#xcom is going great

[heartfullofleeches]

Alien looking through his darings computer and sees that they have like 5000 hours across XCOM and XCOM 2

" I won't let this tear us apart."

"Wha-"

Cupping your face in their hands, Alien hushes you as they lower your head to their chest - stroking your hair as the first tears flow free. "Shhhh- shh shh shh, it's okay. I still love you no matter what and will always be here to support you. It's best if the kids don't see you like this, but they love you too. We all do so - so very much."

"Al, what the fuck are you talking about? We don't even have kids."

Alien points at the computer screen - unable to look at the icon still visible on the desktop. "You've already spent so much time in, but I know I can still save you. That big, beautiful brain of yours is too great to lose to them."

"It's just a game..."

"That's what the government wants you to think. You know how many movies I've seen were the game is just a tool in their sick game to recruit soldier? Theyre trying to brainwash you and I refuse to let that happen!"

"Alien, we're going to limit how many movies you're able to watch...."

"Awww - but I just got my privileges back. I wanted to watch the one about the little blue guy and the human girl with you... :("

[cerastes]

I had a Krolik moment the last time I talked about GFL2's bad script so far (in the main story specifically) so I think it's only fair I talk about the positive aspects of the game, which indeed exist. I like focusing on the positive of anything I peruse, so I think it's only right I talk about those aspects as well.

The menus are very well designed, the UI elements in general are intuitive and tapping/clicking on something will list all the ways in which it can be acquired and where, which you'd think should be standard issue by now but Here We Are, the game's aesthetic is clean and to the point, not minimalist, just not overly dressed in bells, just the right amount of flair and style. The in-game camera is fully adjustable which is important not just in XCOM style games but any game where positioning is of paramount importance. The likelihood of making a mistake in the game positioning is low, and it's only ever happened to me when I'm just quickly tapping, which is on me.

Each character's kit is cohesive and sensible. This is hugely important to me because XCOM didn't have much in the way of character variety as an intentional design choice, and other XCOMlikes, such a Othercide, tend to keep this philosophy of simplicity, of class identity over unit identity. GFL2 does the opposite, where unit identity trumps over class identity -- and does it right -- by giving each unit a different way of going about what they do and additional tools they can bring to battle in order to do sabotage the enemy beyond their role or support the team:

For example, Qiongjiu and Tololo (CHILE MENTIONED) are both Assault Rifle wielding Sentinels, AKA damage dealers. They also play completely different. Qiongjiu's entire thing is using Support Attacks. Her kit is based entirely on attacking alongside other units, with innate buffs and skills that make her attacks outside of her own turn stronger than those in her turn. This makes her incredibly devastating but also position-sensitive. Tololo, on the other hand, relies on good ol' hitting things hard as hell and building up Points (keep Points in the back pocket for now) through different conditions each of her skills have to award said Points until she can build 6, which will give her another turn altogether after she's done with her turn. Unlike Qiongjiu, who wants to grab a good vantage point and blast enemies nonstop off her allies' attacks, Tololo wants to move around and flank enemies and deal heavy damage off multiple attacks per turn when she has a double turn, and otherwise build towards this burst turn.

Inevitably, there's better units than others, and I really don't care because this is a single player game and if you care about doing well in gacha asymmetrical PvP, skill issue, you're doing that to yourself. Even when there's a clear discrepancy in raw power between units -- Vepley is largely considered very weak and completely outgunned by Lotta, the latter of which is lower rarity than the former -- there's no truly unviable unit. You can run a team of "weaker" units and still crush content, or you can run Suomi in any team and tangibly decrease the difficulty of the game drastically, and it's fine if you do that, it's a single player game, Have It Your Way.

One of the single best parts of GFL2 is that team composition trumps over individual strong units. Team synergy is MUCH more important than having one broken unit. A synergistic team of mid Dolls will perform better than one or two power carries. As it should be in an XCOM game.

I've mentioned this before but the game's presentation is gorgeous. From model quality to animation and voice acting, they really knocked it out of the park with this one. I can't really think of a better looking game except Kuro games when they go fucking crazy with it -- like PGR and WuWa -- but here you don't have to put up with Everything Else Kuro Does which tends to be pretty mediocre or bad, besides gameplay, their forte besides looking great. As much as Krolik and Nemesis have me up to my tits with frustration, Groza, Colphne and Mayling are nice, not exceptional, just nice, and there's definitely events to consider, so the final word on the script does have to wait.

But yeah there's definitely good aspects to the game, I Am Overall Enjoying It, especially Challenges and Hordes which are the parts of the game that actually are XCOM.

[germesthegenie]

👽

^ thoughts on this guy

XCOM PTSD kicked in and immediately went “throw flashbang to disrupt psionics, go for the flank- oh god damnit rookie now is not the time to miss- CRIT?! Oh great now the squaddie’s panicking and there are reinforcements. Save scum save scum save scum-“

Anyway funny little gleepglorp emoji

[wageronancap]

Extremely lukewarm take: AI is neither a silver bullet solution to every problem to ever exist, nor is it the literal spawn of the antichrist -- it is a tool, and like all tools, can be used appropriately under the right conditions to great effect, or misused to great harm.

I've done some experiments with ChatGPT, and admittedly I've had a lot of fun. Detailed stories beyond the break.

I started with a statistical probability problem I knew how to describe but didn't know the math to calculate myself -- I'd just watched a number of engineering YouTube videos involving marble runs like Wintergaten, Engineezy, etc, and I wanted to know in a very limited, extremely controlled circumstance, how long could a device go before it "missed" -- before a ball that was supposed to be on a track, wasn't actually there because the reload mechanic is the random element. I gave ChatGPT a very involved prompt and regrettably I don't have it saved, but I was stupendously impressed with how it didn't need clarity from me -- it correctly interpreted the prompt, laid down some additional baseline assumptions, and then just did the math. Which honestly I expected -- computers are really good at counting. I was more pleased the AI had understood the prompt.

Later I asked to play a text-based version of XCOM 2 with the serial numbers filed off and then a Star Trek TNG-style bridge commander game. While the difficulty was too easy and it can lose track of a large cast of characters on occasion, it overall was very fun.

I also fed it a D&D 3.5 monster description and a fairly detailed character concept and it put meat on the bones (the finality of names is the bane of my existence as a worldbuilder); it even helped generate the leadership of a cult that serves the monster-character, and did so in the span of seconds -- it was able to take a concept and drum up roleplay-ready content on demand; content that would have taken me hours to develop by hand.

I recently used ChatGPT to test an item from the 2024 D&D release and immediately realized Chat's true strength for D&D as a balance tester. It is fabulously easy to import stat blocks (or homebrew non-OGL blocks) and just crunch a lot of trials to see the results.

Which led me to revisit an encounter I actually ran myself by hand some years ago -- a Warforged Titan against a Tyrannosaurus Rex. In my "canon" encounter, the tyrannosaurus went blow for blow for about four rounds before landing a critical hit and executing the titan -- a fucking epic brawl with an incredible finish on the fifth round.

I ran the same encounter with ChatGPT 100 times just now and realized just how anomalous my version of the encounter was:

Like, that's cool as fuck to be able to test, analyze, tweak, and retest without sinking a massive amount of time into playtesting, because the computer can play way faster than we fleshlings can -- and I can tune an encounter to give the feel I want it to impart to the players while still leaving room for players to innovate and surprise me as game master.

There are many things about my life I haven't dropped into the AI because it's not a counselor or therapist, it's not a financial advisor, it's not a friend -- it's a rock we put lightning into and taught to count, and it's really good at counting. It's even halfway decent at just helping make an entertaining story.

But it's not The Solution to Life The Universe And Everything.

[ellikiins]

An inside joke for myself.

