What Did We Play Yesterday?

I was one of those people who bounced off the Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild a few times at first, but I eventually settled in and enjoyed the game as a wildlife photography simulator and cartography checklist. I didn't expect to necessarily like TOTK, and there definitely are dumb design choices that bug me.

tl;dr It's weird how a game that wants to be so beautiful and fun can be so bizarrely tedious but I have found things to enjoy.

Leave it to Nintendo to take every complaint about BOTW and then, out of hubris or spite or both, make those things twice as annoying in the sequel. The tutorial area is even more tedious than the plateau in the first game, the spacial controls for the building mechanic are annoying as shit, and they made the power selections wheel more stupid and clunky for no apparent reason. Arbitrary weapons decay remains. Talking to characters is just as annoying as it always has been, and if it rains while you're climbing a mountain fuck you.

That being said, I'm glad I muscled past the starting area (I have never wanted anything as badly as I wanted the glider in those areas). This game effectively has three maps, adding sky and underground zones, along with a very handy ascend ability that allows the player to phase through ceilings and thus leave underground areas without having to climb back up. The fuse mechanic feels like Nintendo's way of keeping randomized decay without having to admit it sucks, but I appreciate some of the more amusing fusion results, like my drumstick sword. I hate the spacial controls for building, but I've resolved to help the incompetent sign-holding guy whenever I see him, and this has been a way to slowly practice and get used to the controls with minimal frustration. I also hate the shrines, but this too may pass, as it did with the previous game. For now, I'm content to find 'em all for the fast-travel options they provide.

I wanted to get back to wildlife photography ASAP, but didn't have a camera. I looked it up and figured out I have to unlock the camera by doing a maybe not-obvious side quest (because of course I do) but this quest introduces the game's very cool underground area, which must be lit up with brightblooms and is riddled with pulsing red gloom, so I got over my indignation and had fun dying there.

Overall, I'm glad I stuck with it and powered through the early parts. Now that I have access to my powers/items and the open world, I'm content to randomly explore and mostly not-die while occasionally building janky machines that are in violation of most safety codes but more or less do what they need to do. I've gotten into the habit of playing for a few minutes in the evening and I'm enjoying a loose and fancy-free playstyle.

Welp I thought I was done with this game, but I said I'd grab this bundle if it went on sale, and it did indeedy, so I got the remaining 12 expansions for about $13 and became briefly obsessed again! Thanks for nothing, Milkstone Studios.

The DLC adds a bunch of crops, gryphons (which lay eggs), tuna, a few herbs and flowers, a crapton of decorations, and of course tons of cosmetics. All of the DLC come with houses, and some of them are pretty epic, but the main advantage is you can generate tickets faster. There are a few reskinned buildings, but outside the candy shop I talked about previously, they are purely aesthetic changes. The downside of adding all these new flowers, crops, and animals is they now become eligible for quests. So you might find yourself obligated to either cancel a quest or start raising gryphons at some point.

Recettear is a doujinware fantasy JRPG shopkeeper sim by EasyGameStation. It has been on my maybe-maybe-maybe list for years because I wasn't convinced I'd actually enjoy the buying/selling aspect.

Buying/selling/trading mechanics are functionally spreadsheet stuff, so games with these mechanisms rely heavily on the surrounding mechanics and story to make the game fun (e.g., not feel like filling out a spreadsheet). There's a reason Recettear is considered a classic in this very niche genre; it just works. It has a good balance of story, dungeon crawling, and merchanise acquisition, the characters are cute, the devs do a great job of introducing new characters and plots in short intervals, and the translation is fun. Within a few days of helping a new adventurer get on his feet I met the rival shopkeeper's daughter, followed by a charming lady thief.

You can obtain new stock buy buying at the Market or Guild or by looting dungeons for rare items to sell or ingredients to fuse to make items more valuable. Dungeon crawling entails hiring an adventurer to support in the dungeon. The player controls the adventurer, and if they survive, your party returns with all loot. Otherwise, the party returns with 1 piece of loot, which is a stiff penalty for failure. The player can lend armor to the adventurer and use their stock to heal or buff. The dungeons themselves consist of randomized levels, with a boss or waypoint at every 5 levels. It isn't turn-based but it feels a little like Shiren the Wanderer to me.

