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What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?
What have you been playing lately? Discussion about video games and board games are both welcome. Please don't just make a list of titles, give some thoughts about the game(s) as well.
Played the Riven Remake. It was very good. Definitely had the same vibes as the original. I heard some puzzles had some changes, and while I don't remember exactly the original puzzles, I do remember the final fire marble puzzle being so confoundingly impossible to understand I never could get it. But it made sense in the remake so I think that was updated and it's so much better now.
There's a lot I don't remember from this game, or maybe it was added in. I don't remember the starry expanse or the spinning platform that you can travel between domes with.
All in all I enjoyed it a lot, and I'm so glad Riven finally got an update. Myst has had like 5 updates and remasters, but Riven never got anything until now.
I hope they continue and do the other Myst games as well, as I never got far in Exile and never touched Revelation or End of Ages and would like to play them, but I feel they're probably too dated at this point to really enjoy, especially after being spoiled with the Myst and Riven remakes
As someone who absolutely loves modern puzzle games that I understand owe a lot to Myst/Riven (The Witness, Outer Wilds, etc), but found Myst to be painful to play due to puzzles feeling overly obscure or arcane — would I enjoy Riven? I've been on the fence about it and I'm curious if it holds up any better.
Riven is the better game by a large margin.
Edit:
Now that i've got a moment, I'd say Riven isn't really obscure, especially in comparison to Myst. I beat the game with my dad as a kid and no guides, and went back many years later and beat it solo and found almost all of it to make sense.
There's one or two little "gotcha" switches I can think of as hardly elegant and mostly just "hey did you randomly click here" but the rest of the puzzles really are quite well explained once you figure out what they're trying to tell you.
I would say Riven is in the same vein of obscure puzzles. Its kinda how Cyan designs their games. I've never been able to beat any of their games without a guide of some kind. With the exception of the Myst remake just because I've played it so many times I know how to solve all the puzzles already.
If you found Myst painful, Riven will likely be the same for you, unfortunately, I'm sad to say.
I'd say it has to do with your tolerance to look up hints. The community is very willing to give gentle leads if you don't want the entire thing spoiled and you're on a right track, but you missed or misinterpreted something. I've had to look up two things so far, and I played the original - one I've chalked up to the shift from 2D to 3D and the lack of forced perspective making the existence of a button slightly unclear. One was a note that I misinterpreted because I thought a mark was aliasing.
In Myst the aesthetic is arcane and the puzzles are... puzzles. In Riven they go into its aesthetic and environment as the puzzles itself. It's a lot less esoteric in puzzle structure and a lot more like Outer Wilds where the people are the puzzles.
Thank god they changed the marble puzzle! I think everyone who played Riven knew the pain.
If that's been changed I would highly, highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in puzzles, it was one of the highlights of the Myst series.
The original marble puzzle was so nonsensical, to this day I do not understand how you're supposed to get the actual solution. I have always had to use a guide to get the solution and just put it in. But in the remake, it makes sense. It's logical. It works and you can figure it out. Vast vast improvement
I don’t quite get that. The original puzzle was all about figuring out the position of stuff on the maps.
They were all super easy except one which required some intuition/directional understanding and that was only super obnoxious because of how long it took to guess each time
The original puzzle made no sense. The one time I actually tried to figure it out with the right coordinates and everything, it was wrong and when I looked up the solution, the marbles were all in completely incorrect positions but that's the answer that worked.
In the remake the locations make sense with the information you gather over the course of the game.
Not sure what to say but I literally have the original cds and have played recently and it makes sense
I played Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes right as it came out in April, and rolled credits two months ago on 2024-05-06 after 50 hours of playtime.
(I enjoy collecting my thoughts after I play a game, but the thoughts kept coming with this one. Turning them into something semi-coherent felt daunting, so here we are 2 months later.)
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes is pitched as a spiritual successor to the Suikoden series; it's a turn-based JRPG with 100+ characters you can build a party with. I was really excited for it. I even played on Hard Mode, something I never do with JRPGs, hoping it'd force me to engage with the game's systems more. But I left pretty disappointed. Balancing, quality of life, and technical issues made the game's systems feel disjointed and the game itself feel unpolished. As if the developers had to forego the QA passes that would've fixed those issues.
What I didn't like
Combat: Turn-Based
The turn-based combat system could've been so good, but the balancing of many parts of combat left encounters feeling so one dimensional during most of the game's runtime. Inexplicably, the balancing majorly shifts as your near the endgame and gives you a glimpse of the depth battles could've had the entire time.
Attacks generally do similar damage regardless of cost, removing any interesting decision-making around choosing an attack. With the exception of your basic attack, using a damaging skill will either cost Skill Points (SP) or Magic Points (MP). Your MP is more valuable than SP, since SP regenerates during battles. This is a framework common to many JRPGs that gives you space to consider the value of "spending" more to use an attack. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes collapses that decision space by preventing damage from scaling consistently with attack cost. Some character's basic attack is the strongest attack they have, making "spam your free basic attack" an optimal strategy for many combat encounters.
That choice-limiting design is exacerbated by the game effectively locking you out of offensive magic. MP doesn't recover naturally, and magic costs an absurd amount of MP. The singular MP recovery item I ever saw for sale recovers just enough MP to use the weakest spells in the game. This keeps offensive magic from being a useful tool since your other options are just as useful but lack the high cost.
Non-damaging skills are a mixed bag. Healing and Buffs can be very impactful, but their MP cost makes them too expensive to use outside boss battles. "Secondary skill effects" like counters or status effects would activate so infrequently that I initially thought my game was broken.
Put these issues together and you're left with combat encounters that lack depth and wrestle away the self-expression I find satisfying in JRPG battle systems. You can get through every random encounter in the game by turning on auto-battle mode, and letting the AI basic attack every enemy to death one at a time. Even on Hard Mode. Hell, you can get through some of the boss battles this way too.
By far the weirdest part of this is how the game's balancing gets turned on it's head as you get closer to rolling credits:
But that only affects the gameplay near the end, and going into the endgame. And it certainly doesn't redeem how lackluster it felt during the 50 hours I played of the main story.
Combat: Duels and War Battles
Outside the traditional turn based combat, there are two other forms of combat: Duels and War Battles
Duels are basically interactive cutscenes where you fight in a 1-on-1 battle. The presentation is off the charts, with the action sequences approaching the best experiences this game has to offer. The interactivity is a sort of rock-paper-scissors where you pick the correct option to move the scene forwards. Except... there's nothing obvious that points you to the correct choice. Which reduces duels to a blind search through the menu of choices until the scene moves along. A search made more frustrating by how obtuse finding the correct option can be. You would think that the "right" option in a duel would be the one that helps you win. But that's not always the case: the first duel in the game can have you press through a scene where you get beat one-sidedly until you ultimately lose. The interactivity sabotages the impact of scene, which is a shame since duels are used in the most climactic parts of the story. I would have enjoyed duels so much more if the interactive components were limited to just be quick time events, or removed altogether.
War Battles are a large-scale battles, where you control an army with strategy-game like mechanics. They're the fruit borne from your efforts in the main story to recruit members for the fight against the enemy Empire's army. War Battles are supposed to be grand moments, but the execution was anything but. I didn't engage with any of the depth that there might've been in the gameplay. Strategy games aren't my thing and just having more units in a square than the enemy was a strategy that always worked ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. And the presentation is abysmal. The battles are long, with each turn playing out as an excruciatingly drawn-out scene of nondescript miniature soldiers doing the same looping attack animations over and over and over and over again. You can't even tell who is winning until eventually one side signals their retreat. Set to a droning cacophony of soldiers yelling, and a looping sound effect of arrows flying through the air.
(Not) Respecting your time
I deeply appreciate games that trim the fat off their gameplay, distilling the experience down to one that is still fun while respecting your time. That is not a description that applies to Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. There is so much cruft that eats your time without contributing to the fun, and make the game feel unpolished:
A bunch of skills and mechanics are poorly explained, or not explained at all.
The autosave system is terrible. It only makes a new save when you move to a new geographic locations in the world. At one point, I'd realized that 4 hours had passed since the game had made last made an auto save. While there are some well-placed manual save points, you can easily spend more than an hour between manual saves. A bad autosave system is worse than useless, since you may only realize that it's unreliable when you need it to recover unsaved progress. I had the game crash on me several times, but was lucky that they happened close to a manual save.
Your inventory starts out frustratingly small. You can only carry a fixed number of "stacks" of items, with some items (like late-game Healing Potions) forming stacks as small as one item. The game pushes you to leave your base carrying as little as possible since exploring quickly fills up your inventory. Unless you want to stop mid-journey and make the round trip to drop stuff off. This limitation never felt additive to any of the games systems; it just made the game more frustrating. Thankfully this eventually becomes a non-issue; you can double the size of your inventory right around when you unlock fast travel.
