It is my turn to rule over the Great British Empire again!
One of the interesting things about this project is that every time I get back to the game it feels at the same time familiar and different. By that I mean, our borders or that of our rivals haven’t changed that much since my last time at the throne.
Yet at the same time we have far more advanced military units, we are pretty much at the end-game now and more than ever it feels like every decision matters.
It is a strange feeling but an interesting one.
For anyone who just stumbled on this, this post is part of a Community Succession game hosted by Naithin of Time to Loot. You can find more information about it and links to all the participating blogs here.
With all that said, let’s get to screwing everything up improving the Great British Empire!
Credits: The image at the top was made by Naithin.
Steam is doing a pretty cool thing right now, the Steam Game Festival. The idea is basically that for a week they will make available demos of a bunch of upcoming games. It is a good way to check out the demos for some games that weren’t in your radar or for games that you are thinking of purchasing and just want to make sure you will like it.
It will be going until June 22 at 10 AM PDT.
Solasta: Crown of the Magister is one of those games that are part of this festival and wasn’t on my radar. In one of the Discord servers I hang at, a friend of mine suggested people to check it out and tell what their thought of the game. If you never heard of it before, like me, Solasta is a western fantasy RPG that uses the 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons rules.
To be honest I’d normally just snub on a game like this, thinking it is just another generic fantasy game, that is just using the D&D name to carry it’s sales. But since it was a request by a friend and I wanted to test the game’s claim of using the D&D ruleset I decided to check it out.
I am glad I did because it is a pretty good damn demo with lots of potential for the full game!
P.S.: I intend to check other demos from the Steam Game Festival and even write about them if possible. However since I have other commitments during the weekend I might not be able to publish the posts before it ends. So I recommend people to check the demos themselves.
If you are feeling overwhelmed with choices here are some that fellow bloggers posted about:
In my last post I talked about my inventory woes in Final Fantasy XIV. I wanted to talk about how I handle the subject in single-player games too but due to length I decided to save it for this post instead.
Actually, it isn’t about inventory woes in single-player games as much as in Skyrim and Fallout 4 (although this applies to pretty much every other Bethesda developed games too). Simply because most other games are, generally speaking, sensible in terms of loot and inventory. But not those two. Those two always make me into a looting monster for some reason.
Some time ago Syp of Biobreak wrote a post with tips for Stardew Valley. I thought I might add some of mine to the mix in the hopes they might help someone else. Or at least help me if I take an extended break from the game and forget all of this. :p
These are things that me and a friend found out while playing the game and discussing it. They should all work with the current version of the game, 1.06, but if a future patch changes things I will update this post.
If you have any tips of yours to add feel free to put it in the comments and I will add to the list with the proper credits. 🙂
Lately I’ve been tweeting a lot (or the equivalent in my case) about Stardew Valley. Ravanel noticed that. She also noticed that I haven’t made any post about the game. So she decided to blackmail me ask me to write some posts about it.
Since she knew almost nothing about the game I thought a review would be a good idea. I might do a few more posts about Stardew Valley after this but it is something I need to think about.
The shorthand I usually hear the most for Stardew Valley is that it is like Harvest Moon/Rune Factory but better. I never played that game series, only heard about it, so I can’t really compare. Another game I hear comparisons about is Animal Crossing but that is another I never got the chance to play. If your case is like mine then read on and I will try to explain what the game is about and why it is so fun.
Recently, Syl linked this music video from Chrono Trigger. Besides this giving me some warm, fuzzy feelings it also made me want to replay Chrono Trigger. The last time I played it must have been about 20 years ago, when I was still a teenager. Back then I didn’t appreciate it as much as I should, just like many games of the time. I mean, I knew it was a good game back then but due to a combination of factors I just treated it as just another game to be played. There are a few reasons for that I think, the first is that like all things at a certain point in time we never consider that it may change. In this case, I never ever stopped to think there might never be other games like Chrono Trigger. I thought games like that would end up being made until the end of time. Or at least they would only get better and better. That the games that would be developed from that point, that even my tastes and gaming systems would change so much over the years were not something I ever considered.
Then there were the fact that I don’t think my english (which is my second language) was still very well developed back then. Mix that with it being a rental that I would only keep for a day, maybe two, didn’t give me much of a chance to appreciate the story or the characters.
