T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I played video games.
Half of my time this week has been spent playing Stardew Valley. Just hit winter in the second year, so we’re spending a lot of time on ginger island trying to get the golden walnuts.
I also picked up Barony. I didn’t know much about the game when I got it, but steam had been recommending it to me for years, so I finally got it. I’m having fun with it, despite the fact that the game definitely encourages multiplayer, and I usually play solo for my roguelikes.
It’s a first-person dungeon crawler, that is perfectly fine with you dyeing a lot. I’m still not entirely sure what I’m doing, but I think I’m doing ok, even when I’m just fumbling around.
How’s everyone else doing?
The No Politics Rule
Here are 6 reasons why I forbid political discussions on this site. #4 will amaze you. Or not.
Ludonarrative Dissonance
What is this silly word, why did some people get so irritated by it, and why did it fall out of use?
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Resident Evil 4
Who is this imbecile and why is he wandering around Europe unsupervised?
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
Brotato continues. Pretty much just committed to the Nightmare difficulty at this point, though I’m still not turning on the random projectiles. It’s become mostly fun again.
Slay the Spire 2. I feel like I’ve gotten the hang of Regent more; whether that’s increased skill, or unlocking valuable items for their build, I don’t know. Not so sure about Necrobinder, all of my runs with them so far have just been Doom builds. It’s working, but doesn’t feel like I know what I’m doing.
Gothic Remake Not a lot of time for it. One session without much progress. At least I can pick locks now.
Cryptmaster As a non-native English speaker I have some difficulties with chests and skulls and I’m tempted to use turn-based mode.
Palworld Two towers down, in the steal age and completely under equipped to take on tower three. The power level of Pals changed significantly from pre 1.0. Foxpaks and Sparkit are much weaker than bigger Pals and they overall level much slower. While my weapons are as weak as ever.
How long have I not touched Stardew Valley? Long enough to sit in confusion about Ginger Island. One day I want to get back into that game, but with the sheer amount of STUFF that’s there to do now… well. It’s A Hurdle for sure.
I have sunk all my gaming time this previous week into Dave: The Divering (on PC), having now well surpassed the progress made on the switch some years ago, and reached the Glacial Area.
There are, I think, some factors for the additonal progress, and the success of the revisit in general, first and foremost “mouse instead of controller”, but also “not getting stuck on an optional boss” helps a lot xD
(I will take down the fucker that is Klaus eventually, but only after gearing up a large amount more…)
Been playing and have now beat Darkest Dungeon 2. Was essentially on easy mode after punting several runs and had good relationship rolls, doubt I will bother with the many extra levels of difficulty increases, but will probably check out the “Kingdoms” mode.
It’s Rimworld, always Rimworld. Specifically, Rimworld with mods; and even more specifically a couple of popular ones called Alpha Animals and Alpha Biomes. It’s immediately apparent why they’re so popular. The mod author has clearly leaned on a lot of very creative people to put their ideas in the game, and done a great job implementing them.
It’s not that lore-friendly, nor does it make that much sense – there’s all sorts of bizarre ideas and creatures – but that’s all part of the point. Live on a gelatinous superorganism! Found a colony on the Forsaken Crags, where there’s never any sunshine! Fight giant spiders called Feralisks everywhere you go, and have many, many different biome-specific variants.
Once again I’ve paired it with the gravship form Odyssey, and am just touring a weird and wonderful planet gawking at the insane wildlife, trying out life in all these odd places. I regularly go ‘What the hell is THAT?!’ – usually followed by ‘…I’m going to try and tame it’.
Currently I’m working my way down to the south pole, where for some reason there are vast lakes of propane. And naturally, arctic Feralisks. Wait, what?
One day I’ll even set foot in the biome described as feralisk-infested jungles, but at the moment I have WAY too many kids fond of going nature running without telling me.
I played another round of Suikoden V. And again, while the gameplay is underwhelming, the story is really good. In this session, I was told to start gathering support and told to go back to an area that I went to at the beginning where the Queen — the protagonist’s mother — had used her powerful Sun Rune to devastate it due to them participating in rebellious activities. The people there have varied attitudes about the Queen’s death, of course, but they seem pleasantly disposed towards the protagonist, mostly because he rescued a child during his visit there. But while they might be willing to support him, they won’t do that as long as he is associated with the noble that he is associated with, because that noble built a dam that they attacked which started the whole mess. But they won’t join the OTHER noble because that noble built a dam that diverted water away from the town and so ensured that they would not be able to recover from the devastation. The story is already hinting that the noble the protagonist is associated with is trying to use him — his own DAUGHTER comments on that — so this is a hint that things will turn sour and the protagonist will have to strike out on his own at some point. But it’s all interconnected and follows on from things done earlier. I liked Suikoden III’s story, but this one is definitely better crafted than any of the others I’ve played.
Last week I finished off Twenty Minutes till Dawn, tried a run of endless mode (and found it just not that engaging relative to the time spent, although clearly there will be people who have fun stacking upgrades into a screen-clearing inferno of buildcrafted bullets and/or summons), and decided I was done.
My evening gaming slot is now going to Spelunky HD. I have exactly one achievement left unfinished — the no-money run — and while it’s kind of frustrating, I’ve also gotten to Olmec a handful of times before either getting squished or losing the run to an accidental gold-chunk pickup, which means that I should be able to get it one of these days.
That said, a lot of my time these days is going to a short-story translation project for a competition, so gaming is getting shunted to later times when I’m less alert and have less focus, so that last achievement may need to wait until some time after this project is off the front burner. We’ll see.