For a game where you can recruit over 100 characters, managing your party can be very clunky:
The random encounters are mostly a waste of time:
There is an item that reduces encounter rate, but equipping it didn't feel like it was doing much. I learned after beating the game that equipping two fully disables random encounters, but the game never tells you that.
You have to backtrack a lot, but you only unlock fast travel 10-15 hours into the game. Even worse, the game plays two cutscenes every time you fast travel; a character who transports you says one of three voices both when you leave and then arrive at your destination.
The default movement speed out in the world is dreadfully slow. For some reason, the game gives you a dedicated button for walking. You do eventually get access to a couple ways to move faster (one support character doubles your speed), which makes the game feel so much better.
Storytelling
The storytelling was pretty unremarkable. The plot is the standard anime plot where "an evil guy does evil things... but it's for the greater good!". The characters are very flat, never evolving beyond the caricatural first impression they make in their recruitment quest. Probably since the game can't afford to invest into the character development of 100+ characters.
Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes sometimes seems confused about what tone it's trying to convey in a scene. The game has a wide tonal range, covering depictions of horrible war crimes to a quest parodying Pokemon and Beyblade. And it's usually successful at managing the tone it wants to convey. But occasionally, an otherwise serious scene will have a infantile insert that feels so out of place it undermines the scene's impact.
The one that continues to stick with me was the reunion between former allies, an enemy and one of your party members. The enemy expresses their displeasure at the reacquaintance, calls them a traitor, all while sprinkling in some racism owing to the fact that your companion is non-human. The response from your party member is: "The hatred's mutual, farthead." .
There are a couple other moments that weren't as egregious as the farthead jeer (e.g. "Rub-a-dub-dub, don't be a flub!"). But curiously, these infantilisms seemed to disappear after the first 5-10 hours of the game.
Playing the prequel game, Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, adds disappointingly little to this game. Almost nothing that happens in the prequel is referenced in Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes. This despite the very direct relation between the main conflicts of both games, and the re-appearance of the entire main cast of the prequel in the second game. Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising ends with major loose threads that are never addressed in the second game (Iugo's "Secret Mission", Isha's limited lifespan) or are resolved with no explanation between both games (Garou's Daughter). You're probably better off just ignoring the prequel altogether.
What I Liked
Graphics, Character Collecting, Base Building
Despite the negatives, I enjoyed a couple parts of this game so much that it carried me all the way through credits.
This game is gorgeous, and its art direction is by far its greatest strength. Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes continues the recent trend of JRPGs with "HD-2D" graphics, where character art is sprite-based but everything else is 3D. I spent my entire playthrough slackjawed at how pretty I found every scene. I suspect the art is so strong because they were able to reuse and improve on much of the work they did for the prequel game.
Character Collecting is a constant stream of dopamine. Sure some of the recruitment quests are really annoying (Beigoma, Fishing RNG), but most are painless and take just a few minutes. The recruitment quests represent the bulk of the dialogue you hear from the recruitable characters, so I appreciated them as fun vignettes.
The base building is very simple: you pay for base upgrades with resources you gather while exploring. But that simplicity is great since the system acts as an extra reward when you return to your base after making progress in the story.
What's even better is how these feed into each other to form a positive feedback loop. Collecting characters places them around your base and unlocks some base upgrades. Upgrading the base puts some of those characters to work in shops, and can unlock characters more to recruit. The great art direction makes watching your base change and seeing new character designs a joy.
This was the second Kickstarter-funded JRPG in row that I've walked away from unsated, the first being Sea of Stars. On paper this was a game that I'd love, but the game ended up fighting me at every turn.
I do hope this game did well enough to warrant a sequel. There's a core here I want to love, so long as the rest of the game is given enough time to bake. In the mean time, I'm keen on playing the Suikoden Remaster that's supposed to come out soon™.
I pretty much agree with your post. This game has a solid core, it just needs more depth. The abilities for characters definitely lack variety and meaning. As you said, 90% of the time.. just spam basic attack is 100% viable. Abilities definitely feel lackluster, and most of the characters that have good AoE abilities hardly ever get to use them because the cost is too high. By the time a character has enough juice stored up to use those abilities basic encounters are pretty much over already so there's no point. I also played through it on hard, if that means anything to anyone reading this.
If they make a sequel and can add some depth to the combat, while cleaning up some of the other systems I think the sequel would be a banger.
Thanks so much for this writeup. I liked Suikoden a whole lot back in the day, although it had issues of its own (including the rock-scissors-paper gameplay during both duels and mass battles, as well as having only the one character who would allow you to run fast on the world map while in the party). I had my eye on Eiyuden because I would have really liked a spiritual successor which improved on its flaws, but it sounds like it only deepened them.
And now I'm off to read your Sea of Stars writeup, because that was another that looked really promising, but I have much less patience for JRPGs these days if they haven't learned from the [edit 8/2: oops, I forgot to finish this sentence. I think I meant to say something about learning from the decades of refinement in game dev since the beginning of JRPGs]. I passed on a previous "Chrono Trigger spiritual sequel" because of the mediocre reviews then, too. All of these games looked gorgeous and like they were built with love for the games they were based on, but it sounds like something still went wrong along the way.
Thank you for the kind words!
I write these comments mainly as a way for me to remember how playing a game made me feel, so they tend to overemphasize the things I care about. Gameplay and graphics are big for me, and I'll tolerate a meh story so long as it doesn't get in the way of my enjoyment of the former.
All that to say that I'd hate if my writeups are what stopped you from trying either game, especially if you come to JRPGs looking for something different from me. I know a lot of people are able to look past the elements of Sea of Stars and Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes that made me feel so negatively about them, and really enjoyed their experience.
If you happen to have Gamepass, I believe both titles are still on there.
Although it does sound like I value the storylines in these types of games more than you do, it's definitely not the only thing I value. If the combat is frustrating and feels worthless to invest in, I'm gonna lose interest real fast. And to be honest, it sounds like (both from what you wrote and from the people who agreed with you) that they flubbed the storytelling in both games too. I lose patience VERY fast with bland plots, dialogue that takes forever to say nothing, "jokes" that are nothing more than meta references and lampshading, and poor characterization.
I'm not against enjoying flawed but good games, but some flaws I wouldn't be able to look past. I've lost count of the number of JRPGs in particular I've started in recent years only to wince at the writing or to get bored and forget to even pick it back up. It's got me questioning whether I'll ever be able to enjoy the genre again, really. Which is a bit sad, but also something of a relief, because those games are an investment and I have much less to invest with these days. Given that there are plenty of other games that I do still enjoy very much, it's probably not a terrible loss. To be honest, I'm probably looking for reasons not to start up a JRPG even as I feel a pang over its lineage from a game I enjoyed 20-30 years ago.
I picked up Balatro on the Steam Summer Sale. I knew I'd enjoy it, and had been putting off getting it because I knew I'd get sucked in, and... yep! It's delightful. It's clear a lot of thought was put into the game's design, as everything seems very intentional and like there's some strategy that uses it. I'm still very bad at it, but have had some thrilling runs! However, with each new stake I unlock, I just realize how out of my depth I am, lol...
I got Luigi's Mansion 2 HD on Friday, and beat it today. One of my best pals is a fellow Luigi's Mansion nut, and I plan on giving her my cartridge next time I see her, so I had a bit of a time-crunch! I adored Luigi's Mansion 3, and Luigi's Mansion on Gamecube was a childhood favorite, with the 3DS remake being wonderful. When Dark Moon initially came out for 3DS, I dismissed it after hearing it was 'mission based' unlike the GC one, and now I really regret having done so. The game was charming and delightful, and the mission structure was done very well. Yes, it does have a bit too much hand-holding and not quite enough exploration... but, as its own game, it's really fun! And it still has a lot of the appeal that the original Luigi's Mansion for Gamecube had, with settings full of personality and whimsical, spooky atmosphere. I regret having not played it on the 3DS as a kid because I just know that the 3D effect would have been stunning with the environments, and it really seemed to use the 3DS features to its advantage. However, on the Switch, you get the HD! It's not as stunning a remake as Metroid Prime Remastered, and definitely doesn't compare to Luigi's Mansion 3 graphically, but it still holds up as a solid remaster.
It is quite interesting playing it last though, because I think I do appreciate it a little more in doing so. Luigi's Mansion 3 now seems very clearly to be a stylistic blend of 1 and 2. The 'floor' structure of 3 is a lot like the 'missions' of 2, but presents larger, more open rooms and objectives like 1. The bosses and gameplay variety, again, are a lot more like 2, but the unique personalities and characters of the bosses are more like 1. It really makes me appreciate 3 even more as well, as being a perfect blend of the appeal of 1 and 2. Maybe I'll have to replay 3 for Halloween this year!
