 |
|
Sid Meier's Civilization VI (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 16th, 2026 at 14:13:25) |
Eh. I played for a couple hours and was bored. I know this is one you have to sink time into to learn and thoroughly enjoy. But I'd just rather not, now that I see just how expansive it is. I did enjoy the option to be Teddy Roosevelt, after whom I named my cat. Bully! I got this in a massive Civ Humble Bundle a while back and gave most of the expansion pass keys away. Should have given it all away! On to the next thing!
read all entries for this GameLog 
- add a comment 
|
|
Fallout 4 (PS4) by jp (Oct 13th, 2026 at 10:30:59) |
For some daft reason I was sure I had played this - a bit - way back when I was at DePaul on an Xbox 360. I remember starting inside a vault, designing my character, leaving the vault, and then wandering around in the wasteland for a bit. I was also confused by the VATS system, which I thought was cool - but I had trouble with the UI/understanding the controls. And then, I didn't play again...
...and now I realize, having played the beginning of THIS game, that I was confusing it with Fallout 3! Wow. I've never played Fallout 4 prior to a few days ago..which seems kind of wild to me.
I've been having fun so far, and I'm learning how to work the UI - I have to stop myself with the VATS since I often, by mistake, switch between enemies instead of between locations on an enemy. But, think I'm starting to get the handle of it. It's a neat system and I just learned (realized) that you can lock in several shots in a row, which is nice.
I did struggle with the "base building" because it took me a while to realize that when building stuff at the workbench you have to WALK AROUND to place the things - I was just frustrated that I had all the items, but the "x" (to buy/place) was disabled.
I hope to play more over the coming days...having sort-of-recently seen the show, I feel like I'm ready to dive into Fallout more than I have in the past.
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Drop Duchy (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 12th, 2026 at 18:12:59) |
This really grew on me. It's a clever blend of Tetris, a city builder, and a roguelite. There's no story to speak of, so I can just explain how the game works. You choose a faction, say, The Duchy (there are only three aside from DLC). You have a few starting cards. At first, cards are either production buildings or military buildings. Production buildings generate resources (you start with the basics: food, lumber, gold), while military buildings generate troops (archers, axemen, swordsmen). You'll start on a standard roguelite map, the Slay-the-Spire-type three-lane path, and choose to move along it from encounter to encounter. You'll land on resources, peaceful regions, or battles at first (more types get unlocked).
Here's how battles work. You're on a Tetris grid. Tetris pieces appear, just like that game, and you rotate and place them, just like that game. Except the pieces are different types of terrain (say, forest, plains, and rivers). And your production and military buildings are also Tetris pieces that appear. And your enemy's military buildings are also in the deck of Tetris pieces. Buildings have various conditions and results. For example, the Farm (production building) turns nearby plains into fields and generates food. The Watchtower (military building) gives an archer for each plain in range and three archers for each field in range. You already see the synergy between these two buildings! When you complete a row, it is considered "explored", and you get resources for every terrain tile in the row (food for fields, lumber for trees, etc.). The row doesn't disappear (as in Tetris), so you have a limited amount of space to place the blocks in the deck before the round ends. If you explore multiple rows at once, you get bonus resources. So, every match is a game of managing terrain, production, and military buildings to generate resources AND to limit your opponent from generating soldiers. That is, when their Watchtower piece comes up, you want to place it next to some woods or some rocks, definitely not smack in the middle of a bunch of fields, where yours hopefully is.
You are always trying to minimize the army the enemy can raise because at the end of the round, you fight. Battles are a rock-paper-scissors affair between archers, axemen, and swordsmen. You basically move groups of units into other groups of units which stacks groups and sends them into battle. This is kind of hard to explain, but the game provides clear rules for how it works based on the size and type of groups that you're moving around, and the order in which battle happens. Just know that you want to be on the winning end of those rock-paper-scissors battles and you want to really, really think through the order in which you group your troops. One miscalculation can ruin the whole fight and lose the game.
