Rediscovered my love of text driven games through a replay of Taco Fiction. I'm back on the wagon and probably going to try Blue Cactus Motel next.

 

Have you ever played any of the Choice of Games or Hosted Games apps Sonder?

 

The founder was my mentor back when I was trying to build a game! I loved their games a lot back then. The first one I played was Choice of Dragon and I just loved that it took everything I loved about the books and made it mobile.

 

That's super cool! I have most of those games. They're a fun read. Quality differs from writer to writer, but some great stuff.

 

The quality definitely differs! I remember my submission to their competition and whoa the cringe. Not great writing.

I really like the broad base of different stories they offer. There’s really something for everyone.

 

My favorite one was surprisingly life of a cat...

 

I haven’t tried that one. I’ll give it a go this weekend!

 

It's so different than a lot of the "epic quest!" ones, more slice of life...but it's quite well written and just a fun adventure.

 

Picked up Assassin's Creed Odyssey over Christmas break, I'm wrapping up DLC now. I adored it, mostly. They need to find a way to reflect in the story what I choose to do as a character. I almost immediately murdered all the Cult members and flew up the Mercenary rankings (both incredible systems btw), all to no effect in the story.

You'd hope story-only cult members would shit their pants at the sight of me, or people in general at the feared Eagle Bearer etc. The dialogue in general is pretty shitty, but I'm hoping that all improves in AC Ragnarok or whatever it is.

I loved building my fire hunter set and just murdering everything too, lol.

By the by, Sony has confirmed they're not at E3 again this year. I'm assuming this means either a PS5 blowout is imminent, or it'll be after the release of TLOU2. I doubt they'd want to cannibalize it or Ghost of Tsushima by doing the PS5 blowout close to either's launch. I think it likely we get a show either really soon, far enough away from TLOU's launch, or almost immediately after it launches in... April now, was it?

 

HMMM

Kotor Remake/Sequel in the works rumored

https://www.ign.com/articles/star-w...nX3EFhimRLw5DWIwEQwZTyJRv85NcJvyBxrjyrt-vBYTA

 

Impossible... Star Wars games never make it to three.

 

Well, back in late 2018 they did shut down the fan remake. And that was around for a while beforehand.
So that would fit quite nicely with them starting preproduction and year and change later the project gets rolling and people are finding out about it.

Unfortunately them "reworking" the games to fit current cannon sounds kinda bad. No idea what direction they are taking with it, but whitewashing the stories to fit a modern, feel good, Disney spin, would destroy them.

 

Just finished Pathologic 2.
It's been... an experience. Weird, weird stuff. Loved most of it.
I hope the other two characters will eventually be released as well.

 

On the advice of a friend, I caved and bought Temtem, Humble's answer to the long running question of "Can a Pokemon MMO be good?". It looks to be very obviously built for people who liked Pokemon, with features players have been asking for (complex quests, auction house, frequent in game tourneys).

So far, I'm around three hours in game, and it's certainly not bad, especially for an Early Access. Apparently, you'll be able to carry over your save from now to the main release. I'll get into my thoughts on that later. I'm not yet up to my first gym, so my impressions are still limited.

You get a very basic RPG pick your avatar sequence, and then your mother (I think?) sends you off to the local professor, who gives you your first Temtem (no, I don't know what it means either), which is either Crystal, Melee, or Mental.

And this is the first hurdle for a pokemon fan.

The types (neutral, fire, water, nature, electric, earth, mental, wind, digital, melee, crystal, toxic) are recognisable to pokefans despite the differences, and the alignment chart is also pretty similar, although some might throw you a bit. However, in the rush to get away from potential trademark issues, it feels like they've slapped a shoddy veneer on - there's no bug type, which feels weird, what with the early bug type temtem you can catch; whilst Digital only contains 2 temtem, and they're a single evolutionary line. Some of the name changes (poison to toxic) work quite well (as poison is ingested, whilst venom is an attack. Both are toxic); whilst others feel really shit (mental - it calls to mind a sanitarium's inmate, rather than someone with psionic abilities).

Having picked your starter, you leave the lab...

You're then one-shotted by your rival.

To skip forward a bit, the attack types are colour coded, rather than with the type underneath. Again, a slight change from what you're used to, and it feels like a really weird change, as the types have their colours changed too.

As an example, the Wind type. It's the equivalent of the Flying type from pokemon, but is a very pale blue, and similar to the Nature type in colour (unless I'm green-blue colourblind).

