What I’m Playing

What I’ve Been Playing – Idling For Hats Edition

A new year, a new time to try to build new habits. Hah ha ha, yeah right… probably. Anyway, I picked up a slew of new-ish games over the holidays in various sales, and I look forward to forgetting that I wanted to play them over the next few months. Off the top of my head, I picked up, yet to really play, Spider-man Miles Morales, Alan Wake 2 and Alan Wake Remastered, Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla, and Horizon Zero Dawn. Plus some cheapies in bundles or randomly, A bunch of Oddworld Games, Need for Speed Payback, Tron 2.0, Karateka. This doesn’t even include the whack of free games from Epic, though of those I only really care about Saints Row, Deathloop, and Guardians of the Galaxy.

I might be a bit slow getting going on these though as I’m doing some work-related training in the evenings 3 nights a week for most of January.

Spider-Man Remastered

I bought this one back at the start of December. I’ve since finished it. I started on some of the DLC, but I’m not really sure I’ll bother doing much more. I really enjoyed the gameplay in this one, but the combat is kind of super repetitious. It’s just the same 3 or 4 enemies in groups but in different outfits depending on the stage of the story.

The game itself is fun, the story is decent, I made the stupid assumption about the end boss not being in the game because, unlike all the other big villains, there wasn’t an explicit achievement. It did a pretty good job of weaving together several unrelated subplots all into one larger narrative. Swinging and running around the city is fun, but it starts to feel a bit slow after a while.

Spider-Man Miles Morales

If I am going to do more of the same Spider-Man, I may as well mix it up, which is why I’ve started on the “Not number 2 but still a sequel” game of Spider-Man Miles Morales. Miles shows up in the first game, and you play as him a few times, as not Spider-man. There is a subplot that sets up Miles gaining his powers and then this game lets you play as him. It’s the same map with a few changes, and the same basic combat with a few new additions, but it’s basically more of the same. I’ve only done one major mission and the game says I am 22% done with the main story, so I guess it’s pretty short compared to the first.

The first isn’t that long either really, it just has a ton of optional mini-missions you can do scattered across the map.

Deathloop

I decided to give Deathloop a quick try, it was a freebie from the holidays. In the 10-15 minutes I played, it kept losing the controls. Repeatedly. I don’t know if it’s something I was doing or if it’s just THAT buggy, but the experience was pretty awful.

Hogwarts Legacy

I played a bit of Hogwarts Legacy again. I really enjoy this game, but it’s taking up space on my drive, and I want to uninstall it, but I need to play up to the last achievement with a Ravenclaw character. It’s really odd just how tedious replaying this is. I am not real sure why it’s like that, but even skipping the cut scenes and rushing, I just don’t want to keep going. I think it took me like 2 hours to do this as Gryphondor and Hufflepuff, but somehow this last run is just so annoying. But I don’t want to reinstall it, I want to finish this and be done.

Fortnite

The game I am not playing, but making progress on. I’m super burnt out on Fortnite, but because I had a screw sub from the last season, I got this season pass. Most of the skins are pretty meh, but it has Solid Snake or will have Solid Snake. A lot of people are going crazy for Peter Griffin, but I don’t care about that at all.

I also have not written about the new Rhythm game or Race game, because both are pretty lame. LEGO is, ok, I’ve gotten a bit better hang of it, but it’s still pretty tedious. The new modes are great for leveling up though. I’ve never leveled so fast in a season ever. In Fortnite LEGO and Fortnite Festival Jam stage, you can load it, and walk away and gain about 5-6 levels a day, for EACH mode. I’m already something like level 165, but I’ve stopped for now until Snake drops. Also, occasionally I kind of need to drop in to catch up on the Weekly quests for those item drops.

It’s like back in Team Fortress 2, when you could idle for hats.

All I wan to add is the pricing on the cosmetics, especially for the new modes, is fucking bonkers nuts. You can buy a Lambo in Fortnite and play their mediocre Mark Kart clone, or for the same price you could buy Forza Horizon 4 (on sale), and get infinite Lambos and a real racing experience on a large, open-world map. The music tracks are like 3x the price of buying the track itself in MP3, and the game mode needs some tweaks to make it playable (lanes should be different colors).

