Josh - Triple Iris80 Days is a Perfect Game
PeerTube
Unoriginal and Uncreative【】
【Weekly Game Log: 2024-12-09】
Chronic health problems, a weird high-humidity pseudo-heatwave, and weird films to watch ate up a lot of my game playing time. And the rest of it was taken up by high hour count games.
Intergalactic Fishing is still great, and so is its incredibly dumb plot. I smuggled a covert spy into my fishing boat to give me enough intel to repopulate a dead lake in order to start an underground "teleportium harvesting" scheme.
I burnt out on 80 days a bit this week. The game is still great, but I'm starting to encounter the same few choke points in every run now.
Somebody mentioned the 2013 game F J O R D S online, and I decided to revisit it for the first time in a while. It's a weird puzzle platformer (using an old Sharecart 1000 save format, that was designed to have many games share one save file) that ostensibly tasks you with delivering a pizza. In this game you move left and right, die, and can enter a small alternate 4-tile radius alternate circle dimension that allows you to move freely and teleports you a magnified distance back in the real world. From there you can access terminals that explicitly change assorted variables to make the game even more bizarre. Very weird and satisfying to solve.
Mythwrecked is an exploration/adventure game where the protagonist ends up stranded on an island with Greek gods. Or so I've heard, I haven't got that far yet. The game seems pleasant enough, but my 40 minutes with the game so far has been beset by irritating glitches (the button to open any of the games menus often plays a sound and just doesn't work, or works so slowly you've started doing something else by the time it pops up) and slow conversations with enough random grunts that fully voice acting the dialogue would have been less effort.
Most of my time since Friday has been spent going down another Caves of Qud hole. Version 1.0 of the game finally released (after 17 years of development) this week, and I've taken the opportunity to dive into it again. The game is a technical and creative marvel, an incredible lore-rich world, both procedurally-generated and authored, that has seemingly endless variation in its features and inhabitants. It's absolutely one of the best games ever made, and it's incredible to see it in a "finished" form now, with an improved UI, and serviceable tutorial (that does tend to get stuck in an unintuitive menu/tutorial popup loop occasionally). If I had to nitpick, the earliest quest to retrieve "wire" seems to have a lot less wire lying around now, which makes it a bit more of annoying chore (and one that you see at the start of every game.)
All Games Played
Deadlock: Good
Caves of Qud: GREAT (Notable)
Intergalactic Fishing: GREAT
80 Days: GREAT
F J O R D S: GREAT
Mythwrecked: OK
【Weekly Game Log: 2024-12-09】
Chronic health problems, a weird high-humidity pseudo-heatwave, and weird films to watch ate up a lot of my game playing time. And the rest of it was taken up by high hour count games.
Intergalactic Fishing is still great, and so is its incredibly dumb plot. I smuggled a covert spy into my fishing boat to give me enough intel to repopulate a dead lake in order to start an underground "teleportium harvesting" scheme.
I burnt out on 80 days a bit this week. The game is still great, but I'm starting to encounter the same few choke points in every run now.
Somebody mentioned the 2013 game F J O R D S online, and I decided to revisit it for the first time in a while. It's a weird puzzle platformer (using an old Sharecart 1000 save format, that was designed to have many games share one save file) that ostensibly tasks you with delivering a pizza. In this game you move left and right, die, and can enter a small alternate 4-tile radius alternate circle dimension that allows you to move freely and teleports you a magnified distance back in the real world. From there you can access terminals that explicitly change assorted variables to make the game even more bizarre. Very weird and satisfying to solve.
Mythwrecked is an exploration/adventure game where the protagonist ends up stranded on an island with Greek gods. Or so I've heard, I haven't got that far yet. The game seems pleasant enough, but my 40 minutes with the game so far has been beset by irritating glitches (the button to open any of the games menus often plays a sound and just doesn't work, or works so slowly you've started doing something else by the time it pops up) and slow conversations with enough random grunts that fully voice acting the dialogue would have been less effort.
Most of my time since Friday has been spent going down another Caves of Qud hole. Version 1.0 of the game finally released (after 17 years of development) this week, and I've taken the opportunity to dive into it again. The game is a technical and creative marvel, an incredible lore-rich world, both procedurally-generated and authored, that has seemingly endless variation in its features and inhabitants. It's absolutely one of the best games ever made, and it's incredible to see it in a "finished" form now, with an improved UI, and serviceable tutorial (that does tend to get stuck in an unintuitive menu/tutorial popup loop occasionally). If I had to nitpick, the earliest quest to retrieve "wire" seems to have a lot less wire lying around now, which makes it a bit more of annoying chore (and one that you see at the start of every game.)
