What I like about Helldivers 2

Full disclosure, I’ve only played about 3 hours of Helldivers 2 so far, but I’ve really liked what I’ve played and I am constantly feeling the pull to go back to it. So here are some thoughts about why I think that is. First of all, the moment-to-moment running around and shooting robots/bugs/etc is good. The weapons feel powerful, the enemies react how you want them to with broken limbs and guts/wires flying everywhere. Being 1 (of up to 4) people against swarms of bad guys that are bigger and scarier than you is fun. Hearing the propaganda messages between messages and your soldier shouting about freedom and democracy every time they kill a bug or throw a grenade has not gotten old yet.

But what stands out in Helldiver 2 is the Galactic War, a galaxy spanning meta game that reflects the state of the war between Super Earth and their various enemy factions. Not only does the galactic war allow the player to experience the changing narrative of the game, recently players had to go to a specific planet to save factories in order to unlock big mech suits in the game. But it also just allows players to pick what they want to do, at any given time there are 10-20 different planets available to choose missions from, the different planets have different enemies, different environmental states, and potentially even different mission types. If a player doesn’t care about saving the mech factories they still have a bunch of other missions they can do, all of which help change the state of the war.

I have always been a fan of feeling like a part of a large group of people working together towards shared goals, but videogames have rarely captured this feeling for me. Fantasies like being on a big sailing ship, pulling one rope while dozens of other crew members do their jobs all for the goal of moving this big ship with one common purpose. When I was a kid I always thought about how every time I threw a rock in the ocean it was raising the water all across the world by a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of an inch. Maybe this makes me a commie but I’ve always been drawn towards the fantasy of being a small individual contributing anything towards a larger goal. While Helldivers' version of that places you as a completely faceless replaceable cog in a fascist war machine the feeling of every mission I complete contributing to a shared goal still feels good.

Games have always included cooperation, but games like Sea Of Theives can put a lot of pressure to make sure that everybody is pulling their weight or else nobody has fun. Helldivers has allowed me, so far, to be able to play basically solo. I’ve grouped up with random players, and played low difficulty missions solo. All of which has felt very low pressure as far as ruining other players’ time. Even if I fail a mission solo somehow the amount it sets b

Games of the Year 2020

Here are my favorite 5 games this year, some honorable mentions are:

Animal Crossing New Horizon - I just completely fell off this game after the first month or 2, and have not felt the urge to go back

Among Us - I only played it a few times this year, but I had a great time each time. Very exciting to see games from small teams blow up like Among Us and Fall Guys did this year.

Spiritfarer - Only barely got bumped off the list, a really great game that I put a lot of time into this year.

5. Yakuza Kiwami 1 and 2 - These are remakes from at least 3 years ago of games that came out at least 15 years ago, but for me they were new in 2020. The Yakuza games are equal parts silly romps, heartwarming tales, and gritty crime dramas. I’m very excited to play the rest of them now that they’ve been announced for game pass in 2021 (don’t tell Sega, I would’ve bought them after I had such a good time with the first 3).

4. Spider-Man: Miles Morales - I think I liked the original PS4 Spider-Man a little more, but swinging around NYC as Spider-Man is still a blast. Miles Morales is definitely a shorter game than its predecessor, I was surprised to find myself wanting more when I was finished with the game, Spider-Man was the first game I got the platinum trophy in.

3. Star Wars Squadrons - I really like Star Wars, and dogfighting games. The story in Squadrons was fine, but the multiplayer has kept me coming back since it came out. The Star Wars factor is has a lot to do with how much I like this game. But I do think the game holds up well enough

2. Hades - Lots of works have been written about how good Hades is, and many more will be written still. Hades’ ability to tell a compelling story not only in a run-based game, but because it’s a run-based game. The combat is good, all the weapons are fun and unique. The sheer amount of writing in this game is staggering, the fact that it is also well written and mostly voiced is basically just showing off. 

1. Hearthstone Battlegrounds - Not a new game, but easily the game I played the most in 2020 than Battlegrounds, Hearthstone’s auto-battler. 

2020 Games that I still want to play

• Ghost of Tsushima

• Final Fantasy 7 Remake

• Kentucky Route Zero

• Yakuza: Like a Dragon

• The Pathless

• Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity

• Umurangi Generation

What I Played Over Break (1/3/2021)

I am very lucky to have had the last week and a half off of work, and spent a decent chunk of that time trying out some new games, most of the games in this list I only played for a handful of hours, all have probably between 2 and 10 hours of playtime each. I also watched a handful of movies, which I started reviewing over on my Letterboxd page.

Bloodborne 

This is my second attempt at getting into a From Software game. I had previously played Dark Souls, and like it enough, I rang the first bell and talked to the weird serpent thing but then couldn’t figure out where to go next and never went back. Bloodborne hasn’t lost me yet, I have beaten Father Gascoigne (thanks to him getting stuck in a wall during this third form, still counts). I’ve been having a great time with it so far. But I actually had a miserable time when i just picked up the game, I spent like 3 hours not even getting to the first boss and then had a warning about my weapon breaking. I felt like I could make no progress and couldn’t accomplish anything, I felt terrible. But when I came back the next day I started a new character with stats that aligned with the weapon I liked, and then a few hours into that session I remembered that I can use the exp currency for things other than leveling (which I still couldn’t actually do) so I used it to stock up on molotov cocktails which I then used to kill all the difficult enemies between me and the first boss. Now that I am able to see more of the game outside of the first area (which I still think is more annoying than it needs to be) I understand why people love this game so much. The world is striking and interesting to explore, the enemies are big, fast, and scary. Beating a boss feels as good as it did in Dark Souls, but now I can actually figure where to go.

Elsinore

A time loop game where you play as Ophelia during a reinterpretation of Hamlet. I really enjoyed my time with it, but I got to a point where the amount of options available to me became overwhelming. I thought I understood a thing I could do for a goal, but it didn’t actually do what I hoped and got deflated, and haven’t been motivated to go back to it. Couple things that stood out as really cool features. The game gives the player a lot of information, the map tints rooms that have events happening in them a different color, the journal shows all the threads you can follow, timeline shows everything that has happened in your loop and allows you to go back and look at everything that happened in previous loops. Going back to look at previous loops isn’t the most smooth UX, since I really wish it would show what the current time in the current loop was. I will hopefully go back to this someday when I have more room in my brain to figure it out.

Fuser

Harmonix’s newest music game, this time meant to create the fantasy of being a music festival DJ, a fantasy I have never had; I’ve never even wanted to go to a music festival. But I do really like this game. The discourse I had heard around it was that “the campaign is whatever, the freestyle mode is where this game is great.” I feel the exact opposite. The constraints that the campaign place on what you need to do to succeed gives me a limit on what is possible and still gives me plenty of room to do fun creative stuff. I think the difference is that if you want to spend your time making one perfect mix of 4 parts then freestyle is the place for that, but the fun I’m finding in the campaign is from constantly changing what is playing and having to balance the requests from the audience and the requests from the manager person. 

Heat Signature

From the designer of Gunpoint, Heat Signature is a spacefaring bounty hunter game where you play as procedurally generated characters who go on procedurally generated missions on procedurally generated ships. I enjoyed the Get Mission > Fly to Ship > Do Mission > Return to Base loop. I also watched Tom play one of the daily challenges on the first, and it was really interesting to see the game’s designer both be really good at the game and find things he would still like to fix with the game. Watching that made me realize there is a lot of depth in the game, definitely might come back to this one, it has meters that I can fill. I love to fill meters.

Roundguard

Peggle meets Rogue, 2 great tastes that taste great together. I heard about this game from the excellent podcast Eggplant: The Secret Lives of Games, formerly known as The Spelunky Showlike, where one of the creators of Roundguard was interviewed. The game works because of the different classes legitimately playing differently, and different spells constantly changing things up during the runs themselves. I’m not sure how many areas there are, but I have reached the boss of the third level twice in my short time with the game. 

Norman’s Great Illusion

A small 2D game about a man working in a capitalist system that gives socialist messages every morning about how workers should rise up. It is very clearly a small team that worked on this game, and it shows. “Driving” is done with a golf swing style minigame, “work” is elementary school math, like 2*(2+3), which penalizes you if you get 5 wrong answers. The loop of the game is waking up > getting some exposition from Wife and Daughter > Drive to work > Do Work (math) > Drive home > More exposition from Wife and Daughter. With occasional additional exposition in between one of those steps. It was cool to see such an overtly socialist/communist game on the Nintendo eShop, but actually playing it wasn’t terribly engaging. But maybe the other endings are interesting enough to go back and try and see.

