I’ve been racking my brain for hours trying to come up with something to write about. Apparently it’s Brainstorming Week for Blapril, so that’s appropriate I suppose. But nothing’s coming. Unlike many people, I luckily still have work, which I have to go to (hard to be a janitor, even if a supervisor, and work from home, though I’m willing to give it a try!). Today an easy project turned out to not be so easy (story of my life these past couple of weeks – but the converse has proved to be true was well), and it kinda sapped my energy – especially my mental energy. (Also, it was outside – always a bad sign – so heat and my allergies flaring doesn’t help matters.)
I uploaded a bunch of BotW screenshots last night, intending to use them sometime soon. Unfortunately, they’re mostly of the above quality, more fit to be used as tweets than for blogging purposes. And I can’t really use them to illustrate my progress in that game since last time, since I haven’t made much. I mean, sure, I’m playing an average of over an hour every night (more like two), but I haven’t really been advancing the plot that much. Just filling in the map, doing side-quests, that sort of thing. Though I did at least start the Gerudo main quest line last night, getting the thunder mask (as indicated by the top pic, and what is below).
It’s just not Link if it’s not green.
But yah, no big ideas for posts. Well, that’s not true – I have ideas, lots of ideas. Even have plans. Even have hinted at them in some of the last few posts. But they aren’t ready yet. Need more things like screenshots and stuff. (Always there’s more to do…) But nothing ready for today… In fact, I think I made basically this post in August…but just have to keep writing. Even if it’s just a stream of consciousness like this.
And, now an idea has come! But this is a post already written, so this is what you get. I mean, this is the fourth paragraph already! While this might not pass the AP exam (need five paragraphs, don’t you know), I think it’s good enough for a blog.
For some reason Screen Rant has a list of the ten best Star Trek games. Now, I haven’t played all of these, and have played some others, but there are a couple of things I wanted to say, which I didn’t think merited making a comment on their site.
First, they have Star Trek: Timelines on the list. The fact that this prime example of a mobile kusoge is better than any game out there, let alone Judgement Rites, is a disgrace to all people with brains. The “game” is 95% comparing the stats on your unit with the required stats + rng of some situation: basically a whole game of saving rolls in a RPG. Except without the story or fun. That last 5% is an actual game that involves space combat and making a decision or two. A simple game, which isn’t presented particularly well, but it is at least a better game than nakedly rolling dice against a table. All in the service of its gacha, of course. I’m sure that the other major Trek mobile game, the one set in the Kelvinverse, is better than that garbage.
The next thing is that they have STO as the best Trek game of all time. I’m not so sure of that being true – but I’m not sure it isn’t true, either. If it was just a spaceship game, Starfleet Command (any version) beats it, hands down. (Heck, STO space combat is just a simplified version of Starfleet Command.) And just about any competent game beats it on the ground game (STO is competent too, but just barely). And as a story, it’s not exactly that great either (though, again, competent – which is good enough for me in this area). But I don’t think there’s any game that brings it all together like this. STO is definitely more than the sum of its parts. Thinking on it, while I don’t think STO deserves the title of “Best Star Trek Game of All Time,” I can’t think of another game that does, either.
A few days ago I was doing something I don’t remember, and a couple of songs came on. Now, I love a certain genre of Japanese pop from the late 70’s thru the early 80’s, known as “city pop.” I don’t know why it’s called that, but you should look it up. Anyhow, it’s no surprise that I should somehow find my way to songs from that era. I just let Youtube do its thing, and then came up with some sort of greatest hits thing from Akina Nakamori:
This is pretty different from what I was used to. And some of it sounded familiar, like from some anime, but I couldn’t place it. Oh, and it’s good stuff. I guess Nakamori, at least from what Wikipedia tells me, was one of the top idols from the early 80’s, and I can certainly see why. This stuff is catchy as hell. Even Youtube agrees: it just played like three of these song compilations in a loop (the autoplay algorithm can really use some work, which is why I stopped using Youtube as a music player).