When you complete an encounter, you choose a new card, and are thus always growing your deck. You use the resources harvested during rounds to upgrade cards. So, at the larger deck-building level, you're looking for synergies between cards, building a deck with some sort of theme, and balancing production and military. Not enough production and you can't upgrade stuff. Not enough military and you can't win battles. In my last game, my first full win, I actually had the fewest buildings I'd ever had. I'd unlocked "technology" cards, which are passive (e.g., every time you explore a field, gain 4 additional food; or, all military building upgrades are 20% cheaper; etc.). I was able to synergize really well and build a deck focused on fields. Fields all the way! I turned woods to plains, plains to fields, got food bonuses for fields, had buildings that created plains and fields when placed, military buildings with bonuses for fields, etc. I pretty much annihilated Act 3 and the last boss.
Speaking of bosses, I had no idea how they would do this. I thought bosses would just be like regular battles but with buffed cards, or maybe with more cards. But no! Boss battles fundamentally alter the grid in some way, alter your typical strategies, etc. For example, the last boss (who had killed me once before) requires "bribes," or else it'll throw you military buildings to deal with. To bribe it, you have to generate x resources over y turns and keep it up throughout the match. Every time you don't meet the bribe amount, the enemy sends a military building. And, every time you place a piece, there are squares on the grid that will automatically generate enemy troops if you place a piece there, and the squares change every piece, so you're constantly working around restrictions on the grid too. The first time I fought this boss, I got overwhelmed and lost. This time, the boss didn't send a single military building and I beat it by almost 100 troops, which is a lot.
This was inevitable, I think, because there are a ton of upgrades in the meta-progression. Tons of new cards, even new mechanics. For example, you can unlock religious buildings and the "faith" mechanic, unlock mercenaries, unlock the "constellation" mechanic (which lets you manipulate a piece every 10 or so pieces, depending), you can unlock technology cards, "noble" cards, and so on. You also upgrade your starting decks and resources with each faction as you play them. I am really tempted to win with each faction before setting the game aside, but I have so much other stuff to play. I'll keep it installed and probably come back in the future!
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Beacon Pines (PC) by dkirschner (Oct 9th, 2026 at 11:18:41) |
Cute little narrative game with a good, darker-than-expected story. The art style is excellent (I love the different ways that tears come out of the characters’ eyes) and the sound and music perfectly complement the setting and story. You play as Luka, a kid in Beacon Pines who discovers that some strange things are happening, and all the adults, including his grandmother, seem to be involved. Hmm…! Pal up with some friends to uncover the town’s secrets.
It features a mechanic where the narrative branches based on words that you discover (e.g., shame, fight, flight, chill, etc.). In certain situations (“turning points”), you can select from some words to use, which will change the course of the story. This was intriguing, but wasn’t used to its full potential. The game’s description oversells the impact of turning points. If you use the “wrong” word, you get a “the end” shortly thereafter. The game’s description says that using different words DRASTICALLY CHANGES EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWS and that you’ll jump back and forth between ENTIRELY DIFFERENT VERSIONS OF THE STORY! Not really. At a “the end” screen, you go back to the turning point (through a menu) and choose a different word. You’ll either get another ending in a second, or it’ll be the “correct” word that continues the story. There are some actual branches, but interestingly, the game still proceeds linearly. For example, you have to go down branch A to get to branch B to get back to branch A. In other words, there is only one way through the story. Oddly, there are some words that are never used. You can’t just choose any word in your stock during turning points; only specific ones are available, which narrows the potential of this mechanic further.
This mechanic reminded me a bit of Great God Grove, which is another “word game”, wherein you use phrases spoken by NPCs to solve dialogue puzzles. Instead of using whole phrases or sentences, here you just occasionally are prompted to use a word to complete a storybook narration, which determines what a character does and therefore what happens. Great God Grove also felt limiting. I suppose that is because language is near limitless, and that makes for tough narrative design.
Despite its simplicity, I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the mystery of Beacon Pines. I wonder if they’ll make a sequel. I’d be interested to see what Luka and his friends get up to next!
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
Crime O'Clock (NSW) by jp (Oct 8th, 2026 at 09:44:19) |
First, what a banger of a name for a game. Ha!