What I Played This Week (12/13/2020)

I finished Yakuza Kiwami 2 immediately after writing last week’s blog post, it turns out I was on the final chapter of the game. Since then I’ve spent most of my gaming time playing Spider-man: Miles Morales, the add-on turned Sequel to Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-man.

Playing this game brought back a memory of a 2018 video from Game Maker’s Toolkit where Mark Brown argues that the web-swinging fails to fulfil the promise of making you “feel like Spider-man” and like a lot of the response to the video I mostly disagree.

I find some of the games Mark chooses as examples of both what to do, and what not to do, very interesting. I’m going to talk briefly about both Super Mario Odyssey and the Batman Arkham series. Mark uses Odyssey as an example of a game that rewards complete mastery of it’s movements systems. It also gives players lots of optional challenges to put those skills to the test. But that’s the thing, they’re completely optional. Mark uses the combat in the Batman Arkham games as an example of a system that is all style over substance, he goes so far as to call it “patronizing”. Both of these game systems, and both of the Insomniac’s Spider-man games’ swinging, have a very low bar to entry. You can almost certainly beat Mario Odyssey without using any of the advanced moves that mark shows off in the video. The batman games could probably get pretty far into the game, just by hitting the punch and parry buttons at mostly the right time. But both of those games have optional ways for more dedicated players to push their abilities. Mario Odyssey hides optional piles of coins at the edges of it’s levels, and doesn’t require advanced movement skills to get to the final fight with Bowser. All of the Arkham games have optional combat challenges that not only ask the players to defeat a large group of enemies, but do it without breaking your combo.

Mark mentions this, but both Spider-man games have similar optional traversal challenges that require using all of the tricks in Spidey’s traversal arsenal, I think it’s fair to want more of these sorts of challenges in the game, he does call out like 3 different boss fights as also integrating traversal and combat. Outside of core story missions, I think the thing that makes Spider-man swinging work is that most of the challenge is completely optional. For a player looking for an easy carefree time swinging around as Spider-man, there’s nothing stopping you from swinging around Manhattan. The game will not stop you to say “no, you didn’t Spider-man right. Go back and try again” because frankly that’s not fun.The challenge in swinging around as Spider-man isn’t imposed by the game, I try to swing fast/efficiently because I think it’s fun, and the game supports that fun. Mark points out that using Point Zip + Point Launch is actually faster for simple traversing and I think that actually disproves his point. Point Zip + Point Launch is more difficult to do well than just swinging through the city. Integrating zips and launches is how Spider-man makes it’s traversal more difficult. Weaving swings and zips seamlessly is how the traversal system gets difficult. The Perfect Point Launch move adds a little reward to perfectly timing a point launch, it not only gives you a big boost of speed, but it rewards you with a big sound and visual effect. The Perfect Point Launch  is the game saying “Damn Spider-man, you nailed that. Good job”. Challenge in games don’t always need to reward challenge points, stars, or gold medals. 

I also totally understand the desire to have more friction in systems like this, I might be the only person to actually like driving in Grand Theft Auto 4 for exactly this reason. Like real driving you had to practice to get good at it. GTA 4 was the first game I got with my Xbox 360, meaning it was the only game I had for a while and spent a lot of time getting good at driving in it. It felt great to confidently weave my car between cars in incoming traffic.

Star Wars Squadrons: I also played some Star Wars Squadrons this week because the B-wing (and TIE Defender) update was released. As much as I wish I liked flying my favorite dumb-looking Star Wars ship, it just too slow. I’ve realized that the way I like to play Squadrons is in an interceptor flying too fast to be hit, I have no idea what to do in a bomber. I try to hit the big ships but then I get shot. It’s possible that this a side-effect of me mostly playing solo, maybe coordinating with a team to better time bombing runs is how to get the most out of a bomber. 

What I Played This Week (12/6/2020)

After a week off for Thanksgiving I’m back to write some thoughts about videogames. Most of my free time over the last couple weeks have been spent playing even more Yakuza Kiwami 2, which was the subject of my last post 2 weeks ago. I don’t have a specific topic to do a deep dive into for this week, so we’ll go back to the original format and give some thoughts about some of the games I’ve played.

Yakuza Kiwami 2: I think I’ve softened on my position from last post, I am still playing Kiwami 2 very differently than I played Yakuzas 0 and Kiwami 1. I have done way more side stories than I did in the last games, both because the map makes them more clear where new Side Stories are, there is also a menu that lists out all available side stories and what the next step is. If this menu was in the last 2 games I didn’t use, or even notice, it. I’m currently torn between trying to do everything possible in Yakuza and also really wanting to start Spider-Man: Miles Morales. At this point I’ll probably just keep doing most everything in Yakuza before moving on. I’ve already done most of the side stories, and the story feels like it’s approaching it’s conclusion. I really do want to start Miles Morales though.

Hearthstone: If you look at the Hearthstone Subreddit, which I don’t recommend anybody actually do, most of what you’ll see is people angrily posting about the changes to the progression system. While I think the reaction is overblown, I do think there are problems with the changes they’ve made. Some baseline numbers for some context: a pack of 5 cards costs 100 Gold, a ticket to the card drafting mode The Arena costs 150 gold. So, what was the old system like? There were a few ways to earn gold: Every 3 wins the regular Hearthstone modes earned 10 gold, daily quests granted 50-60 gold on average (with rarer 80 and 100 gold quests also possible), and if you’re good at it The Arena can also earn players gold depending on how well they do.
So what changed? Quests no longer grant gold, instead they grant experience points for a new battle pass system that grants rewards for every level. They have also removed the 10 gold reward after 3 wins entirely. Arena rewards didn’t change. 

Most of the angry posts on Reddit are about the claim that less gold is earned, on average, between expansion releases. If those criticisms pan out to be true Blizzard should rethink the system especially after claiming that players would earn more than they used to before the changes were released. I do think there are problems that exist outside of the gold/expansion question. Removing the 10 Gold/win just feels bad. Removing this reward disincentivizes playing Standard and Wild a bit, and while earning Gold shouldn’t be the only reason for players to keep playing but removing the ability to earn Gold just by playing will probably make people play fewer games on average. I think it also makes another problem even worse; limiting rewards to only be earned when a new level is reached means that the time between rewards increases as the amount of experience for each level also increases. The case of a player wanting to buy something with Gold, but they’re 10 gold short means that player will need to get all the way to the next level that grants Gold, which might not even be their next level. Even if that level gives enough Gold for 2 (or more) items, that feeling of having to wait multiple days to finish multiple quests to be able to do the thing you want is a terrible experience. Most of these things can also be bought with real money, so making it harder/more annoying to get gold is making a lot of players think that the decision was changed just to get a few more players spend real money. Even if that isn’t true a well designed progression system should not leave players with a rotten taste in their mouth when they’re playing.

Not to just make this post another angry Reddit post, I want to say some things I like about the change. Achievements were added as a part of this update, and I think they are imperfect, but neat. Getting a little toast that says “you did something cool” is fun, having a place to go back and see all the stuff I’ve accomplished is also cool. I do wish they didn’t pop early, especially in Battlegrounds where the “win with X hero” achievements always pop before the final battle spoiling the outcome. 

Weekly quests are great, they give a big chunk of XP and are fun goals to keep working towards. The only problem is every week since they were introduced I’ve finished them by Wednesday or Thursday which leaves the rest of the week feeling a bit less exciting since I don’t have any big quests to work towards. 

Battlegrounds is still fun.

What I Played This Week (11/22/2020)

The format for this week’s post will be a little different. I played, but am not going to spend any energy writing about, Hearthstone and Mini Metro. I have some more thoughts about Hearthstone’s new progression system that maybe I’ll get to next week when I’ve had another week playing with it. But today I want to talk about what I’ve spent most of my gaming time with this week: The hottest new Yakuza game: Yakuza Kiwami 2. I am aware that Kiwami 2 used the engine built for Yakuza 6 and a lot of these thoughts probably apply to both Kiwami 2 and 6, but I haven’t played Yakuza 6 and only have 0, Kiwami 1, and Kiwami 2 to compare between.

I’ve been playing Kiwami 2 a bit differently than how I played both Yakuza 0, and Yakuza Kiwami 1 (abbreviated as 0/K1 in the rest of the post) and I’m still trying to work through why. In 0/K1, Sub Stories were things I would do if I ran into them, or if they were particularly compelling I would seek them out and finish as much of a single story as the game would let me. But in Kiwami 2 I’m planning my routes around Sotenbori and Kamurocho based on where the sub story icons are on the map, and I hate it. I miss the organic moments of running to the next story marker, or the drug store, or wherever and stumbling into some weird person trying to take Kiryu off to some weird room to shave cats or something. Even the sub stories that start by walking near the starting area are no longer surprises because I see the white speech bubble icon on the map and walk towards it to make sure I start this new sub story. I haven’t been legitimately surprised by the start of a sub story at all in this game, which is a huge disappointment. 

