Telling Lies’ voyeurism makes you wonder: “Should I actually be watching this?”
Games Features What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
Sam Barlow’s 2015 BAFTA-winning Her Story began with a simple premise: How much game could you make out of nothing but watching a person talk? Quite a bit, as it turned out. Starring Viva Seifert as a woman undergoing a police interrogation in a series of video clips, Her Story tasked players not only with sussing out the proper keywords to bring up different video segments through the game’s intentionally obtuse search bar, but also with analyzing Seifert herself. Like L.A. Noire—but, you know, good—Her Story prized the ability to read body language and hunt for subtle expressions just as much as it did more traditional video game detective work. (Notably, the game’s end condition was not “defeating” an opponent or catching a culprit, but saying “yes” to a question asking if you thought you understood what had happened.)
Four years later, Barlow and Furious Bee’s follow-up, Telling Lies, is back to tread a much wider swathe of similar ground, to far more head-spinning effect. Centered on a man named David (played, in a dazzling degree of emotional shades, by The O.C.’s Logan Marshall-Green), the game is, on the surface, extremely similar to Barlow’s last. You’re once again watching clips—this time halves of full-length video calls, instead of snippets of interrogations—and hunting down the breadcrumbs to try to piece together whatever the hell is going on. You’re still watching the flickers of people’s faces, still making note of important phrases, still—inevitably—stumbling onto a clip that seems like it’s revealing more of the story than you were actually ready for. Even the interface is fundamentally the same, as you click around a fake desktop, the face of your player character occasionally showing up in the reflection of the virtual glass.
(Meanwhile, in what’s either an obscure clue, or a joke about the inherently messy incompleteness of this sort of “sifting for the truth” approach, the desktop solitaire game you can waste time with between watching clips provides an unwinnable set of 51 cards.)
But while the mechanics are similar, Telling Lies is an evolution in scope from Barlow’s earlier effort, expanding to a cast of more than a dozen performers, and far more situations than a simple interrogation room could hold. That allows the game to dive into a much wider set of worries and tones; given that David is, in some form or another, in a sexual relationship with each of the game’s three main female characters, some of these moments can be shockingly intimate. “Should I actually be watching this?” is a thought that will crop up more than once, heightened by the constant reminders that you’re viewing these stolen moments through an NSA tool designed to eavesdrop on people’s video chats. If Her Story was a locked-room Agatha Christie brain teaser, Telling Lies is far more like one of Paul Auster’s rambling, digressive existential mysteries, dipping its toes into questions of identity, morality, and the toxic ugliness that can lurk behind even the best of intentions.
But that widening of focus can also be bewildering, even disruptive. For as twisty as its narrative was, Her Story felt “solvable”—even if people are still arguing, years later, about what that actual solution might be. Telling Lies is so big—and the game’s own sense of mounting pressure so unrelenting—that it’s unlikely you’ll see more than half of its clips in a single playthrough, allowing a sense of overwhelming despair to set in. Partly that’s intentional, underlining a reality in which “good enough” is, by necessity, where our attitudes about the truth are forced to rest. But for a game that dares you to make sense of the ineffable, it’s also an unwelcome frustration, a prevarication as irritating as the endless lies David feeds to every single other person in his life. (And, often, himself.) And yet, the process is no less fascinating to watch play out, forcing you to hunt for the solitary piece of information gleamed from a cam girl’s faux-sincere flirtations, or a sleepy daughter’s fairy tale, that will unlock the mystery—even if, like a missing king in a game of solitaire, that winning card never actually existed.
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Detroit: Become Human
I had fun playing through this game and it looks great with some stellar music themes. Cheering and regretting choices or failed quick-time events at times, the minute-to-minute experience was addictive. It’s the aftermath, when you let it sink in and think deeper, the game turns out to be quite shallow. However impressive the branching narratives become, the symbolism and story itself aren’t very deep. For example, the most effective segment to show how Other these androids are is the graveyard scene imo. Apart from that, with how human they look and instantaneous their “Awakening” is, we’re conditioned to see them as “humans with blue blood” really. And that puts us at odds with the entire human population in the game. It creates an overly sympathetic, one-sided view I found to be limiting for the scope the game aims for. Where’s the tension in that. How does that inform my choice for a peaceful or violent revolution? It relies on sensationalist feelings rather than informed world and character-building to make your choices. So yeah, the game is about as subtle as putting the Androids in the back of the bus. I’m kind of struggling to delve into the meaning of the story besides superficial commentary.What I found more interesting was the branching of the narrative and the weight of your choices and how we as the player are supposed to handle them. Those Choice Trees at the end of every chapter are great to let you feel the autonomy of your choice. When you visit the chapter screen, the game tells you to at least play the game once without altering choices.
If you play through the game and create your own version of the story, the option to alter choices in the middle of that or even after, diminishes the value or experience of that first playthrough. My Kara died unfortunately but in the end Markus succeeded in a peaceful revolution. When I saw in the Choice Tree how not only Big Choices made that path possible but I was aided by many Smaller Choices that helped me, that ending felt earned and right. (there are questions of how manipulative and “guiding” the writing is though). I have no desire to play through the game again because it would just be a carnival trick to see how the other choices played out. The more you’d do it, the less weight those stories end up having.If David Cage really wants to make his “games as interactive movies” art thesis a thing, then he needs to follow through and add consequences on the player’s side too. At the very least, you shouldn’t be able to change anything when playing through the game the first time. Personally, I’d take inspiration from the gamiest game I played this year and do it like Nier: Automata. For Detroit, I’d delete the game entirely and make it unplayable on that account or something. If you can keep replaying it endlessly, then Cage isn’t making movies, he’s making Choose Your Adventures-books. Fun and entertaining but ultimately trivial. Honestly, the most impressive achievement and realization of the game’s vision is the Main Menu AI personality. Her varied lines sometimes caught me off guard (after a break of a few hours “back so soon?”) and I became very conscious of her piercing eyes every time I booted up the game. That connection that builds up then has a great pay-off after you finish the game. It was a nice closing experience for me and as she said goodbye to me, I said goodbye to the game.
