25-31.12.17

I'm not only on time for once, but even ahead of it. The year ends nicely on a Sunday, meaning my weekly post syncs up neatly. This is the last post I'll be doing in quite such a format, as I've mentioned previously. So... I'll start off with my thoughts on a game I just finished, then move on to talk a little bit about the past year and the coming one.

The mentioned game is Doki Doki Literature Club - something I've been itching to play since it first came out on Steam. "Oh, but Torn, this is a visual novel! You don't write at length about visual novels here." Well, yes, but I'm going to make a slight exception for this one, seeing as it's most definitely not your everyday visual novel, and is ranked ~#10 on Steam right now.

Still, Doki Doki Literature Club is a visual novel in structure through and through. If you're looking for a game, i.e. an interactive experience or gameplay, you won't find it here. In theory, you could pretty mindlessly click through all the dialogue (don't do that, it deserves better) and that would be the end of it. But where it heavily differs from being a visual novel is the content it presents. I don't wish to go into any spoilers, as I would really encourage you to play through the game yourself, but what is clearly stated is that DDLC is a horror game, and a psychological horror game at that, meaning no jump scares, but instead horror through unsettlement - the best kind of horror. By the end of it, I would hope you're left with some new things to think about, or at the very least a deep impression. (Oh, and since some people have difficulty identifying the end, it's when the credits roll. The true end is when you see a written letter from the game's creator.)

But what can I say without spoiling anything? Well, for one, I think the polish on most everything is great. The art and music are not only good, but fit very well with the rest of the game. The writing is thought through, and the timings between various events are quite right. Overall, the execution is excellent. Perhaps my only minor annoyance is how long it takes for the "action" to start in the first place. Sure, the game benefits from the first few hours where it really is just a dating sim because it helps build a connection to these characters. So when everything takes a turn for the not-okay, it triggers more of an emotional response. Still, the pacing could have been faster at various parts in the game, as I felt myself getting a bit impatient. This is a minor grievance though, and I stick by that, overall, the execution of everything is excellent.

So, my verdict on Doki Doki Literature Club? It's great! Go play it! I, myself, was a bit overhyped, and I can't really say if it deserves this incredibly high ranking it has right now, but nevertheless it was a great experience.

So, with that out of the way, onto my thoughts about the past and future.

Like mostly every year, I'm a bit disappointed in my overall progress/accomplishments over the past year. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing. You can aim low, and be happy with yourself by managing more, or you can aim high and be dissatisfied with yourself by managing less. But at the end of the day, maybe aiming high made you try harder, so despite your dissatisfaction, you accomplished more than you would have otherwise?

The vague plan I've had in my head is that I want to get through my to-do list (a big portion of which is my backlog of games), before I start to invest more time into very time-consuming things such as game development. Reason being that I know how much time a big project takes, and I would hate to sacrifice everything else to free up time for it. I'm halfway through university right now, and I feel like I've learned so much already. I feel like there's so much I can do, so much I want to do... but oh so little time.

As for the future, I'll just have to push myself harder to waste less of this time. It's all really a very delicate balance. If things you need or want to do accumulate even just slightly faster than you get them done, you just keep falling behind more and more, never catching up. If it's the other way around, you'll always have everything done and finished, and even a little bit of time left over. Sure, the real world isn't quite that simple, but a little increase in efficiency can have tremendous results. In just about two years, I'll have to really start making a living, and I want to have my ducks in as neat a row as possible by then.

As for this blog specifically, I mentioned switching to a slightly different format. When I first started out, I wanted to write a post every day to make sure that I was indeed doing something noteworthy every single day. Reality is that life doesn't move that fast, and forcing myself to write so often only took more time out of my schedule than needed. I still ended up writing only once every few days, often filling the last days out with some meaningless sentences. This end-of-week post I have now is not super comfortable either, and was a bit of a band-aid.

So my solution is this: Each game gets its own post when I finish with it. Games added to my queue don't get a post. Anything else that feels like a big enough topic to talk about also gets its own post. So I'm basically switching from regularly scheduled posts to event-based posts. There will still, however, be an end-of-week post every Sunday - something of a progress report. I will automatically be reminded of that now, so hopefully I won't miss it anymore. I predict the progress reports will be rather on the short side, and I'll try to shape them to have some sort of recurring structure. That is, if you want to compare my progress on something week after week, it should be easy to do that.

Finally, about the game reviews that I've really not wanted to call game reviews. I don't think I'm a good writer. I can see from my stats page that barely anyone reads what I write here. So this is just something I'm doing 90% for myself right now. But I still want to do this "right". I feel myself striving toward some sort of format in my write-ups, not just a "liked it" / "didn't like it", accompanied by whatever thoughts I can gather at that time. Of course it's not that easy, and not a change I can make overnight. I would have to learn about proper ways to write stuff in addition to the constant practice I'm getting from writing. But the practice has made me a better writer, or so I believe. I can't see this improvement myself, as it's incredibly slow, but I've started to get more compliments from people that I write quite well. So I want to keep improving, and it's not just an impulse I got from the recent literature themed game I finished, heh.

Of course, I shouldn't get too ambitious. If I wanted to be like a "real game critic" or something, then that would be a full-time job I don't have time for. My reviews would need to be on-time as the games come out, I'd need a nice-looking site which generally includes a bunch of bells and whistles which take time to make and maintain, as well as a lot of something I'm very much lacking right now - pictures. Pictures are a difficult subject for me for some reason, but they seem like the easiest improvement to make my content more enjoyable.

I'll be working hard to accomplish as many of my goals as I can, and I hope you are too. Happy new year, everyone!

18-24.12.17

Okay, okay, only a slight reason to be alarmed. I promised 30 games in two months, did I? Phew...

Well, I started with the first one, being Divinity: Original Sin 2. It is going to take a long while, but I found a (hopefully) better co-op partner this time around, so it'll take less than a year. The infrequent playing schedule also allows me to play other stuff in the meanwhile, so I'll try to make steady progress toward that 30 game goal.

The new Divinity looks a lot more... expensive. Definitely shows that a lot more work went into it, and everything looks and sounds just fantastic. The gameplay mechanics are a bit different, changing % damage reduction from armor to flat "armor HP" that has to be destroyed first, reducing overall AP, most status effects can only be applied once the enemy's armor is depleted, and other changes that kind of require you to re-evaluate your strategies from the previous game. Still, it feels familiar enough, and perhaps even a bit more accessible than the last one. So far, the differing mechanics are just that - different, not better or worse.

With Christmas this weekend, I'll have a few days cut off from my other activities. And then there's some final schoolwork I have to finish before the exams start, which might eat a total of another few days. So don't expect all too much next week either, but the more I get done now, the less I'll have to do later.

11-17.12.17

This is basically the last week of school before the winter break and exam session after that. While exams do make me a bit nervous, they don't take up a lot of time. So this means that I will have almost two months of free time for various things... that are only partially school projects...

But I will set a goal for myself! A number made up on the spot, I shall play at least 30 new games in the following two months.

I'm also going to slightly switch how (or rather, when) I do these posts starting next year. But I'll have a post with the details then.

4-10.12.17

While this doesn't actually concern games directly, I'm making positive progress in my overall to-do list. That means playing new games might surface up as an activity soon-ish. I've actually been enjoying some of the games that I hadn't played for a while before such as Mabinogi and Planetside 2.

27.11-3.12.17

I used to at least post new games I've found, but I'm not doing it for the time being for various reasons. For one, I don't feel it's a good use of my time. For another, I've been thinking about somewhat revamping the way I go about finding new games, since the list is growing out of control while I'm not playing. I think I got it to below 100 during the summer, and it's almost over 200 again right now.

Maybe I'll get around to some of this stuff during my winter break. Maybe it'll be just another thing in my general to-do list that is keeping me from getting to my games.

But hey, I do have some news. Ludum Dare was this weekend, and I participated with a team. I was very happy with everyone's commitment and competence, despite the choice of the specific game idea yet again not being to my liking. But such are the consequences of having a team where everyone's opinion matters.

Our lead (technical) artist did a great job, as did my friend, who was writing shaders. I think it might be one of the most visually impressive games I've seen in Ludum Dare overall. Sadly the gameplay never quite "made" it, so it's mostly just a half-functioning pretty sandbox.

