I spent the day bouncing between feeling nauseated and feeling moderately neato. I was actually contemplating a livestream tonight since it’s been forever since I’ve attempted one, but since I’m not feeling well it’s kind of hard to get into the mind set. I played Betrayer a couple times today, figured a walk in 17th century Virginia would be calming enough, even with skeletons and Spaniards wandering about trying to murder my face.
One of these days I might actually complete the game. 😛 To my credit I did at least finish three games this year (AMID EVIL, Serious Sam 4, and Devil May Cry 5… twice) and I only have over 600 to go! And people wonder why I’m never bored…
I cycled through some games today to properly decompress and get my mind off of yet another work week surviving morons, and waiting for late packages in the mail (waiting on gifts to send to people… some of them late, misdelivered and dropped off by residents on other streets, the post office is kind of fucky over here at the moment). I wanted to try some of the freebies I’ve accumulated in my library over the years, and decided to try Lego: Ninjago Movie because, why not? I tried to play it under Linux awhile ago and ran into audio issues, and I figured I’d play it under Windows to get around that issue. The good news is that the audio works! The bad news is that it crashes more than a drunken sailor. I did some reading around, and this game, despite the positive reviews, crashes galore on certain setups, and mine seems to fall into that happy little club. I’m running up to date drivers, it was a clean install of the game, and I even tried running it in both DX9 and DX11 mode. I’m going to see if I can tweak something under Proton, but so far I’m thankful this was a freebie; the amount crashes alone would have made me demand a refund.
Upon returning to the ultimate trudge that is my Steam library I took notice of Neon Boost; a parkour style platformer with an 80’s tron/synthwave aesthetic. You have to get from point A to point B by bouncing, ducking, rocket jumping and running along walls while listening to synthwave during constant movement. There was a LOT of dying. Some instructions are floating in the air, and I had to come around a few times just to figure out what I was supposed to do, or I didn’t climb onto the wall or rocket jump properly from said wall. You can check it out for yourself on Steam, it’s an eternal freebie.
I also gave Lara Croft And The Temple Of Osiris a try again (not a freebie, unfortunately), but the damned game still suffers from amnesia every time you launch the game. At least a free indie came through for me, even if it is a ballbuster.
To kick off the weekend I combed my library of what feels like infinite entertainment, and decided to give an indie called A Memory Of Us. I picked it up in a charity bundle a few months back, and it seemed to be one of the more interesting ones in the bundle. It tells the tale of a young girl that loved to read all kinds of stories about robots and the like, but grew bored of these same tales and ventured off to yonder book store to find a new story to dig into. You find an old man sleeping on the other side of the desk, and through chat balloons and dream speak he tells you to venture upstairs to find stories. I had to drag a ladder to the other side of a room to find the book of plot device (not the actual name of the book), and encountered a bug preventing me from dragging the ladder with my controller. I even tried mapping my Steam Controller to behave like a keyboard, but the arrow keys didn’t seem to register on the analog stick, will need to science that out another time. This game is playable with a keyboard, but this would be a perfect candidate for relaxing on the couch or in bed (or if you play in the bathroom like select Nintendo Switch users and the gaming laptop owners before them). Getting over my peripheral hurdle I found a book and brought it to the old man, and he finds a picture contained within showing a younger him, as well as a girl that looks oddly like the young girl before him. He has a flashback to his childhood, where he first meets her after outrunning cops and hiding in a garbage can you fall/hide in.
You play as both characters, and rely on one another to solve puzzles and other obstacles; such as stealing a slingshot to shoot apples down into a basket, or using a pocket mirror the boy picks up to blind a drunkard, and who knows what else I’ll find? I’ve left off at outrunning the police… I do that a lot for some reason.
Other than the game not being controller friendly I like the rest of it, at least thus far. I’ll return to it again when I’m not feeling like I could sleep for an entire week.
Managed to get a some of video and audio work done today, would have continued to plug at it but started feeling kinda queasy (even now it’s still coming and going). I’ve also been trying to swing past the post office to send some things off but it’s been hella busy even after election day. I’m hoping tomorrow or the next day things calm down, at least until Black Friday season hits.
As a change of pace I decided to tap into Trine, an extremely addicting physics puzzle adventure game that I received for free quite awhile ago. My thief can shoot three arrows as well as shoot fire arrows to burn enemies or light torches (at the cost of Mana of course), my knight can now charge through crowds of skeletons with a firey blade or a hammer of Knock Off Thor, and my wizard can summon the power of the Illuminati to make a floating platform.
I’ll admit I played longer than I had originally wanted to, but I have a habit of only stopping when I either get tired or finally hit a brick wall giving me the edge to take a break. I just kept on keeping on getting past challenges and tons of skeletons… oh and achievement/trophy hunting! Think I’ve had my fill of being awake for now though, need to see if I can sleep off this sour stomach.
I jumped on the Fall Guys bandwagon after watching the trailer and experiencing it at the virtual Devolver Digital Expo thing. Here’s a trailer in case you missed it:
In Fall Guys you play with a total of 60 people, and your goal is to make your way through all kinds of obstacle courses, and the last Fall Guy standing wins a crown! I need to git gud some more to obtain one, but at least I made it to a third round… granted I died 30 seconds in but I at least made it past the first round. I have a feeling that I’ll be coming back to this title, if only for one reason…
AMID EVIL goes on the list of games that I either pre-ordered or supported early on before an official final release, and I’m happy to say I finished it with flying colors, as in colorful weapons killing monsters left and right.