All Games Played
Deadlock: Good
Caves of Qud: GREAT (Notable)
Intergalactic Fishing: GREAT
80 Days: GREAT
F J O R D S: GREAT
Mythwrecked: OK
I've been on a bit of an 80 Days binge lately, I've played through a few runs in the last week or two. It's great, but I feel like I'm close to done with it for now. It's probably mostly due to playing it so much I've burnt out on it.
But in a smaller, more pedantically critical way. I've hit a point where the game stops feeling functionally infinite, and feels like a significantly smaller and more "on rails" experience. And that point is Panama City.
There's still a lot of the game I haven't experienced and want to explore, but as it currently stands* every run where I don't have a large amount of cash at hand, and am south of the very north of Russia ends up forcing me into Panama, ends up in a place where Panama is the only affordable destination, or ends up with a route that gets diverted to Panama mid-Journey.
Panama would be perfectly acceptable as a location in the game. The writing and vivid imagery of potential blood-automatons is great. But there's a lot of ways into Panama, and seemingly way fewer out. Leading to seeing the same reference to the connection to the California goldfields 4 or 5 times, while finding myself unable to experience many distinct and novel parts of the game's world.
*Maybe it's related to the current game RNG seed, which I believe increments every time you successfully finish a run under 80 days and my last few have ended at 81-85 days
But in a smaller, more pedantically critical way. I've hit a point where the game stops feeling functionally infinite, and feels like a significantly smaller and more "on rails" experience. And that point is Panama City.
There's still a lot of the game I haven't experienced and want to explore, but as it currently stands* every run where I don't have a large amount of cash at hand, and am south of the very north of Russia ends up forcing me into Panama, ends up in a place where Panama is the only affordable destination, or ends up with a route that gets diverted to Panama mid-Journey.
Panama would be perfectly acceptable as a location in the game. The writing and vivid imagery of potential blood-automatons is great. But there's a lot of ways into Panama, and seemingly way fewer out. Leading to seeing the same reference to the connection to the California goldfields 4 or 5 times, while finding myself unable to experience many distinct and novel parts of the game's world.
*Maybe it's related to the current game RNG seed, which I believe increments every time you successfully finish a run under 80 days and my last few have ended at 81-85 days
【Weekly Game Log: 2024-12-02】
This week I took ownership of a "Steam Deck" device, for mobile computing and video game playing. So a lot of my playing was informed by my testing of that.
Outside of the Steam Deck, I jumped on the Atlyss train. It's a fast-paced action RPG in early access. Its gameplay skews slightly towards a co-op online experience (single and multiplayer modes are similar, and you just respawn at a checkpoint with the worldstate remaining.) I find it a bit clumsy, the graphical depictions of the player and enemies tend to be loose suggestions of their actual location. However it is also quite simple and fun, and you rarely get bogged down.
The main selling point of Atlyss is its character creation and customisation systems, which are geared toward creating fursonas with extremely pronounced features, and dressing them up. In this regard, the game excels far more than its limited four classes suggest. Though the game supports purely cosmetic apparel appearing in the stead of functional armor, there seems to be a slightly convoluted system behind it, which is a shame.
Usurper is a deck building/chess hybrid, where you optionally place a piece from your deck each turn before your actual chess move, this is later augmented by pieces beyond the standard chess set. The game is quite an original idea, but I found it a bit vague in its instruction. More frustratingly the game suggests picking a difficulty based on Chess ability, but the gameplay here is quite different, leading to an unnecessarily difficult experience.
Similarly Solitomb is one of the many Balatro inspired spins on traditional card games. It's similar to regular klondike solitaire, but suits are replaced by symbols representing damage/armor/monsters/etc. I didn't play much of it because I quickly found I was in the wrong state of mind. I did find it quite unintuitive though.
Caves of Qud is still exceptionally excellent. Surprisingly, so is the playability its controller layout. That said, there's a lot of surprisingly complex tasks with extremely intuitive bindings, but "Move around" is not one of them for some reason. Without opting into the tutorial, it does give a bit of the old Dwarf Fortress "Cannot build bed need bed" vibe the first time you plug in a controller. That said, its still one of the best games ever.
XENOTILT is a pinball game that has been in early access for a year or so, and recently reached version 1.0. The game has one very complex table (way beyond the possibilities of real life) with three tiers, and a vaguely Giger-esque sci-fi theme. It has an endless array of challenges and power-ups, and perfectly nails the FM synth music and grainy speaker that a real table would have. The gameplay is surprisingly simple, you control flippers and use the controller stick/arrows to nudge the table. There is a small gimmick where cradling the ball on the flipper and nudging down causes turrets to fire at obstacles. I got hooked on this game way more than I expected too, and have played multiple hours. However, I do find there are situations where the ball is ejected in preventable situations, but the camera hasn't caught up in time. And the "nudge" functionality seems to not be that realistic, only affecting the ball in certain locations.