Lastly, I've been playing Trails through Daybreak since that came out! I would have posted about it last week, but I was backpacking and decided to wait until this week. : ) It's a delight! I'm a huge fan of the Trails series, as I've posted about before, and have been greatly enjoying this one. It's another fantastic turn-based JRPG, as always, and with a protagonist that is quite refreshing after the Cold Steel arc! The plot is taking its time to get going, which I actually enjoy in this series because the worldbuilding and characters are so rich and alive, so it's nice to have time to get to know them and the new setting before stuff kicks into high gear. Seeing a returning character is always a delight - especially some that we haven't seen in forever! I'm a big fan of the "Law Gray Chaos" system and the more nuanced plotline so far. The greatest strength of Trails has always been in its writing, but I felt the Cold Steel arc, for as fun as it was, did often veer a little too much into 'mindless anime action' territory... which makes it a relief that, so far, Trails through Daybreak really feels like a return to the series more mature and nuanced roots.
For fans of JRPGs, I can't recommend Trails through Daybreak enough. While I love the whole series and would recommend them all, this really does feel like a great entry point so far! All the nods to previous games and returning characters, so far, aren't done in a way that requires prior knowledge, but in fact, could make a replay - or playthrough of the previous games - just more rewarding. I'd strongly encourage folks to at least check out the demo, which I hear is very generous, covering something like 10 hours of gameplay?
Everything past this point is for fellow Trails nuts, lol. Feel free to skip if you have no idea about the games.
Gameplay-wise, I LOVE the shard-skill system so far. I'm still getting used to it, but one of the things I sorely missed after the first two arcs was the way that elemental orbments on lines added up to unlock new arts. I totally understand *why* they removed it, because it WAS really restrictive for arts-based characters... so for them to bring back something that's a spiritual successor to the mechanic, but IMPROVED GREATLY, and which makes orbment lines feel REALLY significant now!? Ugh, it's fantastic! I'm still a little worried about how it might restrict certain elemental builds, BUT it ALSO seems like they've greatly shaken up the distribution of quartz across elements, so it seems truly viable for every element to have a variety of playstyles now, as opposed to the limited nature of elements in the first two Arcs.I'm not as sold on the 'holo cores' and 'arts plugins', unfortunately. While I liked the sound of them in pre-release materials, they do seem unnecessarily restrictive, which is a shame, and I really miss the abilities of Master Quartz, which were so fun to build-around. However, I DID acquire a 'Taurus' Quartz, and there's some new 'Ring' Quartz, which seem to be homages to some of those MQ abilities... so here's hoping that they keep incorporating build-around quartz like that, because THAT would be an improvement!
In the last thread I mentioned that I finished Cyberpunk and was looking for something completely different. A smaller game with maybe a more unique gameplay and/or story.
Meanwhile I finished Stray. A beautiful little game (took me just under 10 hours), where you play as a cat in a post-apocalyptic robot-inhabited city. A nice story with some original lore, and quite moving at times. And I loved the little tippy-taps, the "mews" and "mraws", the naps, ...
After that I played What remains of Edith Finch. Even shorter (maybe a couple of hours of gameplay), but again quite original. It's basically a short story, consisting of several even shorter stories, some with unique gameplay or storytelling mechanisms. I found it very relaxing, in a way. The story is about death and loss, so not a happy story, but sad and beautiful.
Next on the list is Forgotten City. Don't really know what it's about, only that there is a time loop and that it's supposed to be good.
I enjoyed Forgotten City, both as a Skyrim mod and as a standalone game. I think it will probably be more enjoyable if you go into it cold.
Went in completely cold. I didn't even know it originally was a Skyrim mod until after.
It was fun. Not too difficult or farfetched in terms of clue-finding, but it continued being interesting, with some discoveries I did not see coming. And while it was quite short, I became really invested in the characters. The 'best ending' was very satisfying.
I have a feeling the creators are really into history and culture due to the (I'm assuming) lots of accurate pieces of information and items you find throughout the game.
Next to it and Outer Wilds I hope more games will explore the time loop mechanic in the future. I much enjoyed it in both, but I'm also curious if it can be more than a gameplay gimmick.
I've been doing an extensive playthrough of X4: Foundations with the recent Timelines expansion and 7.0 update. This series of games has been a perennial favorite of mine, it's always fun starting at the bottom rung in a huge universe and working your way up the power ladder to become a real force to contend with. I tend to play with the Variety & Rebalance Overhaul mod (VRO) which skews combat to rely more on large fleet actions between capital ships rather than fighter combat, to emphasize the importance of capital assets over dogfighting.
After some starting moves with trade and setting up an industrial base, I bought and captured a few larger ships that let me make some initial moves on a sector being overrun by the Xenon (universally hostile faction), setting up a defense station under fire and holding off waves of attacks until they began to run out of steam and I could counterattack against their shipyards.
Once I had done that, I moved fairly quickly through the next sector but stalled out hard at the one following; this was their primary shipbuilding sector and it was absolutely jam packed with hostile forces. I built up my own forces and created my first wharf for small shipbuilding while I waited for the right moment. Terran forces jumped into the system to launch their own attack, which was doomed to fail but provided a useful distraction for me to come in behind them and wipe out the Xenon wharf, disrupting their resupply of small craft.
After a brief respite to patch myself up, I came back in and wiped the sector clear. Ultimately I think the most rewarding part of a game like this is when you take on that insurmountable threat and win, and it was a great feeling to see the last bits of red vanish from the sector as my own claim stations came online. I'm probably pretty close to done with this playthrough as there's no more upward scaling to be had, but it was a solid couple hundred hours and I had a blast. Strong recommend if you like space combat with a focus on economics, logistics and strategy over dogfighting and tactics.
Every now and then, I try and fail to get into this game. Most things about it (open world, zero to hero/empire, tiny to ginormous starships, sci-fi) says to me, "Dude, you should love this." Hell, a year ago, I played Star Citizen for several months and only quit because the player-base is too sociopathic.
Also, I love Star Sector with the 4X mod added.
Yet I keep failing to get into X4.
Is there some golden path for finding your way to enjoyment in the game? Or is it just not for me?
It's very possible that it's just not your cup of tea! I also love Starsector and am probably overdue for a fresh playthrough. There are a few reasons I can think of that you might not be clicking with X4:
Missions. Missions in X4 are a giant pain in the ass, but they're necessary for any large political shifts to occur, or for certain important developments. The ones that have you zipping around in your spacesuit are just painful. If this is what's killing your vibe, I suggest just ignoring the missions and playing it like a sandbox. Very viable this way and I tend to ignore missions for most of my playthroughs.
Lack of Endgame. There's not really a big goal in X4 aside from increasing your personal power base. Setting one can help with providing direction. In my recent playthrough the goal was to secure Tharka's Cascade to stop the Xenon incursions, and then to push all the way to Matrix 79B. You may also want to play aligned to one of the factions and pursue their interests, which can be engaging and offers a lot more instant conflict. Looking at the NPC fleets and saying "I want to fly that ship" is a good goal, since the process of getting that ship involves several sub-goals that will take time, effort and resources to accomplish.
Lack of direction. The missions can point you where you need to go but they are, as noted, painful. It can be challenging to figure out how you're supposed to parlay that tiny fighter craft into an interstellar trade empire, or really anything more than a marginally larger tiny fighter craft. In the early game setting up passive income is key - you can do things yourself to earn money, but once you get that first couple hundred thousand credits you should focus on investing that into automated miners and traders that make you cash just by existing. It cuts down on the amount of repetitive gameplay you have to engage with, and opens up higher levels of interaction.
Once you have a few million credits your options expand dramatically. Station and fleet building missions offer a way to multiply that nest egg; build up faction relations and accept the war missions ("X vs Y", offered at +10 relation with several factions) to start getting huge payoffs. It's not uncommon to have missions that net you 60m credits, and the most I made was something like 150m for a large fleet order. Once you have money you can reinvest it strategically to make a ton more.
X4 is ultimately a game about economics and logistics masquerading as a game about spaceships. You don't get to play with the coolest toys unless you put in some groundwork building stations, factories, networks of freighters and miners, etc, because that's how you get the credits and resources needed to field the good stuff. It's similar to Starsector in that regard, but emphasizes individual player action even less.
Can you clarify sociopathic? I played many u
years ago when everything was super broken, curious what it's like now.
The players define the game. The criminals in the game demonstrate antisocial tendencies that are at times genuinely disturbing.
The first time I went to prison in the game, I tried to find the honest way out mining. The guy who shanked me whispered the creepiest things to me as he killed me.
The pirates in the game are similarly warped.
