T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I started a Skyblock world in Terraria.
I started it mostly out of curiosity, but I am enjoying the change of pace. There’re only two islands in the whole map, one is the spawn island, which is made of only plain dirt and cloud blocks, and the other has the shimmer. Most of the ways you get materials are from slimes. On the surface they drop grass seeds, acorns and more ore. In the underground they drop stone, dirt, web, granite, and marble. Mimics can spawn pre-hardmode and will drop gold chest loot. Finally, the Eye of Cthulhu will drop a demon altar, and the Eater of Worlds/Brain of Cthulhu will drop dungeon bricks so you can fight Skeletron.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
Juvenile and Proud
Yes, this game is loud, crude, childish, and stupid. But it it knows what it wants to be and nails it. And that's admirable.
PC Hardware is Toast
This is why shopping for graphics cards is so stupid and miserable.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Mass Effect Retrospective
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Seven Springs
The true story of three strange days in 1989, when the last months of my adolescence ran out and the first few sparks of adulthood appeared.
Continuing One Piece Odyssey – Every time I think I get to the end of Alabasta the game throws another detour on me. I want to explore the island created for the game, not fuzzy memories of landscapes already known. (And Alabasta being one of the most boring islands in the OP canon. Why not Little Garden, Impel Down or Sabaody, maybe even Ohara?) For now, I avoid combat whenever I can. The enemies are just way to easy and just a time consuming nuisance.
Coop continues Palworld. I hit Lv. 50 now. We conquered the mountain top tower and got butchered by the Obon tower. Not a time run out, that lady hit hard.
And instead of Deathloop I’m playing Watch Dogs: Legion now. That not-a-main-protagonist-concept is a hard sell for me. Most of the cutscenes are awkwardly written and performed with a lot of the voices sounding familiar to each other (German dub). And the not-MC lacks agency of him-/herself. The world now is a full blown fascist dystopia in London. A teeny-tiny bit unbelievable. In my experience UK working class is more resilient to fall to that crap.
Additional, I remember the controls being better in the first two entries. BUT: The mechanics are still fun: Sneaking around, switching from camera to camera, laying traps, conquering enemy tech – good stuff. It’s my least favorite of the three Watch Dogs (for now), but it’s still a good game.
Yet more proof that Terraria is far more game than I could handle.
Finally I can gush about Cursed Words! It’s really great so far, I suspect it’s everything I would have hoped for from Balatro (but bounced off). A much more interersting premise for me than poker. I must have 5 hours in it and am at 4% apparently. Hopefully this morning’s efforts are on their way to 5%. If there weren’t a % figure, I’d have guessed that I am about 25% through the game, although there is an option on the homepage which says “You are not yet ready”. Maybe that’s a “final dungeon” so to speak, where things become more roguelike.
I was glad to see how it unfolded without really knowing anything beyond having watched Yahtzee play the first few puzzles, and was drawn in by the Scrabble element in particular. These aren’t spoilers beyond what the Steam page shows, but I’ll block out just in case.
It starts out as a letter/word puzzle game which then becomes various interesting logic / spatial puzzles,with a whole host of upgrades and passive multipliers etc. to improve your scores, in order to clear progressively more demanding scores each level, and unlock moreparadigms with which to approach the next run. But runs are subdivided into a progression of scenarios,meaning that it feels like I’m playing a game with a series of levels, that are completed and then I move onto the next one – a tangible progress through the game, rather than the typical roguelite progress of ‘bashing my head against the same gargantuan challenge but gaining new helpful elements along the way from each failed run’. The success to failure ratio is so much higher, so far, and each new scenario presents a new type of puzzle gameplay / paradigm.I’m really enjoying it, and it’s particularly good for Steam-deck type play (I’m playing it on my rather loud GPD Win 2). No idea why this isn’t on mobile platforms, it would surely do so much better there. As it stands it has been out for 20 days and has 350 reviews, which doesn’t seem many for what seems like it should be an absolute slam dunk success given the success of Balatro and the NYT puzzles, of which this is a wonderful hybrid.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass continues. Some of the Hard Mode changes are just un-nerfing enemies; the Lingering Eyes started out with Rebalance, lost it at some point, and now have it again (I for one am happy it’s back). Found one of the two new dungeons; it’s got a quite annoying enemy in it, and it’s occuring to me that I don’t know whether that’s a dungeon thing or a Hard Mode thing because I haven’t seen it on Normal.
