T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I played some Endacopia.
Endacopia is point and click adventure game that is just bazar. I played the demo for it a few years ago on itch.io and was fascinated, but at the time it was just a demo with no release date. But having released late last month I got to play some.
It’s definitely one of the more surreal games I’ve played, with some horror elements mixed with a little bit of Pajama Sam silliness. Every screen feels like a different idea that got stitched together at the end, not in a haphazard way, but in a trying to make every screen interesting and fresh, which appeals to me.
I also very much enjoy the casual switch between 2D pixel art and 3D modals.
I feel a bit bad not talking about anything that happens in the game, but I wouldn’t want to spoilers it, and I don’t even fully understand what’s happening in the first place.
How’s everyone else doing this week?
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
Internet News is All Wrong
Why is internet news so bad, why do people prefer celebrity fluff, and how could it be made better?
What Does a Robot Want?
No, self-aware robots aren't going to turn on us, Skynet-style. Not unless we designed them to.
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
This Game is Too Videogame-y
What's wrong with a game being "too videogameish"?
Baldur’s Gate 3 returns from a year-long hiatus, to… roughly the same way I felt about it last time. I mentioned it felt kind of like a Middle Management Simulator, and the first quest I returned to reinforced that: a couple of guys were harassing an old lady because they thought she was a witch, I picked the option to tell them to knock it off, and they decided they would rather attack a group of armed adventurers who outnumbered them 2 to 1 than stop harassing this old lady. (I then got into a 4-on-4 fight against a group of enemies with height advantage who wrecked my quite squishy team quite badly, and upon finally scraping out a win against them, walked into a poison gas cloud that killed everyone (but not before triggering a fairly lengthy sidequest that looks like it could be interesting, if it ever comes up outside of “three seconds before a poison gas cloud finishes killing my whole team.”) I ended up soft restarting, loading a save from right after the tutorial ship.)
The fights are making me realize I’m going to have to shift my perspective on the game from “RPG” to “Turn-Based Strategy”, as most of the encounters have been nasty. Part of that is the percent-chance-to-hit is taking a toll, seems like 60% success rate is on the high end so far. (One enemy dropped to 1 hp, and then I missed three 60% attacks in a row on them. An NPC finally killed them from across the stage.) There’s also a ton of options that I’m not prepared to use, and I don’t think the game presents them quite adequately; that four-on-four fight that got me to restart had a tutorial in front of it telling me how to turn on Non-Lethal Attacks, I read it about half a dozen times, and afterward did not know how to turn on Non-Lethal Attacks. (Turns out they’re darker than every other option on the wheel, so that they look unavailable.) I’m completely sure I could wiki-walk this thing’s mechanics for days, if I wanted. Which will be avoided as long as practical.
Level 3 brings up proficiencies for characters, so already every character has four separate major builds. That plus character’s conflicting personalities means this is a Replay Game.
The writing might have actually hit the literary equivalent of the Uncanny Valley. It’s really good; I’ve found myself stopping to focus on random lines and inevitably going “I would love to have written that”, which make it stand out more when it does dumb stuff like have those guys attack me instead of run away from the old lady. There’s a quest I ran into, where I could read a bandit leader’s mind, find out he was really worried about the two bandits I fought to reach him, and then got the option to tell him I killed them. Except I didn’t kill them, I knocked them out with the Non-Lethal Attacks, and there was no option to convey that. But I only have a problem with this lack of option because there’s a plethora of options and the game’s got me in the mindset of being able to do anything.
Storywise, I’m caught back up to my old game’s progress, which was nowhere. Found the wizard in the hole, went looking for the other wizard, in the other hole, and instead found an eeevil wizard, in an eeevil hole. (I guess there was also the undead wizard, in the undead hole.) Found a character I didn’t find last time, who told me they knew how to get the brainworm out, all we’ll have to do is visit the Soylent Green factory. And advanced the first main plot event far enough to get the resolution options of Good, Bad, and Clearly Correct. (Also a potential fourth one that’s “insanely impractical”; but now I’m reminded there’s that spell that makes you invincible until you attack someone, and maybe that plan’s just crazy enough to work. But I’d have to make it work to see if it, you know, actually works.)
