T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I only had time to play The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth.
I keep going back and forth on whether I’m having making progress or just playing to no avail. I’m probably making progress all the time, but it’s hard to tell because of how vague the game is with unlocks and progress.
That’s about all I did this week, but what about everyone else?
Batman: Arkham City
A look back at one of my favorite games. The gameplay was stellar, but the underlying story was clumsy and oddly constructed.
Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Why was this classic adventure game so funny in the 80's, and why did it stop being funny?
The Opportunity Crunch
No, brutal, soul-sucking, marriage-destroying crunch mode in game development isn't a privilege or an opportunity. It's idiocy.
The Best of 2011
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
Linux vs. Windows
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Hey, y’all. Long time lurker, posted only a few times back in the day.
I’ve been playing Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind with the Tamriel Rebuilt mod, and for a while now I’ve been meaning to extol it here. It at least doubles the size of the original game, adding a bunch of world and quests that is of at least the quality of the original game. Coincidentally, alongside a recent “Poison Song” update to the mod itself, GOG just added this as one of their “one click” mods, so it doesn’t require the traditional extra mod manager effort to set up a mod. This includes that they’re using OpenMW as the replacement engine, so a lot of little things are fixed (random example: under a levitation spell you can still choose to fully land, so doorways don’t suddenly become harder to pass through).
Just in general I seem to keep going back to all of the various Bethesda Game Studios games, including another community doubling that I also just started over with again, which is Tale of Two Wastelands, which adds all of Fallout 3 as expansion to Fallout: New Vegas (along with other sensible changes for unifying them, like starting in Vault 101 and balancing the New Vegas economy). I probably even have comparatively less negative things to say about Starfield (emphasis on comparatively) and Fallout 76 (which I started playing again now that a friend is playing).
I think what I’m liking is a lot of “numbers go up” and exploration and having an expansive and complex system, but also relatively casual[1], and I think it’s also a positive for me that these games actually lack a lot of functional or emotional “choices matter”, where I get anxious about playing it wrong by making the wrong choice. As a case in point, I am also playing again through Cyberpunk 2077, and I’m having to eat my main quest vegetables (going through The Heist again) to be able to get back to my fixer side quest desserts. In the same game, I also haven’t ever wanted to play through The Devil ending.
[1] My intention of “casual” here that isn’t in conflict with “complex” is “it feels like you and the developers have agreed that, by and large, in 10 minutes you will have progressed further in the game; your skill or lack thereof just decides by how much”.
I really love New Vegas, but it doesn’t have nice dungeons to crawl through (Dead Money notwithstanding), so I tried Tale of Two Wastelands to have some decent dungeons to crawl when I needed a break from the storyline, but it did make it tricky to get all the weapon mods I wanted. I started in the Mojave which made it so the Fallout 3 plot didn’t really make sense; but it doesn’t make much sense regardless, so not much of value is lost there.
I’m replaying New Vegas right now and I am FEELING this. One of my favorite parts of Fallout 3 was clearing out the buildings and finding the secrets, and there just isn’t enough of that in New Vegas.
Well, the PC is fucked.
A new power supply did not solve the issue, however turning the now one off via the main kill switch led to it also not turning back on. Putting the old, assumed fubar’d back to try it did turn on, until I turned it off via the main switch again. So this seems more to be related to the PSU not liking being treated like this, which, fair.
Nexz attempt will be a new graphics card, as the mainboard’s debug LEDs are stuck on VGA. If that doesn’t work, I fear it’s “new mainboard time”, and that will also lead to “new processor”, and *then* I will realize that it’s been the RAM all along (I tested with all four sticks, with all four sticks the debug LEDs stuck on VGA (not CPU or RAM), so I don’t think it *is* the RAM, but it would be typical).
In the meantime I’ve booted the PS5 again, looking a bit back into Ghost of Tsushima, and dreaming of having a button to just give me the tutorial run-down again how anything works…
Betting on motherboard, but I’ve had both the memory and the graphics card freeze the POST.
