a mod i recommend if you’re a beast race devotee like me is https://adul.net/?p=dl_mwmods_aduls_leggings which lets you turn boots into stylish leggings. really helpful if you want to play an argonian/khajit and not be arbitrarily locked out from using the boots of blinding speed because you have weird animal legs
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removing the restrictions from beast races is totally lame and one of the many small changes they made in later games that took a lot of character out of the world imo. i almost always play argonian and if you’re playing morrowind right you don’t need to rely on the boots of blinding speed anyway. it’s pretty trivial to make a cocktail of potions and spells that make you fly around the island at mach 2 for the rest of the game if you invest like 45 minutes into practicing alchemy (yet another reason why morrowind owns compared to the rest of the later TES games)
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So I finished up Monster Boy and there is a design choice right near the end that is just straight up unusual.
How the end-game unfolds spoilers:
The main thrust of the game is gathering up these magic orbs that allow you to transform into different animals and also should be able to reverse the curse on the kingdom. Shockingly after you gather them all up the main bad guy steals them and you end up having to go to his dark realm to kill him and save the kingdom. One of the first things you do is go up to statues representing your various animal forms, press square to enter them and play through a bit.trip looking section as said animal to regain the ability to transform into them. You do this a few times until you regain the ability to transform into every animal form except the pig, end up in front of a giant stone map that shows you the locations of all the golden sword and armor bits spread across the land that need to be gathered up and taken to a special blacksmith to forge said sword and maybe armor (which costs 1000 coins each, which I didn’t have so I had to go grind for 200 bucks after I gathered up the sword chunks). I warped back to the stone map, used the sword to cut through the black goo none of my other weapons could damage (yes, it was the final lock & key), got past some obstacles and faced off with the final boss which I eventually killed.
The end credits rolled and I never got the ability to transform into my pig form back. You have to attack orbs around the boss that represent each animal as said animal, then go through several boss phases each built around one of those animal forms… but none of them were for the pig form. It turns out that at the end of a hallway right past the door that takes you to all the other statues is a wall made up of that black goo that you can go back to and cut through to get to the pig statue, but it is fully off the path you are likely to be taking on your way to the end.
I do not know that I’ve ever played a game where you had to regain abilities or transformations or what have you at the end right before the boss where it decided that one of them would just be put off to the side in a random location, especially in a game with an end run built around using each of their unique abilities to conquer the big evil. The final third of the game had a good amount of padding so it couldn’t be for pacing reasons.
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Most of them were too piddling for me to even remember them, but that nu-Monster-Boy had a lot of micro-design-decisions that rubbed me the wrong way. I quit halfway through.
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Ah, the sword thing was just plain bullshit, reminded me of the end of Jet Force Gemini where they force you to go back and find every single Tribal. The game definitely would have benefited from being about one third as long as it is, and just cut all the padding and pointless treasure hunts
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Alright, after cleaning up all the basic game stuff I’ve finally moved onto the first, uh, kinda controversial DLC for Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.
I’ll spoiler it all in case anyone is itchin’ to play some DLC that hits like, 120 hours into a game of doing the same things for 120 hours.
The whole thing, split across three chapters, is kinda…eh. You meet the guy who may as well be the original Assassin (after Origins, the last game, technically designated its protagonists as the first assassins, but hey, whatever, sure), who brings along with him a whole 'nother cult to hunt down, this one dedicated to maintaining peace in Persia by doing fascism elsewhere, I guess?
That story, and how it pans out, is…eh. It’s OK. It’s not exactly thrilling. It feels like the story of the main game, reheated and condensed, with less intrigue.
Ah, but the controversy! The way the story shoehorns in a love interest and railroads you into having a kid with them, especially in the context of a game that prior to lets you play it as queer as you want, is problematic on its own.
What’s worse? What’s worse is - they’re really fucking boring. Natakas (Darius’s son, I guess his daughter takes his place if you’re playing as Alexios) is a soft spoken doe-eyed dweeb with about an ounce of the personality of the more fun characters who just sorta come and go throughout the main game, and your choice is either a wholly unearned/unbelievable romance with him, or being like, cruelly and weirdly cold and still fucking him in order to Maintain the Bloodline.
Naturally, they kill him off at the beginning of the third chapter, and your kid is kidnapped, so Kassandra goes raging across Greece trying to get revenge and her kid back. That, at least, is like halfway believable. When all’s said and done she ships her kid off, and down the line he’s the great-great-great-great-etc. grandpa of Aya, one of Origins two protagonists. So, uh, back to status quo, free to fuck around Greece from then on, in every sense.
At the risk of sounding like one of those weirdo militant child free reddit types (I’m not!), the domestication of such a fun adventurous character is just, uh, incredibly poorly done, all around. It’s not endearing or even so bad it’s good, it’s just hokey. At least you get some cool weapons out of it, I guess.
Anyway, it was lame, but now I can move onto the Atlantis stuff, which is apparently Actually Good (god I hope so anyway).