We’ve seen Doom inspire many shooters over these last couple decades (and even re-imagine itself), but when it came to successors to games like Hexen or Heretic that seemed to be a niche no one ever really thought to fill. I’m not sure why other than maybe the lack of guns… but who needs guns when you have a trident that strikes lightning upon your enemies? Or an ice wand that shoves icy dildos into your opponents torso? How about a really fabulous weapons that looks like purple ribbons, but is actually one of the most chaotic weapons in the entire fucking game?
On top of the amazing weapon selection there is also the level design. Some levels had you jump from floating giant droplets of water, to floors appearing under your feet as you walk.There are also tons of secrets throughout these worlds, meaning it gives me some replay value. This is one of those games I’ve played quite a bit between home and work, it feels just right on the Steam Controller.
This game was a delight from start to finish. I would love to see workshop support, and maybe even a sequel. 24/10 will probably play over and over again.
I obtained this as a freebie awhile back, and like many I collect freebies for my own amusement. I remember watching some YouTubers play this game, and it looked like a lot of fun but I could never to look for it on Steam when I found the time, not that it matters now… it was free!
It all starts out with the protagonist telling his child a bedtime story inside a black void. He tells her about his own childhood adventure about the search to find his Uncle Fred who loved to travel to infinity and beyond:
No, really.
Even in the beginning of the game there are all kinds of details scattered around in the form of notes and books, some giving you a heads up on the narration, and even some deep meta:
You can’t see much of it, but there are some pages that even detail information for the player to follow. I like little touches like these in games, it gives you something extra to look for.
Salamander Elsa
The search for your Uncle leads you to a village in what looks like a cavernous alien world with a decent amount of glowing plants, floating rocks and strange glowing writings on the walls that your Salamander Elsa friend (her name is Maddie, but I’ve decided she’s Elsa of the Salamanders) helps you decode along on your journey. She is one of the many salamander people who happen to know your uncle, but alas even they have no idea where he is either. You are at least pointed in a dark and scary direction, of which you’ll most likely find your uncle if you can traverse these dark caverns in your new found suit of course.
Checkpoint
You are armed only what is called an adventure suit, which you obtained back at your Uncle’s house. The Adventure Suit gives you the ability to power jump and grapple your way from point to point. You obtain crystals or “power cores” along your journey, and for each one you obtain you can throw an extra grapple before touching the ground. I can currently grapple three times before having to land on the ground to recharge for example.
I accidentally glitched an area of the cave where you meet a one eyed purple people eating worm, and whenever it has its eye open you have to stand perfectly still until it goes back to sleep. I decided to drop off at this point last night, and upon returning to it today the purple cockworm was stuck asleep.
Lazy Bastard
Oops? At least I made it through the cave, and the worm managed to get a good night’s sleep.
Each world seems to be more abstract than the last. You go from caves, to a skyworld, and currently I’m making my way through some icy mountain caves.
Foxy Boxes
I’m not entirely sure how far I’m into the game, but so far I really like it. You might consider it if you’re into first person platformers, the level design is really something else.
It seems Cyan is wanting to start another project:
The video doesn’t seem to show much other than it’s a puzzle type game (Cyan’s specialty) with some nice looking graphics and a creepy voice. Of course unlike their last games Cyan wants to make this a VR exclusive title because so many people play VR… That’s the reason, right? Obviously there are waaaaaaaay more VR gamers than those zombies that stare at their multimonitor setups with drool rolling down their faces.
The team has developed what Miller called a working “experience,” similar to a demo, that will be shown later this month at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco in an attempt to garner interest and financial backing. It features the Mead-based company’s signature puzzle-solving gameplay, he said, in a world built from the ground up to be experienced through a virtual reality headset.
Well, that leaves me out. There aren’t enough games out to justify me getting into VR, plus I’m still pretty miffed about Obduction’s poor optimization for AMD GPU’s as well as overall optimization (broken LOD’s). Plus if I take into consideration how the last Kickstarter took place, and some of the more dramatic moments I’d rather not mention during their update posts, I really am reminded that I should play other games instead. Heck, I’ve been playing Quite a bit of The Phantom Pain lately, and that’s an NVidia Gumworks title.
That said I wish them no ill will. I would like for them to succeed and return to their former glory, but it seems unnecessary to leave people out if they can’t afford VR. Plus I would think they would make money if they developed a non VR version of their game. As it is Cyan’s core fanbase consists of about 7 people who still have use to run a Pentium III setup. :v:
The Steam Winter Sale is in full swing, and I’ve already been playing one of the games I’ve purchased from it so far.
Aragami is a stealth indie game developed on the Unity Engine. You’re an Aragami, a being made of shadows. You have been summoned to save a girl named Yamiko. She is being held prisoner by the army of light or the “Kaiho”. She talks to you via projected hologram.
Yamiko guides you through the game and teaches you how to traverse the shadows, you can leap from shadow to shadow using Shadow Essence, as well as unlock other skills by finding and spending scrolls on them, which I haven’t done yet (but I have TWO SCROLLS). Light makes you weaker, the shadows keep you strong. Don’t go towards the light! Offhandedly, Yamiko tells you that when the sun rises it will kill you. Fortunately this game doesn’t have a day/night cycle. 😛
Aragami runs on Windows, Linux, PS4 and Mac. This is probably one of the more smooth Unity Engine games I’ve played, though the graphics are rather simple but work well with the art style. Reviews for the game on Steam are “Very Positive”, Metacritic gives it an overall average rating of 70/100 on PC, and 71/100 on PS4. I’ve only played an hour of it thus far, and so far it’s been really nice. 🙂 I might install this on my laptop and put together a Steam Controller config (unless someone else has already, which is highly possible).