I also revisited Demon's Tilt (XENOTILT's predecessor), for comparison. And while that game is still good, I still just think "neat idea, fine for what it is" about it. It doesn't seem nearly as polished as XENOTILT is.
I resumed a four year old save of Intergalactic Fishing and was able to immediately back into the swing of it, peacefully fishing and solving interstellar conspiracy theories. It's a simple top-down fishing game, where you float your B.O.A.T around a lake casting rods and chatting with other anglers. The controls are very simple, left click to cast and reel, right click to set the hook to snare a catch, and 90% of the complexity is in the tetris-like lure designer. Then you teleport to a lake elsewhere in the galaxy if you get bored. The killer final touch of the game is a convoluted plot about environmental disaster and corporate malfeasance, which is played deadly seriously in the game.
I also played some more runs of 80 Days, a game I have finished multiple times. It's a text-driven narrative adventure that is also a steampunk adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. It's still excellent, the sheer amount of text written for the endless variations on routes and choices of actions is outstanding. Also, this time I got an achievement for fucking an airship.
Steam Deck notes
I generally recommend the Steam Deck as a portable video game device. Particularly if you have a large Steam library, though the SteamOS (an Arch Linux variant) installation underneath is easily accessible if you want something that doesn't interact directly with Steam.
My biggest criticisms would be
There are a few processes (updates/installations/etc) where it was apparently deemed acceptable for the screen to go black and unresponsive for an extended period.
The GREAT ON DECK certification seems to only care that everything can be performed using the Steam Deck's controllers, and not whether that layout is actually usable
November Game of the Month
XENOTILT
By default I guess. Most other games didn't grab me at all this month.
Games on Deck
The below games were all from the GREAT ON DECK certified section of my library.
XENOTILT - Absolutely fantastic. Controls perfectly and performs well. Graphics seem to have been custom redrawn to fit the resolution perfectly
Demon's Tilt - As above.
Balatro - Functions well. The filters on the graphics seem to require squinting awkwardly.
Another World - Abysmal. I pressed down on the control pad twice and that was enough to quit the game without warning.
80 Days - Works OK-ish, until it doesn't. Uses the touch pad in lieu of mouse more than it should. Trying to drag and drop in the shops seems completely broken.
Caves of Qud - Works as well as the control scheme discussed earlier does.
Intergalactic Fishing - Works kind of OK. Boat is controllable, but the clickable icons are way too small for the level of precision.
All Games Played
Tetrachroma: Good
Deadlock: Good
Atlyss: GREAT
Usurper: OK
Solitomb: OK
Caves of Qud: GREAT
XENOTILT: GREAT (Notable)
Demon's Tilt: Good
Intergalactic Fishing: GREAT
80 Days: GREAT
This week I took ownership of a "Steam Deck" device, for mobile computing and video game playing. So a lot of my playing was informed by my testing of that.
Outside of the Steam Deck, I jumped on the Atlyss train. It's a fast-paced action RPG in early access. Its gameplay skews slightly towards a co-op online experience (single and multiplayer modes are similar, and you just respawn at a checkpoint with the worldstate remaining.) I find it a bit clumsy, the graphical depictions of the player and enemies tend to be loose suggestions of their actual location. However it is also quite simple and fun, and you rarely get bogged down.
The main selling point of Atlyss is its character creation and customisation systems, which are geared toward creating fursonas with extremely pronounced features, and dressing them up. In this regard, the game excels far more than its limited four classes suggest. Though the game supports purely cosmetic apparel appearing in the stead of functional armor, there seems to be a slightly convoluted system behind it, which is a shame.
Usurper is a deck building/chess hybrid, where you optionally place a piece from your deck each turn before your actual chess move, this is later augmented by pieces beyond the standard chess set. The game is quite an original idea, but I found it a bit vague in its instruction. More frustratingly the game suggests picking a difficulty based on Chess ability, but the gameplay here is quite different, leading to an unnecessarily difficult experience.
Similarly Solitomb is one of the many Balatro inspired spins on traditional card games. It's similar to regular klondike solitaire, but suits are replaced by symbols representing damage/armor/monsters/etc. I didn't play much of it because I quickly found I was in the wrong state of mind. I did find it quite unintuitive though.
Caves of Qud is still exceptionally excellent. Surprisingly, so is the playability its controller layout. That said, there's a lot of surprisingly complex tasks with extremely intuitive bindings, but "Move around" is not one of them for some reason. Without opting into the tutorial, it does give a bit of the old Dwarf Fortress "Cannot build bed need bed" vibe the first time you plug in a controller. That said, its still one of the best games ever.