(This is a continuation of the last post, a game of Hearts of Iron 4, just because I wanted to. Also, AAR stands for “After-Action Report,” a common way to recap/follow games on the forums for such.)
So we captured Panama. So far so good. The decision is whether to go down south into Colombia, or to take over the independent islands of the Caribbean. Looking just at resources, Colombia (and Venezuela, and Ecuador, etc.) basically just have more oil, of which Mexico has plenty. Cuba, however, has a ton of chrome, which is needed for tanks, which I’ll need if I’m going to take on the larger countries down south. (My armored divisions are still using light tanks, because I’ve been up against pure infantry up to now.) So Cuba is the target. Should be easy, right?
Easy victory…
Not so fast! Despite having a total force smaller than any single one of my armies to this point, and no air force at all, and no mechanized or armored divisions, they still put up a hell of a fight. My first attempt (I’ll admit, I savescum) was to invade from the south/east, from Guantanamo. Initial landing took way too long, and eventually they beat back my forces completely.
One thing to note about combat in this game is that you need to sorta think about supply lines. Now, in this game they are very abstracted, basically you just need a direct line back to your main areas. This can include over water, but you need a port, not just a coast. No port, and your supply line is cut off. Also, you need a place to retreat to. If you have that, your defeated divisions can go back a territory, to rest and rebuild. This process doesn’t take that long…if you have the supply line intact. If you don’t, then the defeated units don’t rebuild – and a damaged unit is barely better than no unit at all. And if there is no place to retreat to, then the unit gets destroyed instead of retreating. Another thing to take into account is that only a certain amount of individual divisions can actually take part of the battle at any time. The rest of an army is in reserves, and gets called up as the front line retreats from damage. So having a huge stack isn’t immediately better.
Taking those things into account, a country like Cuba presents problems. Having a lot of armies with many divisions, like I did there, isn’t a huge advantage in a place that’s basically a line of territories. As I defeated their divisions, they’d just retreat, heal up, and come right back. I could do the same thing, sometimes. But as my supply lines were longer, they could do the meat grinder longer. And if any army got isolated, it was over quickly. Also, my initial tries didn’t have marines, which are basically custom-made for sea assaults; regular units have a much harder time.
I tried several times, going back to the save at the start of the war, trying different landing strategies. Even when the initial assault worked, my forces would inevitably get annihilated, even outnumbering the enemy 4:1. It took several hours real-time to crack this nut (I wrote the last post after the above defeat, as it was getting late). However, I eventually got it, and when I did it right, it was ezpz. I split up one of my armies in half, for a total of five armies: two big standard armies, a small army of just marines to go against Havana (which is fortified), and then two smaller armies. The strategy was this: start the initial assault against the west part of Cuba, like usual, draw up all the enemy to that side of the island as usual, and then a short while later assault the east end that would be completely open, then cut off the opposition from reinforcement and sweep them up. The initial landings went even better than expected, and pretty much as soon as I occupied the east it was over, with barely any fighting.
Next up is just hopping to the next country, Haiti. This was going to be a cakewalk – or so I thought. Haiti hadn’t been idle this whole time, and had built up a decently strong force. They rebuffed my first attack completely. Trouble is that they only have three territories, only one of which has a port, and it’s the one in the middle. So even landing on all three and getting the outside two isn’t that big of an advantage, since those two are now cut off from the supply line (this game apparently has never heard of setting up beachhead ports), and thus have an enormous disadvantage: even taking it from three sides, they were able to defeat me utterly. I hadn’t really committed, as I was also planning on invading Belize, so that was a bummer. Next time, I committed my entire forces, which almost had the same end. The first landing against Port-au-prince was repulsed, but my marine army had healed up, and was able to come back and save the day, and Haiti was conquered as soon as the capital was occupied.