Second game I played (or first really, it was two weeks ago): The Awesome Adventures Of Captain Spirit.Knowing the game ties into LiS2 of which I know the general Runaways-premise already, I could see the ending coming kinda but it was still very effective with that music. Don’t Nod nails it again with the soundtrack. If you open your demo with Sufjan Stevens, I’m gonna be in, even if the music doesn’t fit the scene (and to be honest, it didn’t really).The game itself is a very relaxed demo that nonetheless has that trademark LiS touch sprinkled throughout. And what is that trademark LiS touch? It’s overwrought but still totally effective writing.
SPOILERS FOLLOW
Like in the first game, there’s a truth and honesty to the characters almost despite the writing of the dialogue itself. In the first LiS, this came out in the totally tubular and totes believable way teenagers spoke. In Captain Spirit, the premise feels a tad overdone. The mom is dead and the dad is a drunk. But the dad is just trying and going through a hard time himself you know? But also, yeah, he totally physically abused his own son which takes away any and all sympathy even though the game wants us to feel some? The puzzles are enjoyable enough. You’re rewarded for exploration and reading through everything. Except the PIN code for that phone. I can’t believe there’s even a single person that found that on his own. There’s zero clues pointing towards it. The alphabet isn’t even shown on the phone keys and it’s a PIN CODE. I’ve never not once seen an 8 digit PIN code in my life, what a pain to unlock your phone every time. Playing this one and Detroit made for an interesting comparison. One has all the production value and the other one is quite minimalist yet it’s the latter that seems to do more with less and have an emotional core that resonated more strongly with me.
Detroit: Become Human might be worth it just for the laugh factor of Lance Henriksen gasping “My God!” at every single one of those stupid digital paintings that demonstrate the intensely literal ways your average video game artist will interpret a series of vague, one-word concepts.Every single time, you think he’s gonna say, “You’re just visualizing the word’s definition. Try going deeper,” or something like that, but instead, his character acts like the robot just became the new Monet.
It’s so very, very David Cage for good or ill.
As someone that was watching a scene analysis of Jurassic Park last night, and being blown away by the complexity of framing and positioning of characters in different moments of their journey through the film, I can understand why they might have phoned-home the artwork. As an engineer and not an artist, I can only vaguely feel the film do its work so I don’t know that I could replicate that naturally without taking it too literally. I’m a philistine when it comes to a lot of art, and my appreciation primarily comes after either I’m forced to sit with it for a while or someone points out the construction of the color and shape, or the historical significance or context of it.
The most disappointing shuddering thing I read about was David Cage using The Great Train Robbery and using it as an example of how much more we can do, aren’t these old movies silly? It mostly showed he doesn’t understand how the movies work to be modeling or learning from them.On the other hand, the fact that reviewers could seamlessly play Beyond Two Souls and have entirely different playthroughs to compare, and not notice they were playing different stories is a fascinating vision of storytelling and it’s purposes.Back to point one, I’m not sure he’s the guy to figure out what he’s doing exactly, but while I feel he’s wrong a lot he’s–well, not right–but interesting a lot of the time too. Mostly I wonder what he’d do with just directing a work instead of writing it as well.
Salutations~!Well, I played a ton of Final Fantasy Record Keeper this past week. Which means I didn’t do much of anything else ^^. Still, I managed to defeat the Ice and Wind Weak versions of Dark Odin (the current super duper uber ultimate mega FFRK end game boss… for now :P), and Fire’s almost cinched too. The only other version of him where I MIGHT stand a formidable chance at victory is Lightning Weak, but that’s gonna take some Magia Point training first. After all that, I’ll take another breather from this game for awhile and FINALLY get back to my adventure gaming queue. So so sooooo many great titles in tow and ahead (not to mention Sam Barlow’s new gem discussed above in the OP, /cheer). So too with the next episode of Life is Strange 2. And Dark Man of Medan next week. And so on and so on… Telltale may be gone but adventure/narrative heavy titles are still going strong in 2019.
So… what to talk about this time around. Hmm… well I’ve been watching an LP of this nifty 1997 PSX/PC game called Sentient, from Psygnosis (Lemmings, Shadow of the Beast, Destruction Derby, etc.). You play a named protagonist who’s recovered from a shuttle crash onto a space station next to a sun (with an ever rapidly decaying orbit). And you spend the entirety of your time on said station… well… asking people who they are, what they’re doing, how they feel about you, what’s up… pretty much anything you can think of to try to gleam solutions to whatever mysteries lie in this immense structure in the vacuum of space. The key factor here is: much like The Colonel’s Bequest, this game’s world and its denizens operate independently of you and your personal volition. They hold meetings whether you’re there or not. Tweak critical functions in the station’s systems. And if you just stumble around, you’re likely to just be perpetually confused for an hour or two before all heck breaks loose and you die and/or quit in frustration.
In this regard, Sentient reminded me QUITE a bit of Ballyhoo, this 1985 Infocom game. Now, cards on the table, Ballyhoo is NOT a good game. It’s not a bad game either. It’s a VERY interesting yet flawed experience in text adventure design. Because it’s trying to simulate an active world and vibrant characters and interactions all around you. In Ballyhoo, you can wait in line. Through a text parser. You can change to a shorter or longer line at your volition. You can interrupt peoples’ conversations and they can interrupt yours. And people can just choose to ignore you.
