Don’t Starve Together and this:
I usually avoid Rogue-like anything, and anything of that nature. Don’t Starve Together is coop though and I love exploration. This one is also exploration and I am a little obsessed, okay a lot, trying to unlike all the explorers. I have one to go, but I am not sure that will satisfy my compulsion to unlock everything else or, you know, gold frame all explorers.
This weekend I’ve been playing Soldam (still $10 on the Switch eShop, and worth it if you’re up for trying an arcade puzzle game you’ve probably never seen before), Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle, and my usual mobile standbys Puzzle & Dragons and Dungeon Rush, plus a newer game I’ve been playing called Merge Dragons!, which is an interesting spin on the core gameplay mechanic of Triple Town.
The Curious Expedition for me as well. I am jealous of you for having unlocked almost all of them. I think I still have six or so to go. Family stuff meant not much time for anything else except the occasional half-hour session of the above.
Well then be prep-pared for more jealousy :-)
It says I put in 61 hours into this game. I would say at around the 40 hour mark I started recognizing patterns, aka in all but the snow biome I know where the shrines are, most the villages and the trader is easy to pick out except when you find the slavers. Temples can be extremely awesome, oh and I think the wiki might be slightly wrong on some of the explorers. I picked up Harriet Tubman and that Cardinal guy, my last unlock, under slightly less strict circumstances than the board gays, good standing seems to be +1 not +2. And I gave up trying to get him when I realized I might just win with my pacifist!
Now the item unlocks… I am thinking I have to up the difficulty to try and get that… and I am not sure I am up to the task for that.
Started playing Abzu last night, it’s a pretty great little game, in a very relaxing and very non-competitive way. It’s pretty cool to just swim around and see the sights, not have to worry about killing or being killed. Makes a great little breather between games that, you know, involve killing or being killed.
Started Metal Gear Solid 5 The Phantom Pain (done Ground Zero in lightning speed). Having not played a Kojima game since, I don’t know, Metal Gear on NES, this feels very gamey. Whereas stealth games like Splinter Cell goes for naturalism and realism, MGS5 sticked to the absurd. You can’t be spotted in broad daylight in a desert, as long as you are far away. When you are spotted, there is an exclamation mark above the enemy that spotted you. Common sense goes out of the window. Ground Zero at least makes more sense, given that bad weather obscures vision.
Those Paz monologues go on and on and sound like fanfic. The whole backstory seems like a fanfic, although I don’t mind the wtf supernatural angle. I’m yet to get to Quiet but I’ve heard all about her. She dresses like THAT going into battle? And Kojima invented a backstory to justify THAT?
I may or may not continue, because I’m kind of bored already. That Mother Base base building mechanics seems all like busy work.
I should start paying more attention to the patterns. I can tell when I’m approaching a pyramid or a cave, but knowing the others would be helpful. I’ve spent my past three games trying to finish first with Marcus Garvey, but his sanity penalty is making it tough. By the fourth or fifth expedition (the one where buried pyramids start appearing on normal difficulty), I can’t afford all the supplies I need, one of my companions turns cannibal and eats another, my donkey’s wound festers and it dies, and then I get killed by poison gas or something while trying to make a mad dash toward the pyramid. Might be time to move on to another character. Frustrating, but I still love this game.
I played around with a bunch of characters early on until I found a few that were easier for my play style. It’s hard to go wrong with a hunter and a cook, Frederick Courtney Selous, was the first one I one with although his camp site might cause you to turtle which is not good. throw in a journalist or an artist and you can single shot a lot of baddies.Careful though if the natives turn on you it gets nasty.
Knowing where the shrines are, the trader and the shaman’s hut is super useful because you don’t want to approach those until you’re ready. Knowing the consequence of the shrine, also super important. There are simply times when you should not anger the gods. Oh and ditch the donkey if you can! 1 or 2 in. If you can’t the you’re stuck leveling up that stupid four-legged waste of space.
So I did play a lot of Guild Wars 2 and Nioh, and a bit of World of Final Fantasy… but I did play one other game a lot more than I expected: Helium Rain. A very promising game so far, I’d say.
I resubbed to Final Fantasy XIV for a month, mostly to partake in some dungeon-running. And that was pretty much all I played for the whole weekend!
I don’t know why it only just occurred to me to read the game’s wiki. I assumed you unlocked new characters by completing the last expedition with different explorers. I guess I was blindly stumbling into new characters. A few of those unlock conditions sound tricky.
They hint at what you have to do on the empty pic but some of the hints are pretty darn vague. To unlock some of them, and one for certain, you can’t actually win which makes a number of them intentional efforts but you might have to abandon it and just survive. I wound up unlocking and winning that last one by accident because I swear someone said good standing was 2 and I had ended one expedition with 1.
Finished up playing the bulk of Slime Rancher over the long weekend. Not too much left for me to do in the base game and my next step is unlock the Ogden’s Wild section that released last month. On the whole, the game reminds me of Minecraft without the building/survival - so, I guess, just the exploration and farming stuff. Fun and chill.
Are there enemies in this game, or you’re just doing the ranching part? Considering whether my kids would like this.
There’s a more casual mode that removes the “enemies”, but I’m playing the standard way. The enemies aren’t a big deal to handle, so I suspect you wouldn’t lose much gameplay by turning them off to begin with.
I finished my re-play of Bioshock 1 and figure to start up Fallout 4.
Four day weekend starts now. And look what just released… Xenoblade Chronicles 2.
I will play some Flashpoint Campaigns: Red Storm (that game is really, really cool), and maybe finish Virginia.
Hmmm. Flashpoint Campaigns… I have that in my backlog. Strongly recommended you say?
I am enjoying it very much, because of all the smart way it represents logistics issues on a quite personal scale (battalion, I think?). And the theme is just cold war kid fantasy, it is golden.
Maybe because I spent some time with Pike and Shot right before playing it, the contrast of the destruction power is quite staggering ;)
It may feel too hands-off to some, but I enjoy trying to set up plans and see them all fail because the AI chose an approach different to what I thought and my recon units weren’t covering the right space.
In all case, it is a very simple system, that can be mastered in one or two hours. A very far cry from CMANO and such.
The scenarios don’t take hours and hours to play either, which is nice.
