T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve been to busy to do much except play Terraria.
I’ve just beaten Golem, and I’m now being incisive if I should work on my base, or try to progress more.
I’m writing this a bit late, and I’m sleep deprived, so I’m keeping this short.
how’s everyone else this week?
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
In Defense of Crunch
Crunch-mode game development isn't good, but sometimes it happens for good reasons.
TitleWhat’s Inside Skinner’s Box?
What is a skinner box, how does it interact with neurotransmitters, and what does it have to do with shooting people in the face for rare loot?
Quakecon 2011 Keynote Annotated
An interesting but technically dense talk about gaming technology. I translate it for the non-coders.
The Mistakes DOOM Didn't Make
How did this game avoid all the usual stupidity that ruins remakes of classic titles?
Played more Book of Hours and I think the answer is it’s not for me. The main loop seems to be that you read books which gives you skills which you can then use to read harder books, occasionally using memories (limited duration and use resources) as well to help out. There’s also crafting which seems like it might be important, and that’s a shame because trying to craft means dealing with some actively malicious game design elements. The game will tell you all the relevant information on any object you have, and if you hover over an attribute it’ll highlight everything that has that attribute, and there the friendliness ends. You get 5 inventory slots, everything else has to sit somewhere in the house. You can’t put things in arbitrary places – each room has specific places you can put things, and that’s it. Which means if I want to find all the pigments or liquids or lenses or whatever, I probably need to look all over the house. There are over a dozen different crafting stations and each has different attributes and uses some different items. The game doesn’t store any info on crafting for you, so you either remember it or write it down (this is a theme).
Overall this game desperately needs some QoL improvements and I’m pretty sure it will never get them because I think it’s probably made for people who don’t like QoL improvements.
I played through the demo of The Adventures of Elliot: The Millennium Tales. It’s by the same people as Octopath Traveler but it’s not turn based – the gameplay is extremely reminiscent of 2D Zelda and seems pretty fun. Unfortunately it’s by the same people as Octopath Traveler and they put writing into the game. The protagonist is the blandest and most generic protagonist you could imagine. He’s motivated by helping the orphanage where he grew up. “Helpful” is I think the full extent of his character. The bad guy is also comedically generic, in his first scene as the obviously evil grand vizier he’s like “you should send soldiers, they might die but we could get power!”, and man, they could have made this character interesting because their kingdom could really use some power, everywhere outside its walls is a deathtrap and it’s only safe because the Princess is channeling protective magic 24/7, but nope. The princess gets to talk to you via magic earrings and, uh, repeats herself a lot. Oh and there’s time travel I guess, I’m pretty sure the protagonist will end up as the “Hero King”.
As a contrast, I played a bit of Esoteric Ebb. It’s heavily inspired by Disco Elysium but when you talk to yourself it’s D&D attributes, and the dialogue is genuinely entertaining. Seems like a really cool game, but time passes when you talk to people and you only get 5 days and I like seeing full conversation trees in games so… that’s going to be hard for me. It’s a fantasy setting but also they’re having their first election ever and that’s some pretty novel ground to explore.
Finally, Lego Batman: Legacy of the Dark Knight. It’s the Arkham Batman gameplay but with Lego. The joke density is high, and they get chuckles from me reasonably often and never really bother me so that’s a plus (but they’re also not getting guffaws). Arkham gameplay is great, it’s simplified in a few ways but you do get two characters you can switch between freely (or it’s definitely intended for 2 player so you could do that). Overall it’s pretty good. I’m definitely not going to be completionist here, and I’m okay with that. Since it is Lego you don’t have, like, people dying or anything, and Batman and will regularly assemble stuff with bricks to solve problems, which is just you holding down a button while the full assembly process is animated and then you use the catapult or whatever to solve your immediate problem.
Oh I also played the demo for Shrodinger’s Cat Burglar, which is a cute puzzle game where you’re playing as a cat who can split in two and then you control one of them with each joystick. I’m amused by it, I’ll probably get the full game at some point but not immediately.
Brotato. Nightmare Mode is annoying enough to remind me the game has Accessibility options that let you change enemy difficulty. So now on top of actual victories with the good classes, I’ve “cleared” Gangster and Multitasker by dropping enemy health and damage to like 30% and sleepwalking through Nightmare mode. (It also turns out there’s a separate option just to turn off the bullets in Nightmare Mode; it’s nice to finally find that, but just further convinces me this update should have been two separate difficulties instead of the one.)
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass got a little bit of play, but I was watching a Chrono Trigger playthrough at the time*, which is not ideal for any RPG. I think there’s just the one Reality Dungeon left, then the final dungeon and any sidequests I feel like doing. But man, my energy for this game drops like a rock after World 6. On the plus side, it turns out the Hard Mode sidequest dragon has a flying sprite in battle and it’s adorable. Also that phase of the fight killed my endgame party, which I think is a good thing? The game has some really rocky pacing for optional quests, and I view that as a feature. (When should you fight this dragon? Immediately. And then it kills you, and you know to come back ten levels higher. And then it kills you again, and you come back thirty levels higher and one-shot it. THAT’s a proper sidequest! That’s integrating the two core game mechanics of Exploration and PunchaBunch!)
