked to try out. In Hollow Knight terms TBP is basically just “Path of Pain, The Game” and thus very much not my cup of tea, but he seems to be enjoying it so far. To each their own, eh?
That’s the benefit of something like They Bleed Pixels vs Hollow Knight that states its difficulty up front. Doesn’t lure you in with being manageable straying into challenging, and then hit you with some insane level challenges once you’re invested. Something that starts out with that Path of Pain level of difficulty I’d just bounce off in the first place – like Geometry Dash. Unlike Path of Pain coming at a point when it seems like I should be able to do it, and then go crazy trying to accomplish.