T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’ve played a few game demos from steam’s next fest.
One of the two of any note was Sir, We Have an Orc Problem. Just an incremental tower defense, with only five levels in the demo, but I enjoyed it. There isn’t a grid to place towers on, instead you place them freely in the build zones and adjust the cone of fire to where you want. The enemies also don’t follow a set path, they behave more like individual physics objects being pulled towards the end zone.
The other game of note is Casualties: Unknown. A 2d exploration game with an extremely unforgiving injury system. The setting is that you’re playing as an anthropomorphic character whose species is treated as expendable fodder, and are tasked with descending into dangerous caves filled with trash, fauna, and depression.
I don’t think a game has ever made me feel so terrible for getting my character injured. The first run I did I fell off a cliff and got internal bleeding, broken bones, and a concussion. There’s less of a sense of I messed up in a video game, and more of a I’m going to die in a cave, and it’s not going to be quick. The injuries are truly unpleasant, your character will vomit blood (which is yellow), wince in pain, and get panic attacks.
It is an extremely cool game, but I cannot recommend it if you’re at all squeamish.
So how’s everyone else doing?
The Truth About Piracy
What are publishers doing to fight piracy and why is it all wrong?
Fixing Match 3
For one of the most popular casual games in existence, Match 3 is actually really broken. Until one developer fixed it.
The Best of 2016
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2016.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Got in another session of Suikoden V. And, again, the plot is the best and most detailed of the Suikoden games I’ve played, as in this short session we are told that the Dawn Rune was taken by rebels and still hasn’t been found, a mysterious character — probably Leknaat from the previous games — shows up to admonish us about not finding it, we discover that the three women in line for the throne all agreed to give it to Arshtat — the main character’s mother — and renounce their claims and refuse to get married and have children — which is certainly responsible for Sialeeds and Gizel breaking off their engagement, which left him free to pursue marriage with the young Lym which will cause so many issues in this game — because of a previous civil war that involved assassins and assassinations, and then we go to Raftfleet which is run by a former Admiral as a reward for helping to repel an invasion, and which will be important later. And all of that exposition is given naturally and covered a couple of hours of playtime, with a joke sequence of a bumbling father and daughter trying to pan for gold in a protected place and only not getting executed because of their connection to Raftfleet (the mother is the second in command there). We haven’t even hit the really BIG plot developments yet, but everything is setting up for them.
I have demo’d a few things.
Deadstick – Bush Pilot Simulator was fun, until I tried to land with mouse and keyboard. That was where I massively bounced off of it, because to get through the tutorial you need one non-destructive landing. And no. Still, if you like flight sims, give it a look!
Over The Hill is a nice little offroading sim. It’s fun. I might get the full one.
Motor Town is a less offroad-y, more career focused driving sim, with a million ways to level up a million different driving skills. It can be very medidative in the right mood, and very jarring when not.
Dopaminer I can see an appeal of, but the loop is very unappealing to me.
Pixel Washer, aka “Power Washing Simulator 2D”, looked fun for a minute until I couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to open a door. (It’s Very Hot here and I am not braining well xD)
The Iron Nest demo suffers heavily from “I’ve seen this level about five times on youtube”, but otherwise it delivers the exact experience I was expecting.
And aside from all that, I have experimented A Lot with a Raspberry Pi 3 – my goal was/is to replace the Steam Link with something that can also play youtube (without ads, as my TV is too old for the custom firmware allowing that) when the Big Machine is off, and after trying a bunch of browsers and a bunch of third-party-players I had to concede that this just will not work. I’ve ordered a Pi5 and will try again.
Yakuza Kiwami 3: Dark Tides: Not much to say about it. They hammer it in, that Mine is always alone, and Kanda isn’t really good for him.
Palworld: Obon boss has fallen, finally; 1m30s left on the clock. And the island south west is explored almost completely. One headhunt is missing, where we need to find a cave entrance somewhere. And one boss (Frostallion Noct) and the Tower of that island is waiting to be beaten. On the Summoning Bosses Blazemut Ryu got a timeout victory during its second phase.
Analog: Expeditions, Bomb Busters, Vale of Eternity (What an excellent game) , Castle Combo and Alli Gator. The later one is new, but nothing to recommend, it has the same tactical depth as Uno.
Attempting yet another Steel Soul run of Silksong. Been pretty consistent about getting to Act 2, but now instead of dying at the same boss all the time, I die to random arena mobs. I think my constant deaths would be more satisfying if the game kept track of how far I got afterwards, so my progress is not just entirely erased from memory.
I tried a Steel Soul run of Hollow Knight some time ago. Did it in one try. Damn, Silksong sure is more punishing.
