T w e n t y S i d e d
In D&D, there is no act more reckless and fraught with danger than that of outsmarting the DM.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings LXXXIII: Ladder Game”
DM of the Rings LXXXIII: Ladder Game
Wednesday Action Log 8-7-24
This week I’m playing Dome Keeper: a little Roguelike with mining and defending your dome from shadow creatures. I’m having fun with the game and its simple but engaging gameplay loop. There isn’t a lot of variety imposed by the game between runs, it mostly comes from what dome and gadget you decide to bring with you. There are also assignments you can do, but they mostly consist of resources being rarer but rocks are easier to break or delivering 200 iron in 30 minutes. So far my favorite gadgets have been the Droneyard and the Drilling Rig but I should probably experiment with a few more different gadgets than I have been.
I’m also still playing Helldivers 2 I don’t have a lot to say. It’s a good game and it’s just updated and the new Terminid enemy is mean to me, and I don’t appreciate being crushed by it.
So what are you guys doing?
Step By Step
Gonna be a bit “train-of-thought” today. OK. *More* train-of-thought than usual. At least as I start writing. I’m still on the Linux project. I have learned how to do many things, and even recently learned that I have been largely wasting my time getting games to run on my PC. The laptop is still doing great…it just gets better and better. I have completed converting all of my external drives to EXT4 from NTFS, with all but 2.5 TB of files transferred back to their customary locations. Part of that involved starting a PC build to accommodate the upgraded hardware that is the only way to solve the gaming problem. And as I write I am testing once more an install of Star Wars: The Old Republic on my laptop, as I have been unable to find a known, definitive reason to explain why it hasn’t worked yet. Other than it’s an old game with a clunky design, and my laptop is based on one of the *least* supported Ryzen integrated architectures.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Step By Step”
DM of the Rings Remastered LXXXII: Have Fireball, Will Travel
Wizards: Work smarter, not harder.
Fighters: Not smarter, hit harder.
Rogues: Lie smarter, steal hardware.
Bards: Sing harder, get- ow! oh geeze! Fine, I’ll stop singing! Quit hitting me already!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “DM of the Rings Remastered LXXXII: Have Fireball, Will Travel”
Wednesday Action Log 7-31-24
This week I think I’m finally running out of steam with Rimworld. At this point I’m just selling Flake and collecting Vanometric power cells without any goals in mind.
On the other hand I did end up getting Helldivers 2. The over the top theming is fun and the game seems to be surprisingly well optimized, I also didn’t expect to like the Stratagem system but having a quick puzzle in the midst of combat really adds to the tension.
Anyway, so what are you guys doing this week.
Interesting Times
Over the past week, I uninstalled World of Warcraft from my laptop, as I had proven everything I needed to regarding running WoW on Linux. I then spent the entire rest of the week trying to get Star Wars: The Old Republic running without ever achieving final success. SWTOR seems to be one of those things that either works immediately without problems or with very minor launch instruction additions…or it doesn’t work at all. I have increasingly run into things that “just work fine” on Linux until I try them, when I discover that the truth is “just works fine” comes with a ****load of caveats and assumptions. And Linux community-sourced support can literally tell you ANYTHING you would ever want to know about every possible problem you might ever have; at the expense of not ever being able to address the literal question you asked in a way that frames a useful experience going forward. I liken it to asking “how do I make a souffle?” and everyone answering “well, first I need you to go learn French or you won’t actually understand what’s going on or the instructions I would give you” or, unfortunately, the standard “why would you want to do THAT?”. Also, every discussion of a support issue WILL DEVOLVE into two separate arguments between two people trying to “help” about whether either is making the correct assumptions before attempting to provide and answer. Regardless, I erased my Windows installation and installed Linux on my main computer, this computer, last night.
Oh, and World of Warcraft released the newest expansion and broke some major game mechanics for two days.
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Interesting Times”
DM of the Rings Remastered LXXXI: Let’s Get Rolling
From The Archives:
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
The Disappointment Engine
No Man's Sky is a game seemingly engineered to create a cycle of anticipation and disappointment.
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
The Game That Ruined Me
Be careful what you learn with your muscle-memory, because it will be very hard to un-learn it.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
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.
id Software Coding Style
When the source code for Doom 3 was released, we got a look at some of the style conventions used by the developers. Here I analyze this style and explain what it all means.
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
The Dumbest Cutscene
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.