The people who combat them? They look into that abyss and come out little better.
On top of it all, the game attracts players who tend toward gun-toting MAGA.
Therein lies many reasons the game creeps me out.
I could see getting back into it with a clan made up of prosocial players.
The game itself has grown and improved. Even a year ago, despite bugs, it was enjoyable for months. The flight sim aspects are breathtakingly excellent.
Wow. Thank you. It definitely wasn't that weird when I played, but that was when your ship would randomly explode/despawn/hurtle off into space on spawn. Also there were no prisons.
Sounds like too much work to make it enjoyable if the underground side of things have become so powerful.
I can't say whether that's true now or not. This was about a year ago. But as CI seems to see the gameplay as emergent, and they seem to take a fairly laissez-faire approach to harassment and abuse, I suspect it's the same or worse.
But, hey, they have free fly events for a week at a time. Would give you some time to ask around and see what it's like now. Or post a thread here. I suspect there are at least a few people on Tildes without enough money (or little enough sense 😂) to play this rich-person's game!
Death Stranding has been so nice. People are right, it really does open up in chapter 3.
I have found myself more obsessed with completing the highway structures than completing story deliveries. I am an architect, a city planner of the ages. I am the epitome of efficiency! Fear me!
It's cozy, it's freaking beautiful, it was worth the $20 that I got it on sale for.
I'm picking up Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. I'm three dungeons in, but like... Why don't I see or hear about this more as a better archetype for a 2D Zelda? The bar system discourages spamming your items but encourages using them by keeping everything at full slot without the obsessive hoarding/bush refill game every game compulsively suggests as you use things, and the dungeons are so wonderfully structured around exploring each gimmick as far as they think it's engaging and interesting. It also feels really vertical at times, the aesthetic charm is impressive, it feels grand, and as a LttP enjoyer I'm wondering how the dark world mechanics will be. Hoping it keeps the momentum.
All of the systems and collectibles in A Link Between Worlds fit together extremely nice. As far as I remember, the game was considered an excellent 2D Zelda title. It really speaks to LttP fans...which is why I actually didn't like it quite as much as my favourites: Spirit Tracks and Phantom Hourglass.
I've always preferred 2D Zelda, so I'm really excited for the upcoming game! We'll see how it ends up.
Perfect Dark Decompilation
This project takes the decompiled source code of the N64 game Perfect Dark, and adds in QOL features - modern Xbox dual stick controls, keyboard controls, etc. You just need to download and unzip the latest release, create a
datafolder, drop in your Perfect Dark ROM, and rename it to what they specify in the readme. On Steam Deck, you can't just run the binary because dependencies are missing. But if you add the game to Steam and configure it to run with Steam Linux Runtime in the Compatibility section, it works.Unfortunately I ran into a couple scenarios where the game unexpectedly freezes. Near the end of the second level (on Perfect Agent difficulty, if that's relevant), and playing vertical split screen multiplayer (on an external monitor, horizontal split didn't seem to have any issues).
Some of their default button remap choices were a little weird to me, but on N64 they did overload A and B with a lot of functions. Maybe when this gets into a more stable state I'll play around with the config.
Portal Revolution
A free mod for Portal 2 with a new campaign. I've played for 90 minutes and I still can't make orange portals. The voice for the GladOS replacement AI is kind of annoying and hasn't made me laugh. I'm dropping it.
Celeste
Decided to give the D-sides (mod) a shot after watching the speedrun at AGDQ this year. I made it to the first checkpoint of 1D but I think that might be where my journey ends. That screen is brutal.
FYI both perfect dark and goldeneye are pretty playable with modern control schemes via the 'solitaire' control schemes and remapping the C buttons with RetroArch or whatever emulator you're using:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroArch/comments/9m3wxg/mupen64plus_config_goldeneye_modern_xbox_controls/
Category is: Games that have no business being MMOs
Secret World Legends
This is a free-to-play reboot of an MMO called The Secret World, released by Funcom (of The Longest Journey and Dreamfall fame).
I had completely forgotten it existed until I stumbled across it during the most recent Steam sale. I was honestly surprised to see that it was even still running. The original TSW launched in 2012, while this reboot launched in 2017. I figured I might as well try it out before it is gone for good.
The good news is that the game's free offering is extremely generous: it's the whole game! There are no expansions you need to buy or subscriptions you have to start in order to access the game's content. You could, in theory, do pretty much everything on offer without paying for it. That's pretty incredible to me.
Of course, there is a monthly subscription you can buy to unlock "Patron" status which comes with additional XP and currency earnings. The big way the game tightens the screws on free players though is by making fast-travel cost an amount of in-game currency that ratchets up over time. Patrons, however, fast travel for free. I ended up signing up for a month in part because I'd played enough that it felt like they earned it from me, but mostly because the game is already a big time-waster, and not having fast-travel makes it that much worse.
Also, the game is very solo-player friendly, which is good, because I'm playing it by myself and don't really want to interact with anyone. It's also good because the game is pretty dead, so you might have a hard time finding people to play with even if you wanted to. I'd been regularly playing it at off-peak hours and saw very few people in-game and was thoroughly enjoying my isolation, but then I played on a Friday night and saw that the game wasn't as dead as I initially thought.
What's most interesting about the game is that it has a pretty rich world and lore to it. Most non-trivial missions have fully animated and voiced cutscene introductions. These are given by distinct and interesting characters, and they often go on for a full minute or two. They're not throwaways. The game also has a wide variety of monsters, many of which have their own ecological reasons for occupying the spaces that they do in the game, which you learn from doing the missions and talking to the NPCs. The writing itself is what I would call "above average for a video game." In terms of vibes and presentation, the game actually reminds me a lot of Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.
Additionally, the game also has investigation missions that aren't just "go here, kill this" or "go here, get X of this." The game has an in-game web browser that you can use because it expects you to look up outside information in order to complete these missions. These were widely lauded at the time of release, and if you peep the Steam reviews a lot of people still speak highly of them.
My first one was completely underwhelming. The mission clue explicitly told me that the coordinates to a treasure chest were based on the song lengths of two different songs. It felt hammy and direct -- not well-written or intriguing. Thankfully, I played another one shortly after that which was much better. I had to search an area to find an ID card. That ID card had a website I had to go to, which was a real website for a fake company (set up by the game, kind of like an ARG). I then had to search their employee database for more information. That kind of thing is cool.
I mentioned up top that this game is in the category of "game that had no business being an MMO" because it feels like the game's strengths are completely at odds with its structure. The game is full of neat ideas and decent writing, but it's also got bad combat and copious amounts of padding. For every halfway decent investigation mission, there are dozens of "go here, kill this" ones. Furthermore, for some strange reason, they decided to make your character a silent protagonist. This means that every cutscene is just another character monologuing at you while you give them a dead-eyed stare. Letting the player character talk wouldn't break immersion -- it would give the game's already decent writing and cutscenes some much needed legs.
Ultimately, I feel like this would have been much better as a single-player, story-driven game instead of an MMO. I can't shake the feeling that I'm just playing an elegantly made skinner box that gives me just enough drip-feed of interesting content to keep me trudging through the rest of the unnecessarily drawn out parts of the game.
Now, despite me being a big negative on the game, if you like MMOs, this one might be worth trying before it's gone. It really does have some cool ideas.
I played for six hours for free and not once during that time did I feel pressured to pay for the subscription. Free play past that point is also very possible if you're willing to hoof it on foot instead of fast-travel places.
Islands of Insight
This was offered up for free shortly before the most recent Steam sale.
It's a big open-world first-person puzzle collectathon MMO. You travel through the world seeking out and completing puzzles of different types, of which there are over 10,000 in the game.
I've only just started it and put 2 hours in. I'm very impressed so far. The puzzle types are varied -- there are pattern puzzles, mazes, perspective tricks, positioning puzzles -- and plenty more that I haven't unlocked yet. The puzzles are quick, and some aren't really puzzles so much as they are collectibles, which gives the game a much more rapid pace than puzzle games traditionally have.
The game is genuinely impressive in its scope and execution. I think the devs gave it away for free as a way of trying to create some buzz around it and get it some attention -- up to that point it hadn't sold very well, and I get the sense that it wasn't exactly cheap to make. This is well above the caliber of game that normally gets given out for free on Steam.
The question I have, though, is why is it an MMO? I have no idea, honestly. You can see other people running around in your game, but shared-puzzle solving doesn't seem like it would go great. This game seems legitimately more fun to play solo, and I imagine implementing networking was a non-negligible feat for the dev team. I don't really understand why they went for it. That said, maybe there's more waiting for me down the line that'll make it make more sense.
The game is 50% off on Steam right now, and I can recommend it if the idea of an open world puzzle solve-a-thon sounds good to you. Think The Witness, only without the elegance and pretension, and with more puzzle variety.