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues, very slowly. Finally out of Act 1, by nearly a full foot’s width. Feels like I probably missed a character quest, from recruiting the character very late. Act 2 will tell. Not much action since last week; basically just dug a wizard out of a rockslide-formerly-known-as-hole, which resulted in… well I won’t say “maximum casualties”, but I will say if you tell me to drop an explosive and blow up a wall, I don’t know why you’re then unprepared for me to throw an explosive at the wall. (I would ask what they were thinking, but they’re no longer thinking.) In related news, it’s nice that the game lets you kill every NPC on the map; in most games those friendly folks would have been immune to friendly fire. More options are nice, especially when they’re violent.
Carrion got picked back up just long enough to convince me that I really don’t want to play any more Carrion. The first room I came back to had three or four shield guys, and the room after that got me lost, and the room after that had an enemy I don’t remember how to fight, if I ever even fought one before. The room after that will not be seen.
Brotato just kind of keeps going, doesn’t it. I cleared a bad character (Ranger) on the absurd difficulty (Nightmare) a while back, and now have fallen into a trap of trying to clear another one. Artificer is not very good; they’ve got, like, three different gimmicks that barely interact with each other, and in return they’ve got both crippled offense and crippled defense. I should just drop the character, but the old mind juice keeps sloshing up against it, so here we are, wasting yet more time pushing this bad character through this very bad difficulty setting. It will definitely be worth it this time, you’ll see.
4TheWords continues, slowly. Completed another main quest location, so only… minimum four left, maybe five or six, each with their own dozen-plus quest chains I’m sure. Plus a ton of optional locations locked behind sidequests that look annoying to complete. Got too many active stories going now, almost none of them near any kind of ending, all knocking the others out of the way, which means instead of working on any of them I usually just play Brotato. Disappointing not just to me, but also to those who know me.
You can kill almost everybody. Allegedly the Tiefling kids are unkillable (I say allegedly because murdering children isn’t something that I am willing to try to do, even when they are fake video game children).
There was some fuss about this during early access, because you can definitely kill the goblin children, and you actually have to go out of your way to avoid it when you rescue Halsin. I suppose you can knock them out, but beating children unconscious doesn’t appeal to me much either.
Oh right, the goblin children. I forgot to mention them back when they came up; I turned on Non-Lethal Attacks to avoid killing the children in that fight, and that’s how I found out the non-lethal toggle only applies to melee. I wanted to use the blunt side of the arrow.
You can also put the explosives down on the ground, which causes all the NPCs to back away to a safe distance, and THEN blow up the wall…
Its definitely possible to blow up the wall without killing the gnomes, but it isn’t exactly obvious at first. I’m pretty sure I chucked a grenade at them the first time I tried it too.
Palworld took the main chunk of my playtime. We’re on the flying islands now and I’m close to level cap, while my equipment is falling behind. My Problem is more, that my Pals one-shot everything, so I miss the opportunity to catch things.
Else: Yu Gi Oh! Duel Links and Master Duel. I have a working Spright-deck in Duel Links now. Working but far from overpowered. Unchained is more of a thread than this. The small field size and missing of Elf hinders Spright more than I expected.
The new support for Fur Hire in Master Duel makes that deck a good rogue option. Fur Hires were one of my favorites before, but far from competitive viable. Too much dependency on normal summoning and cards in hand. The new support mitigated that issue. They still do hardly compete with Kashtira or Snake Eyes, but your average Albaz or Blue Eyes deck can be beaten.
Analog: A game of Earth with the expansions Abundance and Animal Kingdom – I won, barely. Also Bomb Busters: five losses and one victory in mission 36, and two new smaller games I don’t remember the names of.
