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Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (NSW) by jp (Sep 22nd, 2026 at 07:38:16) |
The night before last I played some more and beat the gauntlet! I felt very chuffed about that...kept on going, got to another boss (Parn!) beat that, and immediately after was ANOTHER boss...I lost really quickly and got really mad. In my mind it was boss gauntlet + Parn + final boss...with no saves in between and the thought of doing it all over was too much. So, I put the game down pretty confident that I'd just have to watch the ending on Youtube or something.
Last night I picked it up for a "last attempt" of sorts - before that though I scoured the map and found a few secret areas I had missed! And one area that was now accessible I had forgotten about. Good thing I did, I got a new weapon (the Chakram?) with great range, for a little less damage, but just the sort of thing I'd need for the final boss fight. I then stocked up on potions, swapped my spell to one I thought might work better, and went back in.
And success! (I think I had to try twice)
And in the end, was it all a dream. Sure. With some more to it...but still. The epilogue was nice, though it was weird to going back to level 1 with none of the additional movement unlocked - not that there was any challenge.
It feels strange to beat a game like this. I usually bail a lot earlier due to my lack of interest in practicing enough to improve enough so I can clear certain challenges. This game hit the sweet spot for me - it wasn't trivial, and I felt like I improved and learned the game's systems over time.
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Please, Don't Touch Anything! (PC) by jp (Sep 20th, 2026 at 13:12:20) |
It's weird for me to think/write that the most important "contribution" this game has had for me is how useful/intriguing it's been to show students in experimental games class. The game is strange and quirky and funny and genuinely interesting as a puzzle box style game, especially once you've peeled back a few of its layers and understand how the game's support to work.
Over the years fewer students have heard of it, or played it, which is both good and bad. Good means there's more room for it to be genuinely surprising to them, bad means it's also increasingly more "strange" - I've found that students have a lot less to go on with this game since it is so exploratory in the beginning. Hmm. it would have also made a good addition to the "thinky games" cycle when we did the game design seminar...
Now that I'm at a new place with a new group of students, I wonder how it would go with them?
It's been a while since I've played it - and I don't recall which endings I got or anything like that, but it seems like I did make decent progress since I've only got 5 locked achievements. One if for every ending, the other for ending 25 without unnecesary buttons being pressed. 3 are hidden.
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Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth (NSW) by jp (Sep 20th, 2026 at 12:41:02) |
I'd been playing until I got stuck on a fight - it's a two-parter boss against a soldier guy. The second part is against a sort of zombie/ghoul version of this soldier guy who spews green venom and turns into toxic clouds.
After scouring the map for missing things - found a few new upgrades (not interesting ones at this point) and filled in the map a bit more which was nice - I finally realized that I could buy more than one health potion (up to 10!) and I've come to better appreciate how the magic select menu works. So, I devised a new strategy for the boss fight. I'd get to the 2nd phase and swap out the spell with healing potions and try to use those to stay alive. And it worked! I was down to 3 or so...but still.
Yay!
I'm now in Stage 6. I think this might be the last chapter?
So, I kept on moving through new areas...and went back to older areas too - found a few secret areas as well (null space on the map)...and then I hit what I hope does NOT become a new wall.
Maybe this is the end/last battle? It's basically been - so far - a gauntlet of all the bosses (I think all?) in the game. And, while I don't think they've been scaled in difficulty (meaning some are way easier than when I fought them originally), it is quite tiring.. I did quite well until I got to the boss fight I'd just been stuck on earlier. My hands were cramping up and I just...couldn't.
Thankfully after I forget which boss there are items between them to heal up and such...but still. I think I lost this one from nerves and cramps more than difficulty? Though, I dread to see what happens AFTER this one. Will there be another boss? Sigh. I hope not.
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The Silver Case (PS4) by jp (Sep 20th, 2026 at 12:26:42) |
As I was installing the game I wondered why I had picked it up in the first place. So, I flip the case over and read the back - nothing really stands out until I look down and see "Grasshopper Manufacture".
Ah. Ok.
Grasshopper's oeuvre is interesting in that it's always weird, and strange, and they somehow manage to stay in business which makes it also surprising to me. I think the last game of theirs that I played was "Sun Flower..something..something". A strange DS game that was strange and creepy and I don't think I ever finished. I won't open a separate tab to check my gamelog for that one...but whoever reads this might want to.
Anyways. The game has a really striking visual style - and it's really "noisy" i the visual UI sense. Lots of text coming on, and pictures of the characters in different places on the screen (not always the same place), and words that sort of float around in the background...and little animated effects. It's all very busy, attention grabbing, and just - to me - visually noisy in a way that made me less interested.
Apparently the version I have is a remaster of an older one, so I wonder if the low-res poly graphics (e.g. car driving down an embankment at night) and such are kept in smaller windows because it wouldn't look good today and all the rest of the decorative screen stuff is what's been updated?
Anyways. There was lots of reading. Watching stuff, more reading and very little gameplay...and when the gameplay started it was "fine" (moving around a 3D environment in first-person view, but grid-based, like the old CRPGs Bard's Tale or the dungeons in Ultima and Wizardry). It didn't feel interesting - story least of all - so I finished the first chapter and called it quits.
I just bounced off the writing, the story/context seemed strange but not intriguing...so, time to move on.