Some brief lore:

I did say Diane Whittaker was based off my childhood Sonic OC (Maria), who went through so many dramatic rewrites since her inception in 2004 (I was 9 and loved SA2). In playing XCOM (2012) for the first few times, I created my idea of who the Commander was. As a woman, the Commander should be a woman, too. Stepping in this role, I noticed her personality taking after Maria (both military girlies, obvs). Thus her physical appearance was inspired by an adult Maria Robotnik, her uniform based off my OC's uniform at the time.

I couldn't invent someone new for Fallout 4, so I stole Diane for it. An alternative universe where a Diane grew up to a happy, healthy young woman because she had no family heartbreak and trauma in her youth... to then find it in her adulthood instead as result of the Great War. Oops.

Shh, ignore my childhood Sonic phase and her love for Maria Robotnik, because this could go back even deeper...

Sorry if confusing, just keeping it a brief info dump to share my inner thoughts with the outside world.

I think if I were to update Maria again, she'd be a light yellow, but I wanted to keep her "lore accurate" lmao

[factorialsotherfandoms]

Ooooo Christmas fic from Factorial :0 I love your writing so much!! How about one from one of your Ordem AUs? I really like your post-opc with Johnny and Rubens, but any of the others (xcom, opd/opc fix-it, maybe even that steampunk one you were poking at a while back) are also good. Thank you and Merry Crimmus friend!! Go nuts!! <33

Merry Christmas Curly!!! You do not have post-opc au, you have a special treat... (likely never to be continued steampunk au)

And to everyone else, a wodnerful holiday season to you all.

Please find the ao3 link here is you so prefer: [link]

Mild body horror, but if you can handle ordem canon you should be fine. No spoilers, it's too au for that!

This is the furthest into one of his father's factories that Thiago has been in a long time. Long gone are the great thick safety rails and brass plating, replaced with burning pipes and skin-meltingly hot steam exhausts. The machines used here before were dangerous, yes, but nothing next to the ghost tech now installed. Even Thiago knew ghost tech was dangerous when his father vanished a decade ago; whoever stole his inheritance clearly has no such concerns, not when factory accidents now make the everyday news.

It is Thiago who writes that news, of course. The Gazette is not the most sophisticated of papers, but it is one that allows him the freedom to investigate such accidents. Explosions, burns, loom teeth catching on long skirts... he has seen much, and written it all. Even choking slightly on the cotton dust in the air after yesterday's work Thiago keeps looking; the lack of cleaning plus the exposed boil-vents is reason enough to slam the company, but only page seven news really.

What he hasn't seen, though, is a factory like this one; he had managed to convince the foreman to give him the key, between a silver tongue, a shared and genuine concern for the workers' safety after a number of disappearances, and a the insinuation that he was sleeping with the man's wife. And now he is inside...

The other bits are just factory, but it's in jimmying open a door and getting towards the machine rooms that he finds it.

The true meaning of ghost tech.

Pulsating walls, steam churning like blood, a hulking mass of wire and brass and steam... There's blood all around, and lumps of flesh mixed with the pipework. If it is human or not... Well, he prefers not to think about where those missing workers went.

He also has no idea as to if this monstrosity itself can be considered alive or not; careful of making noise, he grabs a pencil and paper, and begins to draw.

His sketches are nothing special, but they can be used as references for the stamp cutter. Chip here, gap there, move it all about...

He's nearly done when a gloved hand covers his mouth and pulls him closer.

Looking up... a woman, smartly dressed in green-trimmed black. The lace from her hat covers only the left side of her face, a cloth mask covers the lower half, and the edge of a cage-crinoline is pressed against the back of his legs. It's somewhat out of date, most women now preferring the half-hooped crinolette if not the recently developed bustle.

... Maybe Thiago should be paying more attention to his surroundings, and less to his colleagues working on the fashion rags.

Still, with a hand over his throat, there is not much Thiago can do but attempt to make eye contact.

It is very much failing, the woman's one visible eye is trailing over the abomination before them.

"I suggest," she whispers, bite in her tone. "Leaving very carefully and quietly."

Her hand shifts, and Thiago gains space to speak.

"Unfortunately, dear lady, I am here on business, and I am not quite finished yet."

He keeps his voice low, not wanting to draw attention if that thing can hear.

She glances at his sketch, then at him. Pauses a moment, and then…

"Oh, about the explosion?" She asks.

"Explosion?"

What explosion?

"Hm," her eyes run over the abomination again. "The one that will happen in around five minutes. A terrible shame about the use of fire boilers in an uncleaned textile mill."

"Ma'am, that is not a boiler."

"As a member of the Special Investigations Unit," she flashes a badge too quickly to see, then hides it again; there is no way that is a legitimate police unit, Thiago had been studying those extensively before taking to trespassing. "That is all that you know."

"But you know more, don't you?" He presses a little. "These were my father's factories, you know? The Infinite Production Conglomerate stole them during probate."

That seems to catch her attention.

"You're a Fritz?" she asks.

"Thiago," he replies, following her gaze to watch the monster.

The hand leaves his face entirely, reaching instead into a pocket of her skirt. She leans to one side as she does - it must be a large pocket - before pulling out... Some form of gun.

"Elizabeth," she tells him, as though there were fewer than six Elizabeth's working in his department alone. "Now, I am going to see that this monstrosity finds its way to hell. I highly suggest leaving."

Thiago does not know what sort of gun this Miss Elizabeth is holding, but he does know what happens if you combine even a slight flame in a textile factory this poorly maintained.

And he enjoys having skin.

"Alright," he whispers back. "There's an open door just across the factory floor."

"Lockpick?"

"Foreman knows me. He lent me the key."

"Hm," she considers a little. "Alright, your way; I don't want to climb back through the window."

She got in through a window? In that dress?

Thiago would say he is impressed, but flabbergasted would be a more accurate term.

"Of course, my dear Miss Elizabeth," he offers a hand. "Shall we?"

She ignores the hand, and starts crossing the floor.

Thiago quickly finishes up his sketch, and follows after her.

Now that he has seen it, he can hear the squelching of the abomination echoing in the pipes...

He tries not to think about that.

They make it outside without incident, and Thiago finds the guards he snuck around collapsed on the floor. There is no smell of blood, so he likes to think of them as merely drugged unconscious.

It is dark, he cannot see details, he can be forgiven.

Also, Miss Elizabeth does not drag the bodies into the factory, which anyone sensible would do with corpses before demanding a cover-up from a reporter of dubious repute, so they are probably clear of murder charges.

"Permission to explode your possessed factory, Mister Fritz?"

"Of course, Miss Elizabeth; I do think such things an insult to my father's legacy, after all."

She does not say more before snapping open her strange gun. She adds not a bullet but a canister to it, before flipping it closed and pointing it at the broken window.

And then she fires.

No projectile he recognises comes from the gun, but instead a small burning leading a trail of red smoke.

It enters the window.

Miss Elizabeth grabs Thiago by the arm, and pulls him to the ground.

It does not even take a second for the cotton dust to ignite, the entire factory quickly developing into a blazing ball of soon-to-be-ash.

Miss Elizabeth keeps him low for a while - long enough for the shrapnel and spitting fireballs to pass - before carefully getting to her feet.

"A pleasure doing business with you, Miss Elizabeth," he tells her, as he also struggles up.

"I must bid you farewell; I have a telegram to send," she dusts off her dress, and corrects the tilt of her hat. "I suggest leaving; pray we do not meet again, Mister Fritz. You have no business here."

She does not wait for an answer before returning the strange gun to her skirts, and begins sprinting down the road, in the opposite direction to the bell of the approaching fire cart.

What a strange woman, Thiago thinks, even as he, too, sprints off at ninety degrees to them both.

[anaveragedisaster]

Some lore for the reimagined non-XCOM Resistance factions in my Nine Sols/Xcom 2 crossover thing I'm calling the Solcom AU

(By the way, I'm not sure how much the fandoms for these games overlap. I'll try my best to keep things understandable to non-xcom players.)