Watched a playthrough of Directive 8020, the Dark Pictures game from Supermassive, whose games fall ever further from their name. This one’s bad enough it made me want to write a Dark Pictures parody. Turns out that’s a really big project. That brings Really Big Projects up to, I want to say 8, with a current completion rate of 0%. This will all turn out well, I’m sure. Especially since I haven’t 4TheWord-ed since last Wednesday.
*(Been debating replaying Chrono Trigger, but I think watching a playthrough is good enough. Especially since they gave Marle a Valley Girl accent, which maybe triples how interesting Marle is.)
Currently on a family trip where my data plan doesn’t reach and WiFi is sporadic, so my gaming of limited to barely managing to keep up my streaks with the New York Times games (Wordle etc.). I tell you, it’s an interesting experience filling in crossword puzzles on a smartphone.
I ultimately decided to start playing Suikoden V on the PS2, and was immediately struck by, well, why I wanted to play it in the first place … and also why I DIDN’T. Just in the first couple of hours, the characters and the story are I think the best in any of the Suikodens I’ve played, which is now all of them except for IV. The Prince — the MC — is the typical silent protagonist, but his bodyguard Lyon is one of my favourite female and even favourite characters ever, and they build a relationship between him and Lyon and him and his sister that is superior to anything else I’ve seen in the series, and add in a friend and an aunt and his parents and all sorts of things like that. The story starts with him inspecting a town that was devastated by the rune that his mother wears, and they immediately start dropping hints that the rune has an impact on the mind of the bearer, where the “hints” ARE her acting aggressive, people saying that it’s not like her, and a rune master saying that there are legends that it would do that. All of this will be important later, but we are then sent off to prepare for a tournament to choose a husband for the sister, and note that one of the competitors was the former fiance of the aunt, who shows up to rescue us from some sea monsters but there’s an immediate hint that he might have set the entire thing up. This will ALSO be important later. As I said, the story and characters are far better than anything else in the series so far.
However, the mechanics and the gameplay itself can be a problem, with it being quite difficult to figure out where you need to go next and the camera being horrific at times for finding things like chests or showing the doors you need, which had me running around the starter town for a bit until I found the door to the outside in the mansion and then triggered the next cutscene. Given that you get unique items by exploring everywhere and it isn’t always clear where they are, and the areas are often really big — running out to the docks itself is a couple of screens of just one long bridge-thing — and I got tired of exploring really quickly.
I also got in another run of Knights of the Old Republic, finishing Taris. In my diary entries I had stolen Chuck Sonnenberg’s joke about the old man at the beginning always talking about the cantina, and then added another joke myself when we go to the Lower City and need to go to the cantina there to advance the plot, and then found myself chuckling when after you rescue Bastila her suggestion for what to do next is … to go to the cantina. And since you meet her mother in a cantina …
Pretty much all my gaming time this week has been obsessively putting 40 hours into completing Sovereign Tea, a crowd-funded turn-based tactics game about “Tea Princesses” fighting the “Coffee Empire”. It released in 2021 but I only heard about it late last year when it went from paid to free on Steam, at which point I added it to my library but didn’t get around to playing it until now.
Given the memetic premise (tea vs. coffee!) and the cartoon-y art style, I was expecting something cutesy. I was not prepared for, as I put it in my review:
I could go on at length, but yeah. Overall a much higher quality of writing than I was expecting from the presentation, with over a dozen characters with sometimes sharply differing personalities interacting with each other.
Mechanically, the game is also quite good if you like turn-based tactics, with a large array of units with different abilities and an even larger number of potential synergies to find and pull off. Each of the 25 levels is set up like a puzzle that you have to solve, with many placing you in seemingly impossible situations to begin with. I can think of a few improvements in UI (the annoying decision to use left-click for both unit selection and issuing units order led me to make a number of misplays), but overall it’s a pretty solid game.
I’ll be honest – the past 1-2 weeks haven’t been the most satisfying in terms of gaming. Balatro keeps being awesome on mobile, as does Toon Blast and Sugar Kittens Drop. But in terms of gamer’s games, well….
Reading Philadelphus’s posts on here reminded me that I also had Star Wars: Bounty Hunter on my hard drive, but I’d never gotten around to playing it. I used to be an enormous Star Wars fan, and Jango Fett is one of my favourite characters. Growing up, I was always extremely sad that the game wasn’t on PC.
How do I put it… For the first time in my life, I’m glad that Disney has conditioned me to be disappointed with almost anything Star Wars-related, because if I had played this game back in the day, my disappointment would have been immeasurable and my day would have been ruined :D
For one, Jango’s WESTAR-34 blasters sound nothing like they do in the movies. Which is a problem because that’s one of the most iconic aspects of the character, and they’re also one of your main weapons. Beyond that, the combat is really lacklustre, especially compared to the Jedi Outcast and Jedi Academy series, which are my golden standard for Star Wars games.
Which is weird because Outcast and Bounty Hunter both came out in 2002. And shooting isn’t even the main focus of Outcast, yet it’s so much more satisfying and impactful when compared to Bounty Hunter! My only explanation is that the guys at Raven Software cared a lot about the Star Wars universe, while the people behind Bounty Hunter were never that concerned about being faithful to the setting beyond some superficial elements.
