The really sickening thing about this teaser image is that they can continue using 1337 that’s been outdated for over a decade until Borderlands 7. And if they start adding subtitles around installment 4 or 5, as long running game series are wont to do, they could do it indefinitely.
Doki Doki Literature Club is a psychological horror game disguised as a visual novel. That much is obvious from its stern warnings that the game is not suitable for the easily disturbed despite otherwise marketing itself solely as a VN, so that’s not really spoilers, however I am spoiling the Hell out of it below the break.
Hollow Knight is a game I got during the Steam Christmas sale but only bothered playing just now. It may just be because I’ve only just started playing, and more flaws will reveal themselves over time, but Hollow Knight is an incredible game. I can’t find enough good things to say about it. Its atmosphere is amazing, the location – a fallen kingdom of sapient bugs called Hallownest – is interesting and new and varied and makes me want to explore it, the combat is fun and challenging. It’s something I’d recommend to anyone who likes Metroidvania games even a little bit.
One thing that I like about it that I couldn’t have told you I’d like in advance is how small and agile the player character is (at this point I’m not sure if you’re the titular hollow knight or if maybe the hollow knight is the main bad guy or just some critical piece of background lore or what). The player character is at least a little bit smaller than almost every enemy and NPC encountered and is kind of adorable, but the controls are extremely responsive, the arc of the sword slash is wide, and the mana you use to heal or attack at range is recharged by smacking enemies, which encourages (and as time goes on, more and more requires) a very mobile and aggressive playstyle. The juxtaposition between how cute the character looks and how very deadly he can be with just a little practice is strangely compelling.
So I spent most of my spare time playing Hollow Knight today, which is why I’m posting about it instead of making real content.
Many of the towns in Vestitas can be captured as a result of engaging with the adventures associated with their hex, as often the town government is in on or targeted by whatever conspiracy is afoot. When that doesn’t happen, however, characters may capture towns with pure military force. This requires two things: To clear out the current forces holding the town, and to install new ones behind.
Every hex encounter town in Vestitas is held by three forces. For the Imperium, these forces are the PDF, the Ecclesiarchy, and the Arbites. For Chaos territory, these forces are the Red Guard, Chaos sorcerers, and the Praetorians. Every town has a single squad of PDF/Red Guard with a chimera, an Ecclesiarchy preacher or Chaos sorcerer, and a pair of Arbites or Praetorians, plus the Lord Mayor, who is either a noble or a warlord. Once the first three (PDF, Ecclesiarchy, and Arbites or Red Guard, sorcerer, and Praetorians) have been defeated, the Lord Mayor will flee, although if he ends up being killed in the fracas, that works too.
Either way, once the players have cleaned the town out, they must drop a squad of at least a half-dozen of their own loyal minions on the town to provide the muscle. Providing a spiritual leader and someone to investigate crimes that dumb-as-bricks paramilitaries can’t figure out is optional, but encouraged.
Dear brother,
I think, after this week, I can safely conclude that I’ve come to the bad part of Europe.
This hex encounter has a proper, full-fledged three clues style mystery. Except I couldn’t figure out a third clue in time to keep my schedule from slipping any further, so instead it’s a two clues mystery with a couple of mulligans thrown in.
Here’s something that happens way too often: People will come to a thread asking for advice and give their opinion. Worse still, sometimes someone will post advice that applies to general markets, and then a second someone will post their opinion as a counterpoint. Even if the first person is just making a guess about market trends based on their anecdotal experience, they are still actually trying to help the creator who asked the question. Someone who posts their opinion is implicitly claiming that a creator’s goal should be to cater to their tastes, specifically, or at best the tastes of whatever half-dozen random yahoos first walk into the Reddit/forum thread where the advice was posted.
Some creators are hoping to appeal to a broad audience of strangers in hopes of making a career out of their passion. Others have a more specific audience in mind, maybe some personal friends or what-have-you. In the latter case, no amount of personal opinions from random strangers will be at all helpful. In the former case, only the aggregated opinions of many thousands of strangers matters at all. If the creator is a writer trying to make a living self-publishing and they sell their books for $6.99 each and see about $5 of that in actual income, and if they’re writing one book per year, they need about ten thousand fans buying each book to make an average-ish annual income of $50k. If that writer asks for advice on their latest project and you walk in and give your personal opinion without even bothering to think whether or not anyone else shares it, the immediately relevant question is: Are you ten thousand people? No? Then shut up.
The magical doodad in this one involves age reversal. You can pick up some penalties if you sacrifice too many people to the pit and get yourself bumped down to fifteen years old. This immediately begs the question: Why can’t you get stat bonuses for going from 30s or 40s back to your 20s? How come there’s penalties for messing up, but no benefits for actually using the pit correctly? The answer is that characters who are already in their 20s would be unable to get those bonuses, which would be unfairly penalizing them, because it’s not like they got more characteristics at chargen or anything.
Additionally, I expect few parties will end up stumbling into the penalties, whereas many parties would figure out how to get themselves the bonuses. This means that characteristic bonuses could be had for the low price of snuffing a few Chaos sorcerers, which would benefit people who rely on those characteristics a lot (like melee builds) while being barely noticeable to people who don’t tend to use them in the first place (like ranged builds, face builds, psyker builds – anyone for whom being in melee means something has gone horribly wrong, and 5 extra points of Toughness and Strength won’t change that). It’s not like it’s a short-lived bonus, or one that requires a lot of effort to acquire.
I don’t know why, but this whole mini-adventure was way harder than I thought it would be to write, and I’m not sure it’s up to my usual standards of quality. I can’t point to any specific flaw, but it all feels very off to me.
Google likes to serve me up ads for mobile games, since I do occasionally play them, usually just to have something to keep my hands busy while I listen to podcasts. This is how I ended up playing and subsequently hating Galaxy of Heroes. That’s not nearly as bad as this can get, though. Today I saw an ad for a game called “Galaxy War” (or maybe “Galactic War,” it’s hard to tell since the name is so generic that it’s buried in the store, thank God) that’s almost literally an asset flip of Unity’s free Space Shooter Tutorial. Now, it’s not quite an asset flip, since it does include some online leaderboard stuff that isn’t in the original tutorial, but the actual assets and gameplay are identical. They added some bells and whistles (probably Skinner box in nature) and called it a day.
Asset flipping isn’t new, but I got served up a video ad for this one while playing another (unrelated) mobile game. Usually this level of amateur hour sham shows don’t have an advertising budget. Like, Final Fantasy XV: A New Empire is just a Game of War clone (which is, itself, only slightly modified from Evony, which has been blighting the internet for nearly a decade now), but it’s at least got new assets. It might be copying Canadian Devil-grade fun-free mechanics that profit exclusively off of gambling addicts and advertising itself with a tower defense ad “demo” despite having no such gameplay in the actual game, but at least on the surface it appears to be an actual game of some kind. They don’t actually advertise the fact that their game is brazen theft.
Chamomile Has A Blog 