We got 2nd place out of the 8 teams in the local competition, and maybe I'll play and vote on various LD games to get ratings for our game in return. You know, to actually place somewhere in the global competition as well. But I can say if and how that goes at a later date.

Oh, right, and a link to the game, of course.

20-26.11.17

There's no point in writing these three weeks late. I can't remember what I did during this time, nor how it was already so long ago. But for the purposes of this blog, I did nothing all week.

13-19.11.17

This post is both a week late and early, depending on whether you consider the time I completed this here game I'm going to talk about, or look at the date in the title in comparison with when this was actually posted. But let me tell you about the game I "just" finished.

The game's name is OneShot. And I would upfront say it's one of the most lovable games I've played in a long while. As far as the content of the game goes, I can't really reveal all of it, because it's one of those kinds of games. But this "stuff is not what it seems like" thing it has going on isn't the only great thing about it. In fact, I would say it's not even the best thing about it, and that it would have done quite well without it too. So what are the other things making it great? Those I can talk about.

First things first. OneShot is an RPGMaker-style game with no combat. You're a person (not a cat) who has to save a world by taking a lightbulb to the top of a tower. Basically no gameplay, only the story. The few puzzle elements here and there are trivial and probably mainly serve as means of content. Both the pixel art the game is in and the character sprites and occasional images shown are of great quality (and adorable). The music's nice enough that the OST is probably worth listening to outside of the game as well, which I can't say for a lot of games. And the story, mainly presented through dialogue, is at times funny, at times interesting, often (I simply must mention this) adorable, and occasionally even thought-provoking or sad. There are few games whose characters I've loved as much as I loved these.

As far as story-based games go, I'd say this one's a masterpiece, and I would without a shadow of a doubt recommend it.

06-12.11.17

Would you look at that. Can't even find the time to write once a week. I finished OneShot and would love to write my thoughts on it, but I have so overwhelmingly much schoolwork that I can't bring myself to do anything that's even remotely work that isn't schoolwork.

Half-ready to flip out and break something, as the amount of deadlines I have for different things is ridiculous. Computer Graphics by Thursday, Software Engineering by Friday, more CG by Sunday, also Economics for Sunday, Algorithms by Tuesday, then the weekly deadlines for CG and SE again on Thursday and Friday, also some Operating Systems homework in the middle of all that, and it never stops. My head is aching, but I can't stop unless I want to miss the deadlines and succumb to the incoming flow of work I have to do.

This is at least one thing I'm looking forward to in a real job. I'd have fixed hours of work, and if someone is missing a deadline because they misestimated the amount of work that needed to be done, that'd not be my problem.

I'll just need to push myself harder, clear out all of the real work I have to do, then I can get to doing my personal work, which includes writing here, and if all that's nice and done for the most part, I can get back to playing new games.

Seriously. Fuck deadlines.

30.10-05.11.17

Clearly I was not in the right mind on the day during last year's summer that I added Conception II: Children of the Seven Stars to my list. Guess I saw "RPG" and a good rating, but joke's on me, it's one of those JRPGs.

Gameplay's so bad it'd be better of not being there, aaand the rest is what I think they call a dating sim. I watched a couple of hours of the cutscenes. They're so cringy they're actually enjoyable. The reviews for it explain the... various... nuances... quite well, and they can offer a pretty good laugh. I particularly liked this one.

But uh, don't play it.

I think my standards for games really have risen. Steam's getting more games than ever, yet I'm adding the same amount or even less of them to my to-play list. For example, Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King, is something I really wouldn't consider these days, and my short experience of it confirmed it to be rather boring.
I didn't see much in terms of gameplay from it. Mash attack, run around, basic enemies, basic combat, basic levels... Reviews say it's like Zelda, which I've admittedly never played, but surely this has to be like a... light version of it. Very light and sleep-inducing.
I'm sure you'd easily find a better adventure game or RPG, whichever you might see in this game.

23-29.10.17

It's late, I'm tired, and my writing skills have clearly diminished, but I just finished with Reigns. I finished with it, but I didn't finish it. It's a game about swiping left or right, similarly to that one date finding app, or so I've heard. Except instead of judging people you... judge people's decisions? Basically you're given two options, each has some effect on your kingdom, and you got to keep your religion, people, military, and money bars balanced or you lose.

I've heard it's a great game, the reviews are pretty positive, but I didn't like it at all. And aside from the elegant simplicity, I don't see what there is to like. The gameplay is clearly nonexistant, art and music are very basic, there's not much thinking involved behind your decisions, and the story - which seems like it should be the main selling point of the game - doesn't connect at all. It feels like there's some slight arcing of various events, but overall I couldn't really piece anything together that wasn't mostly an isolated random event.

So, I wouldn't recommend it, plain and simple.

Free games have a tendency to cut in line, and so I tried Relik for a couple of hours. It's a sort-of-multiplayer game where you have to solve 4 very simple puzzles. Maze traversal, Memory, Simon, and some sort of pattern repeating. Basically all memory-based "puzzles". All the puzzles you solve are actually created by other people, and you can make your own. Solving them nets you currency which is used to upgrade your puzzles, and there's some odd ranking system.
The multiplayer wrapping around the game is nice, but since the game itself is so trivial, repetitive, and boring, it's really not worth playing.

And the highly anticipated Helldivers' free weekend rolled along. Sadly, I have some harsh words to say about this game. It's a top-down shooter played on relatively small maps that each house a few missions that generally boil down to killing a lot of enemies. And as shooting stuff isn't exactly a lot of variety, it gets rather repetitive.
This game isn't really meant to be played alone. A lot of missions are just too difficult to be completed alone, so you're going to have to find some friends or party up with strangers. Now, the problem with this is that this game has a lot of opportunities for friendly fire of various sorts. And I'm not just talking about the actual act of shooting others, which can mostly be avoided, and is really counterproductive. But a very serious problem is that there are conflicting interests in a co-op game. Mainly, the camera. All players share a camera, so if you're far from each other, neither of you can see much of what is happening, and will want the other to move, so that you could see. With enemies appearing from all sides and many being able to hit you from off-screen, this becomes detrimental.
Another case of conflicting interests that also ties back to the grind is the question of "What is the goal?" Playing with my friends, we would even argue on what we were playing for in the first place, as one of us prioritized killing as many things as possible, one wanted to complete the missions to the highest rewards possible, and one wanted to unlock everything they could as fast as possible. And these goals are conflicting, encourage different playstyles, and make people want to run in different directions, which the game will not let you do because of the constrained camera.
To repeat, this is a co-op game that suffers from a lack of direction and the inability to at least give everyone the option to pursue their own desire in said directionlessness, which leads to a bad experience for everyone involved.
While the game is well made and even kind of funny, it doesn't really excel in anything, and the aforementioned problem really was a major turn-off for me. Their previous Magicka was a much better accomplishment, doing most everything better.

PS. It just hit me that with the inconsistent frequency of the content I output, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to keep any regular posting schedule. If I fail to deliver one week, then the week's post is empty, but if I go on a miraculous spree and play 5 games in a single week, then the post will get very, very long. On the other hand, this wouldn't leave much room for the occasional ramble I like to do, such as this one. Maybe each game should get its own post, and then a weekly post of... other things I want to mention? I'll think about it and decide later, as it would be a shame to change this weekly release schedule after having it for less than a month anyways.

15-22.10.17

Oh how time flies when you got a million things that need doing. School's decently interesting, but that just makes me spend my time on it all the more,

09-15.10.17

See, this would probably paint an accurate picture of my current situation. I don't even have any content for an entire week. I've been playing HotS, some Mabinogi, and a little bit of Factorio in my free time, but I don't really have a whole lot of free time. Working hard to stop work from overflowing, but I can't really see myself having particularly more or less time for games in the near future.

I'm back

I'm feeling a bunch better about stuff now. I've really mostly been doing the same stuff as usual, with the exception that I haven't been starting new games, but have been sulking playing the ones I already play instead. As such, my to-play list has grown considerably, but I've also not missed out on writing about any of the games I've completed. Additionally, I'll switch to a weekly update schedule with an update every Sunday evening.