Putting sub stories on the map in Kiwami 2 is now a skill that must be unlocked by the player in the stats page of the pause menu. It was the first skill I unlocked after the page was tutorialized, the skill is very cheap to unlock and is at the top of the list in the Life Skills tab. I believe it was put there to make sure players unlock it at the beginning of the game and are aware of why there are new icons on the map. When this happened I thought “This is the first of the games to actually put these icons on the map, and I hate it. Can I turn it off?”. But when I sat down to write this post I did some research and found gameplay footage from Kiwami 1 that showed big exclamation marks on the map saying where substories were, the older games just didn’t call it out as an unlock to make it happen. The fact that I was made very conscious of the fact that my action caused sub story icons to appear on the map made me both more aware of their presence and less like they were organic things happening in a living breathing city. Also, I can’t un-learn that skill to take the icons off the map, I checked.

A portion of the map in Yakuza 0

A portion of the map in Yakuza Kiwami 2

The map is overall more detailed in Kiwami 2 when compared to 0/K1, the buildings are represented by 3D models that change perspective as the map is moved around, the icons for various activities and shops point to specific spots instead of just coloring in the whole building as the restaurant or shopping or game color. The Kiwami 2 map even has icons for where the doors in and out of the enterable buildings are. All these extra details make me want/have to pay more attention to the map than I did when playing the previous 2 games. Because Kiwami 2’s map is “better”, I find myself relying on it more, and spending less time organically exploring the city.

In Kiwami 2 there are also many more NPCs that are “talkable”. In 0/K1 if you saw a person with the “You can talk to me” icon, you almost certainly should talk to them because they either had some absurd request to make of you, or (more rarely) they were going to give you Pocket Tissues. But in Kiwami 2 there are tons of people to talk to, most of which will just say something vaguely related to whatever is happening in the story at the time. This made me stop talking to people unless I know they are a sub story giver or I was in a unique area during a story mission and they might have something interesting to say. Even without the icon on the map the prompts to start sub stories aren’t usually “talk” they’re “investigate” or “Examine” or something to that effect, so once you learn the difference in prompts the surprise of a sub story starting is removed again.

The one change that I think makes the biggest difference between the 2 styles of implementation is that in Kiwami 2 the icons for new sub stories are differentiated from the icons for existing substories. In 0/K1 they both used the same exclamation point icon, but in Kiwami 2 the icon has a different color. This makes walking up to a substory icon even less surprising.

This isn’t to say that I’m not enjoying my time with Yakuza Kiwami 2, I’m loving it. It’s gorgeous to look at, the main story is harrowing, the sub stories are wacky and hilarious. It’s everything you could want out of a Yakuza game. I plan on eventually playing all 7 (8 including Judgement) games, I just really love the games this team makes, I just wish the zany-ness could surprise me more often, like it did in Yakuza 0 and Yakuza Kiwami 1. I just wish I was being more surprised by the sub stories in Kiwami 2.

What I Played This Week(11/14/2020)

New consoles came out this week, and I don’t have either of them. I’m sure I will get both of them eventually, but I don’t need to spend $500 to play the Demon’s Souls remake, a prettier Spider-Man: Miles Morales, or slightly prettier versions of Xbox games I already don’t play that often. 

Tetris Effect: Connected - Speaking of Xbox games, Tetris Effect: Connected came out this week for all of the Xboxes this week. The original Tetris Effect was the second game I bought for my PS4 after Marvel™’s Spider-man™for PS4™ and I played the hell out of it there, I beat all of the campaign levels on normal and hard, and spent a while getting my Marathon score up as far as I could on the leaderboard. (I was 648th at one point, but I’m sure I’ve been pushed down in the last 2 years. Now it’s out on Xbox with a new subtitle and new multiplayer modes. It has a traditional VS mode, called Zone Mode, where each player sends trash lines to their opponent when their own lines are cleared, a score attack mode where the player with the highest score after 10 minutes wins, then there’s the most original new mode: The titular Connected mode. 

Connected mode is a co-op Tetris mode against constellation-themed bosses. Those bosses send strange and terrifying attacks at you while the 3 human players fight back in a turn-based phase where all three players’ wells merge into one mega-well and the players try and get as many lines as they in a turn-based phase. This is the most interesting mode, but I think it has some issues. I’ve run into some issues with vibration, the game is supposed to vibrate the controller along with the rhythm of the song, and also when it is your turn to go in the turn-based phase. But my game, or maybe my controller, aren’t working consistently. One game will have the vibration working as expected, but the very next game will have absolutely no vibration. This makes the core frustration of the mode even worse, where it’s one player’s turn and they don’t realize it, making the entire trio wait for them to figure it out. This has happened to me several times while playing, both me not realizing it’s my turn and having to agonizingly wait for the other player to realize it’s their turn. The game has no system for the other 2 players to ping the third player to remind them. It would probably be worse with that though, annoying people would spam it.

Each boss in Connected Mode takes about 10 minutes to beat and the blocks stay in each player’s well after each boss, so that the second and third boss fights start with the potentially messy wells. I had a few attempts where all three of us human players died while trying to beat the third boss after playing for about 20 minutes. It was very demoralizing. 

If you haven’t played Tetris Effect I could not recommend it higher, it is the prettiest version of the best game ever made. If you have Game Pass you have no excuse to not play it.

Tabletop Simulator: I have been sitting on a half designed deckbuilding meets minion combat (like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering) card game for an embarrassing amount of time. This week I finally figured out how to import custom deck into Tabletop Simulator. So maybe now I’ll finally get around to having somebody other than myself or Kay play this thing. But wow figuring out what I was doing wrong was not easy, instead of giving any sort of instruction about file size, or dimension the game just crashes when you try and use a file that is too large, that’s like software engineering 101, tell the user what they can or can’t do and stop them before they break your code. But whatever, an hour of googling and resizing images finally got a deck of cards into TTS.

Hearthstone: Last week I said I probably wouldn’t talk much about Standard any more in these, but then I played more Standard this week than I had in a while. They added a new progression system to Hearthstone with a Battle Pass like system that grants rewards when you pass thresholds of points earned by doing things like completing daily quests, weekly quests, or by unlocking some of the brand new achievements. The achievements are part of what has gotten me back into playing Standard more than I was. Of course with a change to how rewards are earned in-game, the whole community is up in arms about it. I haven’t done the math about how much gold is earned in the old vs. new system but the new system seems fine to me, it has rewards other than gold and gives more ways to earn your way towards those rewards. Playing Battlegrounds now gives me points towards my next level. We’ll see if they change it. 

Spider-man: Miles Morales: I haven’t actually played Miles Morales yet, but I’m a weirdo and like having physical media I ordered a disc for my PS4. But it’s apparently taking a road trip across America, it’s currently in Minnesota. I hope it enjoys the trip

What I Played This Week (11/8/2020)

This week has been 12 years long, but I also didn’t spend a lot of time playing games this week. I did play Among Us for the first time on Election night while I tried to avoid waiting for results to come in. But now that it’s Sunday and Tuesday is finally over I’ll write some words about videogames.

Among Us: If you somehow haven’t heard about Among Us, it’s the latest hot game on Twitch. It’s a new Social Deduction game, where there is a group of players in a Spaceship/Airship/Lava Base, but 1/2/3 of your friends are trying to KILL YOU. Crewmembers have a list of tasks to do, but the imposters are trying to murder as many crewmembers as possible. So as a crewmember you must try to finish all your tasks while watching every other crewmember for suspicious behavior while you avoid being murdered yourself. Crewmembers can also vote to kill people (hopefully the imposters) as another way to win. 

The game really depends on the group being on a similar skill level, our group was mostly people playing for the first time, so it took a couple games to figure out what to do, but we had good close games, which was good to see. 

But after playing for a few hours I think I might enjoy watching Among Us more than actually playing it. As a viewerI can ignore the task mundanity and focus solely on the sleuthing, or I could play more and get better at the tasks.

Also, I don’t do a lot of socializing these days, and the few hours of playing this and chatting with some friends really exhausted me, or maybe it was the 2 beers I had that night (I am old, and a lightweight now).
Lastly, I think it’s extra cool that the team that built Among Us is (at least in part) located in Redmond, love to see a local team find such huge success.

