T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was just Terraria.
We haven’t really made much progress since last week since my sibling and I are jumping between different playthroughs. Our main world is early hardmode, and our second world is almost caught up at just before the Wall of Flesh. The only thing noteworthy about this run, is that through sheer determination and luck, I got a shadow key from the dungeon without killing Skeletron by using a hoik to get through the walls of the dungeon, I did die many times but it was worth it for the novelty alone.
What’s everyone doing this week?
Skylines of the Future
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
The Best of 2017
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2017.
Silent Hill 2 Plot Analysis
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
The run of Horizon: Forbidden West is stopped – probably until I get a new PC. The anticipated crashes suck all the fun out of the game. Instead: Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrale. The English dub is much much better that the German dub. The game itself is still not as good as the original. The additional story bits are mostly a miss for now. Cloud is such a moody blond Noctis. He’s borderline annoying. Barry isn’t much better. And that crazy dude on his motorcycle – this deleted scene of Advent Children should have stayed deleted.
And I started One Piece: Odyssey, a classic JRPG with turn based combat in a rock, paper, scissors battle-system of elements and fighting styles. It mixes a newly told story with “memories” of original One Piece storylines. I now arrived at the memory of Alabasta.
So far the game is fun and close to the vibe of One Piece. Enchiiro Oda has writing/supervising credits. The difficulty is a mixed bag. The intro sequence with lv 40 characters is balanced. Then the crew is weakened and so are the enemies and the game gets very, very easy. But I’ve read steam reviews that say, the game is very grind-y. I’ll see.
Coop Palworld continues. Volcano boss is down, Dessert boss is down. Icy mountain boss next. The Palpedia fills up more and more and we enter lv 50 areas now, while ourselves being lv41/44. Well, the Pals do and receive most of the damage.
Analog I played Chang an with all its modules. Silk road makes the game just longer, Empress is almost pointless, development plan is a nice addition to get some resources for stuff you are already doing, Events do change up the game nicely, and the goal tiles are like a light Prelude to Terraforming Mars.
Triangle Strategy continues. I’m in a much better mood for this game this time, although I’m sure that already knowing the story’s flaws is helping. The mechanics are probably my favorite in the genre, the Quality Of Life is off the charts; the big “these guys can hit you on this square” lines make maneuvering super convenient, and everyone’s got their turn order floating above their head. Plus I found out by accident that it works like Shining Force, where if you restart a battle, you keep all your XP. (Plus every battle’s replayable at any time. Want to grind up a character who’s twenty levels behind everyone now? Well, you’ve got fights from twenty levels ago you can run them through.)
While I haven’t played a whole lot of war-plot strategy games, the story’s pace feels pretty unique; a game like Final Fantasy Tactics has the war continually ramping up until the whole world is on fire, but Triangle Strategy feels like a controlled conflict all the way through, with a series of ebbs and flows as groups attack each other, and then rest and recover before the next attack. And I really like the branching path system, especially when you don’t know what the path will lead to. The need to convince the NPCs to agree with your decision means you’re spending a good chunk of time in the decision process, which makes the whole thing feel weightier. It’s a cool system and I hope more people use it. But, the branches themselves so far feel mostly cosmetic; you get different fights, but not different long-term outcomes. Apart from the ending. That one’s meaty. (Of course the party overruled me at the “pick the ending” choice and gave me the one ending I’ve already seen. So that was a bit annoying.)
Still don’t think salt makes for a compelling conflict point. I know it was historically important, but, the four shakers of salt I bought for $5 total are still in my cupboard, eight years later. Modern day people don’t understand salt shortages; it might as well be a monopoly on hand sanitizer, for all the emotional stakes it holds. I think it should have been some fantasy resource; maybe you have to eat it to use magic. Although that leads to the audience questioning the way the object itself works, while everyone already knows how salt works. Hard to say how to fix it.
I’d heard they wanted the game to be half visual novel (and the early game especially suffers for wordiness), but New Game is showing off the full extent of that visual novel approach; once you’re on the second playthrough, the game starts actually telling you what Conviction stats are, and what they do for you. I guess the first route is supposed to lend to natural choices, while the second is for min-maxing. Not sure how I feel on that one; I feel like that’s not worth hiding. (They also tell you there’s a bonus for playing it like a Fire Emblem and not letting anyone die. I don’t know what the bonus is because I immediately let someone die on the very first NG map. Better Luck Third Route, maybe.)
Demonschool continues. We’re now investigating the ghosts of a plane crash. The problem isn’t that there’s ghosts; it’s that there’s only supposed to be so many ghosts, and now there’s other many ghosts. This is a silly game. A silly game that involves ghost punching.
It’s insane to think that people were even paid in salt in the past. As you say, I bought 750g at university for something like 34 pence, which ended up in my mother’s house and now back in mine, and I still haven’t finished it.
