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Pokémon TCG Pocket (iPd) by jp (Sep 17th, 2026 at 20:24:16) |
Hmm, still "playing" though I would very often forget to "check in" when I first arrived in Rochester. So, for a hot minute, I though I might have been done with it.
The other night I played the card game - demo at a store - and was surprised to learn that the card game is basically a super set of this game. I guess I didn't have a real conception of the difference between them - I thought that the cards were all the same, but they're not! This actually made me a bit less interested in this game, since it really is a watered down version of the regular card game.
I do think it's an interesting approach that I don't know of other examples? Because it really does seem like a subset rather than a "new" or "different" or "variant" version. I wonder if someone's looked closely at them?
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Lorelei and the Laser Eyes (PC) by jp (Sep 17th, 2026 at 20:19:59) |
I feel bad that I didn't keep on playing this one. At this point all of my handwritten notes and reminders and things I'd figured out are long gone...and this doesn't seem like the kind of game you can just pop back into. I think there's too many things going on. So, I'm just going to call it my loss and close out the game log...
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Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (NSW) by jp (Sep 17th, 2026 at 20:18:03) |
Still playing! I'm surprised myself, to be honest. I usually hit some sort of wall with these games - usually a boss fight - I try for a certain amount of time, eventually give up and move on.
I'm currently on the 5th stage, right before another boss battle with one in the can already. The story is - I think pretty obviously - one of a character (Deedlit) in some sort of nightmare/dream hell...so I'm curious how this will end. Sadly, I don't remember how/when the anime ends, and I have no idea if this game is supposed to take place somewhere in the regular continuity?
The fire an arrow at a gear puzzles are still a bit annoying - mostly because timing is a bit tricky for some of them, but I've been able to get past without too much trouble even if there's a bit of frustration at times.
I also feel like I'm getting better - in general - at the boss fights. I've realized how maintaining distance is important, I'm also getting better at swapping between the yellow/blue modes because when you're at level 3 with one, you automatically heal, so if you take a hit, switching over is a way the heal up and it's saved me more than once.
The map is really dense and convoluted in a way that's quite impressive. I guess I'd describe the overall map like a giant rectangle and it seems like it's all pretty much filled in! I wonder how much more there is to the game. The 4th stage felt rather short, and looking at the map it doesn't seem like there's many more places it could go (I guess an entirely new map would be the obvious?)
Fingers crossed that I'm able to continue...
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Bridge Constructor Portal (PS4) by jp (Sep 12th, 2026 at 16:02:23) |
Oh, the main reason I got bored is because, once the levels start to get a lot more complicated, I found myself in the situation of having to painstakingly "rebuild" bridges from scratch because my first attempt just just off by a little bit...and you can't really do things like select a whole construction and, say, move it to the left a little bit...you just have to built it again from scratch, which got a bit tiresome - felt more busywork.
That being said, because the physics simulation isn't quite 100% predictable - there are moments of genuine surprise and laughter. Each level has essentially two goals - get one cart across and get a convoy (multiple, that come out at a regular rate) of carts across. The convoy part was definitely more fun because your bridge might work for one cart, but oscillate a bit such that the next cart barely missed, and then there's a whole pileup with carts flipping and getting stuck or the entire bridge swinging out of control.
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Bridge Constructor Portal (PS4) by jp (Sep 12th, 2026 at 15:58:36) |
I played 40 plus levels, it was fun, didn't take too long but began to get a bit tiresome (which is why I've bailed and moved on).
This game is a portal-themed bridge-constructing game in which carts move automatically and you have to build structures that will sustain/hold them on their way to a pre-determined exit. It's physics based, and having taken static mechanics as an undergraduate I appreciated the load-balancing/bearing principles behind a lot of the gameplay.
However, the game's gameplay is portal-themed and not portal-based. In the main Portal games (1 and 2), the cognitive challenge comes from figuring out where to place portals and how to navigate yourself (your character, in first-person view if I recall) around an area such that you can reach the exit. In this game, the portals (and later gels for speedy and bouncy effects) are already placed - you just need to build bridges. This is fair to the game's title - just an observation not a complaint.
In fact, the existence of portals arguably makes the puzzles themselves more interesting because it affords larger areas withing a single screen/area. If a level in this context is a large rectangular "diorama" - there are only certain ways to navigate from, say, the top left corner down to the bottom right. Portals allows the game's designers to create different navigational paths that violate the regular rules you'd have to follow in a normal space - Portaling around is basically teleporting (going from A to B without traversing anything in between) - so you can have more "interesting" routes you need to build bridges in.
I haven't played the other games in the series, which I assume have their own interesting mechanics and level-things to avoid/make use of, and I wonder if "teleporters" were used in their earlier games? If so, then this game is a lot less interesting - after all it limits itself to portal themed things (switches, sentry guns, the gels, etc.) while the other games could presumably have all that and much more.
Still, as a theming exercise, it's really well done - GladOs and more...and fun little interstitials every 10 levels (or was it 20?).
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GameLog hopes to be a site where gamers such as yourself keep track of the games that
they are currently playing. A GameLog is basically a record of a game you started playing. If it's open,
you still consider yourself to be playing the game. If it's closed, you finished playing the game. (it doesn't matter
if you got bored, frustrated,etc.) You can also attach short comments to each of your games or even maintain a diary (with more detailed entries)
for that game. Call it a weblog of game playing activity if you will.
