12 Nov 2022
I’m .. not in a dry spell exactly, but between games at the moment. I’m deriving more value from working on imtg in my leisure time than I think I would be with any of the games available to me. Which, let’s be honest, really is all of them.
In the past year we justified purchases of a PS5 and an XBox S, and the justification was because we wanted to and we can. And that’s greedy to some extent but it isn’t as though we flew anywhere or even spent a night in a hotel anywhere. So there it is, we have them and enough discretionary money and time that if there is a game I want to play I can buy it and play it.
And I sure did. There’s a series of posts here up until the spring and I don’t remember everything that was said but I know I was talking about Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey. And then sometime shortly after that we got the PS5 and I played Horizon: Forbidden West, and the motorcycle gang post-apocalpytic open world thing. And Assassin’s Creed: whichever it was. Perhaps the best Assassin’s Creed game, though with its increased rpg-ish focus there are good arguments to be made for several others.
I guess best from a mechanics standpoint is the position I would take?
Several other games too but let’s see what I remember of what.
Forbidden West is a good game. It’s a fine extension of the story though battling humans who have altered themselves into effective gods stretches credulity even taking everything else in the setting as given. I did enjoy it and look forward to more adventures in the setting, futuristic gods and all. It will be hard to convince me that Aloy has reason for using bow and arrow now that force shields and laser guns and whatever are commonplace but the shelf on which I will suspend that disbelief is low and readily accessible.
The motorcycle one is Days Gone. I had to look up the name which is too bad. After playing it I looked up the developers and apparently there hasn’t been enough affection for the game and its world to get investment for continued stories there, but yet it is well-regarded enough by players of games for it to be in Sony’s Playstation Collection.
I just looked back at my most recent post and it was from February? The one prior was just before taking the new job. Which is good, mostly. I have a healthier relationship with it than I have my previous couple of positions I think.
Days Gone was an interesting premise in an interesting part of the world that I didn’t know much about. Also it’s basically a zombie game and they do continue to be the most interesting-to-me monster archetype. I am not the sort who gives things scores but I appreciate the nearly modern-day/recent post-apocalypse setting. I don’t play a ton of games where guns and explosives are the things, and those ones tend to be by Naughty Dog and it’s been quite a while.
I guess like, SF settings are gun games too but the approximation of realism was sort of novel to me given the amount of fantasy or far-future type games I gravitate towards. I will keep an eye open for whatever Bend Studio does next, though I probably won’t go back to play the Siphon Filter games.
I played a moderate amount of Hades and quite a bit of Spelunky 2 through much of that. I feel like I’m missing another AAA title but the one I can think of next is Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla. That one I did eventually remember.
I didn’t entirely follow the story. I know the modern-day story has become something of a boat anchor and this probably like mostly let them wrap it up maybe but I ended up going through a major story sequence late one weeknight when I should have been asleep and I couldn’t quite tie all the pieces together.
I certainly didn’t 100% it so there’s still a chance I could pick it up for an afternoon and do a couple more quests. I didn’t get far into the river raiding or the little roguelike game but all the major storyline quests and most of the blue dot things, events I think they were called? Definitely not all the gear, I basically kept the same set of armour and weapon through the entire game. I played on hard, whereas most of the games above I played on normal.
I wish I could enjoy games like these over longer periods of time. I don’t know if it is monotropism or what but I do attach to a single game at a time and I get very focused on working through the games without a ton of delay. I think something like this would be a different and ultimately more enjoyable experience to play at a harder level of difficulty, to think about gear and item use and skills more closely but also I think about all those things and it’s just so tiring.
I do believe that some of that perception of exhaustion is because there isn’t a good interface for these sorts of things and I guess imtg is something I’m doing to try to find that? I want to expose why the different items in the game have value and I do kind of want the choices about inventory and crafting and such to be intentional and consequential. I don’t want to speculate too much on that here however.
I played Kentucky Route Zero before Valhalla. I so deeply appreciate what they did but that same kind of “must get through this game” mentality is in deep conflict with what that game is. I adore that people are making spaces for slow exploration and thoughtful consideration and vague conclusions and I really enjoyed listening to the Eggplant: Secret Lives of Games podcast “Into the Depths” episodes about it and having the context to be able to do that. It was a game I worked through partly because of interest but also because it seemed academically important in its way. It is a notable entry in the canon? The songbook? It has resonance throughout the industry and there’s value in experiencing it for that purpose too.
I would like to be content with the experience of exploration in games. From a Bartle’s four types perspective, though I had to look the name up again. I suppose of the four I am most strongly an achiever. Completing a game is something that has value for me.
I played Tunic. It is a nice game that I wish I could attach to more. It has interesting mechanics and is a nice setting. I got blocked by a puzzle and then the PS5 arrived and I am not at all motivated to go back. I have several friends with similar experiences. I hope there is a Tunic 2 and that perhaps I am able to attach to it more.
I guess that is largely it, at least based on what’s currently installed on my consoles. There’s been bits and pieces here and there and I recently bought Cult of the Lamb but am letting my youngest child play through it first (via shared Steam library) and I have resumed doing a Spelunky run or two every few days as well but right now there isn’t anything available to me that, as I said, I would prefer to spend time on. I played an hour or so of Deathloop but I’m not sure I’ll get back to it.