The shop mechanics are interesting. You can try to attract certain types of customers by putting certain items in the front windows. The adventurers you hire will shop at your store, and if you sell them equipment, you won't have to bring extra stuff along. Since adventurer shopping is never guaranteed, it's useful to take a loss and give pennliess adventurers a steep discount to ensure they buy upgrades. I've found ingredients tend not to sell to the general public (but wizards will put in orders for such things), and if I don't want my store overrun by little girls who only carry pocket money I need to avoid putting candy on display.

Over time you get a feel for how to haggle with different types of customers. The rival shopkeeper fairy will only buy items barely over the base price. The aforementioned little girls tend to not have much money, but old men will usually accept prices around 130%. Married men and women are hit or miss, but more recently they've accepted prices around 120%. As my shop's reputation increased, customers began selling items to me as well. I usually purchase these at 50% of the base price without having to haggle. You can rennovate your shop as you gain merchant levels, and soon gain the ability to add wallpaper and flooring, move counters, rennovate the shop, and buy vending machines.

One issue that may impact my future enjoyment is the debt deadline. Recette must pay off her debt on time, and each time you make a payment, the payment increases. If you miss a payment, it's game over, and you apparently restart in a Plus Game mode. My debt plan is manageable for now, but I can foresee a future where I'm grinding out profits to stay ahead. So far, however, Recettear has been an enjoyable way to decompress.

I bounced off this game when I first bought it because of the sheer volume and layers of stuff on the screen, but I picked it up again as part of my Survivorslike Rodeo and fell right in. Time Wasters by Proton Studio is an aptly-named Survivorslike in a shmup skin (shmuplike?) that gives the player the maneuverability of a space ship, including a boost ability, and loads of pilots and weapons to choose from. The level is filled with different types of timed based the player can use for recovery and other effects, and bosses and invasions of those bases occur at regular intervals. The player picks up permenant upgrades by collecting Space Cubes, but there are a variety of powerups scattered or generated across the levels, including healing, rerolls (Time Cubes), and other items. The goal is to survive 120 enemy waves, including bosses.

The faster-pace of this game means the player must rely on boost and manuverability to get out of tight spots. The enemy ship swarms are utterly relentless, and figuring out how to corral and destroy them efficiently is a significant part of gameplay. Later in the round, more shmup-like bullet formations come into play. At regular intervals, bosses appear or enemies attack one of your bases, and in the case of the bases if you're not adequately powered up you won't be able to save it from destruction.

Once you get the hang of All The Things this is a lot of fun, and I thoroughly enjoy it with a controller. What's particularly neat is once you start perma-upgrading your captains, you sometimes get a random opportunity to recruit a captain and add her perma-upgrades to your current ship, which is a nice boon.

This game is truly the epitome of "just one more" and this feels like a natural evolution of Vampire Survivors for players who have sunk some time into that game but want something a little faster.

There are a few things that diminish the fun for me. The game rounds can last much longer than other games I've played in this genre. My longest run was 40 minutes, but it was that long in part because I ended up in holding patterns with bosses multiple times. Elite bosses often have intermittent invulnerability, which drags out boss battles even if you're properly weaponized. The general sponginess of the bosses is one of my chief complaints because often I find myself "hanging out" in a boss circle, slowly wearing it down, and not really doing much of anything else. Getting Space Cubes to upgrade your character and bases occurs at probability, so sometimes you fail and sometimes you gather as many as 5. This is a bit different than the loot boxes in other survivorslikes, where you are always guaranteed at least 1 upgrade.

HoloCure is a Hololive fangame in the style of Vampire Survivors with hoarde-survival in 20-minute rounds. This is an extremely cute game with a lot of unlockable characters, and it has a good blend of weapons/mechanics inspired by Vampire Survivors (for instance, the Garlic-inspired Spider Cooking) and new ones that keep gameplay interesting. You can also modify and merge weapons in a lot of interesting ways.

It has some unexpected extras, like Holo House, which is a "resting level" with a house that can be decorated.

Imagine my surprise when I opened Steam and saw this:

It turns out Forsaken Isle isn't abandonware after all. The developer said there were too many changes to list, but after 5 years my memory is pretty spotty and I'm not sure how many changes really stand out to me.

