I think I might have relapsed. Send help. Everything was going so well, I was playing through the Final Draft of Alan Wake 2 and having the time of my life, and then I clicked on a video YouTube recommended in my feed that looked interesting and the familiar old craving kicked in. Suddenly a week had passed by and I was deep in the rabbit hole again.
So this week I’ve mostly been modding STALKER: Anomaly. There’s been so many new mods and modpacks and even engine optimization released since I played it last and I’m having a blast getting reacquainted, this time basing my modlist on the H.A.C.R. pack which seems to be a flexible and solid base. I’ve already added about 30 mods to it.
I also have to give special mention to the mod and video that kicked it all off - TALKER. It transcribes your voice talking into the mic, and uses AI to give responses from characters in game and it’s actually just so much fun to use, especially for someone like me who loves the role-play and emergent narratives and storytelling of Anomaly. Right now I haven’t even started a full playthrough yet as I’m still tweaking parameters for the AI to fine tune the prompts given to each faction as well as adding to the list of unique personalities.
If you’re an Anomaly player, I definitely recommend checking out TALKER, even though setting it up is a little annoying.
Block Blast is a hard puzzle game that blends classic Tetris features and current gameplay, delivering an immensely interesting entertainment experience. With basic but interesting gameplay, block blast is an excellent pick for individuals who love intellectual games and want to exercise logical thinking.
It’s better but it’s onboarding is worse. Figuring out the drift boosting is harder than figuring it out for Mario kart with the latter feeling love riding a bike and easy to get back into the muscle memory time and time again.
However, whenever you’ve got the feeling of how CTRs works, It feels better than Mario karts. Giving you more control and more engagement in the moment to moment.
Sometimes i bounce off CTR when coming back to it after a very long time going to just play it for a bit but fumble a bunch of drifts and feel like i can’t be arsed trying to figure it out again currently and just play something else with what little time i had currently.
Hmm I think most rogue likes. But that’s probably a me issue. I just don’t enjoy having to restart and play the same gameplay loop again. Hades was the closest one that I seemed to enjoy more as I liked the story bits between each run. I recently started cult of the lamb and I enjoy the base building so that might help too.
It’s interesting that you mention DS3. I quite enjoyed my time with it(once I got my bearings. I had to restart a number of times) but I’m super curious if I would enjoy it as much if I went back and played DS1 again to compare.
I can completely understand the environment complaint. I really liked sekiro for all the varied environments and themes.
Did you ever give Slay the Spire a go? I was also quite sceptical about roguelikes, but now it is by far my most played game ever at a whopping 600 hours.
The beauty of it is that it is quite easy to understand, but with an incredible amount of depth to it. You’ll start out having trouble winning your first ever run, but that’s when the fun begins. There are 4 characters, each with their play style and cards, and there are 20 ascensions to unlock, each being a more difficult version of a standard run. In the end, you’ll gain such a deep understanding of the balancing and tradeoffs at play that you can’t not be amazed at this achievement in game design. Baalorlord is a great YouTuber and Twitch streamer who is also one of the best players in the world. He was able to do a consecutive winstreak of 20 wins on the highest ascension, showing that this game is RNG based but has a tremendous amount of skill involved too.
Is there a certain tactic to winning Slay the Spire? I’ve played a decent number of hours across multiple characters but I’ve never managed to beat the final boss on the standard difficulty. I remember reading once that binning your default cards is key?
Most certainly! I’ve been playing this game for ages so I 'm unsure what advice is beginner friendly and what not, but let’s see…
Indeed, use any opportunity to throw away one of your starting Strikes (and to a lesser extent, the Defends). Strikes are by far the worst non-curse cards, dealing only 6 damage for 1 cost and taking up a slot in your five card draw each turn. You’ll obtain way better cards and want to increase the chance of drawing those, which is why you really want to remove bad cards as frequently as possible. (At shops and events).
Do not avoid elites! These are the special looking enemies on the map and they are the only fights who drop Relics. Having good Relics and building your deck around them is essential to winning this game!
Don’t pick a card at the end of every fight, only pick the cards that you really want. A small but predictable deck is way better than a massive deck full of OK cards. Seriously, this is one of the most important things I learned, the skip button is there to be used.