A very solid year for games indeed. Few indies which is not super awesome. I’m hoping Cyberpunk 2077 or Last of Us Part II become available to me via one of the subscription services relatively soon but it will probably be a while before that happens. The only game I am anticipating buying and playing is the next Dragon Age.
Oh I played God of War! The viking one. That’s alright too.
16 Feb 2022
This post will contain spoilers for Spelunky 2, because I just beat the first ending. And that’s the first spoiler, there are multiple endings. There will be more, right after this paragraph.
I beat Tiamat for the first time tonight.
I’ve actually beaten Kingu already, so this isn’t the first ending I’ve gotten. That run was heavily coached by my then-eleven-year-old son although I did do the actual defeating by myself.
I’ve been playing Spelunky 2 regularly since it came out, though both of my kids got heavily into it well before I got truly sucked in to it. They two of them beat it together on the eldest’s account first, and then he refused to help the youngest in the same fashion on his account. Kind of a jerk move, eldest.
Youngest responded in the way youngests sometimes do: He got really fucking good at the game. Cosmic Ocean become a Constellation good. I’m probably better than eldest at the game at this point, but still nowhere near youngest’s skill.
I reached this point on the XBox version of the game. As previously posted here - I’m pretty sure, I didn’t actually verify - I got an XBox S after the PS4’s hard drive died in December. I have notions of replacing the drive but I’m not terribly certain I want to bother. There was a break for a while as the game wasn’t released on XBox until January 13th.
I’ve been playing pretty regularly since then, 2-3 runs a day typically. A few more some days, and none at all on others. It took a long time for me to defeat Olmec again, that only happened within the past week.
This was a very good run. I had an abundance of bombs through much of it, there was a clean drill to Vlaad’s and there was an easy alter on that same level so I got the Kapala quickly as well. I got Excalibur, won glue from the Dice House and mostly bombed my way through Neo Babylon.
I got Tiamat a couple of times with Excalibur I am pretty sure, then dropped it while teetering over the edge of a bubble. It took me a few bombs to realize that she was roaring them away. I don’t think I ever noticed that - for a while we were watching Twiggle regularly, and I remember seeing her roar but I didn’t understand everything that was happening. Also, Twiggle very rarely doesn’t cook his bombs properly.
So I started cooking them too, and a couple explosions later and there I was, not disappointing her. I played as Anna Spelunky, who is the only character I’ve played as thus far except for those times when I was passing the controller back and forth with Jon, who typically chose Roffy at that time. I was lawful, a queen, took my first damage on 1-3 which is pretty good, and survived death once.
I pilfered 257,725 (which is a paltry sum compared to what’s possible, I guess perhaps some gold and speed runs are in my future) and the run time was 00:25:16.766. Perhaps I will sort out how to embed a picture here:
02 Feb 2022
Today’s my last day at my current employer. I’ll have the hardware wiped and dropped off by noon, and I’m hoping to go to my preferred pho spot (which is a block from the office) but that nor’easter is finally hitting our part of the world and freezing rain and ice pellets have a good chance of starting between 11 and 12 so I might end up doing takeout which would still be delicious but not quite the experience I want.
The new gig is in a different part of town. It’s near a bougie commercial district called Belmont Village, adjacent to one of the nicer neighbourhoods. My parents’ place (which we moved to when I was in grade 2) is not too far from there and so I spent a lot of time in that part of the world. It was less bougie then, folks had mostly moved out of the urban cores and into suburbs during that period but that nicer part of town always has been so it’s never not been upscale.
There’s a lot of good restaurants, including a Thai place that has pho on the menu which is probably good, but it isn’t really a pho place. Y’know? And they don’t have chicken satay, but they do have a lemon grass chicken which I’m looking forward to trying.
There’s also a good Indian place which has been very absent from my diet in recent years and of course, Big John Subs. Big John Subs were a delicacy growing up. Belmont Village isn’t so close to that childhood home that it was where we would go regularly to spend time and money, we were much closer to Waterloo Town Square. But Big John’s was maybe a bike trip out on a summer day, the mythical sub shop in the distance.
There’s also a small collection of upscale places that maybe Jen and I can even go to for a quiet after work supper every now and then and better shopping options. Gifted, my favourite store that I’ve never actually been into, features lots of local artists.
Anyway, it will be nice to explore the updates to a neighbourhood I’ve been very familiar with, to jog some old memories and create some new ones.
I’m not super pleased with this particular post, there’s some nugget of a thought I’ve been trying to work out but it isn’t really happening. I want to mark the occasion though, so here it is.
24 Dec 2021
I am all over the place game-wise again. Still? I guess when amn’t I, anyway? Actually I often amn’t, flitting about between games is a newish habit in many ways.
I’m going further in Bard’s Tale. It’s a great game for a play session of almost any length, though it does get wearying after too long. I didn’t develop my magic users in the most effecient fashion - I had no idea that was something to do and I’m grateful for that ignorance in many ways - so a lot of my dungeon and tower exploring is still very repetitive.