I played just a smidge of Battle for Wesnoth again, and I watched some gaming content that almost made me feel like going back and brushing the dust off of Baldur’s Gate (the first), but still not a lot of gaming activity here.
My son, on the other hand, has been pretty gung-ho about They Bleed Pixels, and is slowly inching forward through the higher levels, with occasional forays into the challenge levels he’s unlocked. He says that the normal levels he’s going through are more-or-less comparable to Hollow Knight‘s Path of Pain, but it’s pretty clear that some of the challenge levels are “kaizo”-type difficulty spikes.
Brotato returns. Gotten used enough to Nightmare it doesn’t tick me off any more, but still have to add Level 5 runs back in to have actual fun.
Tried the Vampire Crawlers demo, which is the deck-based Vampire Survivors roguelike RPG. It’s fun; you’ve got your card comboes pushing for mana balances, and your card upgrades that add effect like “also gives armor” or “also draws another card”, and your multiple rows of enemies in each encounter with your various cards targeting various rows of them, and your permanent stat upgrades so you can faceroll any level that trips you up. But after clearing the first two levels, my main thought is “this still isn’t as fun as Brotato,” and I think that will be the end of my journey with Vampire Crawlers.
A significant vacation-and-post-vacation anime kick got me to reopen The Hundred Line and move it forward slightly. Will it continue all the way through another plotline? Eh, probably not, but maybe. This plotline seems to have significant time skips, maybe that means it’ll go faster. (I highly doubt it will go faster.)
Picked up Dispatch and enjoyed it enough I immediately started a second run to try some of the options that I hadn’t done the first time. The problem is, I actually identified with the characters enough that I wasn’t willing to make choices that were _too_ terrible.
Tried a few demos, including Sludgineers (incremental game about cleaning up pollution, reminded me that I don’t enjoy incremental games though it’s very well done) and A Game About Chopping Trees, which was a mildly interesting lumberjacking simulator. Not sure if I’ll get the full game, but it was fun enough for 45 minutes at least until I reached the end of the demo.
Otherwise, mostly Phoenix Point, which has finally captured my attention this third try. I’ve gotten to allied relations with two of the factions and am working on the third, have reactivated a number of bases around the globe, and slowly built up a force of soldiers. But the aliens are evolving and the threats are coming thick and fast in what I’m starting to get the distinct impression is the mid-game.
I’m playing with the Terror from the Void overhaul mod, and discovered it has an option to turn off the usual “eight soldier max” setting for missions. I tried it, and I’ve been having an absolute blast rocking up to missions with like fifteen soldiers and being able to pull off mission after mission without casualties. I get why there’s a limit, because I’m probably unique in enjoying handling all those soldiers’ moves each turn, but for a game which is otherwise much more about raw simulationism than XCOM is it just feels right to be able to bring as many people as I want on missions. (I’m still doing some missions with smaller numbers of people due to the sheer number of threats requiring attention around the globe, so it’s not like I’m systematically spoiling my own fun – but it’s fun to have the option to really lay the smackdown on the aliens for big, important missions.)
Marathon has tapered off, though I am happy to report that the thing where you had to manually switch to Solo every single time was considered a bug, and has since been fixed. And apparently the game does have a teeny tiny incentive for people to not just murder you on exfil for no reason, they just. . . didn’t have it on for the first few weeks because reasons? The “C.A.R.R.I” bonus thing gives you some tickets for surviving a map, with a bonus for each person you exfil with. Said tickets can be exchanged for very specific loot which is extremely meh, giving basically no incentive for the high-geared murder-hobos to do anything different.
I’ve tried the final map, Cryo Archive (which is for Trios only and requires you bring at least five grand in gear to be allowed in): first try I used the one free burner kit you’re allowed to take in, got a couple very friendly guys who welcomed me and told me all the basics for the map’s gimmicks, then as we were full up on loot another team started coming after us and I get picked off when I thought we were stopped to figure out where we were going but actually they’d kept moving without me (the two guys apologized for not being able to go back for me and escaped, after some difficulty reaching the exfil). Second try I go in with sufficient value of usable gear, get paired with two guys on Assassin who don’t say anything, and a neighboring team decides to invade our starting zone and gank us as quickly as possible, game over in like 3 minutes.
