Recent-ish Games

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Just as a quick catch-up, here are some more specific comments on games I’ve played in the last year or so:

  • Vampire Survivors: This game was a bit of a craze for a while, and I was late to the party, but I got addicted to it for a while as well. With a bajillion things to unlock, it has that just-one-more-run quality that has you realizing that you sat down to play it for an hour and it’s been four… I finally shook it when I got to a point where I can just get near-infinite upgrade eggs and brute force past any challenge, but it was still a good 70-odd hours of fun to get there.
  • Super Lesbian Animal RPG: Despite what the name might make you think, this is a pretty wholesome (PG-13 at worst, for swearing) JRPG story about a group of LGBT friends trying to find their way as young adults, prove themselves, and work out their relationships, while saving the world from an ancient evil, of course.

    It’s an RPG Maker game, with the limitations that implies, but the author’s put a ton of effort into customizing it and fleshing out the setting, characters, UI, etc. with her own work, so it doesn’t really feel like one. There’s a bit of extra depth to the combat where you have to build up ‘star power’ points to use more powerful attacks, so you can’t just unleash all your best attacks at the start of the fight. Which can sometimes feel a bit tedious because that generally includes multi-target attacks, so you have to spend a turn just getting the points to use one of those… But it’s not too much of a problem because it’s not very grindy overall; the level cap is pretty low and you only fight monsters by running into them on the overworld.
  • LOGistICAL: Earth: A kind of puzzle game where you have to unlock industries and roads around the world by delivering goods from sources to places that want them. And when I mean world, I mean the whole world, as it covers 50,000 towns and 590 different industries. It’s hard to get a good sense of progression with this one; you start out focusing on a few small areas, trading resources and unlocking industries and all that, but you can’t really “complete” a region because there’s a deliberate global interconnectedness to everything that forces you to keep expanding and exploring to find new industries and routes because you can’t satisfy everything locally, but there are also barriers to keep you from exploring until you figure out the ‘puzzle’ to deliver what they need.

    I’ll play in a region until I reach a point where I feel stuck and then switch to another one I’ve unlocked, and I’ve gone through probably a pretty typical sequence, going through New Zealand, eastern Australia, Germany and Scandinavia, the western US, South Korea, North Korea, and the start of Russia. It’s starting to feel like I’m running out of options though, and that the key to progress is hidden in some singular town or road or something that I’m overlooking because there are ten thousand icons on-screen. There’s a spot in Russia where I could break out if I just had Bricks, but I only have access to one truck and some sand, but I could turn the sand to bricks if I build the Brickworks there, but to do that I need to raise an existing Brickworks to level 3 somewhere, which I could do in Germany, except for level 3 I need Machinery, and I do have Machineworks somewhere, but they need Engines as an input and I haven’t even discovered them yet so they’re in some other country and who knows when I’ll actually find them and when I do I don’t currently have a way to transport them to Germany… It’s…still fun in its own way, but it also feels like it’s constantly on the verge of “okay, that’s enough, had my fill of that”.
  • Kitsune Tails: Haven’t gotten very far in this one yet, but it’s a very cute take on a Super Mario World-like platformer. And either it’s surprisingly difficult in some places, or I’m just getting old…
  • Thank Goodness You’re Here: This one has been described as a ‘slap-em-up’, since that’s basically your only way to interact with the world, by running around and slapping things. It’s basically an extended British comedy sketch, centered around you “fixing” peoples’ problems. A bit short at 3 or so hours, but very funny and well worth it if you like that sort of thing.
  • Balatro: eh, it’s alright

Those actually aren’t the games where I’ve spent the most time, but those will really deserve posts of their own…

(No, seriously, Balatro didn’t really grab me in the same way everyone else seems to be obsessed with it. *shrug*)

Time To Dust

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Wow, this place is a bit out-of-date, huh? I kind of want to do a bit more writing, so it’s time to tidy it up a bit, I guess…

I can’t update with everything I’ve played since the last update, (as if I could even remember it all), but I can cover some of the major highlights:

  • I cancelled my WoW subscription, mainly over the reveal of the sexual harassment by high-ranking employees and the poor treatment of the workers in general. I thought that I’d return once they’d cleaned up their act, but it’s been several years now and…I don’t really feel an urge to return? I was just kind of spinning my wheels in it, just doing solo activities and tedious grinding, and I don’t really want to return to just doing that.