Sky: Children of the Light

I’ve shifted into a weird phase with Sky. It’s brought on by the Steam version being available. I’ve now shifted to alts and mechanical farming mode. I’ve got like 5 or 6 total accounts now, one being my main account. I spend a short bit each day, generally in the morning when I would have been eating breakfast (which I am not at the moment, but that’s for a BI post later), where I’ll log into each account, send my main a Heart, and farm out 3-4 candles, to replace the candles I’ve spent on the heart. Two of these accounts have a pile of reserve candles now because the season ended, so if I am feeling time crunched, I’ll just eat into those.

Hearts are one of several in-game currencies. The only way to get them is to be sent one from a friend, at the cost of 3 candles, once per day, or to gather bits of light sent from friends, which I think takes like 60 bits. Getting these normally, is a pain, even with a lot of friends, because half the time, they don’t send you anything even when you send it to them, because who wants to spend their candles on strangers? You can only get like 20-25 candles per day, and Candles are the main currency.

Anyway, I did some rough math, to complete just the main tree, none of the Traveling Spirits trees, I need like 1000+ hearts. Even with 4-5 accounts feeding me hearts daily, that’s 200 days. You start throwing in events and Traveling Sprits, it’s easily a year of farming.

I will probably give up before I get there, but it’s a little nuts. Granted, the bulk of this is the handful of Ultimate Capes, which tend to run 100-200 Hearts each.

I may look into automating the candle and heart farming with some automation tools later, so it just sort of, happens. It would be pretty easy to use some sort of input macro tools to log in, run to a handful of regular candle sources, and send the Hearts.

Part of this exercise in creating accounts also meant running through the game some to unlock areas. Twice now, I’ve done a no cape run, once as a test, and once recorded, which can be viewed in it’s entirety below.

What I’ve Been Playing – Light-Based Lore Edition

Oct 17th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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I kind of want to do these weekly, but I don’t really know if I rotate my game interests enough these days to do them weekly. I just wish I could get more consistent, though I have no one to blame by myself. Though part of the desire to do these sorts of posts was to maybe, encourage more variety in my gaming habits. I think part of the reason I don’t have much variety lately is that, anymore, I play games to fill time more than for enjoyment these days. It’s certainly not for lack of options of things to play.

Hyperlight Drifter

This game kind of reminds me of Zelda a bit in play, it’s top-down, and you go around swording and shooting things. It’s essentially an adventure game like Zelda, though visually it’s all stylized pixel art. In that department it makes me think of Dead Cells. The sort of, core mechanic, is that you can sort of hyperlight speed dodge a short distance. This comes up a lot in combat as the standard strategy tends to be, dodge then hit.

I was enjoying it though it’s a bit brutally difficult in places, it also doesn’t punish you much since dying just means starting the current screen over again. So you can get a feel for actually improving one’s skill.

But I also basically stopped playing. I’ll probably go back, but I got to the first boss. A first boss? I’m not sure the zones have any real order. I just, couldn’t beat it. Not for trying, and trying, and trying, and trying some more. The strategy is fairly clear, get the boss to kill the adds before they spawn in, then dodge and hit the boss. It’s all just a bit too annoyingly knife’s edge for difficulty for me I think.

The game’s fun though, and tells an interesting story despite no actual dialogue.

Omno

In a much different pace than Hyperlight Drifter, I played all the way through Omno. It’s a 3rd person platform puzzle title, and there isn’t really any way to actually die, so well, that makes it considerably easier than Hyperlight Drifter. It also takes maybe 4 hours to 100%.

I like this sort of relaxing play style these days. Interestingly, the game kind of reminded me of Sky: CotL in it’s story, though not really in it’s play style. Especially with the occasional light up hieroglyphics and light collecting game play.

Sky: Children of the Light

Speaking of Sky, I’ve jumped back on that bandwagon a bit again. It’s an enjoyable and relaxing title but it gets really repetitious after a while. I think the main thing is to stop grinding candles. Just stick to daily quests and events. Grinding candles is incredibly time-consuming and makes the repetition worse.