The title screen says it's now at v0.10.3, and the game feels about the same except crafting recipies are now unlocked with resource collection and the combat is more polished. World generation still feels too random and there is not a real sense of a meaningful progression to more difficult areas. I looted a fairly powerful sword early on, which made combat trivial. There are no obvious goals beyond the usual, "gather sticks until you can make an axe, so you can cut down trees." You can build bases and tame animals as before. There is no weapons decay or anything that requires much resource management, you can just hoard whatever you find. I was able to craft some nice spider armor from spider bits and webs, which was cool.

Overall, the game still feels pretty underbaked which is understandable since it's at 0.10. The game froze on me multiple times and I had issues trying to build workbenches like the alchemy table. It was fun revisiting this one, but I will wait a bit to see how it shapes up.

My fixation on this game is slowly starting to wind down now that I'm approaching the grinder stages of farming. Most of things I want to do, like setting up tea fields and more sprinklers, require medals. I have good ways to earn these, such as boosted harvesting cotton candy trees, but ultimately I'm the bottleneck since farming medals requires the use of timed buildings.

I picked up another DLC, the Jalepeño Pack, and resolved not to buy any more until I can get a discounted bundle. But I really wanted to build a cozy adobe house.

An interesting end-game structure in Farm Together is the warehouse. It helps a lot with inevitable inventory problems. It's an upgradeable building that stores 50 of each resource for each level. Each upgrade requires a different type and quantity of resource, so 8 peanuts, then 16 apples, an so on. It's a clever way to allow megafarmers to produce tons of resources without having to constantly scramble for space. I like the new goal this has given me, since the livestock requirements of large quests often slows me down a lot.

One problem the devs do not solve is efficient late-game inventory conversion. The final stage conversion buildings (for instance, the florist shop, which converts 240 flowers to 60 diamonds) are not upgradeable. So if you have 5,000 flowers, you'll need to click the button 20 times. This seems like an incredible oversight. There needs to be a much more efficient way to convert resources endgame. The pawn shop, at least, has a slider for resource conversion. I'd say this is my only gripe regarding gameflow. Since the warehouse requires random quantities of things to upgrade, there's this balancing act between converting resources to diamonds versus letting them accumulate to buy upgrades.

The other end-game structures are upgradable buildings that increase earnings by 2% for certain resource types. You feed money into these all the way to level 100, with the top tiers requring billions of coins. At level 100, you are harvesting at 300%. These are functionally money sinks, and whether it's "worth it" really depends on the play style and longevity of the farm.

I was getting a little stressed out by my messy, overflowing orchard so I ended up banishing all my production orchards to the flat perimeter regions where only farmhands may dwell. Then I decided to reward myself with horsies.

HoloCure gave me an urge to return to some of these games, and the really good ones are such a wonderful blend of chill and stress.

I like hanging out in the library on with a character like Poe Ratcho (comes equipped with garlic) and doing a wrecking-ball close-range build that lets me plow through enemies for 15 minutes. It's super satisfying.

This game continues to be updated. It now has a coop mode and more stages, characters, etc. in addition to two DLC. I have both DLC, and I can't remember what they add. There is just so much stuff here. I've played several of these types of games by now, including ones that didn't stick like Brotato and Halls of Torment, and this one has yet to lose its charm.

HoloCure gave me an urge to return to some of these games, and the really good ones are such a wonderful blend of chill and stress.

I like hanging out in the library on with a character like Poe Ratcho (comes equipped with garlic) and doing a wrecking-ball close-range build that lets me plow through enemies for 15 minutes. It’s super satisfying.

This game continues to be updated. It now has a coop mode and more stages, characters, etc. in addition to two DLC. I have both DLC, and I can’t remember what they add. There is just so much stuff here. I’ve played several of these types of games by now, including ones that didn’t stick like Brotato and Halls of Torment, and this one has yet to lose its charm.

Puzzli is a somewhat obscure match-3 style game where the player tosses fishes into a pond. Matches occur when at least 3 fish are connected and at least one fish is at the surface, or top row. The game is super cute and a fun puzzle, and it's satisfying to get a chain combo (the fisherman spins like a top if you get a certain number of matches in a row). The water level gradually drops as you play, and if one of the columns of fishes is too long to drop, the game is over.

Puzzli hasn't been released outside Japan. Alekmaul created a homebrew port of this game for Nintendo DS (which he says does not work with emulators) and Mega Drive (which does). The MD port isn't quite as responsive as the original, but it provides an English-language alternative if you can't get MAME running. The game was also ported to Colecovision by Michel Louvet for purchase, and he has since provided the source code for those who wish to compile their own ROM. For me, the colorful graphics of the arcade version are a big part of the draw, but this led me down an interesting rabbit hole of Colecovisison paid homebrews.

