T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was just killing time with more Deep Rock Galactic.
But I did pick up Teardown again. I’ve always had a fondness for voxel based games. And, Teardown is just beautiful, the gameplay is simple, but I just love the feedback with the lights and sounds. Sometimes you just need to be given a sledgehammer and just be told ‘break that’. So aside from playing property damage: the game, I’ve just been busy with work.
How’s everyone else this week?
Zenimax vs. Facebook
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
Artless in Alderaan
People were so worried about the boring gameplay of The Old Republic they overlooked just how boring and amateur the art is.
The Best of 2013
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2013.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
Triangle Strategy is complete enough. I’ve seen three of the four endings, one of which was the True Route. I remembered partway through that Octopath team likes to make the final boss a superboss, but I forgot they also like to make you use every character, meaning skipping the last route and its character recruitments meant I had to do fights understaffed, and not rotating meant several of the other characters were uselessly low level. (I also botched the placement pretty badly and had to do the hardest bit with characters not particularly suited to it.)
The True Ending is… meh. Unfortunately, it does not rise above the broken narrative leading up to it; plot threads remain untied
(I can’t believe they introduce a weapon called “the Deathknell”, and then none of the routes involve fighting the Deathknell. Also The Herosbane just disappears and never comes back.)and the final boss has lower pathos than the bosses from the “false” routes.(This is the second mid-2020’s JRPG that ended with a physical conflict against an octogenarian. You might as well make me fight a flagpole, it’s just as little sense of accomplishment.Honestly the first ending I got was the best of them; climactic, thorough and bittersweet. The second was alright, but the extremely obvious payoff did not occur (it was also very funny seeing the hero argue about needing to accept the will of democracy, when due to game mechanics democracy ended in a tie that he personally broke). Who knows, maybe the last one is brilliant. But I’m not going to see it, this game’s done and dusted.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass continues. Quite a lot of Hard Mode additions have primarily been there for jokes. (The wide-eyed children’s recorder soldiers now have “life-or-death training” that buffs them at half health, too late to save them.) But, I’m in World 3 now, and Hard Mode is starting to be felt. First was Big Enormous getting a Rampage attack, which took prior knowledge to beat. Then, the Pumpkin summoned adds, one of which could heal the whole enemy team for what I would refer to as “ludicrous amounts”. Most recently, the Presents now have TWO effects, making the Turnbuckle fight much nastier. (What new malice will the 50’s Style Vampire concoct? A Renfield? A Cookie Monster? A 20’s-Style Vampire? Only one way to find out!)
4TheWords was at a dead stop for about a month and a half, but feels like it’s finally kicking back up. Part of that is Demonschool’s finally finished and Hundred Line and Tri Strat have hit stopping points, but most of it is realizing Mom’s birthday is coming up and if I shove words out at crippling speed then I can theoretically finish this book by then. Will it happen? I’ve never finished a book, so odds point to No. But! It’s possible. And thus, words shall be 4’d anew.
Brotato hit 666 hours of playtime. That’s ominous.
Still playing Suikoden III. I started the fourth chapter which is where you pick a protagonist for the rest of the game, and I chose Grasslander Hugo because he seems best suited to take over the legacy of the previous Grasslander hero. You then have to go and fight a big dragon to earn the right to the True Rune, and afterwards the character who gives you the task says that Hugo earned the Rune … except that while he DID do some damage most of the damage was done by Geddoe with his True Lightning Rune and Chris took care of all the healing, so it seems like either of them did more than he did.
The start of the chapter is also pretty depressing, as you are required to fight through a number of losing battles where if you REALLY lose them it’s a game over. I also had one party fight that I had to retry a couple of times before hitting on the strategy of ensuring that new character Jimba had a Water Rune — he has maxed out Water Skill but starts without a Water Rune, which is key for story reasons — and then at that battle using one character to cast a protection spell and then use Jimba to cast Silent Lake and shut down all magic, since if you don’t the magic using character in that party will just keep pounding group damage spells at the party and they can only survive about two of them, and she almost always gets to cast first and her damage spell almost always causes any other casting characters to stop casting spells — she didn’t block Silent Lake the first time I tried it, though — and without that the characters are strong enough physically to defeat the soldiers protecting her and end the fight. Good thing I picked Jimba to be in the party and gave him a Water Rune, which isn’t necessarily something people would think of.
The game is also pretty bad at telling you what you need to do. A number of times I had to run around to every area and talk to all the people to finally trigger the next plot event. The worst was when I had to run to a specific area on the bridge out of town to talk to Sgt Joe who was standing guard there, and then with no other prompt had to immediately click on him AGAIN to trigger the big speech. I had no idea that I needed to do that and the reasonable expectation is that after talking to him I would have to go to talk to someone else or go somewhere else instead. Also, in the big speech that follows you get a choice of whether to take on the name of the legacy hero or keep your own name. I wanted to keep Hugo’s name, so I selected “I will take over, Bananas” (I used that name because I was watching “The Challenge” at the time and it kinda came to me, and I needed to give SOME name). This had me take over the name of the legacy hero, which isn’t what I wanted. I can kinda see if I squint how the grammar works out, but it was a bit ambiguous.
So not a great session, but I’m still enjoying the game and do plan on finishing it. I’m not sure if I’ll take on “Suikoden V” after this or move on to the updated “Persona 3”.