Finished The Message from Deep Space. I very much enjoyed the game but I wish the hint system was a bit better. You need to get a correct answer to progress, and particularly towards the end things get ambiguous and tough. I found myself stuck several times and didn’t get any Ideas (that’s the hint system) at all. Ended up looking some stuff up. Ah, well, the concept is incredible and often I felt very smart. Turns out there’s a lot more clarity in arithmetic and physics and other science than there is in, say, morality. Still felt really good to build up from one number to being able to understand stories.
Started Star Wars: Zero Company. It’s an Xcom type thing, but Star Wars. Pretty fun so far. I appreciate that it gives you small choices between missions, where you can spend a resource on Encounters to get various rewards. It has a permadeath system but it’s pretty friendly, someone has to get to 0 hp 3 times to die forever and you can heal them between missions (but being injured reduces stats and healing actually gets pretty pricy if you do it a lot).
The game has free respecs, which is something I appreciate in general, but I actually think it goes too far. Not only can you take back points you’ve put into upgrades, you can also switch most characters’ class at will, and for the rando recruits (as opposed to the real named people) you can switch their special talent whenever you want too. It means the only character differentiation for randos is the buffs you get from friendship – surprisingly, you can’t respec those choices.
I jumped in on the highest difficulty on the theory that it would either stomp me (Xcom would!) or not. So far it’s not, though things aren’t trivial at least. I have noticed some AI bugs when enemies are active and really far from your party – some enemies move backwards, but not in a strategic way like they’re taking defensive positions. On one mission 3 melee enemies just kind of stood in one place for a while.
I love that you can have an astromech droid on your team (an R2D2 type). And they’re incredible. My strongest soldier is a trash can who can continuously throw grenades until everyone I don’t like dies. Knockback grenades can instakill enemies on some maps, it’s awesome. I appreciate that all of the limits on stuff are per combat, so if you have multiple fights on one map stuff refreshes between.
I do have some issues with the game. The leveling system lets you upgrade your guys’ abilities but the upgrades are the blandest possible option, +number to damage or whatever each levelup and maybe an extra benefit at maximum. Since I’m specifically comparing this to Xcom it feels bad since ranking up a soldier in that game could be absolutely transformative. I guess you could look at it from the perspective that characters here start with nearly as many abilities as Xcom soldiers ended with. Some people in reviews have mentioned perf issues with the game, but luckily I haven’t run into that.
Also this week I remembered Hardspace: Shipbreaker exists so I’m playing it again. I love that game. Taking spaceships apart is just… so satisfying.
For Binding of Isaac, generally you should know if you’re making progress. The game tells you when you unlock new stuff. There are a ton of characters and bosses and areas to do, the game is huge at this point, and some characters are much stronger than others. And because the items can have such huge impact you’re likely to get a run where you’re basically unstoppable every so often.
The one thing I’d wish about Hardspace: Shipbreaker would be an option to choose an easier ship even with lots of progress. The last time I tried to get back into it I got completely overwhelmed by “what is even going here”, but did not want to leave all the progress behind to start a new save.
I didn’t play Knights of the Old Republic this week, but did get in another session of Suikoden V, advancing the story. Again, I’m quite impressed with what they did there, as this sequence as finally resolving the issue of Lordlake which had been simmering from the beginning. And Lordlake was screwed over by EVERYONE, with the Barrows nobles starting things off and then taking advantage of the unrest to steal the Dawn Rune, the Queen bearing the Sun Rune and devastating it, and the Godwins then building a dam to take away all the water so that they were left without any clean water to drink and so couldn’t even recover. In this sequence, two other important things happen. First, we are told that the dam was built by the sentient, anthropomorphic beavers — hey, it’s a JRPG! — and while the resident of Lordlake who joins you hates them for doing that it was revealed that they were threatened by the Godwins into doing that, which has contributed to their fear and distrust of all humans. And the method for destroying the dam involves draining a bit of a lake which reveals some ancient ruins that become your headquarters, which is always an important part of a Suikoden game. And the sequence of events that lead to you destroying the dam while not killing the conscripted soldiers is cool, too.