I also picked up Diablo IV as part of May’s Humble Bundle. I beat the first act boss, and… I went ahead and downloaded Diablo II, which I am now playing instead. Using the old school graphics :D
With D4, I got up to Act 3, and everything looks exactly the same. Everything is just this washed-out, muddy brown…
Just look at D2 – yes, you have to use your imagination a little, especially when you’re playing on a flat-screen monitor – the graphics were made for CRTs where the low-res sprites don’t get stretched like they do on an LCD. But the colours are so crisp, the models are so distinct that you instantly know where you are, even though the game never drops the dark and gloomy atmosphere.
Another big issue is that in Diablo 4 the heavy gore and demon swarms start right from the very beginning.
In Diablo 2, there was a buildup, and the gore had an actual impact because it wasn’t happening constantly. In D4, it’s paced so poorly that you just get desencitized to it almost immediately.
I also have a few comments about the story (OMG, the story – why does everyone keep saying it’s good?!?!?!??), as well as the gameplay, but this post is long enough as it is :D
Suffice it to say: Diablo 2 managed to achieve more using less.
I’ve tried Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, Torchlight, Diablo 3… Titan Quest wasn’t bad.
But there’s simply nothing like Diablo. None of them capture the atmosphere, the story, or how chunky and visceral the spells feel to use. None of them have that same rhythm that gets you into a groove state, making the hours disappear as you become immersed in Diablo’s dark and brooding world.
From the looks of it, they never will, either. They tried with Diablo 4 (unlike Diablo 3), but they are still way, way off. It seems that the magic at Blizzard is well and truly gone, as is the spirit that gave us all those legendary titles way back when.
I’m just glad I didn’t pay full price for it, and I hope I can get at least some enjoyment out of the rest of the games in that Humble Bundle.
I’ve not played much directly the last couple weeks, instead hammering away at my little mods for BG3, getting annoyed with one roadblock and moving on to the next chunk of stuff until I hit a roadblock or get bored and move to the next. Since trying to get these elemental monk spells to work was still going bad (a game with such modern graphics generally has the graphics they made for it and nothing else, and I don’t even know why the monk version of Spike Growth won’t show up I triple checked it’s on the list everything is spelled right wtf), last night I plowed through a bunch of simpler spell tweaks. Of course, I not even really planning on using a monk next playthrough, but it’s the sort of thing that *should* be easy to fix I want it to be correct on principle.
The big stupid will be integrating the Mystra’s Spells mod, or not. Because they’ve already done like three spells that I know I want to add, but I also know I don’t want to add *all* of the 135 spells they have added. The simple act of adding so many non-vanilla spells, which none of the foes will use, damages verisimilitude on its own, even if I didn’t fully expect some of them will be blatantly overpowered or break the entire point of class distinctions etc. Add on how they’ve gone “oh hey x/y/z spell would be cool on some domain list, well let’s just double the size of all the domain lists!”, and yeah I’m really not interested in their default implementation. But the official toolkit doesn’t let you alter other peoples’ mods, so I can’t just take the spells I want/take out the spells I don’t. So either I make my own versions of work someone’s already done, or I see if the older unofficial tools can open up the mod into a form I *can* alter with the toolkit, or I duplicate modify and redirect every single spell list for every level of every class that gains spells, including all subclass variants, in order to evade the mod adding all of the spells and instead use only what I want.
The latter is stupid, the former wasteful and likely of worse quality (I don’t want to make custom vfx so poor substitute placeholders), and the middle requires me to download another set of (3rd party) tools designed for a different purpose. I don’t even know where the toolkit *really* keeps the mod files, because renaming things reveals that it the name project/folders aren’t actually where anything is stored, reverting a name after changing it and saving something also reverts the change, the true project files are who knows where stored who knows how. So even if I got a file the toolkit could read I wouldn’t know where to put it. I’ll have a better idea what I want to do once I’ve actually evaluated the spells themselves, all I have to do is spoil the fun of seeing new spells.
At some point I’ll get the mods shaped up how I want and then probably drop it and go play something else, same way I got my Cyberpunk mods all lined up an then went back to BG3, as I’ve said before. Which I still haven’t finished and is sitting waiting for me to get on with the point of no return, again as I’m sure I’ve said.
Shogun Showdown. It’s been quite a lot of fun. The game is really good about having a core set of basic mechanics, and then introducing complexity little by little. A great mix of both choice and RNG in a small, digestible package. Easily recommend.
Wave Gothic Treffen was the weekend and vacation the week after that. So: not much video gaming. Camping outside drinking beer and fruit wine, enjoying music and getting sleep deprived were most of my activities – also playing with a 5 year old and his Number Blocks obsession. Highlights were the Horror Punk/Psychobilly Bands The Crimson Ghosts and Batmobil.
I did a bit of reading. Avatar Chronicles – The Rise of Kyoshi. Hell of a good book with lots of references in setting and tone but also being its own thing. Definitely bloodier than the original “kids show” but not gory like song of ice and fire and better written.