The Reapers: Similarly to their XCOM version, they're a loose group of guerrilla fighters that live in the wilderness, away from Sol-controlled cities. I don't think it's confirmed anywhere in the OG game's lore, but in this version, they definitely formed out of old-world prepper groups. Instead of using guns, they've elected to go especially primal and use combat bows.

Their leader, so to speak, is Shennong. He's still one of the humans who was abducted and brought to New Kunlun's Apeman Facility to be experimented on. Over the years, the others were successfully brainwashed and genetically modified to be loyal to the Sols, people who could be presented to the public as ideal citizens of the Solarian-ruled Earth (instead of being a disguised alien, the Propaganda Speaker from XCOM 2 would be one of these humans). Shennong, despite being subjected to the same treatments, remains the paranoid, anti-social guy we know. Luckily, either Eigong or Goumang chose to keep him around as a (probably) harmless anomaly they could observe. However, one day he got fed up enough to break out of the livestock pen and, through sheer luck, made it off New Kunlun and into Earth's wilderness, where he was discovered by the Reapers. They were obviously sceptical of him at first, but his conspiracy theorist personality and his ability to create booze out of random stuff he eats wins them over.

Some of the more devoted fighters have even begun to follow his example and eat poisonous animals and plants they find or grow (in small amounts, obviously), which in gameplay would give them immunity against poison and/or other negative status effects.

Once XCOM has made proper contact with the Reapers, Yi and Shennong hit it off over their shared drinking habit. From then on, XCOM can find and pick up both exotic poisons to trade to him, as well as different types of booze from all over the world that he and Yi can enjoy together.

The Skirmishers (will probably change the name, but haven't thought of one yet): In XCOM 2, they were part of ADVENT's genetically altered army that broke free of their mind control. Similarly, here they're soldiers from the biomechanical army, primarily the Red Tiger Legion, that somehow gained sentience and went rogue. I'm not quite set on how they would be in combat compared to game Skirmishers, though they definitely have their grappling hooks.

Their leader is obviously Chiyou. He made it off New Kunlun soon after it landed and began wandering the Earth, marvelling at its beauty and cultures. Once he encountered other self-aware robots, he happily joined up with them, helping them comprehend their newfound state of freedom with his philosophies. Their primary goal now is to keep their freedom, while helping any other Solarian weapons find theirs. Their storyline would involve XCOM having to destroy Xingtian (probably multiple times, like in the actual game) to put him out of his mindless misery.

There's also a group of geno-soldier scholars that has grown to share Chiyou's appreciation for art and belief in nonviolence. Yi's XCOM can find and give their little circle various artistic works to safeguard and contemplate over (though they've promised to return them once peace and freedom have been restored)

The Neo-Fangshi (aka solcom!Templars): Once the Fusang's roots had spread throughout the world, it didn't take long for humans to start developing or even getting born with a connection to it, much like Heng. Some have even accessed the Limitless Realm and witnessed the great Tao. This has led to a revival of Taoist beliefs in places across the Earth, something the Sols haven't been too happy about due to their science-centric worldview.

Geist (I might change his name as well), in this AU, developed a particularly strong connection to the Limitless Realm, catching glimpses of Lear and his younger warrior form. From records the Sols had made public to humans, he learned about Lear's accomplishments as a scientist and fighter and was inspired to follow in his footsteps. Geist and like-minded 'gifted' humans decided that the power the original Fangshi gained from the Limitless Realm isn't to be ignored like the Sols are seemingly doing. Their New Fangshi guild is dedicated to both using advanced technology and cultivating their qi abilities to become more powerful, so that they may one day bring down the Sols' regime and bring humanity into a new era themselves.

Geist's ambitions are challenged somewhat towards the end of the story (which I've been able to develop somewhat), when XCOM raids Kunlun's Grotto of Scriptures and retrieves the holorecording of his dear Lear's Declaration of Inaction, which Yi gives to him. Soon after, both of them are summoned to the Limitless Realm, where Geist gets to properly meet Lear for the first time. The old master lectures them on what being a Taoist actually means, including telling his story about the Demon Dog. This is even more sobering to Geist, who begins to realize that, with how power hungry most of them are, he, like Lear long ago, may have to put down his fellow Fangshi if there is to be lasting peace after the Sols are defeated.

In terms of fighting style, the Fangshi are like XCOM 2 Templars, whose style in turn is incidentally a lot like Yi's style in his game (which is what inspired me to make them Fangshi like him here). Both use basically magic (psionic energy and qi/rhizomatic energy, respectively) to conjure blades for attacking and to avoid damage through parrying. So yeah.

[ravensilversea]

I love playing XCOM because one minute I'm going, "Damn, this is a really good run. I've rolled good resistance orders, got weapons upgrades, almost built up my facilities... It's just going really well!" :D

And then I get hit with-

Black Site Mission: Squad Wipeout!

Protect the Device: Is that a fucking Andromedon?! Oh it one-shot my captain. great :)

Retaliation Site: Chyrssalid Surprise! :D

...

This is fine

[pizzleyanked]

xcom is such a great “play through shit going wrong and your plans falling apart” story generator machine game that i have to admit that a similar design philosophy being applied to the sims is very intriguing to me as someone who loves not having full control of my sims’ lives

[goodvein]

Othercide

Most tactical RPG's use the exact same terrible combat system Final Fantasy Tactics introduced decades ago. Yes, it helped created the Tactics game genre, but that doesn't mean the gameplay holds up in the slightest. XCOM is the best overall, at least with hindsight. Fallout Tactics used the Fallout gameplay system, for better or worse, (mostly better).

But, the question is always, how do you treat diagonals? Are they 1 square or 2? Fallout dodges the question with the hex grid, which is not the right answer.

Most tactical RPGs, the ones that use the FF Tactics system, treat diagonals as 2, which means you can't melee your corners. 40k: Deathwatch: Tyranid Invasion treats it as 1, which is much, much, much better.

Othercide uses AP. Moving diagonally uses more AP than moving straight, and less AP then moving in a zigzag. The game also has a Burst system. When you go past a certain AP threshold, you take more time. And the game represents this with FFX's Timeline system, which so many more games should use. This is great, because in most RPG's, if you don't have the AP, you don't have the AP.

Deathwatch: Tyranid Invasion gives some characters and wargear the power to generate or borrow AP, but other than that, you have the option of stopping before the space, in the space, but not after the space. This means that next turn, you will have to make a quick move to get across, because if you stand in the space, you'll get shot.

Burst gives you the option of making the long run and attack, because if you do it right, you can kill the target, and not be left vulnerable.

Storywise, you start as a supremely powerful maiden, fightings the Others from beyond the veil of reality into unreality. She is powerful, and can do it physically, but it turns out her enemy was tortured as a child. He's too far gone, now, and too powerful to stop. So, she sends her power back in time to You, the non-entity general. You can use her power to birth Daughters, that do the fighting for you.

Each of the Daughters has a name, and in regular gameplay, they can never be healed. The damage they build up over the game never goes away. The only way to heal them, (outside of Easy mode), is to sacrifice another Daughter of equal or greater level.

Once they die, the memory of them remains, and these memories last through playthroughs. At any time, you can revert time, and try again. Throughout each campaign, you can get a few items that allow you to resurrect a Daughter, and this allows them to be persistent, through playthroughs. You also can gain buffs that are also persistent. This means that every time you play the game, you CAN get more and more powerful. And you will have so many Daughters in your memory, that you have to do the heartbreaking action of Forgetting them.

Because of the persistent health per life, ANY mistake can destroy your playthrough. In order to do this, the game has to be perfect enough to allow you to not make mistakes, and it is.

[fioras-resolve]

What Is Fire Emblem About: an explainer for the uninitiated

this is gonna be a bit of a weird one. i feel like fire emblem fans are gonna get angry at me for mostly sidelining the story, so i'm just gonna say: i'm a game designer, and a very ludocentric person. this is just how i'm going to talk about things. but also, you can't talk about FE story without the contexts of what the games Are mechanically. with that out of the way...

