T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I finally started playing The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.
I’ve been meaning to play this for years, but I’ve just not been able to get past playing two stages and thinking it was fun, but there’s not much going on. But unsurprisingly, just like Enter the Gungeon, it gets more interesting as you play.
I have been enjoying it, despite it’s rather gross aesthetic, and it’s concerningly large quantity of achievements.
I am posting this a bit late and writing this last minute. I’ve been spending most of my free time helping clean a friends house, so I stayed a bit late because I wanted to pet their orange cat Rolo. I think Rolo is such a sweet cat, but I swear that his brain cells might actually neutrinos because I don’t think he could find his way out of a room that was all doors.
So how’s everyone else doing?
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Overthinking Zombies
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
Dear Hollywood: Do a Mash Reboot
Since we're rebooting everything, MASH will probably come up eventually. Here are some casting suggestions.
Crysis 2
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
Baldur’s Gate 3: Porom’s Day Out continues. The lack of autosave has combined with the sudden difficulty spikes to result in redoing several things several times. I’ve had to start manually saving after nearly every event, like in ye olden dayse when games had save points. I’ve also concluded this first, mostly blind run is also a gimmick run; the game seems to be balanced primarily toward ranged attacks, while my team currently has one melee character and three characters good at nothing. I’ve found a couple of new places, and cleared the eeevil hole, with… well I won’t call it ‘maximum casualties’, because WE survived, but definitely ‘suboptimal casualties’. We also backtracked to a spider well, on the grounds that we completed the chapter after it and were probably ready for it now. We are not.
Palom has arrived. I forgot I gave him a giant handlebar mustache, which makes everything better. Two carrot-colored hobbits plus a giant handlebar mustache flying through the cosmos radiates Grade School Play energy. But I am reminded once again that I should have made Palom the protagonist and Porom the second character; Porom would fit the Mystical Oracle role better, and Palom would fit better both mechanically and playstyle-wise. Porom is smart enough not to trade away an eye to a treacherous murder fish in exchange for a promise to solve a problem that cannot possibly be solved this early in the game, but Palom totally would have.
I forgot how much lore Dungeons and Dragons has. Looks like it’s not quite as old as I thought, but 1974 is still over 50 years, there’s a whole lot of lore piling up around here. Hopefully I’m not expected to know it; I read LPs of the first two Baldur’s Gate games so I recognize a couple of names, but I’ve done nothing with D&D in the main.
Anyway, now I’m lost. There’s a quest marker I can’t get to, and another quest marker I can maybe get to if I go back through the tunnel where everyone hates me. But it turns out I can’t handle the tunnel where everyone hates me anymore, because I have one melee character and three dead weights and now everyone hates me. I guess I could try the Tunnel of Plot Progression, but my last venture in there involved a big old fight with a Beho- ahem, “Spectator”, immediately followed by a giant worm with Spectator hitpoints, immediately followed by a series of turrets that would only die to magic. I feel like if I can’t handle the tunnel where everyone hates me then I won’t be able to handle the Undertunnel where everyone hates me Even Harder.
There is a second entrance to the Underdark, which IIRC should be a bit easier than that one
examine the buildings north of the burning village, which is north-center of the region, and a third which I know exists but don’t remember off the top. Although that could be one of the options for “tunnel where everyone hates me?” The proper Act 2 point of no return is not until you enter the shadow-zone or whatever they call it on the surface, so you can keep milling around as long as you don’t finish crossing the underdark or take the land transition after the undead fights.If you’ve got the “hirelings” available then you should be able to fill your team and play the entire game with them if you wish, even if everyone else hates you, so I’d just buy some more melee for now. There’s also another plot-progression exit
far northwest corner, west of that burning village, though the dungeon that leads to will also probably seem very unfair if you’re underleveled.I assume that first spoiler is the place I can’t figure out how to reach. (…and the second spoiler.)
Porom would never abandon her useless friends. Hirelings will be for a second, Tellah playthrough. Tellah would take ALL the deals, and abandon ALL the people.