Nobody knows!
I'm glad you're enjoying Islands of Insight. Despite the compulsive puzzle-solving induced by the sheer variety of puzzles available, the grid puzzles will remain the stars of the show and the learning curve for the increasing amount of mechanics is pretty good. It feels great to stop running around and take the time to solve the really big and complicated ones.
Glad it's not just me! 😂
I'm really liking the grid ones. I thought they were going to get boring, but the swapping out of different rulesets, as well as the addition of new mechanics have kept them interesting.
The only ones that have really bothered me so far are the crystal mazes. I like the idea of being able to see the rest of the maze so you're not locked in to tunnel vision in your current spot, but I find it VERY hard to tell when there's a wall or not (might be my graphics settings -- I have to run it on pretty low to not have it cook my computer).
Overall though I'm seriously impressed with the game. Put in another two hours since my last post and will definitely do a lot more. How far along are you?
I quit after around 70 hours because the servers kept going down some fifteen minutes into attempting to solve said big and complicated puzzles, which kicked me out of the game and forced me to start over, but I was almost done with all the enclaves (only some of the fifth and final area left to solve). Also they were supposed to be releasing an offline mode sometime around now so you shouldn't have this problem anymore.
The crystal mazes were equally problematic for me; solving them mainly consisted in memorizing the layout of the maze before the critical attempt.
Some puzzle types, like skydrops or the tile swapping ones, took many instances before they really clicked. Others, like the fractals, never clicked, and I really hate(d) them. And I was bad at every challenge with a time limit.
Oh wow, that's an incredible amount of time! I'm with you on the fractal ones. I actually haven't solved one yet, despite my attempted solutions looking (what I believe to be) nearly identical to the reference. I'm thinking there might be something I'm missing?
I looked into the offline mode but stayed away from it due to this. Might be nothing, but I figure it's best to wait it out and see whether it's a false alarm or whether they patch it.
Also, in looking up that, I came across this topic which mentions the puzzles resetting. There were a few that I thought that I'd done already, but with so many puzzles in the game it's hard to tell. Did this impact your playthrough?
The idea of the puzzles resetting takes a lot of wind out of my sails, since a lot of the fun in the game is hunting the puzzles and completing different areas. If all my progress gets wiped it makes me not want to keep going in the first place.
To be clear, the puzzles densely placed all over in the big mainland area (all five regions) are temporary puzzles that cycle every day (save for a handful of types, such as skydrops, which cycle much faster). You don't need to solve them at all if you don't want to, but they're there for people who like daily challenges that are applications of what they learned in the enclaves. I vaguely recall that the problem was that repeating a mainland puzzle, even if it had cycled, no longer added progress to your various "mastery" progress trackers. Such progress can yield currency for skills and cosmetics and such, as well as MMO titles. There is no way to tell a cleared mainland puzzle apart from an uncleared one so I suggest not solving any of them with completionism in mind and taking potential benefits from them as an added, nice-to-have bonus.
To the best of my knowledge, every single puzzle in every enclave area is a manually designed, fixed puzzle. Enclave progress is saved and permanent, and enclave objective completion yields mirabilis (cubes). Enclaves are named areas, and every enclave name and enclave mirabilis status is visible in your map. Most enclaves are located in small independent islands or archipelagos, but several are embedded within the mainland. Mainland enclaves function just like the others, with fixed puzzles and permanent progress. You will know you have entered an enclave because there will be a big enclave name announcement on the screen, and the current unlocked objectives for it should appear in the corner (some enclave objectives may require finding or solving something before they are listed). Progress towards completing the game is progress in reaching and completing every enclave. Not to mention every enclave teaches you something or contains a special challenge of some kind. Much more fun to focus on these!
You don't need to unlock the launchpads in the mainland to access the independent archipelago enclaves. Some enclaves can be accessed by careful jumping and gliding from other enclaves. If you can reach it, you can play it out of order! (The voice in the sky will say something to the effect of you being a smartass ;) )
The obelisks with the laser beams that connect to hidden cubes all over the mainland count as enclaves with permanent progress.
During my time with the game, the developers added several more enclave-type permanent progress challenges that didn't exist when I started playing.
In the end game there is also a meta scavenger hunt accessible behind the floating platform area in the second region (each challenge has to be unlocked independently).
GREAT clarification. Thank you for this, Protected! I'll just focus on the Enclaves then (which is honestly what I've been doing anyway -- there are SO many puzzles in the mainland areas that I get a bit overwhelmed).
When I found out it reset progress I was ready to drop the game entirely, but I'm glad I can comfortably keep playing now. It really is something special.
What an interesting coincidence - I don't remember what string of boredom Googling led me to it, but I reinstalled the original TSW the other day. I don't exactly know what the difference between the original and the reboot is when it comes to the questing and worldbuilding, which are the qualities that drew me to purchasing the game back in 2013. But some quick Reddit searches advised me to dig up my old account and install the original game.
I remember an Extra Credits episode that details one of the more convoluted quests in the game and I really, really wanted to play the game again after that! But even if both the original TSW and the reboot are apparently easily soloable, something about that MMO build makes it super daunting to even sit down to find some time to get into.
Interesting! I'm surprised the original still even works. Are you actually connected to servers or is it just sort of running in an offline mode?
And yeah, I agree with you on the MMO thing. It's such a big time-ask, and I feel like it doesn't deliver as much as I'd like it to with that time. It is genuinely substantive in places and has some really cool ideas, but there's also so much padding.
Not sure why I have to install more, but the launcher indicates an online server status... so I'm assuming it's the former!?
That's fascinating! I assumed that the original would have been shut down by now. Maybe the new and old one use the same servers -- or they exist concurrently? Pretty cool that it still works. Hope you enjoy it!
Up until the Tildes Minecraft server launched and started eating up all my freetime, I was binging Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic, which had its 1.0 release in June. Absolutely love it. It's got a shitton of depth in areas that a lot of other city builders neglect, and as a result it scratches the right spot of my brain lol
I picked up Tropico 6 during the steam summer sale. I wasn't paying attention and bought El Prez bundle which was not the comprehensive T6 collection I expected. There is not currently a bundle that includes just the T6 base plus DLC
Aside from that hiccup I'm enjoying the game. My last foray into the series was Tropico 4 and this version is immensely wider than the fourth instalment. It took several tries to get back into the economy building and pacing mindset that has brought me success in past versions but I eventually passed the first mission.
Very excited to get to some of the "future" era stuff. I played around with them in sandbox for a bit but I'm finding the challenge of the missions especially satisfying so I'm waiting to explore those on more detail until I get there via the campaign play
I've only had the game for a week or so but I'd recommend it to fans of the series who haven't had a chance to try it. It's faithful to its predecessors but with enough evolution to warrant the sequel
Lumencraft. Not a deep game but good for an afternoon where you need to check out from reality. Light on the "craft" and more about "dig", "shoot", "run", and "sometimes build".
Buy on sale.
I've been playing the Live A Live remake which is... fine. The art and narrative would have been way ahead of its time in 1994 and holds up quite well.
Unfortunately, the rest of the gameplay is pretty lacking. It uses gameplay to support the story (which is cool!) but the gameplay itself isn't anything worth mentioning. The battle system itself is ok, but if that's all there was, it wouldn't be a good game. Battles are simplistic and abilities are mostly bad except for your One Best One. That would be fine if the rest of the game carried, but you spend a lot of time in combat which can really drag.
Overall I think I'll see it through, but it's something I mostly want to see the end of vs am enjoying sitting down and playing.
Very interesting. I heard about this game as a cult classic, an almost must play that people have spent a lot of time and effort and money to be able to play. I guess you're saying that the story would have been groundbreaking and generationally memorable back in 1994, but times have moved and excellent story telling on that level has become more commonplace since then?
I was intrigued by the reviews
As a frame of reference for me, would you kindly provide some examples of modern excellent games in storytelling?
Yes, I think it would have been really notable at the time. For instance, there's an entire chapter without dialogue, just caveman noises and gestures, which is still pretty unusual and interesting. The overall vibe and writing is probably still its strongest point but that's only because the gameplay is weak.
As for modern storytelling, it's much more varied now, I think. You have games like Pentiment and Frog Detective which use their writing and voice to tell a very specific story. - it's very novel-like. There's also things like The Last of Us which certainly has a narrative, but there's a ton of world building through background text and reading between the lines of dialogue. So that's also great storytelling, but less direct. On the far other end, you have things like Jusant which have story told almost exclusively in the background which the player can engage with as little or as much as they want.
Live A Live waded into some of those waters when (I would imagine) not many other games were, which is neat! I'm just not sure it's something people have to play today when there are better options (that take inspiration from Live A Live) available.