XENOTILT is a pinball game that has been in early access for a year or so, and recently reached version 1.0. The game has one very complex table (way beyond the possibilities of real life) with three tiers, and a vaguely Giger-esque sci-fi theme. It has an endless array of challenges and power-ups, and perfectly nails the FM synth music and grainy speaker that a real table would have. The gameplay is surprisingly simple, you control flippers and use the controller stick/arrows to nudge the table. There is a small gimmick where cradling the ball on the flipper and nudging down causes turrets to fire at obstacles. I got hooked on this game way more than I expected too, and have played multiple hours. However, I do find there are situations where the ball is ejected in preventable situations, but the camera hasn't caught up in time. And the "nudge" functionality seems to not be that realistic, only affecting the ball in certain locations.
I also revisited Demon's Tilt (XENOTILT's predecessor), for comparison. And while that game is still good, I still just think "neat idea, fine for what it is" about it. It doesn't seem nearly as polished as XENOTILT is.
I resumed a four year old save of Intergalactic Fishing and was able to immediately back into the swing of it, peacefully fishing and solving interstellar conspiracy theories. It's a simple top-down fishing game, where you float your B.O.A.T around a lake casting rods and chatting with other anglers. The controls are very simple, left click to cast and reel, right click to set the hook to snare a catch, and 90% of the complexity is in the tetris-like lure designer. Then you teleport to a lake elsewhere in the galaxy if you get bored. The killer final touch of the game is a convoluted plot about environmental disaster and corporate malfeasance, which is played deadly seriously in the game.
I also played some more runs of 80 Days, a game I have finished multiple times. It's a text-driven narrative adventure that is also a steampunk adaptation of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days. It's still excellent, the sheer amount of text written for the endless variations on routes and choices of actions is outstanding. Also, this time I got an achievement for fucking an airship.
Steam Deck notes
I generally recommend the Steam Deck as a portable video game device. Particularly if you have a large Steam library, though the SteamOS (an Arch Linux variant) installation underneath is easily accessible if you want something that doesn't interact directly with Steam.
My biggest criticisms would be
There are a few processes (updates/installations/etc) where it was apparently deemed acceptable for the screen to go black and unresponsive for an extended period.
The GREAT ON DECK certification seems to only care that everything can be performed using the Steam Deck's controllers, and not whether that layout is actually usable
November Game of the Month
XENOTILT
By default I guess. Most other games didn't grab me at all this month.
Games on Deck
The below games were all from the GREAT ON DECK certified section of my library.
XENOTILT - Absolutely fantastic. Controls perfectly and performs well. Graphics seem to have been custom redrawn to fit the resolution perfectly
Demon's Tilt - As above.
Balatro - Functions well. The filters on the graphics seem to require squinting awkwardly.
Another World - Abysmal. I pressed down on the control pad twice and that was enough to quit the game without warning.
80 Days - Works OK-ish, until it doesn't. Uses the touch pad in lieu of mouse more than it should. Trying to drag and drop in the shops seems completely broken.
Caves of Qud - Works as well as the control scheme discussed earlier does.
Intergalactic Fishing - Works kind of OK. Boat is controllable, but the clickable icons are way too small for the level of precision.
All Games Played
Tetrachroma: Good
Deadlock: Good
Atlyss: GREAT
Usurper: OK
Solitomb: OK
Caves of Qud: GREAT
XENOTILT: GREAT (Notable)
Demon's Tilt: Good
Intergalactic Fishing: GREAT
80 Days: GREAT
Ash_Crow
eicker.news ᳇ tech news»From #Infocom to #80Days: An oral #history of #textgames and #interactivefiction: MUDs, Usenet, and open source all play a part in 50 years of IF history.« https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/06/from-infocom-to-80-days-an-oral-history-of-text-games-and-interactive-fiction/?eicker.news #tech #media
Kana Kana
Game Erauntsia🌍 🛺Jules Verne idazlearen Munduari bira 80 egunetan eleberri ezagunaren bertsio alternatiboa eskaintzen digu 80 Days jokoak.
@katukinabarra|k testu bidezko abenturaren analisia idatzi digu.
80 Days
Garatzaile bezala Inkle Ltd eta Cape Guy Ltd taldeak ditu, eta argitaletxe bezala hauetako lehena. 2014an kaleratu zuten iOS-erako zein Android-erako, eta, ondoren, Microsoft zein OS X sistema eragileetarako bertsioak 2015ean irten ziren. Istorio aberatseko eta erabakiak kontutan hartzen dituen bideojoko motaren barruan sartzen dute egileek, Jules Verneren “Around the World in Eighty Days&rd...
Eugen PfisterI did it!! 🍾This was extremely gratifying. What a beautiful game this is: #80Days
Nindie SpotlightFrom the archives #Switch #NindieOfTheDay is #80DAYS!
https://nindiespotlight.com/game_profile.cfm?game=80-days-switch
