Metaphor! I’m at the third town and loving every part of it.
I’m kinda struggling with the difficulty on hard, so I might turn it down a bit, as the resources feel a little too strict and stressful, but it makes finishing a dungeon more satisfying.
Finally started in on Diablo 4: Season 6, and it was a little bit of a pain leveling up with the new system, but once I got into the paragon boards, man, things really took off. I am in love with my Dance of Knives Rogue. She is mowing down mobs like they're nothing. It's only been a week and I'm already on the Slayer chapter for season objectives. At this rate I'll be done faster than my Necromancer last season.
Played Amnesia: The Bunker (again, lol) one night for a couple more achievements: never dropping/storing an item and playing through the whole game without saving. I was also trying to go for three with one about taking out a bunch of rats, but for some reason I could never get more than a group of 4. Oh well.
I got back into Path of Exile a month ago, and that’s still going on. Last time I didn’t do more than finishing the campaign, but this time I’m well into end game and it’s great!
I’ve also started playing Siege Survival: Gloria Victis this weekend. You play as a couple of characters in a city that’s under siege. During the day you need to create supplies for the soldiers in your bastion, and during the nights you’ve got to sneak around the city and gather materials, or scout behind the enemey lines to get Intel for the next siege attack. It’s actually really fun!
One random one that jumps to mind is a game I routinely see bundled on fanatical dirt cheap.
Ugly starts a little slow, and I think the writing is just weird, but the some of the puzzles are really cool, and there’s a good blend between pure puzzles and puzzles that require platformer execution.
I don’t know that I would have paid $20, and I paid less than the $7 it’s available for there now (it says for 10 hours), but I enjoyed what I played of it.
I've got a list of complaints but I'm jaded. It's story-lite (maybe if you know nothing about Smoke Jaguar it sells), the combat isn't as satisfying (for me), the mech lab is kind of a joke even when compared to vanilla, and a dozen menus with questionable options isn't good. The graphics are pretty... but there's just... inconsistencies in choices here.
The things that bother me the most at this particular moment being so far in the game are 1) These mechs are as tall as buildings. So why instead of trees, are we knocking down tall plants? Like literally, there's maps with weeds as tall as you are that you walk through but it sounds like a tree is falling. 2) The mission parameters will say something most everyone ignores but my OCD ass. "We've arrived at the AO from the NorthWest" it says. But you land and you're looking NorthWest... so you came from the SouthEast!
At the beginning you miss a bunch of these because it's a lot and yeah I know I'm nitpicking. Just a thought stream here.
But there's other stuff. 3) You get weird level ups all over the place and one of them is affinities in the barracks menu. You can choose a bunch but you can get one for each mech weight class that gives you a bonus. Ok, so there's Light, Medium, and Heavy. No Assault. Huh? 4) The story hints repeatedly that your clan's tech is miles better than the Inner Sphere and when I'm melting Battlemasters with my mediums I start to agree. So what does the Inner Sphere bring you for serious fights then?
Flying vehicles. I shit you not. Bullet sponge flying fortresses. Guess they should'a used these in some of their wars, huh?
But I think for me, the worst offender here is the fact that it's named Mechwarrior 5: Clans. Five. Okay, that should mean that it's somehow related to the other Mechwarrior 5 games right? MW5 Mercenaries' story talks about a protagonist whose father is revealed to have been a spy for 'somebody' that lives outside the Inner Sphere. It's not Clan Wolf, they've got their own thing going. You play the whole campaign, nothing is revealed, but there's a trailer for MW5: Clans. Surely they're gonna answer all our questions about who this guy was, right?
....two guesses. Completely different game, same name. I just don't get it.
On the different game, same version number thing: That’s a tradition that dates to the mid-90’s with the 3 games published under the title Mechwarrior 2.
31st Century Combat was the first, it featured two campaigns from both sides of the Wolf/Jade Falcon Refusal War. Ghost Bear’s Legacy is also post-Clan invasion but largely to do with the Draconis Combine. MW2 Mercenaries is set pre-invasion up through the Battle of Luthien.