This week I've taken a step back from gaming since I've finished Shadow of the Erdtree. I did spend some time on the following
In Elden Ring I finished a couple bosses near the end. Made my way to the Elden Beast and Malenia. I've made one attempt on the Elden Beast which went well. Decided to finish Malenia before the Elden Beast. I've made about 20 tries on Malenia, some quite good. Many I die quickly. It's a great encounter and I'm happy to attempt it occasionally slowly improving.
Played a bit of Final Fantasy VII: Remake. This game is growing on me quite a bit. I really enjoy the fleshed out characters and story in this game. I'm a bit apprehensive from what I've heard about the sequel but I am enjoying my time with this first part of three.
Which prompted me to find an old PS1 and load up my original *Final Fantasy VII save. I played with that a bit and it was quite fun. But it was quite dark, I think it's my video to HDMI adapter. I may have an old TV in the basement. Was quite fun to play with an old PS1 for a while.
Then Sunday was quite a lazy day, watched the two soccer matches and picked up Blasphemous on my Switch. I played this in 2019 when it came out, I got stuck at some point and never returned. Started over and I'm really enjoying this playthrough. It's an interesting little metroidvania-soulslike type thing with a heaping dose of dark catholicism. It appreciate the combat where most enemies are designed to be parried or dodged and bosses bring both together. You have a short little progression tree with your sword and you have a spell slot. There are also "rosary beads" that you pick up and add to your rosary which have passive skills. You sword also gets some passive abilities by slotting in "relics."
You also can case prayers (spells) by expending fervor (mana). On death instead of losing currency you lose your fervor and your max fervor is reduced. You cleanse this reduction by either returning to where you last died or paying a small amount to a vendor who "cleanses your guilt." It also has a bonfire type mechanic in the guise of "prayer desks."
It's a fun little game. It kind of has the souls feeling of running on fumes exploring and finding a bonfire while you're on your last legs. Then using that bonfire as your base of operations until you eventually loop back to a central area. It's fun because it scratches that itch of exploring a legacy dungeon in Elden Ring while having much simpler systems.
The way you describe Blasphemous sounds really appealing! How's the lore and worldbuilding? And if you don't mind me asking further - how would you describe the combat, fast-paced or slower-paced? I've been trying to get into Elden Ring again, but man, compared to Bloodborne which I really enjoyed the start of, Elden Ring just feels blisteringly fast, which is a shame as I love the world a lot. Makes me weary of other souls-borne-likes which might lean that way.
If you like reading lore there’s a lot to read. Many of NPCs have some decent voice acting. All items have at least a paragraph of lore. It goes over my head though. The quests also give Elden Ring competition for most vague quests ever.
Overall I’d say world building and lore is strong but requires effort. I’m not entirely sure what’s going on.
Combat is slow, clear punish windows and enemy animations are simple to read. Combat is simple enough that it could get stale and there is little room to modify a combat style. It kind of has that souls thing going where you progress through an area slowly but then realize you can pretty much run past stuff once you know where you’re going.
Looks like it’s $25 on Switch. Checking some reviews some people had issues on other platforms. Don’t know if it was patched ymmv. A good handheld game for sure.
The character design and art is also phenomenal — to me maybe even worth the cost of admission. I really enjoyed the gameplay, but the art is what set it apart from other games and made it memorable.
Gameplay is side-scrolling 2d with great level and enemy design, but the cinematics are usually insanely detailed, grotesque (not as in “gross” but as in the full definition of the word) dark Spanish catholic spectacles. Honestly haven’t seen art this good in a game in a long time.
Definitely plays like a side-scrolling Souls game, and lore/world building are similarly obtuse. Not impenetrable, but definitely not obvious either.
Blasphemous 2 solves this issue pretty well with the addition of 3 other main weapons that each have their own skill tree, however it doesn’t have the same overblown cinematics as I described above, and I think it suffers for it. It sacrifices some of what made the original so unique for QOL improvements.
Definitely recommend 1, and if you like the gameplay, 2 is a good get (maybe on sale, though).
Picked up Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales in the recent summer sale and started playing a couple of hours yesterday. It had been on my radar for a few years now, given that I absolutely loved Gwent back in the beta and early release days (and in the Witcher 3!), but somehow never got around to trying Thronebreaker. And holy crap what an amazing game! Extremely polished, incredible art, good voice acting, gripping story, fun puzzles, just an all-around great game. And set in the Witcher universe too which I love. Highly recommend for anyone who likes the Witcher games, or Gwent, or just fantasy/medieval/historical rpgs and great storytelling in general. You can play it with one hand, too, which is always nice for accessibility.
Also picked up Rogue Mage in the sale and am excited to try that after Thronebreaker.
I loved Thronebreaker! It was one of my GotY back in 2021: https://david.reviews/games/thronebreaker-the-witcher-tales/
I really loved how much the story was expressed through gameplay (like a "rock" card moving towards your heroes to simulate a rockslide). And how impactful choices were - it was super well done!
Great website! And yeah I love the little details like that too. Rockslide event means a bunch of rock cards moving towards you that you have to take out. A monster attacking a farm means a bunch of cow cards you need to prevent from dying. Capturing enemy caravans means a couple of caravan cards that you need to bring to your side of the board. All very creative puzzles that perfectly mesh with the mechanics of Gwent.
Finished the new summer campaign in Trackmania. Like I said in the last thread, this season is insane. All the other seasons, I have been able to get every single medal, but I'm giving up on this one: I did get 23 of 25 though. Track 22 is basically impossible for me due to a specific mechanic that I can't seem to get right, and track 25 has been completed only by the world's absolute best. Just track 24 took me somewhere between six and eight hours to complete, so I'm really just not going to waste my breath on the other - even harder - ones.
Still love the game, always have and always will, but it's a bit annoying that I can't 100% this season. Hope they turn the difficulty down a notch for the fall season!
My co-hosts and I just reviewed both DoomRL and Jupiter Hell for our podcast on roguelike/lite games and thought you may enjoy the listen.
DoomRL: I was pleasantly surprised by how high quality a freeware game from 20+ years ago this still is. There were a lot of mechanics I totally missed like dodge and assemblies, but careful perusing of the wiki has helped me beat the cyberdemon twice now (only to get bludgeoned immediately on Hell 1). Love the boss fights in DRL, the audio design soundscape, and the plethora of challenges. I even got it running on the steam deck and it works amazingly well.
Jupiter Hell: You can really tell how much love and effort went into the remaster here. I wish more traditional roguelikes had the simultaneous move-action sequencing that JH does, and I still laugh every time a bunch of reavers go ragdoll flying when rocketed. The art design of Jupiter's moons and different environments here are great and well thought out. Only beat the Harbinger's Throne once, barely, with the aid of a supernova, armor piercing assault rifles, and zillions of grenades. Love playing this on the steam deck, as well as jumping between it and the desktop when I get home from the bus.
Overall: many kudos to the solo dev for his work on these games, they're truly special and you can see the impact they've had on the tradRL landscape. Crossing fingers for Ganymede!
Two of my favourite roguelikes! They are minimalistic at a glance and yet quite deep. Being combat-only makes them tight but the various mechanics and weapons make up for that.
Seems like a good call author has made to make the second game controller-friendly, long before steam deck existed.
I booted up Balatro this week again! The game is still fantastic as ever and a great time sink if I need a 20 minute break from work or whatever during the day.
I also (unfortunately?) started playing Call of Duty again. God this game sucks donkey balls right now, but it still is the only FPS to scratch the exact itch I have. The 6v6 multiplayer is... fine... It is fun to click noggins for a few hours a week, but god damn, this game runs like shit, takes up too much space, the unlock system is the most asinine thing ever put in a game, the skins are too much (I don't mind a couple funky skins running around, but it's a bit much when it's Homelander or Nicki Minaj). The latest thing to get on my nerves is that it seems they added a shitton of maps since the last time I played and most of them are AWFUL small maps made for adderall munching 12 year olds. I'm very much hoping the upcoming Black Ops 6 is at least half good so I can continue to scratch my itch. As I get older, I just don't have the patience for complicated unlock systems, tiny maps where a tenth of a second is the difference between having fun and not, etc. So I'm hoping with the next one, considering it has the longest dev cycle for a game in this series in a long time, and considering the devs have said they're going back to the traditional prestige system, that hopefully the rest of the game is simplified along with it.
Lastly, I tried The First Descendent for a couple hours. It's fine. The gameplay is decent, it's fun enough to shoot guns and fun enough to move around quickly (though the movement isn't as smooth as I would expect for how important it is), and the world is somewhat interesting. It's pretty unpolished right now and some enemies can be absolute bullet sponges. I got into the first dungeon and I was excited to see the boss had actual mechanics, it wasn't just us shooting him a bunch, but then all that excitement left when we had to shoot him for 10 minutes straight and it just bored me out of wanting to play the game again. A few friends that are a lot further has said how grindy the game can be, so I think I'm just gonna avoid it. It has potential after some updates, though!
