 |
|
Crime O'Clock (NSW) by jp (Oct 22nd, 2026 at 08:43:00) |
I'm putting this back no the shelf now - mostly because I started to get a little tired of it. As I think about it, it's abit of a tricky design space and I can see how the design team was trying to keep things fresh and mix things up. They've added a little mechanic where you can tap on some objects that get highlighted to see what's inside. THere's also a "follow the musical pattern" in which you click on things on the map in the right order...following a musical script.
It's all "ok" - not particularly compelling, but I've started to get tired because the also isn't much I find interesting in the story. Each mission feels like "oh, here's a thing that happened, let's fix it" but the characters and the world aren't that compelling, and while there are neat things in the images - they're not really woven into the storytelling. So, I don't feel like I'm learning cool things about this weird/interesting world from the missions themselves - at most I pick things up from the artwork. It's a weird "miss" - because the artwork is super fun and neat to explore, there's cool details and characters - but it falls flat after that.
Also, playing on the Switch is more annoying than it should - I feel the controls are really imprecise - I need to move the cursor to a specific location and I overshoot/undershoot tweak and adjust and it's just...annoying.
read all entries for this GameLog 
- add a comment 
|
|
Kill Knight (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:28:37) |
Retiring this one too. It's a twin-stick shooter / bullet hell type of thing mixed with modern Doom. Slick, for sure, but I didn't know it would be so arcade-y. There's not much story to speak of, and it's basically a test of mastering the controls to beat, with additional motivation provided by leaderboards. It is fun, intense, for sure, but as with Civ 6 and Noita (although Kill Knight isn't long per se), I don't have the patience right now to commit to it. I might be at a point where I'm exhausted by more open-ended or twitch-based games. I could feel it with Drop Duchy (roguelite fatigue?), which I saw through to the end, but perhaps I should find something more story-heavy with a clearly defined ending for next.
Anyway, like I said, Kill Knight is slick. The controls gel really well. You use RT to shoot pistols, circle to melee attack, and LT to shoot like a shotgun spread. All the attacks synergize in different ways. You have to use melee to get shotgun ammo, for example, which incentivizes running up and slicing enemies. Each attack generates some kind of resource that you need for other attacks (or health, very important!), so you have to vary attacks. It really does feel like a twin stick shooter / bullet hell version of the newer Doom games. I think that's about it...
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Noita (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 18th, 2026 at 15:12:28) |
My first thought was "this is like Spelunky." And of course it is because it's another roguelike where you go down, down, down into the depths, and the only way you get better is to die a hundred times, learn what killed you and why, and just skill up. Also learning the wand system, which is one of the two things that make this stand apart. The other is the pixelated destructible environments.
There are huuuuuundreds of enemies, spells, and perks. I saw like 5% of stuff and made it to the third "biome" a few times. In my longer runs, I had cool wands and spells, like spells that made my projectiles home or explode or that covered a wide range. The way it works is that each wand you find has stats (which seem to just randomly vary), including some number of spell slots. You can find/purchase spells, and you can move them around between wands. This means you can load up your favorite wand with a variety of useful/synergistic spells that'll help you kill enemies, move around, and explore the biomes. Perks are also helpful, like ones that make you immune to certain elements or that give you a little ghost companion to augment your damage output.
The destructible environments are cool. Each pixel is categorized as a type of material (e.g., wood, water, coal, gunpowder...), and they have various interactions. Wood burns, for example, so if you shoot a lantern and it falls on wood, it'll light up and maybe collapse. If you're on fire, go find water to put yourself out. I don't know what "blood" does, but I saw that it ticks up to 100% as you stand in it. Acid poisons you. Occasionally stuff blew up and I wasn't sure why. I'm sure there are a lot more interactions. It reminded me of Divinity: Original Sin 2's elemental combat system.
Anyway, so what this looks like while playing is that you're zooming around (you have a jetpack and can float a bit; this replaces a typical game's jump), firing spells and getting fired at by enemies, blowing up the environment, trying to get gold (to purchase wands and spells), find secrets, do whatever, and ultimately get to the bottom of the biome, where you enter a portal and can buy upgrades and rearrange your spells, and then you go to the next biome. There is often a lot of fire/poison/projectiles/etc. on screen at once and it can feel pretty hectic.
