Humanoid

[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bold_and_the_Beautiful]The[/url] [b]Bold[/b] [u]and[/u] [s]the[/s] [i]Beautiful[/i] EDIT: Welp, none of those worked. Now looking whether there's a user-side option to re-enable BBcode.

As with every year, the holiday period is spent visiting my parents and playing co-op games with my sister. The wrap-up: [b]Kingdom: Two Crowns[/b] - Charming if obtuse design. Technically a rogue-lite I guess but so mild as to lose only minimal progress with each death. This becomes especially true in co-op mode as it becomes especially hard to truly die as it then requires both players to lose their crown at the same time. Ultimately there isn't a whole lot of content in the game, all done within a single-digit amount of hours. After getting back home I tried the Shogun campaign, knowing in advance that it's 99% a reskin of the standard European campaign, but all it did was confirm the game doesn't really have meaningful replayability. [b]PlateUp![/b] - If Kingdom was the mildest possible roguelite, then this is at the opposite spectrum. The only meta-progression really is being able to start with a couple of appliances in future runs. Anyway, while visually rather bland, that's obviously not the point of the game. Instead, its main selling point over something like Overcooked is the strategic element required in designing your restaurant before running it. You then are challenged to keep it going for 15 consecutive days without a single failure, and that's the standard way to play the game. There's another face to it all though, and that's a Factorio-like (I think, I've never played Factorio) automation challenge. This is one of those games where by design, you fail eventually because the volume continues to ramp up not just from days 1-15, but indefinitely. I only got the smallest taste of this side of the game, mostly because it only really becomes possible after the 15-day mark, in the optional "overtime" period. That is, you've "won" the level but choose to keep playing until death claims you. I suppose it's apt then, then the only way to stave off death near-indefinitely is to become wholly machine. [b]For The King 2[/b] - This is a game I heard had a really rough launch a couple of years ago, with many players questioning whether it could actually become a better game than its cult-classic predecessor. Just as well then that I didn't try it until recently, and it seems to have matured into a pretty solid product. There are still glitches and general UI jankiness that give a glimpse into its premature launch, but I'm happy to call it an improvement on the first game. The biggest change for mine isn't the limited positioning system added, where you are no longer three characters standing side-by-side, but four characters (plus a posse of optional mercs and pets) arranged in a 2x4 grid (though it's baffling that your starting position within that grid is mostly random). Instead, it's the revamped action economy where instead of simply having a single action per turn, but having a primary and secondary one instead. The main upshot of this is that your offensive moves no longer come to a screeching halt whenever you need to do something like taunting, moving out of a flaming tile, or simply reloading your gun. One recurring criticism I see is that the main campaign is now broken up into five separate ones instead. The sum of the five is of course a fair bit longer than the single campaign of the original game, but this means there is zero continuity between the campaigns in terms of your characters. Instead, you start each leg with a fresh new level 1 party, with the old level 8-9 party being forcibly retired each time. An odd decision indeed, but perhaps excusable in the context that the game scales poorly at high levels. [b]Hades[/b] - Yeah, unlike the others this isn't co-op, it's just what I've been playing solo this month. Day late and dollar short obviously given the sequel has been out for a while now, but I'm holding off on purchasing it until it arrives on the Microsoft Store. An odd thing to do you might think, but the ability to play the same copy and continue the same save between my PC and my Xbox have been invaluable. Anyway, it's a good game with great presentation, with my expectations perhaps set a little too high due to the pre-existing hype. I feel it's a bit too bullet-spongey and visual clarity can also be an issue, especially on smaller screens (and in this context, 55" feels small). Now I've only just cleared the game for the first time, and I'm well aware through genre convention that this is the point where the game truly starts, but I'm not sure I'm really willing to invest that much time into this "post-game" content given the sequel is apparently a "true" sequel which does mostly the same things but better.

Bought myself the Moza Trucking Bundle and add-on stalks with the intention of playing the new Nordic Horizons expansion for Euro Truck Sim 2. Alas, stock for the stalks was delayed and I won't get it until next year. Using the wheel by itself has been a big change from the old Logitech G920 I was using, mostly due to the wheel being approximately double the size. However, I don't think I could recommend using it in this mode without the stalks because the missing inputs stick out like a sore thumb. There simply isn't a conveniently accessible button binding for gear shifts (no paddles on a truck wheel obviously) and indicators. My feedback as it stands, therefore, is to buy both the wheel and the stalks or to buy neither.