More Jedi Survivor, this time I have finally beaten the
double rancors, coming back to them after doing some more map searching and coming across an even more difficult challenge arenatriple WWE monsters. Hilarious seeing the one of them manage to two-footed drop kick the other out of the arena. I stayed up until 4am dealing with that, finally by some weird glitch miracle when I made a blaster parry and then the game slowed down to slow motion for a while, followed by speeding up to a bit faster than usual, before settling down. Seems to be related to the blaster – I had already been finding that sometimes my blaster wouldn’t fire at all. I’d also get stuck on the ladder coming out of the area where the challenge was and have to quit the game. The ferocity of the fight made me go back to thedouble rancorsand they seemed slow as molasses by comparison. Once I finally learnt to dodge backwards against their instakill grab, it was all over. Still took me several more attempts of course. Also learning to use the Impact move again, made things easier I believe, as it has a seemingly infinite range, unlike lightsaber throw.Anyone playing Cursed Words? I saw Yahtzee play some of it, and it looked like a surefire hit hot off the heels of Balatro. But it had only 266 reviews when I went to look on Steam.
Picked up Stellar Tactics on gog. Sort of a Privateer/X3 meets old-school Xcom? Top-down turn-based shooter, merged with an RPG, a spaceship shooter, and a space exploration game? Unsurprisingly, it’s a bit too many things at once, but I’m actually kind of enjoying it so far. We’ll see if it can hold my attention; definitely one of those games where, if I walked away from it for a week, I’d probably have to start over with the tutorial just to re-learn all the systems and controls…
I tried the demo of Solar Expanse which released into Early Access on the 9th…and found myself hooked, and picked it up. You play as a space-related organization starting in the present day, with the goal being to launch missions throughout the Solar System to set up bases, extract resources, terraform celestial bodies*, and maybe one day launch an interstellar colony ship. There is a small chance I end up bouncing off it later on because it involves ?logistics? which my brain absolutely loves…right up to the point where it becomes overwhelming and leaves me unable to comprehend the scale of what I’m doing any more.
I’ve had an idea for years of a game very similar to this (though focused more on science and exploration, with you starting in a randomly-generated Solar System each time), so I’m interested to see how well modding is supported and whether I can mod myself my dream game eventually.
Edit: I’ve also been chasing advanced challenges in Ark Nova (knocked out a few more this week) and progressing through the plot of Star Wars: Bounty Hunter.
*Which is probably the real reason it appealed to me, honestly, I’m an absolute sucker for games that let you terraform Mars. This is at least the fifth one in my library, and I’m eagerly awaiting the release of the third and final DLC for Terraformers on the 16th (which I’ve also been getting back into in preparation for).
After putting all that time into gathering Cyberpunk mods, I of course have spent the last two weeks returning to Baldur’s Gate 3. Spent far too much time going around in circles about messing with builds but did in the end turn Karlach into a Monk/Rogue and tuned up Wyl’s choices. Have slain two major and one minor endgame bosses so far (
Cazador, Sarevok, and Carrion). Kept a video of the middle one ’cause I have no idea how I won that: their super move never touched me, multiple times they walked up and just stopped but I couldn’t tell why (my best guess is a bunch of wacky item effects all going off at once thanks to touching a spell effect and interrupting their turn). I fought basically to the last spell slot though, with other nearby foes joining in, and even my most dubiously useful summons playing significant roles, so I think I earned it.Aside from the usual – One Piece Odyssey, FF VII Remake, Palworld, YGO Duel Links/Master Duel – I played Junkyard Simulator: A Do Everything A Little Bit But Nothing For Real simulator game. Car Mechanic Simulator – Check, but only for two cars and only disassemble, Power Wash Simulator – Check, but only on square little objects, Mudrunner – Check, but only for 2 tiny roads, House Flipper – Check, but without any creative freedom, Blank Store Simulator – Check, but without customers. The list continues.
And I played Toira, an action adventure from Brazil made with Brazilian government funding, that looks and feels like a student midterm project of game academy. Clunky controls, inconsistent gameplay that is more concept than vision, convoluted spiritual story – but the music was good.
Analog I play Rajas of the Ganges. Goods shucking race to 6 VP with a good decision space.
And I started playing Witchbound. That is more a point and click adventure in board game format. Go to space N on page N in the picture book, look at the clues, make notes. Talk to people M by reading paragraph 2M in the story book – make notes – and use clue X in this conversation by reading paragraph XM and make notes.
It is kids friendly, lovely illustrated and so far engaging.
Busy week, but I played two games of note: Escape from Monkey Island, and the demo/prologue for Neverway.
I confess that, though I love adventure games, I had not started played the Monkey Island series in its release order until a few years ago. I actually started with Escape from Monkey Island on the PS2 from the rental store. I got stuck on Monkey Kombat. Coming back to it all these years later at the behest of my fiance has been a welcome treat!
Also, I have a feeling there will be a lot of good discussions about Neverway when it comes out this fall! I can hardly wait!
Just curious: what are your favorite class, weapon, and mining tool in DRG? I’ve grown fond of the driller, the cryo gun, and the grappling hook myself!
Since I usually just play solo, I mostly play Engineer and just have Bosco mine most of the minerals, but I think my favorite would be scout, my favorite weapon is the autocannon with the mortar rounds overclock, and the grappling hook is just so fun and convenient.