Fire Emblem started as one of the earliest examples of a Simulation RPG (or Strategy RPG in the west, but, you know). it was trying to take a wargame framework and apply that to a fantasy rpg. so unlike most wargames, every unit has a name, personality, and unique attributes. but unlike most rpg's, you're moving across a battlefield. units are defined by wargame functions, like "ranged," "high movement," "flying," etc. and if one of your allies dies, they're gone for good. it creates an emotional heft, one found in most games with permadeath. to quote jon bois, talking about xcom,

in a way, fire emblem simulates war in a way that a lot of wargames don't. it makes you care about each of your units, not just because they're unique characters with lives, but because losing them means losing what they did for the army. you only get so many healers in fire emblem, so many thieves who can open a chest, and if you trained someone up for ages just to see them die to a random critical hit, it hurts.

"it immerses you via accountability. if your ranger dies, you are left with a feeling that ultimately, they counted on you to lead them, and that even in a game that is often decided by chance, it was all your fault"

or at least, that's how it works in theory. in reality, most players will just restart the chapter if they lose someone important. strict "ironman" rules have never been implemented in fire emblem, so while theoretically this is a game about living with your mistakes, in practice it's about constantly redoing a fight until you get the right results. modern fire emblem has even made rewinding to specific moments an actual game mechanic, a design choice i call "embracing the bastards." (i say this with affection, i am one of those bastards)

to make up for the fact that you can lose characters, you get a lot of them over the course of the game. a lot of these characters, especially in early FE, are just kind of there. like, you get so many characters of the same class who are clearly just backup if the other ones die. some of these units are great, with amazing stats or the ability to use some cool weapon, and others suck. if you talk to fans of "classic" FE, you'll find that a lot of people's favorite characters are decided by gameplay. as the series progressed, characters grew to be more fleshed out narratively and more balanced mechanically depending on who you ask, so a lot of modern fans are more into a character because of their personality or character arc.

which does lead us into talking about how the series has shifted over time. because when people think of "fire emblem" now, they're not thinking about the games from the 90s. they're probably not even thinking about the games from the 2000s. so let's talk about the changing identity of fire emblem. i like to split this into four "eras," broken up by major mechanical changes and shifts in who's leading the charge. i'm sure some fe fans will disagree on on this, but this is the framing the works the best for me. so!

The Kaga Era: This was an era of fire emblem led by a single guy, Shouzou Kaga. this is, i feel, where the essence of Simulation RPG is felt the most strongly. the games are hard to get into these days if you don't already play fire emblem, but there's a real artistic commitment here to trying to capture ideas through mechanics. aside from FE1, we also got Gaiden, which leaned way harder into the RPG angle with grinding, magic, and dragon-questy towns. we got Mystery of the Emblem, a direct sequel to the first game that put familiar characters in new contexts. we got Genealogy of the Holy War, an incredibly ambitious game that plays out a story of war on a massive scale. we got Archanea Saga, a very short game consisting of four incredibly potent one-shot chapters. And we got Thracia 776, an intensely challenging game left so up to randomness that even healing can miss. some oldheads view Thracia as the height of the series.

The Renaissance: After Kaga left due to a squabble with Nintendo (which is its own story), the dev team had to pick up the pieces without its auteur director. This period is arguably when Fire Emblem was most "itself." The Kaga era was foundational, but too experimental to have a consistent identity. The Renaissance was when the idea of what A Fire Emblem Game was solidified, to the point where if you ask most older fans what they think of when they imagine Fire Emblem, you'll probably get something from the Renaissance. Probably the biggest innovation from this era was the Support Conversation. Basically, if you put two characters next to each other for long enough, they might strike up a conversation with each other. You can usually do this two more times. This fleshed out the characters beyond their first impression, and made personality more of a sticking point. Later games would expand on this further.

You could maybe argue that this period was intensely safe, but I'd say after Kaga's departure, safe was probably necessary. Binding Blade was essentially a rehash of FE1, for better and worse. Blazing Blade, a prequel to Binding, was the first FE game to be released outside of Japan, so it has an extensive tutorial, and is generally a lot easier to accommodate. But also, it features some really solid and creative level design which makes it worth playing to this day. Sacred Stones did similar to Gaiden with its skill system, world map, and grinding. Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn... I actually haven't really played those or heard much about them but a lot of people view them as the height of the series. And Shadow Dragon was a remake of FE1, that actually tried very hard to encourage you to ironman it. Like, you can reclass freely, you get replacement units if you're running low, and the prologue ends by forcing you to pick a sacrifice. Unfortunately, people didn't really get the message. It was my first FE game, and I still reset whenever someone died. Caeda, my beloved.

The Maeda Era: This starts, oddly enough, with a remake of the third game, called New Mystery of the Emblem. It adds a player avatar that you can customize, support conversations, a new plotline about assassins, and crucially, a Casual Mode. Yes, you can now start the game choosing either Classic Mode, which has permadeath, and Casual Mode, which doesn't. This fundamentally changes the experience, as you can imagine, and it's still a pretty contentious topic within the FE community. A lot of new players struggle to get into classic Fire Emblem because the forced permadeath is just too punishing for them. But it's also core to the identity of the series. It was contentious within the dev team, too, with people fighting over whether or not to include it. Ultimately, it was decided that if the FE series was going to survive, it would need to be more playable to a casual audience.

This leads us into Fire Emblem: Awakening, which was a massive success compared to anything else before then. It featured the player avatar and casual mode, it featured a world map and grinding, and it also really leaned into the support system. It even combined this with the marriage and children system of Genealogy, adding a fourth support level which got characters to marry and have a child, who would then join your party by time traveling from the future. You could even marry someone with your player avatar. This did make Awakening more dating sim than tactics game in some people's eyes, but it really helped give the game a fandom that exceeded the existing FE fandom by a longshot. This kind of design was continued with Fire Emblem Fates, a game that was actually three different games you could choose between. Birthright was basically more Awakening, but Conquest took that paradigm and made it into a focused, polished, and tightly designed tactical experience. (Arguably too tight, I don't like it that much but I get why people do.) And the Maeda era ends with FE Heroes, a mobile gacha game with as much creativity as power creep. And honestly, how else could this end?

The Modern Era: Since Maeda is mostly working on Heroes now, we're in a similar situation to the Renaissance, where the series has to pick up where its leader left off. But instead of playing it safe, the new directors have experimented with it in a way we haven't seen since Kaga. It started, of course, with a remake of Gaiden, called Echoes: Shadows of Valentia. I have a soft spot for this game, but what's important for you to know is that it introduced 1) full voice acting, 2) special moves, and 3) turn rewinds, which finally just makes resetting a deliberate game design tool.

From this point on we have Three Houses, which did a similar split-path thing to Fates, but letting you choose based on preference for characters rather than gameplay. I think its mechanics are a really nice synthesis of a lot of different games, but that's not really why people care about Three Houses. People care about Three Houses because it features a hot girlboss voiced by Tara Platt, a school setting that's easy to project onto, multiple queer characters with subtext for each other, and a morally grey set of factions that people can argue passionately about for years. It is THE fandom-ready Fire Emblem game. After that is our most recent game, Engage. Now, this is structured like a traditional Fire Emblem, but it plays pretty substantially different. Now your units can summon past FE protagonists to give massive buffs and execute super moves. My favorite is the one that lets you rush through enemies in a straight line. It's also incredibly anime, like bright colors, power of friendship, character designs a bit too outlandish. It's great if that's your shit.

so, I've been talking a lot about how these games play. and if you're a big fan of these games, especially of the modern ones, that might frustrate you. you don't play rpg's for the combat, you play them for the story, which i have avoided talking about for the most part. and first of all, that's a very reductive way of looking at rpg's, and games generally. second, these things are intertwined, you cannot disconnect story from play. but third, i'm of the mind that what a game is About is decided by what happens when you interact with it. talking solely about what happens in cutscenes and dialogue is treating a game as something to watch or read, not as something to play. and i think we owe it to ourselves, and the medium, to do better than that.