There was also a demo for the PC version. I’m looking forward to the PC release if only because it means I can set up a couple of extra accounts and send myself hearts. Hearts are the most pain in the ass currency to get in-game, You can get a slow drip of partial hearts from friends daily, assuming you fight people who light your candle, or a friend can gift you a whole heart for 3 candles. That’s not a lot of candles, but it adds up rapidly if you were doing it for several friends. The way the system works, the absolute maximum you can farm in a day if you get literally every piece of wax, is around 20-21 candles. This takes HOURS, even when you are super efficient. And candles are the main currency for other things, so you often want to save them up. Not a problem for a second account that’s just feeding hearts to a main account, 3 candles are fairly easy to farm out.

Anyway, on to the Steam Demo/Beta. I ended up doing two paths here, not really intentionally. When I first logged in on my laptop, my account wasn’t linking properly, so I ended up doing a fresh new run with a “local save”. I ended up running through the entire game, including Eden, and eventually, linked it to a secondary Steam Account. When I loaded it up on my Desktop, everything linked fine. I did some runs and collected Winged Lights on my main account, as I had recently run Eden again and needed to regather them all, and I recorded some gameplay of the Trials and posted it to YouTube.

The game plays pretty well on PC, it’s neat seeing the world in nice huge glory after playing so long on my phone. There are a few issues I came across. Both may be related to some core issue with controls. First, in some tight areas, when flying, it was super easy to end up caught in the clouds and bouncing around. This happened most often in “entry corridor” zones, like at the start of Daylight Prairie and Hidden Forrest, but also during the final ascension sequence at the end of the game. I think what’s happening is the PC controls don’t handle, I’m not sure the proper name, “Pressure based movement”. On the phone touch controls, you push forward a bit, your character walks slowly. Push it all the way, they run. On the PC, with WASD, the movement seems to always be the same speed. This actually makes things feel incredibly sluggish at times. I had trouble during the Trial of Fire at times because my character just felt sluggish and wasn’t quite able to make it to light the next candle or avoid a squiggly slug monster.

I’m not entirely sure how to fix this with KB controls aside from adding a “sprint” button.

Fortnite

I’ve ended up playing Fortnite this season more than expected. I mentioned before the pass was super lame and I wasn’t really interested, but I did manage to accumulate the free tier V-Bucks in order to have enough to buy the pass. This was worthwhile since spending 950 V-Bucks unlocked the paid tier V-Bucks, giving a return of 1200 V-Bucks total. Also, while the pass is really mediocre, I really like the heist elements of the map. There are three large compounds you can infiltrate for good loot. It’s fun infiltrating these places.

What I’ve Been Playing – Better Late than Never Edition

May 20th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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So I meant to be way more regular on these things but I’ve kind of failed at that. Two reasons mostly, I suppose. One, often I decide I want to do a full write up on something instead of a brief write up in one of these posts. Two, mostly I have just been playing Fortnite.

I actually want to go on a bit of a tangent regarding Fortnite and Sky, Children of the Light, and paid seasonal passes. I posted a series of posts on Sky: CotL recently. I’d been meaning to write them all out for a while, and I did, and I posted them, and… that was just kind of it. I stopped playing. It seems like a really weird place to stop, and I can’t really say I intended it that way or even realized it had happened. The game is coming to PC soon though, so I will definitely go back.

My frustration here, is the Season Pass. And Season/Battle Passes in general. The entire concept is just, a little lame. It could BE perfectly fine, but most are not. For example, with Sky, I decided to log in and I noticed there was a new season, and while it has some really wonderful looking capes and masks, I had already decided I didn’t really care. What I realized was, i had never finished the last pass. I was literally like 99% there too. But I did not pick up the awesome manta spawning lamp. I am pretty sure, it’s never ever coming back either. That’s it. I paid for the pass, I am pretty sure I even had the candles, I just, never logged in to redeem it.

This whole exclusivity thing is kind of really annoying. It’s why I stopped playing Overwatch 2 out of the gate. It’s annoying in Fortnite as well. Like, I can never get Peely, because he was a pass skin. I can’t get Darth Vader, he was a pass skin. Lots of cool skins I come across, end up being pass skins, from before I played.