Some rough guidelines:
1. Underdark is possible at lvl 4 (it was part of early access after all), but it is better to wait until level 5.
2. The northern area of Act 1 is a good deal harder than the southern area.
The gnollsin that area are level five and get double attack. They are rough if you do not.3. I know its hard in a blind playthrough to do this, but you probably want to do enough to get level 7 before you begin act 2. The
Githyanki monestaryis not technically part of act 2, but its a lot tougher than the rest of act 1.I didn’t really have a time slot to do the encounter where we all get captured and the big reveal happens in Knights of the Old Republic, so I skipped it this week but did get in a session of Suikoden V, where the plot was advanced, which reminded me of just why I think it has the best story. The Godwin family that is in power decides to make another attack on us who are supported by the Barrows family, but it turns out that Barrows has been consorting with a foreign nation that his lands border that tried to invade at one point, and so he talks about having the protagonist join with him and carve out a separate kingdom from the kingdom that your family was ruling. You have to decline or you get a bad ending. In the battle, he has hidden some troops from that kingdom in a nearby forest who are supposed to jump in and help you and start that whole process, but being seen as siding with them will be a bad thing, so the strategist tells you to instead of fighting the attacking army to heads towards those forces. When the attacking army follows you there, their commander decides that the foreign forces are the bigger threat and joins with you to defeat them, although you are strongly encouraged to let HIS forces do all the fighting. This, then, makes it seem like you aren’t involved in the deception but Barrows is, confirmed when his idiot son runs in angry over what happened and in front of you confirms that he was with them at the start.
But wait, there’s more! The instigating incident for a lot of this was a “rebellion” in a town called Lordlake where your mother — the queen — took up the Sun Rune and devastated it in response to that (the strategist recommended her taking up the Rune but probably didn’t intend that response). During the revolution, the Dawn Rune which it is hinted would help balance the Sun Rune and so prevent the madness that caused your mother to be so harsh was stolen. Part of the investigation you needed to do was to find someone who knew what actually happened, and he said that the “rebellion” started as a protest and the noble running Lordlake — who ended up being executed for inciting the riots — was trying to calm them down when the idiot son of Barrows panicked and started the first huge riot, and then when they decided to take their protest to the capital they slipped some military men into the crowd to incite it, and during that they invaded where the Dawn Rune was being held and stole it. We find this out because the idiot son blurts that out during his rant about the foreign army, and then we head into the basement with Barrows’ intelligent and nice daughter to and find it there. Since, again, the Dawn Rune and the Twilight Rune were both there to provide balance for the Sun Rune, this move is what ultimately caused your mother to take up the Rune but to be inflicted with a growing madness, and so pretty much caused all the issues. The result is that all of Barrows’ allies change sides and join with you directly, including his daughter, and you all storm out, with the protagonist now in possession of the Dawn Rune.
All of these things were set up as the plot progressed, as Barrows was accused of working with the foreign nation but denied it, and again there were lots of hints set up about how the Lordlake incident wasn’t what it seemed (necessitating the investigation), and the mystery of the Dawn Rune was raised early on, as well as it being a balance for the Sun Rune. And there are more surprises to come.
I finally did it! 6 years later! And hours spent on dozens, even hundreds of tries on the last section. I beat Path of Pain!!! I’m disappointed now that I can’t redo it immediately, to demonstrate my mastery to myself and prove that it wasn’t a fluke (pun not intended).
After many, many tries, I have finally beat Act 2 of Silksong on Steel Soul mode. The worst were all the runs where I die from some random monster who pushes me into spikes or lava.
Now to see how close I can get to 100%.
You Steel Soulers are a crazy type of person. Although having thought it would be an annoyance having to go through Hollow Knight to reach Path of Pain again, I did actually find it was a joy because the game is that good. The stress in that electric jellyfish area must be intense though.
My latest Rimworld playthrough stopped when the game started evincing game-breaking bugs and I realised I had absolutely zero interest in troubleshooting the problem. I might actually have had my lifetime’s fill of Rimworld!
(…probably not, there’s literally thousands of mods out there… )
So I reinstalled Cyberpunk 2077 because I read a (now nostalgic) article of Shamus’ here about it. And ooh, it’s good to be back in a well-written story game. The characters are believably flawed, the events flow from their choices as much as yours, and there’s a level of detail and verisimilitude to the city that stands out. I kind of…appreciate that I found in-game advertisements *so* loud and *so* crude that it was borderline offensive – but just got used to it over time and barely notice now.
I also like that when something bad happens, it’s less ‘you, the player F*****d Up’ (though that’s very possible) and more ‘the other characters also have agency and their choices affected the situation.