    That also means giving up Diablo IV, but I’ve been kind of curious about trying out Path of Exile instead. PoE2’s still in early access though, and I’d prefer to wait until it’s ‘done’.
  • I played a fair bit of modded Minecraft, in particular the Omnifactory and GTNH modpacks. Part of my Omnifactory journey was documented on Twitter, which I no longer use and I’m kind of loathe to link now due to…reasons, but if you’re curious, it starts here: https://x.com/halibutbarn/status/1413289134869737476

    I still play some GTNH now and then, but progress in it is a lot slower and it’s harder to find time for it.
  • I’ve done a bit of streaming on Twitch, but only something like 5 or 6 times now, mainly of No Man’s Sky and Minecraft. It’s kind of a weird feeling, though; I watch a whole lot of Twitch streams of other people, but I’m also kind of reluctant to stream myself because it feels invasive. Having other people spending their precious time on Earth watching you sets a certain amount of pressure on me to not waste that time, and makes me wonder if I’m up to the task. But it feels like something I should do just for the act of reaching out, like it would help to just talk and force me to articulate myself even if there’s almost nobody listening.

    I’d like to do more, but it’s surprisingly hard to find a block of time to specifically dedicate to it, with a plan of what to do, prepare the necessary tools, etc. If anyone’s curious, I can be found at: https://www.twitch.tv/halibutbarn/
  • The only new console I’ve gotten is a Switch, which I used to play a ton of Animal Crossing New Horizons, and…not much else. I haven’t really done much with the PS4 either, besides God of War and Disgaea, and I haven’t really been interested in a PS5 since there’s not much left that’s exclusive to it. I’m still a 99% PC gamer, really. Speaking of which…
  • My PC sucks now. The CPU is like 10 years old and the GPU is 6 years old, and I’ve had a couple of hard drive failures that have forced me to smaller and smaller drives so I’m now running off of an ’emergency install’ on an old 1TB spinning disk. I’ve been putting off buying a new system for too long, and now I’m tempted to delay it even further with the mess that the release of the new Nvidia 50×0 card has been, and the AMD cards aren’t out yet and…

    I normally assemble my own systems, but I’m tempted to just grab a prebuilt and call it a day, except when I look through the listings I always find some kind of problem. “Not enough RAM.” “Too many LEDs.” “Not enough VRAM.” “That part’s a generation too old.” I know, I’m too picky…

If I can think of anything else I’ll put it in a new post, but for now, it’s essentially a fresh start, I guess!

Did I Or Didn’t I?

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I’ve been playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age and I’m right at the end, just running around cleaning up sidequests, hunts, high-end gear, etc. I couldn’t remember how deep into the endgame stuff I’d gotten when I played the PS2 original though, so out of curiosity I fired it up to take a look and they were actually pretty close: both 88 hours in, very similar gear, and I’m currently level 57 versus 59 in the old save.

And then something suddenly hit me: I’m not sure now if I actually finished the original FF12, even though if you’d asked me before today I’d have sworn that yeah, of course, it’s one of the few Final Fantasy games that I have actually completed! My old saves were certainly ready to finish the game, but none of them were in what I’d consider a ready-to-head-to-the-ending spot; the most recent saves were just off in random zones in the world where I’d been doing hunts, not even by any teleport stones or the airship that I’d typically park myself by for the ‘final’ save. I don’t even really remember the ending, though I’d have chalked that up to it just not being very memorable, but who knows now. So did I actually finish it and just not leave an obvious save file for it, or did I get so caught up in endgame stuff that I just plan forgot to actually finish the game? *shrug*

Whoops

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There are enough PS4-exclusive games that I’m interested in now that I finally caved and ordered a PS4 Pro about a week ago, and it’ll arrive on the 20th (it’s the God of War bundle).

