T w e n t y S i d e d
This week was nothing.
the first few days I was busy, and the last few days I’ve been sick. Just a lot of laying on the couch, and watching YouTube.
What’s everyone else doing? Hopefully not being sick.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout
Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
Autoblography
The story of me. If you're looking for a picture of what it was like growing up in the seventies, then this is for you.
Deus Ex and The Treachery of Labels
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
Why Batman Can't Kill
His problem isn't that he's dumb, the problem is that he bends the world he inhabits.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
I finished Yakuza Kiwami 3: Dark Tides.
Mine surviving the fall is canonical unnecessary nonsense.I didn’t do the underground Colosseum stuff – because I didn’t like the timer aspect and the profit of doing it was not appealing.Then I started Gothic Remake. The voice of the main character is wrong – while all the other characters so far are dubbed very good. I cannot explain that blunder. Mud is annoying as ever and his talking to you in preparation of a fight let to some wtf is happening right now moments. MC puts his weapon away, the camera is fixed on the enemy and MC is running away on his own, while in the background you see Mud getting chewed by the wolf you tried to lure.
Palworld coop: I finally found a way and an area to mine chromium. Which is essential for crafting weapons and armor needed beat the final boss. But beating him will not happen before the 10th of July. The promised date of the 1.0 update, were it is recommended to start anew.
Analog I played some more Vale of Eternity with a runaway victory over two friends of mine. I had a nice engine that grants me blue runes (value 3) at the end of a round, while blue runes were valued as purples (value 6) and a creature that costs 6 and grants 6 points at summon that returns to hand at the end of a round. Combined with an artifact that can trigger an end-of-round effect mid round. So 6 to 12 points per round on that engine alone.
Vampire Crawlers was fun while it lasted. Endgame lets you get some infinite combos, but there’s also a mechanic to stop infinite combos, in that if you play the same card too many times in the same turn, it breaks and turns into a Death boss. I managed to break two cards in the same fight and then kill both Deaths at once, and that’s how I learned they don’t drop anything either, so you really don’t want to break cards. But, looks like I’m out of new levels now, so it would just be running different characters through the old stuff. No New Game+ mode either, so the difficulty’s capped at Max Greed. I guess I should try an Endless run just to make sure that’s true; and maybe I’ll take a full-throttle shot at killing Red Death, which is clearly possible but also clearly requires a VERY good build.
Brotato continues. Hard game, that.
Still doing the dailies in DiRT Rally 2.0. I’ve also tried the new Greek stages in Assetto Corsa Rally, which are pretty good but ACR’s still very much in Early Access (though that doesn’t mean it’s not good, it’s great, just needs a bit more work and a lot more content).
I also kicked the tyres a bit on Vendir: Plague of Lies. I like the Sphere Grid style level up system, although it’s a bit too much like a tree and not enough like a grid (not enough interconnectivity).
Got in another session of Suikoden V. They’ve finally turned me loose to start recruiting, and I’m following a walkthrough because I’d like to get all 108 stars if I can to get the good ending. So I headed out to recruit the one that I missed the first time, not realizing that I should head back to an odd village created and occupied by bad artists to collect a composer who collects elves to perform his music. I did manage to recruit him this time, and that’s probably a good thing because at this point you only have the MC and the bodyguard, and some of the fights can be difficult with only the two of them.
Also got in another session of Knights of the Old Republic, finishing Tatooine. I bumped my Dexterity up to 18, and the only fights on Tatooine that were at all difficult were the one against the swarming Sand People — I don’t recall there being as many waves of them at the entrance to their part of the desert as there were this time — and fighting the Wraids. Facing off against Calo Nord was actually pretty easy and I lost almost no health because anyone that shot at me had the bolts deflected, and I’m still hard to hit in melee. But any further attribute gains probably have to go to Wisdom and Intelligence, for skill checks and Force points.
Phoenix Point continues. I’m nearly at the end of the game; I’ve researched the end-game missions for two of the factions (and I think the third one bugged out), and have been delaying slightly in order to finish as many other researches/capture the last few Pandorans required for those researches and just generally see as much as I can before finishing up. I’m glad it finally held my attention long enough to get through a campaign and see the story, but I can feel my attention wavering and don’t see myself replaying it again anytime soon.
