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May 22nd, 2022 at 17:32:47 - Amnesia: Rebirth (PC) |
I've sat down to play this a few times. I almost quit after the first time though! I was getting super frustrated going around in circles in the dark trying to figure out a puzzle. There is a room with a radio, but there's no obvious way inside. On the second floor of the building, there is a weak floor (you know this because your character, Tasi, comments on it and says if it collapses, that would be a quick way down to the radio room). Well, I found a huge, heavy barrel and rolled it to the weak floor. Nothing. I jumped up and down. Nothing. I wandered round and round in the dark, my eyes getting more and more tired. I wasn't scared. I hadn't been scared the whole game. It was just dark and I used all my matches and I couldn't make this stupid floor break.
So I looked it up online. You have to roll a cannon onto the floor. There is a cannon nearby, but it's on a concrete block and missing two wheels. I didn't think I could move the cannon because it was on a concrete block and I couldn't remove the concrete block. But, I learned you have to find two wheels and put those on first. Putting wheels on the cannon makes it so you can move the concrete block. (You can't move the concrete block from under the cannon, but you can somehow lift the cannon enough to fit wheels on. Okay.) This is how I learned that Amnesia: Rebirth uses physics puzzles and that (as usual) I need to be more patient!
I wanted to quit out of spite. "Pshh, this isn't as scary as The Dark Descent." But I decided not to be petty and forge ahead. Good decision, I think. The story is intriguing, even if the gameplay is a bit bland. You play as Tasi, a pregnant woman who is part of an expedition to the Algerian desert. The plane goes down and the rest of your expedition is missing when you wake up in the wreckage. The game is very much a "walking simulator." You'll read a lot of notes and solve some (so far) easy puzzles. The most challenging thing is navigating in the dark, but when you are in pitch black and becoming afraid, the environment turns this grey-blue color so you can see a little bit. Without light (matches, with which you can light candles and things in the environment, and your lantern, which requires fuel), you will miss interactable objects that you need. So what I usually do is try to navigate my way around in the grey-blue, and if I get stuck, I start lighting candles to see if I missed anything. It's methodical and kind of fun to know that I'm progressing mostly in the dark.
The intrigue is that, it being the desert, and there being a Muslim influence in Northern Africa, there are djinns, spirits in the desert. An older civilization buried under the rocks and sands maybe worshipped one of them, or some goddess. They could travel back and forth between two planes of existence, and Tasi can too when she finds herself in possession of a mysterious amulet. So, as you journey beneath the desert on the trail of your expedition comrades, you also journey back and forth through these planes, following a spirit (and avoiding ghuls and whatever other nasties are out there). The stakes aren't high though. You can't die. You "respawn" feet from where you "died" and it's like nothing happened. So hiding from the ghuls, taking care not to jump from a ledge, none of it matters.
Once I learned the appropriate frame for the game, I began to enjoy it. I now see it as a story game more than a horror game, and that's fine. My expectations were off. But now I'm looking forward to unraveling this mystery and finding out why Tasi is maybe both alive and dead, and what's up with her fetus. I feel like they're going to throw some weird curveball at me!
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May 14th, 2022 at 17:36:39 - Battletech (PC) |
I dug into this for a few days about 6 weeks ago, and haven't had time to play a damn thing since then. I immediately was attracted to Battletech's aesthetic because Harebrained Schemes' Shadowrun: Dragonfall had great art design, characters, and story. Battletech is similarly authentic to its universe, highly detailed. Thus I had high hopes for story and character development. Buuut, the draw here is definitely the mech combat, whereas combat in Shadowrun was the weak part. Buuut again, that doesn't mean that combat is strong in Battletech. After about 10 hours, the game is leaving no mark on me, not in story or gameplay. Even though I haven't been able to play games in the last 6 weeks, I haven't WANTED to play this. I finally did today, my first chance to spend a couple hours playing something in forever, and I was bored bored bored.
There are well documented camera issues, complaints about the slow pace of combat, and various other things. These pretty much all bothered me to some degree, but I think the main thing is just being overwhelmed by so much information. There is a lot to learn. I tend not to mind this in settings in which I am highly literate (e.g., fantasy), but when it comes to military or mech type settings, I get exhausted learning what different types of guns, ammunition, mechs, tanks, and so on do. How is the MG194 different than the SMF837? Well, the MG194 uses G-02 rounds while the SMF837 uses BF-9x rounds, but only if it's the auto version; otherwise, use the JD-8b rounds for mid-range. My brain reads military weaponry speak as nonsense. I understand this is a personal problem, but I need to be sucked in to a game like this to do the work to make sense of it. Battletech didn't suck me in and didn't stick in my brain. And, knowing that the main campaign takes upwards of 50 hours, I'm tapping out now.
