31.03.17

Let's start the day off with a new find. Monster Slayers is a deckbuilding RPG rouge-like, by its own description, and aren't I already playing one of these right now? Well, it's well received and the art style made me recognize it as one of Nerdook's games. I used to love his work back when I was playing flash games on Kongregate. It stands out less now that it's compared to actual paid games, but it's definitely worth trying.

(Click to enlarge)

I forgot about the last "hidden" level in Hand of Fate, so I didn't quite finish it today. But soon. Soon...
I also got over a rather difficult level in Shenzhen, after not playing that out of frustration for a while. My solution was still terribly inefficient and produced the greatest circuit spaghetti imaginable, but it works.

30.03.17

Busy, busy, busy. I actually got a couple more hours of Hand of Fate done, and am nearing the end of the campaign. I'll definitely have my thoughts by the end of it.

29.03.17

Only about an hour of Planetside 2 today. I still like that game.

But there's also a Humble Bundle that might be worth buying if you have friends to play with. There's Eon Altar at the 1$ level, which is an RPG played with an Android app as a controller. Also Helldivers at the 10$ level, which looks like the spiritual successor to Magicka (rather than Magicka 2, which didn't do so well), except with guns.

Sadly you only get the first episode of Eon Altar, and only one of the ~ten DLCs for Helldivers. Far from the full experience, which is why I won't be buying it. But there's also some other games in there, which I dare say are decent, but not as good as the listed ones.

28.03.17

I blame my lack of time on the fact that it's the middle of the semester. It's not always like this every week, I swear. nervous smile

In all honesty, Tuesday-Wednesday are busier days than the rest. I don't have much time for games on them.

27.03.17

Spent most of my free time today picking out parts for my new PC. I just wanted a CPU upgrade, because my shitty 3rd gen i3 was not at all handling a bunch of games on the settings I wanted, but new CPU → different socket → new motherboard → new RAM... So I ended up getting a i5-7600K and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. Should complement the GTX 960 nicely.

26.03.17

More Hand of Fate, more Factorio, also a fair bit of time spent on studies. Nothing of note.

25.03.17

Oh, hey, NieR:Automata released a week ago. I was waiting for that. I heard it has some slight performance problems as is common with console-first games, but nothing too serious. I never played it, but I liked the look of the original NieR, so I'll surely play this one. Eventually.

Right, but, staying on track with actually trying out games:
Butcher is a platformer + shooter that advertises itself as being very difficult. I would definitely say it is difficult, but I don't at all like some of the aspects that contribute to that difficulty. What mainly irks me is how pixelated the games is, and how everything is pretty much the same color. While it's true that this is the "feel" the game is going for, and "that's just part of the style", it could have been executed better.
It is incredibly difficult to keep track of where the enemies as well as all the objects on the screen are, and whether they're scenery or important. It feels frustrating instead of genuinely difficult if more than half the times you get hit are because you couldn't see the enemy. Also pretty bad if a button I have to press gets buried under a mountain of corpses, and I spend 3 minutes looking for it while the entire level only took me 2 minutes otherwise.
I can't even get to analyzing the gameplay because the visuals are really that terrible as to render the game mostly unplayable. For a game that does these kinds of visuals right, I suggest taking a look at Devil Daggers.

I also spent a couple of hours with Hand of Fate, and I am really enjoying it thus far. The atmosphere, the visuals, the animations, how many lines the dealer has... It's all darn wonderful. This game seems to have both loads of content and depth, but I'll get a more detailed understanding of that as I play more.

Finally, not a new game, but I tried my first game of "FactorioMMO" yesterday night/today. Essentially, it's just regular Factorio, but with about 30-60 players on at all times. It feels completely different than playing alone or with a small group, because with tens of people, you can't really keep track of where everything is, so each player kind of has to have their own little area of expertise and just hope that everyone else is doing their job. It doesn't run as smoothly as a well-constructed singleplayer factory, but I'm honestly amazed at the speed of progress and how relatively organized everything is. If it weren't for the inevitable FPS death and the potential lethality of griefers, I would really love to see how one of these would pan out over a longer course of time. There's moderate potential for some sort of economy to form.

24.03.17

Something a little less popular today: Snowflake's Chance. It's a supposedly difficult platformer with a slightly creepy atmosphere. You have 99 lives to climb out of a pit you fell into, mostly running and hiding from your enemies instead of fighting them because you're just a scared little bunny.

