T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been more Deep Rock Galactic, but now one of my siblings is playing with me.
They’ve been mostly just playing Scout (which is understandable) and I’ve been jumping between classes depending on the mission. Having another person instead of Bosco means that some missions are so much easier, the salvage operations are most notable, Bosco is nice to have, but two people during the drop pod repair is so much better.
The game s&box just released, so I’m probably going to be trying that out when I have time.
How’re you guys doing this week?
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
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.
The Best of 2015
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2015.
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Dream Tactics was wearing thin, but managed to recover. Turns out the first route I took features the worst boss in the game (it’s invincible until it stands on a one-use panel), and the enemies level up with you, and then the second route I took had a nasty miniboss that could one-shot a character every round. The story is nothing, and those fights were really stressing the weaknesses of the mechanics. For one, the game doesn’t have a discard pile; if you redraw a card, the replaced one goes straight back into the draw pile and you can get stuck redrawing the same two cards over and over. For two, you can only have four characters in a battle, and you start with three, so once you recruit a fourth there’s not much point switching them out.
But, the third route didn’t have any blocking fights like those two, and I realized there were multiple aspects of the mechanics I hadn’t understood. For one, the “dex” character had no cards that scaled off of Dex; they were actually just another Strength character that I hadn’t given any Strength. For two, even though the extra characters aren’t too worth using, you can put their cards on anybody, and cross-classing cards makes a big difference. And while the enemies level with you, they don’t level as quickly; that horrible boss I first ran into was the last to go down, but went down halfway through their level because my damage output had grown enough to kill them early.
The final boss was annoying. I would say it has too many phases, and during every phase placing a character in the wrong position will still kill them in one turn. But, once I saw what was coming, it went down pretty easily, and like the bad boss before it I killed it before the final phases kicked in. So, overall I had a pretty good time with the game. Probably won’t replay it; the lack of a discard pile is quite annoying. And the other “half” of the game is obstacle courses where you’re dodging stuff in real time, which was always just an irritant.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass didn’t see much play this week, and what it saw was trying to fight the worst boss in the game. I can’t tell if Imaginary Numbers has been buffed by Hard Mode or not; if it has I think it’s had its random table cut down to just the more dangerous end, because the “you just lose now” attack went off pretty darn quickly during every attempt. (That attack really cements the Worst Boss award. The random damage negation means it’d suck anyway, but the random “Everyone takes 550 damage” attack turns the thing into a superboss like Ozma from FF9. Except FF9 also has Auto-Life and Jump to survive that Meteor. Not so for JatPM.)
At least it’s optional.
Right, sorted out the bounty hunters in Jedi Survivor and all of the data scans around the place, now facing the final boss I assume in
our good friend Bodeand the only reason I feel like I can win is that I felt similarly beaten against previous bosses, and eventually saw the patterns and got the flow (and a bit of luck).On Cursed Words I ran up against a level that I can’t beat so far, the chess one. Need to get the right synergies sorted. I was screwed by the last boss the first time, choosing the wrong one that required a crazy amount of points to win. And the second time I ended up not even using the chess synergies all that much. I have much to learn.
Played more Suikoden III, finishing the recruiting that you can do outside of the story and finishing the fourth chapter, so heading into the last chapter. I was pretty happy with the team I was using and for the most part most fights — even against area and dungeon bosses — were trivial, and then I had to head into the Cyndar Temple where the random fights actually did some damage and required me to fight for a bit, and then I hit the boss of that dungeon and got into a VERY tough and close fight. The boss had these ice blocks that would attack and also blocked the way to the boss and then it would attack as well, and they took down my protagonist and another character in the first round, which was bad because those characters were my backup healers. But I managed to take one of the blocks out and my two tanks took almost no damage except for when the blocks combined for a magical attack, and the one tank with a big axe got inside the blocks — they get reformed after a while — and kept hitting the boss for 700+ damage every round. But no one else managed to get into melee range, so the main process was to keep having him hit them and have others attack a block to try to get a melee character inside to do more damage and use my main healer to keep everyone still alive going. I never managed to get another character into melee range, but later I discovered that my ranged character — that I brought along for a defense boost — could hit the boss as well, and even though I was out of healing the combination managed to take it down, which got me the last True Rune and moved me on to the end of the chapter. In hindsight, there were some other strategies that I could have used here, like bringing more ranged characters and bringing someone with Lightning Magic which has more multi-hit spells. I also could have not used the single target Fire spells in the previous fight and instead focused on simply targeted the main character with melee. But despite the difficulty spike, I managed to make it through, and have pretty much all of the side things that I wanted to get done done, so the end is in sight.
Also played Knights of the Old Republic, doing the Upper City part of Taris. What I had never done before and did this time was stop to talk to people while wearing the Sith armour … including the shopkeepers. They have much different reactions while you’re wearing the armour, so it’s impressive that they managed to write all of that in. Also, in terms of combat so far my character is doing pretty well. I’ve been doing the dueling to raise money and while the first two are indeed suppose to be easy I took on the third one and only had to use a medpack once, so it looks like my dexterity based approach is working, as none of the fights so far have been an issue at all. But we’ll see how that works as the game goes along.