When attacking a temtem, if you've caught it previously, then your targeting reticule (wait a paragraph) will be either Red (not very effective), White, or Green (super effective), which is a nice touch, because I've not got a clue what most of them are.

On combat:
It's always a group battle. You will always send out two temtem, and your opponents will nearly always do the same. Wild tem will also attack in twos, although they might mix species. This adds extras layer to battling - two of the same type will power up moves of that type even further, and some moves will have extra bonuses if the other tem shares a type.

Tem seem chunkier than mon, with a super effective STAB against a lower level tem not wiping it. Being a two-on-two on top of that , you will BURN through healing items. This is ameliorated slightly by the Tempessence Vial, a 'Mass Heal' item you get in the first town, which revives all your tem to full health, but can only be used once per recharge, and requires visiting a Temporium (fuck me, I still don't understand the naming conventions) to recharge. I'm combat swapping, healing mid-battle, and heading back to town quite regularly. A nuzlocke (apparently the option will be added in the base game in future) will be devastating.

You cannot rely on murdering your opponent each turn with a STAB/SE move, which means battle flows very differently. Also, status changes wear off.

There's no PP for moves, instead, it uses a Stamina system, with different moves having different requirements. Stamina regenerates slowly, and tem can skip their go. There's also a warmup period for some moves - one of mine has two that it can use indefinitely, one with a single warmup, and one that takes four turns between uses. It means you can't just fill up the four slots with the superpowerful moves, because you have to survive long enough to launch them.

Definitely enjoying the combat.

However - remember Lance's Dragonite and the Rare Candy Abuse? It's pretty common for the trainers you're facing to have tem you can't get yet, and at levels that don't make sense. I haven't actually recorded it, but I'm sure I've seen some tem at levels that are flat out impossible for you to have. Mildly irksome/


On stats:
IVs are between 0 and 50, apart from fertility, which is 0-8. Any stat above 45 reduces fertility by one.
So does having offspring.
This means you CANNOT breed from your perfect tem. They're built like Gods, or, at least, one godin particular.
Not yet gone into depth on this, but it's apparently possible, with ~$t20,000 to get a guaranteed perfectly statted tem, so long as you can start with sufficient of the species.
You can also breed moves with some ease, and all tem that share any types are compatable (any two fire types, or a fire/wind and a wind/electric, etc). Whether you can chain moves across, I haven't yet figured.


Evolution is also weird (coming from pokemon) - it doesn't happen at a set level. Instead, it happens [N] levels after you caught the tem. This means something you bred for might evolve at 21, but it's wild-caught parent would instead evolve at 43. Definitely an interesting change, no major strong feelings on this yet.


On Early Access:
The game is available now, and progress will be retained when the full launch happens. This will add areas to the map, increase the level cap, and add new tem to the tempedia.

My main concern with this, is that I'll be overlevelled for going back through Route 1, even if there's a tem there I haven't yet seen - I'll not be going back to see it. Similarly, if new content is added to the first few towns, it won't be seen by existing players, as they don't otherwise have a reason to go back. I mean, that's my own fault for buying Early Access, but I would have maybe thought to completely finish each area before releasing that, rather than release the majority of the world, and then go back to fill it in.


Finally: Avatars and sprites.
Tem look decent enough. Some are a bit derpy, but they're at least still animals (so far), and most of what I'm seeing I want to catch and keep, rather than not being interested in at all. However, the battle sprites for other trainers all looked to be built off the player build... So the mother/daughter team, where the kid's too young to have their own? I don't know which one was which. But if the NPCs can be old, why am I stuck being a ten year old?

I want my goddamned beard back.

However, it's not always easy to figure out, on sight, what type a tem is. Not massively difficult, and this could be because of my own confusion around the different types, because I am consistently confused about which of my attacks are going to be super effective.



Overall, I am surprised at how much I'm enjoying this, and how much of a challenge it is. Don't expect a PokeWars-esque level of combat, but be prepared for this to be both harder (2v2) and more forgiving (tankier) than pokemon.

Consider adding to your watchlists.

 

Kotor 2 is probably my favorite piece of Star Wars media, right next to Empire Strikes Back, perhaps even above it. It showed what you can actually do with the ip, it respected the universe and brought new perspective to it. Frankly it has the best writing among all Star Wars, which admittedly isn't that hard.