I certainly appreciate the game and the ways that it makes something like Spelunky 2 feel traditional. There's a ton of customization with the wands, strategy in manipulating the environment, and so many things to discover. But having recently bashed my head against the Spelunky 2 roguelike wall for a while, I realize I have little interest in a similar head-bashing-against-the-wall experience playing Noita.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 17:37:02) |
Ugh. I'm not sure I want to continue playing. We'll see.
I've hit level 7 and I would say that the experience so far is really mixed. The game seems to want to encourage scavenging all the things. But, you hit a weight limit super fast - and it becomes really annoying to manage that, especially since you can't fast travel when you're encumbered. So, why bother?
I've also picked up all kinds of things that...I can't do anything with? Tings have "value" but I've yet to run into a store or any place where I can sell. So far everything has involved killing all the raiders/enemies - and the towns I've been setting up/helping out (two so far) don't have shops. Though I think I can build one if I get the materials? (something to try out the next time I play).
I also nearly worked myself into an unrecoverable position - I left a car manufacturing plant (running away from enemies) only to load immediately into 4 enemies right there. I don't know how I was able to survive them - a lot of luck I think, and more than a few tries. But it was really bad. I might have quit there if a few more tries hadn't worked out...
Also, so far at least, there's surprisingly little in the way of story/narrative. I'm surprised because it's a Bethesda game - so I was expecting a lot more.
I'm ignoring the wonky glitches and weird graphical things because that would be a bit unfair at this point (old game and all that, and I don't think it downloaded an update because I think the game's content servers are offline by now?)
Anyways, we'll see how much further I go...
Oh! The other thing that's really annoying is how hard/rare it is to find the item that decontaminates you such that you can heal back up. Every rad lowers your max health, but getting rid of rad has been SUPER hard/rare. Most of my time I'm running around with 1/2 health just because of the rad capping it.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Shroom and Gloom (PC) by jp (Oct 17th, 2026 at 17:02:29) |
I played this enough to complete a full run with the starter character (this unlocked new characters - but I haven't gone back to play since). And WOW, the final boss fight was super stressful and cool. I'm feeling kind of lucky that I beat it on my first try actually. First try at the boss, not first run. I might have been 3 or four runs before I got that far...
..it's an interesting game! There's a new element in the "safe areas" where you also have a (separate) deck of cards that lets you do things in the safe areas - find new cards, upgrade stuff, and that sort of thing. When you get new cards they can either be for the combat part of the game or for the safe zones, and there's some neat interactions there. Interestingly, when you rest at a safe zone it can have negative consequences - but you only want to do it to draw a new hand of safe zone cards. I'm not sure I entirely understood how everything here worked - lots of card play reduces the "danger rating", but I don't know if it matters at all other than resting there. As in, does leaving a safe zone with a high danger rating mean harder combat later? A less safe state for the next safe zone? All of this I couldn't figure out from what I've played so far.
There was some stuff I thought was a bit unfair - there are some things in the safe zone that you can play a card to unlock, but some require multiple cards - and more than once I left a safe zone without having unlocked the thing. It felt like I had wasted those cards on a thing I didn't know I couldn't unlock - and as far as I could tell, the progress towards unlocking is reset when you leave.
Visually, the game is so cool - it's like a slicker version of Inscryption.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
|
|
|
GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
[latest site fixes and updates]
[read more]
|
view feed xml
|
 |
|
2323 registered gamers and 3392 games. 7932 GameLogs with 13447 journal entries. 5111 games are currently being played.
More stats
|
 |
|
Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC) by dkirschner |
| Very similar to other MMOs so far, nothing really different. AAA production though. --------- Yep, basically the same synopsis at the end. |
|
most recent entry: Friday 31 May, 2013
|
As promised, the second half of my Star Wars thoughts as I leveled up to 17, started a Sith Inquisitor, and saw more of the galaxy…
A few big things happen at level 10. You can queue for the game’s PvP “warzones,” PvE “flashpoints,” and you leave the newbie planet and go to a hub world (Coruscant for my Jedi). I’ve learned that each planet in the galaxy is a “zone.” The story mission leads you from planet to planet, and there appears to be one planet for each level bracket. So planet A is levels 1-10, B is 10-15, C is 15-20, and so on. I wasn’t too excited about having only one option of where to go at any given moment, but more on that later. Let’s talk about the hub world Coruscant for now. I had thought that Coruscant would be like the hub cities I was familiar with in RPG games. They’re mostly just the city, with a lot of vendors and trainers and some quests. Hub worlds here are more than cities. They are full zones. I always like hubs in games because it’s a break from the monotony of questing to explore and just see what all you can do. But this one, all the vendors and things to do were crammed into one little corridor of the zone, the majority of which were skill trainers for your ‘crew skills’ (archaeology, treasure hunting, armorsmithing and so on). The scale of the city itself was awesome, as are the rest of the zones I visited. But there is NOTHING THERE. NPCs stand around together not doing anything and…that’s mostly it. It’s that issue where it appears populated and lived in, but after being there a while you realize you’re the only thing acting. So anyway, I found an auction house and listed some items (even sold a few!), tons of vendors selling stuff that no one except high level players would care about, and the like 20 crew skill trainers. Otherwise all the big open spaces and pretty architecture is just to run through, point A to B, point B to C, point C to A, back and forth back and forth, playing the typical MMOG quest courier.