Not much gaming. Hexentanz Festival / Walpurgisschlacht was last weekend, so my time went to camping, mosching and dancing in the heat of the day and freezing at Night. Catching a cold in the process, but: Good bands who themselfes had a lot of fun. My highlights were Lacrimas Profundere, Mr. Hurley und die Pulveraffen and Manntra. So, some very different music styles.
Finished up my replay of Psychonauts 2.
I’m gonna be more positive this time around, thankfully. The game is quite creative, and even occasionally charming (though at least one level completely baffles me). Gameplay is smooth and mostly fun. The main story is solid. And music is mostly excellent.
Still can’t stand those interns, though.
Been playing a whole bunch of Abiotic Factor. It’s a survival crafting game, but you’re not going to be punching trees because it’s set inside an office. Specifically, it’s set inside an office with clear inspiration from both SCP and Half-Life 1, because you’re a scientist (well, you have some class choices but they’re mostly scientist) employee of a company who was working on opening portals to other dimensions for Science and/or profit reasons. Dimensions filled with critters who follow weird rules and have been assigned numbers, hence SCP. Things go wrong and suddenly you’re fighting against monsters and murdery soldiers who have invaded the facility (hence HL1).
Survival crafting isn’t usually my thing but I did like Subnautica and people have nice things to say about this game. For good reason, I think. I mean, it definitely doesn’t have the visual splendor of Subnautica (it’s very much a retro look), but the gameplay is fun. Gathering staplers and keyboards and stuff for crafting is amusing even if mechanically it’s a lot like gathering anything else.
Also, because it takes place in a building, it’s not open world. It is a very big building with multiple paths but there are chokepoints it has set up where you can’t progress until you go to a specific place, which gates resource availability and allows for some story beats. There’s not a ton of story, there are a number of surviving people you can talk to each of whom has like 2 lines of dialogue and sometimes they give out quests/ideas for what to do next. The surviving people hurt the vibe a little because you’ll have someone clearly dying and saying their last words and you can then go do stuff for an ingame week and come back and they’ll still be there with the same line – people do update when you make enough progress in the game and I don’t actually want a time limit on talking to them, but this is a case where gameplay and story are not working together.
There are a bunch of skills that you can level up by, shockingly, using them. Some are a lot simpler than others – for strength just carry a lot, for construction they give you a bajillion every time you build anything (and you can pack it up and rebuild it to repeat), for stealth I really don’t know what actually gives XP ticks but it seems hard, and for fishing I made a fishing rod a while ago and have failed to notice any way to use it. Cooking is also kind of jank because I’ve put a bunch of things on a frying pan and every time it tells me “nope, got it wrong”. At least I can make soup (there are a LOT of soup types).
Inventory is pretty restrictive but there’s things that help with that. You can make a cart really early that you can carry with you and deploy, it holds a good amount of stuff and is basically a vehicle. Getting new crafting recipes feels satisfying – generally you get them by picking up a new item, and sometimes there’s a very small minigame where you need to guess which 4 items out of 8ish would be needed, there’s no penalty for getting it wrong but it does make it feel more like you’re an inventor. There’s also a minigame for lifting weights, and the exact same minigame for pooping, funnily enough.
I’ve never been one much for survival crafting game either ? I think Minecraft being my first one made all the rest seem shallow by comparison – but I’ve enjoyed Abiotic Factor as well, though I’ve been playing it with a friend and we’ve both been busy and I just realized the last time we played it was probably last year sometime. We should get back to that. I think what drew me to it was the theme, where mechanically it’s the same as punching trees and rocks, but thematically it’s busting up office computers for CPUs and wire and scavenging pens and rubber bands. There’s just something fun about it.
I progressed to the endgame of Going Under before sort of burning out on the game and setting it aside for a while. There’s one more major boss that seems to be the end of the storyline, but then there are a handful of achievements indicating some sort of post-game play for those who are interested. The thing is, right now I’m not very interested.
Instead I bought Monument Valley and Monument Valley 2 on sale and played through them. They’re both very pleasant little spatial-reasoning puzzle games, although to be honest most of the puzzles are very linear and don’t require a lot of thought. But while they weren’t the most engaging challenge I’ve ever seen, the visuals and sound design and story were all just right to make the games into a much-needed palate-cleanser for me in a kind of stressful time. On top of that, they were parceled out into chapters that were very easy to fit into my spare moments in the evenings. For anyone in the need of mood-centric, Escher-inspired light puzzling, they’re easy to recommend.
On a whim I also fired up Spelunky HD for a bit, only to find that playing so much Silksong rewired my hands to an awkward degree and right now I don’t have the time or energy to readjust, so that ended pretty quickly. C’est la vie.