…so, yeah. I feel like I’m actually going to make progress this time. Eventually. Slowly. Although if the combat keeps being vindictive I might have to turn the difficulty down to “I don’t like your game” mode.
Yeah, the non-lethal attacks really feels like it was shoehorned in at the last minute. It’s never properly affected dialogue that I’ve seen, and I only know of exactly one character who basically has a secret recruitment method if you use it. And uh, if you haven’t noticed yet that the old lady is not what she seems then. . . you’ve taken a particularly eccentric route and I apologize for the minor spoiler.
Sanctuary can indeed be very busted, luckily only a few enemies in the game will abuse it against you. I find it more useful than Healing Word for rescuing people in a fight: if you try to heal someone after they drop during a fight, they lose their entire next turn, so using a standard action heal means you’ve lost two turns, and even the bonus action Healing Word just resets their death save counter and eats one attack from the next enemy as they get dropped again. Slinging Sanctuary at them right before they drop means you don’t lose any actions and have the chance to properly heal them up, as long as you’ve cleared any foes with AoEs.
I don’t recall what difficulty you said you’re playing on, but I have a whole rant about “Tactican” and how it’s actually just flat higher enemy numbers across the board, so if you’re on that yeah I’d recommend not. I played on Custom with the tactics from tactician and the actual enemy stats turned back down to normal, and it’s what I would recommend until the start of Act 3.
I don’t remember if there were any signs about her before the fight with those guys; my previous interaction with her was over a year ago, and didn’t stick. It was very obvious right after, but either way those guys thought she was a witch, and picked a fight with both her and four armed adventurers at the same time.
I’m just playing on Balanced, I don’t play enough of these to try to turn the difficulty up. I’m picking up on using Sanctuary during fights for that same purpose, it’s been a running theme that someone gets knocked down, I pick them up, and straight down they go again. And I managed to spoil myself on the recruitment character, so theoretically they’re in the Bag of Recruiting now. (That fight took, I think five attempts; the successful one involved clearing out the room around the corner beforehand and then shoving two heavy boys into a bottomless pit. And the boss still just waltzed up past three team members and killed the rogue outright. I feel like I’m doing these wrong. The neighboring boss also killed me half a dozen times, until I likewise shoved him down a pit and made him fight his own spiders, while all my guys shot him with bows. One can only hope that whenever I finally fight this dark god of brainworms, it will take place near a shove-friendly pit.)
Spiders in a pit, sounds like you may have beelined straight to the goblin fort without doing the rest of the sidequests (or possibly even fighting all the stuff on the way in)? Yeah, I’d expect that place to suck at 3rd, pretty sure I’d cleared everything and was at least 4th before fighting those, might have hit 5th partway through. I was also running wizard, cleric, barbarian, fighter, with what turns out to be a well-supported broken build on one of them, so I had a lot of beef, and my wizard had as much AC as everyone else. And I take very long turns. And had some pretty BS gear too I think.
Some people say that you’re not supposed to 100% clear everything, but it sure felt to me like when clearing everything I was just about barely at the correct level for the major boss fights, and the early game definitely has some spots where you can get into fights where you just don’t have the tech if you go in the “wrong” order. Rogues also kinda suck in BG3/5e, or at least on paper I couldn’t see any reason to have one around so I never brought them except for specific thieving missions. Honestly that might be the biggest thing. If you’ve got a character you like and their class isn’t working, don’t worry too much about completely rebuilding them, though making Shadowheart into a Light or Healing cleric is an obvious clash. I’ve considered making Astarion a Ranger on some future run, can’t go wrong with free animal plus bow, if nothing else it’s *two* pools of sacrificial hit points to chew through. Although, hmm, if you haven’t got the item that gives advantage on lockpicking you might feel like you need the full rogue bonus.