As for games I tried today:
Yomawari: Night Alone is an isometric horror-y adventure game. I'd say the best part about it are the visuals - I quite like how cute the sprites are, looks a bit like Don't Starve. Now, the horror part isn't nearly as well executed. With how adorable stuff looks, it doesn't really give a frightening atmosphere, and while I was spooked a few times, those were simply poorly executed jump scares. Rather hard to not jump at a sudden sound and a picture popping up at you.
The game does a poor job at explaining what exactly I'm supposed to do or how I'm supposed to avoid the enemies in the narrow streets I'm traversing. The isometric view combined with tall trees and buildings often obscures my view, and the enemies are invisible unless directly looked at to boot. Overall, not a very pleasant playing experience.
Oh, also, it doesn't really explain the controls, it crashed on me after playing for a semi-short while, and I couldn't really find a way to recover my save data. So, with how the game had been, I just quit it there instead of starting over.

As suspected, Night in the Woods isn't really my cup of tea. The story didn't seem to start to get any interesting and I didn't really relate to it either. Possibly a conscious decision on the art style, but it did a very poor job with expressing the (rather important) details. I couldn't understand anyone's gender, mood, expression, anything... And the characters only had about one sprite. If that was facing sideways, it looked terrible in any situation when they shouldn't have been facing sideways. There wasn't really any gameplay to speak of, just walking from place to place, so nothing to commend there either. (And gosh, those rhythm game sequences are long and not even good.)
Overall, the only thing I saw going for it was the humorous mono- and dialogue. Got a chuckle and a few grins out of me, but not enough to keep me playing. I don't know, clearly a fair amount of people like it, but personally I don't even know who the target audience would be, so I can't at all recommend it.

23.03.17

Now, I don't really like card games. Something like Hearthstone didn't sit with me at all. Duelyst was a little bit better with the game board and moving units it brought to the table, but ultimately still not to my liking. Now, I don't really have much hope for it, but I figured I would give Faeria a try. It adds to just having a gameboard with the ability to actually build it as the game progresses. Sadly, that was about the only innovative thing I saw on it, and it wasn't that much of a game-changer. Not really in the mood to explore yet another card game deeper, as it doesn't seem to be special enough - might as well go back to Duelyst.

22.03.17

I haven't actually played it yet, but there's this apparently MMO shooter thing by the name of Foxhole. It's not out yet, but there's a pre-alpha available for install further down on its Steam page. It reminds me a bit of Running with Rifles, which was pretty good, funny, although mostly dead in terms of the playerbase.

21.03.17

Maybe if I cut down on some of those PvP games, I'd have an adequate amount of time. In any case, tomorrow's a long day, but at least I have the 3 day weekends to look forward to now.

And I just counted - I have 95 games left to play, not counting Visual Novels and VR games. (Which I don't have a headset for.) So I'm not sure how I counted 111 games some while back. Maybe I included the half-finished ones in my Library? Point is, that's less than 100, and that already looks like a manageable number. One day... One day I'll try them all.

20.03.17

I should kind of just admit that I don't really have time for stuff on the weekdays. I want to have something to write every day, but it's quite difficult.

19.03.17

As promised, starting a new game today. Night of Azure is that game, and it's got rather sad reviews on Steam already and a couple hours of playing mostly confirms what the reviews say.
For starters, the game doesn't even scale to 1080p, forcing me to play in either windowed mode or have stretched out pixels. Secondly, while I can play with a keyboard, nothing explains the controls to me, nor allows for rebinding them. The original keyboard controls are listed in some text file that comes with the installation, but they're pretty terrible. I'd need three hands, as I can't use the mouse for looking around.
There's a clear deficit of polygons, as is common for console games, the animations are noticeably robotic, and as far as I've gotten, the story is bad.
As for the game itself... It's pretty much a cycle between cutscenes and levels, with a break for equipping new stuff every now and then. Except the levels are boring, easy, and you just mash the attack key while awkwardly trying to handle movement and the camera, which are on opposite sides of the keyboard. (And the attack key is in the middle.) There's a lack in the variety of your equipment, and it practically changes nothing except for a small boost to your stats.
So, uh, yeah... Game's shit. Again.

Speaking of Action Anime RPGs, I wonder how Dragon Nest is doing. I never really liked it, judging it as an MMO, but as a singleplayer ARPG, it might even be pretty good. I might take a look at some point.