To be honest, I did finally complete Divinity: Original Sin. Took me far over a year, since it's really hard to find co-op partners who don't ditch you midway through the game. And no one wants to pick up someone else's character, so you got to start over only to have playthrough end midway as well. sigh With the experience as smeared out as it was, I have trouble recollecting everything about the game, but I can assure you it was great. The fact alone that despite other people trying their hardest to keep me from enjoying it, I didn't give up and kept at it for over a year, coming back to continue the adventure.
I've no complaints about the game, and plenty to praise it for. Enough that I don't even know what to mention, what to leave out. Well balanced difficulty, pretty visuals, nice soundtrack, full voice acting, great combat mechanics, non-repetitive story, varied enemies, decent puzzles, entertaining NPCs, and definitely much more. This game gets the top spot in my list of favorite RPGs and RPG-like games, and I hear Original Sin II is even better.
So in case it wasn't clear, I'd absolutely recommend playing Divinity. Although with the next version out already, you might be better off just playing that instead.

I also gave Battle for Wesnoth a try, as per a friend's request. It's a fun open source TBS where you move each unit individually. Kind of like Civ, except there's no city-building, no economy, politics, or any of the other stuff. Just basic unit recruiting and combat with some stuff like daytime and terrain modifiers.

It's nice that it also functions as sort of an engine so you can make your own games or game modes on it, and also has an online server browser, but the game itself felt rather shallow. After playing through the tutorial, and a relatively short match, I feel I've seen most of the game. Sure, there's plenty to be learned in terms of optimal strategies, but there's not enough features to keep it entertaining.

Overall I'd recommend any of the at-least-half-decent commercial TBSes over this thing.

Of other notable news is that SteamDB switched the formula by which they rate games. Why it's noteworthy here, is because the formula they switched to was the one that I made. (I also described it here, some not too many posts ago.)

14.08.17

Looks like my eye problems aren't done plaguing me yet. It's nothing to write about here in detail, but I've developed some form of depression as a side effect. As such I will be taking a break from writing in this blog until further notice. I hope to be back when the problem has been resolved, but I'm not sure about anything right now. Until later, Torn out.

13.08.17

So I managed to play through Monolith today. Monolith is a top-down shooter where you clear rooms and avoid enemy bullets. It's pretty much exactly Binding of Isaac made into a bullet hell game. Honestly, for as long as it lasted, I really liked it more than The Binding of Isaac. Your movement is very responsive, all attacks are well defined - the gameplay is tight. The aesthetics match the music perfectly and create a very "old" feel, I guess. Not that people ever stopped making games with these kinds of graphics, but I digress, I loved the visuals and sounds.

"Wait, Torn, you're not actually saying this game is like The Binding of Isaac, but better?" No, no, sadly it is not. What this game really lacks is content, as is always the case these days. I don't know if people get bored or run out of ideas, but they can really make great game mechanics, and then not add any meat to it all. But this issue isn't really specific to this game.

So, in conclusion, I liked this game. I wouldn't really recommend it because it hasn't got enough content and is over too soon, but it's worth your time if you get a chance to play it.

12.08.17

I won't be playing this, as I already have a couple such games on mobile, but Draw Puzzle looks like a nice relaxing game. Draw lines, watch pictures happen. You're not actually the one making these pictures in these kinds of games, but since you're the one drawing the lines, it feels like you are, and it's always a nice feeling to make something that looks good. =)

11.08.17

I managed to hurt my eye yesterday and as such I will spend less time looking at a monitor for the next several days. I hope for it to be mostly fine by next week.

10.08.17

Oh look, the first game in the latest entry to The Legend of Heroes series is on Steam: Trails of Cold Steel. I didn't really like Trails in the Sky when it released in English a few years ago, but since it was originally a 2004 game, I'm willing to give the newer one a try. Maybe 9 years of additional experience will have improved things. The Legend of Heroes series is a turn-based strategy type of JRPGs. This latest entry is finally in proper 3D, which is nice.

09.08.17

I don't know why I feel reluctant to start with another game. I'll never finish my backlog at this rate. I played some Factorio today. That was about all.

08.08.17

(Click to enlarge)

I did a few more hours of Monster Slayers this morning, completing normal mode. Turns out the Rogue class is totally OP once your deck mostly consists of cards that allow you to draw more cards. Once you cross a certain threshold, you'll be able to cycle the entire deck each turn. You basically just rack up your played card count with mostly non-damaging cards that give you more cards, then finish off with 2-3 backstabs. This one-shots most enemies in the game. I also got my chain record to around ~25 cards. There's more character classes to be unlocked and a "Legendary mode" that's supposedly a bunch more difficult.

I believe that what I said about the game yesterday is correct, except for the "not enough content" part. I think the actual word I was looking for was "shallow". There's an okay amount of content, but as I explained, it doesn't offer enough possibilities as a whole.

07.08.17

I started with Monster Slayers today. It is, as the description states, a deck-building rogue-like. You start off with a class that determines your starting deck. You have HP, MP, and AP as resource pools, and cards that use your resource pools to decrease the enemy's resource pools - mainly their HP. As the game progresses you can upgrade and delete your cards as well as add new ones. Battles are fought 1v1 in rapidly increasing difficulty and you can buy permanent upgrades that persist through deaths.

I don't usually give a game's full feature list. When I do, it's probably because I wish to point out that that's all there is to that game. Now, generally I'd follow that up by calling the game shit, but I'm not going to do that here. I quite liked Monster Slayers. Despite being turn-based, it feels quite fast, and instead of the usual "attack the enemy once, enemy attacks you once" combat these kinds of games provide, this one had a lot of focus put into attack chains, to chain together lots of cards. The longest card chain I got was 11 cards, and this mechanic feels really, really good. The progression system also keeps you playing for a long time, as I'm not even nearly halfway through after 5 hours.

But the problem is mainly the lack of content. This combines with the fact that the game doesn't require all too much thinking, and suddenly you feel like you're on a treadmill, except you're not even getting any exercise done. I would've loved features like bigger parties, bigger groups of enemies, cards that depend on one another a little bit more... I don't know... something. I really wanted to like this game more, but playing it literally made me nauseous. I've no idea why, but it consistently happens when doing repetitive low-effort tasks for a long time.

So, would I recommend this game? I'd recommend to try this game, it's really fun for the first couple of hours. But ultimately I can't say it's a good game. Great idea, great execution, just not enough content and possibilities.

06.08.17

Fully completing Danganronpa 2 requires a shocking amount of time, possibly another full day after completing the main game. Mainly that maxing your Island mode relationship with each character takes a ridiculous amount of in-game days, which requires multiple playthroughs. The light novel took me only about 1-2 hours, and I really enjoyed it. But I skipped maxing my relationship, instead opting to view the dialogue from other people's playthroughs. So that's not entirely the reason why I still didn't start a new game today.

I spent more hours than I care to admit thinking up a new formula with which to give Steam's games a proper rating based on their review percentage and the number of reviews. It took a few tries to come up with something that'd at least seem better than what I previously had. Basically, what I wanted was something that would: a) Estimate the result closer to 50% the fewer reviews it had. b) Get ever more slowly closer to its actual rating as its number of reviews increased but never quite reach it.

I previously used Laplace smoothing and took the base 10 logarithm of the number of reviews so that it would approach the given rating much, much slower than regular Laplace smoothing. α = 0.5, β = 1.0 I had two problems with this. The first one was that I didn't actually understand what this formula was doing. Just that it was moving ratings with a low sample size closer to α / β, ratings with a high sample size closer to the real rating, and that I could control its "adjustment intensity" by increasing or decreasing α and β or the base of the logarithm. The other problem was that it gave highly rated games with a low sample size too good of a rating, and if I were to turn the knob to value the sample size more, then it would start to over-value the sample size on ratings with a high sample size.

So I sat down and started to make a formula from scratch that would fill the criteria mentioned above. After tweaking the numbers I settled on "A game with 10x the amount of reviews should have 2x the score certainty." Alternatively "...half the score uncertainty." would describe it better. So if a game with 1 review had an uncertainty of 100% (certainty of 0%), then something with 10 reviews would have half that uncertainty - 50%, 100 reviews - 25%, and so on. And what certainty means is just how big of a portion of the final rating would be the actual rating, and the remaining would be 50%. Putting that all together: r - (r - 0.5) * 2^{-log₁₀(a + 1)}, where r is the rating and a is the amount of reviews. This definitely emphasizes the amount of ratings more when there aren't many of them, and the actual rating itself when there are. It also has two "knobs" to turn, should I want to adjust it, instead of just the one the previous formula had.

But, uh, I'll get around to a game by the name of Monster Slayers tomorrow.