Whew, I can't wait to get to the point where I can treat Balatro as a 20-mintue time sink, lol. I just picked it up but every time I play it, I might tell myself it's just gonna be for 20 minutes, but there's still so much for me to discover and unlock that it inevitably ends up an hour. :P
Well, sometimes 20 minutes turns into 30 or 40 or 60, you know how it is.
You reminded me that IW4x exists which is MW2 2009 with a server browser, mods (including custom maps), and other improvements, I might give it a shot getting it to run on Linux. If you have a PC I recommend it, but I expect the player count to be pretty low these days.
Went through Still Wakes the Deep on the weekend. As far as first-person linear horror walking sims (or whatever we're calling them) go... Yeah, pretty good.
It's not a mechanically rich game or anything, but it's got some decently implemented interaction and traversal mechanics that draw you in a little bit more than simply 'press a button to do a thing', which I liked. The 'hide-from-monster' sections got a tad repetitive, but they were admittedly fun and not too drawn out.
I didn't find this game as pants-shittingly scary as Amnesia or anything, but sometimes (and I know I'm not alone in this) I don't particularly feel like shitting my pants. At least it didn't share Frictional's obsession with light management.
But my god, the voice acting, the script, the world design... just lovely. I think we can safely say that's kinda The Chinese Room's thing at this point. A Lovecraftian horror game that takes place entirely on a Scottish oil rig... Sure, why not.
Got Celeste on SteamDeck because the Switch Drift had become near impossible to play consistently. Wanted to finally beat Farewell and get back into some of the speedtech, but realized I needed to grind through it all again. So I looked up the dev tools that opens up everything and in the Mods list there was a massive level pack called Strawberry Jam. Just finished the beginner lobby and it might as well be a whole new game.
Off the bat, its exceptionally well made. Celeste as a framework is sort of like Portal and main Mario games, where the player have fixed capabilities and the level designs need to leverage or add onto it. And with the creativity and design on display, I think this game has a lot of staying power fueled by the community.
The only low point would be the puzzle level. I love those types of games but this is not the best engine and implementation of it, especially when the core theme of the game onwards and upwards. It a simple block pushing/ice slide puzzle but the mixture of hard limits to movement, pixel perfect falls and forced resets does not gel well. There are levels that nerf movement but you just have to learn the dance and flow through.
My other gripe would be difficulty mismatch and design errors. A few times I'd be flying trough a level and be hard stopped by an insane screen or a spike that's a little bit off.
Beside that, I have nothing but praise. Tons of new systems, weird combos and redesigns; all on top of beautiful pixel art and music. And I'm glad everyone is credited because a lot of these guys are worth a follow. (Give the soundtrack a listen if you need something in the background.).
It's just an amazing showcase of not just the game, but video games as a medium and the ways different artists use it. Some people want to tell a story about decompressing through burnout. Other people want to make a rhythm based platformer. Levels that make you think about time manipulation. Blindfolded co-op. Re-imagine other games into this one. My personal favorite is square fruit loop land. Also my kid loves shouting "secret strawberry" and dashing through the ending so 10/10. I'm tempted to mess around with the level tools.
Will probably take a break before jumping into the next level set. Considering the Elden Ring DLC.
Just in case you aren't aware: you can enable "cheat mode" from the prologue in order to unlock all the B/C sides etc.
I saw that cheat code on the discord but I was more interested in the QOL tools you can access like display overlays and training maps. It is much easier to understand tech like overclocking or dustbunny skips when you can actually see whats happening under the hood.
Ah right, after rereading your comment, I missed the speedtech bit (in my defense, I was severely under-rested yesterday). Personally I found Celeste a wonderful game but felt utterly dejected when I realized I wasn't good enough for the DLC -- so kudos to you for persevering. Maybe I should give the strawberry jam mod a shot, though. I assume the difficulty is generally not too bad (other than a few walls)?
Re: switch drift
They fix them, though :)
I've contacted Nintendo twice about two separate drift/cracked screen issues. The first time I sent two joycons back for $50 shipping and $0 service. They came back in great shape.
The second time I decided, as an experiment, to try being very polite and asking if they can make it cheaper. It was for fixing drift and a crack screened on a full sized switch. Each rep I talked to (text, text escalation, phone) was helpful, and at each step I emphasized that I understand if there's nothing they can do to further reduce the cost/shipping and that I'm grateful for their time checking anyway. After a few more minutes it was all free. It's not that I don't think $100+ship was outrageous, but it was an interesting experiment in Nintendo's customer service philosophy.
Glad you managed to negotiate that service. I'm sure I could strong arm the same here for the six busted joycons I've amassed. Can probably take it to any mall kisok or get a home repair kit for the same result now days. But it's hardly worth it for me at this point.
Celeste was the first game I've played in almost a year. Since 2020 the only exclusives I've finished was Metroid Dread, Fire Emblem 3H, Zelda ToTK and The World Ends With You remake. Don't much care for Mario, given up on Pokémon, have better/cheaper ways to play 30+ year old games and the Decks performance more than makes up for the bulky form factor.
We're already lending a PS5 among friends and will likely do the same for the Switch 2, unless it's an insane innovation.
Yeah I see where you're coming from - I'm very very happy with my Deck and will try my hardest to buy/play all my games for it in the future. Ours are only useful because of the last remaining exclusives of interest, Kirby and Pikmin. I wish pokemon were better......but also emulators exist.
Probably not going to buy any consoles in the future, beyond sub $200 used pricing realm. No lack of games to play while we wait for the next gen to reach end of life.
Lastly for us, a Switch is safe in kid hands than the deck.
Fellow owner of six Joycons as well, I've taken to doing the repairs for anyone who asks for the price of parts.
The last Switch Lite I did was almost a two hour affair because a rubber membrane would slip every time I closed it.
Still, I think it's fun and I hate the fact that they make you wait and pay anything at all.
You can so buy hall effect sticks to install yourself. I would if mine ever developed drift. It just takes a couple screws and a gentle touch.
Gentle touch is what I don't have unfortunately lol too nervous. Once they go out of official service possibly then that's what I'll do :);
I took Cultist Simulator for a spin. This game is played "entirely" on a virtual tabletop, in which cards that you can drag and drop are deployed representing various concepts. You have a number of verbs available, like Work, Talk, etc. and you can slot cards into them. Cards take time to use with a verb and also expire if not used, so this is a game of timeouts and progress bars, somewhat reminiscent of Citizen Sleeper. Operations (and sometimes random events) yield new cards, and some verbs may appear and disappear that automatically consume cards of certain types whether you want it or not.
I like the elegance of the concept, but I did not love this game; compared to Citizen Sleeper, it had considerably more egregious design flaws. The player (the cultist) must be fed, and to eat he has to perform some kind of work to produce money (cards). This is usually a grindy, tightly timed loop that requires investing the player's very limited amount of mental capacity (cards). The game will shower the player with physical and mental illness events that must be dealt with, taking up even more resources and more of the player's attention. Another problem I found was that a verb can only be used on one card at a time, and the Study verb quickly emerged as a major chokepoint, since it's required for basically any kind of progress. I would have enjoyed trying to accomplish more than one thing at a time and essentially optimizing my gameplay, but it turned out to be a recipe for frustration as it may turn out that the various cards' short timeouts and the verb capacity problem simply do not permit it, but you only realize it fifteen minutes later when all your cards burn up because you couldn't use them on time.
I also played American Arcadia.
You are Trevor Hills, an accountant living in the utopian city of Arcadia in 70s US. Trevor has a boring life of peaceful routine, and he likes it just like that. He greets all his neighbors, doesn't litter and doesn't miss a day of work. Until the day Gus, his coworker, disappears on a mysterious "vacation".
You are Angela Solano, a stage technician working in 2023 for Walton Media, a fictional megacorporation with absolutely no real world counterpart, known for its famous cartoon dog and early cinema beginnings. In his lifetime, founder Elijah Walton and Angela's favorite person, his inventor friend Arpad Kovacs, envisioned Arcadia as, uh, let's call it an experimental prototype community. Of tomorrow. Then Elijah passed away and his brother fired Kovacs and took the company in a different direction. A corrupt senator helps secure for Walton Media the legal right to adopt people, and a new Arcadia is born, a reality show populated by generations of people owned by the company, who, none the wiser, live their lives for the entertainment of those outside. A dense web of cameras, facial recognition tech and smartphone apps allow viewers to see what their favorite Arcadian citizens are up to at all times. It's like the Truman Show on steroids! A disgusted Angela is recruited by an activist group that informs her that Trevor and other boring people are slated for disposal, since ratings are down and they are no longer profitable to keep around. She readily agrees to help save him.