I picked this up from the box art. It looked like this was "MicroMacro: Crime City" in videogame form. A good thing in my mind. What made MicroMacro cool/fun is that it's a giant "where's wally" with an extra twist - you have to find things but then also "trace" them over time. So, a character might be dead in part of the "map", but you can look around to and see the character still alive walking to the place where they're dead, and so on. So, you trace time through space.. it's hard to describe.
This game - at least from what I've played so far does exactly the same thing with two differences. First, the map (illustration) changes - so, there are different maps for different snapshots in time (some things change others stay the same from what I can tell). Second, there are occasional mini-interactive activities you have to do (not quite enough depth to call them minigames) - these represent "computer analysis" moments - like tracing a cell phone being used to towers, or identi-kit-style assembling the portrait of a perp. They take place in a sort of "computer network" visualization that's all black background which is in direct contrast to the main map that's on white.
The art style is all black line drawing comic-style characters (like MicroMacro, but different enough) on a white background with color used very sparingly for UI-stuff.. I think it looks great.
The maps (only played on one, the tutorial and the first case) are fun to look at with lots of little easter egg style details.
I think I'm going to enjoy this!
read all entries for this GameLog
- add a comment
|
|
|
|
|
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.
[latest site fixes and updates]
[read more]
|
view feed xml
|
 |
|
2323 registered gamers and 3388 games. 7928 GameLogs with 13441 journal entries. 5110 games are currently being played.
More stats
|
 |
|
Final Fantasy XIII-2 (PS3) by dkirschner |
| Great "awe"-inspiring game. Big improvements over XIII. Such fun! |
|
most recent entry: Tuesday 11 March, 2014
|
Been on this a couple weeks now. Just beat the main game. Huge huge improvement over FFXIII. I noticed immediately that it fixed one of the problems with the original, that is, it was FUN from the start. It has Final Fantasy charm oozing out of it, which is so great, and was so missed in everything Final Fantasy that I've played since X and X-2. The music is excellent and there are a bunch of songs just for when you are riding chocobos, including...a metal song. SO YOU THINK YOU CAN RIDE THIS CHOCOBO? GIVE IT SOME GYSHAL GREENS AND WATCH IT GO. That song is hilarious, surprisingly good, and majestic in metal-nerd grandeur. I'll just go through some pros and cons so to minimize the rambling topics...
PRO SECTION:
It's a great sequel, picks up a few years after the end of FFXIII. It takes the story in a wholly unanticipated direction, but it works. All the major characters from XIII have cameos, with Hope being the most important one. Actually, Hope (and Lightning, you who are trying to save), have more than cameos. They're pretty integral to the story. You find Snow in one time and spend an area with him. Fang and Vanille appear, luckily only for about 5 minutes because Vanille was Most Hated Character #1 in FFXIII. Sazh and Dajh pop up heroically at the end too.
Story. The story is mind-bendingly wonderful. It's impossible for me to explain it in much detail though. I'm not sure it would make sense to a player if they played XIII-2 but not XIII. Anyway. It's about time, temporal paradoxes and changing the future and the past. A little confusing, but worth the effort to follow it.
Basically...the goddess Etro saved everyone from crystal slumber after they completed their focus in the last game, except Fang and Vanille because they became part of the crystal pillar supporting Cocoon. As Etro's power saved everyone, in that moment, some dark Chaos something or other emerged from Etro's temporary weakness and sucked Lightning into Valhalla, which is like this eternal realm of neither life nor death nor time in the game. When Etro intervened and saved everyone, and that Chaos popped into the timeline for a moment, the timeline was altered. A ton of paradoxes were introduced such that there are now multiple futures and multiple pasts.
Playing as Serah, Lightning's sister, your goal is to find Lightning in Valhalla. And playing as Noel (the last human in the distant future who was cast back into Serah's timeline), your goal is to follow Caius (bad guy) and save Yeul (a seeress from Noel's futuristic tribe), which is an interrelated story arc.