Once again, it’s the end of World 6 that kind of drains my enthusiasm for continuing, which sucks, because there’s a lot of game after that. But that’s mostly the point where it switches from themed worlds with multiple dungeons, to just stand-alone dungeons (and heavy-handedness about the waking world). But, I should probably push through; Hard Mode has more to see after all.
Dream Tactics got dusted off. Got it a while ago because it was keyboard-only, but dropped it because the graphics were painfully small. But now my TV is ludicrously big and I can play it without squinting. The story’s quite mediocre, but the gameplay is fun, and is short enough to fit in most Brotato windows. I’ll probably finish it, but it’s going to take quite a while.
Played through Start Trek: Voyager – Across the Unknown. It’s a procedurally generated resource management game where you’re building rooms in your ship, trying not to run out of fuel, and occasionally getting into fights or sending off away teams or doing main or sidequests based on the show. The start of the game was definitely harder than the end. I generally had fun with it but some parts were annoying – sometimes you have percent chances in dialogue, and those can just say “no you don’t get to do this sidequest”. And there was one main quest occasion where I had a straight 50-50 of losing, which meant reloading (to a pretty friendly autosave) and trying again, which is a truly terrible choice of game design.
The combat was basic but did at least have some strategy to it. In the endgame you fight some borg cubes and the game does a very good job of making them feel enormous but also as I mentioned the game got easier over time so I genuinely could not tell if they were attacking me.
The game is divided into chapters and you’re incentivized to spend as much time as you can in each one since research and construction and stuff take “cycles”. You have some limits on this because eventually you’ve looted all the resources available and also there are increasing morale penalties if you take too long in a given chapter, which is good for the game.
I’ve also been playing Escape from Ever After, which is a Paper Mario-like game, meaning a turn based game with little minigames for every attack and small damage numbers. Also everyone is kind of made of paper, both visually and literally because they’re all storybook characters. Capitalism has found a way to get into books so there is a company that is recruiting fictional characters and building on fictional land. The game is overall ok. Some of it feels like it should be more interesting than it is – for example there’s a section where you’re in a pirate story looking for pirate treasure, and when you’re on your pirate boat you talk to your pirate captain and then get into a fight. Over and over. Being on a boat manages to be less interesting than the normal dungeons because in those you can try to avoid enemies or get first strikes on them and there are little platforming bits between.
There’s an optional challenge dungeon where you have to clear 100 floors with no healing or saves. I hate it. The difficulty increases over the floors and it means if you can beat floor 100 then you’re going to have an absolute joke of a time with floors 1-80 or so, probably, even with the flat scaling (I am not at endgame and died at floor 40-something, and 1-30 were jokes). And dying means you lose all of the time you spent in it. Ugh.
The little minigames for attacking are fun and don’t really get tedious. Blocking is kind of a mixed bag – most moves have pretty clear tells for when you need to block but some moves cover a lot of screen space and you just kind of have to trial and error your way to the right timing.
I really wish you had 3 active characters like Bug Fables. Having just 2 means that using Research to get info on enemies can be painful, particularly in boss fights against multiple significant enemies. Your characters have certain specialties and you can switch between them. I do very much like having a dragon on the team.
Still playing Suikoden III. I managed to get two sessions in this week, which was pretty much taken up by recruiting. I have almost all of the 108 Stars of Destiny that you can recruit outside of the story, including the playmaster, who once you recruit him and give him some scripts will let you put on plays using those recruitable characters. Some of them are good actors and some aren’t, and at the end of the play you get a crowd reaction, either boos or cheers. The first time through I was doing “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and was mostly aiming to put bad actors in for the funny sequences, but before I quit I really wanted to get a good one in, and managed to do that. The second time I went with “Romeo And Juliet” and had good reactions most of the time, but at the end I went with characters that weren’t quite suited for the roles — one was a silent character for one of the guards and one was someone who wasn’t good at deep roles for Juliet — and while _I_ thought it went well, the crowd booed. I had cheers from the previous ones, so that was fine. I have to find the last few scripts and will play with that a bit more.