But I only just realized something: I don’t have an audio path for it. With the previous gen consoles, they all had cables that broke out plain old RCA outputs, so my current system is built around that. It’s a digital world now though, but unfortunately for me, the HDMI goes straight into a computer monitor with no audio. The only other option on the PS4 is S/PDIF, so I guess I’m going to have to look for a converter!

I also spent some time today cleaning up the rat’s nest of wiring around my current setup so it’s easier to hook up once it arrives. This mainly meant yanking out the Xbox 360 and Wii entirely, as much as it pains me. I keep thinking of the games on them that I still have unfinished and intend to play one day (mainly Xenoblade on the Wii; Lost Odyssey, Nier, and Resonance of Fate on the 360), but honestly, I’d barely touched them in years. If I ever do get the urge to use them again, I have another old monitor I could use for an ad-hoc setup as needed.

I really need to just completely redo my “home theatre” setup from scratch, though. I’ve been using a 24″ computer monitor and PC speakers for over 10 years now and yeah, it could be better…

Time Flies

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Boy, it’s kind of embarrassing to have the posts on the front page cover a five-year span. I’ve had…issues, but that’s not for here.

I’ve certainly been playing games, but of them all, Minecraft still dominates a lot of my playtime. I hardly touch vanilla anymore, just modpacks nowadays, and over the last few years I’ve tried:

  • Age of Engineering: A gated progression pack, where you proceed through a series of ‘ages’ where each age unlocks a new tier of machines and you progress to the next tier by crafting a certain item. Each age depends on stuff produced by the previous age so you can’t really skip ages, and many recipes are changed to make mods more interdependent on each other and more difficult to make. Can get a bit grindy, but I actually stuck with it all the way through this one and ‘beat’ it by crafting the hardest item in the pack, a creative vending upgrade, at which point you basically have infinite resources. Even if my base kinda looks like a hot mess…
  • Sprout: I had high hopes for this one since it’s by the author of Regrowth, another really good modpack. It is very well-crafted, as all of the mods fit together well and create a nice, coherent world…but I couldn’t really get into it. I guess I was expecting something a bit more goal-oriented like Regrowth, but this one has only vague, nonessential quests.
  • Craft of the Titans: A challenge pack where your goal is to survive an extremely hostile world (lots of new and aggressive monster spawns, even in daylight) and eventually get strong enough to work your way through defeating various bosses. I eventually got tired of this one before beating all of them, but did make it fairly far.
  • Project Ozone 2: Also a challenge pack, though not as hostile (just the occasional blood moon) and with more intermixing between the mods. Did almost all of the quests in it aside from killing the Chaos Guardian, which I gave up on after a while.
  • All The Mods Expert: Anther progression pack with customized, more-difficult recipes where it takes quite a bit of effort just to get to the basic sets of machines like Ender IO furnaces and grinders. No real end goal to it, so I stopped after I had a base where most processing was almost fully automated.

There are a few other packs I’m tempted to try out, like Modern Skyblock 2, Divine Journey, and Forever Stranded, but I think I might be kinda sick of Minecraft, for a little while at least…

You Can’t Go Hearthstone Again

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I hadn’t played WoW in quite a while, but I wound up buying Legion in the recent Black Friday sale and have been working my way through Pandaria with my shadow priest (with xp disabled once I hit 90 so I don’t overlevel too much), and it’s been fun in that comfortably-scratches-an-old-itch sense, but I’m still feeling kind of unsatisfied overall.