but, last few notes before i finish the post. first off, there are a few games i missed, particularly spinoffs, like the Warriors spinoffs or that weird MegaTen crossover that isn't much FE or MegaTen at all. second, the setting, characters, and lore shifts with each entry. sometimes you get games in the same universe, like Awakening's continent is just the FE1 continent but a thousand years in the future. but you don't particularly need to worry about playing the other ones if you want to get into a specific game. third, there's a fair bit of Weird Anime Shit. particularly the consistent use of the thousand-year-old loli trope which has been around since the first game. Fates lets you marry and have children with your siblings, and it's really funny how each of their S-Supports have the other character pull up a letter from their mom saying you're not actually related. Break Glass In Case Of Incest. the games are almost always about royalty finding sacred weapons to kill a problems dragon, and i'm honestly not big on stories that valorize nobility, but it's a fairy tale, so whatever. i have in the backburner a game i've been working on that does this kind of story from the perspective of civilians, so keep an eye out for that in the next few years. also for the love of fuck, if you're a fire emblem fan please play other tactics games. the fe series is good, but there's a whole slue of games out there if you want to expand your horizons. i recommend triangle strategy, xcom 2, into the breach, my own catalogue, and walk with the living.

-Angie Nyx

[falciesystemessays]

it is hard to capture pain in video games.

this is one of the things i ended up thinking about a lot in the hospital over the past few days. i had been going through a lot of stomach pain, and it turns out it wasn't overeating, that i had to get my gallbladder removed. i am finally back home laying in bed, trying desperately to find a good position that will kill neither my back nor my abdomen. it's not going great, but i'm too much of a wuss to use the opiate i was prescribed, so now i am typing this post in a kind of terrible state. the people sending their love and good vibes and best wishes are nothing to me, no amount of good energy will cure this abdominal pain, no amount of thoughts and prayers will take away my shortness of breath. i normally have better writing than this, but you don't deserve better writing from me right now. i don't owe you that.

so, look, i spent most of this time playing a shitton of fire emblem fates and some rhythm heaven megamix, i have been desperately trying to distract myself from the everything of this situation. and of course, as a game designer, i try to think of how to turn this into a teachable moment for my design work. but it's not fuckin easy, is it? it's hard to sell someone on a game that will physically hurt them without being a very real health risk, and it's hard to emotionally capture that sense of viscerality using game mechanics alone. tell me in the replies games that come close! but genuinely no amount of heartbreak or dread or panic in a game comes close to the sheer horribility of being in actual godawful pain, for days on end.

in my past, i actually worked on a game that tried to be about pain. it's a very different project now, and no longer in my hands, but i ended up getting its protagonist, Fang, in my head. fang's gimmick is Blood Aura, essentially an attunement to pain that gives her greater strength the lower her health is at. in a sense, it kinda captures the sense of letting yourself get harmed on purpose because that's when you feel the most alive. it makes you put yourself at risk so that you can lash out in spades. but it's all very calculated, and more to the point, it's not making you the player experience pain.

the thing i've realized about games, rpg's especially, is that you are not your player characters. the player character acts as a surrogate for you, essentially as an arm for your will, but you do not become the character as you play. the reason i emphasize rpg's is due to the nature of a party-based game. you don't play as marth in fire emblem shadow dragon, you do not play as tidus in final fantasy x. but you also, crucially, do not embody any of these characters individually as you control them. you play as the collective, the group, the dynamic itself. you play as a collective id, or perhaps, an unspoken sense of team play. games like into the breach and xcom compensate for this by simply making you an offscreen commander. it's a practical solution, and it carries me to my next point.

shortly after the surgery, i started asking various people - my mom, my friends, my beloved - how they personally felt seeing me go through this. i realized that while you can't easily capture my kind of visceral pain as a player character, you can capture the feeling of knowing someone going through it. perhaps a party member in an rpg could fall ill, and you as a commander would have to marinate in that reality. some were worried, some sympathized but knew it was gonna be alright, my beloved was terrified, and my mom talked about wanting desperately to know, and to do something. that's something that can all be done in a game form.

so here's my idea. at one point in a fairly long rpg, one of your characters gets sick, or needs some kind of operation, or something like that. this isn't foreshadowed, medical peril so often isn't, but you have to deal with it anyway. this character, who may have been vital to your team composition or may have been just another unit, is now completely unable to do any of the things you expect. you're told this won't be permanent, probably, but recovery will be a very slow process as they slowly, slowly drift back into normalcy. during this process, you have several opportunities to check in on them, for all the good that'll do. maybe it'll do something, maybe it won't. you don't know, and you don't know how successful or quick this recovery will be. you can choose to process this however you like.

this will of course run into some issues. something i've noticed playing fire emblem is a tendency i and others have to care less about characters of less tactical use to us. whether i let a unit die on classic mode hinges on whether i can be bothered to reset. so there is, always, a possibility that a gamer could see this thing and be like "wow, now this fucker is useless to me, so i don't give a shit." and, if they know this is coming, they might not bother to level up the character because it'd just be a waste of exp. not that i even like exp systems to begin with, and i highly encourage you to ask me my thoughts on exp systems because i am running purely on spite at this point.

maybe what games ultimately need is to be willing to actually physically punish the player. we have game-linked vibrators after all, why not shift the pleasure into pain? but trying to actually sell this game would mean it only appeals to masochists, and while i respect them deeply, they are not my target audience. i want the player i inflict pain upon to hate every moment of it, just as i hate every moment of being in this goddamn bed waiting for things to finally recover. apparently it'll take about six weeks. awesome, right? maybe i finally will go on that damn opioid. i am on three hours of sleep, and before the surgery i had barely eaten anything for two days. this past week has been nothing but pain, distractions from the pain, and eventual relief from the pain. fuck i hate this.

[marmotsomsierost]

When you fuck with the youtube music algorithm long enough, it's useful (discovering opal ocean, chinchilla, black pumas, etc) and entertaining (unexpectedly being teleported back to high school when smashmouth's flo pops up, realizing the marcus miller version of higher ground is a stevie wonder cover*) and, at times, the risk of creating a sudden bluescreen is absurdly hazardous.

Such as tonight, when i was about 2/3 the way through this song

when the combo of it plus the ambient xcom noises and the more acute noises of sierra gnawing on the mini-mjølnir and the clunking of the dryer abruptly tripped all the overstimulate-audio switches in my brain, so i skipped it.

Algorithm gave me this next, followed by several other Hu songs

and then this, which was a little heavier than i was vibing with tonight, but i had zucchini all over my hands and no easy way to skip to next without zucchinifying my phone or my earbuds.

All fine, right. So why the post, M? This was the next thing to play:

Like. Youtube. Buddy. I know i listened to like three phish albums on wednesday and yesterday was a lot of andy allo and leikeli47 and frank ocean and tuesday was, like, seventeen repeats of the great gate of kiev and jupiter the bringer of jollity and tine ting helseth's recording of hummel's fuck this trumpet in particular concerto in e flat and also abdelazer's rondeau from empire brass and bill kuhlman (listen tuesday was A Day, okay, monday was not so bad and we paid for it with tuesday) and i understand that might make it difficult to accurately predict what i might next want to hear. But.

Going from italian gothic metal to swedish folktronica is certainly A Choice. Not one i would recommend. I would also especially not recommend timing it in such a way that you are in the middle of dealing with hot oil and moist vegetables, because the resulting bluescreen might lead to dumping the entire bowl of shredded zucchini directly into the pan from somewhat higher elevation than desired.

In entirely unrelated news, everything to the left of my stove and the floor is very very clean now.

I'm adding this one in here because though it was not involved in today's youtube shenanigans, it is a fucking excellent song.