Hearthstone Battlegrounds: I probably won’t really talk much about Standard Hearthstone much in these things any more, I basically only play Battlegrounds now. Last week I wrote about how I was doing a lot of losing and how I ended up forcing elementals most games. They’ve since released a large balance update to Battlegrounds (and duels) that took a lot of power out of Elementals. They also made the other change that I had wanted, elementals are no longer in every game of Battlegrounds, so I’ve now played a game of Battlegrounds without elementals in it which was great. Just before the patch, and now in the newest patch I’ve had a lot more success getting top 4s and wins. Battlegrounds feels like it’s in a good state right now and that’s nice.

Hades: I have now rolled credits on Hades, and completed one more run in the epilogue. I think I’m going to keep playing it still, I have Fates to complete, characters to give gifts to, cosmetic items to buy. Not sure I’m going to make a Game of the Year thing at the end of the year but if I do I will certainly talk about Hades in that.

Mini Metro: Mini Metro is still excellent. Maybe I’ll have more words for it next week.

Want To Play: Zachtronics games has a new game that came out this week: Möbius Front '83 about Reagan-Era America finding an “evil” shadow America popping up in the middle of the country. I really enjoyed Zachtronics Opus Magnum, a puzzle game with a surprisingly compelling story. I might even play this once I finish writing this post.

What I Played and Watched This Week (11/1/2020)

I'm still trying to finish The Expanse, and I have until this upcoming Friday to finish it. I have started season 4 so I'm not worried about being able to get that done. Other than that I've played some Star Wars: Squadrons, Hades, Hearthstone, and Mini Metro.

The Expanse (Mild Spoilers for Seasons 2 and 3): The show really turned it up to 11 after the midpoint of Season 2 and kept it going all the way through season 3. That season and a half was everything I wanted from the show all the way through. The politics between Earth, Mars, and The Belt. Along with the inter-belt politicking between the disparate factions inside the OPA. I had previously complained about the Protomolecule, but it's become pretty clear that the Protomolecule is a core feature of this story and has definitely become more interesting than it was in the first season where it was just a mad science experiment. I am curious about the Origins of the Protomolecule, but I also don't know that any actual answer will be satisfying.

I've only watched Episode 1 of Season 4 so far and I'm not sure how much I'll like it if the story is going to be mostly set on this new world. It does appear that there will be some more political intrigue, but with less of the characters we've met throughout the other 3 seasons, I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Hades: Because of my The Expanse binge I hadn't played Hades in a few days. So when I went back to it on Saturday I was TERRIBLE at it, I did a few runs and only made it to the final boss once and did not kill him. This week I realized that even though I've gotten 7 clears but none of those are with the sword. I made 2 escape attempts with the sword this week and they both went poorly, clearly I'm missing something with that weapon.

Hearthstone: I've realized that I keep playing Hearthstone, but I never actually have anything to say about it when I write these posts. So while I spent an evening playing Hearthstone I thought a little harder about why the hell I was doing it.

Part of Hearthstone's appeal to me is that I don't need to give it undivided attention while I play it, would I do more winning if I paid more attention? Undoubtedly, but that's fine. 

Some more thoughts about the current state of Battlegrounds: With elementals being the new addition to the pool of minions they are available in every game and even though I try not to always go Elementals, I can't seem to help it. I'm probably just overvaluing the new minions because they're new. I'm excited for Elementals to no longer be in every game so I can remember how to make a comp with other types of minions.

Losing in Battlegrounds also tends to feel significantly worse than winning feels good. It feels like I either win without having to think too hard (because I'm just winning by so much) or I place in the bottom 4 feeling like there was nothing I could have done or feeling like I was "1 turn away from turning the corner". Twitch Streamer/YouTuber Sylsssa had offered some advice for people in my specific situation, to summarize she said that I am probably playing "too greedy", but I can't seem to not do that for some reason.

Star Wars: Squadrons: I played a few rounds of Fleet Battles this week to grind some currency to unlock the new Mandalorian-Themed items. My A-Wing is currently rocking a Baby Yoda bobblehead. In the time since I last played Squadrons people have gotten very good at that game, I did a bit more along than winning. It's still very fun to fly around in Star Wars spaceships.

Mini Metro: I had, for a while, been playing the Mini Metro daily in the evening before going to bed, but I’ve recently started making it part of my wake up routine since it gets my brain spinning, but it’s not too hard or time consuming. It's still good, and I'm excited for Mini Motorways to come to Steam in May! I got 4th place on the Daily on Thursday, that was pretty neat. They have also added 2 new maps to the game 6 years after the game was first released, which is also neat.

What I Played (And Watched) This Week (10/25/2020)

I actually haven’t played games that much this week, I got a month trial of Amazon Prime because we needed to get a piece for our wall mount before the weekend, so we could install it over a weekend. So while we have a month of Prime, we’ve been trying to take advantage of watching everything we could on Prime Video before canceling it and not giving Amazon any more money. Kay and I watched the 3 available seasons of Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, I’ve been watching Gear Top Grand Tour, and our current goal is to finish all of The Expanse before our trial runs out in early November.

Yakuza Kiwami 2: I don’t have much to say yet about Kiwami 2 yet, I’ve only played the first chapter. The visual upgrade between Kiwami 1 and Kiwami 2 was immediately noticeable. Excited to play more once I finish cramming TV.

Hades: I am now up to 8 clears in Hades, the story is still good, the gameplay is still good. I will keep playing Hades, it is good.

Hearthstone: Hearthstone announced a new Expansion, and an entirely new game mode: Duels. The new game mode is a PvP version of their Dungeon Run solo modes. Each player starts with 15 HP and a 16 card deck which includes a powerful “treasure” card and after each game you add cards and/or treasures until you either lose 3 times or win 12 times. I haven’t actually played this new mode because it’s currently locked behind the expensive pre-order for the new expansion. It will be out of this “early access” state soon enough and I won’t have to play $80 to try it out. Full runs of the new mode seem to take about 90 minutes to complete (less if you’re bad) this makes me much less likely to watch youtube videos of complete Duals runs when they’re the same length as a feature film. I enjoy watching Battlegrounds videos, they tend to be 20-30 minutes long especially when some of the waiting time has been edited out. I wonder how the watchability will affect Duels, even in streams on Twitch.

The Expanse: We have watched up to Season 2, Episode 7 so far. And I generally like it. Most of the characters are fun and interesting, I’m a big fan of Miller and Amos especially. The pacing of the show, especially in the second season so far is SO FAST, a huge thing happened at the end of episode 6, and Episode 7 starts with another huge event starting. The characters rarely seem to get any time to reflect on the bonkers things that happened to them. I can think of one scene where Alex (the mostly boring pilot with a Texan(?) accent) was sad in a bar for about a minute. I want more scenes like that, where I can get into these people’s heads and figure out what they’re thinking about. I will try and finish it out

*Slight Spoiler thoughts below*
I think “the protomolecule” is both a dumb name, and mostly distracts from the stuff I’m more interested in, which is the politicking between Earth, Mars, and the OPA. Especially once it was revealed (as far as I know in 2:07) that it wasn’t really a weapon, but more of a generic Mad Science scheme to “Advance Humanity” or whatever.

What I Played This Week (10/18/2020)

It’s just Hades, I played a lot of Hades. I’ll probably get back to Squadrons at some point when I can find somebody to play with. (Dear reader, do you want to play Squadrons? Let me know).

The build that got me my first completion.

Hades: This was the week where I finally got a clear in Hades, and it took 61 attempts. And then since that first clear I have gotten 5 more clears. I’m not sure what clicked since getting that first win but I can pretty consistently get at least to Styx and pretty often make it to the Hades fight. It’s really incredible that I’ve played ~75 runs and I still haven’t noticed much, if any, repeated dialogue. Especially since 99% of it is spoken, it’s a really incredible feat of game production.

*Light Spoilers below about what happens when you finish a run for the first time*

Hades also makes a really smart and interesting decision to not put credits after the first clear. Most run-based games have other endings that require multiple runs or specific actions to be done mid-run to reach the “real ending”. Slay the Spire has the 3 keys, Spelunky has an item that has to be acquired in each level. I don’t care to try and find those secrets myself, or even just look them up when I’m playing other run-based games. I got to the end, they played credits, I’m done, or I play until the fun runs out. Hades’ decision to not put credits after the first completed run and more importantly the dialogue between Persephone and Zagreous after that first completion makes it clear that there is still more game to be played and the story is not over. The reward for continuing to play is not a secret ending, it’s the continuation of the story which I assume will lead to an ending at some point. Hades, like all Supergiant games before it, has a system to manually increase difficulty. In Hades it’s called the Pact of Punishment and unlocks after you complete a run for the first time. This is the most I’ve really interacted with one of these systems in any of their games (I think I used the one in Pyre a couple times because I felt like the standard game was too easy). You could, hypothetically, continue the story without interacting with the Pact, but you would stop receiving the reward items (Titan’s Blood, Diamonds, and Ambrosia). Because the story is so compelling and I want to keep playing to see where it goes invites me to use the Pact more so than the similar systems in earlier Supergiant games. Having the story be the primary thing driving me to keep playing a run-based game is new and a huge testament to how good the story has been in Hades.

