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?
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
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.
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
How I Plan To Rule This Dumb Industry
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
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.
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.