So you go from timeline to timeline, different times and places, and the same places in different times, and the same times in different places, resolving paradoxes in order to unlock other timelines. Paradoxes in the game are things that are in a timeline that don't belong there, that are there from another timeline. Sometimes it's a powerful enemy or some NPCs or some item.
Example: You need to climb Augustus Tower in the year 300. You climb partway, but are blocked by an AI security system (a product of a man-made Fal'cie actually). You need to go back in time to find out why the AI system is blocking you. To do this, you need to find the proper gate (there are various gates leading to various places that you can unlock in each timeline). So You need to go back through old timelines and try to find the correct gate to unlock Augustus Tower in the year 200 to figure out what's up with the AI. The timeline that has the proper gate is one with Hope, who is a research scientist, who has also figured out about time-travel, who is building a new artificial Cocoon for everyone to live on. He had this artificial Fal'cie built, which put this AI system in place in another timeline, which you find out. You've previously played a timeline where the Fal'cie/AI system he put in place takes over an entire city and begins killing citizens. So by interacting with Hope here, you learn what that was all about too. You find some override code to override the AI in Augustus Tower. You go back to Augustus Tower and get past the part you were stuck at. In the boss battle against the artificial Fal'cie in the tower, you can't kill the Fal'cie because it doesn't really exist in that timeline. It exists in some other timeline and is just projecting itself into this timeline, so it keeps coming back. You have a bunch of options of things to try, and one is "Yell at Hope." I did that one last because it sounded futile, but it's the correct one. You yell at Hope about creating the Fal'cie/AI that eventually goes nuts and kills everyone, and he, in the past, doesn't create it, and then in the future (or the present where you are fighting it), it disappears because the past was changed such that it shouldn't exist in the future anymore. Then you if you go exploring the different timeline of that city that I mentioned that was destroyed by the Fal'cie/AI, it is a wonderful metropolis where the people don't rely on the Fal'cie/AI.
SO COOL.
Which reminds me, I've been reading through Jane McGonigal's book, Reality is Broken, and she has a discussion of "awe" in games and says that games inspire this reverence when we stop to think about their complexity, everything that went into making them, and the experiences they enable us to have. This game is "awe"some in the real sense of the word. The environments, the music, the story...the whole fiction that is built up and the way this game is done with the time-travel is just AWESOME. I can't count how many times I just stopped and stared and thought "Wow." The last dungeon was particularly cool, this big open Tetris-block inspired maze, and the last boss had a really cool design.
A couple other things to point out that are worth mentioning because they are vast improvements over the original...
The music is SO GREAT in this game. It was good in the first game, but I definitely remember the same battle song being used over and over and over and over in practically every location and playing it on mute sometimes. I wanted to hear all the music all the time in this game. I've already mentioned the funny and surprisingly good metal chocobo song. There is J-pop, ambient environmental music, and orchestral scores. They seem to have made a song, or a different type of music for every event. There are probably 30 timeline locations, and at least half a dozen scores for them.
There are a lot of interesting side quests. In XIII, there was literally nothing else to do for the first 20 hours of the game except follow the story, then you could basically "kill hard monsters" for side quests. First of all, the pacing in XIII-2 is infinitely better. You can start doing optional exploratory, FUN, things right away aside from the main story.
Let me explain how this works a bit...You use "gates" to travel the timeline. Each gate is opened with a crystal fragment. There are 160 fragments, only some of which are used to open gates. These are the ultimate objects of the side quests. You get them from defeating hard monsters, finding objects, playing quiz games, winning chocobo races (I assume!), performing requests for NPCs and various other things. There are some number of fragments (average, probably 5 or so) in each timeline. Like I said, I just beat the main game and I have 69/160, and I've spent some time actually hunting for them too!
Now that I've beaten the game, there is clearly a lot of stuff I can do regarding getting fragments. The game said that I can explore "alternate futures" and stuff, so I think that I can go places I haven't been, find fragments I couldn't find before, see alternate timelines that differ from the "real" one that happened through the main story, maybe even see alternate endings! It sounds really cool. I am not a person to do much extra stuff after beating a game, but I am really interested in what all there is to do and see here. The reason is it doesn't sound grindy. It sounds exploratory. I love exploring. The locations are so varied and beautiful, and the story so mind-bending, that I want to see more.