And also on the smaller scale

On the other hand, the existing Forgotten Realms worldbuilding can get in the way of immersion as well. I did not find the existence of the Act 2 area being left cursed for the past 100 years to believable for example, in a similar way perhaps to how Bethesda Fallout games would have you believe people still live in bombed out ruins full of debris 200 years after the war. And that's to say nothing of how the story interacts with access to restorative and resurrection magic in the setting. But yeah, mechanically the D:OS games were weird with the extremely steep level scaling essentially funneling the player into a fixed path through the zones. BG3 didn't have that issue at all, but in some ways had the opposite problem inherent to modern D&D which unbelievably still has things like empty level-ups where you don't do anything but click the confirm button, and the continuing insanity of only every second stat point increase doing anything (seriously, a quarter of a century of this nonsense). Thankfully Cyberpunk did not level/stat/perk-gate silent takedowns so I could still merrily ignore every single mechanic complained about by that YouTuber. Healing? Grenades? Stamina? Never heard of 'em.

I could see them simplifying the name if they're making turn-based RPGs their signature and just soft-reboot the naming scheme. The name Divinity: Original Sin is a bit of a mouthful otherwise. But it's also fully possible that gameplay might resemble Divinity 2 (third person new Witcher-like), or less likely, Divine Divinity (isometric Diablo-like). I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's got no chance of resembling Dragon Commander. 😛

BG3 doesn't split XP, you're on the same levelling curve whether solo or with a party of six and XP is synced such that any party member with less XP than your main character will be brought up to match them. Note this doesn't work in the reverse, so it's possible to get companions that are higher level than the player character (though this is only really likely to be seen when speedrunning). For the most part, it also attempts to prevent double-dipping on XP, in that if you kill an enemy after talking your way past them, they won't award any kill XP. Yeah, this catches out a few people and is a bit of a silly outcome. I think it's an engine limitation - enemies can't go through zone transitions so the ones outside can never reinforce the ones inside and vice versa. That limitation also means the optimal solution is to fast travel out from the indoor area so you can engage the outdoor ones from a safer distance. (It's also a bit dumb that two of the leaders can be assassinated properly with the camp remaining neutral, but one just sets an unavoidable faction-wide aggro flag) Speaking of engine limitations, the text-only "books" in the game are a pretty glaring one. The system doesn't support graphics so even if you're looking at a map or a drawing, you just get text saying stuff like "this is a map showing an X nearby". The D:OS engine has done good service over the years and has seen some nice upgrades, but it's time for Larian to move on.

Haven't tried Museum yet, but Hospital and Campus were good but somewhat limited games. By that I mean the core gameplay loop was solid, and the aesthetic and humour are well done for anyone looking for something like the old Bullfrog games. Definitely no regrets in buying the base games. However the limits become apparent once you consider the expansion model, where each new thing added isn't ever going to be truly "new". Any new disease they add in Hospital for example is functionally the same as any other disease, just with new graphics on the patients, and a matching new "new disease curing room" to go with it. Hopefully the reports on it improving on is predecessors is true. I get mentally tired already just thinking of the arbitrary "increase room value" goals from both Hospital and Campus, where the supposed challenge of the later levels just involves spamming decorative items inside each room.

I think hiving launch clans behind DLC is a deal-breaker for me even if the game miraculously isn't a complete car crash. 😐

It's a weird mix of styles, both in terms of setting and in gameplay. Ultimately I almost always preferred it when the game allowed for emergent gameplay, and was least happy when the game tried to be cinematic. It was great for example when the game let you bypass an early boss fight by means of a trivial QTE. But where was that kind of freedom later in the game, and in PL? It's almost a bit of Bethesda-itis. "We put a lot of effort into this awesome content, and you will experience it.

Back in the late 90s, I bought a PC Gaming magazine (not sure which, I think it was a British publication) that contained a full walkthrough of Resident Evil 1. I have no interest whatsoever in Resident Evil or frankly anything in the horror genre in general, but I read that entire walkthrough start-to-finish. After all, I paid for that magazine and I'll be damned if I didn't get full value from my allowance money. So yeah, that's the sum of my experience with the series.

Wasn't that because they made the game freeware?

While I haven't played the game myself, there's an in-game option to turn off QTEs when the player attacks, which solves half the problem. However it doesn't affect the QTEs for when you're defending, which I assume is a game balance thing - if you succeed every single time, you never take damage and thus the game completely breaks. Fortunately there's already a mod to tweak them by increasing the window by 50/100/200%.

My unholy trinity of bad games I've had the misfortune to purchase are Oblivion, Mass Effect 3 and Civilization Call to Power.