Money Puzzle Exchanger is a color match puzzle similar to Magical Drop but with a twist. The player can only combine coins of a certain number and denomination. Two or more 50 coins turn into 100, five or more 1c turn into a 5c, and so on. Coins are continually added to the play area and the player must try to exchange and eliminate as many as possible before the screen fills. This leads to interesting combos and chains. There are two special coins, labelled ER and RU. If two ER are combined, they erase every coin matching the denomination sitting above it. RU turns all the coins matching the denomination above it to the next value.

The characters are all cute anime idols with names like Debtmiser, Exchanger, and Coquetrybouncer.

I got sucked into this one thanks to the twist on color-matching. The denomination requirement adds just enough strategy to shake things up. The CPU is really difficult and ramps up quickly. I've been stuck on the 3rd character, Everyworker, for a while now, and mostly play solo to beat my own score. This sad tale is documented in the screenshot gallery.

The game was ported to modern consoles as part of the ACA NEO-GEO line by Hamster. There aren't many differences outside the score leaderboard, but I like having this on Switch and Donut sometimes plays as well.

I tried the Gameboy version, but it was completely underwhelming and the lack of color really took the magic out of it.

The Nintendo Switch version recently went on sale for $3, so I decided to give this another go. Donut got to it first and evidently rage-quit within 5 minutes. When I fired it up later that night, I understood why. It's a bad port. It has clunky controls and long load times and stutters, the graphics look weirdly rezzed down. What a waste of time. If I'd paid more than $3 I'd be genuinely annoyed.

As it is, I'm a little annoyed I did some preliminary research and the reviews did not indicate how crappy this port is. The same thing happened with Don't Starve Together for Nintendo Switch. The game is essentially unplayable due to load times, and I was glad I paid less than $2 for it. We're all playing on the same hardware, here. If there's a performance issue on a multi-platform game, I want to know that up-front.

Recently I learned about a genre of maze games where you dig holes to trap enemies. They're sometimes called Digger-likes or trap-em-ups. The player moves about a maze and digs holes, which is a multi-stage process, hoping to capture the monsters. After they fall in the hole they have to be buried.

Heiankyo Alien is the originator and I feel down a rabbit hole for a bit trying out different versions of this style game.

Nichibutsu Arcade Classics 2 for Super Famicom has a "new type" version as well as the original. The new version is stupid cute. Unfortunately, I didn't find it very fun to play because if your sprite isn't lined up exactly on the tile, you can't properly dig, which I found both stressful and annoying.

Cratermaze for TG16 had better play control and more level design variety. I may return to this one from time to time, but it will take a while to beat all 60 levels.

Finally, honorable mention to Gameboy Color Heiankyo Alien. It looks cool, the play control isn't as fussy as the SFC version. It's hard, as you can see from the screenshot of my character being eaten.

I returned to BG3 just in time to formally end Act I and trigger the second phases of companion sidequests and they're all nice and juicy. Lae'zel continues to be amazing, and Karlach continues to be the most relatable, but I cannot stress how much I've come to like Gale and Astarion. Also Halsan has been giving me the sexy eye, and I don't mind that at all.

We ventured into the shadowy realms, which was pretty creepy, and managed to trigger Gale's flirt where he asks, in a scholarly way, if I'm as scared and horny as he is, and I was beside myself. I also triggered Mystra's ultamatum, which had me reeling. (Meanwhile, Gale, bless his heart, is just like, "Well, maybe she has a point." Yeah, no, she totally doesn't, my man.)

Early in Act 2 there's an unexpected battle at the Last Light End that seems a bit different than usual. I just happened to duckduck this battle after losing, and I'm glad I did because I learned the outcome of this battle has a significant impact on many of the open questlines from Act 1 and I absolutely need to win it. I ended up doubling back to work on a few more quests and move Halsin's personal questline forward, putting him at the Inn so he can assist.

I also unexpectedly triggered Lae'zel's relationship confirmation scene. Normally I try to put off formalizing relationships as long as possible, but there doesn't seem to be any way around this short of not sleeping and Lae'zel is monogamous so my dating adventures in BG3 are now over.