Last time, I was a stealth-focussed, female, Street Kid V who ended up romancing Judy Alvarez, so this time I went with a melee-focussed, male, Nomad V.
And boy, does this game make you specialise. Melee sucks until you have a lot of points invested – the defining moment for me was probably the time I charged an enemy and wailed continuously on him with a katana while he emptied two whole assault rifle clips into me and I died.
‘Yeah, I probably need to respec for this’, I said.
Anyway. Simple melee combat against melee foes is pretty fun (blocking, counters, dodging is all good) but sadly most combat consists of people with *guns*, which goes like this:
– Me activating the ‘slow-down-time’ cyberware and hacking helpless chumps apart for a bit.
– Me hiding in cover after the cyberware wears off, occasionally running sweatily after opponents as they hose me down with bullets. Then I wail gracelessly on them until body parts fall off.
– The Sandevistan cooldown timer ends! Back to Easy Mode where I chop up a few more people for a bit and it feels less like I’m a rube who bought a sword to a gunfight.
I think I’ve seen enough of this playstyle now, though. I’ve locked myself out of a lot of other things I could be doing, and almost every fight seems to turn into a combination of this and a growing sense of ‘you’re constantly getting shot and thus playing the game wrong’.
Yeah, I’ve got enough HP to tank all those bullets people fire at me, and lots of cyberware to give me armor, but it still feels pretty stupid to be running headlong into gunfire all the time.
As soon as I’ve seen the end of the Panam Palmer romance I’m probably going to restart with a female Corpo V, super-focussed on netrunning.
In DiRT Rally 2.0 I’m not only doing the dailies now, but I’ve also started a custom rally season to really force myself to practise rear-wheel drive rallying.
I didn’t have as much time for gaming this week as Hurricane Lala passing by Hawaii left me without power for 56 hours over the weekend (though I was out of the path of maximal destruction and personally wasn’t affected much otherwise). But I did get a few runs of PEAK in with some friends (mostly newbies like me, with one veteran). I haven’t made it past the third biome yet, but I feel like I’m seeing improvements in my skill.
I also finished the last mission of the remastered campaign in the LEGO Rock Raiders remake Manic Miners, and was pleasantly surprised with a nice original song by the guy who made it in the credits. If you enjoyed playing LEGO Rock Raiders in all its brilliant-but-flawed glory, or if you’ve never played it, I can highly recommend this remake.
I spent two days figuring out the “perfect” character, as in one I actually want to play, and have begun Owlcat’s Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. Which yup, I knew there was no point in preparing Burning Hands: I’ve just made it through the first non-tutorial dungeon, and yeesh is this some 3.x char-op DM nonsense. At 2nd level not a single thing in there, all of which were PC-classed NPCs, had less than 20 hit points, and the game did not tell me about resting until I had completed what had to have been at least two full days’ worth of encounters. I forgot how these games like to drown you in heal potions, else I would have used Shield of Faith and gotten more value than my own Cure Lights. Was only possible due to the starting tank they give having like 21-22 AC. Meanwhile most of those *enemies* have like 20 AC, my wolf is useless, sure hope you took one of the pathfinder X charges of 1d6 touch attack classes. And the rolling has screwed me so many times it sure feels fake: on at least 5 separate occasions, like 1/3 of the fights total, my entire party will miss on turn 1, then the enemy gets like a 10-15% hit on the main tank, then I get maybe one hit, then they *crit* the tank (which requires a confirmation roll in this game, so they rolled two more 18s to make that happen). Maybe the game is punishing me for not taking the stop enemy 20s unluck aura first. I’m playing on “Core”-ish, with the “default” enemies instead of the increased amount it says for core, in turn-based mode.