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I agree with the overall sentiment but there are so many other cool things later TES games dropped that are unique to morrowind that i felt okay dropping “inability to wear shoes” 
and i just like it when furries with weird beast legs wear stylish leggings
And for how cool alchemy is conceptually i have never been able to invest much time in doing it, because it bores the shit out of me. Meanwhile there’s a pair of boots that let me run fast right here, and a pair of pants that let me fly right over there, and we’re off to the races
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getting rid of weird argonian feet in later games annoys me more than it has any right to. my first mw character as a kid was an argonian i put 1k hours into, literally the most powerful man in the world, squatting in foryn gilnith’s shed with stacks of money and rare artifacts. i think the first time a game really broke my heart was when i got Oblivion for my birthday in 2006. it literally gave me disassociative depression as a 9 year old
yea I don’t really enjoy the process of alchemy in any TES game but morrowind allowing me to use my game knowledge to make powerful enough fortify intelligence potions to turn my brain into a supercomputer so i can make fortify speed potions that last 6 irl hours and let me outrun cell loading to such an extent i crash the game or phase through walls owns so hard in a way few other games have ever approached. i spend about an hour each playthrough doing alchemy so i’m set for the rest of the game which i appreciate a lot more than skyrim asking me to do it constantly
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played a little of bioshock 1 last night since the collection is free on ps+ this month. this really feels like the gaming equivalent of when everyone thought the christopher nolan batman movies were amazing, but then thought about the for more than two seconds and realized they were nonsense.
game gives me a weird feeling of sensory overload. just way too much “creepy” 1950s imagery and tWiStEd fReAks talking to themselves. i can’t stop and let myself appreciate the messages written in BLOOD and the audiologs because the boring enemies keep respawning.
the first big daddy fight was cool because it just kept trying to maul me to death unlike any other enemy i’ve come across. the subsequent ones just stood there and shot at me.
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i played Wide Ocean Big Jacket, which is very sweet and only an hour long. recommended! it’s on steam and the switch, maybe other places too. i initially thought the writing was Too Cute but i warmed to it.
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honestly since you got to the Big Daddy fight and got The Choice and now understand Bioshock, you should just skip on to 2, play through that and Minerva’s Den and then delete it before you entertain playing Infinite
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I have been wanting to replay Bioshock 2. I remember playing it when it first came out and suspecting that I liked it more than the original. A lot of people then wrote it off as a soulless sequel, which is unfair. It doesn’t surprise me to hear more and more people coming round to liking it. It plays better and just extends the setting of Rapture in very nice, elegant ways.
Not sure if it has better or worse characters than Bioshock. I remember a lot of silhouettes talking to me through glass or intercoms.
How the fuck do i unlock Lucrezia’s last weapon in Croixleur Sigma
never mnind effing finally jeez
Finished Grandia on the HD collection. Pretty great game but felt way too long, especially as the story transitioned away from coming-of-age adventure into fate of the world magical destiny stuff.
The HD version is missing subtitles in some key scenes at the end, including the epilogue, which is super annoying
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I was bored recently and remembered I had Bioshock sitting in my Steam library as well, having nosed into a bit some years back. Tried starting up again, and yeah, just not feeling it much. Levels aren’t interesting, forced “watch this thing” scripted scenes are too constant and perhaps most significantly, the shooting of things is simply not particularly engaging or enjoyable. Given how it seems the mood they were going for was, they probably should have gone full horror game rather than FPS.
Speaking of horror-y games, I picked up The Forest which really emphasizes the survival aspect of survival horror and have been lumberjacking away, when not being accosted by angry cannibals who apparently really don’t like you cutting down trees, so I guess they’re like super grunge Bosmer or something. Though apparently making some degree of peace is possible, and while I think I burned that bridge, not wrecking their head on a stick markers for easy rags and sticks seems to have calmed the local bunch down and I haven’t been bothered much the past few days. Though when I do tear some down, go away a bit and come back to find new ones stuck around, it almost reminds of when you find dead birds or rodents at the door left by your cat. Though I am curious if the things are actually actively placed by someone, since I’ve see numerous signs that stuff goes on outside your presence. Observation of shore patrols from a raft has made it clear that even outside of draw distance they keep moving along, as I will see groups traveling the same direction as me reappear further down shore some time after I passed them on. And sometimes I find corpses near my house, apparently the result of local conflict as the differing groups don’t all get along with each other and got into it while I was away.
Generally digging it but various little things niggle at me both functionally and thematically. Like I can fucking MacGyver bombs out of spare change, a wristwatch, and a bottle of whiskey, but apparently wrapping some booze soaked rags around the end of a stick to make a torch is beyond my capabilities and a Bic lighter as my only light source ATM. And sometimes get where some emphasis on the survival aspect is maybe done a bit to tedium, like some carrying limits make doing certain task annoying, and sometimes you have a forced animation for certain “long” actions, others you have to hold the use key for a second or two, but sometimes in some instances you get both and I thought the latter was generally done as an abstraction when you don’t do the former, stacking them just bugs me.
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I loved Grandia, though I haven’t played it in over a decade. I think because the game is somewhat linear, it really adds to the sense of adventure. I even think the English voices were good, which everyone seems to hate. I don’t know, I just totally bought into that 90s anime sweetheart dynamic between Justin and Feena that the English cast conveyed perfectly!? The ending where it cuts to credits right as they’re going to show adult Justin and Feena was such a copout though!!!
Anyway Grandia 2 sucks.
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Yeah the linearity helped the story move along at a good pace, but I think also bogged it down when it came to pacing between dungeons. It just started to feel like a long string of narrow corridors with unescapable monster encounters, punctuated by bosses and cutscenes.
I liked how it seemed to use the JRPG mechanics to symbolise the coming of age themes somewhat, like the adult characters who joined where always twice your level and way OP, Sue lags behind in levels because she’s a little kid etc
Lol I guess I’ll find out soon enough
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Tell us how you enjoy the footstep noise in Grandia 2.
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Grandia 2 is dope y’alls haters.
The battle system never asks as much as I wish it did.
Great english dub as well.
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