T w e n t y S i d e d
This week I played a few different games.
I finished my skyblock Terraria world. After it got into hardmode most of the difficulty of it being a skyblock disappears, you can get wings, and you’ll probably already have a few mob farms set up so it’s just kill a boss, farm some loot, kill a boss, farm some loot.
I also bought a small game called Scritchy Scratchy. It’s a short idle game about scratching scratch cards, it was $7 and I got a few hours of fun out of it.
I also learned that Rimworld has a multiplayer mod that just works with minimal hassle. I don’t know how well it works on the newest version, but it’s not given any trouble in version 1.5 so far.
Anyway, How’s everyone else doing?
Punishing The Internet for Sharing
Why make millions on your video game when you could be making HUNDREDS on frivolous copyright claims?
The Best of 2018
I called 2018 "The Year of Good News". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
Skyrim Thieves Guild
The Thieves Guild quest in Skyrim is a vortex of disjointed plot-holes, contrivances, and nonsense.
Dead Island
A stream-of-gameplay review of Dead Island. This game is a cavalcade of bugs and bad design choices.
Twelve Years
Even allegedly smart people can make life-changing blunders that seem very, very obvious in retrospect.
It’s been pretty busy here, so after finished the first two Monument Valley games I haven’t really done much gaming at all. In fact, aside from the NYT Crossword and related time-fillers, all the gaming as gaming that I’ve done is a few solo rounds of Battle for Wesnoth.
It’s actually fine. It feels a little weird to not at least have one or two longer game projects ongoing, and there’s certainly plenty of stuff that I could start doing when I have the time, but for now… it’s actually fine. Nothing’s really grabbed my imagination and demanded that I play it, the way Terraria or the Civ games, etc. have done at times. I guess we’ll see how this current mood runs its course… maybe it’ll last until the next big “must play” game goes on sale, or an especially appealing update/DLC drops for something that I’ve played a bunch in the past.
Mostly I played Watch Dogs: Legion. Spoken dialog in this no-main-protagonist-game is really, really bad and that 1984-distopia is not believable in a major European city. But the gameplay is fun. And in gameplay a main protagonist exists: The Spider Bot. In a stealth run almost everything is done by Spider Bot, while the deadsec-agent stands outside staring at his/her phone.
Also playing Palworld without much progress in recent times. The Obon boss still reigns supreme and one biome is still open for exploration. But we found and completed the Terraria-colab-dungeon.
And Master Duel playing Dragonmaids and RikkAromage. Not very successful, but they are fun decks to play. Two games of the digital version of Canvas. Lost one, won one. Not a bad version and Steam Remote Play is available.
The analog play contained Witchbound and ito. Witchbound is more or less a point-and-click-adventure in paper form and ito is a party game about ordering your example to a topic to the examples of the other players. It induces a lot of laughter around the table, when imagining the extreme examples to certain topics.
More Abiotic Factor. I figured out fishing (you can fish in any water at all, basically) and cooking (whenever you put anything on a frying pan, it will give you an error message, which is a lie). There is a lot to do in this game. The containment units are where the game goes really SCP – there’s a painting that may spread to or transfer to other nearby art, a doorway that wipes your memories if you step through it, and a gun that is, to all appearances, totally ordinary, but maybe it wasn’t always that way. There’s also an object that they sent into space where they know it will be a big problem in 50000 years, but hey, that’s not a problem for today.
I’ve mostly settled on a combat strategy of “run at enemy with big stick”. It works really well, mostly, charge power attacks with heavy weapons do bonkers damage. Anything that uses ammunition is a little awkward because it just eats up so many resources. That’s definitely a side of the game that I’m less interested in, just like in Subnautica – finding something new and being able to craft new stuff is cool. Worrying about running out of metal scrap or whatever other early game resource is not. Luckily I can mostly avoid dealing with that.
I do not like the weather effect that just makes everything incredibly dark. It’s much worse than when the power goes out at night. Possibly the night vision goggles deal with it but playing the game in all green tones is also not my cup of tea.
Game continues to be cool, and it’s handy every time I get a new QoL feature. I wish vehicles were more practical, their turn radius has been pretty bad and the security carts don’t have storage on them.
Still playing Suikoden III. I hit the part that I had forgotten about which is after you finally get everyone their True Runes … they get taken away from you. That was a bit annoying, especially since my parties were able to mop the floor with the antagonists only to lose the True Runes anyway. But that each of those chapters is a chapter that puts together the old teams again to reflect the earlier chapters is nice. I found myself thinking that I do indeed really like this game, annoyance over the story mandated loss of the True Runes aside.
Also got in another play of Knights of the Old Republic. For blog-related reasons, I’m playing it in nice, bite-sized increments, and so this time explored the Lower City and got the quest to get the swoop engine. Next session I’ll probably get the swoop engine and maybe run the race. I went with a high dexterity character with low strength and constitution, and so far that’s working fairly well for me. I might have wanted to make intelligence a little higher to get more skill points, but otherwise things are okay.
Skill points are fairly useless in Kotor 1, and you need to boost int to 14 to get any bonus points. Its mostly not worth it.
Put a point into persuasion every level, and let your companions cover the rest.
That being said, repair *IS* kind of nice for one of the companion quests, and that has to be MC repair. I don’t know if I should worry about spoiling a 25 year old game, but I’ll leave it at that.
Sailed through the 5th level of Cursed Words, satisfying – a playing cards level, but synergised with the chess pieces. Wonder what’s next.
Been a couple weeks, I still exist. I’m probably 1-2 sessions from finishing BG3, about to cross the point of no return (very explicitly flagged by the game), but I had a bad week and then the water heater started leaking and I had another bad week. I’ve poked around in the modding tools and uh oh, I can actually use these, welp.
Nothing but Brotato, really.
Disgaea 4 got booted up, long enough to affirm that I’ve forgotten how to play, which is not great when I’m trying to jump back into the Postgame storyline. So, I’m kind of left with the choice between restarting the game, and playing back to postgame, or trying to brute force the puzzle fight while relearning how puzzles even work. Or, just dropping it again. That third one’s winning at the moment.
Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass finally started moving again; we’re out of the last linear level and into the sky with the airship. Fought the upgraded fish monsters; turns out on Hard Mode, they get an ability that lets them reflect the one type of damage they don’t naturally reflect. So the Physical-Immune guy can just, reflect magic whenever it wants, and the Magic-Immune guy can counterattack physical. On the one hand, it certainly helps distinguish them from the base versions, which I thought was the biggest problem with them in the normal game. On the other, they’re just randomly fully invincible now, and you only find out when you swing at them and take your own damage. (It’s honestly a toss-up which version’s worse; I didn’t like this dungeon to begin with.)
I also forgot how quickly the special form is available. That feels like it should have been locked behind another dungeon. But, it’s not, and I have it now, and that’s largely the end of form shifting.
…do we talk about TV? I watched Documental, the Japanese comedy show that’s the basis for all the various Last One Laughing [Country] shows. Except the Japanese version has no boundaries; jokes routinely involve comedians getting naked and handling either their own balls, or someone else’s. Multiple jokes involved someone peeing on the floor. One joke was a comedian giving another comedian a Brazilian wax, and then the waxer laughed halfway through, got eliminated, and an untrained guy had to step in and finish the waxing before it dried.