The character I ended up with is an Oracle (PF’s spontaneous Cleric-ish class), with the nature domain to steal some Druid spells I’ve never got to play with, and the intent to dip Loremaster 1 to steal a very particular Druid 9 spell I saw while researching and absolutely must have
they can summon a giant purple worm, that’s never a thing anyone gets to do, I must have this. Why not Druid? Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned from BG3 it’s that I’m tired of preparing spells. Oracle should make extremely good use of a particular aspect of the Mythic mechanics, though I’ll have to do the fairly boring Angel path, it’s another impossibly rare opportunity (rather than the much cooler sounding Aeon one, who get to summon Golems, another thing almost never used). This game seems to be designed around giving PF players even more of what they want: grossly unbalanced stacking parallel advancement mechanics. But I have to actually get there first, and if I’m being honest that entire first dungeon was a boring unfun slog that seems to exist entirely to justify getting to level 3. . . oh wait we’re not even level 3. Maybe I should “reduce” enemy stats for a while.On the one hand, not sure I like how binary the moral choice at the end was
bring the cannibal traitor who basically admits they’ll stab you in the back if you’re too nice and wants to Warcraft Orc Horde brainwash an army but with cannibalism, or the Nice Guy who is full of too many forced jokes, but on the other hand at least it wasn’t a difficult one. But the Angel/Demon binary makes being a perfectly reasonable normal person into “Angel.”Oh, the moral choice between recruiting
Lann or Wenduagis kind of laughable. Would you like adeceitful, cruel, wretched and obviously unstable person as a companion character, or someone who’s…not those things? Honestly, if it were a choice between being friends with Wenduag or being kicked in the nuts repeatedly, I’d probably choose the kicking.It’s a problem with a lot of ‘Demon’ choices in the game: they don’t just seem evil, they seem stupid and counterproductive as well. You very quickly become the leader of a crusade against a demonic invasion, and most of the demon choices are ‘undermine your own Crusade for the lols’ which…fits, I guess, but it seems like no-one would actually let you get away with that for long. And
Wenduagis a choice that comes back to bite you repeatedly.Still you can always pivot to being a Lich or Devil, or Swarm-That-Walks for less contradictory evil…
Oh if I wanted to be a Lich I would be, but (mechanical spoiler)
because the way mythic spellcasting works I want the merged list so I can play with that spell earlier, so I have to choose at the start unless I flip my entire character., and also I don’t generally do evil routes. We’ll see though, maybe the NPCs will make me mad enough to turn on them. I can see how there’s a steam review with 780 hours, this game actually has enough options to start feeling like 3.5 nonsense, and they throw six different extra mthic classes and story variants on top of it.My first run was an Angel/Oracle combo, and I actually gave up because it felt too OP. Which I think I was misunderstanding the point of the campaign, but a level 16 character should have *zero* level 9 spells, not *so many it’s the first thing I think to do in every fight*!
Still, didn’t stop me trying a Wizard/Lich combo, and yeah, that had the same issues. As well as the awful spell memorising mechanics that Pathfinder/ D&D 3.x had. Paying pathfinder games really made me appreciate some choices D&D 5e made…
Honestly I recommend going the opposite route with regards to difficulty. Rather than reduced numbers of core-level enemies, use normal difficulty but boost the monster numbers and (optionally) switch on extra behaviours.
This, in my experience, gives a less frustrating and more tactical experience.
I love WotR to pieces, but it’s definitely tricky to engage with at first.
Edited to add: The Shield Maze is a slog every time. Because you’ll be level 2, you won’t have a lot of your abilities and synergies in place yet, so there are some build options (especially with hexes), that are just better than others AT THAT POINT. Push through it and once you’re deep into act 1 you’ll start getting more fun toys.
Considering how many of those encounters were One 5th Level Guy or Two 3rd Level Guys, yeah. I just hate how “normal” difficulty is a penalty to monster stats (which indicates the “DM” knows their statblocks are bogus and refuses to admit it), and a flat reduction of damage to PCs by 20%, and one-sided weaker crits. That’s the sort of kludge that’s supposed to be for Hard and Easy mode, not Normal, and I know how DnD works. But I suppose I’ve also told people that PF is not 3.5, and yeah they’ve got classes available that are straight up different power levels but I say that’s a feature. A feature in an actual tabletop game with a DM.
Witch was one of my considerations, despite my many irks with the class (healing allies or giving yourself permanent +2 natural armor are not hexes, if you’re going to put that there then get a better ability name, and I rather dislike when so much of a class hinges on a Domain list). But naturally I thought, well it’s a demon campaign so sleep shouldn’t be that useful, right? Certainly better than the Arcanist with their limited use damage effects in 6 person PF game where even a pile of Maximize rods can’t keep up. But mostly it was that mechanical reason above, and not feeling like doing Lich. Although a total rebuild from Oracle into Leyline Witch wouldn’t be too crazy of a jump if I’m feeling miserable.