(I was at the concert this recording is from, and it is one of my most favorite memories of college. I had been having an absolutely shit day, decided i absolutely could not deal with one of my classes that day and went to the masterclass the empire brass was offering instead- that was a small mood-booster, but the actual concert was just...joyful. Instantly obliterated any and all of the crappiness from that day. It's still pretty far up there on my most favorite concerts. I will always recommend this album to people who like brass arrangements or organ or are unable to escape my general vicinity. or tumblr.)

*i could hear my mother declaiming 'A HOLE in your eduCATION!' from 800mi away. I know, mom. I know.

[videogaems]

Steam Next Fest - June 2024

Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers It feels easy to say 'Balatro Clone'. BUT if you say that about this game, you are openly admitting that you only see playing cards and have no nuance, just like everyone said. Dungeons and Degenerate Gamblers (Or D&DG as I'm going to refer to it, to save my little fingies the typing) is a roguelike blackjack battler. Those words feel confusing to stitch together but just follow me.

You choose your suit (different suits have different abilities, and the game equates this to difficulty) and begin playing blackjack against an opponent. You are always able to see their cards, unlike regular blackjack, and whoever of the two players wins does damage to the other players health pool, amounting to the difference between your final hands. Going over 21 results in your hand value being reduced to zero, in which case be prepared to take 17 full points of damage to the face.

As you win against opponents, you will acquire new cards for your deck, much like Balatro. Your opponents will also be acquiring these cards, much unlike Balatro.

There is also a mechanic of some cards being manually 'Exploited' (Read as: Activated), but in order to Exploit a Card, you must have Advantage (Read as: Points). This isn't explained well in the game *at all* in my opinion, but as you can see I figured it out using my brain and eyes, much to my chagrin.

I don't think I'll be Wishlisting D&DG, but it does the thing I like: It's a weird spin on a concept you know. And it works! I'll be curious to see if this catches on with the Balatro crowd, but I will certainly recommend it to roguelike and deckbuilding fans.

Dungeon Clawler I won't lie, when I saw that this was a dungeon crawler where you play a crane game to fight people, I automatically assumed this was my shit. I will say that it's kind of my shit, but it's not as 'my shit' as I originally thought it would be. Gameplay is cool and straightforward, you get two chances per turn to drop a claw into a claw machine and pull out symbols. The symbols you pull out will have some kind of effect (swords do damage, shields block damage, etc). By winning fights, you amass coins and new symbols to add to your crain machine that have varying effects.

By and large, the game is a cool idea but I'm not wild about execution. Now, Baron Mind® that this game is still in development so the following critiques may not apply someday BUT:

The art style is that kind cel-drawn images squash and stretch to imply movement, but it ends up kind of looking chinsey. It was the first thing I noticed, but maybe that's just because of how offput I am by that artistic choice.

Second, a banger of a soundtrack, even if it is just a remix of the Type B song from Game Boy Tetris, it's pretty good. But, zero sound effects. None at all, which filled me with discontent. I'm seeing attacks, I'm getting shields, I need noise.

Again, probably not a Wishlist for me but good execution on a great idea.

Tactical Breach Wizards

This was probably the breakout hit for me this Next Fest, and I will absolutely buy this day one (And hope the demo works after the fest is over). The third in the Defenestration Trilogy by Tom Francis - Which also includes Heat Signature (maybe one of my favorite games of all time) and Gunpoint (A game that, years after it came out, I found out I have a friend whose brother did the music - small world).

In Tactical Breach Wizards, it is the modern world, but magic exists. You are a team of magic users who are also a SWAT team. And when I say SWAT, I want you to imagine all the straight-to-DVD action movies that are marketed to the people who are military nerds, but never actually joined the military - It's that. I mean, one character is effectively Gandalf in Desert Camo with an M14 that has a staff sticking out of it, another has a wand with a laser sight and a silencer. It whips ass.

Gameplay is a lot like XCom, with one cool feature being that your wizard can see one second into the future, so after finishing your turns, you can forsee how the enemy will react, and rewind your turn as far back as you like, as many times as you want in order to achieve your desired outcome.

Honestly, I could rave about this game for a while. The gameplay, the style, the writing, everything is just aces, and this immediately breached the door to my Steam wishlist and killed everyone inside. Can't wait for August.

Caravan Sandwitch

I was unsure how to feel about Caravan Sandwitch. You play a girl who is returning to her hometown after a long time away, and reuniting with friends while driving a van.

The art style? Fantastic. Really just an absolute dream to look at and play. The setting? Eh... Now, don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of games that don't hold your hand to explain the world lore, and just kind of let you figure it out through context. Caravan Sandwitch does try to do that, but it falls short, and you end up feeling like a third wheel to these characters, rather than being in the shoes of the character you're playing.

While you explore, the game will have pillows sitting about in hard-to-reach places that effectively serve as collectible lookout points, where your character will just chill and observe the surroundings. These moments are peaceful, and personally I'd love to see more games do something like this, in an effort to make the player really observe the effort put into the environment (A thing I fail to do often)

However, other than that, Caravan Sandwitch didn't really grip me and I probably won't keep up on it.

Dustborn

Another entry in forgettable-single-name-game-titles-that-are-portmanteaus. Dustborn has you follow a group of characters in a band, traveling across the country on a tour in an effort to get to Nova Scotia, which seems to be some kind of safe haven in a military-state America.

Again, the Art style in this game is fantastic, everything is very comic book stylized, even the button prompts, but the demo jumps between moments in the first couple hours of the game without giving you a lot of info as to what is going on. I was surprised when combat was introduced, and thrilled when it included a baseball bat that you can throw and retrieve like the Leviathan Axe in God of War. Well, not quite like the Leviathan Axe... it's posited that way, but ultimately ends up being a ranged attack that just automatically returns to you. Combat was very floaty and just didn't have that je-ne-sais-quois that makes combat feel good.

The game also contained a rhythm action sequence that was reminiscent of Gitaroo Man, another fave of mine, but that wasn't enough to make me want to follow up.

BUS: Bro U Survived

I dislike this game on name alone, and playing it didn't really help much. Points to it for having customization options to let me have a handlebar mustache, but this game just kind of boils down to a co-op zombie survival game in a cartoony style where you have to drive a bus sometimes. I only clocked 26 minutes in this game, and to be fair, I was playing solo (What, I'm supposed to make friends?), but this game didn't hold me for very long. Even as I write this I'm trying to remember much about it, and it just ended up being very forgettable.

Wizard of Legend 2

Hell yeah. HELL YEAH. I forget how I even found out about the original Wizard of Legend, but it's a fun roguelike that I recommend. I was unaware that a sequel was even in the works, so this was a delight to find out about, and an even bigger delight to play.

Players will play the role of a wizard attempting to complete a legendary challenge, with the idea that each run is a new wizard's attempt, since the last one died. Choose spells of different elements, speed, and power, and try to find combinations that mesh well together. I had a lot of fun using a wind vortex to pull all enemies to me, and then hitting the lot of them with chain lightning. Even for a demo, I could see myself sinking a lot of time into this (and I'm hoping it's still playable after Next Fest). This one makes the Wishlist for sure, and I'm looking forward to the release.

Aloft

I found Aloft very disappointing. Yet another first person crafting survival game with the hook being that eventually you make a glider that you can use to zip around the world.

The demo is in Alpha, as the devs will make known quickly, and the game made known to me quickly, since I encountered a bug early on that I had to visit the steam forums to make sense of. While going through the tutorial prompts, after collecting leaves and wood and shit like that, I was prompted to craft a Glider at the Glider station. Oh boy, it's finally my time to fly! But wait, I don't have a Glider Station. What's more, I can't build a Glider Station. Where is the Glider Station? Is this 'Glider Station' in the room with us right now?

Eventually I learned that this is a bug - the game is supposed to give you more prompts to guide you up the mountain in the game, where you will learn how to make the Glider station, and THEN you are supposed to get the prompt to build your glider. To drive that point forward: The. Tutorial. Is. Bugged. The thing that teaches you how to play the game does not work correctly. I know it's Alpha, and I know I don't make games, but this seems like such an oversight.