It’s annoying and Frustrating.

Fortnite

Back on track a bit though, and on Fortnite, I finally picked up Save the World, the single player hoard mode campaign. It’s… kind of a little lame. I can see why it’s not popular. It comes with a bunch of V-Bucks, and eventually I can build some experience grinding endurance run builds, but I kind of regret bothering. You can’t even get the V-Bucks included until you have played for quite a bit to unlock the daily quests. The voice acting and little story bits are fun and funny, the actual game play loop feels a lot like an annoying mobile game and it’s kind of tedious and boring.

Banko Kazooie Grunty’s Revenge (GBA)

I may do a full write up on this game, but I have never played and Banjo Kazooie games, but I really enjoy both Yooka Laylee games from the same studio (more or less). It’s really kind of weird how similar the games are. I’ve compared Yooka Laylee to Donkey Kong Country, but it’s almost a straight reskin of Banjo Kazooie’s world. Anyway, I finished it, 100%. It’s fun.

The Wizard Game That shall Not Be Named

I’ve been a bit torn on this one. I really like Harry Potter, but Rowling is actually kind of shit, and there has been a huge basically, witch hunt campaign against anyone who cares about this game. There is actually a great video that covers the whole thing pretty well. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0TwTJCRf58

Don’t worry too much though, the game is decidedly pretty mid tier.

I ended up getting a free copy of this game through a raffle online, so it’s kind of awash, I guess. I get the controversy around everything, personally, the Transgender audience complaining about Rowling is legitimate. The whole “Goblin/Jews” thing, feels a little bit over blown. Goblins, orcs, trolls, etc, have basically always “looked like that”. because it’s a mechanism to make evil characters. If anything, Jewish stereotypes, were also just, designed to look like creepy goblins, less so the other way around. I don’t know, maybe I am way off base there.

I will say though, taking a random female model character, and just, giving them a male voice actor, does not a transgender character make. Maybe there is more to it as the story progresses, I have been mostly exploring the castle, and not really doing the story, so I’m hugely over leveled, but I really doubt it. I am not sure what they could have done, but it just feels, a little forced and awkward.

It should not be real surprising though, there is something weird going on with some of the voice acting in this game in general. Several characters sound like they recorded their lines in an echo chamber or something. My own character also sounds weird, maybe it’s partially my fault? When you create a character, you can adjust the pitch of the voice chosen, higher and lower, and I went on the higher end, which seemed fine in the character creation demo lines, but after going through actual dialogue, she sounds like a weird echo bumblebee. It’s grating enough I have considered seeing if there is a way to hack the save file to choose a different voice pitch.

There is also a lot of oddness to the graphics going on. Maybe this sort of thing is common, I don’t really play too many “AAA” level titles, but there is a lot of weird clipping, at times. Particularly with the cloaks everyone wears, which will randomly flop up on one side, maybe it’s supposed to be wind?

I am also disappointed by the lack of real interaction with your character and the NPC students. A lot fo my comparison here comes from GTA, which is the big daddy of “open world games”. In this game, you can’t say, randomly Leviosa another student. You can barely even bump into them. In GTA, you run through a crowd of people, they all bump around realistically and get kind of offended. In this, they just sort of, do nothing.

I also wish there was more NPC variety in the students. The game has a pretty robust cosmetics system to it, but you’re supposed to be a student, and literally every other student just wears a basic house outfit and robes. So you wearing anything else, feels super weird.

Probably the biggest issue I have had, and this may be explained better later, is your character’s place in the world. You’re like, the most Mary Sue character ever to visit Hogwarts, including the not yet born Harry Potter. You come in as a 5th year student, which feels really odd, but I kind of get that they didn’t want you to start as an 11 year old kid. It feels like Magic is something you would want to start from the beginning with though, screwing up Math by starting school as a 5th grader, isn’t going to turn anyone into a frog. There has been at least one little scene though suggesting there were other students admitted as 5th year students. All of them, including your character, also have access to this Mary Sue Magic (Ancient Magic) which is apparently uncommon. You learn all you spells pretty easily, which is just one more, “Mary Sue moment”. Basically, you are perfect at everything. I get that it’s needed for gameplay, but it feels weird from a story perspective.

