T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I played a few different games.
I finished my skyblock Terraria world. After it got into hardmode most of the difficulty of it being a skyblock disappears, you can get wings, and you’ll probably already have a few mob farms set up so it’s just kill a boss, farm some loot, kill a boss, farm some loot.
I also bought a small game called Scritchy Scratchy. It’s a short idle game about scratching scratch cards, it was $7 and I got a few hours of fun out of it.
I also learned that Rimworld has a multiplayer mod that just works with minimal hassle. I don’t know how well it works on the newest version, but it’s not given any trouble in version 1.5 so far.
Anyway, How’s everyone else doing?
Megatextures
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
Blistering Stupidity of Fallout 3
Yeah, this game is a classic. But the story is idiotic, incoherent, thematically confused, and patronizing.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
It’s been pretty busy here, so after finished the first two Monument Valley games I haven’t really done much gaming at all. In fact, aside from the NYT Crossword and related time-fillers, all the gaming as gaming that I’ve done is a few solo rounds of Battle for Wesnoth.
It’s actually fine. It feels a little weird to not at least have one or two longer game projects ongoing, and there’s certainly plenty of stuff that I could start doing when I have the time, but for now… it’s actually fine. Nothing’s really grabbed my imagination and demanded that I play it, the way Terraria or the Civ games, etc. have done at times. I guess we’ll see how this current mood runs its course… maybe it’ll last until the next big “must play” game goes on sale, or an especially appealing update/DLC drops for something that I’ve played a bunch in the past.
Mostly I played Watch Dogs: Legion. Spoken dialog in this no-main-protagonist-game is really, really bad and that 1984-distopia is not believable in a major European city. But the gameplay is fun. And in gameplay a main protagonist exists: The Spider Bot. In a stealth run almost everything is done by Spider Bot, while the deadsec-agent stands outside staring at his/her phone.
Also playing Palworld without much progress in recent times. The Obon boss still reigns supreme and one biome is still open for exploration. But we found and completed the Terraria-colab-dungeon.
And Master Duel playing Dragonmaids and RikkAromage. Not very successful, but they are fun decks to play. Two games of the digital version of Canvas. Lost one, won one. Not a bad version and Steam Remote Play is available.
The analog play contained Witchbound and ito. Witchbound is more or less a point-and-click-adventure in paper form and ito is a party game about ordering your example to a topic to the examples of the other players. It induces a lot of laughter around the table, when imagining the extreme examples to certain topics.
More Abiotic Factor. I figured out fishing (you can fish in any water at all, basically) and cooking (whenever you put anything on a frying pan, it will give you an error message, which is a lie). There is a lot to do in this game. The containment units are where the game goes really SCP – there’s a painting that may spread to or transfer to other nearby art, a doorway that wipes your memories if you step through it, and a gun that is, to all appearances, totally ordinary, but maybe it wasn’t always that way. There’s also an object that they sent into space where they know it will be a big problem in 50000 years, but hey, that’s not a problem for today.
I’ve mostly settled on a combat strategy of “run at enemy with big stick”. It works really well, mostly, charge power attacks with heavy weapons do bonkers damage. Anything that uses ammunition is a little awkward because it just eats up so many resources. That’s definitely a side of the game that I’m less interested in, just like in Subnautica – finding something new and being able to craft new stuff is cool. Worrying about running out of metal scrap or whatever other early game resource is not. Luckily I can mostly avoid dealing with that.
I do not like the weather effect that just makes everything incredibly dark. It’s much worse than when the power goes out at night. Possibly the night vision goggles deal with it but playing the game in all green tones is also not my cup of tea.
Game continues to be cool, and it’s handy every time I get a new QoL feature. I wish vehicles were more practical, their turn radius has been pretty bad and the security carts don’t have storage on them.
Still playing Suikoden III. I hit the part that I had forgotten about which is after you finally get everyone their True Runes … they get taken away from you. That was a bit annoying, especially since my parties were able to mop the floor with the antagonists only to lose the True Runes anyway. But that each of those chapters is a chapter that puts together the old teams again to reflect the earlier chapters is nice. I found myself thinking that I do indeed really like this game, annoyance over the story mandated loss of the True Runes aside.
Also got in another play of Knights of the Old Republic. For blog-related reasons, I’m playing it in nice, bite-sized increments, and so this time explored the Lower City and got the quest to get the swoop engine. Next session I’ll probably get the swoop engine and maybe run the race. I went with a high dexterity character with low strength and constitution, and so far that’s working fairly well for me. I might have wanted to make intelligence a little higher to get more skill points, but otherwise things are okay.
Sailed through the 5th level of Cursed Words, satisfying – a playing cards level, but synergised with the chess pieces. Wonder what’s next.