T w e n t y S i d e d
I got nothing this week.
I played a few rounds of Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, not anything new.
The only other thin I’ve had time for was working on my GED. I’ve gotten most of it done, I’m just working on reading literacy and writing.
Anyone else doing anything interesting?
A Star is Born
Remember the superhero MMO from 2009? Neither does anyone else. It was dumb. So dumb I was compelled to write this.
Silver Sable Sucks
This version of Silver Sable is poorly designed, horribly written, and placed in the game for all the wrong reasons.
Charging More for a Worse Product
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.
Do It Again, Stupid
One of the highest-rated games of all time has some of the least interesting gameplay.
Pixel City Dev Blog
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
More Star Wars: Zero Company. Still generally enjoying the game, still have some complaints. There was a mission that annoyed me (and caused my first reload) because it had an enemy who would counter all attacks by meleeing. “No problem”, I thought to myself, “I’ll attack from on top of a building”. Cue the enemy running up and attacking me on the building. Ok, next up I tried from the middle of the building. Still got hit with a melee attack. Ok, time to be clever, I’ll overwatch them, it’s really powerful against melee enemies in this game. Nope, didn’t even go off. Anyway, I got past that and otherwise it’s been fine.
Anakin is in the game, which is actually pretty reasonable given the time it’s in and what you’re doing. I could have done with him complimenting the main character OC do not steal a bit less. Ah well, he was very amusing in gameplay. This isn’t a game that usually hits 3 digits of damage.
The game gave me a really massive powerup by letting people have secondary classes. Feels good.
While I do enjoy the operations that you can do between real missions, I wish that more of them explained their rewards. Like, I’m not actually making a strategic decision when I can spend 50 intel on operation A and get [unknown reward] or 75 intel on operation B and get [unknown reward].
I also played through Delete. If you’ve ever played minesweeper and thought it could be a good game if it just didn’t suck, this is the game for you. Same basic rules as minesweeper but it takes it into the third dimension (so you’re selecting faces as mine or not and adjacencies can get funky, luckily if you click on a numbered space it tells you what faces it’s measuring), the levels are fixed (so you’re never stuck in a 50/50 with no way of telling which is correct), and there are a few other twists like, for example, being able to twist part of the level. The downside of the fixed levels is the game is ~2 hours long but it’s also very cheap so whatever.
In Palworld we tried to defeat the shrine boss and got squashed. I’m now doing side missions until the next attempt.
In Scrap Mechanic I could cheese the second trashbot battle the same way, I could cheese the first. All you need is a few seats to get back to the elevator and you can ignore all the bullet hell stuff. Then I tried to build a flyer, but I’m missing a few component kits to level up the thrusters to level 5.
Also starting Forza Horizon 5. It takes some time until you finally can run in a normal race. “I have an hour. Let’s try a few rounds” wasn’t going to happen. I hate the wheelspin progression system. All you get for being good at racing is random bullshit faster. So racing and winning is almost unnecessary in this racing game. The rewards being randomized or gifted for no particular reason robs the player all agency progressioning.
At leas the driving feels good and the map is beautiful to look at.
Baldur’s Gate 3 continues, very, very slowly. I think all I did this week was invade the house of a small child, embarrass him at hide and seek, and then kill his dog. (He seems to have disappeared afterward. Maybe I didn’t embarrass him at hide and seek after all.) We also let a fairy out of a lamp, and then reloaded and didn’t let a fairy out of a lamp. But that means I’m in the same place I was last week, with a fairy in a lamp.
Brotato may have finally hit a tipping point; I slammed my face against Artificer long enough to knock down Nightmare, and then quickly followed it with a Nightmare Ranger victory, meaning all the characters I wanted Nightmare clears with now have Nightmare clears. I’ve faced Abyss Wave 17 enough times to be fully convinced it’s deeply unfair garbage, and have decided that level is bad enough by itself to never play on Nightmare again. So back to happy and healthy Level 5 runs with Doctor.
Replayed Thronebreaker. Damn I love that game. Possibly my favorite of the Witcher titles.
DiRT Rally 2.0 dailies (the problem I had with winnings not getting paid out has been fixed), other than that I’ve been flip-flopping back and forth between Nioh 2 (first Nioh game I’ve played, a bit easier than Dark Souls but also somewhat more complicated), which really makes me work to get the rust off, and Dragon’s Dogma 2, which does various things differently than DD1 but by and large it’s an improvement (no more having to plan out your build before you even start if you want to get strong enough to beat the superboss, but unfortunately no more Double Vault); and I really love DD1, so I’m really loving DD2.
I didn’t get the time to play anything this week. I did manage to do a bit of setup for an Arkham Horror Second Edition Board Game PBF that I’m running, and a Battlestar Galactica Board Game PBF that I’m in is building towards a conclusion (in that one, I played a Cylon Leader but at this point I have no possible way to meet my objectives, so I decided to just help the sole Cylon win, since that’s what most of my motives are about anyway. It’s pretty tight.)