Anyway, I actually have been trying to force myself to play more single player titles and just, stuff, besides Fortnite. Like, I had started Death Stranding and Final Fantasy 7R, and then stopped. I want to go back to those, but I have yet to do so. I just end up playing more Fortnite, it’s quick and easy.

What I’ve Been Playing Recently

Jan 28th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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It’s been a bit, so it’s been a bit busy I suppose. I’m going to mostly push off my current “regular games” a bit with Fortnite and Sky. just for some discussion about what else I’ve been playing.

Death Stranding

Funny enough, this isn’t the only game I’m playing at the moment with “dangerous rain”. Sky has a zone of rain that harms you when you’re standing in it. Though, they call it “Time Fall” in Death Stranding, and it’s a Hideo Kojima game, so it’s full of weird unexplained shit that may or may not eventually be explained.

The core gameplay is nothing like I expected. You’re in this weird dystopian future with rain that makes you grow old if it touches you, and dead bodies explode or something within a few days of dying and then turn into these weird invisible monster things that only show up when it rains and then there is this baby in a bottle for some reason. And so far all of the game play has been, “Deliver things on foot by walking through the wilderness.” Like no joke, there is a balance mechanic to weight distribution that has TWO dedicated buttons on the controller.

I really just, don’t know. But it looks pretty. Also I am told that eventually you can make grenades or something from your poops!

Bayonetta

Speaking of weird but highly acclaimed games. I also picked up Bayonetta. I’m… not sure I have the patience for this style of weird anymore. The gameplay is kind of button mashy and the plot is full of “ZaNy AnImE” style shit. Like the intro scenario has this dude just throwing guns at your character going “guns guns guns” and it’s just like, too much odd for the sake of oddness.

Like Death Stranding is weird, but I feel like eventually most of it will eventually be mostly explained by some sci-fi related world building. Bayonetta is just over the top for the sake of being over the top.

Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins

I’ve been playing a lot of random stuff on the Retroid lately but I’m going to stick with what I played significantly. I’ve beaten Mario Land 2 a several times, but decided to play through it again, which took like 2 hours, maybe. And I beat it again.

The biggest stand out is just how many unique enemies are in this series. Plus it’s weird how much the recent LEGO Mario sets seem to be designed entirely around one world in this universe. The LEGO Mario looks kind of like the Mario Zone robot and the Mario Zone itself even includes a LEGO like level.

Wario Land 4

After defeating Wario in Mario Land 2, I realized I had never really played any of the stand alone Wario Land games. So I loaded them up to play through. I’m not sure why I started at the end in Wario Land 4 but I did. I think mostly because it’s a slightly more polished GBA title, so it was more appealing.

I also completed it. It’s not a very lengthy game. The levels also feel like they are intended to be played repeatedly, but most of them are pretty linear despite the interweaving/multiple paths of them (Wario Land 3 is quite literally the opposite).

Also apparently Wario has his own princess now too.

F.I.S.T.: Forged in Shadow Torch

I could have sworn I had wrapped this one up in a post. I mentioned FIST Last time, and I have since completed it. I also finished it 100%, which wasn’t actually that hard to do. The last few bosses are really really rough though the second to last boss, the big sumo pig, is a lot more difficult than the actual end boss.

The most amusing thing about this game, a lot of the plot revolves around this super powered crystal, “The Spark”. It’s weird though because there are at least two of these things, and more importantly, you fight three enemies powered by this “ultimate force”. The first is a rock monster empowered by it to retrieve it. Then later you get betrayed and have to fight a dude in power armor powered by the Spark, which destroys it, then SURPRISE there is another one, which you retrieve but it’s stolen then you get to fight the end boss, powered by The Spark.

It doesn’t really feel all that impressive honestly. I kind of defeated “The Power of the Spark” repeatedly. Not that impressive.

What I’ve Been Playing Recently

Jan 5th, 2023

by Ramen Junkie.

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I wonder if those titles should be more distinct or if it even matters. Anyway, I “completed” one game this week. Actually I sort of “beat” two games, but I forget how I have counted the Fortnite Battle Passes. Let’s call it one for now. The Fortnite BP technically goes to Level 200.