Hearthstone: I also played some more Hearthstone, there was a balance update to battlegrounds, it seems good.

Mini Metro: I got 7th on the Daily Challenge on Saturday, the game is good. They’ve announced some upcoming updates for the game which is exciting.

What I Played This Week (10/11/2020)

Short post this week, got busy unpacking.

I finally got the TV mounted on the wall, which gave us room to unpack the consoles. I haven’t actually played anything on the ol’ Xbox or PlayStation, but the Xbox is updated now so I guess I can now. But I have been playing on the PC, Switch, and Phone still. 

Hades: I saw some things in my work Slack about Hades that really made me want to keep playing. I have gotten to the final boss fight (the second part anyways) a handful of times but have never been able to get past that last challenge. 

Hearthstone: Battlegrounds is still fun, elementals are probably too powerful. Standard is fine, but I don’t play it much. When I do, it’s face hunter, good for short games that mostly end with me winning.

Star Wars: Squadrons: Really enjoying Squadrons multiplayer, I’m hopeful that they continue to add content to it (B-wings please), because I really enjoy the vroom and the pew-pew, but there’s not much stuff there right now. 2 modes, 5 maps (one of which is completely empty) isn’t a lot of game. The game that is there was definitely worth the price of admission though.

What I Played This Week (10/4/2020)

I missed a week of this blog thing, but I was pretty busy moving all of my things across Seattle, and I only played Hades and mobile games last week so the list will mostly focus on things I played this week. I’m waiting for a mount to put the TV on the wall before I set up the consoles again, but I can play Hades in handheld mode on the Switch and Squadrons on my PC so what do I need them for anyways?

Hades: As I said in the intro Hades is the only other game I played the week that I moved. It’s excellent, the combat feels great, the upgrades feel important and stack in fun and interesting ways. Stacking a specific god’s powers until they become absurdly powerful seems like both the most fun and the most effective way to play. The system that encourages you to change which weapon you use by giving a different weapon a resource bonus is brilliant, it has gotten me to change weapons every run, even making it all the way to the final boss with the bow (a weapon I think isn’t very good). The way that the Daedalus hammer changes the core functionality of each weapon makes me want to get those upgrades every time. But the thing that Hades does better than any other run-based game (a better genre descriptor than rogue-lite) that I’ve played is how well integrated the narrative is. Other games like Rogue Legacy have a narrative excuse for why the player has to start over when they die, but it’s not much more than just an excuse. Hades, on the other hand, makes dieing and re-trying the core part of the story. Lots has been written about the narrative and writing in Hades, so this won’t be a revolutionary take, but the writing in Hades is excellent. The game acknowledges everything you do and the characters tell you about it. Who killed you last, what other gods’ boons you are currently using, how far you’ve made it, and lots more that I can’t think of. The voice acting is also quite good, giving the dialogue even more personality to all the characters. Also, there’s fishing.

Star Wars: Squadrons: I finished the campaign for Squadrons after ~6-7 hours, it was mostly unremarkable to me. All of the new characters were well realized. When I watched the story review from Star Wars Explained I realized that the little character details really did a good job of fleshing out the motivation of the 2 factions. But the true meat of this game is going to be the multiplayer, I’ve played a couple matches of Dogfight, and 1 Player vs Player game of Fleet Battle. Both modes seem really fun, the push and pull of fleet battles seems really well designed. I’ll hopefully have some more well defined thoughts about the multiplayer next week after I’ve played a few more hours.

Hearthstone: Elementals have been added to Battlegrounds, along with 4 new/re-added heroes. Elementals seem fun, with a similar play style to Pirates, lots of the new minions get or give stats when elementals are/were played. Of the new heroes Ragnaros is definitely too powerful, after a few turns it gives 2 minions of the players choosing +4/+4 each for free. Compare that to something like Edwin, which costs 1 and gives 1 minion +1/+1 for each minion bought that turn which on average is probably +3/+3 or +4/+4 and requires much more set-up than Ragnaros does. Of the brand new heroes, I’ve only played Chenvala who reduces the cost of moving to the next tier when 3 elementals are played, it was bad and I didn’t do well. New stuff makes the game more exciting, I’ll definitely be playing more battlegrounds this week.

Mini Metro: Mini metro continues to be excellent, today’s daily was my best of the week. I am currently sitting at 39th place. The difference between 39th and 1 is a lot, I got 1866 passengers today but the number 1 player got 3131. There are some people that are very good at this game.

Egg Inc: I think I may be approaching the end of the current run with Egg Inc. The accomplishments are small and coming slowly. This is the typical Egg Inc experience for me, I play for a few weeks and then leave it un-opened on my phone for months. We’ll see when this current run ends, and if the next one begins

What I Played This Week (9/20/2020)

This week was the end of Seattle’s skies being filled with unhealthy amounts of smoke, but before that happened I got fed up with the smoke, and covered my window with cling wrap and blue tape so I could use my Air Conditioner again. That only had to last for a couple days before the smoke was finally gone, I then took it all down and the windows have been open ever since! I will be moving this coming week, so next week’s list might just be the 3 mobile games I can play while sitting on the floor in between taking boxes between locations. Or maybe there won’t be a post next week, who knows.

Titanfall 2: Titanfall 1 was the reason I bought an Xbox One, I played a LOT of that game. Titanfall 2 is the best FPS of this generation, and might be the best game of the generation. The campaign is full of fun and interesting ideas, and the multiplayer is the best version of the Call of Duty formula of multiplayer, with customizable classes, perks, etc. Even in 2020 I can still find matches on Xbox. Running and jumping through great maps and double jumping into a giant robot still feels great 4 years later. I yearn for a Titanfall 3 with a new awesome campaign and great multiplayer maps, but I worry that the success of Apex Legends means that my dream of a Titanfall 3 may never come, and for that I am sad. I’ll just have to keep playing Titanfall 2 until that day comes.

I, Zombie: I tested this little game back when I was a little baby Functional Certification Tester for Xbox. I think this might have been one of the only games I got every achievement in while I was testing it. I remember enjoying my time with it, going back to it now and playing it when I could be doing something else (unlike when I was working and playing this game was all I could do for 8 hours a day over 2 days). The game is a puzzle game where you play as a little zombie and your goal is to turn all the characters in the level into zombies. Some of the humans are soldiers with guns, some are civilians, and some are scientists. Every person you turn is able to be controlled with 3 commands: Attack, Follow, or Stay. The puzzles revolve around figuring out which person you can turn first and when to send your zombie squad into the guns of the soldiers. The levels are either scored on how fast you complete them, or how many zombies you managed to save when you finished the level. The game was a joy to test when I had to do it, and it was well worth the $1 I paid to see if it was actually good.

Assassin’s Creed Origins: After playing Horizon: Zero Dawn and other similarly structured open world games I have found that for an open world game to be interesting to me the actual world must be interesting to actually be in. Breath of the Wild (the best open world ever made) makes exploring the world the core loop of the whole game. AC Origins, on the other hand, has a button that just lets you auto-pilot to your destination, or as like to call it the “skip exploring” button. I haven’t had any drive to do things other than make my camel automatically bring me to the objective, do the thing, then go back to whatever NPC gave me the mission. Outside of actually doing the objectives I have not thought about the environments more than “this is where the camel brought me”. Also this game is like a thousand hours long, I do not see a world in which I finish this game, but I might come back and slowly work through it 1 mission at a time, but who knows.

Hades: I started Hades yesterday, now that it is out on the Switch. I have gotten to the second boss once, which felt pretty good for just a couple hours of playing. All of the weapons that I’ve tried have been great. I just unlocked the spear, but haven’t done a run with it yet. The writing is also great, I am expecting some sort of twist but I’m excited to try it out. Supergiant make great games, and Hades is no exception. 

Hotshot Racing: Tried this out again briefly, nothing new from what I said last week. Game seems fine, but I don’t think I’ll play much more of it.

Hearthstone: Won some, lost more. Sitting around 7300 in Battlegrounds. Haven’t played much constructed except to finish quests. It’s still good, but I didn't play much this week.

Mini Metro: Did the dailies every day this week. I got into the top 10% 3 days, the Saturday Daily didn’t give me an actual ranking but 10th got 1482 and I got 1455, so I’m going to give myself 11th that day. Mini Metro continues to be excellent.