This article from the always solid Digital Antiquarian on the game’s merits and pitfalls nails Ballyhoo’s eccentricities most comprehensively (far better than I ever could):
https://www.filfre.net/2014/12/ballyhoo/The point is, in both Ballyhoo and Sentient, 10+ years apart from one another, much care was made to provide the player with a precursor to what we experience today in so many open 3D worlds. All these intriguing individuals inhabiting this open space, capable of committing any number of acts or instigating a plethora of intriguing conversations at the drop of a hat. The possibilities are endless. But that inundation of randomness and oddity swallows the players’ investment in progression triggers whole. The Colonel’s Bequest tethered that randomness through its act structure and clock chiming, so that while it can be a tad vexing for young players at first to grasp where to go and what to do, you always have that lifeline present. Figure who’s killing people. Search for clues. Stay alive. But with Sentient and Ballyhoo, there’s simply TOO many variables to analyze when you’re gauging “okay… where do I go next to make something happen… has something happened yet? Is this progress in this game? Will I ever know that for sure? For sure… what progress even IS?” Do you show someone a key you think they want? Do you need to ASK them about what they want first to trigger the need to receive the key you have for them? Do you need to walk WITH them as they use this key to trigger the next conversation point with them (as you’ve now earned their trust)? Example: In Sentient, you can locate the lead engineer and learn of the various factions on board pitted against one another. You can pick sides. You can acquire evidence to help one side over another… though the hardest thing to do is figuring out EXACTLY how to get either side to accept your evidence (not unlike the trickiness of deciphering a text parser in an old text adventure game). And even if you use this evidence to aid or blackmail, the characters only react SO much to what you do. Because the priority here is crafting this immense world that FEELS alive and real. But that also means a minimal amount of cinematic structuring and context given to each act you commit.Long story short as always, much like Ballyhoo, Sentient is not a great game, but it is very interesting in its core design. What it’s attempting and the marriage it represents between the text adventure era of the ‘80s and the pseudo 3D, rudimentary open worlds of the late ‘90s. I’m reminded in particular of our talks a couple weeks back regarding the virtues of Planescape: Torment. Sentient makes me wonder how Planescape: Torment would have come off if you interacted throughout the ‘verse in this similar way. Just wandering from NPC to NPC trying to piece together what everyone wants in order to grasp a bigger piece of the picture. There’d have to be significantly less text involved, to be sure, but given just how DENSE Sentient’s database is on board the station, the comparison’s a lot closer between the two in execution than one might initially think. And nowadays EVERYTHING’s practically got a glowing yellow arrow on the ceiling and walls directly you PRECISELY to the next progression trigger within seconds. Or the protagonist mutters 2-3 variants of mini-tutorial exchanges out loud just to clue you in. And it’s far too much work to make EVERYONE’s daily actions so vast and detailed and random. Sure, you can watch people do yoga classes in Marvel’s Spider-Man within this fantastically well crafted depiction of New York City, but that’s all they’ll do in that one locale for as long as you’re watching them. They’re not going to commute home after they buy a hot dog and you can’t ask them 30+ different questions about how their day’s going. Totally understandable. That’s just not practical, feasible, or conducive to an overall heightened enjoyment factor for the player in the short term. It’s not worth the potential dissonance and confusion it might cause to have too many flexible variables out there.
In terms of modern game progression ease, that’s a GREAT thing.In terms of universal game design innovation and creativity… ….that’s a bit of a shame too, though… isn’t it? We could use a LITTLE more Sentient in 2019’s games (not a LOT… like maybe 5-10% Sentient).Take care and have wonderful weekend, everyone. Stay safe!And always remember, if someone asks you to see their impromptu rabbit drawing, you ALWAYS say YES! 😛
Every time you beat Dark Odin, that stupid elemental drive becomes a lot easier to deal with. Although it’s pretty satisfying to let an elemental radiant shield feed damage and chain so he keeps punching himself. It’s really a race of seeing how many nasty attacks you can avoid through DPS while still having enough left in the tank to knock him to kingdom come. I still have water and earth on the list for fun, but there’s some magia farming I have to do before then. That and my list of abilities that correspond to AASBs I want to get to R5 might keep me busy.
So that means you clobbered LNG Weak Odin with Lightning’s Liberator, yes? Congrats! Earlier this morning, I finally succeeded in slaying Fire/LNG Weak Odin!!! I indeed had to upgrade my abilities for Fire as I surmised when I originally posted this comment. But LNG was just as you described, this insane rush of Last Stand spam from Raijin and Edge to keep everyone alive while Raijin’s Lightning Radiant Shield chipped away at Odin, piece by piece. I can’t believe that plan actually worked. /cheer to Sora, /cheer to Prompto and /cheer to Raijin. Finally got my 4 accessories. I won’t be able to get a #5 until Divine Veiled Grimoire is available for Anima Lens in a couple months, and I don’t have a Holy Chain to use with T.G. Cid/Rem/Cid Raines either. But no complaints from me. I’m amazed I was actually able to squeak out enough wins to deck out my team with Odin bracelets. And just as you say, they really help mitigate that elemental drive spam. Sensational. Should you endeavor to defeat Earth/Water Weak Dark Odin, best of fortune to you! /cheer ^^
Honestly I haven’t used DVG in any of my runs so far. There’s so much piercing and I don’t run any kind of big entrusts in my setups. I’ll find a haste, run it without protect or shell and see how far I can make it in without them. From there, I look at the AI thread and see if there’s any non-piercing attacks and try to keep stretching how long I can go without a heal. It lets you focus on building up to bigger damage later.And yeah Liberator was a thing of beauty in that fight, especially since the 6* celerity attack gets to 6 hits pretty damn quickly. This was also the first fight with all the Odin resist accessories and boy it just chops down that end fight BS. Still have to do a lot of damage in a little time, but the threat of dying to anything but the final 3 moves is greatly lessened.On the plus side, four clears is good since most of the time you’ll have a major resist on your healer. My next quest is a non-cheese clear of the I torment. Just got Sarah’s weird USB and WoL chain so there will be shenanigans.
