T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was just more Terraria.
Due to the difficulty of the bosses in legendary mode, especially the three mechanical bosses being combined into Mechdusa, I’ve experimented with different ways to fight bosses. So far I’ve found some success with fighting bosses in a giant pool of lava with the lava shark mount. The main two benefits of this method being decent mobility, and projectiles being greatly slowed.
So far this strategy has worked for the Queen slime, and Mechdusa, but I don’t know if it’ll work that well for the other bosses. Especially since I have to keep making giant pools of lava, and it’s getting a bit tedious.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
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.
Gamers Aren’t Toxic
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Games and the Fear of Death
Why killing you might be the least scary thing a game can do.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
I beat Abiotic Factor. While I did very much enjoy the game, I wasn’t ecstatic about how it ended. Spoilers about the last few areas:
The residences felt like it added way fewer items than previous areas. I think literally the only new crafting item was the IS-91-B essence? And shopping and botanicals had none, though the final suit unlock was really snazzy. Shopping had jump pads over an infinite hole, and they were absolutely not reliable – I died several times using them. Shopping was at least incredibly visible striking and botanicals had a cool gimmick. And then there was the last fight, against a giant enemy with no health bar, no indicator of how damaged it was, and a frequent invincibility shield. Which you brought down by killing the 20 adds it summoned, then you hit it like 3 times and repeated. It actually did quite low damage except for the giant laser, which was also annoying because when the boss teleported to a new spot while using the laser it would just keep using it. It was a dramatic fight but it would have been a lot more dramatic if I wasn’t just slapping tentacles 90% of the time.Ah well, I loved a lot of parts of it and I’m glad I saw it through to the end.Now I’m playing Book of Hours. I saw it and wondered what kind of game it was. Now that I’ve played it for 3 hours, I can confidently say that I’m still wondering that same thing. It’s kind of a worker placement game, where most relevant actions you take require a “soul” card and the ones you have refresh every day, but I haven’t seen any evidence of time pressure yet. Currently I’m trying to read books, which requires I get together enough symbols from a soul, a skill, and a memory card. I have no idea if this is what I’m supposed to be doing but it’s there and the alternative is hiring people to open up rooms of the house, which contain all sorts of stuff like furniture that I don’t know how to use and will be unhappy to track down once I do know.
No idea if I’m actually going to end up enjoying this but I’m willing to give it more time just in case I can figure out what to do.
Brotato continues. The new Nightmare difficulty feels like at least two ranks up from Level 5, maybe three. I’m getting close to dropping it, but am currently stuck trying to clear one more character, I only have two cleared so far.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass continues. Kung Fu Tower remains the most fun reality dungeon.
I have looked into the demo of Motor Town, and I see the appeal. Maybe I’ll get deeper in it, if I find the time.
Also, after visiting a local railway museum I have dug up Derail Valley again and am now trying to remember how to train xD
Lastly, I had An Itch and have installed Tropico 4 again, after checking which entry in the series was most recommended. And while it *does* scratch the Tropico-itch, the first few mission were almost disturbingly straightforward xD
Went to London this weekend so no gaming unfortunately. That’s two weekends in a row I’ve been away, too much! I do a ridiculous thing of not concentrating during the day at work (from home) and then having to work late to catch up, meaning that I miss both my exercise and my gaming and then stay up late trying to relax, wake up early, lie in, spend time thinking about how I mismanaged my time, get up tired and rush straight to working, repeat. Nonetheless, I will be taking my Switch Lite when I go on holiday, so we shall see if I get back to my ostensible 100 games in a year completion target. I think I’m still on the 8 I managed in the first month before I fell off by replaying Hollow Knight and then aspiring to complete Jedi Survivor on Jedi Grandmaster.
I finished off Suikoden III over the long weekend we had here. Basically, all that was left were the final battles, and I played the first two to retrieve the True Runes one day and then quit because I had to redo them a few times and that was too frustrating to do the very final battle knowing that I’d probably have to redo THAT a couple of times to beat it. The first one is against the very physical antagonist, so I had to leave after losing the first battle and swap some runes around so that the magic would hit and take his HP down and take out the enemies with him. It took me longer to beat the second battle against the very magical antagonist, mostly because I forgot that you really need to lock out magic for her since she has powerful spells and she had two strong spell casters with her, and then the first time I tried that strategy the special ability of the spell casters silenced my characters that had that one so I couldn’t recast it. I got lucky about the fourth time through and the one with the most spells — and the one who cast it slower so I cast it with the other character first — was still able to cast so I was able to lock her down and then just beat on everyone with my strong physical characters — the group there were all armoured knights — and finally win. The next group didn’t have to fight at all, and so then it was time for the final battle which was against one big creature and a bunch of rune entities, and the first time I forgot that the Water Rune revived the entities if they were defeated and so didn’t make much progress, so I went in the second time and focused on the Water Rune and with powerful True Lightning Rune all enemy attacks … and my main character went down in the first round. Fortunately, that doesn’t end the fight, but I was worried that I would lose again, but it turned out that the True Water Rune had the same spell to revive characters, so I revived the MC and then had two characters pound on the Lightning Rune — that had powerful spells — with melee while True Lightning pounding everything, cleared out the rune entities, and then just pounded on the main enemy while one character healed every round. At the round where she ran out of healing spells, the melee characters — who were getting three or four attacks of 300 damage or so every round — managed to take it out.