Mechwarrior 4 was fairly similar; Vengeance was a relatively small story set on Kentares IV (and its moon) and is kind of a microcosm of the FedCom Civil War. Black Knight does continue the bad ending of Vengeance, and MW4: Mercenaries is more broadly about the FedCom Civil War; most missions are either Davion or Steiner aligned though other units and factions appear (including the Jade Falcons and the Capellans). Kentares IV isn’t so much as mentioned.
So what does the Inner Sphere bring you for serious fights then?
This is something I don’t think any of the Mechwarrior games ever really brought to life because yes the Clans had outright superior weapons and the Inner Sphere to my knowledge never won a toe-to-toe fight during the invasion. Name one time an inner sphere lance stood against a Clan star in a fair fight and won. The clans ultimately lost because it turns out blitzkrieg is a dumber thing to base a religion around than the phone company. And it’s really difficult to build an action cockpit simulator game around that as a primary gameplay mechanic.
Name one time an inner sphere lance stood against a Clan star in a fair fight and won.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wolcott did just this and turned the tide. The Battle of Tukayyid in particular?
And yeah the rest of your post is good... I guess I'm still just kinda confused why Piranha doesn't really use the canon narrative to drive their stories. It raises the stakes in each game, which is great for player engagement.
Wolcott comes the closest as the Kuritans did actually answer the batchall and bid the fight, they played by the clan’s rules. They also presented the Genyosha as green troops instead of the elite force they were, and they dug traps, hid explosives and hung strips of metal from the trees in the swamp they were to fight in. I see it as reaching a similar place that the Lyrans did at Twycross, both took significant planning ahead to take advantage of prevailing conditions that reduced some of the clans’ technical advantages, both involved setting traps, and both still resulted in a lengthy and brutal knock down drag out fight.
As for Tukayyid, the clans lost at Tukayyid through a failure of doctrine. With the exception of the Wolves, the clans thought they were fighting a trial of possession. Comstar thought they were fighting a siege. Comstar was right.
That’s actually same as me. I did play Diablo 2 tons of time. But that was just to finish the game with different characters and different skills combo.
Like one time with Amazon with bow skills, then next time with Amazon with Javelin skills. Also, since I couldn’t afford many games back then, I would just re-install it every few months or year or so, and play through it once or twice.
Though, to be completely fair, I didn’t even know you could keep playing after finishing the game. Thought it was some glitch that game restarted again 😀
So, not exactly same as you. I want to play with all the characters. At least once.
Dungeons and dragons, both the paper version and the digital stuff. I remember as a kid playing some random DnD games with no context and being upset that they were weird rpgs that only went up to level 8 or whatever. Without context, that is not common in videoganes. And not knowing how much more open the games could have been than just playing them “murder hobo” style…
I only ended up playing paper DnD at around the start of 5e, while I was tangentially aware of it since I think before third edition, I didn’t know I would actually like it back then. And it’s entirely possible I wouldn’t have. I have a processing delay, so whether or not I end up enjoying board games, or anything else involving players taking turns doing complicated thinking… largely depends on how patient the other players are.
I also wasn’t super creative back then… although maybe playing DnD would have helped. But at the very least, I wish I would have tried learning paper DnD back then even if I didn’t like it, so I had the context when I played the digital games. I would have very much appreciated those if I understood why certain limitations were in place.
I mean, could you imagine a DnD digital game trying to accurately represent the capabilities of level 20 characters… hitting level 20 in DnD basically forces your campaign into “jumping the shark”. Which omnipotent god are we one-shotting this week?
I remember looking at the rows of PC game boxes at the store and being very curious about Myst. But for some reason I never asked my parents for it. I guess maybe since I didn’t really have any idea what it was, it just felt like something out of reach.
I love “artsy puzzle games” now, so I feel like that would have been a pretty cool experience for me way back then!
There is a bunch of different modern versions of Myst. It’s also got a VR version that is very good. Riven and Obduction are also available in VR. Not sure about some of the lesser known Myst games like exile, uru, or revelation.
In my experience, playing them when I was younger didn’t work out great, some of the puzzles were just way too hard for pre-teen me. But they were great to play now.
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