these fuckers.
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Its mostly about exploration/emergent story stuff right now but I have a couple narrative threads to pursue. I have three possible factions I want to investigate: interning with some community minded socialists, joining up with a bunch of egoist libertines in the desert or joining a band of priests going out and doing good deeds. I also know that there’s a leyline under the conflux mountain that if I manage to survive my way into I will be able to permanently trade some health and stamina for the ability to do magic.
There are bosses from what I know, and the areas outside the starting region definitely have more dangerous enemies like manticores.
I am taking it slow because my character is way more fragile than what I might encounter out there.
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Just like with the Dragon Quest XI demo, I could neither bring myself to explore nor leave the first town in the Bravely Default II demo. I guess I don’t much care for JRPG towns anymore, and I dislike free roaming, symbol-based encounters more than I dislike random encounters.
Somehow the music and visuals and then ultimately the battle system carried me through the Octopath Traveller demo. But there was so much story, and I didn’t care for any of it, so that was enough for me.
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sounds like y’all need the barely produced jank of Trials of Mana
which version? take your pick, the combat’s still going to be kind of janky and the script is still going to be ridiculous but it still comes together somehow (though honestly having the camera close-up looking at stock animations going off on models just makes things even more JRPG than the pantomiming of pixel art)
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1st day of my 1st Fall in Stardew Valley and I have one half-assed patch of cultivated land, I finally just built a grain silo, I have no relationships with the townspeople other than transactions and my savings are very modest.
However I have already reached level 100 in the mines and I’m like 2/3 done with finding all the artifacts for the museum guy. I may also be about to start pursuing lobster pots as a source of income in earnest.
I should probably quit this game I don’t think it’s good for my well-being.
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i finished the main set of levels in Molek-Syntez !!
most of my time with Zachtronics games has been watching them and assuming they would be too hard for me, but i got through this one fine. is this a particularly easy one? with the real challenge being optimisation and the extra set of levels?
anyway, here’s ketamine:
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select button
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In my experience, Molek-Syntez is actually the most difficult of the bunch, due to the heightened abstraction and some weirdness about how hydrogens and bonds behave.
I still want a sequel to Constructor
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*picks up guitar*
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i think being able to lay out all the indivual atoms and then just work on connections makes sense for how i think about most things, rather than the actual coding style/logic that seems to be in earlier games.
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Played some Crash 2 in the trilogy remaster for PS4 because I don’t have energy to play anything more complicated these days and 2 worlds in, I think this is probably the best executed of the trilogy. It feels tighter and with less frustrating bullshit in the level design (at least so far) compared to the other two. It gives me the good childhood DKC feels and it makes me happy in these depressing times.
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Oh no, it’s absolutely still janky. I never got to try the Predator in the beta, but in the tutorial (which is only available for the Predator?) it feels…hmm. Very much like a, uh, B-game platform character that dies from shitty slippery controls?
Button mapping seems bizarre, and there’s no tutorial for how to play as the fireteam (there’s not much to it, but anything would help!). At least as that half of the game goes, moving around and shooting feels better than it did than the beta.
I dunno! This is my curse. Just a big soft spot for weird, broken licensed games. Probably from only having Sonic 2 and Jurassic Park on the Genesis for years as a kid.
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thank you for your service
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Okay, I have this… bad habit where I either overlook important parts of a game or make just the exact wrong decisions at the worst time and let me tell you about how I’m doing in Deus Ex
Spoilers for a 20 year old game follow, please don’t spoil anything that comes after for me thanks!
The fourth or so mission involves you finding your “traitor” brother Paul and him asking you to go look up some info he dug up about the group you work for that supposedly show that they are bad. I find it but decide “eh this looks bad, but the other group are terrorists and I’d rather not side with them”. I go to Paul and tell him this, and while disappointed he respects this decision and we decide to go our own ways. The thing is that I could not actually find a way to progress the game after this. The guy with the copter is waiting for you at Battery Park, which requires taking the subway which is locked behind a door tied to an unhackable code box.
I decided to force the issue by just killing Paul as this is Deus Ex, a game I’ve heard talked up for years about respecting the player who takes the path less traveled and that you can’t really break narratively, that accounts for everything. It turns out that either Paul is invincible or has absurdly high HP as I emptied every explosive round I had into him and it wasn’t enough. I tried to blow up the door to the subway but it is also invincible (the lady standing next to it was sadly not). I looked up a couple walkthroughs and they all took the “side with Paul” path, but one of them had the passcode to the subway written down.
I got on the subway, got off at battery park and saw an augmented looking individual up ahead so I jumped into the airducts and took the back path up to the surface. One of my augmented associates saw me and ran up to the doorway I was trying to get out of. He blocked it not letting me get out and would not talk to me. Annoyed I went back down via the ducts to the subway and the augmented person down there is my lady coworker who also keeps running right at me and not talking to me. Still it was easy enough to walk around her and get back up to the surface, which has a lot of our soldiers standing around and every path blocked off by stuff just a hair too tall for me to jump over. I tried to blow a crate up and everyone shot me.
At this point I went and looked things up and apparently while the game gives you a choice there… there is only actually one path forward and that is deciding to listen to your brother and go betray the UN (either that or I need to google better). Perhaps this is just a side effect of hearing about the freedom offered by Deus Ex for well over a decade now but like… why have you be able to go back to Paul and have the convo about how “UNATCO has problems but I can’t side with terrorists” “Well I guess we have to go our separate ways now, I wish I could open your eyes to this”? I spent an hour running around in circles over this (separate from the hour I spent running in circles because that exploding barrel randomly didn’t blow up the generator) and like… I feel like I have managed to step on every possible rake in this game so far and am just going to assume that it is a straight linear game with one path and limited choice like every other not-hyped-for-decades game for the sake of my own sanity.
I swear I am at times the dumbest gamer in the world.
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I think one of the least intuitive things about Deus Ex is the way it makes it seem like there’s an alternate choice to siding with the NSF and there isn’t, it got cut in development. I remember the first time I played it as a kid I kind of ended up deciding to do what Paul said pretty arbitrarily. There is actually an interesting choice you can make on the plane with Lebedev though!
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yeah I believe it’s like the wing commander example broco gave a couple days ago where you can flip like one mission or two earlier than you have to, but you will eventually flip
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yeah you can basically decide if you’re for the people before UNATCO starts shooting at you or after. I wonder what an alternate path where JC is a low-rent hatchetman for the New World Order would be like
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Also a lot of Deus Ex can be explained by realizing the game’s initial scope was way, way larger than what actually got made. For instance it was originally designed to have 25 missions across a bunch more locations. Lots and lots of stuff got cut as they got further into development. There’s a 64 page design doc that got put up online a few years ago that’s really fascinating to thumb through.
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I do like how tight the final game feels though. It’s all pretty memorable.
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