18.03.17

Oh crap, I've been lagging behind on posts by a day, but I'll start a new game tomorrow, I swear.

17.03.17

Turns out that with the slight change in the Steam reviews system, they also changed it to not show the score of any game with less than 10 reviews. It sort of makes sense because you can't really accurately decide from such a low amount of reviews, but they do help, especially the negative ones. Games with a low amount of reviews tend to have more positive ones, so each negative one speaks a lot about the game. That and the change also broke my script which I used to look through those games. Actually took me three days to notice that it hadn't given me any games to manually look through. Well, fixed now though.

And among those three days worth of games I found Streets of Rogue. It's apparently some sort of Early Access multiplayer roguelike with a ton of mechanics, but not (yet?) terribly much content. But it looks kind of interesting. Reminds me a bit of Monaco.

16.03.17

Well, I finished my HotS placements, placing in the same spot I was last season. At least the progress isn't backwards.

I also managed to relocate all my classes from Friday, so I have a three-day weekend now, which is nice. I've still a bit much on my plate right now, but I hope to get a few games over with on the weekend.

15.03.17

I found Atelier Firis: The Alchemist and-the-name-is-way-too-long... Didn't I just see another game by the same name (that spans like two whole lines) like a week back? Anyways, hey, it's another JRPG, and I've grown wary of those. Couldn't tell from the images, the video, nor the user reviews that it's severely lacking in certain aspects, and maybe it actually isn't, but I have my doubts at this point. Still, worth a try, right?

14.03.17

HotS' season is coming to an end really soon, so I spent the evening trying to rank up.

So, sorry, no new games. Maybe Thursday.

13.03.17

Sometimes I just mentally skip a day. I really don't have any recollection of what kept me so busy this Monday.

12.03.17

Started the day off with a few more hours of Tyranny. By my estimates, I'm maybe 20% through the game now, so I have a decent enough idea of it. And from what I hear, the ending is rushed/incomplete anyways.

I can't accurately compare it to Pillars of Eternity, since it's been a few months since I played the latter. It obviously shares all of the major mechanics and is all around very similar, but as far as gameplay and ease-of-use (UI, menu layouts, understanding what I'm supposed to do, etc.) go, I'd say there have been slight improvements.

Other than that, my opinions are the same as last time in that it's not inherently bad, but instead just not my style.

-Expects me to roleplay to some degree, to at least interact with the story, but I prefer to pick the most efficient route.

-It's darn hard to determine the most efficient route and that would turn the rate of progress into an unbearably slow slog.

-So I either dislike it because I am being suboptimal or I dislike it because it takes too long to do every little thing.

And adding to that, I don't really care much for the story, nor do I consider the combat to be fun or interesting.

Quick to be added, quick to be removed. As far as games go, The Mooseman was terrible. You just walk right and try to solve shitty puzzles. And it throws some myths and real-life lore at you real often. If I wanted to read this lore, I'd go do so somewhere outside a game. Although, this barely qualifies as a game.

Way of the Red was that one game I added to my list because I hadn't been adding enough games. That was back when I didn't have automation assisting me in filtering out the garbage from the Store. It actually turned out to be surprisingly good. Not quite worth recommending, but good nonetheless.
Way of the Red is a simple action platformer. Not sure if one could really classify it as a Metroidvania, but it's near there at least. Now, I don't particularly have anything bad to say about the game, but the majority of the components weren't good either. My biggest issue was with how wall-grabbing required you to press jump after you had made contact with a wall. If you were holding it down any sooner, it failed. But other than that, basic movement was actually above average, as it was really responsive and quick. I never felt frustration from the controls, only from my own incompetence (at times).
But the problem was that the game was only a few short hours long and lacked features. There wasn't any real quality in the art, story, or gameplay. It was all just barely sufficient to not be bad in any way, but I could never point to this game for doing something particularly well.
So, hey, if you're starved on Metroidvanias or the like, you can try this, it probably won't be a dislikeable few hours, but don't expect anything memorable either.

11.03.17

But I actually completed everything I had to do for next week, so I got the weekend free. Therefore, games.

So I played about 4 more hours of God Eater 2: Rage Burst, and I'm stopping here. My opinions from the first time still stand, and I won't much repeat them. I'm losing more and more hope in JRPGs, perhaps I'll one day actually be biased against them.