05.08.17

Nothing really new today. I cleaned various things today, including my computer and my Steam library. Basically I finally gave up on trying to play Torchlight II with my friends since the netcode was not on our side and people and enemies weren't synced at all. Also tried Shardbound which wasn't any interesting, just another card game, mostly a Duelyst clone.

Though I completed Danganronpa 2's Story mode, it seems there's a little more story there in the form of an Island mode where I can finish learning about everyone through interacting with them (that sounds kind of weird, actually), as well as apparently a light novel that'll take a couple of hours. I'm probably not going to 100% it, but I will spend a few more hours on it.

04.08.17

It would seem Thursdays are the most popular day for releasing games, followed shortly by Friday, then by Wednesday a little farther off. Any other days only have a small fraction of games released on them in comparison. There's about a whopping 50 games released on both Thursday and Friday, with maybe about 40 on Wednesday, and 60 on the others combined, for a total of about 200 games every week. That is honestly a sickening amount of games, the vast majority of which are utter garbage. I fear the day when there are more games than people care to browse through, and some good ones end up getting lost. But for today, we can still enjoy Steam reviews to give us a decent quality standard.

With that said, here's two new games I'm barely interested in.

Immortal Planet - some sort of action-RPG.

The Darkside Detective - a comedic point-and-click adventure.

 I also finally finished Danganronpa 2. I think it was a nice sequel to the first one (sorry for the spoiler), but generally very similar to it, with perhaps small improvements in various places. I'd still question if its uniqueness warranted the clearly lacking quality in certain, mostly visual, aspects, but I guess they did a good job given the resources they had? The ending got a little bit weird for me, but I ultimately like the conclusion, even if it's a little far-fetched. I guess I'll be looking forward to the next episode and perhaps I'll even try the spin-off titles.
Overall, it's clearly flawed in some parts of the story, and the art style can be very uncomfortable, but I'd still recommend it if you like murder mysteries and/or pseudo-VNs.

03.08.17

Uh, darn, I wasn't being productive today. I mean, playing games isn't very productive in the first place, but I wasn't even managing to do that much.

02.08.17

Oh hey, Pyre released. It's from the creators of Bastion and Transistor, the latter of which I really should get around to playing. It's also got pretty good reviews. I'll let it be a surprise what exactly the game is about, but it seems to have: a) a lot of story, b) action-based games instead of lethal combat, c) a branching story. Any or all of those might not be entirely true, but that's the impression I got. I'll probably wait with this until I finish Transistor, whenever that'll be.

01.08.17

I spent today resting from the fatigue of working dawn-to-dusk for three days straight. Played various games with friends... nothing noteworthy though. Will probably get back to my routine shortly enough.

31.07.17

Day 3 was mostly spent on polish and making the levels out of the building blocks we already had. In the end we scrapped having the flashlight consume power, and we didn't quite have time for making UI for the tutorial. The enemy AI was also underwhelming. But overall, I think the finished game was a little better and a little more complete than last time around.

Here's a link to the Ludum Dare page, if you're interested in giving it a try. It's a 3-day game made by non-professionals, so it's clearly nothing good, but I can't just not link something that I myself helped make.

30.07.17

Day 2 was spent mostly on making these various missing interactions so that everything would behave as expected. Deadly spikes and bullets, enemies that could be killed / destroyed, UI for the ammunition, various triggers for events and some moving parts like platforms and doors. Some of these less-crucial interactions also got pushed into day 3, but I can't quite remember in hindsight what those were.

We also got the lighting system in and the first batch of levels that were supposed to act as a sort of introduction. Most of the art and animation was also put in during this day.

29.07.17

Most of our team members weren't too enthusiastic about suggesting game ideas. In the end, like last LD, the idea we ultimately picked wasn't one that I liked. I guess it can't be helped in a team, but it feels kinda bad when you can't really make what you want even when working on such a small thing as a Ludum Dare game.

We settled on a platformer where the environment was mostly pitch black and you had a limited source of power cells that you found in the levels that you could use either on a flashlight so you could see where you're going, or as ammo for a gun, to kill enemy threats.

My suspicions about one of my teammates were justified, as he was mostly useless at best, distracting us from working at worst. Excluding him, we had two programmers and two 2D artists. Still, by the end of the first day, we had managed to finish character movement, some platforms, and some enemies. So while there wasn't much interaction between anything, things could move around properly.

28.07.17

I haven't been feeling super great about things in general for the past few days. I'm not sure what that's about and the timing coinciding with Ludum Dare isn't a nice surprise. Maybe they're related, who knows. So the mood's a little less pleasant this time around.

The local LD competition I'm participating in did their team formation today. In hindsight, I can blame myself for jumping into a team early, but I'm not entirely satisfied with the people who got added to the team I was in afterwards. I guess I'll find out how it turns out in the coming days, but one of them claimed to have no experience in any of the fields relating to making a game (programming, art, etc.), and one of them is apparently late to arrive. Furthermore, we were expected to present our initial game idea by 13:00, but most of the team said that they can't really arrive before 12:00, giving us way too little time for such a crucial foundation for the next three days. But I'm trying to keep my attitude positive and I hope to be proven wrong, as usual.

On another topic, partially related to what I mentioned a few days ago, that I've been more critical towards accepting games... I looked back at the reason I started looking through all of Steam's games and trying as many as I could... And I couldn't really remember it. I guess I was maybe afraid of missing out on any potential good releases? But now I feel like the only actual good releases are games I'd already hear about one way or the other. Maybe I just wanted to play games to not be bored? Well, a lot of the games I choose right now are indeed boring, if only offering some variety from the usual stuff I play. And at the end of it all, my favorites are always the kinds of games that are made over a lot of time, with a lot of people, and with at least some advertising behind it, so there's no way I'd ever accidentally miss any of those. And that's normal, because more time and more people can just make more content and more quality. I do enjoy a good indie every now and then, and while it's true my top 60 contains some less known games, most of them, especially the ones near the top, are still super popular. I just feel like I'm not helping anyone else by trying to find these games and that I'm not helping myself either, because, collectively, people have already done this job for me for the large majority.
But the silver lining is that the less games I add to be tried out, the faster I get to finishing everything I have set out to try already. I'll eventually either run out of games, get bored, and repeat the cycle, remember my goal and start filling my queue again, or find happiness in some other place. I may not have a clear goal in mind, but I'm moving towards it, whatever it is.

27.07.17

I'm approaching the end of Danganronpa 2 after clearing yet another chapter. The plot thickens, as usual, and I'm not too hopeful that they'll answer many of the questions that they've created about the story before it ends for this episode. But hey, there's already the next, I just need to wait for it to be localized.

Also Ludum Dare is coming up this weekend, so I'll be occupied with that Friday - Monday in all likelihood. No new games then, but do expect a write-up of what I did, during or after the event.

26.07.17

I went ahead and labelled a bunch of posts either "thoughts" or "ramblings". Basically, "thoughts" are posts where I talk about games in a more general sense instead of the typical game-specific opinions I give. "ramblings" are kind of the same, except the label is used when I don't feel like I actually had anything worthwhile to say.

It's been a while since I've added any games, as mentioned just yesterday, so I got an entirety of two extra games today.
Tangledeep claims to be roguelike that is inspired by classic RPGs. It does actually look more like an RPG, and as such I'm not really sure what would make it a roguelike. There are also no negative reviews at all for me to try to understand what could potentially be wrong with the game. So, I guess I'll have to try it myself.
Kingsway is something I've heard about a little bit more, perhaps because of its rather unique gameplay mechanic where the game is built like an OS. Apparently it's terribly shallow beneath that unique cover, but I've decided to try it regardless.

25.07.17

I'm almost certainly becoming more critical towards the games I see on Steam, and what I add to my list. This may have been apparent from the drought of new games being added. I'd like to think of this as a good thing, meaning I spend less time on stuff that's bad, and more time on stuff that's good. Not to mention it helps me catch up with the list instead of letting it slip ever further away. But this begs another question. What's the point of this at all then? I originally wanted to not miss any of the so-called hidden gems by also looking through many of the less popular games on Steam. Well, now that my program is taking care of what I am nearly certain is absolute rubbish, there are very few of these unpopular games left, and even then I rarely decide I want to play them. Maybe this is a good thing? Maybe, through looking through tens of thousands of games, I have finally confirmed on my own that this system Steam has is working. That good games are going to have lots of ratings, and that they are going to have lots of good and highly rated ratings. This of course means that good games surface and are very easy to find, while the rest is left in the depths of the unknown and unfound, as it should be. Wouldn't that be wonderful. Still, I'll continue what I'm doing.

