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As a final, parting nut shot on its way out the door, back to being a functional piece of tech again instead of a 15lbs, $1000+ paperweight, my computer went and took my save file for the game I mentioned on the previous page. Twas to be expected, what with fully installing Windows and all (and fucking twice no less, ffs I'm still so salty over this...), but even the Steam Cloud file I had for it also does not have the actual, relevant data for my savefile on hand (somehow, I guess, because why, at all, would a cloud based save file transfer system transfer the data that contained all my precious savefile data on it to the cloud for further transferring back at a later point in time, t'would be most unbecoming)
Over 50 hours alone on that particular savefile, done on permadeath (in a 'hard-mode' sequel to an already rather difficult and obtuse game), all while dodging the potholes and pitfalls of playing a game this janky and this early access that also does not have an autosave feature by design (even while not on permadeath mode or even in it's less demanding predecessor). Not only had I acquired all the necessary parts to, just a few parts shy of, a fully built exterior (just literally only missing the hood, literally had every other panel on including trunk lid a a brand new passenger door that not only was the correct year range for my personal car (post face lift with plastic handle and mirror), it fucking had the correct interior door trim panel color to match the rest of the (almost fully done no fucking less) interior, with one part shy of an equally matching set of seats to that same trim color (both front seats and rear bench, just needed the seat back for that rear bench. Fuck, I even managed to find one of those stupid little shelf pieces that sits under the main rear window glass in your standard car in the right color too).
Most importantly though, I was, finally, after trying forever on this file, finally started to grab all of the small, fiddly, and extremely necessary parts to actually put suspension and wheels on this bucket, and put togther the actual engine. Since Steam also doesn't actually save any screenshots you take (unless you literally post them online to Steam itself), so I can't even show you all any of the few pictures I did manage to take before to show what once was. While it was only the lowest, least luxurious base model available and post face lift (with the most pug ugly grille you ever saw), it was a lovely shade of baby blue from the factory, with a light tan interior with a 4 speed manual and radio.
Like, I fully signed on board for something like this to happen at some point (permadeath is a setting you can choose, and I chose it knowing the consequences very well), and the prospect of both losing hours, even days of progress to carelessness or recklessness, but...man...not like this...
Ah well, such is life I guess...
Easy Come, Easy Go...
See You Space Cowboy...
Over 50 hours alone on that particular savefile, done on permadeath (in a 'hard-mode' sequel to an already rather difficult and obtuse game), all while dodging the potholes and pitfalls of playing a game this janky and this early access that also does not have an autosave feature by design (even while not on permadeath mode or even in it's less demanding predecessor). Not only had I acquired all the necessary parts to, just a few parts shy of, a fully built exterior (just literally only missing the hood, literally had every other panel on including trunk lid a a brand new passenger door that not only was the correct year range for my personal car (post face lift with plastic handle and mirror), it fucking had the correct interior door trim panel color to match the rest of the (almost fully done no fucking less) interior, with one part shy of an equally matching set of seats to that same trim color (both front seats and rear bench, just needed the seat back for that rear bench. Fuck, I even managed to find one of those stupid little shelf pieces that sits under the main rear window glass in your standard car in the right color too).
Most importantly though, I was, finally, after trying forever on this file, finally started to grab all of the small, fiddly, and extremely necessary parts to actually put suspension and wheels on this bucket, and put togther the actual engine. Since Steam also doesn't actually save any screenshots you take (unless you literally post them online to Steam itself), so I can't even show you all any of the few pictures I did manage to take before to show what once was. While it was only the lowest, least luxurious base model available and post face lift (with the most pug ugly grille you ever saw), it was a lovely shade of baby blue from the factory, with a light tan interior with a 4 speed manual and radio.
Like, I fully signed on board for something like this to happen at some point (permadeath is a setting you can choose, and I chose it knowing the consequences very well), and the prospect of both losing hours, even days of progress to carelessness or recklessness, but...man...not like this...