Finally, I made my Glider, and took off. It was... fine. The camera cuts to third person when this happens, but your character is so stiff and rigid flying around. It felt cool to zip around, but it didn't feel good if that makes any sense.

Maybe I'll circle back around on Aloft when it's in Beta or 1.0, but this just wasn't it for me.

Goblin Cleanup

But this was!!! Play as a goblin henchman whose job it is to clean up and reset all the traps in the dungeon before the next group of heroes arrive! For some reason, gamified mundane shit always gets me, and this game was no exception.

Goblin cleanup is almost beat-for-beat a reproduction of Viscera Cleanup Detail. Instead of a mop, you stab a slime and poke bloodstains with it until it soaks them all up (and dies?!). Instead of washing the mop, you feed the slime to a mimic, so on and so forth. Some improvements include:

Structure. You're given a list of tasks to complete, and they are checked off as you complete them. As a person with ADHD Inattentive Type, lists are key for me, so this was a big improvement over Viscera Cleanup Details approach of 'Clean until you're done and we'll tell you if you did good'. I'm neurodivergent with a praise kink, you've gotta tell me I'm doing good while I'm doing good.

Scanning. Hitting Q at any given point will highlight on your HUD where there are still items to be cleaned up. Massive improvement over Viscera Cleanup Detail, where you just have to kind of eyeball it.

I liked this! A lot! I could see myself buying this, or even just going back and trying to finish the level proper before NextFest is over.

Pawn Planet

I'm a massive mark for shop-owning games, and even more so if the game has a mechanic for haggling. Pawn planet has both, and by and large, I enjoyed it. The premise is simple, you run a pawn shop on a remote planet. Aliens come in an buy the stuff you have, or try to sell you things. When they approach the register you are given stats on the customer, like Anger, Knowledge, and Greediness. Using this, as well as the condition of the item you are buying or selling, you haggle on a price until one of you coughs up the cash. After the day is over, you can buy supplies to repair the items to make your money back.

Some days, there will be an auction at a storage planet where you roll the bones and bid on a Storage Locker of random items, storage wars style. Not going to lie, this had me hyped until I got fleeced on a board game I paid way too much for.

Other days, you will travel through a portal and ostensibly raid an alien base in order to murder civilians and take their stuff to sell. Okay, so the game doesn't say that, but the game also doesn't explain who these people are or why you are shooting them in the face. This section was underwhelming - The shooting isn't super tight, and you just sort of strafe and click on the aliens until they blow up. Not to mention there was some confusing placement of items in the alien base; Why are you putting what is obviously a safe in this room if it is not intended that I should try to crack it open and steal the rest of whatever was left in these creature's will?

Other bugbears included the fact that when you buy an item, only that item will come to your shipping bay, and you must remove it before you can buy another item. So in a situation where I needed three separate items, I needed to leave the computer, go to the shipping bay, retrieve it, and return to the computer... three separate times. Also, when traveling to the storage planet, I had to click where I wanted to go on my computer inside, then go outside to the spaceship to leave. These are small grievances, but the question and the sometimes vowel remains: Why?

This one gets a rec from me, I didn't spend too much time with it but I did enjoy it overall. Hoping that the finished product has a bit more polish.

The Alters

From the trailers I've seen of this game, it seems cool, but I didn't get far enough in the demo to really see the meat and bones. Which is to say I didn't get far enough to see any of the titular Alters. I, instead, ran headfirst into some radiation at some point, and lost about 10 minutes worth of progress that I just didn't have the nerve to redo, so I bailed. Luckily, these NextFest demos seem to not have expired, so maybe I'll go back and give it another shot.

In the meantime, there are a lot of Death Stranding vibes, a game I loved, and a base building mechanic similar to XCOM, yet another game I like. I think this has legs, and I enjoy the idea of alternate versions of the main character helping him out, but again - I didn't get there.

I dunno... seems neat.

Demonschool

This came at the recommendation of a friend, and I simply could not wrap my head around it. I'm a real sucker for teenagers at a weird school doing paranormal stuff, but the combat system felt very obtuse. One character only buffs, and two characters only attack. You choose the actions they will take but just kind of clicking around (not actually selecting the skills, just sort of running the character into targets), and then they play out those actions once your turn has concluded. Which I sort of get why, but it's still very disorienting. I only stuck around for two combats, so I can't say this is for me, but if you're into visual novelesque storytelling with Into the Breach Combat, this may be your cup of tea.

Reka

I think I remember seeing a trailer for this game during the Wholesome Direct or Cozy Direct or whatever the hell in 2023, but it seemed cool, and it is. This is effectively a base building game, except you're a young witch training under Baba Yaga and the base is a giant chicken house that you can drive around. It's pretty tight. Your character only looks like a haunted doll, regardless of what features you choose, and the controls are very floaty but I think this has a lot of potential. My first action once getting my Bird House was to see how big I could make the platform it sits upon, and the answer is 'pretty big'. This was one of a few demos that I actually saw through to the end, so I think that says quite a bit. Hoping the full release has some meat on these Chicken House Bones.

Thank Goodness You're Here!

I'm going to file this one under Biggest Disappointment of the Fest. I typically try to give games about 15 minutes at least so I can get a feel for what they're doing. This demo was 13 minutes long. It being by the creators of Untitled Goose Game had me excited, but ultimately you just kind of run around and slap things and everyone has a funny British accent. I was very un-wowed by the game, and very wowed when the demo ended so abruptly. Oh well, I suppose.

Tiny Glade

Not so much a game as it is a toy, but oh boy is it a fun one. Intuitively whip up little castles with no problem, and then walk around with them in the first person. I was so charmed by this that I called my artist wife in to sit down and take a look at it, and I didn't need to explain anything about it before she had build herself a little castle. You build little castles! What's not to love? I'm hoping there's more to it in the full release, or at the very point that the price point reflects what it is exactly.

Tiny Bookshop

Another one I saw in a cozy direct that I had my eye on that ended up kind of falling flat for me. This game boils down to a shop simulator, which I'm a huge fan of, obviously. But then there's the whole aspect of have percentages of book genres, and how many books you have affecting your likelihood to sell... it just didn't hook me in the way I hoped. The art style, however, was very good, and it's a delight to look at. This might be another one I take a stab at when I'm in the right headspace.

Wild Bastards

I heard Void Bastards was good, but I never actually played it. Wild Bastards seems pretty neat though... you are a couple of Wild West Robots (hell yeah) who are venturing across the galaxy and resurrecting your dead team members with a magic ship. Levels consist of beaming down to a planet and taking out enemies meticulously while not being killed yourself. You can only take down two team members at a time, but you can hotswap between them which is a neat mechanical way of changing weapons. Unfortunately, once I got my third team members, I was summarily shithoused by a bunch of plants and my run was ruined. Still, I had a lot of fun and I will be keeping a close eye on this one. Maybe not a day one buy, but certainly something to pick up.

That's my NextFest, folks. Love it or hate it, I love videogames and I like that demos are coming back in vogue. Til next time.

[eri-blogs-life]

Today officially marks my 5-year anniversary of starting gender-affirming hormone replacement therapy! It's been a real good five years, overall. A mixed bag at times, for sure, with my old shitty job and then me losing my job and getting into extreme debt, but on the bright side I'm in a great relationship, I've got some fantastic friends, and I feel like I am my own person now and all that good stuff's got a lot to do with my transition.

Anyway, to celebrate I decided to take a whole day off work and play a bunch of video games! Quick impressions on like the half-dozen games I played at least an hour or so of today, in no particular order other than the order I played them in today:

Lego: Lord of the Rings

I'll be real, I was not the biggest fan from my first impression. I grew up with Lego Star Wars, and still love that game to this day, but a new Lego game for me...? The gameplay is pretty simple, which is fine but not necessarily the most engaging.