Ah, another non-tutorialized mechanic that might be useful is that you can throw potions from the throw menu (you’ll probably have to scroll quite a ways before they show up).
Not a beeline, but I don’t know how much I skipped, and have been mostly avoiding fights. Hit Level 4 right before the bosses, I think, thanks in part to a bit of Hitman-style “oops someone saw me, better take them out, oops someone saw that, better take them out, oops…”
Level 5 is a huge power spike in 5e (fighters get two attacks and casters get lvl 3 spells), so it makes a big difference if you do enough side quests to hit it before the goblin boss fights.
That being said, I cleared it during early access when the level cap was 4, so its definitely possible.
Palworld We finally gathered enough materials to enter the oil age, while level wise we exceed it already by two generations. But without oil there is no way to enter the later generation ingot crafting.
Scrap Mechanic I have a secure farm now to grow all the crops in the world. Next main objective is to rescue Lorenzo from the warehouse. I have a lot of food and potatoes planted to make through that ordeal.
I played a bunch of Songs of Conquest, which is a Might and Magic type game. I played the single player campaigns and haven’t actually played any Might and Magic so I don’t have a ton of comparisons to make but I enjoyed it overall. The single player protagonists were pretty variable, the guy breaking his species free from slavery was understandable but the guy who had spent his entire life in indentured servitude and kept praising the whole system behind it was… really not. The single player storylines for all the various factions interwove, which was interesting. And each mission ended with, per the title, a song, I appreciated that.
Played some Balatro. I know it’s a big surprise but the poker roguelite is, in fact, very good. It is kind of intimidating looking at 15 decks each of which has like 10 different difficulties but luckily I can lose just fine on the base difficulty so I don’t need to worry about it much. I picked it up after seeing the SGDQ infinity score speedrun (which I very much recommend, it’s quite dramatic) but it does turn out that person is better at the game than I am. Still, is cool.
Also been playing Denshattack, which is a skateboarding game except it’s much more interesting because you’re driving a train. Seeing a train do kickflips, drifts, grinds, manuals, jumps, and so on is just so much funnier than seeing some guy on a skateboard doing it. The controls took a bit of getting used to but they generally feel good, and the levels are very generous on basic completion while having a high cap if you want gold medals. The story is goofy, which is very appropriate, and the boss fights (yes, there are boss fights) are definitely dramatic.
And yes, the game contains multi-track drifting (the best solution to the trolley problem).
If you like Songs of Conquest then you should definitely have a go at Heroes of Might and Magic. IMO HoMM 3 is the best.
I have finished the base game of Dave the Diver!
Throughout all of it it remained a million minigames in a trench coat, or rather in a diving suit, which.. works reasonably well if one doesn’t get stuck on the sudden shark influx at one point.
Reading the wiki on the weapons upgrades also helped A Lot.
I’m missing by now I think one photo mission, two bosses, and the platinum rating in cooksta, as well as a bunch of fishes from the Dredge tie-in. The goal is to get the (most of) those and another weapons upgrade, and then head into the jungle DLC.
Got in a session of Knights of the Old Republic, finishing Manaan. I only got killed by a shark once in the underwater section, mostly because there’s an early intersection and I stunned the one that was on the path I needed and figured I’d have plenty of time to get to the door before the other one came back, or would at least be far enough down the path that it would turn around and head back and, well, it didn’t and I didn’t.
Also got in another session of Suikoden V, where the plot didn’t advance much but I mostly recruited Stars of Destiny. I’m following a walkthrough to get all of the Stars because the ending changes if you get all of them and I missed that the first time I played. Given that I was doing recruiting, most of the stuff here was light, with a long sequence with the detective who is supposed to find out more details about the Lordlake incident but then if you want to recruit him easier you need to help him solve the case, which is lampshaded, but the secret isn’t revealed yet. I also need to remember to grind characters a bit because the party gets split later on and the first time I played I used the main party only and so it made the rest of it really difficult.