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Mar 29th, 2022 at 19:03:43 - The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (WiiU) |
According to GameLog, I started this in November 2020. That puts me just a little past time to make an entry...I haven't been playing that whole time, but I am in the middle of a burst of Zelda energy now. I have no idea how long I've been playing, but I have cleansed three of the Divine Beasts and am approaching the fourth one. After that, I don't know what happens. Can I go to Hyrule Castle, defeat Ganon, and end the game?
Why have I been playing this so long, anyway? Well, I've gone through hot and cold periods with it. It is a game that requires patience, and I'm not always a patient player, given that I often have no or little time to play and given that I always have so many games backlogged. When I'm not feeling patient, the game can frustrate me. But when I'm in a good frame of mine for it, playing BoTW is extremely relaxing, and I'll get lost in it. This tension itself between wanting to blow through a game and wanting to be patient and explore all it has to offer can be frustrating, too. The reason I'm feeling the tension so strongly with BoTW is because it is a phenomenal game, but also a phenomenally long, detailed game! I want to see everything but I also just want to get it done and move on!
BoTW has a huge map. Hyrule is teeming with secrets, characters, dungeons, monsters, items, and activities. You can spend time searching for and clearing the shrines, which are thoughtful puzzles or combat challenges. I've recently been hunting these down, especially the secret ones, which you find by solving riddles and following clues. Some puzzle shrines are head-scratchers, while others are elementary. This morning, I found a puzzle shrine that took me about 30 seconds to complete. I've never been in and out of one so quickly. Alternatively, the other day I found a combat shrine that took me at least half an hour to finally kill the tough Guardian inside. Your reward for completing shrines is an orb. Collect enough and you can make an offering of them to get extra health and stamina.
You could also spend time seeking Koroks, cute leafy creatures hiding around the world. If you notice something amiss--a stone circle with one stone out of place; an odd assortment of flowers in the wild; a pattern with one part slightly off--then figure out a way to "solve" whatever it is. I have found maybe 12 Koroks, but recently read that there are NINE HUNDRED of them. Finding them allows you to unlock inventory slots, which is useful because since your weapons, bows, and shields break with use, you always want a lot of backups, and different types of weapons are handy to have in stock for different situations.
You could spend your time learning cooking recipes, training your horse, completing side quests from NPCs, exploring nooks and crannies of the map, following up on rumors, finding and killing unique monsters, searching for the settings of Link's photo album, trying to glide as far as you can, buy a house, etc., etc., etc. My next step is to cleanse the final Divine Beast. Then, I would like to take my time and explore more of Hyrule (two entire regions are still undiscovered), try to solve some of the hidden shrines, complete some challenging side quests, and really enjoy more of this open world. I'll come back later and write about cooking and climbing (you can climb literally anywhere and it is awesome) and combat and whatever else is on my mind then!
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Mar 29th, 2022 at 18:23:50 - 7 Billion Humans (PC) |
It appears that the devs behind World of Goo and Little Inferno puzzle games have moved toward programming puzzles! This was a surprise for my non-programmer self. I've tried plenty of games that benefit from programming knowledge (e.g., the Zachtronics catalog) and typically enjoy them until they get beyond me. 7 Billion Humans was no different. You are presented with puzzles and commands in a programming language. In each puzzle, you have to make workers perform mundane office tasks (arranging data in specific order, shredding documents, etc.). Well, sort of mundane. You see, the world is controlled by robot overlords and they are training humans (you) to become self-sufficient and manage themselves to solve problems. The mundane tasks you program workers to complete are actually having big impact: solving climate change, growing enough food for everyone on the planet, providing free public transit, and so on. The game has the critical humor I expected, at least.
Puzzles begin easily enough. You might be asked to make workers to pick up a datacube in front of them and then drop it in their original location. That would require commands: step (forward) --> pick up (datacube) --> step (backward) --> drop. These get increasingly complex, of course, and I gave up about halfway through, on level 31 or something, when I had to make workers pick up documents from a printer and arrange the documents in a checkerboard pattern, while not falling through several holes in the floor. This used various commands, including takeFrom (printer) to get the document, "if" commands with directions to guide their walking so they don't fall into holes, the "nearest" command to make sure they are going to the printer to get documents and not picking them up off the ground, "memory" commands so they remember where the nearest printer is, and so on. I couldn't figure it out and looked on YouTube. Once I saw how unlikely it was that I would have figured out that solution, I looked at some of the next solutions too. All brutally difficult for me! I realized that this was my wall and bowed out. Later levels have you writing memory (instead of just remembering something that already exists), performing arithmetic on datacube values, and actually programming communication between workers to synchronize their actions.
So, I'm glad I stopped, but glad I tried it out. Many of the puzzles I did solve made me feel very clever indeed.
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