Yep yep, agreed on DVG’s practicality most of the time. I definitely need Tyro’s Astral Barrier USB1 for some later fights (jeez can’t believe Earth Weak Odin spams Paralyze AoE 3 times), and it looks like 6* Magicite has a lot of non-piercing moves so I just figured I’d get both his USB1 and USB3 to keep as many options open as possible. Good luck on the Torment redux for FFI! /cheer ^^I’m waiting for the 500 Gem Select that might come global side this next festival to claim Sarah’s bUSB, then I might finally make some headway on that dreaded Garland’s Incubus Round Edge/Incubus Soul of Chaos spam following Phase 3. For now I can’t breach 50% on D???, but that’s cool. End game FFRK is pretty darn exciting. Thanks again for introducing me to it!
I remember reading a walkthrough of Sentient in an old Gamepro (I think) 20-some years ago and it seemed so interesting and evocative that I still think about it regularly. It sounds like actually playing it would have soured me on it.
Yeah, same here. What it’s trying to do is very intriguing, but its execution is just too cluttered and awkward to pull everything off. From what I’ve seen, you spend 90% of your time navigating through all these dense conversation topic prompts looking for JUST the right statement/hook/turn-of-phrase to get NPCs to acknowledge you know what’s what. And that’s IF you’re engaged enough to follow everything that’s happening in the first place. Still, more power to these guys for trying to blend the best of the old school text adventure titles with the pseudo open world nuance of the late ‘90s PSX era.
I’m playing The Witcher 3 in preparation for the new Netflix series and I love revisiting this world, especially with the added DLC content that I haven’t played yet.As I’m listening to Priscilla’s song at the Novigrad tavern, I was thinking how awesome it’d be for Maya Hawke to play Priscilla in the Netflix series. I know that the series will be based more on the books than the games but come on, a bit of videogame fanservice won’t hurt right?
This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone even insinuate that LA Noire wasn’t good.
The segments where you have to puzzle out whether people are telling the truth based on their facial expressions have received some critique, in large part because the fidelity on animation differs markedly between the face and the rest of the body.
It was still considered good for its time, at least the facial animation–people understood that’s where the tech was at that time. Lumping the facial and body animations together and implying the game’s attempt at it wasn’t good is a bit disingenuous, IMO, especially considering this one’s fully live-action.
I’ve mostly encountered the opinion that LA Noire felt half-baked. It was a decent implementation of some very clever ideas – animating characters’ faces so you can tell if they’re lying is clever, but the animations were a little cartoonish, and they had a very clumsy interface for interrogation. Having an open world of 1940s LA was neat, but there wasn’t all that much to do (in part because shooting was tedious, and it broke the flow of the game to suddenly be in a gunfight every so often). Judged by the standards of a point-and-click adventure game (which it is, at heart), it’s rock-solid.
It’s a fascinating experiment, but ultimately kind of a shallow experience. Whether or not you call it “good” or “bad” is, of course, intensely subjective – I basically enjoyed it, but my feelings for it don’t go much beyond that.It is one of those games where I’d genuinely love to see a sequel -increasing graphical fidelity is actually really important to that sort of game, and I’d like to see a dev team really explore the possibilities the original only hinted at.
I finished Heaven’s Vault about an hour ago, and I have to say: it’s probably the best game I’ve played that I wouldn’t recommend. For those of you not in the know, it’s an adventure-’em-up where instead of solving traditional puzzles, the challenge comes from trying to decipher an ancient language.So why would I not recommend it? First off, it’s hella janky — not in a game-breaking way, but definitely in an annoying way. Camera angles in cutscenes are probably procedural rather than pre-programmed, which results in the game sometimes picking angles that obscure the scene from view. Other times, assets just fail to load, and the end result is that you can see through walls.The second reason I wouldn’t recommend the game is because calling this game’s pacing “languid” would be an understatement. Sometimes this works to the game’s detriment: the protagonist’s walking speed is irritatingly slow, and the sailing sections of the game are interminable. But the game’s slow pacing allows the player to better absorb the story and gives them time to subconsciously work through the game’s translation elements. I enjoyed this aspect of the game, but your mileage may vary.
So why do I love this game in spite of all of that? For starters, it’s one of the most unique gaming experiences I’ve had in a while. As you progress through the game, you not only figure out the game’s fictional language; you also learn about the culture whence the language came. The way glyphs and morphemes are combined in the fictional language tells you how the ancient people thought.And on top of that, the art direction is just stunning. I’d describe the aesthetic as post-post-apocalyptic Arabi-retro-futuristic. It’s super-neat to see old-style Islamic design blended with holograms and LEDs.Overall, definitely one of the best games of the year. But also definitely not for everyone.
Man, I was interested in that game, but “The way glyphs and morphemes are combined in the fictional language tells you how the ancient people thought.” kinda sells me on it.
It’s on PS4 too so I’ve put it on my wishlist. Doing a good job of going through my backlog these days, so when that’s dwindled down, I can check it out.
Seems like a fun game for the Switch too. Snuggle in bed with a nice brainy game.
Yeah, it does seem like a good Switch game. Since there’s a bunch of dragging and dropping, a touchscreen interface would work pretty well. It’s probably really clunky to play entirely with a controller; I wouldn’t recommend getting it on PS4.
Thanks for the warning. Hadn’t thought about that but now the Switch-thing went from a side-note to an actual “wait to buy” reason. Everything gets ported these days to the Switch, hopefully it sells well enough to warrant one too.