Then it was time to work through the antagonists’ chapter, since I had gotten all the Stars of Destiny. I was looking forward to it, but didn’t care for it much this time, as it was a bit inconsistent. He claims that he’s doing it because this is all a battle between basically Order and Chaos and Order is destined to win this one, but the more credible reason is that he was literally created to be a repository for a True Rune — like another character — and he’s bitter over that. And if you lose a fight it’s the same sort of game over as it would be in the main game. But it does add a little bit more to the characters, which was nice.
I’m currently set up to play Suikoden V on PS2, but I keep asking myself if I really want to spend the 50 hours it would take to beat that one. It would complete all the Suikoden games I have and I liked parts of the plot and some of the characters, but it was also really, really annoying at times. I guess I’ll see when I play next.
Also played a bit more of Knights of the Old Republic, getting to the point on Taris where you “rescue” Bastilla. The high dexterity build seems to be working pretty well, as my character hangs back and shoots and Carth does all the melee. So I think I might be able to get through this run with this character.
I completed the story of Watch Dogs: Legion. The surprise villain was as dumb as the rest of the story. I uninstalled the game and wrote a bad steam review right after that.
Next I started Yakuza Kiwami 3. They put a lot of new stuff in the game compared to the Remaster or the old PS3 game. A completely new fighting style with new characters to teach it to Kiryu. A side story of Kiryu leading a Girl Motorcycle gang, which resembles the crew feature of Pirate Yakuza. The Street Surfer Prototype is back. New side content relating to Kiryus mobile phone (No need for phone booth’s anymore). And that is just the Okinawa content. Also a lot of Game Gear classics entered, you can edit Kiryus outfits and more.
It lost content in the process: Golf is reduced to the mini game known from the rest of the franchise, no hostess clubs anymore and the QTE photo challenge to learn new moves from hilarious situations in the streets is gone.
Palworld: We got our stuff back. Thanks to the Terraria crossover weapons – like the lamp that shots enemies with homing projectiles and through walls – we could fight our way back to our corpses. And we defeated Belnoire Liberto with 20 seconds left on the clock and 50plus Pals down. That thing is a beast.
In analog Witchbound I hit the next roadblock. I have no idea where to find something fluffy to stuff my ears and enter the tower full of Mandrakes. Digital point-and-click adventures are way easier, because they keep track of all the dialog options with all the characters for you.
Palworld sounds crazy (as does Terraria…)
Finished up Star Wars: Bounty Hunter this week. Turns out the hardest level was about two-thirds of the way through, and the remaining levels were actually pretty fun. Much of that is because they mostly involve you fighting mostly melee attackers, and Jango’s flamethrower is pretty much an I-win button for those*. The game designers were not shy of having levels where you’re shorn of various weapons for variety (a big part of what makes That One Level so hard is not having your jetpack or flamethrower for it), so I’m glad they didn’t arbitrarily remove it for difficulty at the end. I’ve mentioned before how the game’s finite-lives-per-level and sparse checkpoints bring it down, but otherwise it’s a decently fun little game and a bit of a nostalgia trip. Took me a little over 9 hours to finish according to the in-game measure, though Steam says I’ve spent 15 in it, so that must not be counting level retries.
Otherwise I’ve continued expanding in Solar Expanse, having established colonies on Umbriel and Ariel around Uranus, sending supplies ahead to set up a colony on Triton, and unlocking big ol’ rockets I can use to move asteroids around the Solar System so I can start terraforming Mars in earnest.
*Other than those nexus on Malastare, which keep attacking even on when on fire. *shudder*
Was the difficult level the
underground prison? I remember a cave area with grey walls, several vehicles attacking, and then countless escaped prisoners,that I had to redo many many times.That was certainly very difficult too – I’d call it the second-hardest level for me. The one I meant was Longo Two-Guns, where you have to fight through hundreds of gangsters in a town on Tatooine. Inexplicably not having your jetpack and flamethrower makes it incredibly difficult, as the flamethrower would be phenomenal for crowd control in tight spaces (as the final levels show). But instead it seems like the game is going out of its way to make you use grena– thermal detonators for this level, hands down the most useless, hard to use, and self-dangerous weapon in the game.
I’ve totally forgotten about that level, this is making me want to replay the game to be honest. A little more in the way of interactivity in the cities would have been lovely. I often find myself thinking that a (likely impossible) combination of various Star Wars games could be the ultimate game. Jedi Outcast + KotOR. Bounty Hunter with a bit more in the way of rpg elements would have been very cool, make the cities feel more lived-in. I do need to try that recent one with Kay Vess, I forget the name, Outlaws that’s it. I find the tone and dialogue in a lot of these recent games (Jedi FO/S being two of them) to be uninteresting but the bustling nature of the towns looks great in Outlaws.
Nice! I think possibly the best level in the game is the early one in the lower levels of Coruscant, where it’s large enough that you can roam around freely in many places just passing non-hostile civilians, looking for and claiming bounties without being in the middle of a firefight, sniping hostiles from range before they notice you, etc. A game more like that would be fun, especially with a real stealth system.
Oh yes definitely, some of the platforms on Coruscant is probably the main part that I remember, as you say walking past the civilians searching for bounties.