All that makes me think of how much I missed, not only of the games I did play and forgot so much about, as well as a lot of other games that for a reason or another I missed.
Usually I avoid doing reviews. Not because I hate them simply because I feel like there are other people who are much better at it than I am and I rather not parrot what they say. But then there are those moments where a game resonates with me so strongly in some way that I just feel like praising it to everyone I meet. Unfortunately just saying “Play this game! It is awesome!” is a very poor way to get people interested in said games. Therefore I find myself trying my hand at something resembling a review. This is one such an occasion.
So, about this game, it is an adventure game about a girl called Fran Bow that was living happily with her family and her best friend, a cat called Mr. Midnight, until one night while she was trying to sleep she saw an horrible creature peeking through her window. The next minute Fran heard her mother screaming and when she went to her parents bedroom she found them brutally murdered. Next thing she knows she is an asylum for kids who suffer from psychiatric problems. During one of her sessions she end up taking a new medication that the doctor hopes to help her. It ends up having quite the opposite effect, making her see a lot of creepy and horrible things that others can’t see. It is at that point that Fran decides to escape the Asylum, find Mr. Midnight and discover who murdered her parents.
First off, I apologize for the lack of more interesting screenshots in this post. Just like the start of this playthrough the decision of writing this was pretty much a spur of the moment thing. In other words this was born more of an “Hey, why not write about it?” than anything else.
To be completely honest (and as you may already expect from the title) I am a terrible player of Crusader Kings 2. I barely know enough to get through with dinasty in the west european/feudal countries. In fact, I usually just tried to start playing in Ireland, also nicknamed “Tutorial Island” by the players due to how easy it is to start there. :p It is just that was the only place I usually got anything done to my satisfaction as my attempts to play in other locations or other cultures (like the vikings, muslim or republics) didn’t work out so well. So, Ireland was a safe, known place. And I thought if I mastered it enough, if I was start there and expand from it to conquer to other places I might have a chance later on with different scenarios.
Well, that never really happened. But in one of those whims of what to play, I decided to play Crusaders Kings 2 and this time try something different. Instead of starting off as one of the counties that would one day form Ireland, I decided to start as a Duke in Italy in Early Medieval Ages. This was the time of Charlemagne, before Italy was the way we know of it today and it was called Lambard.
My plan was relatively simple: I was going to start as a Duke, try to get as much control over the adjacent counties until I had an army strong enough where I could just demand to be nominated King of Italy, perhaps even expanding from there to conquer other countries.
I decided to start as a duke in Pisa. This decision was based on no other reason that I liked the name of the place. Plus for some unbeknownst reason I thought it would be a good launch place to attack one of the arabian nations across the ocean if I felt crazy enough. :p
Seems like the fashionable thing to do in the blogosphere right now is to make a list of planned games to play in 2016. Although I am not fashionable by any meaning of the word I still thought it might be fun to do. :p
Anyhoo, like any kind of list like this there is no absolute guarantee I will follow it. But these are definitely the games that have been in my mind lately therefore making them the most likely for me to play next year, even if it is just in the first few months of the year.
MMOs
I haven’t played any MMO for months. I just haven’t been in the right mood for them. This is also unlikely to change in the following months. Still there has been a few that have been swimming in my head in case my mood changes.
Final Fantasy XIV – At the time of Final Fantasy XIV relaunch I found it just wasn’t for me. To be fair, it isn’t like they lied or anything. A Realm Reborn was exactly what they were promising for months when the whole thing was announced. It just wasn’t the kind of game I wanted to play back then. Still I have a lot of respect for them for being honest and communicative about what they were playing. Plus it was exactly what the game needed, not to mention much better than it was before. Again, it was just a case of not being my type of cup of tea back then.
And despite all that I still miss the game world. There was a certain beauty and artistry to it that few other MMOs have managed to rival. So it makes me wonder if it isn’t worth just dealing with the parts that I don’t like much to partake in the parts that I do like.
Guild Wars 2 – My relationship with Guild Wars 2 has been complicated. I never really disliked it but I stopped playing for various reasons, part of them being a depression I was going through and my friends disliking the game and leaving it. So much time passed, so many changes went by that I just found hard to come back. But recently I have been reading “Sea of Sorrows” a novel based on the game that tells the period when Orr rose from the bottom of the ocean and Lion’s Arch turned into the place that it is today. This novel has been making me really miss my charr, my asura and other characters. So I think it is about time to leave behind all the complicated emotions I got associated with the game and move on with it.