Good news! Heaven’s Vault actually is coming to Switch, probably next year:
https://www.destructoid.com/adventure-games-80-days-and-heaven-s-vault-coming-to-switch-565679.phtml
Greetings, denizens of the weekly WAYPTW thread!On the PC, I returned to what has been my standard issue
addiction, good old Star Wars: The Old Republic. Once more, I was playing as my
female Zabrak Imperial Agent in the class story. I was determined to finish out
the part of the mission that was set on Nar Shaddaa. If you don’t recall from
the last time I mentioned this game, my current objective is to track down the
mysterious figure known as “The Eagle,” a terrorist who blew up the Dominator,
an Imperial capital ship and killed Darth Jadus (though there’s been no sign of
a body, so my comic book sense is tingling.)Nar Shaddaa was all about cutting off the Eagle’s terrorist
network, which seems to consist mostly of individuals hopped up on an
artificial and invariably fatal stimulant known as Cyclone. Having tracked down
the source of the stimulant, I was holographically disguised as a service droid
to infiltrate the manufacturer. That done, I killed most of the staff, and
extracted the information I needed from the cyborg brain of the sole survivor
of my assault, who ceased to be a survivor after his knowledge was transmitted
back to Imperial Intelligence. My one contact who used the confusion to escape
jail was also tracked down and terminated with extreme prejudice (and a big ol’
gun). Next up is going to Balmorra to try and track down Eagle themselves. I
remember the Balmorra part of the Republic Trooper class story to be a bit of a
slog, as I think it was the most boring of the planets, so I’m not hugely
looking forward to this one. I’m hoping the story is better, and the fact that
fast travel markers are now available for free-to-play moochers like me makes
it much less of a slog.I also logged into Magic – The Gathering: Arena for the
first time in a few weeks, and there’s been some interface overhauls, so it
looks like there’s a bit more depth, and possibly a parallel track to the
daily/weekly quest goals. There’s also been the launch of the 2020 Core Set of
cards and associated in-game events/rewards since last I played. I didn’t
indulge too much, but did play a couple of ranked quick-play games with my
go-to Black/White Vampire Lifegain deck, getting a couple of wins against
random players (including one going by the rather odious name MAGA Jew Killer,
who I probably wouldn’t have played against if I’d noticed the name before
curb-stomping them). One of them got me down to 2 life after 3 turns and was I
think trying to trash talk me by spamming the “Oops” speech macro at the end of
each of their phases. Thanks to some fortuitous combos, I ended up attacking
with 7 3/3 Lifegain vampire tokens with Vigilance the next turn, which not only
put me above my initial 20 life total, but put them below 0, giving me the win.
I went with a polite “Good Game” speech macro and left it at that…I also took a hot minute to play The Sims 4, where I
finally finished up the introductory tutorial for my first sim, the splendidly
named Jett Savage (got to love random name generators…). I’m now mostly
familiar with the controls and mechanics of the game, got started completing
career aspirations for Jett, and the second the tutorial ended, managed to set
him on fire while attempting to cook Mac & Cheese, so the sim is even
dumber than I, since that’s a dish I can cook quite well.On the tabletop front, what was supposed to be our
fortnightly Dungeons & Dragons
game has gone into an indefinite hiatus due to the DM’s job situation changing.
Which sucks, since it took forever to find a local group, and because I bought
a miniature to represent my player character, a gnome sorcerer (the miniature
says it’s a wizard, but it’s close enough, plus with a paint job and weapon
swap…) Fortunately, my spouse and I have been doing local meetups, so we might
be able to get a group or two together to do the rotating DM thing. We’re
planning on doing a few one shots to see how we like each other in general
before committing to a campaign, since you want to get along with the other
players. I’m currently writing two one-shot ideas, one of which is loosely
based on Scooby-Doo, and the other one is a spin on the Kennedy assassination,
where the big bad is a literal “grassy gnoll.” I’ll be curious to see if the
players spot the inspirations and bad puns during the sessions. More
interestingly, my wife, who has never DMed, and has only really played in one
campaign really wants to run an adventure, so I’m very curious to see how that
goes.Our small gaming group of five people did get together
Monday night and play Ticket To Ride, which was a lot of
fun, and is a whole lot more competitive when you have five players rather than
the two or three we’d been having
lately. I ended up in a distant third place, and would have made it to an
equally distant second if I hadn’t failed to connect New York to Miami.On mobile, I’m now up to level 1,950 of Wordscapes. I’m also
still playing Harry Potter Wizards Unite, which had a “Back to Hogwarts” event
to celebrate the start of the new school year. I was more diligent about
getting my daily tasks, and some of the additional ones done for that one, so
not only was I able to complete the special tasks, like so:I was also able to fill out the entire section in the
registry:
Though I will say the way the Hogwarts Express portkey works
where you have to tap on a glowing section of the scenery outside the train
window as it scrolls past is very frustrating, when you have reflexes like
mine. Still, I was able through blind luck and repeated tapping to do all five
required to get the luggage carts as pictured above. Though even with all that,
I’m still merely at level 19…
I’m hoping that Doom (2016) will show up today (paging The Demons!). In the meantime I’ve been playing Katamari Damacy Reroll, which I enjoyed so much I kept it from GameFly. My skills aren’t where they used to be – I’ve been struggling to get the Eternal modes on the house and town levels, and I only have a handful of the presents, but I did make the moon. I’ve been trying to decide between Stardew Valley and Into The Breach, inspired by this Inventory article. If anyone has a vote, I’m open to suggestions. I very much enjoyed Harvest Moon, but I’ve never played FTL and I’m pretty easily frustrated, so I’m worried that Into The Breach might turn me off before I git gud.