Egg Inc: I prestiged for the first time since picking Egg Inc back up, prestiging earns you another currency called Soul Eggs, each Soul Egg increases the value of the regular egg in every farm. This prestige took me from 1.3 Million Soul Eggs to 3.2 Billion soul eggs, increasing my earning bonus to 958.118Billion%. This game loves big numbers, and so do I.

What I Played This Week (9/13/2020)

This week has been most noted by being even more stuck inside than before. Last week I could go outside wearing a cloth mask to avoid catching or spreading COVID-19, but this weekend I couldn’t/shouldn’t go outside without an N-95 mask, which I don’t have, so I’ve spent even more time inside this week than I usually do, which didn’t seem possible a week ago. Also, as I’m writing this my apartment is the coolest it’s been all weekend, it’s 83 degrees, it’s gotten as warm as 89, it’s miserable.

Hearthstone: Spent a lot of time getting 5th or worse in Battleground games. I haven’t played a lot of constructed, except to get some quests finished. Opened a Legendary from a pack, that was neat. I did watch a fair amount of the Masters Tour Montreal Online this weekend and did see some Hunter decks that looked line a fun and fast deck to play in Standard. Might try those out when I get back into it.

Mini Metro: Continued to play a lot of dailies and did fine, not any top 10s or wins this week. But playing games on a phone generates much less heat than either a PC or console, so I tried for some more of the achievements that can be unlocked in the standard mode, the ones I did this weekend were “Reach Week 10 in Osaka” and “Reach Week 8 in Stockholm with one at least one station connected to all lines”. The Stockholm achievement was especially fun because it required a change in playstyle, Stockholm is a very water-heavy map and requiring a station to be on every line almost requires that every line uses at least one tunnel. The restriction forced me to generally never take extra lines, in the attempt that got the achievement I picked extra tunnels twice, one interchange, and carriages every other time. Mini Metro is still excellent and I’m still excited to try Mini Motorway whenever that happens.

Egg Inc: Finished a couple Contracts this week, I have one currently running. I should unlock a new egg type in the main game. Egg Inc continues to be a great idle game. Maybe next week I’ll write about the active portion of the game, and how strange it is to me to have to actively be playing an idle game to be SO much more efficient than just letting it idle.

Hotshot Racing: I saw this game on Twitter, it looked like a fun arcade-y racing game. It's a lap-based low-poly racing game with a very clever system to keep the races close. Both drifting, and slipstreaming build up a boost meter. Slipstreaming also increases the speed of the car behind, which does double duty in keeping all the cars in a tight pack, unless you crash into a wall while you're boosting and get back onto the track outside of slipstream range, then you restart. 

The best part about this game is that the characters have personalities and backstories and when you win it plays a Tekken style cutscene about what the win means for that character. I won with the American man who turned his life around and wanted to prove to his newborn son that he was a success by winning this race. It was weird and funny, big thumbs up. This is a perfect example of a game that I wouldn’t have tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass, I probably won’t go back to it, but I had a fun enough hour with it. 

The Sims 4: Journey to Batuu: I watched this over Kay’s shoulder, and moved the camera around a little. I haven’t played a Sims game since The Sims 1 on GameCube. I’m not sure if i just wasn’t in the mood for it, or if The Sims isn’t the Series for me. Seeing all the Star Wars stuff was cool, but the story telling seemed to mostly happen in text bubbles in the corner. Our Sim got interrogated and all that meant was they got walked into a room by a stormtrooper and had to stay there for a while. I didn’t even notice the moment they got out because either there was no notification, or I missed it. Kay did Star Wars-ify a Lars Homestead house she downloaded that didn’t have the new items in it already. 

Crusader Kings III: I thought that Kay would like CK3, so I downloaded it from Game Pass and played through the tutorial with her. I was totally right and she plans on starting her own matriarchal game this evening. Not sure if she’ll be able to play on her own account on our PC, we haven’t tried that with Game Pass games yet. The game itself was probably a bit too much for me, the tutorial was A LOT, but it did feel pretty good to win that first war, I was just at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I didn’t put that much time in after the tutorial ended because we started making dinner, but I will try and go back to it. I need to scheme to make my neighbors like me enough to let me vassalize them, or maybe my armies will be encouragement enough.

Spiritfarer: I spent most of my Saturday, and plan to spend some of my Sunday afternoon finishing up most everything in Spiritfarer, I haven’t had the urge to complete a game this thoroughly in a long time. I have made every dish, smelted every metal, finished most of the side quests. After I finish writing this I plan to finish up the last side quests and bring these last spirits to the Everdoor. After having used each of the item-producing buildings over my hours playing I would like to rank them in order of most-to-least fun.

1. Sawmill - The most skillful of the production minigames, in my opinion. Lining up the saw with the line was both tricky and something I got better at as I kept doing it. Succeeding and failing were both fun, I could tell what i had done wrong. Also, the consequence for failure was never very harsh, perfection was not required to get the maximum reward for each log. 10/10

2. Foundry - A simpler minigame than the Sawmill, run between the 2 bellows and push them to keep the heat dial between 2 markers, but it was still possible to get better at. It simply boiled down to figuring out how low to let the dial go down to before pressing the belows again. Most of the metals were very simple: “Just press it when it’s at the lower marker”, but both Silver and Gold moved further on the dial with each bellows press than the markers were apart. This means that you have to let the dial go below the markers before you press the next bellow It also means that you have to intuit the location where the press has to happen, unlike the rest of the metals where you just press the button when the dial reaches the bottom marker.

3. Fishing - This minigame starts very simple where you just hold the button until the fish is caught, it quickly adds the restriction that if the fishing rod turns red then you have to release the button until the rod returns to yellow. Like my other favorite minigames this one gets difficult, especially when trying to catch one of the 3 varieties of Tuna across the map. The tuna require very precise timing because they swim back just about as far as they get realed in each time, so you have to stop reeling as late as possible and/or start reeling again as soon as possible to make any progress. There’s a good variety in how the different fish behave also.

4. Loom - This minigame is much simpler than the ones above it, you hold the button down to make an arrow move down a line and release the button when the arrow is inside a zone that is marked on the line, hitting the exact center of that zone gives the player extra items from the minigame. Each item you use in the Loom has a different zone size, zone location, and arrow movement speed, which means that you get a different set of circumstances every time you try to use the Loom with a new item. The starting item (Linen) is pretty easy to hit the bullseye, but most of the other ones I found pretty difficult to nail, which felt great when i did manage it.

5. Kitchen - From here on down, there aren’t really any more mini-games left. The fun of the kitchen comes not from a minigame, it’s about combining 2 items together and seeing what comes out. I did get discouraged from experimenting early on when all the fruit and vegetables I had planted appeared to be just “a fruit” or “a vegetable”. But i did discover that later on there were certain recipes that required specifically apples, or pears, and not just “fruit”. Having more combinations accessible in the early game might have stopped me from having that moment where I stopped wanting to experiment.

6. Chicken Coop - Like i said above, not much of a minigame here, but you do have to keep placing eggs in the incubator to fill it up. It also has a unique method for keeping the chickens fed; there is a feed silo outside of the coop where you can place seeds that get automatically eaten by the chickens. I think this is the only building that can be interacted with from the outside (other than the door).

7. Garden/Field/Orchard - Plant a thing, water it, it grows. Or don’t water it, and it still grows, but slower. Or also play it a song and it grows really quickly. I found myself leaving the Garden and Field full of fully grown plants because that meant there wasn’t a WATER icon there all the time telling me how neglectful I was being to my poor plants. The Orchard doesn’t require watering the trees once they are fully grown, which I greatly appreciated.

8. Sheep Corral/Cow Stall - Only 2 things you can do to a sheep or cow: 1) Feed it 2) Sheer/Milk it. Nothing interesting, but it is easy to do, I especially liked that the feeding animation could be skipped when feeding then shearing the sheep. Made that task much less annoying.

9. Cellar - Boring, but not overly so. Just place a thing in a box and come back when it’s done. Things can be left for too long, but other than that not much going on here. 

10. Windmill - I barely understand how this one works, and I had to look it up. I’m not sure i can accurately explain how this one works, you put stuff in it and move a thing at the top until the windmill starts to spin. Why does it start? I have no idea.

11. Crusher - Just mash the button, takes longer than you want, and is boring the whole time.

12. Smithy - This one also confuses me, the tutorial (that I read some of) mentioned something about each metal having a best amount of time to pull back the hammer but I couldn’t figure out what that was for any of the metals, so this ended up being the same as the crusher: Just mash the button until it’s done. I ranked this lower than the Crusher because you have to sit around before mashing the button, but not enough time to go do something else. Not a fan.