PS. I'm starting to run out of games that aren't in Early Access, but this will be a topic for when that actually happens.

As per a friend's request, I played a few games of the newly released Gigantic with them. As I didn't and probably wouldn't have picked this game on my own, I don't feel too strong an urge to say much about it, but... It's a little something between a third-person shooter and a MOBA. Think Paragon without the laning and the minions. MOBAs may be saturated, but it still manages to scratch an itch that some people may not have gotten satisfied from other games. It has no laning or minions so it's not purely a traditional MOBA, and is indeed probably closest to Overwatch. Still, it's neither first person nor strictly a shooter. Honestly, you'd probably still be better off playing Overwatch if you like these kinds of things, but if you want something that's like Overwatch, while not actually being Overwatch, go ahead and try Gigantic. I found no obvious flaws with it, and it would've probably been a big hit, but with the giant known as Overwatch, the bar is simply set higher these days.

24.07.17

Progress, progress, but not much I can really say that isn't a spoiler. I'm still quite enjoying the story, but it seems they felt the need to be overly fanciful at times, which is actually making the story a little too ridiculous to immediately believe. It's a shame, because there's this conflict between the murder mysteries that they're trying to make highly logical and then certain other parts of the game which are just plain impossible in reality. I feel that these small flaws pile up and subtract from what could be an excellent game (or story, if you'd rather call it that), making it simply a good game.

23.07.17

I spent the morning on this little thing called V. It's a game about deciding whether the color on the screen matches the word on the screen, but there are, of course, lots of little twists to it. The game's free, so I'd recommend you try it, even if it only provides an hour or few of entertainment.

PS. Check out the colorblind settings.

22.07.17

I found this cute little boss rush game named She Save that will probably take no more than a literal hour once I try to play it. It's apparently not very good and I'm not expecting anything, but it's just one hour.

21.07.17

Some more Danganronpa and Terraria. Both are probably going to take a while, so I don't have much to say in the meanwhile.

20.07.17

Oh shit, it's Edmund McMillens next game, The End Is Nigh. Lots of comparisons to Super Meat Boy here, but it describedly plays more like an adventure platformer. Well, I simply have to try it.

I started playing Danganronpa 2 today, and it's proving to be both slower and a bit more interesting than the previous installment. I'd credit the latter to a more thought-through plot that is less predictable. Oh, Danganronpa is sort of like a VN murder mystery. While there is actual gameplay and not only clicking through the thing, it's still mostly text, so it's not really a game.

19.07.17

I gave Hearthlands a brief try. It's a city-builder game that also incorporates resource management and some RTS elements. I can't say I found it particularly bad, but it's trying to do a tad too many things without putting much effort into making any one of those work well. With the amount of high-quality games of this genre already out there, the niche is kind of full and you need to put in a whole lot of effort to surpass them in even just one aspect. This game rather does the opposite and as such completely pales in comparison. It's just comparatively boring and I wouldn't recommend playing it.

18.07.17

Aside from more Terraria, I tried MHRD today. I guess you could say it's a programming "game", but instead of writing regular code for stuff, or even the low-level pseudo-assembly like in TIS or Shenzhen, you're writing hardware. The game starts you off with a NAND gate and it's up to you to use it to construct various other pieces of "micro hardware" (which is also the name of the game - Micro HaRD), each a little bit more difficult than the last. Eventually these pieces, stacked up, make for something that's complicated enough to qualify as a simple CPU.

It's a nice concept, and also slightly educational in this narrow category, but as a game, I find it was lacking. Inevitably, I must compare it to Zachtronics' games, and it basically falls short in every aspect.

First of all, the presentation. It's entirely possible it was going for an archaic feel, but not allowing me to use my mouse didn't help the game in any aspect and only made navigating around that little bit more difficult. Also it had no background music whatsoever, instead opting to have the hum of a computer and the clacking of the keys as I pressed them to satisfy my audio needs. I can't remember when I've last muted a game as I was playing it, but I don't need more hum and double the clack each time I press a key. These sounds are already there, and at least the hum is something I could live without entirely.

Secondly, perhaps inevitably, the puzzles, if I can even call them that, were too unimaginative. I say inevitably, because there's only so many options to make these logic gates and other pieces, solutions are bound to be the same. Not only that, if you've ever been taught how to make these things, then you already knew the answers. These were standard problems with standard solutions. I can't say off the top of my head if you could even make non-standard problems given this theme of using logic gates, or if mostly everything's already been solved, but it's definitely possible for something like the pseudo-assembly of Shenzhen. Shenzhen's puzzles offered a wide variety of solutions, some not even objectively better than others.

Finally, if this was indeed intended as a educational game for people who had some idea of how this kind of logic worked, but hadn't actually studied logic circuits (I kind of qualify), it would be at least a bit fun as you realize how simply some of these things can really be made. But it's not very educative, as you're bound to get a correct answer by just throwing enough circuitry at the problem, and it doesn't do much to tell you if or how your design should be improved, nor does it explain much as to how these solutions should be implemented. At least for the first part, again something Zachtronics does better with their leaderboard system.

So, overall, I wouldn't recommend this "game", if it can even be called that. If you're interested about this subject, flat out trying to learn it somewhere would be a better idea.

17.07.17

I hadn't played Terraria in like a year, so I got a couple of my friends and started a playthrough of that. It may be like my 3rd-ish playthrough, but thanks to the generous support Re-Logic is giving Terraria via free patches, there's always been a boatload of new content between the times I've played. Again, no new games, but it's a rarity to find more than one other of my friends who'd want to play some certain game I'd want, so I take those opportunities when they arise.

16.07.17

Darn, I'm falling behind on my schedule. Mostly not game related activities today, and I'm not too certain about having time on some days next week and the week after that either.

15.07.17

Aw shit, no new games. I spent today on Divinity: OS. I'm really close to the end now. That is all.

14.07.17

Monsters' Den: Godfall released. If I can recall correctly, it's a party-based dungeon crawler. I've played some previous Monsters' Den games back when they were free flash games, and I liked them. So even though this one has less than stellar reviews, it's going onto the list.

The first game to be attempted today was Alwa's Awakening. It's a metroidvania that is trying to imitate NES games. Now, I haven't actually played any NES games, but I would guess that some of their gameplay was governed by the technological limitations of that time. And while I can appreciate trying to go for a nostalgic feel, it wouldn't have hurt to make some things a little bit more modern. What mainly irked me was that the entire game stopped for a few seconds every time you reached the edge of a room, which was maybe once every 15-30 seconds if you were just running through the area. That's a large portion of time that the game is effectively frozen, not to mention when you felt the desire to go back to the room you just came from.
I can't criticize the art, music, the level layouts, puzzles... But the entire thing was really slow and unexciting. You were locked into a walking speed, your jumps were very floaty, and the melee attack, your only form of offense, felt underwhelming in its execution. Another issue I had was with the checkpoints. While I can't say they were placed too infrequently, there should have perhaps been some way to get from one to another. On two occasions, I fell down after some poorly executed platforming and the way back up was simply way too long. It wasn't even difficult, but due to the relatively slow travel time and the possibility that I'd make a mistake again at some point, it took far too long.
So, in conclusion, if you hold Alwa's Awakening to the standards of some of the older games, then perhaps it's of pretty decent quality. I would hold it to a more modern standard and say it's badly made in some important aspects, and not because of the retro feel it's trying to create.

And the other one was Rosenkreuzstilette. Oddly enough I also added them to my list on the same day, and they are both old-looking platformers. But that's about where the similarities end. I'd say Rosenkreuzstilette is like a shitty ripoff of Megaman, except that would be giving it too much credit. It's more like someone made a shitty ripoff of Megaman, and then this game is a shitty ripoff of that. Except all of the characters have been turned into little anime girls.
I had a genuine laugh at how little anything I saw in the game made sense. There was no music, the sound effects were terrible, and the lack of music only made them seem so much worse. The artstyle was all over the place with very shitty quality pictures as the background and tiles, and then enemies that were animated at like 2 FPS and drawn in MS Paint. I was shooting little potatoes out of my hands, and some of the enemies were like impossible to get past without losing health to them. But hey, once I got to the first boss, shit became flat out impossible. I could barely land a single shot at it, as it was either firing at me, being invincible, or both at the same time. The best part was that after 3 tries, I got a Game Over screen, and was forced to start from the beginning of the level. And well, clearly that was where my attempt ended as I closed the game, still laughing.
In case I need to spell it out, don't even dare try it, regardless of what the reviews say.