I finally tried the 2016 Doom this month when they added it to the PSNow library. It just reminded me how very bad I am at FPS. I’ll play something like Fallout, where it’s about a lot more than shooting and I can move with more caution. Borderlands is about as fast-paced as I can go, though. Doom is entirely too frantic for me to be any good at it.
I’m going to vote for Stardew Valley, mostly because I have a copy and someone else playing might motivate me to do more with it. Plus it has a very chill kind of vibe.
I put Doom 2016 on “I’m Too Young To Die” and I’m happy with how I can just pick it up cold and enjoy it. It gives me a lot of satisfaction in killing without too much frustration because I’m not very good and still get the same platforming and puzzle solving exploration that also makes Doom fun.If you’re easily frustrated, then totally get Stardew Valley. Into the Breach relies on you failing to keep getting better and better, while constantly trying to get you to overcome RNG.
Oh God, someone help me. I can’t stop playing Final Fantasy XIV.
So, I think The Witcher 3 sixth playthrough will
end this weekend. The Mage Witcher has held up well, with the arsenal of huge
Yrdens, Active Quens that refill the life bar, and bone-melting Ignis (I wish I
had some images of the character sheet to show you how strong this stuff gets!)
Just some Blood and Wine main story
left, and that’s that. I love the game, but I think it might need a break
before playthrough number seven, haha.After that, I’m really at a loss as to what game to play
next, I’m still quite torn. There’s so many I want to replay, but can’t decide
on which one! Streaming a long RPG is fun if you get a dedicated audience that
wants to live out the story with you, but then you also have to take time off
stream to do all the mindless grinding and fetching so you don’t bog the stream
down with that. It’s a lot of work, to be honest, haha. That being said, I
likely will do another RPG next on stream, as I’m still waiting to see what the
next balance patch for
Gwent holds, but that won’t happen
until next week. I haven’t felt like streaming that in a while now, since the
metas have not been that exciting.Also, vacation starts after work today! Other than some
teaching, I’m off until September 4th! Plenty of time to hunker down
and get back to the games I love the most. Maybe I try out all my old games and
figure out which one piques the interest the most for a full replay. Or maybe I
finally just get some decent sleep for a week. We will see!
I have such a weird boner for that girl that played Clem in Westworld
Not very much gaming this past week, since I was on family vacation being gnawed on by infants, growled at by toddlers and admired by the elderly (2 out of 3 of those things may be fabrications) so I’m eager to veg out and play some video games. I hit a wall on Pathfinder: Kingmaker and Pillars of Eternity- the former due to flailing around looking for the next thing that will advance the story/give me something more substantial to do than wander the map and the latter because I had spent a long time on it. In the intervening pause, I spent a lot of time looking at character build videos on YouTube (because I am a very cool dude) and now I’m back on Skyrim (PS4 version) and Fallout 4 until Borderlands 3 comes out next month. In Skyrim I’m doing a Breton Paladin type character wielding a warhammer and Restoration magic (which is a pain to level if you don’t want to stand in front of traps and heal yourself for hours) and using Smithing and Enchanting to make good gear (also very boring to level up). In Fallout 4, I’m doing a charismatic sarcastic sniper guy and it’s been pretty fun- you can get things done a lot faster in Fallout because it uses an XP system, I find. I also need to do the BL2 free DLC that came out a little while ago, but maybe I’ll do that next weekend. Part of me also wants to jump into Tyranny or Deadfire, but I should wait on starting either of those until Pathfinder and Pillars are finished.
I really wanted to like Pathfinder: Kingmaker more than I have. For some reason it just doesn’t work for me. I almost returned it to steam a couple of days after I bought it and now I’m thinking I probably should have.
It did take me some time to get into it and some time looking up effective character builds to make it more enjoyable. I liked it more after hitting level 3 or 4 and getting the kobold vs. mites dungeon and final part of Act I finished, but I can definitely see where it would lose someone. The story isn’t initially strong enough to hook you and if you aren’t already familiar with Pathfinder rules, it’s very easy to get overwhelmed.
I’m in the mites dungeon right now and I keep getting lost. Have I been here before? Where the hell is the key to this door?
I am loving No Man’s Sky with the new Beyond update. I don’t know what the opposite of nerfing is (Kooshing?), but it seems like they did that with the economy. Previous iterations essentially forced you to become an interplanetary lube magnate in order to afford the best stuff. Now, it’s just a matter od finding the right planet with the right resources. I just dug up a piece of scrap worth $2.7 million. That would have taken HOURS of lube farming before. This is great, because it lets you keep your focus on exploration without feeling like you can’t keep up money-wise.
I shall hopefully be finishing Sekiro and maybe having a wee shot of the new COD Beta. With Sekiro i’m up to the last 2 mandatory and last 2 optional bosses, still have 3 mini-bosses to go too. I’ve gotta say though that this has been by far the most enjoyment i’ve had from a game in ages. The difficulty was just right and nearly ever fight i had i felt i could win, there was no feeling of being cheated like some FromSoftware game manage to do and none of the bosses so far have felt overpowered or have had cheap moves that randomly destroy you. Its the best game they’ve made so far as far as i’m concerned and i cannot wait for any DLC or a sequel, though Misaki usually doesn’t go that route.
Last I heard they weren’t doing any DLC for Sekiro, which is a bummer given the DLC _tend_ to be even better than the base games from From.
I finished fire emblem with the Black Eagles. The ending was pretty straightforward and I lost a good chunk of my students in the last battle but everything ended happily. I’m gonna go back and try the other storylines eventually. This weekend I’m gonna check out the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2v2 alpha mode on PS4. I’m getting pretty excited for this new CoD. Black ops 4 was pretty disappointing for me with no campaign and multiplayer that felt really unbalanced. I would be ok if this new CoD didn’t have Blackout mode at all. I’m very burnt out on BR games.