Splashing Cold Water on My Face: Splashing cold water into my face, and taking the coldest showers I can remember, have been my favorite activities this weekend, they are the only things that are keeping this weekend bearable. 10/10 would recommend.

What I Played This Week (9/7/2020)

I’ve been wanting to get back to writing about games for a while now, but I haven’t found something specific that I felt like it was worth publishing my thoughts about. But this format should give me both the motivation to write something every week and the freedom to not worry too much about how “important” or “wise” or whatever other reason was stopping me from publishing things. So what is the format? Like any videogame podcast I’m going to just say what I played that week and talk about what my thoughts are about those games. I will try to publish these on Sundays (except this week, which is happening on a Monday, but it’s labor day so it still counts). This week might be longer than future weeks, since I’ll be 

So, here’s what I played this week:

Hearthstone: These lists are likely always going to start with Hearthstone. I’ve been playing Hearthstone for years now, and likely will continue to for a good long while. In recent weeks I’ve been playing both Wild constructed and Battlegrounds. Wild is the mode where all cards throughout Hearthstone’s history are available to use, I’ve been playing an aggro Shaman deck that hopes to win by turn 6 with cheap minions and burn spells pointed at the opponent’s face. But most of my time in Hearthstone is spent in Battlegrounds, which is Hearthstone’s “Auto-Battler (or Auto Chess Like if you prefer) mode where you buy minions, set up a board and watch as they fight another player’s board. I really like Battlegrounds, even though this week I spent more time losing than winning. My MMR at its highest was ~8100, and I’ve fallen down to ~7700. There was a fairly recent balance patch for Battlegrounds that really threw me off my rhythm, but I’ll keep playing and hopefully figure out what’s good.

Spiritfarer: I started out really enjoying Spiritfarer, and then didn’t enjoy it as much, and most recently I came back around and really enjoyed it. My problems stem from one of my biggest pet peeves in videogames, and life really, not knowing what to do next. Especially when finding the thing to do isn’t fun. Breath of the Wild is the exception that proves this rule for me, because in BOTW finding the thing to do next was as fun (or even more fun) than doing whatever the thing was. The thing that caused me to think about putting the game down was having a full quest log of requests I couldn’t do because I couldn’t get to the area that had those resources because I didn’t have another resource to get the upgrade to get to that area. Turned out I had to do something that wasn’t marked in my quest log to get that missing resource. Which wasn’t difficult, I just had to figure out what the thing I was missing was, which wasn’t fun. I needed to find one of my animal friends and bring them to The Everdoor. After I got the upgrade, the Ice Breaker, I was able to find new resources, new spirits, and new areas. In broad terms, Spiritfarer has been great, good writing, fun characters, gorgeous visuals. I just met a sentient mushroom who I’m excited to talk to more.

Egg Inc: An idle game that I have been playing off-and-on for a few years. It has lots of resources and upgrades that need to be managed in order to have an efficient egg farm. The standard game can tend to get pretty boring, just waiting for the numbers to get big enough, so they have more short-term games that they call Contracts. The contracts also focus on the number of eggs delivered instead of just trying to earn cash. The contracts make some upgrades more valuable than others. I picked Egg Inc up again after over a year because I deleted the Facebook app off of my phone and I needed something to fill those moments that used to be filled getting mad on Facebook. Egg Inc. is undoubtedly better than that.

Mini Metro: Mini Metro is also likely to appear on this list most weeks, I try to do the Daily Challenge most days, and since deleting Facebook have found myself playing the standard mode a few times a week. Mini Metro is great, I have nothing but good things to say about it. I think I bought it 3 times (once on Steam, once in a humble bundle, and once on the Google Play store). I can’t recommend this game highly enough and am excited to be able to play Mini Motorways, Dinosaur Polo Club’s follow-up as soon as it’s released on a platform that I own. 

80 Days: I actually played this last weekend, but I wanted to write about it because I was 6 years late to this game, and it’s good. I did 2 full trips around the world last Sunday, one that was a disastrous 110+ day trip, and one lightning fast 53 day trip. Playing 80 days the second time it felt noteworthy that all the routes between cities are (or at least appeared to be) alway the same scenario with the same result. The cities that I traveled through on both of my trips around the world had the same scenarios, I was able to use the knowledge I had gained from the first trip to avoid some of the disastrous routes that had plagued my first trip. There are lots of cities that I haven’t explored yet, so there is reason to play again, but it did feel weird seeing the same scene again. I should play more of this, it was good.

F1 2019: I’ve been watching F1 races for the first time this season after having watched the 2 seasons of the Documentary Series Drive To Survive on Netflix. F1 is racing at Monza this weekend, so I wanted to do a few labs around to get a better sense of it for when I watch the race later. Why not F1 2020? 2019 is on Game Pass. Also, it’s strange to have Sebastian Vettel on the cover of the 2019 game while watching him qualify in 17th/20 racers in this weekend’s race.

Bloons Tower Defense 6: Sometimes I just want to see a bunch of balloons explode, Bloons TD is good for this. But also, sometimes your brain is in a bad place and you find yourself playing a time-killing game like this when you really ought to be doing anything else.

Apex Legends: The Card Game - The Game Design Workshop at GDC

As part of the Game Design Workshop at GDC 2019 I worked on a team of 6 to build an analog version of Apex Legends. We were asked to find a single emotion that we wanted our paper game to imbue onto our players. We decided the emotion we wanted our game to elicit was “thrill”. We were also asked to list 3 words that represented the digital version of our game. We agreed that our 3 most important words could be boiled down into LOOT, FIGHT, and MOVE. We knew that representing the totality of a Battle Royale match was too much for cards and dice with only a few hours to design. So we needed to figure out which part of the game was the best to represent “thrill”. We started with the idea of abstracting away the actual fighting, instead having the game be a series of checks to see if your loot and your luck was good enough, progressing through a series of checks until you become the champion. We instead decided to focus the game on a single fight between teams. We wanted the players to feel the thrill of immediately getting into a fight and (hopefully) coming out on top, and honestly most of us only get into one fight per match anyways.

The Loot:

We started by building the loot deck, a deck of cards full of loot found in the digital game: weapons, armor, health items, weapon attachments, and grenades. We never actually considered including ammo, I think all of us either forgot it was a pick-up or realized how un-fun managing ammo counts would be in a card game. One thing I am sad about is that we never got time to differentiate the weapons, we just ended up making them all use a six-sided die. If I decide to come back to this project one of the first things I will do will be to differentiate the weapons by having different dice or damage output or both. The Mozambique needs to mostly do nothing, so that you feel that much better if you manage to win with it. There were also too many weapons in the deck, play testers focused on getting armor at the expense of weapons because armor was much more rare than weapons in our short time building the game.

The Drop:

Apex Legends: The Card Game starts with The Drop; each player rolls a six-sided die. The values of all the dice are added together and that many cards are revealed from the Loot Deck face up on the table. Looting begins with the player that rolled highest, that player picks one piece of Loot from the table followed by the player who rolled the second highest, continuing until all the cards have been taken or all the players’ inventories are full.

We started in a 2 player game with The Drop being a set number of cards, five to start with. Late in the day we decided to add a third player and thus had to change the starting card amount, so we decided on this dynamic loot system so that player didn’t need to reference a table every time. This system also re-creates the idea of dropping in a “low-tier” loot zone from the digital game. In doing so allows the game to re-create the thrilling moments of punching and kicking an enemy before they have a chance to get their bearings and good loot.

The Fight:

After the drop when the players have their loot they pick up their Action Cards, which read “Fight” and “Loot”. Each player picks a card secretly and plays it face down in front of them, all players’ Action Cards are then revealed at once. Players who choose Fight must also choose a target, if there is more than 1 other player. Players who choose Fight can roll the dice noted on one of their weapon cards and deal damage to the target player. Players who choose Fight can also decide to use one of their items like health packs, shield cells, and grenades. Players who choose Loot get to draw another card from the Loot deck and add it to their inventory. This continues until only 1 player remains, that player wins!

Combat was the system that took the longest for us to get to a place we were happy with, we got looting down and feeling fun quickly, but it took us a while to figure out what the number rolled on the dice meant. Does it just deal that much damage to the other player? How much health do they have? How does armor affect that? Do players loose cards to represent their health? The armor question was the last one to be answered. We tried a few ideas starting with armor having different values, between two and four. If the attacker rolled a number less than your armor value the attack would not do damage, instead it would decrement the armor making it less effective in the future. I really liked this system but I think there were already a few too many dice to manage and without some other balance changes would make the fights too long. We ended up having armor act as extra health that was depleted first when you take damage. Players start at 6 health, with a six-sided die to represent it, and are dealt damage equal to the other player’s die roll. For example if you have five health and an armor with value 3 and the other player is attacking you and rolls a four, your armor is depleted and your health goes down to four.