13.07.17

So I gave Rakuen a try, and... To put it shortly, this story should never have been in the form of a game. It's purely focused on the story with no action or combat or anything whatsoever. You just walk around the place interacting with various things to uncover and advance little bits of the story. Now, aside from the fact that you're a potentially terminally ill boy in a hospital (I didn't actually learn a single thing about why he's hospitalized during the time I played), I never really reached any part where the story would pick up.

The first two hours that I played were doing a piss poor job at keeping me awake. I couldn't grasp what the story was going to be about - there was no big initial problem that needed fixing, instead you just walked around the hospital talking to people, looking for your stolen book, which continued for a good hour. I guess this served as some form of introduction to the characters, but gosh, was it forced. Then the next hour out of the two was spent in the game's alternate fantasy world, where certain characters correspond to the ones you saw at the hospital. And so the first two hours were spent on mind-numbingly boring things with no apparent reason behind them from the story's perspective. Again, a forced introduction, I believe.

It was only after that that the game gave a promise of what the rest would be about. I was to help the people I had met at the hospital in exchange for one of my wishes to be granted. But, sadly, by that point I had lost hope in the game. But this is still a rather highly rated title, as far as the story-only games go, so I didn't just want to leave it at that, and proceeded to read elsewhere what I was missing out on.

No spoilers from me, but the game is supposedly pretty sad towards the end, probably more so if you actually bothered to experience it. And while I wouldn't shun this game for the story, despite it having its flaws as well, I would most definitely call any gameplay attached to it a load of crap. I am not sure why the developers went the route of making this a game, when there was practically no effort put into making it bearable to play. Even for an RPG Maker game, the setup of the menus, interactions with items in the game, the placement of those items... It was terrible. Were you to write this story as a book, it would be a light 100-150 page read, not the 8 hour sleep-inducing semi-errand-simulator it is. The text runs too slow, there are too many tasks that need to be done that don't connect enough to the story, the distances are too long, and navigating the menus feels unnatural, which is even worse when this makes some of the characters sound like broken record boxes.

If you really want to know what this story is about and don't want to just read someone's compilation of it, then I guess you can play it. Otherwise I'd stay far away.

 I cleared out a few games from the list that clearly had problems and that I no longer wished to try out. Coupled with the other game I played today, that should bring my total down to 102 games. (Plus some visual novels, and VR games I can't play.) That's just about 2 per day for the rest of the summer if nothing gets added to the list, which of course it will.

But that other game I mentioned was Hyper Knights. To describe it through other existing and popular games, it's a clear mixture between Mount & Blade's campaign mode and One Finger Death Punch. So you got a bunch of villages, outposts, and castles, which stock you with gold and troops to fuel your expansion. You can also hire knights to lead larger armies for automated conquest or more solid defense of your own lands. The enemy responds in kind. There's a lot going on on the map at all times, but the AI takes good care of it all.
When you personally enter a battle, however, your knight is not like all the others. You have a dash, two attack keys, and a power key. Each enemy has some keys above their head that each correspond to one of the attack keys you have. Like in OFDP, you have to hit the right key to deal damage to the enemy. The power key allows you to choose a power that can be an AoE, multiple dashes, shield, shockwave, or a bunch others - basically a super strong attack.
There's not terribly much content there, but given the mechanics I've described, it'd be at least as fun as OFDP, right? Well, it very well might be, were it not that some of the powers are way too strong, basically making the game devolve to charging those powers, then using them to win. But even worse than that is that unlike OFDP, there is no penalty for hitting a wrong button. So the strategy is just to mash the two attack buttons alternately until you get the special power, everyone's dead, or your fingers are too tired.
So, due to these pretty major flaws, I can't actually recommend this game, but I did have a few hours of fun playing it. It's quite the grind, and that couples well with the mindless combat system, so if you want to switch off your brain for a few hours and beef up your fingers, get tapping.

12.07.17

Starship Theory recently went into Early Access on Steam and seems to be a game that's somewhere between FTL and Rimworld, as you build your spaceship while traveling across space and making sure your crew is okay. The review score is rather low for the moment, but I will probably be waiting until it's out of Early Access anyways, as usual.

11.07.17

Finally continuing on with other games.

Riptale is a game where you run around somewhat randomly generated levels, hitting stuff with your sword before that stuff manages to hit you. I feel I have a little something to say about each of its aspects, so lets start at the least significant.

The music is pretty nice and matches the game in its fast pace. The game uses black-and-white pixel art, which looks stylistically fitting, but makes it difficult to spot some enemies. Due to the fast and rather unforgiving nature of the game, being unable to instantly recognize an enemy becomes a big problem. There's also apparently a story told via books that appear every few levels, but as far as I saw, it's very brief and not at all interesting.

As for the gameplay, it's quite simple. You can run around and jump. Then you have (by default) three attack charges, which can be used to launch directional attacks that one-shot enemies, dash you in that direction, and also offer a very far-reaching sweep. These clearly overpowered attacks are the game's main, and pretty much only mechanic. After hitting an enemy, time stops for a split second, allowing you to aim at another enemy to potentially continue the combo.

I think this is a very nice mechanic, but it is plagued by a bad aiming mechanic and level design that heavily hinders your line of sight to a lot of enemies. I think this might even be playable if you could aim with your mouse, but as it stands now, I have at best 8 directions where I can aim, and while the game tries to slightly adjust my aim, it also often adjusts it in the wrong direction, causing me to miss an otherwise perfectly aimed attack. Secondly, a lot of the enemies have very spazzy movement, meaning that if the game placed them in some cozy nook where you can't get line of sight without getting close, it's very difficult to not take damage. Other enemies fire projectiles at you, which can also make hitting them without taking damage a very difficult task in some of the generated levels.

So, it's a nice idea, but the implementation is really rather poor, hence I wouldn't recommend it.

Weapon Shop Fantasy is a game where you get workers, have them gather materials, use those materials to make items, then sell the items to get new gathering locations and item recipes. And that's basically the whole game loop. It's a very simple game, it's a very grindy game, and it's not a very good game. It's basically a clicker game because each item has to be queued up, and you can't really automate the process. So if I were to compare it to a clicker game, I could say it's pretty decent with a nice amount of variety as you have to stay on top of what items are being requested from you. Compare it to any "normal" game, and it's just a complete waste of your time, as most clicker games tend to be.
If you're looking for a game about running an item shop, try Recettear. It's not super good, but I liked it enough that I would recommend it.

10.07.17

There's a nagging little voice in the back of my head calling me weak or a casual for quitting when facing a challenge. The other part, that I decided to listen to, tells me that if I'm not having fun, I don't have to spend my time playing a game even if I like the concept and it's a modern genre-definer that a ton of people like.

So for largely the same reasons as I once quit the original Dark Souls, I now quit Dark Souls II. I had been progressing at a steady pace, lit the third Primal Bonfire, usually taking a couple of deaths to gather most of the stuff in the area and find the boss, then a few deaths at the boss before beating it. Definitely nothing disheartening in itself, and I was by no means stuck, given the current difficulty. However, the difficulty was definitely a factor that influenced the decision to stop playing after a particular death while running through another area.

My thoughts were plain and simple. "I am not having fun, I don't want to play this anymore." But being who I am, I can't just leave things at that. "Why am I not having fun?" I asked myself. And starting from the end of the story, I figured I could've probably prevented that death. Instead I just charged at the enemy without caution, opting to rely on my heavy armor and tons of Estus. As for why I did that, it's clear - I didn't care to analyze this enemy's moves, to find a strategy to beat it without taking damage, because it would overall probably be faster to just run through it. It's not like I'd encounter them again all that much, I don't need to know their ins and outs. But this just meant I had subconsciously shifted from trying to experience (learn) the game, to trying to get it over with.