Go to do some quests then? Arbitrary map restrictions continue to be incredibly unfun, as Dire Marsh (Day) is still being blocked out every other hour. Which I remind you is where all the mid and lategame quests are. After spinning my wheels on other maps until the timer ticks over I can finally go take a few runs at the next story quest. I grab free blue tier kit I just unlocked (every time you unlock a purchasable you get the first one free), but forget to switch from trios to solo, get paired with two people on free kits, and immediately die. So I grab a free green kit I haven’t used yet, pretty sure that run I died again accomplishing nothing, leading to my final free green kit, where I die literally while activating the last terminal of the quest (which required visiting three different locations and was usually spawning me as far from the first as possible), being shot by a the mobs I’d been running past- if it hadn’t also been the final 30 seconds I would have waited for my healing to finish. So I go in yet again, on a free kit. . . and complete the whole quest. Granted, I announced myself to a guy who actually decided not to murder me for no reason, and later snuck directly below another person (who was probably also trying to avoid everyone), but seriously. Taking in gear doesn’t even matter unless your quest requires you to kill a boss (or other player). There’s no point unless you’re running Cryo Archive which requires that gear to even enter- oh and it’s only available for like 2 days at a time so you can’t just keep running that either.
In fact, in one random trios match I was informed that at least at one point in time the game matched groups based on their shield tier/color. Well either they dropped that or it stops bothering late night when there’s less people, ’cause free kits are being matched with blues and purps, as I was being told that while our free/green team was killed by a team with purple shields. Yet, I suspect the game may still being doing some of that, because it sure would explain why taking good gear in never seems to provide an advantage. In fact as much as shield matching would seem to be more fair and what I’d expect to prefer, it’s actually a betrayal of the concept of the extraction shooter where having better loot is supposed to mean you’re on top ganking the noobs until someone with *even better* loot shows up. Doing gear matching sometimes but then not other times would make the game the worst of all worlds: not fair in either direction, even more random invisible rolls that dictate whether you’re just going to punt everything to no benefit or just take a free lap.
Add to this the announcement of a new PvE mode for Cryo Archive next month, and these devs continue to just sound *monumentally* out of touch. I mean, sounds like this is exactly what I want, right? Nope, this PvE mode will specifically use none of your own gear, and will not let you take any loot with you: all it gives are its own little currency tickets which can be exchanged for whatever specific gear they decide is available (in theory they could let you use these to buy the specific crafting stuff you’re trying to get, but I seriously doubt it.). Which okay, still not a bad idea, lets people get some practice on the ridiculously twisty maze of a map where you have to constantly fight robots while other teams could pop out of anything at any time. But the *reasoning* behind it, that’s where they have no concept of the average player:
“This let’s you experience Cryo Archive without flooding the economy with low-risk, high-power Cryo loot.”
Low-risk? The eff are you talking about? What high power loot? I had nearly a full run and didn’t see anything higher than blue, which is the tier you need to bring in with you, the game literally *requiring* you to have a certain gear value to even enter, at which point you then have to actually survive *all the other players* and get out. I’m pretty sure most games have maybe two teams surviving, out of like 5 spawning in: the team that ends up king of the hill over the ‘good loot’, and maybe one team that manages to avoid them by not bothering to contest the hill and just running for it. Are the devs expecting/seeing some ridiculous build where people are just loading their backpacks with “valuable” trash to get into Cryo, pick up a bunch of blue guns off the mobs, and then go squat on all the non-Cryo maps? Hell this isn’t even hard to fix, just make the Cryo mobs drop no guns, or all their guns disintegrate on exfil like rook gear.
So yeah, that announcement which seems like it should be positive, just suggests to me that either these devs are completely out of touch with normal people, or that no I truly do suck and shouldn’t be playing their stupid game- but the basic mechanics of the extraction shooter are designed so that there is no such thing as “low-risk” loot so methinks it is not the latter. They’re also apparently going to add more stuff to the first map, Perimeter, which could be good if it spreads out the fighting, but could also be bad making it you can’t slink around and do your quests anymore because the safe edges are no longer empty.
So I’m at a point where the game is straight up locking me out of the progression I would actually want to do, and it already locks everyone out of the high level gear dump, and even when stuff isn’t locked out it might very well be better to run on nothing but free kits anyway. Having played with other people yeah it’s a lot more fun that way and much easier to grind faction xp, but it also means every game is a series of team pvp fights and there’s no option to just hide in the woods half the map so you can try to survive/work in peace (assuming your quest doesn’t have a timer specifically to prevent that). Or in short, the shiny new thing has worn off and the quick progression has now stalled out, I’m at ~55 hours which is a full game’s worth of time, and mostly only think of playing it for something to do ’cause I went ham for a while and nothing else sounds good.
Cyberpunk is at an awkward point to actually resume playing and killed some of my interest with the world babiest theology quest- seriously I should have just thrown the grenade, while BG3 veered off into modding work I only got maybe halfway through, and in either case I’m trying to get my head back up for air after the month or two of just sitting in the tank.
Hmm. I suppose the face for my actual email isn’t *terrible*.