Recent-ish Games

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

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!