T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I’m too tired to write much words.
Multiple extremely busy days and little time to rest.
But I still want to know what everyone else is doing. So, what is everyone doing?
The Terrible New Thing
Fidget spinners are ruining education! We need to... oh, never mind the fad is over. This is not the first time we've had a dumb moral panic.
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.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Stop Asking Me to Play Dark Souls!
An unhinged rant where I maybe slightly over-reacted to the water torture of Souls evangelism.
Playstation 3
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
In Gothic Remake I reached the new camp and finally own some armor. Maybe a wolf will need two bites to kill me now.
In Scrap Mechanic my vehicle got blown to less then pieces. Seat, Lv5 engine, suspension, wheels and al the chests with their content are lost forever. Fuck!
In Palworld we reached obon island again. Lets see how we will fair against the tower boss.
Played a little more Knights of the Old Republic, getting past the Sith base on Manaan and solving the mystery with Sunry. Stopped because I couldn’t really face doing the underwater facility at that point. Yeah, Manaan can be a bit of a slog, especially with the underwater sequence.
Also got in another short session of Suikoden V, getting past the naval battle and then deciding to stop because I didn’t feel like doing a Stars hunt at that point and otherwise it was a good place to stop. In line with what Syal commented on last week, the cutscene after the battle showed the main antagonists talking about my having recruited my tactician and commented that she backstabs everyone and so will tear the group apart on her own. But since they themselves backstab everyone, I’m not sure their take is all that accurate, but it does show an attempt to set up some issues with her.
The main antagonists, Benedict and Arnold.
My one and only time playing KotOR was when a friend lent me the disk (back in 2010 or so). It wasn’t very stable on my system, and for whatever reason the underwater sequence on Manaan was particularly bad: it would (I kid you not) crash on average every 30 seconds or so during that part. I learned to play with my finger on the quick-save button and managed to finish the game, but I always have to remind myself ever since that the lingering feelings of frustration that arise whenever I hear KotOR mentioned are not the game’s fault.
One of my kids has been wanting to play KotOR and KotOR 2. We had both for the original Xbox. But both games are missing now. Don’t know what happened to them. They actually worked pretty well; I would rather play that version than the PC version, even with the mods and unlocks you can use on the PC versions. (I acknowledge that’s actually a strong argument for KotOR 2 on PC, really)
Continuing with The Thamaturge. The story is a bit more interesting than where I left off last time, and I do feel like there are some small choices cropping up, so things are improving. The setting and atmosphere are still really intriguing, certainly the highlight so far. I do wonder how much the Telltale-esque “character will remember that” notifications will actually make a difference in the end, though. Right now, it’s a cautiously positive experience.
Spent last week visiting family on the mainland where I tried out a few multiplayer games with my brothers:
Meccha Chameleon, a Prop Hunt-esque game where you paint your white humanoid body to blend into the surroundings (or to look like a prop, if you can get away with). Lots of settings for various different game modes.
Make Way, a racing game where you build and extend the track each round (sort of like Ultimate Chicken Horse). Includes various power-ups and weapons. Very fast-paced and chaotic.
Both were pretty fun (though I was hamstrung by playing on my Steam Deck) and we’ll definitely be playing them again.
While I was there I also mentioned to them that there’s a remake of the LEGO Rock Raiders game called Manic Miners, which we ended up trying. And it’s really good! Like, really good – the visuals and audio match up incredibly well with the original while also being updated for modern screen resolutions, and there are entirely new features like customizing your miners and new vehicle abilities that fit seamlessly into the original game. It runs perfectly on my Linux system with Proton through Steam, and I’ve gone through the original campaign and have started on a full set of replacement levels that came with the game.
I also tried the demo for Battlestar Galactica: Scattered Hopes. It reminds me of FTL; Faster Than Light in some ways with the fleet management and real-time-with-pause battling, though it’s closer to the combat in Crying Suns…which I discovered was made by the same developers after I’d finished the demo. I’ve never engaged with the Batttlestar Galactica franchise before this so I don’t have any particular attachment to it, but the demo was fun enough that it’s gone on my wishlist.
Aside from DiRT Rally 2.0 I’ve been making some progress on Murder By Numbers, although the ’90s vibes aren’t quite good enough to get me over the flawed writing. But the puzzles are well-enough designed to keep me going for now.
Haven’t played much more of SKALD: Against the Black Priory since I got absolutely mangled by slimes, but instead I’ve played some Disciples Liberation. It’s got some neat features, but the combat system is quite complex and mentally exhausting, so it’s not great for long sessions.
After finishing out 20 Minutes Till Dawn I’ve repeatedly come close to completing Spelunky HD‘s no-money challenge, but even more repeatedly failed. Part of the issue seems to be that I’d always played the game with my ring finger almost-perpetually holding down the Shift key to run, which starts to hurt after a while… but when I changed the options so that the character auto-runs and holding down Shift makes them walk instead, my muscle memory started messing things up so that I repeatedly overshoot and accidentally run over some gold, thus scuttling the run. Maybe I should just change it back and try to remember not to press so hard on the key.
Beyond that, I’ve gotten back into Terraria again after a long hiatus. I’ve picked up a few of the recently-added achievements, but not all, so right now I’m working on the Journey Mode achievement (“Trash Compactor”) as a long-term project. Since there are thousands upon thousands of objects in the game and the achievement is for gathering and “researching” at least half of them, this will clearly take a while and at the very least require getting well into the Hard Mode phase of progression, although admittedly Journey Mode gives you a lot of control and makes progression itself relatively easy, including a slider with granular control of the spawn rate, instant jumping to specific times of day, and the ability to create indefinite amounts of any object you’ve researched. The main issue is just how much time it takes — both to craft and then “research” every single item in e.g. a given furniture or equipment set for each material, and also just to collect enough of some of the rarer objects to complete your “research.”
That said, I enjoy playing Terraria, so it’s much less of a grind than just a long-term project, and I appreciate what is essentially an enforced guided tour through some of the game’s more obscure crafting systems and building and decoration options.
Oh right, I did play something besides Brotato.
Carrion is not my cup of tea. It’s a… stealth game? A stealth game featuring a character half the size of the screen. You move really fast, but enemies also react fast, and after the first few encounters enemies start being immune to frontal attacks, so you have to come at them without them seeing you. It’s a lot of fun to move, but the fighting requires an attack accuracy I don’t have; most of my attempts instead launch me over their head directly in front of them, to be shot a few times. I’m also not a fan of exploration powers being locked behind certain levels of health. You can only shoot webs or turn invisible when you’re low health, and only smash things when you’re high health. It’s even more annoying when they start mixing puzzles to make you do both.
It’s more linear than I was hoping. I was looking for more of a stealth sandbox experience; pick a direction, go harass it. (if anyone knows one, I’m interested.) This is very much a straight line.
4TheWords is crawling back to regularity. I’m remembering the whole point of starting the big projects was because they were rattling around in my head and interfering with other thoughts; so trying to ignore new projects rattling around in my head interfering with the old ones is basically missing the point. So the 4 project limit is fully abandoned now, and I’m rotating, like, 13 different stories, giving one (and usually only one) a few hundred words a day. Perhaps one of them will get finished in my lifetime. Maybe even two!