Telling Lies? No, papa! Please donate to my Patreon for more
Just finding out a couple days ago that Telling Lies is a thing, that it’s in the same style as Her Story, and that it comes out in a matter of hours, I’m ducking out on reading this article after a couple paragraphs. I’m sure it’s respectful and there’s no casual, “It’s when Character A kills Character B 80% of the way through the game that my opinion really turned.” But all the same, there’s something to be said for playing something without preconceived expectations about what’s going to be done well, how well it’s done, and whether there are big bombshells to eagerly anticipate. With game night moved to Sunday, this might be the centerpiece of my Saturday.Video Games:Typing this is giving me a little respite from my retread through Katamari Damacy Reroll. I love the hell out of this game, but getting Holy Cow in the Taurus challenge is so needlessly cruel. Though smaller objects fade out of the scope of things the game is tracking each time the game adjusts its scale, there’s a point just before they get filtered out that they are obnoxiously difficult to spot before you crash into them. And given that the challenge ends the moment you hit any cow, and many of the streets are booby trapped with tiny cows suspended by balloons, there have been countless unexpected failures as I’ve been just approaching the ~7m I need to be to roll up my final item to add to the game’s ~1400-deep collection.So far I’ve knocked the Holy Cow out twice. Once, I hit a man in a cow costume before I could claim my prize. The other time, it ran away permanently, leaving me with a choice to either opt for the second biggest cow and increase the size of my constellation or to attempt to grab the more obvious Holy Cow who’s being circled by tiny cow sentries, daring you to drop in from a nearby cliff and hope you can land cleanly enough to hit the Holy Cow twice without so much up as brushing up against anything that has a black spots on it.I’m at the point where it’s been over an hour since I first said, “I’m only giving this one more try. I need to be functional at work tomorrow.” Yet here I am, 10 mediocre cows later, still plugging away.Outside of serving as a designated hint-giver for a blind Monkey Island 2 Twitch stream, Katamari has been the sole focus of my week in video games. With Telling Lies releasing while I’m at work today, though, I’m about to switch it up.Board GamesI took Monday off for the hell of it. Wasn’t sick, wasn’t stressed out, was maybe a little behind on sleep, but more than anything I just wanted a day of laziness. When I finally left the apartment around 12:30, I saw a package on my doorstep. I knew my mom had been open to researching board games on her own and picking one out without being specifically directed to get something I already knew I wanted, but it’d been a month since my birthday and I hadn’t known when this was going to arrive or exactly what game was going to be inside.I’d had three conversations about Pandemic Legacy in the week leading up to that, and I’d agreed with my roommate that games that encouraged tearing up cards and permanently altering both the board and character sheets, such that you couldn’t reset and start the game over once you were done, seemed like a giant “fuck you” to the players. After reading the instructions and looking through the box’s contents, though I am legitimately very excited to get into this game. This was, in fact, the perfect gift: something I wouldn’t have purchased for myself, something I didn’t know I wanted.Showing Andrew just how many blank spots there were in the rules for later placing stickers, and all the elements of the game that would be revealed at a later time, I brought him around, too, and I recruited the girl we’d met at a diner last week as essentially an interview to join our board game group. My initial goal was to get a group of 4, but after sitting down to play a single-player 4-role game with 5 epidemics in play, it felt like too much happened between each character’s turn for us to make the most of the most powerful roles. And we didn’t really have a lead on someone else who would both make strong decisions and reliably show up every week for 3-4 months. It feels like 3’s the right group size, and the game’s difficulty level is self-correcting anyway, so I don’t think there’s a wrong size. I just think I’m not going to cry over losing the scientist.Last week we finally dusted off Frag: Deadlands and played a game, keeping track of stats on notebook paper. I hadn’t been excited to play this game. It seemed like it could potentially drag on and be very adversarial, plus in most situations rolling a 1 causes your weapon to fail and damage you. From the first moment I read the rules and saw that you determine how many points to put into speed, health, and accuracy, I just knew max speed was the only winning strategy, and I wanted to absolutely destroy this game in the most cutthroat way possible just to get it off the list of games we owned and had not played.I chose the character with the most powerful starting weapon and started sweeping the board until I got equipment that gave me +4 health and +2 accuracy, letting the other two players get in a kill apiece while I loaded up on a good inventory reserve. Then I struck and won the game brutally within a couple turns. At one point, I had a double damage modifier active that affected everyone in the game, and Andrew took the opportunity to take me down with a 7-dice gun, not realizing that this was doubled to 14 and he could not get a single 1 if he wanted to hurt me. The magnificent bastard rolled the dice one at a time for maximum dramatic effect and did not hit a single 1.Then I played a card that read, “Play immediately after any damage roll and proceed as if every roll was changed to a 1.” Andrew cried foul and said I had to declare I was playing it before the damage roll. I asked him to read the card aloud. It is played after the damage roll. Do you want to roll 14d6 to see how much damage you take from your exploding weapon, or do you just want to agree that you’re dead?I was seriously way too powerful, and I wanted to play as such a terrible fucking asshole that nobody would want to play this with me again. All I did was make Andrew reconsider the importance of speed in the game. So I told him, look, win or lose, this isn’t my style of game. If you want to play this at a future board game night, I’ll probably opt to cook food for everyone.
Got to that thing in Fire Emblem and this game is just blowing me away. I’m curious to see how many branching versions of the plot there are and where the story goes from here.
So Yakuza 3, 4 and 5 are coming out in for the PS4 early next year. As someone who only got into the series with 0 and didn’t have a PS3, I’m very excited for this.