The Repopulation – This is a game that I got more because my friends are interested into it. But there are some interesting features about it plus it is a Sci-Fi game. I am all for playing games just to check what kind of interesting, unique features they have. The fact it is also a Sci-Fi game might be a good change of pace from all the fantasy games I have been consuming the last years too.
Single Player Games
There aren’t that many games I am looking forward in the 2016 but these are all games I am drool just thinking about them.
XCom 2 – When the first XCom was announced I was apprehensive. There had been so many shallow and soulless remakes of classic games. I was afraid XCom would just be another one of those. Nothing could be further from that. XCom turned out to be able to keep the spirit of the original game as well as being its own thing. And with XCom 2 it seems they are taking all the good parts of the first one, adding a bunch of new cool stuff and making it much bigger and better. I also like that the sequel goes from the premise that we lost in the first game, the aliens conquered Earth and now we are rebels that have to take it back. The only thing I find funny is that for some reason the XCom organization wants the same leader who lost everything to begin with to come back to lead them. I mean, doing such a terrible job does not lead much faith that this time things will be different. :p
In any case, this is the game I am most looking forward to in 2016. 🙂
Deus Ex: Manking Divided – I loved Deux Ex: Human Revolution. It was a pretty fun shooter/stealthy game with a decent story and good characters. There were some parts the story just didn’t work out so well for me and the required boss fights were silly. But at least in the latter they seem to have learned their lesson and there will have a lot more freedom on how to deal with bosses in the second game. As for story… I am not sure I buy the premise of it but at I am willing to see where it goes before judging it.
Dinivity: Original Sin 2 – I kickstarted the first Divinity: Original Sin by a recommendation of a friend and because I liked what the developers said in their campaign and in interviews. Turns out this was a pretty good investment since the game was one of the best RPGs I played in quite a while. So when they launched a Kickstarter campaign for the sequel I backed it up without a second thought. The day this game will be released can’t come fast enough! In the mean time I will just have to content myself with playing the Enhanced Edition of the first one and following every update of the development of the second one!
The Backlog
My crusade against my backlog of games may never end but there are a few I really want to get out of the way as soon as possible.
Dragon Age: Inquisition – When this one was released I was feeling a big fatigue of Bioware games, to the point I wasn’t even sure if their games were the kind I enjoyed anymore. So I decided to sit this one out, see what other people thought about it and if it turned out I liked what I heard then I would buy it whenever it had an Ultimate/Game of the Year/Super-Uber-Duper-Really-Complete Edition of the game AND it had a nice enough discount. Well, that happened and I Intent to play it… as soon as I recreate my first (and cannonical in my head) character for Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age 2 since I lost those saves and I want to see what kind of impact their actions had for the third game. Yes, I know I could just use the Tapestry to set the major decisions but it is not the same thing. :p
Fallout 4 – Kind of in the same boat as Dragon Age: Inquisition. The difference being that I hated Oblivion and Fallout 3 to the point that Bethesda dropped of my list of “Developers That Makes Games I Enjoy”. Skyrim helped to regain my trust in them somewhat but I was still skeptical about Fallout 4. Even more so when they announced that the player character would be voice acted. Considering how Bethesda’s dialogue goes it just didn’t inspire me with much confidence. Still, from what I hear they did quite a few things right with Fallout 4 so I am going to do the same thing I did with Dragon Age: Inquisition: wait for a definitive edition, that contains the base game and all DLCs, to be released, wait for that to go on sale and just then buy it. The only annoying thing is to avoid all interesting discussions about the game until then. :p
Pillars of Eternity – I tried to begin playing this game a couple of times. Although I loved what little I saw of the story and characters I just had trouble with the “Real Time With Pause” combat. You see, I hate “Real Time With Pause” combat. It isn’t as good as actual real time combat, much less Turn Based combat. It is the main reason I was never able to get into the Baldur’s Gate games (don’t ask me how I got into Icewind Dale back in the days. I have no idea). Still, I think this is one of the cases where it is worth just sucking up the bad parts because the good parts are so good that you will be remembering them for years.