Right, but why am I stopping? Well, let's start with the less bad case - the story. It feeds you some bits of story here and there through cutscenes and optional dialogue. Most of the time, neither is particularly interesting, and at worst, they're cringeworthy. There's hints to an interesting overarching storyline, but ugh, the majority of it is garbage.

I would complain that forcing the not-so-good story down my throat at regular intervals is a bad thing, but sadly, compared to actually playing the game, I was looking forward to the occasional cutscene. The combat is really repetitive, enemies are either too easy or can soak up too much damage, and the hitboxes of their attacks are weird, meaning you basically just run up to them and hit them until they die, running to a safe distance if they start charging an attack you feel you don't want to risk tanking. No flashy dodging nor awesome combos, just hit, hit, and hit some more.

And the complicated equipment system? Shallow, sadly. I'd say at least 75% of it doesn't see any use. Now, which 75% might depend on who's playing, but for any single individual, the vast majority of the stuff you see is irrelevant.

All the environments are heavily re-used, tiny, but you still need to run tons to actually get from one fight to another. And the minimum downtime between two actual missions is huge, because you need to wait for like 40 seconds after each victory, then it lists you all the stuff you earned one-by-one, loading screens, head back to the mission terminal, back to the gate, more loading screens... Laughably little fighting.

Honestly, the first impression it gives is pretty good, but that quickly wears off and then it's just layers upon layers of bad. Each worse than the last and the next.

So instead I gave Tyranny a go. Looks extremely similar to Obsidian's last game - Pillars of Eternity, which I didn't end up liking. I'm about 3 hours in right now, and I'm slightly less bored, but by no means enthralled by it. The reason for the former might just be the ever-different circumstances and levels of boredom in my life, or maybe Tyranny does something slightly better than it's predecessor. Some optimistic estimate sets the playthrough time at 12 hours, but I highly doubt that's the case with my pace.

10.03.17

Doing stuff.

09.03.17

No time.

08.03.17

This is all the news you'll be getting for today, but two new games:

Desync is an FPS, where you... shoot enemies. Well, clearly I have my doubts about the depth of this game and how long it can be entertaining, but it looks colorful and action-y enough.

And the other is For The King. It's a turn-based RPG, and it seems everything is on a hex grid, from the battles to the world map. I really like how the game looks, but I hear it has some serious problems with the balancing of some mechanics. In any case, it's in Early Access, so at least for me, it has time to fix those issues.

07.03.17

Well, hope for more updates on some later date. Probably not tomorrow.

06.03.17

The more I think about it, adding possibly shitty games to my list isn't all that bad. If they're good, I lose nothing. If they're bad, I run them through another 2-minute check before playing anyways, so I get to second-guess any past decisions, should I feel the need. And even if I do try them, the bad ones don't last too long. I guess the quality of my choices has kept up with my expectations, else I'd be more picky with the games I choose.

That said, Weapon Shop Fantasy is listed as a casual game, and does look like something that might make for a mobile game. On the other hand, most mobile games are completely trashed by Steam users, so I'm hoping this isn't as bad. Not much need for descriptions what the game is about - the name pretty much says it all.

05.03.17

At least I finally got like 2 hours of "proper" free time just as the weekend was ending. I'll surely be showered with new problems the next week, but for now, I have time.

So I started with God Eater 2: Rage Burst. It's a little more anime-ish than I thought and it totally shows it's a console port. The graphics don't look all that old nor bad, but there's a distinct lack of polygons, and the control scheme isn't the best, but I don't have any major problems with it right now, and it's probably better than that of the average port.

The game seems incredibly complicated on the combat portion, to the point I don't really have a clue what I'm doing yet. I just hope it has the depth to match instead of eventually boiling down to a few strategies that work best, and then a ton of useless fluff. Sadly that does seem to often be the case with RPGs coming from the East. Same issue with poorly adjusted difficulty. I haven't really made it past the tutorial-y portions yet so I don't really know about either, but I hope those things won't be issues.

The game looks really cool in my opinion, and the weapon are about the most oversized I've seen. It lists my 2 meter sword as a knife. So if the combat ends up being more fun than tedious, I feel like I got another long game on my hands. For better or worse.

04.03.17

Okay, no, there's no way there's so many "passable" games being released as of late. I must just be getting more lenient with picking them.

But even now I'm feeling a sense of "Maybe it would have been fun." on some games I left out. Like a Guns of Icarus with actual ships at sea, or some physics-based ragdoll climber, or a side-view PvP shooter.