I wouldn't be opposed to an remake. Keep everything intact, the systems, dialogue, voice acting etc. Only thing left for change would be the graphics and engine.

Seems like this isn't what they are doing. They are making a completely new game, most likely bastardizing both Kotor 1 and 2 in their attempt. The games are light and day in their atmoshphere, the light hearted first one versus the almost suffocating feeling of the second one. Honestly I wouldn't expect anything good either way, it is the age of Disney after all. Shame though, that it had to be Kotor on the chopping block.

 

KOTOR 2 ranks in my mind as one of the finest pieces of Star Wars media produced from a storytelling POV, alongside Matthew Stover's Traitor and his Revenge of the Sith novelization. I'll be curious to see what a new take on KOTOR as a whole will be, but I personally haven't been fond of much of the new continuity, so I don't have particularly high hopes at the moment.

On the topic of other video games, I've recently purchased and gotten into Bloodborne. I haven't properly played a "Soulslike" game (or whatever the "genre" is called) outside of completing Salt & Sanctuary and a few hours of Dark Souls on my 360, but Bloodborne has hooked me from pretty much the first hour. Fifteen hours in and at Old Yharnam after defeating Vicar Amelia and having a blast so far - the atmosphere, controls, and combat have all been top notch. Rocking a skill build on my character and using a Threaded Cane I've been upgrading at every opportunity I can.

 

I'm probably not speaking for everyone (most likely, actually), but when people say they want a Pokemon MMO, they don't mean the current Pokemon formula with better online functionality... I always envisioned it with a much larger focus on exploration and scale.

Maybe that's just me. It certainly seems no one has the balls to go really out there to make a 'next level' MMO, so I won't hold my breath.

 

While Warcraft 3: Reforged seemed like a low effort cash grab from the beginning, Blizzard quality strikes again and the entire debacle is perhaps the most egregious example of publisher's greed and customer hostility in... I wouldn't say the entire history of video games, but it's easily topping EA's usual fuckery imo.

Out of what was promised, little was delivered. Even the graphical upgrade is middling at best: it looks like a half-assed mobile game, many textures genuinely look worse than the original and everything is washed-out and blurs together (big no-no in an RTS). The 'remastered cutscenes' are just upscaled old ones. Some old maps and gamemodes are gone/banned because... copyright, I guess? Nobody really knows. There are no changes made to the campaigns to adapt it to the 'new lore' that Blizz promised, like fleshing out the Scourge. There's no QoL changes or an update to the game's interface, but there's a bunch of new bugs, freezes and performance issues (special QoL mention: you actually have to manually scroll down the chat to see new messages... just, wow.)

"Just play classic," you'd say. Except you can't, because Blizzard nuked the old game and it auto-updates to Reforged. You don't need to pay to play it, but you'll be playing on old graphics with new bugs, a new bnet version that doesn't even have player profiles or a ranking multiplayer and you'll also need 30GB instead of classic's 2GB. Old bnet account, your friends list, clans etc? Gone from the game and unrecoverable. You can't even play custom campaigns any longer.
The new EULA is also just lol (even if absolutely unenforceable in courts, probably). Blizzard owns every single scrap of creativity you might ever show in your lifetime if you even look at W3R because they're still butthurt about DOTA and probably think they'd have had the MOBA market cornered instead of just sitting on potential IP and letting it languish.

At the moment, it's sitting on a comfortable 1.0 on Metacritic. Of course the game itself isn't a 1.0, but the sheer contempt shown to the players probably makes that score deserved.

W3R is an absurdly bad product that fucks over not only those that bought it, but also everybody that might at some point want to reinstall classic (or, worse yet, still played W3 on bnet). That they're asking 40$ for this dumpster fire is rather, uh, brave.

Somehow Blizzard managed to outshine EA.

 

In these days, most of the entertainment I get from gaming comes from schadenfreude. It is going to be very fun to watch this newest clusterfuck.

On another note here is a very neat game i recently got

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1058430/A_Legionarys_Life/

It is a product of single developer. You play as a fresh legionary during Second Punic War. You are going to start and die many times. RNG can get frustrating sometimes but combat is neat regardless. Getting the best ending was really satisfying.

 

Instead World of Tanks, imagine a game called World of Banks where every player has their own bank and tries to steal from other players and put them in debt. Of course, as all respectable banks you have armed mercenaries.