Now, this whole time, the rest of the world was not idle. (Well, except for the USA, which I don’t think did a single thing the entire game but switch between communism and fascism every election. Oh wait, they formed their own faction (Axis, Allies, Comintern, etc.), with them and Paraguay, right at the end.) As I was conquering Haiti, the Axis finally defeated the Allies. All of Britain’s American territories went to Italy, so if I wanted to get Belize, I’d have to take on the whole Axis. Which wasn’t happening. And so the world was now at peace, and the Olympics could resume.
I’ve never actually finished the whole timeline for this game, so I was surprised when the game itself ended in 1949. Didn’t do too badly for myself, but was still way behind in points. Having basically the bare minimum in armies, navy, and airforce kinda does that. Also didn’t have as much industry or infrastructure as I could have. But I accomplished what I wanted, which was fine.
Still has a lot of the same problems. I don’t own any of the DLC. Paradox’s MO when they release DLC is to make major patches for free, with lots of changes, which are mostly negative/nerfs, if you don’t have the DLC which adds systems to take advantages of those nerfs. So, not buying DLC is basically a net negative for these games. (Though sometimes it doesn’t add annoying mechanics, like the Aztec invasion or plagues in Crusader Kings II, if you don’t have those DLC.) And this game isn’t really worth playing on its own, let alone buy DLC: it’s very shallow, despite the complexity. But hey, at least they took out the event where the USA shuts down any smaller American nations, so that’s a plus.
Thought I’d do something a bit different. I don’t know why I got this idea yesterday, but here we go. I decided to try Hearts of Iron 4 after a year, see if things had improved any. While I am fond of grand strategy games like this, this particular game hasn’t really grabbed me in the past. There’s just too much of the modern Paradox feel to it, along with several unfun aspects. But why not give it a shot again?
I know I’m playing it “wrong,” because you’re supposed to take part in WWII. That’s the whole point. But I don’t like grand wars like that. I want to play something a bit smaller-scale. Too bad that this particular time period isn’t too convenient for that – too many big boys, and if you play Europe, you ARE going to get in the war, and probably promptly wrekt unless you’re one of the big guys. And for the rest of the world, it’s mostly just colonial powers, with one major exception: Central and South America. So that’s where we’re going this time.
Now, there is (or was) a problem with this: in my previous game, there was an event that the USA would get, that would basically put all of the Americas under its wing, and any aggressive moves against any country would put it – and all its allies – against you. This would be pretty inconvenient, if you were trying to make the biggest X you could. Many of my runs basically ended at this point. And if you happened to be at war when this happened, suddenly you’d find yourself in the Axis against America. Very annoying.
Now, I’d heard a while ago that events and focuses were changed somewhat, improved, and that this particular thing had gone away. So here I am, going to make Greater Mexico (I think most of the fun C.American empire names didn’t make it over from VickyII). And so it goes. I’m playing on EZMODO FOR FIRST GRADERS, since it’s been a while. Let’s get to it!
The trouble with playing these minor countries is that you basically start at the beginning, a global primitive. (And the focus tree is very generic). I’m going to focus on industry first, since rushing production is key to getting ahead of the neighbors. (That’s also why I started as Mexico, since they actually have a few factories and resources to actually do anything at all; Argentina or Brazil are also good starts for this reason.) After that, going down the facism tree, to improve the militarism of the populace. Don’t need to do much with navy or air, since my neighbors are overland, and just as primitive as I (with slower improvements to boot). For tech, I’m going mechanized infantry and industry focus.
The start of the game is pretty boring honestly. Being primitive keeps the options low, and you can’t even declare war until the global conflict meter gets over 50% – basically after WWII starts. Annoying in the past, when you’d have to rush until the USA stopped your “neutrality” game. And boring for the start. Until then, it’s just a waiting game, slooooowly building up the army.
There goes the neighborhood.
Naturally, as Mexico the first victim is Guatemala. They can’t even come close to withstanding my armies, and victory is quick.
