T w e n t y S i d e d
Just a little bit this week.
Played some Rimworld. Maximizing melee stats has been funny, I accepted a quest that had my colony fight off 48 cougars in exchange for ~600 gold and some armor. My colonists faired quite well, having only the loss of a hand as any injury of significance.
We got a new fridge today. It keeps things cold.
How’s everyone else this week?
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
If Star Wars Was Made in 2006?
Imagine if the original Star Wars hadn't appeared in the 1970's, but instead was pitched to studios in 2006. How would that turn out?
PC Gaming Golden Age
It's not a legend. It was real. There was a time before DLC. Before DRM. Before crappy ports. It was glorious.
Hardware Review
So what happens when a SOFTWARE engineer tries to review hardware? This. This happens.
Best. Plot Twist. Ever.
Few people remember BioWare's Jade Empire, but it had a unique setting and a really well-executed plot twist.
Yakuza Kiwami 3 is done. The post-credit scene is new … and dumb and it contradicts the events of Yakuza 4 where Hamizaki should be in prison. Overall a good remake with some good (Hamizaki) and some debatable (Rikiya) re-casts. Some new content (Okinawa fighting style, Bad Boy Dragon, Dark Tides, …) and some cut content (Mack, Golf, Hostess clubs, …). Next will be Dark Tides, but Mine is such ans asshole, I don’t wanna play as him.
Gothic Remake is bought and downloaded … maybeee.
Palworld coop play continues. Hunting bosses on the last island. The last trailer announced 10th July as the 1.0 release. I don’t think we will finish the available content until then.
Analog I’m playing some Expeditions with the first expansion. This first expansion does add quality of life stuff (dual layer player boards) some new cards, some new Explorers and an Infected Mech module. Nothing ground breaking.
I also tried a few more rounds of Origin Story aka. Hero Story. It doesn’t click with me. There is too much randomness and rule breaking for a trick taking game for me.
Finished Mina the Hollower. Very good game. I love how versatile digging is – it makes you immune to most enemy attacks, it moves faster, it lets you jump farther, it’s how you pick stuff up, it’s how you swim, it lets you go under things, enter holes, and more. And all of that works together, there’s no “I’d like to do this thing but the awesome button is doing this other thing right now”.
Started Vampire Survivors. I see how people play this a lot. I actually think I prefer Halls of Torment as a bullet heaven, but I completed most of that and it’s cool to try a different one.
I played another session of Suikoden V. The navigation still sucks, but this session reminded me of how strong the story is. In this session, there is a competition for the right to marry the princess — the realm is matriarchal — and they had already set up that the nobles are hiring gladiators to win it but that the main character’s father was a foreigner who won on his own. Well, there’s one character who is trying to do the same thing, and the main character is sent to find out more about him. It turns out that a woman at the inn is in love with him, and he cares for her as well, but he’s entering because he was originally a slave gladiator and he wants to marry the princess — who will become queen later — to end the practice of slavery. The woman is kidnapped and the party goes to help him rescue her, but the protector notes someone strange there who disappears, and then there’s a hint that the main noble has a plan to win that involves the woman, but a backup plan if that should fail, and it has already been noted that he likes plotting for its own sake and sets these things in motion just for the fun of seeing what will happen. Anyway, the woman drugs the competitor so he loses, and the drug is undetectable and a drug that shouldn’t exist, but the protector has a connection to it and so she can identify it. The party discovers the involvement, but can’t prove anything, but the Queen briefly slips into vengeful madness again discussing it, and it is indeed clear that the noble, who did manage to win, has lots of plots in play. The events with the Queen, with the noble, and with the protector will all be important later. This is FAR more story than the other games had, even Suikoden III, which had a superior story to the first two Suikoden games.