Which leads to the war battle sequence. In general, Suikoden games always have that sort of mechanism, where you don’t just take a party into dungeons but instead need to fight an actual battle. In this game, you get various types of units and they face off against the enemy in a rock-paper-scissors sort of thing, with one type beating another type but that type being beat by another and that type being beaten by the first one. This one was a sea battle — there are land battles as well — and the walkthrough talked a lot about how it would get a bit chaotic and you needed to plan for that and so on and so forth. But I discovered early on that the ships were basically holding station and not attacking — which doesn’t usually happen — and so what I could do is take the ship that would have the advantage against a specific ship and move it JUST far enough to get that one to come after it, draw it away a bit, attack it, and then order mine back to station. The attacked ship would still come after that ship, but the others wouldn’t move. So if I was careful, I could draw one out at a time and sink it, and if I happened to draw another one having the ships of the other type there allowed me to use that one to go after it. This was the most fun that I had with a war battle in the game so far. Sure, it ultimately was really easy and I was never under any real threat, but somehow it felt like I EARNED that one for being cautious and a bit tactical. The other battles were indeed more chaotic, which is definitely less fun.
I’m up to level 8 in Wrath of the Righteous, just got the second mythic point. And after having spent a bunch of time considering and then doing a rebuild of my main, I am of course going to have to do it all over again. Because it turns out the mounted combat in this game is *even more* broken then I’d noticed before: not only do you get to move and full attack, but *so does your mount*. If you’re not mounted they only get to move and single, but put together you *both* get moving zig-zag full attack. And even though my wolf does not yet have the “Multiattack” ability which was delayed to 9th and in 3.5 is what gives them a second attack, apparently they don’t need it ‘case at BAB 6 they’re now making iterative attacks. The natural weapon system in this game, it’s not complicated guys how did you even end up with this? Griffon Man’s various attack modes make zero sense, everything’s out of order, etc.
The only drawback is that if you’re mounted and say cast a spell then your mount won’t attack, so I will never cast any low-level curseish backup spells. Which means I shouldn’t have bothered learning them and certainly shouldn’t have spent any feats on preparing for SR when the SR is so ludicrously huge even the specialists can have 50% fail rate and I’ve got maybe two spells I might have cast later which will be worse than double murder wolf anyway. I’m also not really enjoying persist- with extend and proper pausing you don’t really need more than one cast for a big map, you’ve gotta re-cast everything every day anyway, and the world map movement is so slow I’m almost never visiting two spots in one day to take advantage of a 24 hour spell. It’s just not worth. I’m seeing a window here for quickened super skeletons via Sorcerous Reflexes and Ascendant Summons, the latter of which I’ll need if I want to test anything that’s *not* a skeleton fairly.
I will say, as aggravating as it is that they give you a crippled (illusionist) wizard, apparently Phantasmal Killer is the only insta-kill spell that wasn’t nerfed into the ground. It’s matched only by Dismissal, which a poster says does in fact just kill the target and leave a lootable body. Meanwhile Slay Living is actually “Deal an extra 9d6 on failed save Living”, and Wail of the Banshee is just offensive. Still, I wasn’t going to be casting any of those anyway. And I don’t like taking the wizard because the most effective use is just 7 slots full of Haste, which would be even more is she had Extend Spell. Oh jeeze, don’t get me started on how this game *requires* you to have metamagic to cast spells using a higher level slot. Better hope there’s a useful spell for your build at every single level and the number of casts you need happens to exactly match the number of slots, because there shall be no mixing! I’d forgot what I learned in Kingmaker, that Extend Spell is a mandatory feat for *every* spellcaster just for slot level fixing.
Camellia’s ridiculous build is finally on line, and works, for the most part, as long as one is willing and remembers to micro all her little extra clicks that need to be set up first. Though the big event battle specifically kept alternating enemy types so her bane was wrong half the time. Her dialogue is also getting more obviously unhinged, so I guess we’ll just have to see where that goes.