The good part is that after the game was pretty bad at telling you what to do next, it’s been pretty clear this time, as the strategist says to go to the Cyndar Temple because something odd is happening there, and I know where that is. I also managed to put together a pretty strong team, adding some tanks to my main character and other characters with some magic and high Swing skills so I get a LOT of attacks in, and when the enemy targets the tanks their Armor Protect skills are so high that the attacks almost always do 0 damage. I might have to level up some other characters, though, at some point because at the end the teams are split into the original teams, and right now I can’t use the other protagonists but will definitely need them leveled up and with their skills at max for that part.
Replaying Psychonauts 2. I remember being underwhelmed the first time, so I’m going though again to try to see why.
The main thing is that the writing just isn’t funny. Psychonauts was full of vibrant, humorous characters, but the dialogue in this one just isn’t as sharp. Sure, the characters have plenty to say, but there’s not much substance in it, and it’s far less ‘humorous’ than it is ‘snarky’. The dialogue is largely filler. The oddest decision is to create six fellow psy-interns, all of whom are fairly bland. There’s a lot here that I can see what its function is, but the execution leaves something to be desired.
That’s a real shame to hear. The whole point in the first one for me was the silliness.
I’ve enjoyed it personally, I think it does a good job of leveraging the higher production values and it has a stronger, more coherent overall theme. Having said that I think the focus on that theme is what’s responsible for it being less humorous and the level design being less “out there”, the latter being what I was personally missing from the game.
Forgot to mention Jedi Survivor – I have discovered
the truth, or part of it, which was already spoiled for me when I looked up opinions on how hard people thought theDagan Gerafight was. And now I have beatenDarth Vaderwhich felt incredibly difficult on Jedi Grandmaster, but eventually I got good, and lucky presumably, after countless deaths. It’s why it makes me laugh when people would say oh yes Dark Souls boss X was really difficult, took me 8 tries. That’s such a low number of tries! Dark Souls just has various way of making it feel very difficult, or indeed be very difficult, while not actually necessarily taking all that many tries in the scheme of things (except you, Midir…and Sister Friede… and… Iron Golem). Anyway, now it’s time to take on some Bounty Hunter rumour. Oh what’s that, somehow getting to him is harder than any of those blasted bosses or challenges I’ve faced so far?! Cal is not equipped to deal with multiple ranged enemies, or melee enemies supported by ranged enemies!Playing through Solar Expanse. It starts in ~2020, and I’m up to about 2050 in game now, having set up both a lunar and a martian colony and just started mining asteroids. I’ve researched and built some solar sail craft that can carry small amounts of cargo slowly around the inner Solar System, but without costing any fuel, which I’m definitely starting to feel a crunch for (both traditional rocket fuel and noble gasses for my electric propulsion craft). I designed a mission to drop a probe off on each of the Galilean moons in one go, which was fun. I’m working my way towards researching terraforming, which I’m looking forward to. I’m curious to see how much is supported, like if I could theoretically terraforming Venus.
The game’s still in Early Access, and definitely feels like it. I had an embarrassing incident where a hundred prospective martian colonists starved in Earth orbit surrounded by food. I set up the mission to take them to Mars (which had a launch date over a year in the future because I’m bad at planning), and the UI doesn’t have an easy way to see how many of the hundreds of tons of supplies I’d launched into orbit it was taking on the mission. So while I thought I told it to take a good amount that would keep people fed but also keep plenty back for them to eat while waiting for the launch, it took everything, and since the game doesn’t recognize supplies earmarked for a future mission as being available, suddenly all those people in orbit found themselves with no food and promptly starved the next day before I could launch more up from Earth. So, yeah. There’s definitely some polish that could be done on various UI elements.
Also been playing the third and final DLC for Terraformers, which adds politics to the martian terraforming strategy game. It’s…fine, I guess. I enjoyed the first two (about settling colonies throughout the Solar System and building unique one-per-city megastructures) a little more, but it’s of the same high quality as the rest of the game. I appreciate that owning all three DLCs unlocks an additional scenario where the goal is to turn Phobos or Deimos into an interstellar colony ship and launch it; I finished it for the first time this week and found that it has a unique little ending animation of the ship firing its engines and leaving, while the credits roll. Felt very fitting for the final addition to game, which I’ve been following ever since I first tried its demo back when Steam Next Fest was still relatively new.
I also tried the demo for Leafy Corner, a game about running a plant store. It’s a bit bare-bones, but it’s got a lovely art style and goes well my current attempt to grow some plants in real life (something I’ve not been very good at in the past, but I’m giving it another go).