My thoughts: it’s an interesting experience, I just keep coming back to the phrase “less than the sum of its parts” when thinking about it. There’s a ludicrous number of different pieces of equipment in the game. From the wiki I counted seventeen different pieces of chest armor you can get. One or two of them are unique, but this is, frankly, absurd. While every piece has slightly different stats, in practice there is no meaningful decision-making to be had choosing among them. This same exorbitant overabundance extends to every piece of armor and weapon in the game; every single projectile weapon in the game has its own unique ammunition you have to keep track of, except for a few special weapons whose selling point is that they don’t require ammo. You also can’t just make new ammo (poison-tipped, acid-spreading, etc.) for an existing weapon either, oh no – you literally have to make new guns/crossbows/whatever to use the new ammo, which is just…yeah. The game could stand to undergo a serious balance overhaul and contraction in the number of items to make the difference between them actually matter.
Also tried out The Red Lantern, a…rogue-like about dog-sledding in Alaska? Not my usual fare (I’m more of a cat person), but it was free-to-claim for a limited time last month and I downloaded it out of curiosity. You assemble a team of dogs from a larger pool of options (with each dog hinted at having some unique ability or strength*), then set out crossing the wilderness. Die, and it turns out that run was all just a nightmare and you restart at the beginning better prepared with more supplies. (I’ve only just gotten to that point so far, but I’m assuming the route you take is procedurally generated each time.) Along the way you have opportunities to hunt and fish, encounter various Alaskan fauna, and otherwise have random encounters, all narrated by a surprising depth of voice work.
It’s quite well done; the slightly stylized art style is lovely, the voice work is good, and the animation is excellent. You can also pet your dogs each time you make camp, and the animators clearly love dogs and have done a great job capturing their mannerisms. It’s a similar feeling to what I got from playing Stray the first time.
*Igloo so far has fought off a wolverine, muskox, and bear.
Played through OneShot, which is… I guess an adventure game probably? It’s top down and you’re controlling a character who is trying to restore the sun. It breaks the 4th wall, a lot – the main character will directly talk to you. Apparently in the original version, if you closed the game (besides at specific rest points) you lost. Forever. It’s friendlier about that now. I liked it a lot, the solutions for things made sense, the characters were generally interesting, and the meta stuff was cool.
Started Dispatch. It’s kind of mostly a superhero movie so far, but it’s a pretty good movie.
I picked up Twenty Minutes Till Dawn [sic] in the Steam summer sale and have been playing through that. I guess it’s a Vampire-Survivors-alike? I’m not quite sure what to think; there’s a sense in which the gameplay is very samey every time no matter which character or weapon you choose… but there’s also a sense in which it’s fun to build up a character from weapon and starting runes, through various upgrade choices, into a powerhouse that melts through hordes of monsters like a hot bulldozer through pudding. At this point it’s looking like I’ll finish getting all the achievements, try an endless run just to see what they’re like (even though… no achievements for that? It feels like a bit of an obvious oversight), and then be done. Overall, I’d say it’s worth the three dollars I paid on sale.
I enjoyed it enough to play until I felt like I’d seen everything, beat with all the characters and weapons and such, 20 hours on record. It doesn’t have a huge amount of variety and there are flaws, but anime girls with anime weapons are one of my interests yes. A perfectly decent entry in the run of survivor-likes/bullet heavens/etc. I believe it’s a solo dev, and they were going to do a major rebalance/build/etc, but last news post was. . . October of ’24.
I’m doing the “every step I take is the furthest I’ve been from home” Sam Gamgee challenge in Lord of the Rings Online. Finally made it to Moria last week, and I’ve done the first three areas. I *think* I’m about halfway through the fourth area, but it’s hard to tell. From the beginning of the area the path splits and runs two parallel lines from west to east. I’ve over halfway across, but I just reached the northern questing area and I know one of the biggest hubs in the expansion comes next. (Also, I jumped into a well just to see what happened. I died, of course; but also I fell into one of the other areas. The “world map” of Moria has everything laid out in 2D, but it turns out at least one of those areas, and I suspect others, actually exist *underneath* the other areas pictured. Not sure that’s how *I* would have done the map, but the reality works pretty well. Lots of verticality, which is appropriate in Moria.