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2323 registered gamers and 3383 games. 7922 GameLogs with 13431 journal entries. 5118 games are currently being played.
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Thronebreaker: The Witcher Tales (PC) by dkirschner |
| Heroes of Might & Magic crossed with Gwent. Badass. --------- Certainly fun, but starts to drag, is really long, too big maps, too easy. |
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most recent entry: Thursday 20 July, 2023
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This is a CCG + Heroes of Might & Magic style Witcher game. One draw of Thronebreaker is that you can acquire cards to use in Gwent. It was well reviewed on its own though, so it was a no-brainer to play (and I paused Gwent until I finished!). Thronebreaker is extremely engaging, though it does peter off after the halfway mark as the game begins to drag for its length. The maps may be a bit bland, but the characters and especially the cards are well drawn and animated. I always like looking at and reading the Gwent cards. The writing is excellent. Gwent itself is fun, but dulled down for this single-player experience, though the addition of puzzles added some interesting situations. You play as Meve, a backstabbed and deposed queen, who travels far and wide, building an army, to expel a conquering army from her land, punish the traitors, and take back the throne.
In the beginning, Thronebreaker seemed to provide some challenge, but unfortunately once you get some specific cards, learn the enemy AI, and develop some fairly basic strategies, it is really easy, even on the hard difficulty (and then you fight the final boss, geez. It took me about 10 tries, some strategizing about my deck, and a dose of luck to win. There should have been more of this difficulty!). This could also be because I’ve played a fair amount of Gwent and other CCGs, but it’s really not that complex here, being distilled from the full Gwent game.
I found a lot of these “insta-win” strategies across my playthrough and rarely had to vary them; they applied to almost all situations. For example, the card Reyna has an “order” ability (which means you can perform an action with the card once it’s played) that lets you choose a card to play from your deck. I had another card with an order ability to give two charges to another card’s order ability. So, of course I always chose that card, then just gave the two charges to Reyna, who could then choose two more cards from the deck. I had yet a third card that gave one charge to any card that had exhausted its order cards. So I always picked that one last and Reyna got another charge, and so did that card that gives cards other charges (so I could give Reyna yet another charge). All in all, by playing Reyna, I started a combo that resulted in me putting like 6 hand-picked cards on the board, which is absurd. No enemy ever was able to match that. That’s part of the problem with the difficulty. The enemy can’t match you. You pull off these crazy combos (that are not hard to set up) and the enemy can do nothing. But, in the story, Reyna massacred some dwarven prisoners because she is racist and I kicked her out of my party, so I lost her card. This happened a few other times too. I thought the game would get a bit more challenging after these characters left and I lost their cards, but not really. There are numerous other insta-win strategies to find.
For example, my last one (near the end of the game, not the final boss) was to play literally the most basic card in the game. It’s a farmer with 10 power who gains +7 power when Meve uses her leader ability (which you can get down to every 2 or 3 turns). Then, on the second turn I play an artifact that lets me play all copies of any card I have on the board. So I play four more copies of the farmer. Then I use Meve’s leader ability. That makes 17x5 = 85 points on turn two. And the artifact is a golden card, and the first time I play a golden card, there’s a cool dog card that automatically plays. So really like 92 points after turn 2. The enemy has no hope of keeping up after that. Another insta-win strategy is to set both enemy rows on fire (I have two cards that set a row on fire) and bounce enemies back and forth between rows (I have five cards and a leader ability that move three cards at a time to a different row and damage them). I mean, these strategies just decimate the AI. The AI, by the way, frustratingly refuses to give up or pass when it’s clearly losing, and forces you to play rounds far longer than is necessary. I’ll be up 200-20 and the enemy AI is still considering its next move. Annoying. A variety of changes could make Thronebreaker meaningfully shorter, and this is one of them. The other main one is smaller maps. They’re unnecessarily large.
So about halfway through the game, I realized it wasn’t going to get any harder. It was a cakewalk. And you basically do the same thing across five giant maps (and yet another small map after you technically beat the game. It keeps fucking going!), traversing the land, clicking on resources, clicking on encounters, making some story decisions, and stomping the enemy in battles. Luckily, as per CD Projekt Red and The Witcher games, the story is thrilling and characters are dark and complex. Every little side branch, every character, every engagement, it’s all so well written, often dreary with unexpected twists, that it’s what has kept me going. Battles are still fun, of course, but knowing I’m going to win makes them feel like time-wasters. One very cool addition though is the puzzle battles. These give you specific cards, specific rules, and a specific objective, and you usually have to figure out a specific order in which to perform actions to meet the objective. Some of these have been quite tricky! Puzzle battles are where the game’s challenge lies, instead of the regular battles (which are also usually arbitrarily shortened to one round, which at first I didn’t like, but now I like because they’re too easy and I want them to go faster). One puzzle battle took the form of a game of memory. Another riffed on Hearthstone, and was hilarious. Another challenged you to get that cute dog I mentioned through a dungeon, eating all the food along the way. Each one is unique.
Finally, you’re collecting all those resources on the map for a reason. You can upgrade your camp, which is interesting enough, but like the realization that the game is easy, you’ll realize you don’t need to think about upgrades either. You’ll have enough resources to upgrade everything and create every card. There aren’t tough gameplay choices to make here.
I’m looking forward to seeing what all I unlocked in Gwent because it turns out I just about 100%ed Thronebreaker! Just. About. I missed a weapon somewhere and got 38/39 achievements. I 97%ed it. Damn mystery weapon!
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