kubikill

August + September 2019 Progress

Finished games:

Mini Thief

5.7 hours, 20 of 20 achievements

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A top-down 2D stealth game.

Concept is good, but execution is mediocre. It's decent, but clunky and glitchy. I skipped through the story because of how badly written it was. Difficulty isn't too hard until the train level. Oh man, SCREW THAT LEVEL. It shows how horrible the AI is - the guards can still catch you if you turn a corner and hide behind a bush when out of sight.
Worst part of the game is that if you get caught, you lose ALL your money and almost all tools you bought. There's an item that prevents that, but you have to rebuy it every time you get caught.

It's not something I would recommend. Don't play unless you really want to.


Stacking

9.4 hours, 21 of 21 achievements

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A puzzle adventure game.

Short and good. Puzzles are simple, but not too easy. Story is ok. The humor is pretty good - I chuckled at some cutscenes and some abilities are very hilarious. Honestly I have no idea what else to say and I just want to get this review out of the way, so… I recommend this game.


Dum-Dum

8.6 hours, 62 of 62 achievements

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An adventure game and a fictional OS simulator.

I like OS simulators and this game truly feels like one. While this game has a pretty good "main story" where you use the OS in creative ways to ruin an evil CEO's evil plan, there are lots of games and distractions you can use if you want to give yourself a break from the story. On the game side, you have a Solitaire 1985 which feels similar to TriPeaks, a Mastermind clone, a 4x4 tile slider puzzle, a peg solitaire puzzle and more - basically those kind of little games you would see on Windows 3.1 or 95. On the software side, you have, for example, a BASIC terminal, a turtle programming toy, a simple animating program and a basic internet browser (with experimental support for making your own simple websites). This is an Early Access game and so far, this game is receiving small, but frequent updates with bits of content added each time.

This game is pretty cool and honestly I'm very interested into seeing how it grows. If you want to go back to the good ol' Windows 3.1/95 days, Dum-Dum is the game for you.


Slipstream

8.1 hours, 29 of 29 achievements

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A pseudo-3D racing game.

This game feels exactly like a 80s/early 90s arcade racing game. Beautiful graphics, large replay value, challenging tracks and a perfectly-fitting soundtrack. The AI cheats sometimes, though. This game uncovered an Outrun itch I didn't even know I had after playing it a lot in Yakuza 0, and it scratched it once and for all.

If you love retro racing games, Slipstream just might be the right game for you.


One Finger Death Punch

12.6 hours, 115 of 152 achievements

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A 2-button fighting game.

Remember those stick figure fight animations from the 2000s Internet? OFDP is basically that, but in game form. Simple, challenging and fun from the very start. I like how this game heavily discourages button mashing (something common in fighting games) - doing that will make you miss very often and any missed attack will leave you entirely defenseless to the enemies.

It's good, but from what I heard, the sequel is basically the same game except everything is better and you don't lose much from not playing the first game. It might be a good idea to skip straight to the sequel.


Serious Sam HD: The First Encounter

11.8 hours, 22 of 76 achievements
Played via Serious Sam Fusion 2017

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A HD version of an old-school FPS.

What could I say? It's Serious Sam. In HD. You can even run the game on The Talos Principle engine.
A classic, fast-paced, mindlessly fun FPS. If you're tired or just want to take a break from modern FPS games, Serious Sam is for you.


Snake Pass

5.5 hours, 5 of 33 achievements
Challenge Me!

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A 3D physics-based puzzle platformer.

I was really looking forward to this game, but I couldn't grasp its controls. I kept screwing up and the gameplay didn't seem fun to me. Shame though, since the game looks gorgeous.


Life Is Strange

1 hours, no achievements
Challenge Me!

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An episodic adventure game.

I only heard good things about this game. It's similar to Telltale games, too (which I really liked). Despite all that, I couldn't get into this game. The story didn't hook me and I didn't like the characters. The time rewind mechanic was good but, ultimately, I stopped before I even finished chapter 1 and I can't bring myself to continue.


Unfinished games:

  • I started playing Serious Sam: The Second Encounter a few days ago. Haven’t played too much yet, but it feels like more of the same good ol’ Serious Sam.
  • While I did play TWoM before, I decided to return to it to play the new DLCs and clean up the achievements. Father’s Promise was pretty good and The Last Broadcast was even better. I’ll replay TLB one more time for achievements and then I’ll play the Fading Embers DLC.
  • I’m super close to finally finishing Fallout 4. It took me 138 hours to reach the ending. All that’s left to do is complete the Institute and Brotherhood of Steel questlines for the remaining achievements.
  • Haven’t played Dust too much lately, but I’ll put some more focus into it this month.
  • At first, Gothic II put me off. I couldn’t make sense of the keyboard-only controls (as mouse controls are bad) and the game felt really clunky. However, I managed to pull through - I got used to the controls, I figured out how the game works and eventually I got hooked.
  • I managed to complete the “Deponia” part of Deponia: The Complete Journey. Now I’m working on the “Chaos on Deponia” part.