Besides doing the DiRT Rally 2.0 daily rallies I’ve also switched my computers from Arch Linux to OpenSUSE to get SELinux (extra protection against malicious programs) support and to avoid AUR shenanigans.
Hello, Isaac. This is my first time commenting on this blog.
I wanted to let you know that I loved your dad’s Doom levels so much that I made 4 videos reviewing all of his creations in Doom. Doom City was his most famous WAD, but he had other stuff he made and the levels were always well polished and had great decorations. His music was also cool, unique and completely different from the MIDI tracks that are commonly used in Doom maps.
I’m glad this website is still up. I made these videos so your dad’s memory is not forgotten. Doom is my all time favorite game and the stuff he made back in 1995 and 1996 has stood the test of time.
Have a nice day
Been playing a number of things this week. Primarily I’m still playing through Manic Miners, the excellent fan remake of LEGO Rock Raiders. I finished the “classic” campaign and have moved onto the “remastered” version, with levels that have been overhauled to be more interesting and take advantage of some of the new mechanics that have been added.
Tried Moonlighter, which was free to claim on Steam for a bit. It has you as a shopkeeper who moonlights as a dungeon-raiding adventurer, bringing back stuff to sell. I didn’t quite vibe with it; I dislike that the only way to know how to price your product is trial-and-error watching people’s reactions to the prices you set, and the real-time combat felt…clunky, I guess. Mostly it made me want to go back and finish my playthrough of Potionomics, where you brew up potions to sell from ingredients you buy or hire adventurers to retrieve, and barter up your prices in a fun card-based combat format.
Speaking of deck battling I also tried out the demo for Moonstone Island, which is basically Stardew Valley, Pokémon, and Slay the Spire mashed together into one game. It’s a creature collector where the creatures fight using their own individual decks of cards, and also you can mine, forage, and grow crops in a very Pelican Town-esque town with a bunch of eligible marriage options. I’m not sure how I feel about it, to be honest; sometimes it’s a bit on-the-nose with its inspirations (though I did like that it procedurally builds a world when you start, something I’ve wanted to see in creature collectors for a while to increase replayability). I may need to give it another play session or two.
I completed the “Trash Compactor” achievement in Terraria and then, because the Journey Mode tools make it relatively easy, also picked up the Training Day and Organized Chaos achievements as well. Only five achievements to go to get to the 100%, but most of those require extra-hard mode/seed combinations, and the other one (“Book Worm”) requires meeting literally every single monster, boss, critter, and NPC in the base game, which is a bit of a grind, so probably those aren’t coming any time soon.
That said, my return to Terraria has inspired my son as well, so we’ve been playing the Calamity mod together and it’s been pretty fun. Unfortunately, I did also just catch wind of Calamity no longer being supported or developed, which seems like a shame given the fact that tModLoader is eventually going to update to match 1.4.5 and it would be a shame for one of the classic mods to get left behind.
I’ve also played a few skirmishes in Battle for Wesnoth, which really is evergreen.
One of the devs actually popped into the comments of a youtube video to clarify that they’ll still be doing bugfixes and maintenance, and that Calamity will still be getting updated to 1.4.5 – they’re just not doing any new content or rebalancing or anything. Of course, given how precarious the situation is, there’s no guarantee that’ll still be the case by the time tModLoader actually updates to 1.4.5, but at least there’s still a glimmer of hope.
My computer has been on since Friday evening, keeping me on the final section of the Path of Pain indefinitely until I bloody well get past the under-and-up part. I can get fairly reliably to bouncing on the last spikes but not reliably enough to have had enough tries at the under-and-up bounce dash jump pogo. It’s so easy for tiny deviations to result in collision with thorns or spikes or saws. I’ve tried various controllers, and now have some white cotton gloves next to my controller for if my hands are too sweaty for this rapid fine-tuning sort of gameplay!