Pick cards and relics that increase card draw. A big issue in Slay the Spire is drawing a bad hand and not having the necessary cards for that turn in hand. Lots of cards, relics and potions will allow you to draw extra cards during your turn, which can often make the difference between life and death in this game. Especially towards the end when you have more energy, it becomes extremely important to be able to spend it on good cards, and increasing the cards you draw per turn gives you more options to play good cards.
Finally, keep trying. Different enemy types attack in their own pattern every time. Even when you lose, you start to learn their mechanics and how to best counteract those. There are three elite types per act, and three end boss types per act. For the end bosses, you can actually see on the map which one you will have at the end of the current act! So in total, there are “only” 9 different bosses* and 9 different elites. Once you get to know them, you’ll realize their strengths and weaknesses!
There is a tenth secret boss at the true ending, but let’s not dwell on that for now :). Suffice it to say that the pro players have win streaks of 20+ on the highest ascension difficulty (ascension 20) while always taking on this extra final boss. So this game is insanely tactical and almost any run can be salvaged to win even on the highest difficulty!
Enjoy your journey :). Oh, and start with Ironclad, he’s the most straightforward character!
One of the things that helped me improve a lot was watching streamers play. Baalorlord as previously mentioned is great. I’ve also watched a lot of videos from Jorbs and Frost Prime.
They all have some videos specifically targeted toward newer players where they explain their thought process but I’ve also gotten a lot of value out of just watching them do normal runs. I like to figure out what I would do in each situation and if they do something different I try to analyze why they made that decision instead. There are many cards that I didn’t think were very good until I saw an expert using them.
Monster Hunter World - IceborneI can’t stop! The game is such a marathon…
I think I’m about halfway through and I’m starting to find the difficult spike a bit much so I’m focussing on some easier optional quests to get materials for upgrades which is quite nice as I get through them quickly.
I love how the game looks and feels, prefer it to Rise, but I think I prefer the combat in Rise. The problem with MHWI is the new clutch claw mechanic, it makes monsters get staggered during a fight and leaves them out of distance so you have to use the claw, it really breaks the rhythm of the game, plus they have inflated the monster health massively in Master Rank to compensate for the new mechanic which means fights can take ages if you don’t take advantage of the clutch claw moves perfectly.
Looking forward to Monster Hunter Wilds at some point in the future.
My experience was only playing at friends’ houses who had Play Stations, but I never felt like one was better than the other. I appreciated the mechanic of upgrading items helped to give a different element to the game instead of it being the same thing Nintendo was doing but with different characters. What we really played a lot with friends, though, was Battle Mode on Mario Kart. I don’t think CTR had that, or else no one thought it was as good. It really hasn’t been as good in Mario Kart either since the Wii version I’d say.
I have no attachment to Nintendo brands nor Mario Kart in particular. My sister bought a Mario Kart Wii game a few years back and I didn’t care much for it. Having grown up with CTR on PS1, and Spyro and Crash as platformers, I immensely enjoyed the remake.
I like how the kart handles, and the turbo mechanic is a lot of fun and has a lot of depth. But I suppose that MK fans have other things they enjoy from their franchise.
CTR also rewarded you for understanding the mechanics more. Some boost pads gave you a boost with a higher top speed (blue flame). If you knew how to maintain a boost, you could maintain that blue-flame boost indefinitely.
It’s just that to do that you had to hit nearly every boost pad, triple boost at nearly every corner, and avoid all the obstacles (including touching walls). It’s hard to maintain it, but even maintaining it for a little bit can really launch you towards the front.
Finished Diablo 3 Season 36. I was really hoping to fully fill out the Altar of Rites this time, but for the life of me and my necromancer, I could not get Ramaladni's Gift to drop. Oh well. This week I'll finally be starting Diablo 4's new season in-between Thief runs (yes, I'm still obsessed, lol).
When game developers noticed the market for GPUs is growing and processing in general are getting more advanced, they started to care less about optimizing their games. That’s literally it. It’s laziness.
There are still devs that do their best to really optimize their games but most studios, especially AAA ones don’t care.
Funny you bring it up. When Mario Kart introduced the coins, I immediately thought of the Wumpa Fruits in even the first CTR.
I read it as Nintendo running out of ideas. But it seems the Switch 2 Mario Kart adding the cross country game mode is somewhat more novel than the coins.
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