About equivalently Greek
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I died partway through what’s gotta be the first actual mission I’ve done since the second mission in Breakpoint, where I had to investigate a noise coming from a cave.
I died in said cave (turns out that, yeah, you can toss C4, but sorta just one - the button you hold to detonate it is the same one you hold to chuck it - great stuff), spawning outside of it followed like, ten seconds later by all the drones outside that I had blown up earlier, causing a whole mess of them and some dudes and a helicopter to chase me into a tiny spot between some boulders, where I, uh, took them all out?
Anyway the mission ends up with you taking on two small tank-ish drones, which can’t go through a chokepoint in the cave and instead desperately shoot grenades that obscure your vision at you and sometimes shoot you.
My reward for all this was some guy saying “Oh hey, thanks, the noise is gone.”
Also on my way back I shot a tiny drone that flew overhead and it dropped a sniper rifle?
Later I tried to snipe a heavy. It didn’t go great (several shots to the head with a sniper rifle didn’t take him out!), but the guy my drone identified as “The Bag Man” hopped into a humvee and ran him over, killing him.
What a dumb, great game.
i watched a pal play slay the spire, a game i had paid no attention to previously and thought ‘oh wow, let me in on this’
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It’s extremely unassuming until you actually see it in action and then suddenly you understand why people get sucked in
what people mean when they say “slay the spire”:
what i think people are talking about when they say “slay the spire”:
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This is the second time today someone mentioned Slay the Spire, is it really just Dream Quest with some… desktop juice??
edit I just bought another rogue like deck builder so I’m not getting a third one just this minute to compare and contrast
i got the ultimate alliance 3 dlc. blade and morbius are a lot of fun to play. moon knight i have not tried yet, and fuck the punisher he sucks and i’ll never play as him. a good thing about the dlc is that because blade and morbius are in the midnight sons, i can finally use ghost rider and else bloodstone without having to lug around the less good members (scarlet witch and dr. strange are not good characters to play). i put venom on the team because he matches and looks cool.
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It’s pretty different in terms of design. Dream Quest has a higher emphasis on pure deckbuilding and flexibility and map routing strategy.
A lot of deck building choices in Slay the Spire are driven by passive abilities that you gain over the course of the game which changes the relative value of certain cards from run to run. It also has a higher emphasis on building combo decks that excel at one thing rather than the generalist decks you tend to build in Dream Quest to handle monsters that directly counter your main strategy.
Slay the Spire’s map is more of a tree and you don’t have abilities that affect the map, so the routing feels much more linear. You can’t see what monsters you’ll fight on the map (other than the general categories of “elite” or “normal”). There’s no XP so you’re not having to fight enemies in a certain order to time a level up correctly or route to time ability cooldowns.
Classes in Slay the Spire are set up more like Hearthstone classes; each one has access unique cards, but they all also have access to a pool of “common” cards that can be used by any class. Afaik in Dream Quest every class has access to every card, but they show up in different frequencies.
The enemies in Dream Quest are very similar to the player in that they also have a deck and play cards. The enemies in Slay the Spire carry out different actions every turn, and there is no backing deck of cards to constrain or define these actions. They do, however, fuzzily announce the actions they intend to do next turn, which helps the player know when to try to play their current hand for attack or defense or buffs or whatever.
They’re pretty different games and I think playing a lot of one wouldn’t necessarily preclude your enjoyment of the other (although you may certainly have preferences for certain mechanics in either direction). I enjoy both!
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Thanks, that’s really helpful.
The card frequencies in DQ are hard to intuit, I’ve never seen a Soul Steal outside of the Necromancer’s starting deck, or a Backstab during a magic-user run.
I think the card selection pool is custom per character + the common pool of unlocked cards, and frequency is weighted by your deck contents. I know that each floor has a seperate pool, and certain cards only get added if you have lower-tier versions of the card in your deck when you start the level (e.g. Prayer of Wrath adds Curse of Doom on floor two).
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I beat Father Gascoigne for the first time ever. I couldn’t beat him at launch and when I tried to get back into it a couple years ago but I got the urge to play again for Halloween and it took me about ten tries buy I got it eventually without cheesing firebombs.
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…as somebody past Ascension 15 on five characters, I have to protest this a fair bit, even if you don’t intend to present Spire as worse.
Serious combos (i.e infinites) are deeply inconsistent past early difficulty levels due to the cumulative stressors on proceeding at all making it difficult to narrow decks down to such. There are few hard-counter encounters, but the consistent difficulty spikes and power levels past A10 leaves a serious macro balancing act between keeping synergies, sufficient card selection, and the six needs of [burst | scaling] [single-target offense | multi-target offense | defense]. Past A15 or with Act 4 this sort of wilts because synergies themselves start getting centralized, but I can forgive a game struggling to keep coherency at the [15+ wins on one character] point.
Also, commons aren’t shared between classes- that’s the shared neutral cards that are rarer than character cards and exist solely in shops / events, and they’re about 15% relevant to any run. Routing isn’t about producing specific plans, but being able to intuit what one can manage based on one’s deck and what one would gamble for based on passives collection also decides runs pretty hard.
(…most significantly, that fact that enemies in Dream Quest play counter-deck results in significantly more RNG and less per-turn decisions than Spire’s forecast’d enemy patterns, strangely enough, because by default you draw more in Spire and face generally consistent + varied heavy demands for that single / multi burst / scaling & defense.)
(…I may be slowly iterating upon my own deckbuilder roguelike and would argue a lot more in Spire’s direction than most others. Perhaps this should have it’s own thread.)
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Yeah, I haven’t played Slay the Spire’s post game enough to comment on it, but I doubt I’d disagree with what you’re saying if I did. It doesn’t surprise me that steadily increasing the difficulty makes planning and deck generalization more important.
And yeah, the RNG for the map in Dream Quest is a product of hidden information and fog of war, while the RNG for the map in Slay the Spire is the fuzziness of which exact event or enemy you’ll get on a given node. Routing in Dream Quest feel more like a series of puzzles or short-term tactical decisions, while routing in Slay the Spire is a generalized strategic decision.
I think Slay the Spire is probably the more balanced game, but the unbalanced nature of Dream Quest is kind of appealing to me too. Dream Quest feels more like a physical board game to me, and Slay the Spire a video game with “modern” sensibilities. The passives in Slay the Spire put a large emphasis on side effects and incremental advantages, and while that likely raises the skill cap quite a bit, I find it A Bit Much sometimes!
That said, I do like both games quite a bit and they’re fun to compare and contrast!
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I had the same issue. After gazza the rest of the game is yours.
Just a handful more Riddler challenges to complete and I’ll have swept up the last, whiniest, least consequential supervillain in Gotham. Then it’ll be onto the side-story DLC’s and then, who knows.
Overall, I’ve really enjoyed Arkham Knight, performance has been the same as Arkham City but with a slightly lower CTD-per-hour ratio. The gadgets and stealth segments have been the best in the series IMO, and the camera has been a fair bit less of a pain than it was in the last couple games, for most part. Targeting for quick-use gadgets can be a bit fiddly, though. The post-game, with everyone but the Riddler squared away, though, ehh… that gets to be a bit of a drag. The only “enemies” are the rioters (AKA, the folks Gotham didn’t bus out when this portion of the city was evacuated), and uh, yeah, a dozen or so folks that stand less than no chance against the Bat is not exactly the most compelling challenge.
Kinda hoping New Game+ does more than turn up the damage. I know in Arkham City it messed with enemy comps pretty aggressively, throwing more and wider varieties of armed enemies at you much sooner than the initial play through.
On the Warframe front I’ve gotten to play co-op a bit on and off with my brother over the last week or so and that’s been pretty great fun. The amount of things you can do when you’re able to coordinate and have warframes that play off eachother well is just a blast.
Well, the on part has been fun. The co-op with randos has run the gamut from “I’m just gonna take a nap while the aimbot-frames clear the map to all points of the compass” to “Oh, my whole team has decided to abandon me after an Interception mission on the new Jupiter Interception map had a bit of a rocky start and we won the first round with a 40% progression difference instead of the 80%+ that you see on older maps with simpler enemies and far lower spawn rates and totals.”
One player crashed, the host bailed on the run, the first round completed, and then the Ash noped on out leaving me to figure out how I’m gonna manage. Turns out, just fine. Gauss is a goddamn powerhouse and don’t buy for a second anyone telling you otherwise. Also of note, that Jupiter maps scale enemies numbers and spawn rates much more aggressively with additional players than older maps. Something to keep in mind with upcoming redesign of the Corpus ship tilesets.
Hmm, oh, I guess I should post a couple pics of Gauss I used on that sortie. I used a pretty simple loadout since I didn’t really feel a need to fiddle with two ranged weapons as I was going to primarily use melee anyways. This a bit different a color scheme than normal. Was trying for a look similar to the Gundam Barbatos, but limitations on color palette and the way everything is broken up kinda lead me a bit off the mark. Still pretty happy with the way it turned out, mostly.
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I haven’t played the original but killer queen black is great
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the original is only in arcades and it’s very very good. perfect arcade party game
So a secret demo for The Devil’s Calculator was released on steam a few days back, stealth in that it appeared on the new release list that only I check but there is no button for it on the store page so the only way to DL it is to type in a specific address into your browser (it is steam://install/1023820/ if anyone wants to try it). It seemed interesting and was one of my random game names (that RPS then mentioned later that week) so I figured it’d be worth giving a shot.
The demo is the first 20 stages out of 100, the goal in each of them being to get the calculator to calculate the number 666. If you notice there is no buttons for traditional operations such as addition or subtraction, just those odd symbols (in the demo there was only one of them, apparently you get two more later on). The thing is that the button does a different thing each stage. It may double it, or subtract 3 from every number you type out (i.e. 789 becomes 456), figuring it out is the bulk of the puzzle. Also at certain points certain buttons are covered in flames which means you can’t press them, which means you also have to figure out how to enter a certain number that you can’t normally type in directly.
I like puzzles, and I like numbers, but this was just a bit too much for me. I liked the thought of looking for patterns and trying to use that to figure out how to get to the ideal number but it quickly advanced beyond that to advanced mathematical notions beyond what I can easily recall. A button takes you to a graphing site that I assume can help, but again it is a bit more than I could handle. I wonder if someone with more advanced math knowledge would be able to mine more enjoyment out of it, but I personally had to tap out by the 16th stage.
So yeah, good concept but requires legit math knowledge.
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Except, and this is super bullshit to me, it’s not always a math thing. One of the puzzles required you to figure out it was converting Fahrenheit to Celsius (or maybe the other way around?) and I thought that was total bullshit. I tried to carry on after a while, but I got lost pretty fast after that puzzle.
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More Breakpoint stuff let’s see let’s see.
I guess the promise of the game was that 1) you are all alone out there and 2) rather than your buddies always smarting off alongside you and announcing what seat they’re taking on the chopper, you’d get some drone companions.
As far as I can tell, both of those didn’t pan out. Almost every few hundred feet there’s either some sort of enemy patrol, or a bunch of people standing around complaining next to a motorcycle. You can sorta walk up and scare the shit out of those people, who will then tell you where a fish factory or something is.
Ubisoft swears they’re gonna add AI companions to the game, which, boo no, it’s more fun to go at this alone. Sadly though, you don’t exactly get a little pet army of drones. Instead, there are disposable, single use drones that you can deploy (they zoom off and I guess, uh, hover around the enemy? Like a bee or something?) so long as you have momentary, direct line of sight of an enemy, and they function more or less like your crew in Wildlands did, firing on your command or shooting when you shoot.
It’s a weird, busted game (I used those drones to kill an elite patrol, and then couldn’t pick up the juicy shit they dropped since I’d get stuck in a looting animation loop), and the loot system kinda sucks (gotta hold onto these, uh, under-leveled boots, because they boost my XP gain 5%), but I’m having a better time of it than I did with Wildlands.
During the Typhoon I played through most of Shovel Knight’s Specter Knight. I think I liked it more than Shovel? Wall run and jump slash remind me of the messenger. It is thankfully no where near as demanding as The Messenger.
For all the charm and work there is still something off about Shovel Knight. In Specter knight you start filling up your hub with the game’s enemies who all say something cute. I should love this excessive work.
They mark all the secret rooms so you aren’t hitting every wall.
The music is good even if I also simultaneously think it is trying to hard and I couldn’t hum a single one and wasn’t considering any of them the second the stage was done.
Jake Kaufman maybe uses the King Hippo noise a little too much.
Still can’t figure out if I even have an opinion about Shovel Knight.
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