For what it’s worth, there’s a saying in Japanese, “to send salt to your enemy,” based on an event from the Sengoku period (the generation before the country’s unification and start of the Edo era). I can totally see this fun little tidbit as keeping the historical importance of salt, and its military implications, closer to mind for any reasonably-educated Japanese person than it is for perhaps most western players.
I was wondering if it had more relevance over there.
Meanwhile we’ve got salty seadogs crying salty tears.
A bunch more FF7: Rebirth. Still enjoy the game but it sure does have filler. The open world is very Ubisoft, every “puzzle” that requires moving things sucks (so slow!), and rewards are super skewed. Like, getting new materia, super exciting. Getting a materia that I already have 3 of at max level, less exciting. Getting crafting materials, generally not exciting at all. In particular the game really seems to value cosmotite ore and mythril ore and cosmotite goes exclusively into making consumable mana regen items (I don’t use consumable items, I remember them being disabled on hard in the last game) and mythril ore goes into… almost literally nothing?
I’m at the endgame now, so some genuinely hard fights have opened up and I’ll need to think about setups for them. Synergy skills were a really good addition to the game and encourage switching which character you control rather than sticking with just one because you have to use 3-4 moves on two different characters to activate them and they’re strong. Synergy abilities are… less relevant, but sometimes I remember to use them.
I still think the Queen’s Blood quest is super goofy. There’s this card game, but they really feel the need to give it a dark backstory and a dramatic final encounter and… it’s a card game, I refuse to take any of that seriously. It’s pretty fun, though I mostly settled into the same deck I wound up with last time I played because “kill your own stuff” is ludicrously powerful as an archetype. I appreciate the various challenges they offer which mess with the rules so that you try out different things, for example the one where the board is reversed drastically changes the value of some cards. The AI is pretty bad at managing the most basic strategic step, “control who can play cards where”.
It’s lovely that you’re playing multiplayer with your sibling. My sister and I used to play together on the PS2 when we were younger. I need to restart that actually, when we’re at our mother’s.
Anyway, this week I finally have something of note to report gaming-wise. I’ve been playing A Long Way Down on Switch. Which is quite an interesting game, a deck-builder with level maps that you must traverse by building paths using blocks available to both you and your enemy. The issues I’ve been having however are: a) the writing is tiny on the Switch and even on the TV, b) without mouse hover, I’m not sure what some of the stats are, and c) it keeps bugging when I use certain powers, or just in general, on a particularly difficult fight, to the point that last night I beat the fight and then it became unresponsive. Finally beat it properly, and now the next (final?) boss is using my own deck against me meaning he has loads of heals but also couldn’t kill me, and the fight was seemingly infinite. I did wonder why it gave me the option to re-do my deck beforehand, time to remove all the heals and see if I can do enough damage quickly enough. I recommend getting it on PC for much faster loading times (I assume) and hopefully fewer bugs (but the Steam reviews said otherwise in 2021). It’s currently 80% off at £2.79. For the £1.49 or so I spent on Switch, it’s certainly more value than most of the other cheap deals I’ve had on that platform!!
Still playing Suikoden III, having played Geddoe’s second chapter and Thomas’ second — and final — chapter. The game is structured as having three more or less separate chapters for each main character, and then an optional two chapter arc for Thomas, and then two other optional chapters (one for the dog and one for the main antagonists if you get all the stars). This chapter approach allows for different viewpoints on the early part of the game and also to have a clear stopping point where you are supposed to move on to another chapter. The downside is that sometimes it can be difficult to decide what characters to recruit with which players as any party member who could be useful in an actual party can only be used by the party that recruited them. Here I grabbed everyone powerful that I could for Thomas because he has a battle sequence that could be tough, which ultimately made them easy, as I could have beaten off the entire attacking army group by myself but had to do the scripted retreat, at one point into an unwinnable battle that if I had realized was unbeatable I wouldn’t have attacked but would have focused on defense for the final one, although that one was trivial so it didn’t matter. I’m a bit worried that I didn’t leave enough characters for Chris to use in her third chapter.
Anyway, I’m still really enjoying it, but I’ve put in about 20+ hours into it so far and my save file from the last time I played it was 62 hours. So it may take me a while to get through it.
Marvel Rivals continues. Still enjoying Blade as a melee character I can actually play: he’s mostly about rapid continuous attacks, rather than having to land a perfect pounce or cycle a bunch of abilities, and it’s nice having a damage character to play that doesn’t rely on long-range accuracy. Had a night playing with the guys from work where the game kept giving us the most BM highlight clips, just short little single kill things like “wow, you suck so bad this is the best we could come up with,” because the automatic highlight system is not great sometimes and is hilarious (and they still don’t have a way for you to share clips with your friends list, which is ridiculous).
In single player, still troubleshooting mods for Cyberpunk and trying to decide if I want to start a new run of BG3, or finish my current one, and whether or not I should add mods first. Or as scrolling the Steam sale has reminded me, I could just go play Solasta if I want something I haven’t seen, which also shouldn’t be full of videogamey items and “we simplified this spell so now it’s broken.” Picked up a few cheap and a couple VR games on the Steam sale.