While I'd normally enjoy a challenge, because that means I was incapable of using my current pool of experience to easily dismantle the situation, and can thus use this new challenge to gain new experience for further trials... Dark Souls just didn't feel like that kind of challenge to me. I wasn't trying new things. I didn't felt like I was learning new things. Maybe I should have done both, but I didn't need to. My current build and strategies were carrying me through the game just fine, but I wasn't learning how to play better. I was just learning how the game worked.

I'd normally say that a game that isn't too easy and isn't too hard has to be fun because of that precise balance of difficulty alone. One source of fun is definitely learning (but not studying, mind you, which is why we like games but not school), which can't be done when something is so easy you can not learn from it, nor when something is so hard you can not wrap your head around it. But I guess a balanced challenge doesn't always make you learn something from it.

In the case of Dark Souls, I dare say the content is unfair. Far too often I am not given an option to learn upfront, only as a result of getting defeated. I do not wish to re-run the same content multiple times unless I have something left to learn from it, but in many cases here, I didn't. I just needed to get the information that was pretty much only acquirable by dying, and then I could use my already existing knowledge to work out a solution. I guess it's kind of hard to tell the two apart, but really, I didn't approach a boss with a different strategy on the fifth time than the first time. "Dodge or block their attacks, use the downtime when they're not attacking to either heal up or deal damage." And that's a pretty comprehensive guide I was following in my head. I just needed to know what their attacks were and how their downtime worked. Most of the times I died to something new I hadn't seen before. But I couldn't possible prepare for those times.

It's really hard to tell sometimes why I like one game but dislike another. Dark Souls has named a whole genre, meaning it clearly did something that was not only new, but also desired. Sure, the souls-like games, as they're called, aren't really big as a genre, but I've seen a decent bunch of them. I even quite like Salt and Sanctuary, despite it being shockingly similar to Dark Souls. So I can't not recommend Dark Souls, simply because of how influential this game is. Even though I didn't like it, it's a game that I'm glad to have played because of it's higher-than-average historical significance.

09.07.17

(Click to enlarge)

Finished the other bell tower and the Iron Keep. Since that was the second Primal Bonfire out of the four (I vaguely remember there were four?), I guess I should be halfway through the game now, DLC aside. I reached the 50 strength I was aiming for and am now running with my great hammer in one hand, Tower Shield in the other. I found the armor merchant was selling the Smelter Demon's armor as well, which was pretty good, so I went ahead and got that. That all of course caused my equip load to pass 100%, so I'm working on building up my capacity now. At least I got a majestic strut instead of the usual jog.

Also beat the Grave of Saints and The Gutter (screw that place) later on this day. Should probably be continuing with the Shaded Woods instead of that poison-filled hellhole after The Gutter.

08.07.17

This session took care of Huntsman's Copse, Harvest Valley, and Earthen Peak. Also the Iron Keep should be about half-finished. I'm fairly close to getting 50 strength so I could one-hand the mace great hammer. Someone who summoned me one time had an even larger one though, so I guess I'm not capped out yet.

07.07.17

Dark Souls progressed a little faster this session. Cleared The Lost Bastille, Sinner's Rise, Heide's Tower of Flame, unpetrified the pyromancer at the lever in Majula, cleared some of that area until the 3rd bonfire there, There's some stairs at The Lost Bastille that I have actually yet to go down, and probably some other stuff I can't recall right now.

06.07.17

I've been designing blueprints for Factorio. I currently have early-to-end-game smelting blueprints and 4.5/6 science production blueprints done. I guess certain parts of Factorio will eventually just devolve into placing down blueprints and hooking them up to your main bus. But that just gives you more time to focus on other, less automatable aspects of the game, or further perfect your existing designs. On the other hand, nobody likes inventing the wheel over and over again, even if you do it the first time instead of copying someone else's work.

Other than that I got started with Dark Souls II. The bosses are pretty grueling and it doesn't much help that the more you die, the harder the game gets (from loss of maximum health). So by the time you eventually do beat the boss, you'll pretty much manage to do it without even getting hit. But I promised to record my progression in the game, so here goes.

I wake up in the middle of a stone altar, the only source of light being the entrance to a deep chasm. The same one I am in now. The only path is forward, and I am greeted by some four-legged abominations that still somehow resemble humans. They are not hostile and lead me to a house, the inhabitants of which help me recall who I am. I guess I was what would be called a bandit, not that it seems to matter much here. There is ever only one path - forward, and so I proceed out the door. A bonfire greets me, offering an odd revitalizing sensation. I pause there briefly before continuing on to the area ahead. The path is narrow and any wrong step would lead to me falling into yet another abyss. There are undead scattered around the various branching paths, reminding me the basics of combat. From my experience in life, I've seen a decent amount of it, and these barely moving souls do not pose a threat. But each branch leads back to the main trail, urging me forward. It is only at the end of the last branch that I find something interesting - a bird's nest from which I hear the voices of some whom I do not see. They ask for a stone I have on me, and I lay it down in the nest only for it to disappear and be replaced with another stone. Albeit the latter being slightly more valuable to me. I find an egg in my possession, and after some hesitation I offer it to them. By some odd force I can not explain, they thank me for it, and in return give me a weapon that can best be described as an ornate boulder on top of a long and similarly ornate handle. It is much too heavy to fight with for now, but I take it anyways. Having exhausted my options in this cavern, I head forward into a small tunnel. At the end of it I finally reach a source of light and emerge into a large open area.

For once, things don't look quite as grim. I spot another bonfire in the distance and proceed straight to it. Near it, a green-clad lady stands, offering me a chance to transfer the power from the souls I've defeated into my own soul. Other than that, she rambles something about finding larger souls and the king. I swear, no one here can just say what they want to say, instead stopping at vague hints. She also hands me a flask containing a liquid that much resembles the revitalizing sensation from the bonfires. There are a few other people around in the area as well as a large well and a locked house. One of them is a blacksmith, who has managed to get locked out of his own workshop. The other is an armor merchant, though he doesn't sell much anything I'd care to spend my currency on. Speaking of currency, it seems regular money has no value here. Instead everyone seeks souls in exchange for their wares or services. How cruel that so many must die in order for the few to succeed. Though I can't say I care much for the shambling undead I've seen so far. Among the weirdest inhabitants of this area I find a talking cat who compliments my bodily odors. She sells magical rings, one of which even catches my eye. It would grant me the ability to land better, allowing for jumping down from higher places. Sadly the price in souls is far too steep for me right now. Having exhausted this area as well for the time being, I head into one of the multiple tunnels leading away from here. Surely I'd return often, for the chance to further enhance my own soul by the power of others'.

The tunnel winds a bit, leading through some water and gates, but I eventually reach a forest inhabited by more of these weak undead. A bonfire catches my eye in the distance, and I am drawn to it, eliminating the undead that block my path. Yet again there is not much choice for me in terms of direction, so I proceed to clear my path. I soon reach a knight in white armor. He's holding a sword which catches my eye. Mistaking him for dead, I attempt to take his sword, but he retaliates, and I jump back. I can not see his body under that armor, but from the way he moves, he does not seem to be fully alive either. Still, the armor helps shield him and he lands two blows on me before I finish him off, but the sword is now mine. Compared to my axe, it is short, but it crackles with energy, and as I felt from fighting against it, each hit not only cuts, but also stings like lightning. This will be useful. I empty the flask I was given into my mouth and my wounds miraculously heal. I guess I need to thank her for this. Heading forward still, through more undead, a larger one of their kind blocks some stairs upward. I hesitate momentarily before deciding that neither his armor nor his sword can be as threatening as the knight I just fought. Surely enough, while more dangerous than his smaller friends, he is not a problem. The path continues for a while, going over and through broken buildings, trees, and more undead. Of note is a cave with a giant fire-breathing lizard, inside of which I find a similar sword as the lightning one I am carrying right now. The newly found sword is instead fire-based, but on closer inspection I decide to stick with my current one. Beyond a gate, I find another bonfire and an old lady who sells various trinkets I do not have use for. She does however have the blacksmith's key for some reason, which I purchase off her. Most of the undead beyond this bonfire are the larger kind, and some of their archers manage to land a few shots on me. Luckily the flask replenishes itself at the bonfires, allowing me to use it over and over again. Additionally, some of their armor has not completely deteriorated and I manage to fit it onto myself, as it provides better protection than what I arrived here with. In another cave I find a man claiming to be a cartographer and also the one living in that locked house I found, for which he hands me the key. As I head back towards the bonfire with the old lady next to it, something... different happens. I check out the rooftop of a building, when a giant bird carrying a similarly gigantic knight flies by, dropping said knight onto the rooftop. It is easily four times my size, with a sword to match. It closes in on me with surprising swiftness and strikes me with his sword, sending me flying. I scramble to reach the ladder to escape, but he is faster, and with another swing of his sword, my life ends. Or so I thought. Instead I wake up at the nearby bonfire with the only thing missing being the souls I had managed to gather. But soon enough I notice that my skin has turned green, more resembling the undead which I've killed here. Furthermore, the enemies I have already slain are back where I first met them, ready to meet me again. I can only imagine the implications.

