Saturday Morning Gaming: Added Value
A million years ago, games came out on cartridges. That’s it. That was the game. It was like that for more than a decade. When the Game Genie came out, it was a revelation. Holy cow! We can change the game!
Heck, when computer games first did their thing, you played the game off of the disk. While there were a ton of hex editors out there, it was a very good way to wreck your scenario disk in Wizardry to try to give yourself a decent helm. (Want a blast from the past? Check this out.)
By the time that we switched from floppies to hard drives, games were a little more robust (not that you couldn’t wreck a game on a CD, just that you were mostly limited to physical means of doing so) but we were sort of back to the cartridge at that point. The game you got? That’s the game you got.
Until, one day, PC Gaming Magazine included a CD. It had demos on it… and, more importantly, IT HAD ADDITIONAL LEVELS FOR DOOM. Holy crap.
This was right around the time that only students would have email accounts and right before AOL hit the big time so a lot of these files got passed around hand to hand, like contraband. Sure, we all knew the guy who had a computer WITH a modem and we scheduled our time with him carefully. Pay him with Twix bars and if you wanted to use his CD burner, you had to give him the blank CDs. He wasn’t falling for that again.
And THEN everybody got online and everything went to heck. Video games started getting sent out unfinished and the first thing you had to do when you booted it up was connect to the server and download the patch for it. Pool of Radiance: Ruins of Myth Drannor was downright unplayable and did you the service of deleting some of your other files for uninstalling it. Temple of Elemental Evil was broke out the door and it took three huge patches to get it to a playable state. (Heck, it’s still being patched.) On the upside, though, the patches did get it to a playable state… so there’s that.
But this has some upsides too…for example, Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines came out a buggy mess, but the patches not only turned it playable, the original developers of the game have worked with the game community and they’ve issued out unofficial patches that unlock previously hidden content (a new patch came out LAST WEEK). (For example, in the original game, you were limited to the seven clans… in the patched version, you can play each clan with a different background. For example, you can play a Toreador Starving Artist (bonus to perception, limitations on appearance) or a Well Educated Ventrue (bonuses to many skills, but hard limits on how high you can raise intimidation). The game just keeps getting better and better and better. And it’s all thanks to the fact that it remains malleable even 16 years after coming out in stores.
Well, it’s in that vein that I’m pleased to say that both Monster Train and Griftlands have added additional play modes. You can now do a “Challenge of the Day” kinda thing. They assign you some lop-sided hand to play and the fun is in figuring out how to best leverage the skills you’ve been given and work around the hobbling they’ve done to you.
For example, today’s challenge is an Umbra/Melting Remnant challenge and you get two cards every time you draft one, the position of all units in the train shuffle after combat, and friendly and enemy units get +5/+10 damage/hitpoints and the Pyre gets +10 damage. The other day, I played one that said that if a creature died, it was removed from your deck. Given that I was playing with Melting Remnants, this made the game end pretty quickly.
But, hey, the original game mode is still there. This is just a fun challenge to come back to and, get this, this is additional content handed out for free.
And that’s something that was unthinkable back in the cartridge days.
So… what are you playing?
(Featured image is Monster Train)
No Man’s Sky had yet another big update: this time you can find derelict freighters to loot and even change the colors and storage capabilities of your capital ship, so I’ve been playing that. Also, the fancy edition of Shadow of War was on sale for fifteen bucks, so I bought it. I’m not sure why; I still need have a LOT to do in RD2. I blame you, Jaybird, for the glowing review you did a while back. Lol.Report
Anything I can do to help people quarantine I see as a good deed.Report
You’re doing good work.Report
No Man’s Sky has been my main focus for the past few weeks (and also fits really well with Jaybird’s “games that have improved with updates” theme). I had been curious about it since launch, but I was not playing a lot of games on the computer, so I never got around to getting it. I finally got it from Steam’s Summer Sale, and I have really been enjoying it. There is just a lot to do, with lots of little distractions from whatever I am actually trying to accomplish. “I need to mine some cadmium. Oh look, something shiny! Oh, look, something else shiny! There’s a building! What happened to that ore deposit?”