Interestingly, the USA went commie. That certainly won’t affect anything at all. Also, USA is guaranteeing independence to all American countries. Very interesting, but I guess that only applies to non-American countries, because they don’t even send a strongly-worded leter.
After that, it’s just a slow march down south, hopping country to country. El Salvador managed to almost achieve parity in troop levels, which was concerning when they were together, but splitting into both their territories, it wasn’t even an issue. Soon we’re down to Panama.
Panama presents a little bit of a problem. The country is bisected by the Panama Canal, which is owned by the USA (now fascist I guess, because why not?). USA won’t let me have military access, despite 100 relations. And Panama won’t surrender, despite having no army, and me occupying the capital. So an amphibious landing it is! Only, I don’t remember how it’s supposed to work. So I sit there for weeks, months, nothing happening. I need naval supremacy, but my navy is the only one in the region? Oh, I need to have the “support landings” mission. OK, everything is fine, mission accomplished.
So now Mexico holds all of Central America, except for the Panama Canal and British Belize. I could probably take Belize – Britain is a bit busy at the moment, and USA is neutral. But I think I’ll let it go for now. Next up: Cuba. If I can ever beat it…
I was initially going to title this something along the lines of “first impressions,” but after playing this over a week, and doing half the guardians, I think my impressions are a little beyond initial. But my main impression: this is a great game, that could be made possibly the best game ever made with only a few tweaks.
As for my initial impression, the big take was: this is what Conan: Exiles could be, if that game had some actual structure (and no base building). Both games feel pretty similar, at least at first, before they really get going: you are a weakling in a very dangerous world that doesn’t care about your existence, and won’t even give you weapons that don’t break after a couple of mobs. And you climb things. A lot. But not too high, or you fall down and die. Which death will be marked on the map for no reason.
I have to say, I really like the format of this game. A lot of people put the game down for not really having the traditional dungeon structure, but I quite enjoy not being stuck in a series of puzzles and combat rooms. The shrines are basically individual dungeon rooms spread across the map, which is just fine by me. And I don’t mind there not being monsters or npc’s every ten feet. Maybe they could be more common (especially villages), but it’s fine.
My major complaint is the same as most folk’s: the equipment durability. It really should be twice what it is. And it really sucks to finally get good stuff, only for it to break on some low-tier mob and you have to take their crappy stuff. I really hope that gets addressed in the sequel.
It’s the official beginning of April (the 1st doesn’t count), so here I am, to describe what I did, gaming-wise at least, last month, and what I hope to do this month.
As I mentioned before, I got a Switch. A new system naturally means new games. And, as I mentioned before, I got them: Splatoon 2, Hyrule Warriors, and Breath of the Wild. I also got the cheap standard-style controller, just for fun, which turned out to be the right call, as it’s what I mostly use (I also play on TV, always, so far).
Started with Splatoon, which is a fun game, but not really my speed. I’m not all that into competitive shooters in general, nor console shooters. Once I got access to the noob roller, though, things started looking up, but I was kinda frustrated by the lack of coordination between the competitive, coop, and single-player modes. So I only played a little bit of that.
Next came Hyrule Warriors, which was a game I’ve been looking forward to for a long time. I know it’s not really cool to like it, but I did. In fact, it might be my new favorite Zelda game; it’s definitely up there, at any rate. Not just for the cute girls, either, though it does have that.
Speaking of cute girls, isn’t BotW Zelda very cute? This is a seriously fun game. Also frustrating sometimes. Like, why even have those stupid forced gyro sections (remember how I got the cheap controller?)? But still, very good. /v/ has been crapping on this game since day 1, and there are some valid criticisms there, but it’s an extremely good game.
Granblue Fantasy Vs. came out on Steam. So I got it with the Season 1 pass. $80, and it doesn’t even come with gacha game codes. Bad move, but I guess it was to prevent cheaters. Even with the simplified controls, it’s too much for me sometimes. Even in the single-player modes. I’m just not a fightan’ game guy, no matter how much I want to get into the genre.