60 hours in, I still enjoy this game, but I have to be in a particular headspace to play and I'm not overly concerned about actually finishing it. I've begun to take a gander at mods because small issues like the carry weight limit are frankly driving me crazy, and I learned you can't get achievements with a modded game. I was mainly interested in No Romance Limit because I doubt I'll be able to do multiple playthroughs to see the different romances, but I'm wary of conflicts and issues. I went ahead and grabbed the BG3ModManager and have a shortlist of things to consider:

• Achievement Enabler
• Better Containers
• Carry Weight Increased
• Everyone In Dialogue

Also of note: Steam Background Replacements

Well, I'm doin' it again. I got the Candy DLC with a bit of an ulterior motive. The main boon is lots of fun candy-themed decorations, but it also contains cotton candy trees, which to my knowledge are the only DLC item that actually impacts the game strategy. Cotton candy trees cost only 2k and produce 1 honey every summer. Contrast this with beehives, which produce 1 honey every 23 hours and takes up 2 tiles of space. This makes honey > medals a viable strategy, AND as a tiny bonus, this DLC comes with the Cake Shop honey converter. The conversion is still the same (20 honey > 1 medal) but it only takes up 1 tile instead of the 2 the Honey Stand takes. It matters only that you can fit twice as many converters in the same space if you want to heavily farm honey.

Anyway, if you set up a farmhand cluster of these, you'd farm about 9 medals an hour, twice what you'd get farming 4-season trees for fruit to make jam. OR, if you have a helper boost, you can harvest 2x yourself.

This pack also comes with a new road, which is a welcome addition as I am in desperate need of new roads, and a giant gingerbread house, and a new flower and crop.

I started looking at Candy Sorrels, the flower, a little closer because it can produce up to 4 diamonds in 2.5 hours (1.6/hour) and it only cost 10 diamonds to plant, while other diamond-producing flowers cost medals. Tea produces 51 diamonds in 24 hours (2.125), rosemary produces 27 in 36 hours (0.75), and mustard produces 33 in 10 hours (3.3). The up-front costs are way lower, and you'd need a farm hand, but it would definitely be an okay beginner strategy for farming diamonds. Tea is usually offered as a diamond strategy, but technically mustard is the best. Of course, to get the maximum the flowers need to be watered, so there are sprinkler costs.

Wishing Wells

I've reached the point where my ambition outstrips my means, and I've gotten interested in different passive earning setups and have been playing around with mixing and matching types. Money wells generate 24 gold every 2 minutes, and a farmhand can reliably harvest about 36. Starting out, especially with a farmhand working on livestock, stashing wells in the empty spots would be a good way to passively support the livestock, which can be difficult early on. Since I have two livestock farmhand setups, I stashed some wells in each that the farmhands can harvest during downtime.

These numbers are based on my current levels, not the starter levels.

• $16,800 for 168 apple trees @ 16 per harvest = $2,688 & 168 fruits > 3ish jam (1/3 a medal)
• $1 million for 168 mango trees @ 115 per harvest = $19,320 & 168 fruits > 3ish jam (1/3 a medal)
• $1.260 million for 168 tamarind trees @ 136 per harvest = $22,848 & 168 fruits > 3ish jam (1/3 a medal)
• 144 diamonds for 36 wells = ($864 at approx 7x per season = $6,048).

Each well generates approx. $168 per season, slightly edging out tamarind which have a significantly higher startup cost.

Multiplayer

Confession time, even though I have no friends and claim not to want any, I'm reaching the point where I'd like to make my farm public and try some of the multiplayer options. So while hyper-organizing my farm is genuinely very fun and relaxing for me, my ulterior motive is it will make it easier for other people to navigate the place. Reading into the multiplayer side, it seems players can only visit your farm when you're online, and if you help with other people's farms you get a boost bonus to your crop yields (2x???). The permissions are pretty granular, so you can grant permission for just harvesting crops, or for harvesting crops and fruit, or whatever. The host famer gets farm XP, the guest gets player XP plus time added to their boost meter.

I've visited a few farms and witnessed the sliding scale of "total efficiency" farming verging on soulless grinding to "tricked out decorated farm" that has custom tiles covering every thing. Equally importantly, I'm starting to get a feel for which permission restrictions are prohibitively so. For example, I've seen multiple farms that ask for quest help, but lock out access to gas pumps. If I can't use my tractor, there's no way I'm going to harvest.