Anarchic Fox on 26/11/2022 at 04:53

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Thanksgiving break is a good time to catch up with family and... catch up with gaming.

FixFox is a fix-em-up (this should be a genre) with an emphasis on physicality. You scrounge for low-tier equipment and materials to fix basic items, which reward you with mid-tier stuff to fix more complex items. Not a complex game loop, but a satisfying one. The commitment to making everything tactile and kinaesthetic reminds me strongly of Ultima VI and VII. You rummage through your backpack Ultima VII-style for what you need, you apply items directly on components, you save by dragging cassettes around, and your cursor on informational screens is a big ol' hand. It's fun, though I have some quibbles I may articulate more later.

Creeper World 4 is an RTS where your enemy is fluid physics. Each map will have sources of viscous, corrosive group that slowly oozes across the terrain destroying whatever it engulfs. Thankfully bombs and bullets seem to be effective against it. All resources must flow from destination to destination across the map, via solar towers and energy relays. Resources have no hard caps, and efficiency is all about spotting bottlenecks before they become disastrous, so you can play quite slow and methodically if you like. Further missions (I'm about a third of the way through) have introduced complications like enemy organisms that can launch the goo behind your front lines. It's fun, but fatiguing.

Finally, I've played a bit of Avernum: Escape from the Pit, which is a remake of a remake of Jeff Vogel's first game. Solid world design, but rather unsatisfying leveling.

Sulphur on 27/11/2022 at 04:54

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I think less focused is a fair piece of critique. It's definitely a bit rambling in terms of what happens, and the motivations for a bunch of its characters are a bit... askew, but I appreciate that it's trying something more character-driven than Innocence's apparent interest in interrogating religion and The Inquisition and then having nothing to say or do with it except as a horror movie threat before it becomes full on fantastical (I'll never forget chuckling at the rat tornadoes while fighting the pope Grand Inquisitor. It was so OTT ludicrous you could have used it in a Bayonetta game). Less good is more subjective, and that's fine, it was better at being more human compared to the roughness of Innocence, IMO.



I don't think that's what it was trying to say. It's not that there's no cure, it's that things would have been all right if the world had just left them alone. It's a direct follow-through on Innocence's theme where the world's full of people who wouldn't think twice about using a child as a tool, and while they all ultimately pay a price, the one for whom the cost is too high in the end is Hugo. Amicia does her best to protect him, but you can't keep someone innocent forever, and his breaking point is losing both his mother and, in his head, Amicia, because they were his only (tenuous) tether to the world as a place with good in it. Fairly depressing, yes, but I think there's enough emotional truth to the way it wraps up that Hugo needing to die doesn't necessarily cheapen everything that came before it. It does stumble a bit by trying to contrast Amicia's values with everyone else's, and then dangles her into the abyss of bloodlust for a bit before pulling her back, but she's always at the uneasy boundary between 'not a killer' and 'they deserve it... a little'.

The dream does seem to be a huge bit of misdirection, but you can read it as an analogy for just finding a place to be at peace.

Also I may be a bit biased because as the youngest kid in my family, my sister did do a fair bit of bringing me up, so YMMV on how much you can relate to that. But even that aside, I think it's a much better game than the first one overall.

Malf on 29/11/2022 at 15:18

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GW2 is very active, even more so since it came to Steam earlier this year along with a new expansion.

But the beauty of it is that because they never increase the level cap, you can pretty much jump back in whenever you want once you've hit the level cap.
It does have what they call "horizontal progression", in that there are a bunch of abilities, skills and elite professions you can pursue once you're 80, but the "power level" never increases.
It does still have visibility issues in big fights, made a bit worse by the fact that a lot of veteran players look like violent Christmas trees at a disco, but the later developed events suffer from this less thanks to more refined encounter design.

However, they do seem to have improved ground attack indicators, meaning that if you're on the ball, it's quite easy to stay alive.
Most "PvE" content, especially in "Core" Tyria (the first area that was available on release), is quite easy to play through as long as you pay even a little attention to your build, although Heart of Thorns (the first expansion) is a massive step up in solo difficulty, being designed to make you cooperate with other players roaming the world. The second expansion, Path of Fire, steps down the solo difficulty somewhat, and introduces the best mounts in video games.
Overall, I still recommend it if you like open world type games, as there's just a HUGE amount of stuff to explore, with a lot of variety.

Guild Wars 1 is also still running, and ArenaNet have promised to keep it going in perpetuity. I even reinstalled it recently, thanks to a YouTube streamer I follow playing it live on Sunday night.
But they really are completely different games, and pretty much all they share is the setting.
GW1 plays more like some weird hybrid of party-based RPG, RTS and card-based game, whereas Guild Wars 2 is slightly more traditional (if not still breaking the MMO mould in numerous ways).

I think GW1 was definitely the more revolutionary design, and I sometimes wish they'd hued closer to it when making the sequel (seriously, I rank the first game's AI alongside FEAR and Black & White, while GW2's AI is thick as a brick, in a "Standard" AI kinda way), but GW2's active and mobile combat is incredibly moreish.

GW2 does however suffer from a stupidly bloated number of "currencies", that take a long time to get your head around. And a lot of the end-game content almost requires having the wiki page open in order to understand exactly WTF you're meant to do.

Thirith on 1/12/2022 at 07:54

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I can't remember quite when I started playing Sekiro, but it was this summer. Well, yesterday I finally beat the game... admittedly with a somewhat cheesy strategy for the final boss fight, but even this took practice and coordination, so I'm fine with it. I greatly enjoyed this for how it varied the From Software formula, and the Japanese setting made for a great change from the world of Dark Souls, but I'm also glad to be done with it. I greatly enjoy From Software games - every couple of years. I'm certainly going to play Elden Ring at some point, but not yet, not yet.

I'm also close to the endgame of The Excavation of Hob's Barrow. It's a lovely game, but the horror doesn't entirely land for me; there's something too cosy and leisurely for point and click adventures to feel consistently unsettling or scary, at least to me. It's difficult to be frightened if you're trying to get an egg so you can exchange it for a peach, which you'll use to distract the boy who's watching the local shop, where you need to steal a map of the area - no, that's not an actual puzzle from Hob's Barrow, but you know how P&C games work. Still, it's a definite recommendation if you like the genre and if you're okay with relatively easy puzzles as long as there's good characters and an interesting story.

EvaUnit02 on 2/12/2022 at 23:25

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Since I've got an active Game Pass sub I'm playing through CrossfireX: Operation Catalyst ATM. It looks like fuzzy poo and runs like a dog, probably 25fps - on a Xbox 1 S. It's a generic CoD clone that feels like it fell out of 2009. Even by CoD standards the enemy AI is utterly brain dead.


The Remedy signatures are few but there. There's a dream-like delusion every other level, where live action footage of the protagonist's wife is projected - akin to Alan Wake. The mo-capped acting in the cutscenes does look very good.


Only half of the story is on Game Pass. If you want the concluding campaign, Operation Spectre, you have to buy it. It's $10 USD, but the campaign is only ~3 hours long.


If you must play it, avoid on Xb 1. Only play on Xb Series.