Also did the normal stuff in the various gacha games. Granblue Fantasy had it’s 6th anniversary celebration practically the whole month, which included a ton of free rolls; those turned out pretty well for me. That anniversary event was good too; it disappointed a lot of people, but I thought it was quite good – I think it was just got overhyped, over practically nothing. (Also, fujos and yumes mad that the brute got the unit instead of the bishi.) Dragalia Lost is currently having it’s 1.5 anniversary celebration, which is cool I guess.
As far as MMO’s go, haven’t really done much. ESO is seriously on the backburner for me – too many other games I’m actually excited to play right now, rather than the inertia that drives my MMO playing.
As for next month, I plan to finish BotW. Not 100% it or anything (I’m not going to be posting videos of me doing cool stuff – I can barely handle the basics!), but I’ll finish the game to my liking. Then it will be Fire Emblem Warriors. After that, who knows?
At the beginning of a new time period, it is common for humans to reflect on the past time period, and make goals for improving performance in the new time period. As such, I would like to join my fellow humans this new time period:
Video games have got to go. Video games are pure wastes of time, and like my fellow humans I have little time to waste these days. So busy with so many things!
Star Trek has got to go. In present optimistic times, the last thing we need is an optimistic hope for a bright future, where all of fellow humans are better humans. Fortunately CBS and the current head of Star Trek, Alex Kurtzman, are doing wonderfully, turning Trek into the bleak modern generic sci-fi we humans love. However, there is all that Star Trek from the past that still exists, readily available in multiple formats. I will just have to quit all that.
Anime and manga have got to go. Anime presents an unrealistic expectation for fellow humans, giving feelings of things like moe and beauty and cuteness and happiness. Instead, the ugly generic Cal-Arts western cartoons are for me.
The Internet has got to go. I have too much interaction with my fellow humans as-is, especially these days; I don’t need to waste time online. And, considering most of my interactions with my fellow humans is about the above three things, I can join my fellow humans in setting and attaining efficiency improvement goals this way.
Well, it’s been a while since the (time before) last I’ve written. So, have I just been being boring this whole time? Or has stuff actually happened (worth writing about here)?
In a word, yes! Lots of exciting stuff! Well, and other things that are aggravating, too. But they caused excitement of a sort, at least.
First off, I got a Switch. I’ve been putting it off a long time, obviously. I’m not really sure what made me pull the trigger when I did. I’m glad I got it when I did: there’s been a bit of a shortage of all sorts of Chinese-manufactured stuff lately, for some reason…but I was able to get one despite that. My first two games were Hyrule Warriors and Splatoon 2. Haven’t put too much time into the latter, but the former…wow, it really surprised me how much I liked it. Liked it so much, in fact, that I got Fire Emblem Warriors, and I’ve never even really played a FE game (I think I put in an hour or two in one of the GBA games, but didn’t like it, and dropped it). Finally, I got Breath of the Wild (which is my current game). One thing that does disappoint me about the Switch is that, on the face of it, you can only share screens to some social media…and I don’t want to spam my twitter with screenshots (especially before I post them here!).
Star Trek Picard ended. Good riddance. I’ll have more to say on that at some point.
I’ve been playing my mobile games, to some extent or another. Anniversaries and such are a good time to at least log in and see what’s going on.
That’s about it, for now. Didn’t really do the Maybe In March thing. I tried some backlog stuff, but none of it really stuck. Obviously, as I’m playing new games. But at least I’m playing those new games, instead of just adding them to my backlog.
I’ve decided to participate in Blapril. How exciting!
Now, I know what you’re thinking. “This guy hasn’t posted any thing at all in the past month. How is he going to do something every day?” This is valid. But never you mind the recent past; look even further. I averaged a post every day my very first month, I can handle this this month. Especially since I’ve had a whole month of ideas and games (games!) to build up. Of course, I can’t guarantee quality, but that’s always been the case.
Dating Sims on the Holodeck 