Ah well, such is life I guess...
Easy Come, Easy Go...
See You Space Cowboy...
Some parting thoughts now that I'm 100% done with Silksong, at least until the DLC comes out (which, I'm not holding my breath - history says Team Cherry announces they're turning this DLC into another full game before the end of the year, then proceed to disappear for another six years):
- Unlike when replaying Hollow Knight, it's some ways into the game (back half of Act 2) before you feel like you're 100% back in full control of Hornet. It's getting Clawline for me. In both games you get the double jump relatively late, and in Silksong's case it's optional, but the way the areas are designed you rarely miss it.
- Playing for the first time felt a bit rough (the angle of pogo, the enemy hitboxes, Hornet being a tad too fast), but didn't have any problem snapping back into action and this was after playing another 22 games in between. So whatever goes into developing muscle memory is top notch here.
- I still think it's bad design that I have to fall back on backup saves to circumvent having to farm shards for tools whenever I'm stuck on a boss for too long. But this mostly wasn't an issue because the nature of the speedrun has you playing sans tools anyway.
- There's an impressive dose of sequence breaking available once you know what you're doing - more than half the map becomes optional if you're booking it to the finish line.
- The runbacks (or most of the infamously annoying bosses) aren't as bad as I remember them but again, easy said once you realize you can ignore most of the actual game until you're in the endgame and properly decked out.
- Speaking of annoying bosses, you can thankfully ignore Broodmother when going for 100%. You can also ignore 1 of the 4 Old Hearts in Act 3. I picked Khann, who's not a hard boss per se but is preceded by four gauntlets of bullshit, and you only unlock a shortcut between gauntlets 3 and 4.
- You can also ignore Watcher at the Edge, Shakra, Garmond and Tormented Trobbio.
- For the intents of "speedrunning" either achievement (under 5h, any% and under 30h, 100%) you're given a very generous time limit that allows plenty of death and faffing about. I could've let the console running for another 10 hours with Hornet left to idle and still popped the trophy.
- I still think TC shows a sadistic sense of humor by planting little speedbumps to inconvenience your own inertia, like how you always pop up on the most inconvenient side of a fast travel station, or how there's always some imperfection on the ground to break up a smooth run, or how many screens it takes to go from a checkpoint to reach the first enemy you can reliably farm for cash, and of course why are you only able to magnetize one of the two currencies you can carry (while the other typically falls off the edge of a platform).
- Yes, it's still bullshit that bosses don't drop anything. Hell even regular enemies in gauntlets don't drop anything. What's up with that.
- I really, really wish the last dmg upgrade wasn't locked behind three annoying minigames designed around either staying in the air or juggling things in the air.
- Cornifer is still a more fun map NPC than Shakra.
- Apr 1, 2009
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
- Apr 1, 2009
- 16,515
- 5,113
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
Been playing EU5 along with a friend, played quite a few paradox game but never played EU so sorta new to me (althought its not that different than other gran strategy entry). Pretty good starting point, but with a few big flaw. First, I know its in the title, but you really have to play as a european, to get new tech, they need to "spread" to you from a single location in the world where they spawn. That location is almost always in europe, so if you don't play as europe, you'll decades, if not century, behind in science, even getting to the point where you have nothing to research anymore.
Second, there's some system that are just too much, thankfully the game can automate a lot, but then too much become automated. Like, trade is insane to keep track of, its constantly changing as war, blockade and tech change what is available or in demand. So you have to automate it, but the automation is not very good so you still kinda want to do some manual trade, but its just not setup to let you do that. Similarly, you have to approve a ton of marriage, as teh game goes on, your court get bigger, and everyone will constantly ask you to marry them, this eventually becomes most of what you do. You can ignore them and they'll eventually marry, but very slowly and not always, which can led to the opposite problem of your court having too few people.