Not knowing what else to do, I did most of the quests in Coruscant, and near the end decided I was going to focus on my Jedi story missions only. Turns out that if you focus only on story missions and neglect other quests (I did do the ones that were directly on my way to story missions), you start lagging a bit in level. So by the time I quit at 17, on the next planet, I was fighting level 18-19 enemies, which was starting to be a little tougher. It turns out that the life of a Jedi is completing trivial tasks for an endless number of people who need your help. Through at least level 10, this was all fine, new and exciting being in the Star Wars universe, and the full voice acting was mesmerizing. It is still cool for sure, but there are serious drawbacks to the full voice acting. The game moves slowly. If you listen to the quests, then it’s taking you like 5 times longer than other MMOGs to receive and turn them in than if you just read/skimmed them. Since that is the quest difference between SW and other MMOGs, I want to experience it. But it does drag the game’s pace. Then especially when you realize that so many of the quests are dull errands to keep doing the same tasks for NPCs, it loses its luster.
I switched to a Sith character at one point to see if maybe the Jedi was just getting a bit dull. With the Sith, I decided to be only a jerk, thinking that the Sith would react. Turns out it’s the same as the Jedi there, and it was not how I imagined it should be. In the conversation wheel, I’d select only the smart-ass things, talking back to Sith masters and all that, and they just get pissed for one line of dialogue, and then continue on asking your help for something. No, I am a Sith and you are a Sith NPC. We should all be power-mad and vicious to one another. You should not let a mere slave talk trash to you, master Sith NPC, sir. So being a Sith was amusing for a few levels, then it just was silly that I could be an ass to such people without consequence.
Anyway, so at level 10 I immediately queued for a PvE flashpoint. This has the same issue, at first glance, as the planet level ranges. There was only one flashpoint I was eligible for at any given time, meaning if I wanted to do flashpoints, I would be doing the same one over and over until I leveled out of it. I ended up playing two, and they were very different. The first one, I would not have a problem playing over and over, and in fact I tried but the queue times for the random groups were up to 90 minutes. The second one was a completely straightforward MMOG dungeon. Back to the first one, the conversation wheel works in groups and it is brilliant. There are 4 people in a full group, and when you get in a conversation with an NPC, each player chooses a response from the conversation wheel and gets a die roll to determine whose choice is the one that impacts the progression of the flashpoint. In this first flashpoint, there were like 30 conversation decisions. Everyone gets their lines heard at some point, and it is really really cool to be like, oh hey, this happened because I chose it!
Example: This first flashpoint takes place aboard a ship. As I recall, it was being invaded by some Imperial forces that we have to run around stopping. There was some espionage and some backstabbing within the Republic crew, and it was very twisty-turny regarding the story. The whole thing really was a new experience for me and I thought it was fantastic. So anyway, at one point we run out into the engineering room of the ship and there is part of our engineering crew who has gotten locked in an airlock when something or other went down. If I recall correctly, we could either keep them in there and try to rescue them later, or vent them into space. I remember laughing at the vent into space option and I selected it. Then I watched as my die roll won, and my character said, “We’re going to vent you into space,” and then the cut scene played of me hitting the airlock button and all the crew ejected to their deaths. I was like “Whoa.” Then I felt bad and got 100 dark side points. Point being, we could have saved them and something different would have happened later I think. At another point, some other NPC called us out for venting the engineering crew into space. You can also choose to rescue some story NPC or ditch her and leave her behind. We rescued her, but I wonder what happens if you ditch her since she is a main story NPC in the flashpoint. I read that some of these decisions change boss battles, where you go, who you fight, rewards you get and so on. Worth playing again if it’s interesting, right? Unfortunately though, and mind-bogglingly for me, that second flashpoint I played had like 2 conversations and was just so cookie cutter. I don’t know why it didn’t pull all the cool tricks that the first one did.
