T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I picked up Dave the Diver.
I’m having a lot of fun with it, and I like that I keep getting new things to do so regularly. Some of the boss fights were annoying with not clear objectives, and janky hit boxes, but that’s my only complaint.
Also started playing PEAK. just some good old mountain climbing. The base mechanic of climbing is much more fun and intuitive than I expected. Once I got used to the climbing it feels great to be able to climb quickly and efficiently, and catch yourself when falling. I found it interesting that the game has the map layout stay the same for everyone, and change every 24 hours.
What’s everyone else doing this week?
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Black Desert Online
This Korean title would be the greatest MMO ever made if not for the horrendous monetization system. And the embarrassing translation. And the terrible progression. And the developer's general apathy towards its western audience.
Philosophy of Moderation
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
The Best of 2012
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2012.
Playing Demeo x Dungeons & Dragons: Battlemarked in VR with my wife. And despite having the most cumbersome name ever, its a good game, and we like it!
Played some FF16. It was on sale and I was curious. I now have some regrets because it’s really not very good. The combat system seems pretty basic and barely feels like Final Fantasy, quite the contract with the FF7 remakes which really brought FF elements into mostly real time combat. The level design is bland, the loot is mostly crafting materials (which you can use for the blandest possible crafting system, “use arbitrary items to upgrade your sword from level 1 to level 2 and slightly increase its numbers, rinse and repeat”), and build variety is super limited. Maybe that changes later, I’m just 6 hours in.
I played through The Witness. I beat it previously but I got reminded of it and the puzzles are genuinely fun. The island is pretty and I genuinely don’t remember if I figured out the
environment puzzlespreviously, and they’re clever. On the other hand, this game really does not respect your time. There are multiple moving bridge mechanisms where you can genuinely start it and then run out of the area and around and come in from a whole different entrance and you’ll get to the other side faster. I know there’s kind of a reason for it but c’mon, seriously. Also, the audio recordings and especially the videos are boring to the point that I have to believe the videos are an ARG or Steganography or something. Also I’ve learned that Jonathan Blow is a jackass which is a shame since I did enjoy the demo for Order of the Sinking Star.I also played through The Looker, which is a free parody of the Witness that clearly a) comes from a place of love and b) mocks the heck out of it. I didn’t enjoy every part of it but some of the jokes (including an intentionally extremely slow animation) hit perfectly,
Finally, I’m playing The Lonesome Guild. It’s a cutesy game where you’re playing as a ghost with amnesia and several animal people. It’s top down and the combat is pretty basic, dodge, attack, charge up your stronger attacks, honestly a lot like the FF16 combat but it’s so much more disappointing when it comes from Square Enix rather than a much, much smaller company. The puzzles mostly leverage you having multiple people to control and by leverage I mean you’re mostly just pulling levers. Not 100% sure on if I’ll continue but it is adorable.
Brain melted this week and I bought a bunch of games I didn’t need.
Vampire Crawlers continues to be the same level of fun as the demo, which is “fun but not as fun as Brotato”. But, I still haven’t finished it, which means it’s still mostly new. Although so far all the assets and evolutions are straight outta Vampire Survivors, so not THAT new. But it’s been a long time since I played Vampire Survivors so I’ve forgotten at least some of it.
Senran Kagura: Shinovi Versus is a boob game beat-em-up, sort of like Dynasty Warriors with more verticality. It’s fun and fast-paced, but I’d say the mechanics are on the edge of mediocre. Quite a bit of that is there’s no menu that shows you moves; I think the loading screens are supposed to do that, but the game loads too fast for those to be readable. Also the camera gets stuck on things and blinds you. Also the story is bad, it does that anime thing where you win a battle without getting hit and then the characters act like you lost it.
DeltaRune Chapter 5 is out. I think I made it to the pre-game dark world, and then stopped. I should probably do an actual Happy run, my town is very empty.
Brotato. Potato beats vampire.
Played more Suikoden V. As I’ve said, the plot here is the best out of all of the ones I’ve played, as I just got past the first main revelation: the guy who cheated to win the marriage competition so that he could marry the next in line for the throne, in conjunction with his father, decided at the engagement ceremony to try to take over the palace and ensure that he was completely in charge. The royal family was actually prepared for them … but he brought in this group of assassins that was supposed to be wiped out which made for a tougher fight and some of the royal bodyguards supported him as well, and so the MC has to flee. The Queen and her husband were also killed in the fight, and afterwards they blame the character that has always been at your side, which is CLEARLY a complete lie, right? And the MC’s personal bodyguard — and my favourite character — has a link to the assassins and says she’ll explain later but hasn’t yet. So we have to head off to find the noble family that opposes the family that took over to try to fix things. And not all the revelations have happened yet …
What makes this good is that everything was set up in advance. Everything that happened here was hinted at beforehand, including the turning of the bodyguards, the link to the assassins from the main bodyguard, and even what ultimately happened to the Queen. A lot of the earlier games had plot points kinda come out of nowhere or go nowhere, but that hasn’t happened here, at least so far. The first two games had decent characters and character arcs, but were hampered by things coming out of nowhere and then getting resolved overly quickly without having a proper link to what happened next. Those games seemed to rush things WAY too much. Suikoden III was better as the Tri-View system gave more room to develop these things, but it didn’t have the stronger story with all the interrelated facets as Suikoden V does. It’s a shame that the graphics and the gameplay is so limited in Suikoden V …
I finished up Tellyport, a free game that released on Steam recently (I think it’s student work that they decided to release). It’s a short (~45 minutes) puzzle game in the vein of Portal, an apt comparison since you go through (pre-placed) television screens which serve as portals to take you elsewhere in the various rooms. Some of them change your gravity direction, and others cause you to grow or shrink in size (reminiscent of Superliminal), allowing you to retrieve cubes to place on buttons to open the door to progress. I don’t feel a need to replay it, but it might be a nice introductory puzzle game for young gamers – I appreciated that it has a hint system built into the levels.
Otherwise, mostly continued progress in Phoenix Point with the Terror from the Void overhaul mod. I finally met the last of the seven kinds of alien(?) creatures, the terrifying Scylla, a massive multi-tile behemoth with an immense health pool and multiple ways of ruining your operatives’ day from crushing physical attacks to spewing Mist to birthing Mindfraggers. (There are seven main kinds of creatures in the game, but most of them come in numerous variations with different abilities – I think I’ve discovered upwards of twenty different variations so far.)
I have tried Lord of the Rings Online over and over again for years. The first time I installed it was when the first expansion, The Mines of Moria, came out. And ONLY TODAY I finally got a character into the Mines of Moria. I’m gonna go have pizza now.
Been a while since I posted, good to see some familiar faces still.
Since I picked it up last November, DiRT Rally 2.0 has become a habit. Every evening I start it up to do the dailies and thus I got over 200 hours already.
Aside from that I’ve been going through some demos on my backlog and I had a blast with ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs. Added it to my wishlist for when the game’s released.