Ugh. This is proving to be more time consuming than I thought. I'd hate to spend a large fraction of the time I spent playing also cataloguing my events. I guess I underestimated how long it would take. No use scrapping what I already wrote, but I won't be continuing it. So far I beat the first two bosses and am now using the Drangleic armor as well as two-handing the giant hammer I got in the beginning of the game. I'm stuck at the three Sentinels right now, wishing I had enough strength to one-hand the hammer so I could use a darned shield.

05.07.17

Writing here wants to slip through my hands. It's doing a good job, since I again already forgot what I was doing for the entire day. Probably various non-ending, non-new games.

04.07.17

Today is the day I give in to the difficulty of the puzzles in Shenzhen I/O. TIS-100 is the only Zachtronics game I've completed so far, but I was quite close to the end in Shenzhen. Clearly I still need practice. But I've already given my thoughts on this game, and I remain by my early opinions - I like it. It just became too much of a chore once the difficulty passed a certain level.

So, I also started a new game today. But before I tell you what game it is, I'd like to mention that Steam has a pretty large amount of what I would call minimalist casual puzzle games. And nine times out of ten they're bad because due to the minimalism they offer nothing in terms of gameplay, and due to being casual they offer nothing in terms of challenging puzzles.
Now, all of this applies to what I started playing today - Linelight, but what makes me not only not dislike, but even actually like this game, is its presentation. The pictures and trailer don't really convey it to the full extent, but it feels unnaturally great because of the combination of the minimalist graphics, the audio, and the flow of the game. I'm not entirely sure, but I think it's the flow that ties everything together, and makes it so that you would really have to experience it yourself.
I can't really say it's a great game though. Even after the really nice experience it has provided me with, the above listed faults still apply. There wasn't much in terms of gameplay, not much in terms of puzzle difficulty, and it takes 3-4 hours to get everything, probably ~2 hours if you were to rush through it (which really defeats the point, but some levels are flat out skippable), or some indeterminate amount of time more if you were to go look for all the hidden areas.
Regardless, I would absolutely recommend this game for the experience it provides.

I'll probably be starting a playthrough of Dark Souls II (yes, I still haven't completed the second one) like tomorrow or the day after that. I've tried it briefly before, but I'm mostly going in blind. I know it's another really long game, so if nothing causes me to quit midway, it could be a few days or a week before I start anything else new. Maybe I'll try keeping a sort of diary detailing my adventure to compensate for the lack of regular content. We'll see how it goes.

03.07.17

Aside from a lot more Factorio, I tried The Signal From Tölva.

The judgement was quick on this one - it's shit. Basically it's something between an exploration game and a FPS, but it's unenjoyable in both aspects. The map is large, but quite empty, often forcing treks of half a kilometer or so while the scenery is just rocks, unexpectedly impassable terrain, and scarce, unimpressive foliage. The guns handle terribly and are very generic, just as the enemies. There's nothing even remotely interesting about the combat nor the boring long walks. So when both of the aspects that make up your game are terrible and devoid of content, what's left? Nothing. Don't even try this.

02.07.17

So I played 4 more hours of Atelier Sophie and looked up some info on the Atelier series as a whole to get an idea of what I might be missing were I to quit right now. Apparently, not much. So I'm going to tell you what I think about it.

The Atelier series is just a month and a half younger than me at 20 years old, and has apparently stuck to a similar theme throughout the entire time, releasing more or less one game every year. It differs from most RPGs in that the story is very "trivial", and there's a very heavy focus on crafting.

What I mean by the story being trivial is that there's no huge issue to solve or a grand plot, but it's more like an amplified slice of life. Really not my cup of tea, and I could've literally fallen asleep had I played for a little longer. And while I'm a big fan of crafting, then at least in this installment, the crafting depends way too heavily on the rest of the game, while not giving much back. That is, in order to experience the most of the depth of the crafting system, you have to really grind some other aspects of the game, but the difference in actual results is negligible. But if you don't want to spend more time than is fun on the other parts of the game, then the finer points of the crafting system might as well not exist. So, really, it doesn't tie in too well to the rest of the game, yet is dependent upon it.

And as is tradition for JRPGs, they overdo certain aspects. The first of which is of course cutscenes. I came to play a game, not to read a 3D visual novel, so I wouldn't be surprised if someone just quit before even getting to the game since they were stuck watching cutscenes for the first hour of the game. Secondly, the incredibly complicated, but not equivalently deep mechanics and game systems strike again. There's pages upon pages of tutorials explaining to me the multitude of possibilities, yet a sizeable portion of them go unused for the most part.

And a short but very important note is that the keyboard controls were simply atrocious, not listed anywhere except a text file in the game files (and even then lacking two very important keys), and none of them were rebindable, making navigating the world and the menus a hellish experience.

Each next JRPG I play further drums it into me that all JRPGs are pretty much the same. Although I felt this one was perhaps even slightly better than the average JRPG I've experienced. It felt kind of sweet, for lack of a better word, and I like that, but I'm really going to doze off from how boring and bland it is for the most part. As such, this is the last I'll play of it.

I'm quite sure all of this also applies to the next game in the series, Atelier Firis, which I've removed from my backlog as well.

01.07.17

Aside from another good lot of Factorio (if that is where my summer goes this time, I'll understand), I started on Atelier Sophie. The first hour was without exaggeration 90% cutscenes, and I was almost driven to quitting, but once the game started, it wasn't half bad. I'm two hours in now, and it's estimated to take around 50, so... Could be a long ride if I don't decide to quit halfway. There's still a ton of cutscenes, but there's actually okay combat, a neat-ish crafting system, and the entire thing isn't too easy this time. (Probably because I bumped the difficulty above Hard to Extreme. I'm struggling with the enemies now though, but it's better than the alternative?)

30.06.17

I had Inversus on my list as a game I wanted to try out in multiplayer. Well, I couldn't get multiplayer to work on it, and judging from the singleplayer, it probably wouldn't have provided entertainment for too long anyways. So that's now removed from the list. Yay, progress...

29.06.17

Hmm, I swear I did something other than continue my ongoing Factorio game this day.

28.06.17

Okay, so I tried out Formula Fusion. It had recently launched and for some reason taken a large hit in ratings. Well, as retrospective inspection revealed, it was because the game was a laggy mess that couldn't run on any computer without at the very least hitching. My computer's pretty good, I dare say, and it froze like once a minute for 5 seconds on high settings, and had a split-second hitch every few seconds on the lowest settings. I'm not even really sure how the game itself was. Didn't look all too interesting, and the multiplayer is dead, but none of that matters because the lag renders it basically unplayable. Good riddance the review score is dropping.

Other than that, I took One Way Heroics for another playthrough. Failed about 10 times, but the 11th or so attempt went really well and I won. =) I don't really have much to say about the particular playthrough, and I don't really want to give lengthy opinions about games I've already played a bunch before, but One Way Heroics is an absolutely wonderful little game with more depth than you could ever imagine from looking at it or even playing it. It'll take a long time before you stop finding new things, and the sense of constant exploration and discovery is simply amazing. I should really get the expansion to it as well. Good thing the Steam Summer Sale is underway.

27.06.17

I was slightly occupied with other matters today, so no new games completed or started, but here's a new game that released on Steam a week ago.

Nex Machina is a 3D bullet hell game. It claims to focus on the action, so perhaps that's all there is to it. Looks pretty, ratings are okay, I guess it'll do.

Oh, also, PCGamer did an article on some hidden gems of the store, based on some mathematical formulas that basically searched for well-rated games with a low amount of ratings. I think a lot of the games included are pretty good, and there's a good chance you haven't heard of them. Which ones of course depends on the genres you're into. Here's the article with the top 100 listed at the bottom. And here is another list with a similar algorithm for a top 250.