There is currently some discussion of getting bonuses at work. If that actually comes through, I might be getting an Occulus to play the game in VR.
I still haven’t tried out the derelict freighter yet. Just finished the Atlas quest line, then going back to the Artemis quest line. I also have a bunch of base building quests to do.Report
I started playing VTM:B Thursday, as a mental prep for the new one coming out.
I actually find the game slightly frustrating in a lot of weird ways. Mostly because it’s very easy to secretly miss thing.
I had forgotten that you actually didn’t get directed towards quests, except the main one. The way the game works is…you just randomly talk to people. If you don’t talk to one person, you can miss out on entire chains of quests. Also…the quest descriptions tend to be very bad…the game is good at giving you very good directions, and then vaguing them up for ‘let me check my notes’. It’s like…I know I was told exactly what to do…and I don’t seem to have that information anymore. What, am I supposed to remember things now?
This is my first time as a Tremere vampire, and I have somehow missed my upgraded safehouse…I think. (You can’t get the normal upgraded one as a Tremere, you get one in their building instead.) I keep going to the Tremere guy, to check in, but he doesn’t seem to want anything from me, or have anything to say. And I haven’t been rude to him or anything.
Tremere’s a lot of fun, though, once I figured out how they were supposed to work. You almost _have to_ use magic (Um, is it technically magic? I guess it is?), because your physical stats can’t get above three.
The easiest magic is…the one that just makes them vomit blood, which uses very little power. So many boss fights I just make them do that, wail on them with a sword while they’re doing that, stop when they recover, run off so that I finish recharging which happens like five seconds after _they_ recover, and hit them again. It’s a crazy playstyle, but, apparently, that’s sorta how you do it.
I just finished the stupid Warrens thing and was sent to Chinatown but haven’t actually gone there yet, and I’ve been doing the quests as they came along, so…I’m pretty close to endgame.
And it’s my first time playing an actual modded version (As opposed to just the patched stuff.), I’m doing Camarilla Version. It actually added a cloud minds-type aoe spell, I forget the name, but…it works way better than ‘trance’ spell, which annoyingly breaks if you walk near them and only gets one person at a time, and they can annoyingly block things. This just makes them sorta ‘reset’ and wander around confused, and it’s such an interesting spell I sorta think it was built-in but one of those things that got diked out in the release.
I’ve noticed that every time I’ve played the game, I sorta walk the middle path, which I guess…next time, I’m full Anarch, probably as a Brujah or a Gangrel. And then full buttkiss.Report
Have you ever played Malkavian?Report
No, and I haven’t played Nosferatu either, which I’m sure changes the game even more. Honestly, Nosferatu sound really annoying, and I might never do that…but Malkavian, I do plan to play that at some point.
I guess I could try it on my planned anarch playthrough…although I don’t actually know what happens if you just outright keep arguing with LaCroix, at the very start of the game, and keep it up the entire game, so maybe I need to try that normally first before trying it Malkavian.
Oh, and FYI: I hadn’t missed out on the Tremere safehouse, I just got it earlier today…apparently you get it really late game. At this point, I’m randomly wandering around collecting posters and other silly loose ends, until I jump into endgame…and I don’t actually know how I’m taking that. I don’t think I’ve cut any path off at this point, so I might just…save and try them all.
Next time I play, I’m going to look for other mods, too. But an interesting thing about this game is…you can only use one mod at a time. Basically, they create their own subdirectory and that subdirectory has a bunch of changed game files in it, and then you just start the game with that directory as an option.
While I’m sure this is annoying for modders, it’s good for me, because a lot of times, I end up spending a hell of a lot of effort trying to figure out what mods I should play with in various games. But here…I just have to pick one, and that’s all I can do. (There are some ‘merged mods’ though. Like…every mod starts with the unofficial patch in it, and a few of them try to put together some of the bigger unrelated ones.)Report
Okay, you inspired me to start playing it again (as Malkavian). I went through the prologue and got my new apartment.