I think that’s more on me than the game, though. For a while now I thought I’d just been temporarily “burned out” on MMOs and would eventually come back to them refreshed and ready to go again, much like other gaming genres at various times, but it just hasn’t happened. I think I just don’t have room in my life anymore for the social and time commitments for raiding and regular grouping, and past that, sure there are some new sights to see and new mechanics to play with here and there, but an awful lot of what’s left is just more bear ass collection and faction grinding.

And I could apply that equally well to Guild Wars 2, LOTRO, EQ2, etc. Sorry MMOs, you were fun while it lasted!

(Wish I’d realized that before buying expansions for some of these that I never even reached. :P )

Buyer’s Remorse

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So another Steam sale has come and gone and I bought a few too many games (as usual) and I haven’t really played many recently, so it’s time to start working through the backlog again…

Infested Planet: I’m not terribly good at RTSes, but this one is more up my alley. You’ve got a squad of soldiers on maps full of enemies and the goal is simple: eliminate them all. The tricky part is that you’ve only got a small handful of soldiers and there are massive numbers of those enemies constantly spawning from hives, so you have to plan out where to strike, proceed aggressively enough to push the enemy back but not so aggressively that you get overrun, protect your flank and bases so the enemy doesn’t take them back, buy the right upgrades for your current goal, etc. Enemy mutations can happen mid-battle so you suddenly have to adapt to something new, rethink your approach, and redeploy your resources. It gives you tons of choice and so far has let me proceed at pretty much my own pace, which I really like.

Super Amazing Wagon Adventure: Remember that old game Oregon Trail? Now imagine it as a scrolling shooter. With unicorn stampedes. And narwhals. And a whole bunch of other random, silly scenarios. It gets repetitive rather quickly, but it was only a buck and it’s great fun while it lasts.

GRID Autosport: A brand-new entry in the GRID series, this one leans more towards ‘serious’ racing. There’s not as much choice or career persistence as in something like Forza, but it’s nice to have a wider variety of racing disciplines (it includes endurance and open wheel races as well as the usual sports cars). I’m terrible at handling the RWD cars so far though; I just keep spinning out… I’d gotten kind of tired of GT6, so this should scratch my racing itch for a while.

Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons: An adventure game where you control two characters (the brothers) simultaneously, each one on a different analog stick, and many of the puzzles depend on coordinating the two. It’s really short and not very difficult, but it’s very well-done and moving. To say more would be spoilery, but it’s definitely recommended.

Last Chance To See

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Yeah, I’m behind again…

But I just recently realized that I still have some games that use Games For Windows Live, and that service is expected to shut down around July.  Not all of them have announced plans to patch that requirement out, so I’d better play them sometime soon, and that includes:

  • Dead Rising 2: Off The Record
  • Iron Brigade
  • Bulletstorm
  • Dark Souls
  • Red Faction: Guerrilla
  • DiRT 3
  • GTA IV + expansions
  • WH40K Dawn Of War II

The Batman Arkham games have already had it patched out, but the original GFWL versions are still available so I could play them just for the gamerscore, too… Eh, like I have that much free time. :P

Pre-2014

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And yes, I’d been playing a bunch of other stuff in the meantime.

Borderlands 2: Borderlands, but more of it and with a much better story and villain, and I was happy with that.  I’ve made it most of the way through TVHM with Axton and should get around to finishing that off at some point.  I’ve also done most of the DLC, except Hammerlock’s Big Hunt, which was a boring slog.  Not sure if I’ll have time for UVHM or trying other classes in the future.

Minecraft: Of course. The 1.6 release took a long time to stabilize for mods, so I’d been putting together and playing my own custom mod pack of it, tweaking it as mods were updated. The major mod packs are catching up now, but I think I’ll stick with my own custom one for now.

Gran Turismo 6: It’s an improvement in a bunch of ways, but it’s really what GT5 should have been in the first place. It fixes up a bunch of stuff (the menu system and career mode in particular), but doesn’t really do anything revolutionary, and still has a bunch of flaws (weak leaderboards, features delayed into future patches) so it feels fairly weak compared to hearing about the new stuff in, say, Forza 5. It’s about the best I’m going to get for now though, without an XBone or PS4.