Worst of all though is adding voice acting. One of the best aspects of the Lego Star Wars games was that they had to get creative with how they told the story, focus only on the really important details, and come up with unique ways for characters to express themselves. By ripping the dialogue straight out of the Lord of the Rings movies instead, it cuts a lot of the Lego charm that I loved so much in those games growing up.

Probably not going to play much more of this one

Warhammer 40,000: Boltgun

RIP AND TEAR

Holy shit, this game slaps. Like, I'd heard lots of good things, but now that I've played it I can really feel just how good it is. The pixel art intro is amazing (though a little long-winded for my taste I feel), the graphics of the core gameplay are absolutely beautiful, the music and sound feels so good to the ears, the shooting feels so clunky and satisfying... All around, an absolutely awesome experience.

I am definitely going to be beating this one at LEAST once through.

Lethal Company

Far from my first time playing Lethal Company, but yeah, this is a real fun game. The mix of horror and goofing off with friends just makes for a real fun experience. Once you start learning the creatures' behaviors and they stop being so scary, it really does become just a fun, goofy, silly time with friends in which you ocassionally get extremely freaked out by something suddenly killing you when you don't expect it.

Absolutely playing more, of course.

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin Edition

I've written about this game before on my blog, it is one of my favorite games of all time and I absolutely adore it. I didn't play for a whole lot today, mostly just booted it up and played until I died, but that made for a satisfying little taste of the game again. Without the social aspect of me playing this game with my friend Jon back in college, though, it definitely doesn't have quite the same appeal.

I don't know if I'm going to play more DS2 anytime soon. I played so, so many hours of this game and explored nearly all its secrets, I don't know how much more playtime I've got in me.

XCOM 2

I've been playing this game for the past few weeks, actually, and fucking loving it. I adored the original reboot XCOM and played it tons, and I picked up XCOM 2 shortly after its release, but I didn't actually give it a real good playing until recently. It's fantastic, but man is it rough to play. You lose a couple of good soldiers on one mision and it feels like everything starts chain-reacting til you've lost the whole run.

Definitely going to be playing more. I want to see this game's ending at least once.

Slay the Spire

Quite possibly my favorite game of all time, I love Slay the Spire's everything. Its game loop, its art, its music, the whole package is absolutely fantastic.

Absolutely I'm playing this game more. I also cannot wait for StS 2.

Cube Escape Collection

Alright, so my first exposure to this series was my neice playing a Cube Escape game on her ipad in, like, 2014, and then I didn't think about it again for a really long time. It was just some weird little puzzle game for mobile apps for kids or whatever. But then I saw this game on steam one time on sale, thought the name sounded familiar, and decided to pick it up. So far in first little experience, it's chill. I do enjoy me a good little escape room puzzle, for sure.

Probably going to play more, but it might be a while before I pick it up again

Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp

I loved Monster Prom - its fun characters and silly setting make for a really entertaining time. I finally got around to trying out the sequel. It's good, though mechanically it felt like largely the same core loop. It's not a bad loop by any means, and of course the real appeal is in the new romanceable characters, but I didn't find myself really falling too hard for any of them on an initial runthrough like I did with Polly in Monster Prom.

I might play more. Might try at least one run to date Aaravi cause they seemed fun.

Highschool Romance

Holy shit this made me feel things. The premise of a boy has to crossdress to fit in at an all-girls school feels kinda silly at first blush, but it really feels like the game takes it seriously. I dunno, when the game put me in a situation where I had to make a decision between revealing my identity to the girl I was interested in or keeping it a secret, I had to just pause the game and step away for a few minutes. The game really got me in to feeling like I was there in the character's shoes, caught in the headlights of a near impossible decision between trying to keep my secret a little longer or coming out when I didn't know how she'd take it. I tried keeping it a secret, but it didn't exactly end up working out, and she found out. But she was cool about it. And she even wanted to kiss me, which was pretty hot.

I'm absolutely about to play the fuck out of this game.

Ocean's Heart

Didn't play this game for long, but I got just enough of a taste to say it seems really promising. Got a lot of the 2D Zelda genes in it and from my short time with it, it feels pretty fun to play.

Definitely going to play more of it, but I think it's going to go back onto the backlog for now while I focus on other games.

[etherealvoidechoes]

Raal’Maker and His (Human) Shells

First off, so sorry to the anon that asked this like last year+, but how so many things went around that time it just completely slipped from my mind. Read more for ~~spoilers~~.

So why are Maker’s shell-bodies human-looking and don’t look more like the Hybrids? 

Technically, all of his shell-bodies are spliced to varying degrees, but human DNA makes up the majority of it since human DNA has been rather pliable and fairly compatible with a plethora of DNA. They definitely look less human under all the clothes.

In the early days of his experimenting, there was more Elder, Sectoid, and other DNA spliced in them leading to the faces and skin color leaning more towards a Sectoids or the Elders, and some even had four arms as I personally believe the Elders wouldn’t want to give that up.

But that all changed after his one incident with Jynn(or any of my other Commanders) when trying to pull Asaru out of her again(not fully realizing it was just strands and he wasn’t there). Instead, what he found was a nasty psionic bomb of a backlash with a touch of something else. This nearly killed him and sadly killed or drove a few of the nearby workers mad. He barely had enough strength to quarantine his entire facility, cut the room off from the rest of it, and cut it off from his brethren as the psionic poison ravaged his system. 

Ever since that day, he had to be interned into his sarcophagus earlier than projected and cut himself off from the hive mind with his brethren as his psionics have become unstable and risk affecting the rest of them. 

In addition to his psionics becoming unstable, it’s like they have a mind of their own and actively hate his old shell bodies that had a higher concentration of Elder DNA, and somewhat the same towards Sectoid DNA and a few others. He went through a great deal of trial and error to find just the right amount that allowed compatible possession.

One bonus from the unstable psionics and power increase is it’s allowing him really test how much power a body can handle before damaging itself via feedback or burning out the synaptic nerves. It’s concerning, but the others support it since, of course, they want to be able to use their full power unimpeded and want to continue to grow said power in the future.

Though, Maker has had to shift any tests with bodies with heavier amounts of Elder DNA to the others, his current work is still useful for them as the less of their ailing/corrupted DNA they have to use to make new bodies is a good thing, but their collective superiority doesn’t exactly want to admit that. Such an attitude leads to one incident with an early prototype they had to semi-shelve due to recent events with XCOM and the Resistance becoming more of a nuisance, they’re going to bring it back out after some heavy indoctrination and more active brainwashing. Will be stealing Specimen Zero a.k.a. “Void” from that Legends game.

The shift to more human shell-bodies with the occasional experiment with some other compatible races when Va’lo’Fe supplies him with the genetic material has also left him estranged from most of his kind. They already aren’t too fond of any from or influenced by Va’lo’Fe (as the old Elder changed eons ago becoming a great deal less like they are now, (but they respect his position and most of his wisdom)), and then for Maker, they find he’s becoming more “human”/like the lesser races to their disgust(and some horror wondering if they could be infected with humanity if they’re not careful building their new bodies.) 

Through a lot of inner contemplation and reviewing what he learned under Va’lo’Fe, Maker finds it all enlightening and poetic. Even before the incident, he was enjoying all the sensations and feelings that came with possessing the various prototype bodies. Things he only felt in a tentative vicarious way when possessing a being with a will; that was always distant. But these prototype bodies with no wills, or if there were any it was quickly subsumed by his power, he felt everything with none of that distance or disconnects. And then there were none(at the time) of the subtle pains, weaknesses, and numbness that plagued his Elder body.

So he’s been embracing his human shells a little more every time he makes a major iteration. He’s still going to work on a body he can properly inhabit(or die trying) or one for those he can trust and can seem some could be persuaded to change. He’s lost a lot of love for the majority of his brethren minus those with Va’lo’Fe.