Christmas 2021 Gaming Dump

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.