I also got in another run of Knights of the Old Republic. I switched back to two lightsabers — I had been using one lightsaber and Mission’s vibroblade, which is balanced for two-handed fighting but is a blade which keys off of strength — and in the battle with the Dark Jedi on Tatooine my first flurry had three misses and so I was resigned to sucking at melee, but then the next ones all hit and one did 23 damage, and I was hitting more often than I missed, so it seems like this is working out. I didn’t get out of Tatooine, though, as I took Sasha back to Dantooine and then went through the town getting all of the quests. For the first time, I went to where the swoop races are run from, and talked to a lot of people and found a bit of a quest where you can help a young racer get a better deal from the Hutt, but it looks like you can’t really complete it until you run more races and get more prestige, and I’m not sure my character wants to do that.
I spend last weeks playing XCOM2 (2014). Never finished it before; I hated timed missions. But every now and then, I get the craving for some turn-based tactics, so I read some advice and finally beat the aliens off the earth. But did so by saving and reloading. Now I started ironman mode. It is so much fun when you have to be more careful, no way to reload. I got some near everything-is-lost moments, but getting back from this is much more satisfying. This one is close to a perfect game.
On the topic of turn-based tactics, I’ve been craving something different recently and on a whim fired up Phoenix Point (by the creator of the original X-COM) which I hadn’t touched in a few years. I’ve started it twice, once on vanilla, and once with a major overhaul mod called Terror from the Void, and didn’t manage to last more than a couple of hours each time. Rather than start over again I jumped into my previous save, and the experience of having to piece things together without going through the tutorials helped keep me interested, I think, as I’m approaching 24 hours spent in it this week.
In theory Phoenix Point has some things I really like; bullets are fully ballistic and you can aim them where you want (so cover is a function of level geometry), enemies have multiple body parts that can be individually disabled, stuff like that. In practice, it always seems to be somehow less than the sum of its parts to me (no pun intended). Maybe that’s because my experience of XCOM comes from the Firaxis remakes (which PP superficially resembles graphically) and not the original. The TftV overhaul mod apparently rebalances and addresses some player pain points from the vanilla game and it’s keeping my attention better so far, so we’ll see if I actually manage to complete a campaign this time.
I also did a bit more of Solar Expanse, where I’ve launched an interstellar colony ship to Trappist-1 and am working on ramping up production of asteroid engines strong enough to move asteroids around so that can speed up terraformation of Mars.
Fridges are also important for holding magnets, and sometimes lists.
Just got back a couple days ago from a big trip in which literally all my gaming was limited the near-miraculous maintenance of my NYT crossword puzzle streak (along with Wordle and a couple of others).
The day after we got back, after getting a full 8 hours of sleep for the first time in several days, I opened up Steam… and looked at the store a little, then closed it again without playing anything. I guess after a forced “detox” of sorts, and without needing a stress release after a long day of work, I’m just not in the mood for significant digital gaming.
Who knows; maybe I can use the opening this mood provides to get back into the writing groove again? That might be nice.
Back from vacation, which unpredictably featured no Internet at all. So got to sit around and exclusively play board games.
Cribbage was the card game of choice growing up, and continues to be a grand old time. The colorful little pegs certainly contribute to that, but also it’s just fun to play a game where the strongest card you can have is a 5.
Scrabble is more fun when you cheat. Plus our dictionaries are older than I am, and without Internet that’s the only source of words. So on the one hand, “nerf” is not a word because the 1950’s didn’t have the term “nerfing”, and on the other you can just flip through the dictionary until you find a word like “cambered” that uses all the letters in your hand.
In the meantime I managed to write a story using Samsung Notes. The good news is, that means 4TheWords has not destroyed my ability to write outside of the game, which was a thing I was worried about. The bad news is it turns out Samsung Notes defaults to, like, 4×6 index card pages, and none of the options allow you to adjust the page size, either before or after turning it into a pdf. So a 6-page story ended up getting printed out on 30 pages with, like, 64 point font. I may have to find an actual writing app for my phone, now that I’ve got Internet again.