For I have chosen the Way of Pain once again, despite what I learned in Kingmaker, and am trying to play a summoner. It seems to have more support in this game, posters say it can be done. I was really expecting the animal companion to pull more weight at the start but every enemy fighter having AC 20 is ridiculous.
-Actually come to think of it, yeah that’ll be because they’re probably giving literally everything the same super-elite stats you get, which is not how DnD was supposed to work. Turning their stats down to “normal” would be entirely appropriate then.
I’m speaking as someone with over a 1000 hours in WotR, who would put it in my top three games of all time:
You’re pretty much right with all of your criticisms. It helps if you mentally change “core” to “hard” in your head. Normal is the best way to start off. An entirely core run is absolutely viable, even with only limited min-maxing, but it will invariably include some level of rng-frustration.
My view of it is that core is Pathfinder rules, which are made for a tabletop where people might run 2 to 3 combats tops over the course of a 4 hour session. They don’t really translate perfectly to a game where you might have dozens of encounters in a row.
Again, I adore this game, and I forgive it all its faults, but I can’t deny them.
But I hope you push through them, because there is so much to love about it.
Good luck!
Indeed- in fact part of what gets me is that there were so many fights in the “maze” and it only went halfway to three. Even with PF declaring that PC-Classed NPCs are CR=Level-1, that’s still well more than 13.3 fights of 2+, usually + in level (and even if it wasn’t 13 it was *definitely* more than 6-7, all in one rest). Unless PF also changed the expected number of encounters per level? They changed the xp system (same amount per level/different calculation per monster) so yeah actually they might have.
My first run through WotR I reused one of my stronger Kingmaker characters (Scaled Fist 1/Freebooter 10/Archaeologist 2/Dragon Disciple 4/Vivisectionist 3, not in order I took the levels) because I knew for a fact that Owlcat wasn’t gonna have any decent tanks among the standard companions. It went better than my first run through of Kingmaker (with a Sorcerer 10/Dragon Disciple 10), but not by that much. But that’s why I have a level 20 save in Treasures so I can play around with making characters until I find something I like.
Seelah isn’t terrible as a tank. She has decent charisma so you can give her a robe and a level of scaled fist. You can do better with a merc though (or the MC).
Stick her on a horse and she can tank for days. Mercenaries may be better, but anything below unfair she can do fine.
I also found Valerie extremely underwhemling in Kingmaker, as it takes quite a while for the unique benefits of her Tower Shield focused archetype to actually matter and early on she could have done better with just normal Fighter and more focused feats. The Paladin given here is much better though- even if the lay on hands healing is pitiful, they start with properly focused AC feats, and she even has the Pickpocket background. Which is to say, the one true Most Optimized background possible because it’s free initiative bonus (aside: whoever invented the Hummingbird familiar had no idea what they were doing), which I was going to use, but since I had to do rebuild my character after a quick test* I swapped mine out.
*I couldn’t remember if these games properly did full round actions when you’re limited to a single standard action. You can charge just fine, but nope, that niggling in my head was correct, it flat-out bars you from casting a summon spell if you’re staggered. Such as by the oracle curse that makes you staggered on the first round of every fight. The way that *should* work is I could start casting turn 1 and still finish on turn 2 like normal, while getting the later initative benefit from the curse. Because summon spells demand high initiative, as going last on turn 1 means your summon doesn’t show up until the end of turn 2, when the fight’s half over.
I have finished the base game of Dave the Diver, missing, I think, one final final boss that I’ll do in due time.
For now, I have moved into the Jungle-DLC, which adds to the “many minigames in a trenchcoat” a Stardew Valley-liky open map with villagers to befriend, a permanently running clock, and a whole new lake to dive in. Let’s see how that goes.
An OF COURSE I got sidetracked: I have learned that there’s some new content in Ghost Recon: Wildlands, a game that exceedingly well fed into my map-completionist probably-adhd brain. And indeed it still plays as nicely as I remembered, with proper murder-puzzles to be solved with drones and sniper rifles. I’ll report once I’ve finished the Last Rites, and will probably also check then on the two new Big Bads on the main game’s map.
@admins
It looks like the spam filter ate one of my comments, probably because I put a link in it