The Witcher – No, I am not forgetting a number in there. It is the actual first Witcher game. You see, I really want to play the Witcher 3. But before that I want to play the first and second Witcher games. And my problem with the first Witcher game is that the combat mechanics are just clunky. I can see what they were trying and there were some good ideas in there. It is just the implementation is just not that good in my opinion. Still the story seems good, some of the characters are interesting and if Witcher 3 turns out to be just as 10% good of everything I hear then it will be more than worth to deal with any terrible mechanics its predecessors may have.
I think those are the major games that I want to play next year. There are a few others of course, but I don’t have as much strong feelings about those games as these ones. And to end this off, I wish everyone a Merry Christmas, a happy New Year and all the best in these holidays! 🙂
Well, since I am addicted to Dark Souls right now and not really playing anything else, I thought I might as well make a post with some of the Dark Souls videos I’ve been watching.
This is the Let’s Play that got me quasi-obsessed with Dark Souls until I actually bought it in the latest Humble Bundle. Despite the name, and being a newbie at the game, Dan is pretty good at it. Or at least he is better than me since I died far more times than he did. :p
The series, as you can guess, has Dan, who is an animator in the game industry, playing the game. Serving as a sort of advisor is James, who is a designer in the game industry, and who already played the game to completion. Both of them discuss the game’s design as Dan progresses through the game. If you are an armchair game designer like me there is a lot of interesting game design discussion here. Right now it is incomplete and in an hiatus while they produce more episodes. Still, pretty interesting to watch if you like watching newbies trying to learn a game as they play it AND game design discussion in one show!
If that is not your cup of you tea but you do love discussion about game design then you might enjoy their main show, Extra Credits. That one is all about game design discussion.
Another Let’s Play, this one is more of a walkthrough with some tips and lore discussion. Obviously it is played by a very experienced player. But what I find fascinating it, besides his player skills which made it fascinating to watch (at least for a noobie like me), is the lore discussion. As he goes through the game he talks about what the description of items he finds means, what NPCs are probably talking about, the themes of the game and so on. Describing it sounds boring but the way he talks about this stuff is very, very interesting if you like the game.
I also find it fascinating how our playstyles are so very different. Yes, there is the obvious huge gap in game skill and knowledge about the game between us. But I also think it is due to the different choices and preferences in the way we play our characters. I end up making a knight, which starting out is a class that is pretty slow to move around due to the gear and initial stats but they can block a lot of enemies attacks without losing any HP. While he made a warrior that although isn’t the fastest starting class in the game isn’t nearly as slow as the knight. He also doesn’t use the shield much, and has been gearing and leveling his character to make sure he can move fast, preferring to dodge enemy attacks than block it. While I have been keeping my character pretty much a turtle, slow but steady and very well protected.
Another interesting thing is he hasn’t been following the most obvious path through the game. Part of the reason is to make some detours to get some loot, the other is so he can trigger some dialogues that people might not have seem and can lead to interesting discussion about the game’s lore.
This is also incomplete as of this writing but I think it is updated about every two days.
This is a series that was recommended by the guys in the Side Quest Let’s Play. Basically, it discuss the story and lore of Dark Souls through a focus on its main NPCs that you end up finding through the game. I admit I have watched almost nothing of it because I want to keep myself as spoiler free as possible. I did watch his series about the Demon’s Souls Lore though since it is a game I am unlikely to ever play (unless a Playstation 3 and a copy of the game somehow ends up in my hands) and they are pretty interesting. He also makes a pretty good case of the reasons for Dark Souls being the way it is in Dark Souls: Why it’s Different.
This video is a discussion about Dark Souls design, why it is like that, what makes it tick and its themes. If you like that some intelligent and interesting discussion about games in general give a look at the rest of his channel too!
This one is a parody of Dark Souls, where a guy goes from complete newbie to someone who finished the game. It is pretty funny but be warned it does contain spoilers about the game’s story.
Usually I avoid doing reviews. Not because I hate them simply because I feel like there are other people who are much better at it than I am and I rather not parrot what they say. But then there are those moments where a game resonates with me so strongly in some way that I just feel like praising it to everyone I meet. Unfortunately just saying “Play this game! It is awesome!” is a very poor way to get people interested in said games. Therefore I find myself trying my hand at something resembling a review. This is one such an occasion.