I think when you play Malkavian, you’ll have a blast. The first time I played the game, I trusted the personality test and it gave me Malkavian and… well, the second time I played the game as Brujah and had fun with it… then I played Malkavian again and I said “HOLY CRAP THIS VERSION OF THE GAME IS NOTHING BUT OBFUSCATED SPOILERS!!!”
So if you sigh happily and think about playing it again, play again as Malkavian.Report
My first playthrough was Tremere. My second was Malkavian. Both were many years ago. I quit the Malkavian playthrough before I got to the end game where it was just killing your way to the obnoxious final boss. I did not have the willpower to do it a second time.
Have they fixed the endgame with the new patches? That would be something that might entice me to try again.Report
That’s a great question. I last played a few patches ago and stopped playing somewhere around the Malkavian Maze.
This time I *WILL* get through it. I have started the game with 510 skill points, thanks to the console.
I’m certain that this will make some of the sloggier parts less sloggy.Report
Okay. I beat it. It remains an amazing game.
Of course, gaming has advanced somewhat since then… fetch quests are obviously fetch quests now (and they didn’t *FEEL* like fetch quests at the time…) and part of the game that were terrifying and amazing the first time lack any tension whatsoever this time around (e.g., the haunted hotel).
BUT. It was an awesome game.
And, yes, you’ll want to use the latest version of the unofficial patch.
And you’ll want to start the game by going through the tutorial to find your feet again, then, once the tutorial is over, opening the console with tilde (~), typing in giftxp 255 and then doing that again.
Then give yourself 510 xp to play with.
The sloggy stuff (apart from the aforementioned hotel) evaporates.Report
I didn’t mention it, but on my play-through I actually picked an Ending I didn’t even know existing: the Camerilla ending. Where you basically just tell the Camerilla what’s going on and they come grab LeCroix and the sarcophagus.
I didn’t realize there was a way to beat the game without anyone opening the sarcophagus.
That would, weirdly, be a very strange ending to have without having already played through the game once. You get no solution to what’s going on at all.Report
Is that the one where you replace the Ventrue leader with the Tremere one?
The first time I played, I picked that one. Like, but this was before the Unofficial Patch. They were still working on the official ones at that point.
This time around, I picked the Anarch ending for the first time and was delighted by it.
(I understand that there is also a Kuei-Jin ending that is spectacularly unfulfilling. I’ve never pursued it… and googling tells me that there’s a Sabbat ending? What the heck?)Report
Yes, that is what functionally happens, but…you don’t really ‘do’ that in any real way. You just go tell the Camerilla what’s going on with LeCroix working with the Kuei-Jin, and they apparently run it up the chain and say ‘Well, he’s out’. You’d think you need to gather evidence or something, but nope.
The interesting thing is there’s a dialog place in the cab where there’s a list of people can side with, but that’s not one of the choices! So it’s not an obvious ending.
You have to talk a bit more to the cab driver and realize that telling the Camerilla what is actually happening would, in theory, solve most of your problems, and then you realize you can tell the Tremere leader, who seemed to be a loyal Camerilla follower who nevertheless wasn’t that enamored of LeCroix. (Presumably that’s only there if you haven’t seriously pissed him off..although I wonder what would happen if you did. Like…it’s still true.)
Like the ‘no side’ ending, you still have to fight all the boss battles. I don’t particular remember _why_ I ended up having to fight LeCroix, I think it was basically ‘Officially, he’s out, but he’s still got the stupid thing and he’s going to open it, and we don’t have the army it would take to defeat him.’
I’m probably going to take a break and then, I dunno, go another round next month. VtM:B 2’s release date has apparently been bumped to 2021.
The Sabbat side of the game was apparently _really_ cut back before release, and I think you can’t actually _do_ it in the original version, you have to have the plus version of the unofficial mod.
If you are going to do it, go get a mod that vastly expands it. Like the Clan Quest Mod, that’s the one I’m using next time.Report
“That would, weirdly, be a very strange ending to have without having already played through the game once. You get no solution to what’s going on at all.”
It’s the one where the DM is like “well, you weren’t supposed to fight that guy, and if you did you weren’t supposed to win, so, I guess you all just go back to the inn and, that’s it, that’s the campaign…”Report