But otherwise I quite like the various system, unlike CK, you can control as many territory as you want, but with the caveat that further territory yield very little, insensitivising you to make vassal (unfortunately they give you very little back and are more useful as a way to convert the territory to your religion/culture, so that you can later re absorb it).
Second, there's some system that are just too much, thankfully the game can automate a lot, but then too much become automated. Like, trade is insane to keep track of, its constantly changing as war, blockade and tech change what is available or in demand. So you have to automate it, but the automation is not very good so you still kinda want to do some manual trade, but its just not setup to let you do that. Similarly, you have to approve a ton of marriage, as teh game goes on, your court get bigger, and everyone will constantly ask you to marry them, this eventually becomes most of what you do. You can ignore them and they'll eventually marry, but very slowly and not always, which can led to the opposite problem of your court having too few people.
But otherwise I quite like the various system, unlike CK, you can control as many territory as you want, but with the caveat that further territory yield very little, insensitivising you to make vassal (unfortunately they give you very little back and are more useful as a way to convert the territory to your religion/culture, so that you can later re absorb it).
- Apr 1, 2009
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Before the sale ended I grabbed Lies of P since I was in the mood for more souls type games after Khazan. I forgot that Khazan is really an action game with some souls like in it, instead of a souls like. Lies of P, Lies of P is a souls like, straight up. I'm having to get used to souls like combat again after playing a really responsive action game, but I'm having fun. Lies of P has a great style, combat feels pretty good, not quite as good as Dark Souls, but it works pretty well, feels more block based since dodging doesn't cover as much distance as it does in Dark Souls.
Dodging's only really used against grab attacks, which is kinda rough since they aren't telegraphed the same way that unblockable attacks in Sekiro are, or the red attacks in this one that have to be parried. I think it's the one thing about Lies of P that I didn't really care for.
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Hrmm. Not sure how I feel about that since blocking, especially the whole perfect block thing is kinda annoying when a normal block will leave you damaged and it seems like there is no way around that so far.
- Feb 7, 2011
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I got about 15 hours in and never really clicked with the combat in Lies of P.
I think the biggest problem with the game is that you never actually have to block, or parry outside of bossfights.
The base enemies aren't tricky or aggressive enough that you can't just beat them down without engaging with the parry system, so the only time you actually end up having to parry is on bosses...and not even all of the bosses, just some of them. There's a good number of bosses where you can just circle to the back and pummel them without having to worry about parrying anything.
So I felt like they didn't really commit to the core combat loop, and because of that I never really got the hang of the parry timing the way I did in something like Sekiro, which required you to parry constantly and learn it or die even against pretty basic enemies.
All in all, the base enemies in Lies of P are pretty boring, and I just got bored of fighting the puppets. There are some other enemy variations later, but the game always goes back to the puppets, and I just don't find the puppets fun to fight.
it doesn't have the enemy variety of a souls game, it doesn't have the good feeling combat loop of Bloodborne or Sekiro, and it doesn't have the combat complexity of something like Nioh.
Overall I was just rather underwhelmed. I got the game for free though, so I didn't really care that I quit 15 hours in (which I think is like half-way through the base game).
Don't feel the need to try to perfect block everything in the game, dodging is a pretty viable way to play the game. I played the game a few weeks ago and went into it trying to perfect block everything, but I sucked at the game's timing and just reverted back to dodging and blocking as if I was playing a normal Souls game and it went pretty well.
And if I'm not mistaken part of the damage you take when you block can be regained if you counter attack fast enough.
Every time I hear the title Europa Universalis I think it sounds like it should be a game set in outer space, and then am disappointed when I remember it's not.
Playing Wattam, which is a puzzle game in the sense that Twin Peaks is a cop show.
It's made by Keita Takahashi, who created Katamari Damacy and directed the first two games in that series. I suppose the setting qualifies as post-apocalyptic because once more some kind of cosmic bender has fucked up the natural order of a trippy candyland reality, and it falls down to you to reestablish status quo.