Terraria: There was a big patch (1.2) that added a whole bunch of new stuff so I started a new world and character.  I haven’t really put much time into it yet though, so I haven’t really seen too much of that new stuff.

Animal Crossing New Leaf: I caved in and picked up a 3DS due to a tidal wave of games I was interested in last year (including Fire Emblem Awakening, Etrian Odyssey 4, and Shin Megami Tensei 4), but this is the one I’ve put the most time into by far. When granted municipal powers over animal people, I turn into an obsessive petty tyrant, apparently.

Ittle Dew: An indie Zelda clone.  Fairly simple and short, but it’s still fun and pretty cute.

Bit.Trip Presents…Runner2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien: One of those ‘continuous runner’ games where you can’t control the forward motion, just whether you jump, duck, kick, etc. Surprisingly difficult, but it’s satisfying when you finally nail a good run, and it’s still easier than the original Bit.Trip Runner game, which I gave up on in frustration.

Cookie Clicker: DON’T ASK.

MMO-wise, I finally registered Rift and gave it a try, but it didn’t really grab me.  I just haven’t been feeling the MMO urge for a while now, so I recently wound up cancelling all of the active subscriptions I still had going (Rift, EQ/EQ2, WoW, and LOTRO).  Maybe EQ Next will revive my interest, since it’s at least trying something different.

2014!

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As if nothing happened!

Okay, I blacked out for a bit during the holidays and when I woke up I had a whole bunch of new games in my Steam catalog, but we can deal with this, we can work through it…

Pac-Man Championship Edition DX+: This is…definitely not the Pac-Man I was used to.  This new edition has a whole bunch of different maps and modes and a lot of them are time-based instead of score-based, and the triggers that cause dots and fruits to appear vary, and there can be tons of ghosts, and sometimes the maps expands…

It actually works really well; the original Pac-Man was just about memorizing patterns, but in these variants you have to react to a changing board, think about what ghosts will be woken up by the path you take, consider how long you can go before resorting to a power pellet in an easy-to-get to place (but in very limited supply), look for shorter paths to reduce the time taken to get that next fruit, and so on.  It makes you face a whole bunch of different challenges at lightning-fast speed, but it doesn’t make it feel like an impossible task.  Even a scrub like me could survive the 5-minute time attack modes, the true humiliation not coming until discovering that my score ranking on the leaderboards was…lacking.

So yeah, it’s a fun, surprisingly well-designed update of a classic game.  And I’m not going to play it anymore.  As good as it is, it’s the kind of game that takes a lot of practice to perfect, and with my backlog, I just don’t have the time to spend replaying this over and over just to shave off a few seconds here and there.

Hammerwatch: This game has been described as Gauntlet-like, and that’s pretty apt; it’s top-down maze-navigating monster-killing with simple attacks as one of various classes. There are differences, of course. There’s a persistent stats/skill system that lets you improve your character as you progress.  The levels are enormous, so there’s more of a Diablo-ish feeling of exploration and there’ll be a ton of backtracking. There are ‘optional’ switch-hittin’ and button-pressin’ objectives on each floor, but the gold you find for upgrades is pretty tight, so you’ll probably want to make sure you do them anyway, leading to a lot of that backtracking. And if you’re prone to RSI, this game will murder your thumb (at least with the paladin that I’ve tried so far). You can carefully lure monsters in small packs, but there’s a combo system that really wants you to just dive in to masses of enemies and kill everything as quickly as possible, and there are a lot of enemies.

It’s been pretty fun so far, and I played a bit longer than expected due to that “just a little further…” effect, but I do wonder if it’ll start to get too repetitive and thumb-wrecking at some point. I’ve done one of four bosses so far, so I’ll keep going until at least the second boss.