T w e n t y S i d e d
I’m feeling a bit better this week, so a bit of games where played.
I finished most of Dave the Diver. I still don’t like some of the boss fights, but other than that, it’s just a really good game.
I’ve also been playing a bit of Stardew Valley with my sibling while recovering. Just as good as ever, nice chill farming, stressful mining, and obligatory fishing minigame. So, that’s been most of my week.
What’s everyone else doing?
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
A Lack of Vision and Leadership
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
The Best of 2019
I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
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.
Stolen Pixels
A screencap comic that poked fun at videogames and the industry. The comic has ended, but there's plenty of archives for you to binge on.
Slay The Spire 2. StS 1 is the only Steam game I still have more time in than Brotato, and I’m remembering why. 2 is largely the same so far, just with new enemies, which is… good, I think. Three of the four characters have been brought back, and two new ones. I don’t think I like the new ones; the Regent’s gimmick is a second mana pool (which breaks prizes like random zero-cost cards: that “zero cost card” can still cost 5 Blue, making it unusably expensive.) The Necrobinder’s gimmick is a meatshield companion, the tradeoff being lower starting health and divided Attack bonuses; they’re fun, but I really haven’t figured out the right way to play them. Meanwhile Ironclad and The Silent are just tearing through every run like butter.
The big change, apart from more story events and NPC characters, is it’s harder to get permanent extra mana, which was always the default choice in 1 because it was so valuable. But there seems to be more options to play free cards. (Oh, right; they also added an Act Upgrade to the character’s starting card, which can make them hugely powerful. Bash was never great, but Break is absurdly good.)
Not sure how this one’s going to hold up.
I really like both Necrobinder and Regent:
Necrobinder is IMO fairly simple, but fun. Having the option for defense that persists between turns is just really nice and can mitigate some turn-to-turn randomness. I think it’s hard to have a fully “Osty build”, but it’s a good complement to doing other stuff (souls, doom). Regent I think takes the most ‘figuring out’, due to the second mana pool and some of the strategies are less-straightforward than something like shivmaxxing. I didn’t like it at first, but it’s grown on me and now I enjoy it a lot.
—
If you have the opportunity to play multiplayer, highly recommend it. I liked StS1, but I played for a few weeks, fell off, and then revisted it from time to time over the years. I’ve probably already played much more StS2 multiplayer than I ever played StS1 singleplayer.
Slay the Spire 1 has a multiplayer mod which has been around for a while; I was playing it well over a year before StS 2 released and it was pretty solid at that point. From what I’ve seen of 2 it looks like they more-or-less integrated that mod’s functionality directly. I also don’t really play StS 1 singleplayer anymore, but I did a multiplayer run with a friend just last week.
A little bit of Gothic Remake. Progress is slow. I’ve beaten almost all the “easy” enemies around the old camp, leaving those who one-shot me and got to lv 3. Where to get exp now?
Asterix & Obelix: Slap ’em All in short bursts. A Double Dragon-like beat ‘m up. Very simple. Good animations, but repetitive gameplay, bare-bones presentation of the story and it misses the iconic music. Oh! And bugs: If you load a save game from the main menu – in the upcoming level enemies get frozen after you slap them once. Not recommended for more than 30 minute intervals.
A good chunk of my time went into Palworld 1.0. After a restart we reached the metal age and the game turns resource grindy. The 1.0 changes are vast. The tech tree is revamped, new pals, a towers and some bosses got relocated. There is now a different kind of tower to reveal the map (like ubisoft). The quest chain has changed – not necessarily for the better. Graphics improved with a far better rendering distance. Overall a good update, where you want to progress as fast as possible to take the edge of the grind.
Funnily enough, mostly Dave the Diver, crawling back one dive at a time.
I’ve played it a while on the switch, some time ago, and ultimately bounced off of it due to a combination of a frustrating boss fight and leaving it sitting long enough to lose enough muscle memory to no longer be able to just get back into it at a point where the sea was… rather dangerous.
I agree with the above assessement: some bossfights just suck. But aside from that, it’s a neat game.
I wanted to pad out the plays I had for my blog posts for Knights of the Old Republic, so I spent time doing that instead of playing Suikoden V, finishing off Kashyyk. The plot points and how they tie back to Zaalbar are interesting, but I made sure to free the guy in debt slavery before finishing things off with the Wookiees because if you get them to oppose Czerka at the very least everyone is chased out, and theoretically they could all be killed (the Wookiees aren’t known for differentiating between different types of outsiders, as they consider you as such until you prove differently). The other thing is that while I did try to build a bit of a skilled character in my MC, with higher dexterity and lower — but not low — Wisdom and Intelligence she’s not all that great at doing things like recovering mines and opening locks, so I need to bring Mission along to do those things that I can’t, which I hadn’t really done before, and here that’s a really good thing to do, because if you try to go through the Wookiee village without Zaalbar she tells you to bring him, and she has more commentary on what you find because of her connection to him. So that was kinda cool.
Aside from the dailies on DiRT Rally 2.0 I’ve also played a bit of House of Necrosis. Despite the very obvious Resident Evil (1, as in PSX RE1, as in Directors Cut) coding, it’s more of a Mystery Dungeon style game. Which is nice because as much as I have nostalgia for Resident Evil (being one of the first PSX games I played), Survival Horror just leaves me kinda bored and frustrated.
I finished Phoenix Point this week. The game has five different endings according to the achievement for getting them; one ending, I suspect, is losing the game, then there are three you get by allying with the three main factions and a fallback if you’re going it alone. I was allied with everyone but two of the final missions seem to have bugged out and disappeared – fortunately the remaining one is the one I was planning on going for anyway (with the Synedrion faction).
I do like that you get multiple options for victory (though given the nature of the setup I suspect the final mission plays out pretty similarly). I discovered that three talking heads from Synedrion whom I’d been conversing with throughout the game showed up as soldiers in the final fight – that was a nice surprise. Overall I had fun with the game, and there were some aspects of it which I really enjoyed, but I’m not feeling an urge to fire it up again. Apparently it’s back to RimWorld for now with a new playthrough I started yesterday…
Oh, and I finished one of the last two advanced challenges in Ark Nova which I’ve been banging my head on for a few weeks – and really crushed it after failing blatantly quite a few times. Just one more to go!
I don’t know if it counts, but there’s technically two endings for Synedrion, depending on which of the sub-factions you side with at the beginning of their quest chain. They both want to do different things with the Pandorans, and that’s reflected in the ending slides.
Also, while I understand that having the NPCs you’ve been talking to turn up for the final mission is fun, it amuses me that it happens with Synedrion too. Those NPCs in particular really didn’t strike me as soldiers.
Ohhh, that’d make sense. Interesting! I vaguely remember siding with the symbiosis sub-faction rather than the terraformers very early on and then it never seemed to come up again so I didn’t realize it had that effect. That does fit the “very-slightly-asymmetric” nature of the game, though*.
Maybe one day I’ll go back and give it another run for another ending. I did the New Jericho mission where you protect Tobias West from attack, so I know he shows up as a soldier, but the Disciples of Anu mission about building the Exalted’s…temple thingy bugged out on me or something so I don’t know who you get for their mission(s).
*Phoenix Point, New Jericho, and Synedrion have mechanical vehicles; Disciples of Anu have a mutant creature. NJ and S have one soldier class unique to them: DoA have two. PP, NJ, and DoA have one ending; S has two, etc. etc.