Current progress:

30%
8%
13%
49%
0%

does not include "won't play" games

News on BLAEO Generators

I’m working on the 2.0 update for BLAEO Generators. It will add a lot of new features (such as looking up games by their title instead of their AppIDs, custom images, text shadow toggle, being able to change bar height, being able to change some of the default settings, better error handling, possibly a new generator) and most of generator code will be rewritten to be more readable. I want to make BLAEO Generators useful for all of you and the code rewrite is a perfect opportunity to add more features, so if you have anything you’d like to see changed or added, let me know here or in the Steam group post.

Garcias

Just wanted to ask if you forgot any game you completed in early August after I don’t know how many months that you happened to play in co-op with a fellow blaeo member? cof cof If so, I would love to know your thoughts on it cof cof

kubikill

Aaaaaaaaaa so I DID forget about something!!
The main game seemed good at first. I thought it was a goofy game, but the humor was lacking. It got much better in the DLCs, though. Gameplay was repetitive, sometimes boring unless we were getting wrecked or we were fighting a boss. Honestly, this game was meh. Not terrible but not that good either. I really hope the second game is much better.
Also it took us… uh… a bit of time to finish the game. Partially because I wasn’t always available to play.

Garcias

I couldn’t agree more! But sadly by the time we were in the DLCs I was a bit tired of the repetitiveness of the game, which also put me at fault of not playing more.

RikkiUW

:( I couldn’t get into LiS at fist too. The first half of the first chapter put me off… a story about teenage highschool drama didn’t interest me. IMO it’s worth continuing though, because it gets a lot better. Eventually I picked it back up and finished it. It’s now one of my all time favourite games. Personally I think it’s worth giving it a second chance.

kubikill

Honestly I don’t think I’ll give it a second chance. Things got really unbearable last time I played. I don’t want to spend time on something I won’t end up liking, especially if I don’t have too much time anymore. Though I’m sure the game isn’t bad… it’s just I don’t like it.

RikkiUW

That’s fair. No point forcing yourself to play something you don’t enjoy, especially if you’re time limited.

Arbiter Libera

At first, Gothic II put me off. I couldn’t make sense of the keyboard-only controls (as mouse controls are bad) and the game felt really clunky. However, I managed to pull through - I got used to the controls, I figured out how the game works and eventually I got hooked.

Steam only has the Gold version, right? How did you hold up with Night of the Raven expansion? It kicks the difficulty up a bit overall on top of adding new content.

BLAEO Generators

I wonder if something could be done with these new vertical covers provided they’re linkable directly from the store and not just from library. Haven’t seen them anywhere looking at store pages, though.

kubikill

Yes, Steam only has the Gold version. When it comes to difficulty, the beginning was brutal. Me being a weakling combined with having little to no knowledge about this game made pretty much everything living thing a real threat to me, even those goddamn rats. To make things easier I decided to get as much exp as possible by doing most of the side quests and killing pretty much every single animal I could take on. Because of this, chapter 1 took me around 20 hours to complete. Now I’m in chapter 2, doing the Jarkendar questline. It seems quite easy so far, I have no problem fighting most of the enemies, except for swamp golems or the orcs.

I was thinking about using those vertical covers and yes, those are directly linkable. The backgrounds and logos are linkable as well. The only problem is that not every game has those images. I came up with a rough idea on how to use those backgrounds and logos together, but I’m not sure if that idea will work yet.

Arbiter Libera

That’s the right approach with Gothic - always exhaust all the things you can do particularly in the first chapter before you commit to one faction you want to actually join. You still end up missing out on content to warrant a replay at some point, though. Especially with Mages who are kinda their own thing for a decent chunk of the game before the stories converges. And yeah, try to kill as much of the wildlife in each chapter because some of them re-spawn and you really REALLY want to maximize that experience gain with NotR installed. Once you get a good weapon and armor you’ve set yourself up for much easier time.

I was thinking about using those vertical covers and yes, those are directly linkable. The backgrounds and logos are linkable as well.

Interesting. I know some developers never bothered updating their game assets, but I assumed blurry stand-ins were actually on the server and not user end. So there’s no foolproof way to link every game’s vertical art yet using only stuff Steam put up there. SteamGridto the rescue, I guess.

RomTaka

Just passing by to say I really like your BLAEO generators. Thanks for your work !

kubikill

No problem :)