At level 10, you can also begin doing PvP warzones. I queued for one of these instantly and thought I was going to be squashed because I was in a group with level 20-somethings. I was getting squashed a little bit just for being new, but I realized at some point later that the warzones normalize player level. Everyone’s health and stats become normal for a level 55 character! Equal playing field, yay. Although I think that equipment is not equal, that if you have better equipment on, you are stronger. Not sure on that, but seems like if it did normalize equipment too then there would be no point for PvP equipment, which does exist. There are 5 or so PvP maps, which are neat, standard PvP modes. I couldn’t select a specific map, so it randomly tossed me in a few over the course of my time. One was a ‘capture and hold the locations’ kind of thing, where the locations were turrets that shot down an enemy ship. If your team held more bigger turrets longer, you’d shoot the enemy ship down first and win. Another mode was the typical attacker/defender thing. Team 1 attacks and gets as far as they can, then when time runs out the teams switch and Team 2 attacks and tries to get farther than Team 1 did. Then there was one more I played but I honestly can’t remember what it was. PvP was fast and fun, especially when I was doing it at the end around level 17 and had learned more (PvP) skills and how to fight better. The last one I did I was actually barely second on the damage charts, which made me feel good.
After level 10, the next big thing is just following your story mission around until you get your own spaceship. I was really anticipating this because I thought it might mean I could explore the galaxy on my own and go wherever I wanted. I didn’t know what all I’d be able to do, what story lines I could discover. It happened after completing the Jedi story on Coruscant, when I was level 15. My own ship with my own crew being the three companions I now had acquired. I stepped inside and…my expectations were immediately dashed a bit. You see, I was imagining Commander Shepherd’s Normandy in Mass Effect. This is not the Normandy. It’s a tiny ship with three crew members, none of whom talk to you unless it’s story-based, one storage locker, a holodeck that is also only for missions, another space battle mission-dispensing machine, and a map. Ok, I thought, still plenty of new things to do, right?!
Let’s try space battles. Ok, I can accept space battle missions from the computer and then click on the galaxy map, find the space battle icons, and travel there. Ok, first space battle. O…Ok, I can’t control the ship. All I can do is shoot lasers or shoot from my stock of 20 missiles. Ok, so I’m on a rail and I just need to shoot anything that moves for 5 minutes. O…ok, this doesn’t seem exciting at all. Yeah, yep, ok I’m just playing a shooting gallery for 5 minutes. Ok, first mission success. Maybe the others will be different. [Tried two more missions.] WELL, all the space battles are apparently 5-minute long shooting galleries, the exact same thing. How freaking lame! And you get yet another type of currency as rewards, presumably to get better parts for your ship(s) to do more difficult shooting galleries. Let’s try something else…
Oh, I know, I’ll explore the galaxy now that I have a ship! I’ll just look at the map here. Neat, there are a lot of planets, but most of them are too high a level. Hey let’s see if I can travel to Illum, a level 50 planet, or if the game stops me. Oh awesome, I can go! I can go anywhere!
I explored Ilum for a few minutes, wandered outside through the safe Republic base camp, wondered at the snowy and jagged planet, was attacked by level 50 creatures who amazingly did not kill me before I ran back to safety, and left. I really liked being able to go to Ilum, and figured if I could go there I could go anywhere. I knew I was approaching the end of my play because the whole boring questing thing had gotten to me already, and I wanted to see what all the different planets looked like, because as I have said, the game is beautiful and the scale of some of these environments is massive. So I went to leave Ilum and fly somewhere else only to see “Not enough credits” on my screen. What? Then I saw how much I had paid to fly to Ilum. ALL MY MONEY save about 20 credits. DOH! I couldn’t believe that I’d had exactly enough money to get there and accidentally stranded myself! The only planet I could afford to fly to was back to my Jedi starting world. I could have gone back and sold some things out of my storage to make enough money to fly somewhere else, but then I would have had to just stay there and do the quests and missions because I had no money to leave. So the real lesson here is that you can technically go wherever you want, but at level 17 it costs you a lot of money to get to places that are for higher levels. So though you can go…you can’t go. Or you can go, but you can’t return…easily.
And that is Star Wars: The Old Republic as far as I will go with it. Broke and nearly stranded in a level 50 zone. Sad Jedi.
[read this GameLog]
|
|
|