Yeah, first Erica now this. The PS4’s full of surprises this month! I’m not getting this right away since Judgment satiated my needs for an open world excursion into Kamurocho for the time being, but I’m really glad to know it’s always there on the PSN to snag on a rainy day. /cheer to SEGA and the SEGA/Atlus localization team for all their valiant efforts.
Once again, it’s all Fire Emblem all the time. And I’m not sure how deep I can really go into this because I’ve just hit the time jump and oh boy a lot of things sure did happen and boy the game sure did change a bit. Not the combat of course, it’s still very much Fire Emblem and if you picked Normal difficulty, this is at least where the difficulty picks up a little bit. Not “We’re going to die” difficult—odds are you still have an over-leveled Byleth and House leader (Claude in my case) who can step up and rip people’s hearts out with counterattacks—but there’s some more variety (one of those varieties I wish Claude had given me a little bit more warning about …).I do kind of miss the intros to each month that revealed a little bit more of the lore of the kingdom. Now it’s a “last time/and on this episode of Fire Emblem” kind of thing. I appreciate the fact that even those little cut scenes changed, but I wish they found just a bit more to do with them creatively to match what came before the jump. The hard part about this is all is boy there are just spoilers on spoilers I could be discussing, but suffice it to say, it’s good. I kind of wish there was more of an opportunity to bring in my benchwarmers than the occasional mid-month fights. The adjunct feature is nice, but it’s also really limiting since I’m a B+ professor and can only bring along two others for leveling purposes. Some characters are getting really left behind. I also wish I’d paid a little more attention to the Master Class requirements. That would have saved me a lot of leveling.
Derrick Sanskrit was just talking about Telling Lies this week, and I
love that these games have a co-op/party capability to them… though it
sounds like this one might be a little too intimate for certain types
of parties.
Oh, boy, this weekend is busy for both games and
work! I’m in St. Louis for work, but I brought not only my Switch and
3DS (glad I have the Switch to buy the games that went on sale!), but
also One Deck Dungeon, where my wife and I started a campaign after our
third-ever playthrough (she’s a Paladin named Polly, and I’m an Archer
named Mancy…). We have gotten pretty good at winning the easy dungeon,
though we missed a couple of rules along the way by mistake that in
hindsight might have helped a little, and now that we’ve collected some
EXP on our character sheet, we’re ready to tackle an intermediate
dungeon for the first time! Grinding may be necessary, but we’re looking
forward to a challenge.
Finally, I got my Retroflag GPi Case
going in celebration of the 30th Anniversary of the original Game Boy, and it’s the first emulation and “unofficial” game downloading I’ve done in 15 years… I
found a pre-configured image that had some inexplicably large number of titles of various dead systems that included some homebrew and hacked variants, and I’m playing Castlevania: Symphony of the Night for the first time! I don’t have the Redbook Audio with it, but I’m still enjoying the exploration. It’s hard to think of it coming six years before my introduction to the Castlevania series in Aria of Sorrow on GBA, as it feels so much like it. I’m not a connoisseur of the genre, so I don’t know if there’s enough of a unique experience to justify finishing it all the way through, but I’m happy to keep going for a while on it for the historic value.I feel like Samus Returns on the 3DS is a high-water-mark in the genre for me, at least for the mobility aspect, as it feels so good to play with the analog aiming and lovely visuals, but the RPG-like aspects of SotN will have to flesh themselves out a bit more so I can play with them, because I’m so early in the game I don’t have any deep decisions on loadouts. That’s where I’m sure it will start shining.Have a great weekend, everyone!
Best of fortune with your Polly and Mancy on One Deck Dungeon intermediate and beyond. I’ve never played that game but it sounds fun!
I played a mod called Serious Duke 3D, which (unsurprisingly) is a fan-made remake of Duke Nukem 3D using the Serious Sam 3 engine.It’s not a straight remake though, as some of the elements from Duke Nukem Forever are in there too; stuff like the level where you’ve been shrunk and a bit with a monster truck, etc. It’s kind of like a “greatest hits” compilation of Duke bitsIt’s a bit janky; the AI is rather poor (though this might be a homage to the original game, perhaps?) and it has the lack of polish that most one-man mods do. But, for a single-person effort, it’s pretty good and it is at least a lot fun. It even has VR support!It’s technically a mod pack, as it was about six different downloads on Steam Workshop, but if you Google the title you’ll find a link easy enough.Hail to the king, baby!
I’ve been playing some Overwatch idly this week while putting off other games. I still have AssCreed Odyssey watching me from the corner of my room, but I dunno if I have the stones to deal with such a…well, an odyssey.I’ve been wanting a video game that deals with impossible architecture lately, something that has you exploring some sort of monolithic and alien structure, sort of like Ico and its castle. To that end, I’ll look into three games this weekend: Echo, NaissanceE, and Fugue in Void. The latter two appear to be “walking simulators” with light puzzle or platforming elements and I hope my shitty laptop can handle them. The former is some sort of survival-horror sci-fi game where you’re chased by copies of yourself, I guess? Sounds dope, and the stuff I’ve seen of it clearly has a lot of wack architecture, so that’s right up my alley.
“Like L.A. Noire—but, you know, good—Her Story prized the ability to read body language and hunt for subtle expressions just as much as it did more traditional video game detective work.”L.A. Noire was a fantastic game and her story was a glorified youtube video that only got recognition because of the current political climate at the time.
Did the different sections feel like they were directed differently? Because I think they ought to be, to really feel like different people and smooth over the possible tics of having the same writer.I was pretty underwhelmed with Her Story, honestly. It’s a minority opinion, but I thought the story itself was derivative and shlocky, tied to an interesting but not quite robust interface. The puzzle of it wasn’t enough to me, so I had that “rather be watching a movie” feeling. Having not quite bought in to that one, I’m wondering if I’d think the execution grew to match the ambition of this one.
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