Gameplay consists in platforming with escape and stealth sequences and simplistic puzzle solving. The strength of the game is in its narrative; while the various characters have a simplistic design as a deliberate stylistic choice, the game does have great sets that bring the city/studio of Arcadia to life. Trevor does all the platforming and parkour, always in a 2D sidescrolling format (like in INSIDE or Trine). Angela on the other hand moves freely in 3D, but won't even jump; her contribution consists in looking through cameras and controlling the many devices in Arcadia in order to help Trevor and stall pursuers. The game transitions seamlessly between them as Angela sits at a computer or picks up her smartphone to keep tabs on Trevor inbetween constant interruptions and threats of being found out by the company.
I thought the game was pretty good. It can be played through in less than 7 hours, but I enjoyed the narrative including the various characters and plot twists. Expect extreme cynicism from the plot; Walton Media cheerfully employs brainwashing, taser drones, ultrasound torture and more as part of their system of checks and controls for the people of Arcadia, all the while tourists are allowed to vacation in monitored parts of the dome. At one point you'll see a livestream chat callously commenting on the events taking place. I won't spoil what actually happens to Trevor or Angela, but this should give you an idea of the general tone! Occasional funny moments notwithstanding.
Wartales
Fell in love with this game recently. I loved the career mode in games like BattleTech, but Wartales takes it up to a whole new level. They got new content hitting the game almost monthly, and they break up the turn-based combat with lots of various mini-games and even a tavern simulator. I'm not looking forward to burning out on it.
I've been playing SOVL.
It's a completely free as in beer game that's essentially a rougelike implementation of a fantasy battles tabletop game. There are various factions with different units you can recruit and as your progress through the map you fight battles to upgrade your army and units. It's a great, simple game that you should definitely check out. There are no micro-transactions or anything, just optional paid DLC to unlock extra factions but there are already quite a few in the free game so there is no need to buy them unless you like the game and want to support the developer.
Most recent two games completed:
Outer Worlds - A quite enjoyable fallout-ish (but different too) experience. Story was maybe the strongest point for me, but not perfect either. Gameplay was good. Combat is decent, though a bit shallow and repetitive. It feels annoying on stronger difficulties, and eventually pretty easy to overcome on easier difficulties. The time-slow mechanic and differing damage types helps change things up slightly- but sometimes in a very annoying way (getting hit by N-Rays just... never feels good- that said, it can really take down some enemies too... so that balances it I guess). Overall, didn't have interest in pursuing any DLC content before finishing the story. If I had to rate the experience overall, probably a 4/5. I was immersed enough that I can forgive the flaws, but by the end I was ready to have closure on the experience and move on to something else.
Soul Caliber VI - I am not typically big into fighting games. I have some nostalgia for them, and they're a fun occasional "dip in and out" kind of thing. So tackling the "campaign" part of the game and actually finishing it was a very foreign experience for me. I could not get into the story at all. All of the in-between story stuff between all the fights got to the point where I was just pressing start and choosing to Skip- because the fun part is the fights, and the story just felt like it was keeping me from the fun. Especially since there's a lot of it, and it's a bit slowly told. This is partially on me for doing the campaign instead of arcade or other modes or something, I suppose- but felt novel to try a fighting game "campaign" so I gave it a shot. As far as gameplay- sometimes it feels really good- sometimes it feels awful. I could land moves and combos pretty well and got some "perfect" rounds and blocks/counters and stun-lock enemies and so on. Though, at other times, I could easily get stunlocked by enemies, enemies not even nearly as strong as me. But in the next fight, I'd win easily. Began to feel very arbitrary. I suppose that's the game's way of really punishing you if you miss a block or leave yourself very open. Some of the optional/challenge/side quests really help you with equipment and items but some of them are just really annoying too because of the special challenge variants (like "only low moves do good damage"). If you just happen to choose the right one and get the right drops, it can make you quite a bit more powerful damage-wise when it comes to weapons, which feels arbitrary too. I initially felt like I could give this a 3.5/5 because the fights feel really good sometimes- but I'm gonna say this is a pretty firm 3/5 and no higher than that. If I ever revisit this game or series, or games like it- it will be in a more arcade mode type of thing.
Similar experience: a while back, I got MK11 and MKX, mostly out of nostalgia. I don't have any interest in gitting gud at fighting games so I was playing through the story modes. Mainly to play a variety of fighters/styles and matchups. The story is so stupid and the motivation for characters fighting each other is paper thin sometimes. I finished 11 but not X.
Triangle Strategy - This would be my second play through. I was on vacation last week and broke out the steam deck and had settled on a play through NG. I did remember most of the story but had forgotten the details. I had to push through some hesitation to use the NG slot but after rereading all the skills I started to remember how to play.
What was unique for me was that I was really hooked on the second play through. There were still a few characters and scenes I had not unlocked by going down other story routes. I am very much a one and done kind of player but I am a sucker for tactic games with good stories.
I feel like this game is criminally underrated by people because there are so many scenes and dialog. The thing is, I love the scenes and dialog, the plot lines are very interesting. When the characters go to vote on the scales of conviction, almost every choice is an interesting debate. The game is very much aware of the character's personal issues vs the large ones of the kingdoms. The plots and scheming by the characters are clever and well thought out, none of the characters or plots feel forced. All of this leads to me being more engaged with each story battle as I play it.
On top of this, there is a large cast of characters that are almost all incredibly useful. Some are just good until you find the right set of terrain or circumstances and then they become incredible. The way the leveling system is built is buttery smooth, as it just averages out as you approach the current level. So if you are at a level 30 encounter and bring in a level 20 guy, they will level up every action they take until they hit level 28 and then be on pace with everyone else, and you can't over level past the current level. This means that every battle feels balanced with the numbers and you only feel overpowered if you have everyone more built out.
Looking at this whole game I just feel like it is built incredibly well, plays great on a steam deck, and has kept me interested and engaged all the way through a NG mode. It's the final fantasy tactics successor of a game that I was looking for that I hadn't quite found with other tactic game entries.
In the end I guess if you do not want to sit through rounds of dialog scenes, voting, investigation (walking around the map), and then finally combat, it probably will drive you nuts. There is a fastfoward button that lets you skip non-interesting parts, but it does take a bit before arriving at combat. That said, I enjoyed all of that myself, and it had me pretty hyped up to play each map. If I felt fatigued by dialog I would just do practice battles to level up for some distractions that session
Also on the side am playing through wyldermyth with a friend, we picked up the DLC and a few story mods and are making our way through the second campaign now. I had previously played through the first 4, but it was a long while ago. It's just as fun as ever, even though I do dislike one of the author's writing styles.
I finished my second BG3 playthrough. It took longer than the first because I was doing all the side quests I missed the first time around. The party at the end (which wasn't there yet the first time I finished it) was a nice touch. I was definitely ready for it to be over, though.
I'm now about an hour into Cocoon. It's a neat little puzzle game that feels like a cross between Tunic and a better Planet of Lana (the latter felt like it had potential but I found the puzzles disappointingly simplistic). I haven't the slightest idea what's going on plot-wise so far.
Armored Core VI! Had it in my interests for a while and got it on sale. It's... Okay? The movement is fun, and mastering bosses can feel satisfying some of the time. But the regular goons are all fodder, and some of the bosses just come down to getting lucky with your dodges it feels like. And the story so far is nothing to write home about, I'm about 80% of the way through and despite my love of scifi and robots I'm just not compelled by the generic feeling plot (weird space substance, morally evil corpos want them, you're a really cool and strong guy for no real given reason!)
I still enjoy it, and I'll finish it, and I love the robots and the cool tech. But I guess I was hoping for more
(the) Gnorp Apologue
Picked up and finished this cute little incremental this week.
Steam description: "(the) Gnorp Apologue is the journey of the gnorps as you guide them towards their goal of delightfully excessive wealth accumulation.
Like all incremental, you move from collecting individual rock shards to hundreds of millions of shards per minute. The numbers go to billions when it ends, though, so nowhere near as gruelling as say, Cookie Clicker. More akin to Universal Paperclip in terms of length.
Features prestige and variable builds: each prestige you freely re-allocate skill point to try a new strategy, which may only meet a short term goal instead of the end game, and that's okay. Synergy is emphasized rather than sheer time spent.
What sets this one apart is all of little cute details: the excitement of your rifle gnorps when they get their first gun; the little frowny mountain buddy gnorps who were told mountain climbing would be fun (it is not); the pursuit for the little crowns; how you can watch the entire process from garden fruits to barf on a rock; the mini saga of the sword in the stone..... Cute cute cute.