OH RIGHT I STILL WRITE THESE DON'T I · 12:21pm Nov 3rd, 2017
I have had a majorly unproductive week. My sleep schedule has stretched and inverted repeatedly, meaning I lost track of the concept of 'days'. So it's Friday now. I was supposed to write one of these on Wednesday, huh?
Okay well. I guess. I might as well show you what I've been doing instead of writing. I'm in a weird spot where I got finals next week I'm focused on, so I'm not really writing, but I've also done everything I can to prepare for them, which means I'm not really studying either. So I'm catching up on my reading and video game backlog.
This week I binged two games hard. Like, complete-in-one-24-hour-period-because-I-forgot-to-sleep hard. The new Zachtronics game Opus Magnum, and the war-story game This War of Mine.
Let it first be said that I have an unhealthy addiction to Zachtronics games. Like, really, genuinely, compulsive obsessiveness with them. So, on Sunday, after I'd played D&D all day, I got home around 10pm and thought I'd try the first few levels of Opus Magnum so I could think about the mechanics of it the next day.
Well, that happened, but only because I was still playing at 4pm on Monday, when I built this:
This game is; "What if SpaceChem had Factorio's level of flexible toolsets"
So I spun lead into gold
I made fast machines
I made tiny efficient machines
But most of all, the point I was going to make here was lost two hours ago when I was scrolling through my saved gifs and I saw the inefficiencies in them and went back and made a lot of little adjustments and corrections.
So that's Opus Magnum.
The other game I played was This War of Mine.
This War of Mine is a game about the horrors of war and the decisions people have to make to survive. My first game went thirty two days. Everybody died. Illness, starvation, crippling depression, everyone broke. I had to rob two innocent old people who begged and pleaded for me not to take their medication just to get the food I needed to survive. That broke my survivors, who couldn't find the will to go on after.
It was awful, and terrible, and tragic, and I learned everything I needed to know about the game in that first play through to break it over my knee.
The next playthrough I had Katia. For those who do not know: Katia is broken. Katia is disgustingly broken. She is wonderfully, blessedly broken.
You see, Katia has a bonus 20% on the value of all her trades. This is nice on its own, but what you need to understand is trades are fixed so that the trader always gets a static value more from a transaction,
What does that mean, exactly?
It means if you make a few large-value trades, that 20% will always, always be worth more than the static value. Also you can trade back for the things you traded, with some traders.
With enough patience, one can trade a roll of bandages for the traders entire inventory, their pants, and also the bandages.
While this only works on a few traders, and the ones you really want it to work on won't trade back, it's a godsend in the early game until you can make enough goods to do the trade legitimately.
This was nifty, and a good start. Using that, I got the ramp I needed to build up your starting base quick.
You see, the game has levels of security upgrades, and it ups the threat every few days. If you get the security up faster than the threat counter, you're basically immune to raids. Only if you're extremely, impossibly quick though, like if you have Boris as a scavenger or... well, if you have Katia with a clothesline full of every merchant's pants as a trophy case.
So that was my base set up. Now I needed food, guns and bullets. The easiest way to get those things is by murdering bandits who have been using their guns and bullets to steal innocent people's food. Piece of cake, right?
The problem is the game's combat and stealth system. It is, simply put, awful. It's just bad. It's obtuse and non-interactive and awful. It's why I didn't feel so bad about siccing Katia on the game; my first game was lost because the stupid bullshit system killed my scavenger. There is only one really viable option: Sneak attack kills. Fortunately it's really viable.
I learned this stabbing a would-be rapist in the back in a supermarket, when he was... distracted. That was when I figured out that the game has a backstab mechanic, and that's what the dark corners on certain levels were for.
Every level with enemies has little hiding spaces your heroes can wait in. If someone walks past without seeing your hiding hero, they can perform a brutal melee execution.
So my former football star, Pavle, had the brilliant idea of taking his hatchet to a bandit outpost, running to a hiding spot on the first floor, and then waiting for the guard to come and see what the noise was.
Gank'd. Assault rifle and all his stuff gone, Pavle then walked out with his pockets full. This made him sad, so Katia played him a bardic song about his legendary prowess to make him happy again.
He came back the next night and did the same thing.
He came back the night after and did the same thing.
Yeah there were three bandits and none of them ever worked out what happened because the stupidity of the game's combat system -- designed to make the player feel helpless and powerless and like it's all just a crapshoot and almost never worth the risk because even the smallest untreated wound could lead to death -- is that stealth kills are OP, and that it's balanced against stupidly high loot rewards if you do risk it.
I then had my former celebrity chef, Bruno, buy all the sugar in the goddamn world and make it into rum, then had Katia sell that for three weeks worth of supplies. Pavle comes back with armfuls of armaments and sits at the barricades.
Fun fact; if you catch a pigeon, you're eating pigeon. If a chef catches pigeon, you're eating squab, which is a delicacy, sir.
I sat out that war a booze baron, cooking fine meals with squab and fresh herbs, producing so much spare medical goods that I got the happy endings by just giving free stuff to whoever asked for it.
The last eight days of the war my people were rich, fat, heavily armed, and never had to leave the damn house once.
So what's the takeaway here?
Dodgy game design can undermine the tone of a very serious game with a compelling message if, once you understand it, on your second playthrough you can spend the entire back half of the game drunk, obese and partying? Maybe.
I personally believe that the takeaway should be that war really isn't that hard and everyone else is just complaining way too much about it.
Fun aside; A Soviet pilot defected to the US during the Cold War when he landed his plane on a runway with birds on it, because he realized that the citizens weren't hungry enough to be catching them.
I couldn't get into 'This War of Mine' the first time I played. Maybe I should try picking it up again.
Glad to hear you're not dead and spending your time making the world a better place for folks n_n
So much unintentional comedy!
HaHA!
Gaming systems is always funny when they lead to hilarious unintentional gameplay.
I DEMAND A LETS PLAY
I saw Scott Manley demo Opus Magnum a few days ago, and it looks very cool. Also I'm cheap, so I'll wait and see what Steam has it priced at during the Holiday Sale.