When we added the third player it was remarkable how much better it made the game. It made the decision to Fight or Loot more interesting. With 2 players it was simply: Is my loot better than theirs? Adding a third player added several more questions each player had to ask themselves; Who is that player going to attack? Is this a turn I can get away with healing, or even looting? If those 2 players are going to fight each other, who do I think will be left and can then finish off? Adding a third player also allowed for the popular “Third Party” phenomenon from the digital game, where a team shows up in the middle of a fight to take advantage of the chaos and damaged players, to happen in our game. Since the third player was added so late we didn’t have time to include a system for looting a defeated enemy, but looking back I think this would give players more of a reason to finish off a player rather than letting them fight the 3rd player while you wait and gather loot. But without any play testing, it’s difficult to say how exactly it would turn out.

I had a really great time working on this project. It reminded me that I really love designing games, the whole process; coming up with an idea, making it playable, testing it, finding out it’s actually terrible, and trying again. The joy of finding a mechanic or designing a system that feels good, or invokes emotion, or is simply fun is something I need to keep doing. This workshop also reminded me that I can do game design, and do it well. I’m not going to claim that all the good ideas that ended up in the prototype were mine, or that all the ideas I suggested were good but I was good at listening to teammates’ thoughts while they played to try and find what 1) the actual problem was and 2) how we can fix it.

FPS Minimaps, Comparing Titanfall 2 and Star Wars Battlefront 2

I have been playing a lot of Star Wars Battlefront II lately, mostly for the Star Wars-y-ness of it. But while I was playing I noticed that I never used the minimap, even when I remembered it existed. After playing a lot of Battlefront II I went back to Titanfall 2 and I was using the minimap constantly, multiple times a match compared to maybe once in a game of Battlefront. That made me wonder what it was about the two games that made me use their minimaps so differently. 

Let's start with some things I would want from a minimap in a shooter.

1. Show where enemies are in relation to the player.

2. Show where teammates are in relation to the player.

3. Show where any other important locations, like the objective, are, like objectives.

Alright, let's look at both game’s minimaps

First up, Battlefront II

Star Wars Battlefront II's Minimap

It shows a lot of the info you want in a minimap, which direction the enemies are, where your teammates are, and where the objective is. One thing I noticed with Battlefront II’s map is there is not a lot of detail about your surrounding, it only really shows you areas that are out of bounds, either because of physical walls or because of a change in game phase. So let's see how Titanfall 2’s minimap handles it.

Titanfall 2's Minimap

It’s immediately clear that Titanfall 2’s minimap show a lot more detail to the level geometry compared to Battlefront’s. It does show all the other info that we needed, enemies and teammates. Titanfall 2’s minimap also shows some extra detail, it shows the player’s field of view. It also has different icons for Grunts and Pilots which is a problem specific to Titanfall and isn’t really applicable to Battlefront.

But I think the biggest thing that makes Titanfall 2’s map more usable is its location on the screen.

The full screen of Titanfall 2 gameplay

Full Star Wars Battlefront II screen

It might not be clear, but I think the location on the screen makes the usability of the minimap, you spend more time looking at the upper half of the screen in a shooter.

With the minimap on the top of the screen it takes less time to glance over from the part of the screen you already were looking at. The map placement is one small detail that makes Titanfall's fast-paced gameplay feel even better. It could be that Dice, the developers of Star Wars Battlefront II, might not have wanted to have their minimap be a tool to use during a firefight. They might have wanted it to be a tool to find the direction that of the front line. 

I tend to prefer my shooters to be faster with less time between fights, so Battlefront II's implementation of the minimap is servicable, but not exciting. Battlefront II, and by extension most of Dice's Battlefield franchise, tend to focus on large combat areas where the less detailed minimap is all that is needed. I tend to prefer my shooters much smaller scale where a more detailed minimap, in a more easily accessible location on the screen, can be used right after a firefight to try and find the next fight quickly.

The top half of the Titanfall 2 screen, enemies are very visible in this half.

The bottom half of the Battlefront II screen. Most of this space is filled with ground, not enemies.

Titanfall 2 is Made Great by the Details

Titanfall 2 is so good! It’s like crazy how good it is. From the level design to the art direction to the voice acting to the creature design to the best-in-class movement mechanics. I could, and maybe will write about all of these pieces. But right now I want to talk about 2 little details that most people could probably ignore, but made me pause the game in jealousy of the designers when they happened.

The first is in the tutorial, which ends with a time trial called “The Gauntlet”. The Gauntlet tasks you to get to the end of a course and shooting all the targets as quickly as possible. Early in the course we get to this obstacle.

The player has learned that the fastest way to get underneath things is to slide, but they have not been tested on aiming while sliding. This scenario forces the player to combine the 2 skills at once, and do it fast! But what I think is so brilliant about this piece of the tutorial is the enemy placement. Not only are the enemies placed in such a way that challenges the player’s ability to aim in 2 different directions, but they’re also placed in such a way that the player knows exactly where they are as soon as they see the wall to slide under. This gives the player time to feel incredibly smart and cool when they see both targets, realize they can slide then shoot one and then shoot the other before the slide is done and then try to pull it off. And if they’re like me, miss the first shot and sit awkwardly on the ground trying to shoot the first target a few times. But when you do manage to pull it off, it’s a tremendous feeling helped created in no small part thanks to the placements of those targets.

Another little detail that caused me to pause the game wasn’t in the level design, but instead was a smart piece of combat design. First, some background, the game has established that hitting robotic enemies in their glowing red spots does extra damage and has established that grunts can be killed with a single melee attack, at least on the normal difficulty. So, in Level 3 Blood and Rust the campaign introduces a new enemy, the size of a grunt but robotic like a Titan. These robots are called Spectres, they take a lot more damage to stop and they also have glowing red spots. Titanfall 2 is all about moving quickly, so having to put a bunch of bullets into each of these Spectres can slow down the pace of the game. But they have an elegant solution to this problem that not only helps keep the pace of the game fast and makes the player feel really clever when they figure out how to take advantage of it. Hitting spectres with a melee attack spins them 180 degrees putting their big glowing weak spot right where the player can hit it. This bit of simple combat design helps the player keep moving and allowing them to not stop and pour a bunch of bullets into any single enemy.

A Spectre after being hit with a Melee attack

Titanfall 2 has a campaign on the same very high level that the studio’s founders were known for, in no small part thanks to “small” details like these all throughout. The Titanfall 2 campaign is not only full of these details, it also has some of the best first-person movement in the genre, a pace that keeps the player on their toes by introducing all new mechanics and then immediately throwing them away for more new mechanics. These details and high quality throughout show an understanding and care for the FPS campaign, a thing that sometimes feels like a thing of the past, that proves Respawn are some of the best in the business.

Breath of the Wild's World Doesn't Care About You

I just finished listening to Giant Bomb’s marathon Game of the Year deliberations podcasts and I have some thoughts about weapon durability and rain in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

First of all, critics of Breath of the Wild are completely valid in their opinions, people can like things that other people dislike. So, what problems do people have? The biggest criticisms I’ve heard are against 2 systems in particular, Rain and Weapon Durability. Both of these systems make playing the game frustrating, losing your best weapon during a difficult Lynel fight or being unable to scale a cliff because it happened to start raining are both things that the player would rather not have happen. But that’s exactly what makes both of these systems so so good.

The core of what makes Breath of the Wild so good is exploration. Nearly every part of the game is either something to find while you’re exploring or something to help you explore. But how does slipping down the side of a wall every 5 seconds help exploration? It forced me to explore my surroundings and find a way to their destination that doesn’t involve climbing. The size and density of Breath of the Wild’s world means that there is a good chance that anybody will stumble across something interesting when they are forced off their path.And if there wasn’t one, I could always light a fire and wait out the rain.

Weapon durability forced me to explore weapons that I likely would never choose to otherwise use. I know that I would be a lot less likely to use spears and other 2-handed weapons if my broadswords didn’t break. Elemental weapons have such huge advantages in certain situations, hitting an Ice Lizalfos with a fire sword, they die instantly. If weapons didn’t break I would just carry one of each type of weapon all the time, trivializing most of the combat entirely. Knowing that my weapons are a resource to be managed caused me to think twice about which weapon I use in every single combat encounter. Breaking weapons is also rewarded, if the last hit is against an enemy it deals double the normal damage.

Breath of the Wild’s world is not interested in creating the perfect joyful exploring experience, look to Super Mario Odyssey for that. Instead it wants to challenge you to explore every corner of it’s huge world and explore how to interact with the world.