F.I.S.T: Forged In Shadow Torch

Man, that acronym. Someone really wanted it to stand for FIST. This was one of the free games from Epic over the Holidays that they push every year. It looked interesting from the animal characters and Steampunkish design then I noticed it’s a Metroidvania title, which is probably my favorite game genre. So I decided to jump on playing it. You play as a sort of, grizzled ex soldier rabbit, armed with a giant robotic FIST from his old war days mech. The game play is pretty smooth and it’s definitely a Metroidvania style title.

My main gripe so far is the slight unevenness of the enemies. Most of the bosses I have encountered are super predictable and almost too easy. Dodge Dodge Dodge Strike. It’s a pretty regular pattern for all of them so far. One large biped mech was particularly easy to confuse because it didn’t move and you could just jump from it’s left to it’s right, meaning it would miss miss miss, then turn around, so you move again, and repeat. But the regular enemies, are often tougher than the bosses, and feel like they have just as much health. There is also this really annoying bit where you can stun them out of an attack animation, but not ALL attacks, and often you can’t stop your slightly sluggish attacking, until it’s too late to dodge away. And the enemies often have huge attack arcs. If that makes any sense.

It’s not awful, but it’s annoying, especially with packs of enemies. The game feels like you should be able to “juggle” the enemies, but you really can’t. It’s particularly bad with the samurai looking dudes and worse with the axe throwing shield guys. The game is still fun, but it feels like it could use a slight bit of tweaking to it’s regular enemies and maybe a slight beefing up on the actual bosses.

Fortnite

I finished the main part of the Chapter 4 Season 1 Battle Pass. Which means reaching level 100. The game is honestly, starting to feel like a chore. I’ll keep at it for now, but at this moment, I have no desire to continue to Season 2 unless things seem really good. There have been a LOT of complaints about the new weekly quest system. They expire now, instead of just stacking until the end of the season, and they are almost always incredibly grindy. Like, “you must do ONLY THIS all week” to complete the top tier. The map also was neat at first but it’s gotten really stale. It also hasn’t really changed at all. It felt like in Chapter 3 the map was constantly changing every week or so. The weapons pool also has not really changed.

Sky: Children of the Light

Now that the Season of Aurora has ended and I’m not worried about maximizing my Candles each week, I decided to just go for it at take a swing at The Eye of Eden, the end zone of this game. man, you want a game that is bipolar on its own game play. I kind of want to do a separate write up of Sky, so I won’t go into a ton of detail, but let’s just sat this. The base game play loop is about as non confrontational as it gets. You mostly just, fly around lighting candles and collecting wax balls and occasionally doing little spirit stories. The final zone, is literally an endurance until you die.

Your health is represented by these Winged Light bits that you collect, which strengthen your overall ability to fly and explore. I was up to I think 76 before entering Eden, which is pretty close to max on regular basic Winged Lights. The first zone is a slow climb up some cliffs through winds and rock storms. The second zone is stronger wings and bigger rocks, but now there are Krill dragons patrolling around. The third zone is where the action is, it loses the dragons, but instead there is a constant barrage of lava rocks splattering all over the zone that will basically one shot you destroying some of your Winged Light. You can hide behind some rocks, but for the most part, you have to run around the zone depositing your Winged lights into these little statues to save them. You give up your health, to save these other entities.

You do this, until you die.

And then you get reborn at zero. Though for each spirit saved you get some special candles to use to buy some more permanent Winged Lights. It’s not 1:1 though. I earned I think 13 Ascended Candles. I restarted the game at around 8 Winged Lights I think.

Klonoa: Door to Phantomile

I still jump around a bit on the Retroid Pocket but for now I have settled on playing the first Klonoa game on Playstation 1. I am not sure how far I am, maybe halfway? The game reminds me of the style of Donkey Kong Country, but not nearly as fast paced. It’s a neat little game, though I’m not entirely sure of the ins and outs of some of it. Like occasionally there are clock items to pick up, but from what I can tell, the game has no timer. I’m not too concerned, I am not trying to master this one.