Like Katamari, the tone is also somewhere between sugary and infantile (the gameplay loop has you walking up to a crying anthropomophic rock or toilet or sushi roll, asking them what's wrong and then humoring them) and also rather suspect, like when you have to chase around a giant faceless monster girl and beat the crap out of her to stun her just long enough to take individual control of her disembodied nose and mouth and eyes in order to reattach them.
I suppose broadly speaking you're amassing a cast of 100 something buddy plants and objects, and the selling point is you can toggle across all of them at any given point and control them, though most of them are functionally the same. The puzzles are all no-brainer stuff. At their most elaborate you have to fiddle with Wattam's bizarre life cycle: you can plant seeds and grow them into trees by having characters join hands and do a little dance around them, and then the trees can eat other characters and turn them into fruit, which can then be eaten by others and turned into poop, which you can then flush into gold poop or stack up high, which you can then revert back to normal by detonating a bomb near them... and so on.
Apparently the studio was plagued by accusations of "emotional abuse" (not against Keita, bless him) and isn't that a bummer, by the way.
It's made by Keita Takahashi, who created Katamari Damacy and directed the first two games in that series. I suppose the setting qualifies as post-apocalyptic because once more some kind of cosmic bender has fucked up the natural order of a trippy candyland reality, and it falls down to you to reestablish status quo.
Like Katamari, the tone is also somewhere between sugary and infantile (the gameplay loop has you walking up to a crying anthropomophic rock or toilet or sushi roll, asking them what's wrong and then humoring them) and also rather suspect, like when you have to chase around a giant faceless monster girl and beat the crap out of her to stun her just long enough to take individual control of her disembodied nose and mouth and eyes in order to reattach them.
I suppose broadly speaking you're amassing a cast of 100 something buddy plants and objects, and the selling point is you can toggle across all of them at any given point and control them, though most of them are functionally the same. The puzzles are all no-brainer stuff. At their most elaborate you have to fiddle with Wattam's bizarre life cycle: you can plant seeds and grow them into trees by having characters join hands and do a little dance around them, and then the trees can eat other characters and turn them into fruit, which can then be eaten by others and turned into poop, which you can then flush into gold poop or stack up high, which you can then revert back to normal by detonating a bomb near them... and so on.
Apparently the studio was plagued by accusations of "emotional abuse" (not against Keita, bless him) and isn't that a bummer, by the way.
Just finished Injustice 2 (with cheats courtesy of Wand)
Very fun to look at, especially for a comic book fan. Great characters, dialogue, situations but does choke at the end
Even with cheats, I disliked that they made it so you came to have to beat the enemy timely or they regenerated health, causing you to start all over (not in early stages).
I had to tab out, go back to wand, click a bunch on button that deletes enemy health.
Overall, very fun and satisfying.
Very fun to look at, especially for a comic book fan. Great characters, dialogue, situations but does choke at the end
Not happy about what ever happened with Brainiac. Why would Batman think they can use him to restore disappeared cities? Aaaannnd we don't actually see what becomes of him. And, what do you do with a restored city of Kandor if that happens?
I had to tab out, go back to wand, click a bunch on button that deletes enemy health.
Overall, very fun and satisfying.
- Apr 1, 2009
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- Whatever, just wash your hands.
I just beat the factory boss. It wasn't hard, the electric cop was tricky. So far its good, but can't really compete with Khazan, but for now I'm enjoying it.
Does seem like dodging works better then it looks like it should. Getting the hang of it better now.
Yeah, but I want a different one. Stellaris is ok but was always kind of a clunky design, and the expansions tended to bloat things out with more gameplay systems, leaving major annoyances intact. To quote myself:
Drathnoxis 2019 said:
Granted that was 5 years ago and it's been under constant development for close to 10 years after launch, so maybe it's amazing now.Drathnoxis 2020 said: