random games

[ganonfloyd]

heard nothing but good things about that game

I didn't know there were bosses oops now I feel compelled to try it.

[Random]

Yeah man. They're not like Dark Souls fights, mind. It's you versus a beefier enemy mech, and maybe they have some lackey mechs supporting, and the character is just talking trash at you the whole time (and throughout the level leading up to the fight), but it's good fun. If you can grab the game for cheap (they typically give it away during any kind of sale), I think it's worth a jaunt.

[Random]

I'm struck, thinking back over it, by how none of the Americas depicted in the game actually exist.

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2020/02/death-stranding-and-america.html

Good piece that talks about this.

[Random]

Failed to mention it in here, but last week I played through Manifold Garden. It's a first-person puzzle game in the vein of Antichamber or Portal where you're exploring a fractaline space. You can at any moment change the orientation of gravity, and if you walk off the edge of a platform, you will fall until you land back on the same platform. There's other puzzle mechanics that are introduced over the course of the game.

The objective is to find seven seeds and then plant them in order to, I guess, grow the garden. There's a weird rot or corruption that shows up in certain places, and solving puzzles dispels that. The game is pretty linear, though there were hints of secrets that I was not very good at following up on. One room I saw but couldn't figure out how to get into. Another room I found accidentally but then wandered out of it and couldn't figure out how to get back.

Pretty cool experience overall, but I don't think it's one I'll be thinking about in the long run. Sometimes it's just cool to do wacky stuff with physics. Also it had surprisingly good sound design for a game in that style.


I didn't really play much over the weekend. Spent a lot of time kinda zoning out, honestly. I'm still trying to write up a blog post on all the games I played in 2019, and I did make some more progress on that.

Also, after Floyd and I emerged bloodied from Yahar'gul, I went back in and ran through Nightmare Frontier by myself the next night. I figure we were probably going to skip over it at this point, and I wanted to confirm there's not really anything worth having there. It's definitely a breeze at this point in the game, and you can tell you're meant to go there sooner based on all the lower-level upgrade materials you get. There are a bunch of decent defensive runes, but other than that, it's a justified time-save to not bother.

I had a satisfying kill on Amygdala, though. Got through the fight almost unscathed, and when the boss was low enough health, I shot it several times in the head to stagger it and then finished with a visceral.

[ganonfloyd]

i greatly appreciate you confirming nightmare frontier is not worth doing honestly

[Random]

The fewer Winter Lanterns we have to face, the better.

[Random]

A friend and I played a couple rounds of Apex Legends last night, intending to just dip back in, get our sea legs back, and learn some of the new map. Instead we ended up winning two out of three games we played. I unlocked Wattson using the in-game currency I never used to get Caustic, and I had fun with her? She's a less-aggressive, more static hero that kinda fits with how I play a lot of the time, but I'll have to learn more about how to place her walls, as well as get faster at doing them.

Winning was unexpected. I felt like I was flailing at several points, but we also had some good luck with third parties and just not running into too many people until the late game. Wattson is particularly strong at that point because her ult lets you fortify a location and avoid grenades and bombardments.

Maybe our MMR was just generous. Either way. Apex. It's a good game.

[Random]

was reading through some of the posts from my Dark Souls playthrough, on a whim

man I have come a long way since I picked up those games in 2014

I can't believe I got a Black Knight Halberd to drop and never used it

[ganonfloyd]

I'm pretty sure I got a Black Knight Sword drop on my first run. Good memories.

[Random]

I had one of those, too, by the end. It's what I used to kill Kalameet. I just did a ton of grinding clearly, the kind of stuff I'd never bother with now.

[Random]

Finished Act II of KRZ last night. I want to sit down and play each of the last three acts straight through rather than awkwardly subdividing them as I have the first ones. Game continues to be good.

On recommendation from a friend, I booted up Rime last night after noticing that it was in my PS Plus library. This game really wants to be Studio Japan meets Studio Ghibli, with a little bit of Journey sprinkled in. It's got the slightly jank controls of the former and the scale combined with gorgeous music of the latter, though some of the visuals are a little inconsistent. The boy's facial expressions just don't exactly measure up to the emotions it's trying to convey.

The game is also surprisingly choppy, which is unfortunate. It's odd where it happens, too. Like I might expect the framerate to dip when I'm climbing up a big set piece windmill thing, but instead it just tanks when I'm running down a hallway without much going on.

I think I'm about halfway through, so I'll probably wrap that up tonight or this weekend.

[Random]

I've been playing a lot of Apex in the past couple of weeks, but I did find time to finish Rime. I appreciate how personal the game feels, though the music I think does a lot of the emotional work. Glad to have played it, but also glad I didn't pay for it.

[Random]

Played through Donut County this weekend. I was neither terribly impressed nor amused. The puzzle solving is rudimentary, the music gets obnoxious quickly, and it seems like they ran out of jokes for the Trashopedia entries early on. Also pretty frustrating when there's only one thing left on the screen, but it's awkwardly proportioned and keeps popping out of the hole.

[ganonfloyd]

How's Blasphemous been? I've seen it pop up when you're playing it on Switch and it looks neat.

[Random]

I beat it last night, actually.

It's good. The art is pretty amazing, and the combat feels nice and weighty. The Penitent One's dodge move is probably the best feeling thing in the game, especially when you find stuff that lets you improve it. And the sword feels nice and slice-y (compared with the thwack-iness of Hollow Knight), especially after parrying.

The sword needs to be good because Prayers (magic attacks) are all pretty bad. They all have so much windup that most enemies or bosses will interrupt you when you're trying to use them, and most of them don't have enough range to use from a safe distance.

The game is a Metroidvania souls-like similar to Hollow Knight, but the death mechanic is less punishing. You drop a fragment of guilt upon death, and until you collect it, your mana bar is shortened, your mana buildup is reduced, and you get less currency from killing enemies. You can also drop multiple fragments, so the mana bar can get shorter and shorter upon subsequent death. Even so, you don't lose any of the money you had, and if your guilt is in an annoying place, you can go pay a Confessor statue to recover it for you.

The difficulty curve feels similar to Dark Souls, too. There are three places you can go to start, and they're all doable, but I would say there is one direction that is easiest and I went there second.

One of my biggest beefs with the game is that there is no equivalent to the Firekeeper Soul/Undead Bone Shard, so while you find additional healing flasks, they always heal the same amount, even when your health is quadruple what you started with. Late game bosses deal huge chunks of damage, and if you want to recover you might have to use 5 flasks, all of which require a 2 second animation where you can't move. I found the best way to win was usually to avoid taking damage at all, and it's doable, but it leads to few of those satisfying scenarios where you eke out a win. Maybe to compensate for this, when you've fully upgraded the sword, it is stupidly strong, so I still wound up doing considerable damage every time I opened up the last boss.

There's a true ending that I don't think I would have discovered without looking it up. Also there's gonna be free DLC, so that's pretty cool. I would recommend the game.

also if I replayed this game it would be very different in some places because I did not learn until the final boss how to air combo. not sure if I missed a tutorial or what, but I didn't find out until I looked up what a certain item did.

Edit: Oh, another thing I'd ding it for is the music. There's a lot of nice Spanish-sounding guitar, but it feels pretty same-y after the third area.