Scratched my Civ4 itch for now by going one world size up (to standard), which only validated my usual preference for small planets. It felt a bit easier but that may have been just down to RNG, and it was only on Monarch difficulty anyway. Anyway, for the past few weeks I'd been thinking "I haven't played Rimworld for a few patches now, let's see what's new". Turns out that was a pretty big understatement: based on my old saves, the last time I played was a pre-release build, albeit the final one before 1.0. For context, it's at 1.5 now and four expansions have been released in the interim. Incidentally, while those old saves do load with some warnings, the UI ends up broken so they're not really playable. I still haven't finished Avowed and right now I'm kind of in "wait for the announced roadmap" mode. I also see KCD2 is now out on GOG and I'll buy it at some point in the near-ish future, though I don't know if I'd wait for a token-ish sale price.

Weirdly, both of the major bugs in Avowed that I encountered happened on my second day of playing, within 15 minutes of each other. Firstly there was a hard CTD when looting the chest in the watermill (the one which acts as a tutorial for upgrading your gear). Then shortly thereafter, while walking past the ruins of the wall on the way to rescue the mayor, I noticed various assets had stopped loading in, stuff like lampposts, enemies, then I fell through the world. That said, I've been so consumed by a Civ4 binge that I haven't finished Emerald Stair yet. I also kinda don't like how gloomy it is relative to Dawnshore which might play a part in it.

*Missing characters 12* Cadegund

Yeah, I'm only halfway through the second zone so it may change by the end of the journey, but at the moment I feel it's a good game that won't live particularly long in my mind. I mean, I suppose for me personally the ceiling was always going to be kind of low because of its modest ambitions - no matter how I build my character it'll always mostly be about clearing camps of enemies with very few non-combat exceptions. It doesn't even remotely attempt to be simulationist in terms of making a living, breathing gameworld, and that's fine - it just means it's not something I'd be looking to revisit in the future. The ideal Game Pass game, in a way.

There are more than five bandits but I guess exactly five of them drop the quest item, and the only way you know you need exactly five is that that the quest log updates when you loot the fifth. It's all very gamey in an MMO sort of way. The other bounties are thankfully more straightforward - run-of-the-mill "bring me the leader's head" fare. I believe the teleporting quest item is likely meant to be an anti-frustration feature. I had four of the items, couldn't find the fifth, went back to the questgiver anyway to see if there was any progress to be had there (which of course there wasn't). Went back to the bandit camp, nothing doing. But it turns out the item had been teleported to the floor of the destination fast travel point within the city, the first fast travel destination I had selected after wiping out the bandit camp.

On a related note, I can't figure out a way to fast travel to a camp site without camping, and that kind of takes me out of it. I also got annoyed by the WoW-esque "collect 5 Defias bandit masks" type quest, except that unlike WoW, the game doesn't even tell you how many you need. Apparently I missed looting one of the five, and then the quest item simply spawned at a fast travel point. Seriously? Still generally positive about the game mind you, and while the stealth approach has been disappointing, I don't dislike combat as much as I expected to. It's like the opposite of Cyberpunk, where I really like the stealth but hate the combat. P.S. Every NPC's eyebrows look kind of weird in this engine.

I kinda liked that the protagonists of It Takes Two are actually terrible, extraordinarily selfish people if you give it any thought. It was my game of the year. I liked A Way Out too, and will be travelling to Melbourne next month in order to play Split Fiction co-op in person with my sister.

I'd like to see a PoE match-3 game.

The intro cutscene put me in the mind of Lord British saying "I must send thee, Avatar, through the pillars to the Serpent Isle!"

I've only just finished the tutorial zone and arrived at the first town. Early observations: 1) The third-person camera feels like a bit of an afterthought in that it exposes the janky player character animations. Jumping looks weird, and the dodging animation ...well, there isn't really a dodging animation and you just magically slide around. But it remains my preference because I don't buy into the belief that first-person cameras are more immersive. At least, not while my viewport is limited to a narrow 16:9 window. 2) I like that so far I don't seem to be expected to loot random bodies and containers, but the flipside of this is that I hate that breaking random crates and pots is rewarded. I'm going to refuse to keep doing it, and the opportunity cost based on what I've seen so far doesn't seem to be particularly large. 3) I welcome the return of stealth kills, though it's weird that they relate it to some mystical godlike power instead of something more mundane. However it's ridiculous that performing one automatically cancels stealth, and you have to always remember to manually re-crouch after each kill.

Great to hear - the lack of it in Outer Worlds made things really awkward. I'd be close enough to an enemy to touch them and then ...welp, guess I'll shoot them now.