T w e n t y S i d e d
I apparently forgot what day it was and am now writing this at 1AM, whoops.
I just had picked up Vampire Crawlers, a few hours ago. I’ve only played enough to stumble into crude strategy. so as a result, I’m more of a Vampire Fumbler than a Vampire Crawler.
How’re you guys doing?
Bethesda’s Launcher is Everything You Expect
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
Diablo III Retrospective
We were so upset by the server problems and real money auction that we overlooked just how terrible everything else is.
Overused Words in Game Titles
I scoured the Steam database to figure out what words were the most commonly used in game titles.
Fable II
The plot of this game isn't just dumb, it's actively hostile to the player. This game hates you and thinks you are stupid.
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.
Finished Well Dweller. Overall it was a good metroidvania. I really do like the creepy fairytale aesthetic. One issue I will mention is the difficulty curve of the game, which very much trends downward. I think the main culprit is the upgrade system – in games like Hollow Knight or Nine Sols you get very few slots for trinkets (or whatever the game calls them). In Well Dweller, they’re sold from the store in effectively infinite quantity for very cheap. I feel like if you want to preserve the difficulty of the game, maybe avoid buying those, you also find plenty when exploring. There are 40 trinkets in the game and you can equip all of them at once.
I played some Bloons TD 6. Been a while since I’ve played a tower defense and it has a lot to recommend it – tons of monkeys (towers) with varied upgrades, so very many maps, etc. That being said, it has one huge thing against it – it’s a mobile game and not subtle about it. There are like 20 buttons on the main screen. In a ton of places where the game has numbers, it has s next to those numbers so you can go to the store and pay real money for more. It’s possible to ignore it but it’s just really annoying. That being said, I think the stuff I actually care about isn’t gated behind it. Like, each monkey type has XP it earns globally (and a way to spend cash to skip it), but maxing them out seems very practical just playing the game, it feels like progression rather than a slog. There are a few tower types that are locked but it’s 6ish out of like 40. And there’s a ton of heroes, I guess, but you only take one of those into each map anyway.
I finished the story of Scrap Mechanic and went for the missing challenge levels to immediately hit a wall. An unreasonably tightly timed shooting range in challenge 43 stopped me dead in my tracks. All methods – like editing the level to give me more time or even disconnect the spud guns at the end failed.
In Palworld we defeated the huge whale and entered the world tree.
Additionally I was on an educational journey last week – all about economics and laws surrounding economics plus concerts on the weekends prior and after. Sooo: not much playtime. But I can recommend Dresden, Germany for a visit, especially Neustadt (“Newtown”) if you like the Kiez-Life. (Similar in America to New Orleans prior Cathrina life)