Feel like I’m gonna have to take control of/rebuild more builds, ’cause these picks are starting to get ridiculous. I suppose Mythic Deadly Aim might be worth more (all of 2) damage immediately vs Mythic Weapon Specialization ( 1), but why are you taking either when there’s one that could give your arrows splash damage, Lann? You just failed an SR roll against a boss Ember, why are you taking 1 cl for Evocation when what you clearly need is Mythic Spell Penetration? (well trading 1’s worth for 1d6 damage). Meanwhile I’ve just given Seelah 1d6 10 damage on every hit, according to the text (which is insane). But the game’s builds have also loaded up the spontaneous casters with some spells I might have ignored: apparently “Unbreakable Heart” is super important because this game doesn’t tag [compulsions] the same way as tabletop and doesn’t have a super long duration Magic Circle Against Alignment anyway, so something to undo Confusion and other stuff is important. And I spent that last boss fight standing around doing nothing after a bad roll vs Hold Person ’cause I didn’t bother putting Freedom of Movement on even though Ember had it.
Regarding Regill from last week: yeah, I’m also finding him pretty respectable, making it somewhat amusing how Seelah just absolutely goes off every time she sees him. The trick is of course that I know I’m the protagonist, and thus having him under my command means I can almost certainly stop him doing anything I don’t like. But then, in this game *everyone else* knows you’re the protagonist too. Meeting him back at camp, the conversation about how now he also has some mythic powers, I gladly took the “Evil” point to say “yeah and remember who gave them to you.” To which he replied yes yes and if you disappoint me I’ll turn on you, etc, or something like that. I suppose the hardest thing to square is that he’s Evil, which is most easily defined as sacrificing others for self. But what does he gain? I guess the satisfaction really, since he wants to crush the demons even if the methods required hurt other people.
I’ve not been impressed with what I’ve seen of the Hellknights in the crusade battles, but then, I only got 7 mans worth. Even so, when the number of unit types in an army is capped, and I have huge piles of the basic unit types, it makes no sense to spend a ton of money trying to catch up the numbers on expensive cavalry just for them to get shot. And their Smite Chaos doesn’t even work, they have no Cha bonus! Presumably after I take Drezen and actually start the base-building stuff things will get more interesting on that front. I did find it appropriate that when I tried fighting the army with the caster general, it did in fact just kept casting direct damage every single turn exactly the way I can.
One thing I remember about mounted combat in the Pathfinder games was that eventually, the animation can’t keep up with the sheer number of attacks. Seelah just trots up to the enemy, her arms blur, and they fall over dead as a deluge of numbers rise from their body. And according to the logs, they actually died because her horse bit them.
Fun thing about Regill is that a lot of it hinges on what you think ‘evil’ means. He’d absolutely do something monstrous like sacrifice an innocent baby for victory – which I’d call evil – without hesitation, but because it’s not him personally gaining from the sacrifice, that doesn’t fit?
Goes to show that the famous alignment chart is there as a guideline more than anything else. To me, at least.
That does remind me, though, that I actually quit a play through of WOTR due to the game’s expectations of what my Mythic Path ‘should’ do. I was going for the Pure Aeon path and had essentially locked myself into an escalating series of
of Lawful Stupid decisions, so I just decided ‘nope, the Crusade failed because the commander had become a blithering idiot’ and restarted.
It’s tricky to define Evil in a useful way when the background is ‘we’re fighting against demons who will take over and torture and kill the world’. If Regill was more concerned about gaining honour and prestige than being pragmatic about winning the war it’d be easier to call him Evil. But yeah, alignment systems are janky and that’s why Fallout New Vegas is better than Fallout 3.
Mounts are good for casters too. You can use metamagic with a spontaneous caster, which is usually a full round action, and then still move if you are on a mount. Mounts also act like ablative armor. Your squishies can survive a round or two of focus mounted even on unfair.