Okay, so, people probably heard about 911 Operator. It's kind of a management game where you send different emergency vehicles to places that need help, or something. Seems there are some other events that you might have to respond to as well. Eh, will see.

Then there's Hollow Knight - another metroidvania. I like how it looks. As for the gameplay side, seems pretty standard, but well polished? Again, will see once I hopefully ever get around to it.

And oh, hey, more knights. Hyper Knights seems like a much shorter game about using various combinations to execute attacks on little tiny knights or having your own army of little tiny knights fight the other ones. Seems fun for a short while, which seems to be kind of a trend with well received games these days.

Actually, about that last part. I did just realize that there are comparatively few (good) full-length or well-replayable games coming out. It's definitely harder to have a game be engaging for a longer period of time, but if I can't even pull double digits out of a game, I can't honestly recommend it as good. It's a semi-sad state of affairs where we're drifting towards this "lots of cheap games that will keep you entertained for a short while" mentality. I mean, if they continue being fun, then these short experiments, I dare say, are fine. But I'm afraid we might be leaning towards the mobile market where people might not want to pay large amounts of money for games, or expect to get a new game every couple of days. Here's me giving my vote to quality over quantity, always.

And, finally, I'd mention that that Codingame thing I was linked to was pretty fun. Got out of wood tier and into bronze at least. I have some more ideas for improvements, but considering it ends in a day and I still have other things to do, I'll leave it as it is. They supposedly have more competitions happening, so perhaps I can try again at some other time.

03.03.17

Work, work, work. The end is in sight though, so I have hope for getting some stuff done this weekend. Not much hope for reaching my goal though.

02.03.17

I'm really going to struggle reaching that goal I set for myself by the end of this weekend since I'm adding all these new games.

Right, so, Northgard released (into Early Access), which has been sitting in my wishlist for a fair while. I can't even remember why I originally added it, but it seems the reception so far is very good, unlike most Early Access games. The game looks quite pretty in both art and design too. It's an RTS, probably more like Age of Empires than Starcraft though. I do have a general distaste for RTS games, but that's mostly only if there's any form of multiplayer involved. Current complaints seem to be a lack of difficulty and meaningful content, but perhaps that'll get better over time.

Then there's Unexplored, which seems to be another randomly generated rogue-like. But apparently this one's actually decent, or something? I skipped over this when I first saw it, but it actually released now, and people seem to praise it for the good dungeon generation algorithm as well as the plethora of content.

And lastly, Open Sorcery, which seems to be shortest and simplest of the bunch. At first glance I thought it might be another coding game of sorts, but looking closer I guess it's just a text-based adventure. But it's also supposedly real short, so nothing lost either way.

Still, I need to really step up my pace and work through a large bunch of games this weekend if I want to stay on track. It doesn't help that I'm still busy and have a bunch of stuff I need to take care of if I want to enjoy a weekend free of responsibilities. A friend also recently pointed me to this, and a time-limited contest taking place there. Not that I'd want to seriously compete, but it seems like a fun thing to try. But that does add another thing that I need to do in the near future, and my imaginary schedule is overflowing already. I do hope to one day surmount my giant list of games, but I can't help but think if that's a false hope, and I'll instead be locked in an eternal struggle against them.

01.03.17

There's a terrible lack of time right now. Which is great because everything I'm doing feels really important, but obviously bad because I still don't have enough time to do everything.

A rather large group of potentially good new games in the Store today.

First up, Pixel Privateers. This is from the same group who made Pixel Piracy, I think, and plays somewhat similarly too. It looks like there's tons of new content and mechanics, and a multiplayer mode. The original Pixel Piracy was a flop in terms of execution, but it had decent ideas. Considering the reviews for this are relatively good, I have hopes it'll be enjoyable unlike its predecessor.

Next, Berserk and the Band of the Hawk. Ugh, I partially think the good reviews come from people liking the source material, not the game itself. I speculate I won't actually like it, but with how popular it is, I can't just not try it.

And finally, Night in the Woods. Some cartoon-y adventure game about... I don't know what. Again, looks like a game for a different target audience than me, but I have to try it. It's kind of the reason I play all these games even though I don't like >90% of them. They're often enough not a waste of time, and if I'm ever pleasantly surprised, it's worth all the times I haven't been.

I also finished watching Attack on Titan. Can't say it was the best I've seen, but it was still pretty darn great and the quality was consistent throughout.