I was telling Jon the other day that there’s so many great things in it and it still stands up as a relatively casual rpg in a lot of ways except that it doesn’t create shortcuts. But then I did a bit of reading and meta stuff, not too much and a lot of it is content that is in the manual but reading it on screen is not terribly enjoyable, and there are spells that help with it. I’m getting closer to them but still generally enjoy both the “run from as many fights as possible” to go deeper and explore more and the “everyone defend until Merlin casts Mind Blast” xp and gold grinding play styles that I seem to have embraced.
Inventory management in the game is relatively uninteresting. There’s increasingly good armour but the only way it can be acquired is through random drops. Armour class can get down to -50 apparently and my best one is somewhere around a -9 - the paladin I think - so it is all coming along fine but seeking through lists after list after list to see who can use what isn’t terribly appealing. Something for me to keep in mind.
I’ve started playing The Forgotten City on XBox. It’s Hi I’m Mark Brown and this is the Game Maker’s Toolkit’s game of the year and some folks on the eggplant discord said very good things about it and it’s part of the subscription I have so why not right? And it’s really strong. I’m early in it, and I started the game in Jen’s profile by accident so I had to do the intro stuff over but I’m now ready to start the investigation in earnest and I have a week off so this is likely to be a big part of my time.
And I still am getting a Hades run in here and there. Not a ton, it’s heavier to get into than Bard’s Tale and even though in theory it is possible to stop after one run, in reality I much prefer being able to do around 3, to get the dust off, to do really well, and to do poorly enough that I can feel like I’ve made progress and it’s a good place to stop.
12 Dec 2021
Okay, so I’ve been playing Hades lately, sort of. Quite a few things actually. Went for a spell without too much more than a few rounds of Spelunky 2 most days and a fair bit of effort into imtg but that’s settled a bit, in that the interface stuff I want to do next is bulky and I need to kind of gird myself to go into it a little bit.
Not bulky bad, like, really important. If there’s any entertainment in it the interface is the thing that will hide it the most.
This document was drafted a few weeks back as I struggled to think about the resistence I feel playing it. It’s not my style of game. It’s not an anti-style of game or whatever like, bad unenjoyable game types might be but I also am not sure I have crossed paths with any classification of video game that has no entries I would play. I’m sure it exists, I just haven’t crossed paths with it. Or I’ve forgotten about it.
But I think that as soon as there’s a enough games to be able to lump them together and slap a witty name on that collection of common attributes there’s got to be something in that group worth playing. Probably?
Hades is a procedurally generated game. I respect people who distinguish between roguelikes and -lites enough to not put either label on it because I haven’t thought enough about Berlin and I don’t want to look it up to make any kind of decision of my own. It’s RNG-based.
It is also a progression-style RNG-based game. On each run into the various realms of Hades, various items and currency and story unlocks are collected and can be spent or used or whatever to make the next run a little bit easier.
Hades does a really good job of maintaining pacing through the early progression. I am somewhere around 25 runs in and they have all been satisfactory from a progression perspective and every now and then there’s a big chunk of something or other allocated to me and it’s really impressive.
I’m sure there will be some boilerplate runs along the way and I don’t really know what my level of gaming ability is on the global scale but I am pretty good and so that might be why things haven’t gotten stale. There’s always something in the House of Hades that progresses.
I’ve only been using the sword so far, and today I made it to Elysium three times I think, and found the second and third fury, beating them both first try. Luck absolutely played a part, in the fights themselves and of course in the kit I had when I got there.
The thing about progression games that I don’t like is pretty boring and trite and I think probably one of the most frequent negative comments about progression games and that is that it is - maybe not impossible, people can do some pretty amazing things, so let’s just go with extraordinarily difficult - to complete it out of the box.
Spelunky 2 isn’t available on XBox, so when I do end up picking it up again I’m not going to make it super far but a top tier player like Twiggle or something like that can, from a fresh install, make it all the way through with the same likelihood as he gets on his own system. That’s just the nature of the game.
I took a break from Hades to play through Control finally. It was very enjoyable, but after finishing the game I didn’t go back to finish all the side quests, nor did I download the DLC. Perhaps someday? I’ll be very excited when a sequel arrives.
I decided to give The Bard’s Tale Trilogy a try, expecting to drop out of it after half an hour. 10 hours or so later, and I’m much further than I got when playing with a friend when we were children although I think we did better than I remembered us doing. I started with the A-Team, a pre-built party that has some high quality starting equipment, not a fresh party build and that’s probably a big part of it. A lot less punishing out of the gate. I have beaten all the statues, drank some wine, learned the Mad God’s name, and gotten kicked out of Magrin’s tower and I honestly think that we got that far way back then, too.
I’m not sure if I’ll go back in. I probably will, but I’m on the edge of abandoning it. There’s really good features like automapping but it’s a lot of go down go down go up go up, and I’m not sure if I screwed myself over getting one of my mages to Conjurer level 7 to get the teleporty spell. Maybe it’s available in other ways as well, I guess perhaps I’ll find out.