Finally, there is this whole other sort of collectible mini-game. In FFXIII, you had 3 members in your party at a time, with more characters sitting out waiting to be swapped in. In XIII-2, you have Serah and Noel the entire time. They are complemented by a third, a monster. You collect the monsters. It's like, I don't know really because I haven't actually played these games, but maybe like Monster Hunter or Pokemon or something where you collect monsters to raise and fight. You can collect all the monsters (there's probably a fragment for this [that I will not get!]) just by winning battles against them. You can set 3 monsters from all you've collected to choose among in battle to fill that third party slot. Monsters all have assigned roles like Medic or Sentinel, so they are like little role specialists you can sub in and out. You can also level them up in the Chrystarium, making them stronger and learn more abilities. Each monster has different attributes too, like "Meleeproof" (high physical damage resist), "Early Peaker" (can only go up to level 20 [out of 100]) and so on. You can also "infuse" monsters, which I like to think of as having them cannibalize one another and absorb their abilities. So you can grow them this way too. There's more to the system, but it's pretty freaking cool and is like a gazillion times better that that horrible Eidolon summoning system in XIII.
CON SECTION:
Yeah, there are a couple little snags.
Although the pacing is better than XIII, it's not perfect. It was over before I knew it. The last portion of the game is just really fast. There's a ton of story parts, then BAM, characters start talking about the final confrontation! You go through the last dungeon, and sure enough, boss battle, done. This isn't so bad though because of all the extra stuff at the end I guess, but it was surprising and I like the game and story so much I didn't want it to end already!
There is a downside to the fragments. When you are just casually finding them, it is great, but there were a couple times where you needed a particular fragment in order to continue, which meant you had to go back to a bunch of different timelines and search for them. Some fragments, and lots of treasure chests too, are invisible! Yes, invisible. Your Mog companion can see them, so sometimes he will get excited and yell "Kupo!" when you're near one, but not always. This made searching for fragments begin to feel like playing a hidden object game with random encounters. A similar thing happened with the quests from NPCs too. A lot of them were sequential, so you had to do them in order, which meant searching the entire area for an NPC with a quest, then doing that quest, then searching the entire area again for an NPC with the next quest, then doing that, then searching the entire area...until you found as many fragments as you could in that timeline (and usually there was one or two unaccounted-for fragments, which I guess I can find now that I've beaten the game[?]). Hopefully it doesn't feel tooooo much like hidden object hunting anymore. If it does, that's definitely when I'll retire the game!
Finally, there's a casino fun town called Serendipity, which is reminiscent of that one place in FFVII with chocobo racing and other stuff where you go on a date with Aerys and gamers the world over got a tear in their collective eye. Anyway, this place, Serendipity, has two things: slot machines and chocobo racing. I hate slot machines, so that takes care of that one. Now, chocobo racing, I was super excited about. I raced the hell out of some chocobos in FFVII. This is completely nostalgic though, and unfortunately not as exciting as I remembered. You can race chocobos that you capture from battles. I won...one...race the entire game. This means my chocobos were not leveled up at all (Rank D in all attributes, yuck). I leveled two of them up to 30 even! Actually one might be 40. But I did find a golden chocobo near the end of the game, which sounds promising. Anyway, I'd like to continue screwing with the chocobo races, but there doesn't seem to be much substance to it. Serendipity particularly sucks because, and even the NPCs say this, it's "unfinished" or "under construction." This means, "if you want to have something else to do besides race chocobos or play slots, you need to go buy DLC." Yeah, I think I'll go buy DLC to play virtual poker in FFXIII-2...not. How dumb. Why not just put all the mini-games in there to begin with?
Anyway, I will check out the endgame and hopefully find even more enjoyment in it! This is a straight up 5/5 from me. Worth every word I wrote about it.
[read this GameLog]
|
|
|