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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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The Riftbreaker (PC) by dkirschner |
| Hectic, hard! ----------- Exhausting! |
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most recent entry: Friday 10 December, 2021
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I've been playing this a lot the last two days. It's a crazy hybrid of tower defense, RTS, action-RPG, a horde mode, and more genres. I have never played anything quite like it. The closest thing overall might be Sanctum, which is a tower defense game where you also control a character, though it was tower defense and FPS, whereas this is tower defense/horde mode and top-down action-RPG/bullet hell. The humongous research tree is bigger than anything I've ever seen in an RTS and can only approach Path of Exile's skill tree in size. My initial impressions were surprise that everything clicks. You might think that all these genres can't be mashed together, but they are mashed really well.
If you play the campaign, you'll quickly realize that the story is bland though. It's just a pretense for base building and killing aliens. I read a review that said if you watched Avatar and rooted for the industrialist colonizers, then this game is for you (although the main character, Ashley, at once cares for the environment and destroys it, supposedly in service of extracting resources for life on Earth). You are plopped down on a planet. Your goal is to explore, catalog alien life, extract resources, and then get the hell out of there. You pretty quickly get the objective to get back to Earth, but that requires three other sub-objectives to build components of the teleporter that will take you to other biomes on the planet to face new environmental and faunal (is that a word?) challenges.
One main part of the game is base building. In this, the game is very much like an RTS. You build buildings, which unlock other buildings. Research down the skill tree to unlock upgrades and still more buildings. Extract resources to power all the buildings. Everything can be upgraded several times, and all these upgrades require ever more rare and difficult-to-extract resources. You'll create numerous mining outposts just to harvest xyz types of resources, which eventually involves you juggling your main base and a lot of other outposts at the same time, warping back and forth to maximize production and check on your defenses. In the base building, there are obvious Factorio inspirations. You know, those games where you maximize efficiency for automation and production and you see screenshots of people's games and you wonder how much time it took them to plan so precisely, as if they traced a blueprint on grid paper on their computer screen and filled it in.
The tower defense is part of the base building. You're going to get attacked (often) by hordes of aliens from all directions, so you need to build walls around your base, build towers (all the types, all the upgrades), make sure those towers are powered (yes, you have to manage a whole power grid), make sure those towers have ammo (yes, you have to build ammo storage; in fact, you have to build storage for just about every resource), and make sure that you can get through the wall to fight the aliens directly (don't forget your gates!). I never really made it far in the tower building department, as I preferred to take on the aliens myself. Well, maybe this is because I was no good at building my base...
Aliens attack in waves. You can clear them out on the map, but they respawn, and still new waves will attack your base. These waves quickly become massive, overwhelming. It was quite frustrating for me. I am on the "build a uranium outpost" level and I cannot get ahead of the alien swarms. I have established a perimeter around my base, but I can't build power arrays and towers fast enough before the next wave comes. I held off a couple with relatively minimal damage, but the last wave just annihilated my base. I mean, they destroyed my whole eastern wall, most of my solar power generators, my power storage, my outpost building, a bunch of factories and power plants, a bunch of power grid connectors. It's very demoralizing having to rebuild the entire base. And then, when you build it back, the aliens just come full force again. One thing that this game could benefit from is having a list of currently built buildings, or some indication of which buildings you are missing. It does well to show you when a building lacks power, and some other notifications, but after my base gets halfway destroyed, there's so much shit on the map that I am not sure which buildings were actually destroyed. I have to go through and catalog everything to figure it out, which is probably why I am unprepared for the next alien wave!
I was having early success taking on the attacking hordes myself. You control a big mech with a cool arsenal of weapons (all of which must also be researched, crafted, upgraded, equipped, and modded). The flamethrower is great for swarms of weak enemies, mines are useful for extra defense, beefed up machine guns will annihilate some ranged enemies, and so on. The top-down bullet hell/action-RPG combat is fun, smooth, and challenging. There are a ton of weapons, upgrades, and mods. But eventually, the enemy number became too great and I could only hold off so many, while the rest destroyed my base.
I could continue rebuilding, learning from my mistakes, maybe making my base smaller and building more walls (as I saw people doing on stream, building walls like 4 thick), but man, it's frustrating! There was a level I was playing yesterday where you are learning how to pump mud into a water purifier, which you then route to a building that basically plants plants (for you to harvest after you've built a harvester building). In this level, you have to run a pipe almost the whole length of the level. This sounds easy, but it took me probably 3 hours. First, I was running the pipe through quicksand, which destroys it after a while (it took me some time to figure out this was the cause of my destroyed pipes). Second, aliens periodically attack your pipe (I learned to set teleporters along it so I could zip to the problem areas). The mud problem was solved by re-routing the pipes around mud. The alien problem was solved by, well, running up and down the length of the pipe repairing it and killing aliens, back and forth, back and forth, until I finally didn't have any holes in the pipe.
I think that, overall, that last example sticks with me the most to sum up The Riftbreaker. It's exhausting. Stressful. Frustrating. It's also very neat, but it is still all of those annoying feelings. I am also aware that it may take upwards of 40 hours to complete the campaign, which as I said earlier you are not doing for the story. The gameplay has to carry it. I would be more motivated to stick it out, to retry more times, if there was some interesting story thread, or if there was some mystery or question to be answered. There's not though! I can see the next 25 hours clearly: I'll continue unlocking everything in the skill tree. Once I finally get my uranium outpost up and running, I'll have to do the same thing for two other rare elements. I'll scan a million plants and animals (this is really boring), constantly fight while exploring the maps (this is already getting old because the enemies are so plentiful and aggressive), constantly defend my bases, and eventually open the rift back to Earth.
I'll keep this installed for the duration of my Game Pass time just in case I am inspired to go a'base building, but may not come back to it.
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