The Malgorian Blog

So this was brought to my attention earlier.

The Garbage Dwellers humble bundle. Part of the bundle was something I've not seen before on there (not that I've seen every bundle go by.) The "Rat Pack" is a group of 4 games. When you buy the bundle you get ONE randomly selected game from those 4. As a steam key. If you rebuy the bundle because you didn't get the game you wanted, you can easily end up getting the same game again. However, the keys are linked to your account so you apparently *can't* give dups away to other people. (Based on the bright extensive orange disclaimer on the Rat Pack entry.

If you donate the minimum amount, you only get.. the Rat Pack.

I was tempted to email them and point out that this looks like straight up mobile game lootbox gambling that bigger companies have gotten successfully sued over in various countries in the past. But since they didn't have a convenient link to submit feedback on their main website I decided to just ignore the entire thing. I don't know if there's anything else in that bundle that I actually wanted, but the mere existence of the effective lootbox in the bundle made me shitlist the entire thing. I may just shitlist the entire site honestly. I have no interest in promoting that sort of business tactic since when you do it ALWAYS gets worse. ("What's the big deal guys, it's only cosmetic horse armor!" :P)

(edited to add the word can't.)

So the latest games I completed were these two. I have Legacy on steam apparently, but I played both of them on the PS4. The Awakening one I have is the 8-bit one.

In Awakening you wake up, summoned to the land of Alwa to defeat the bad guy so you can get sent back home. It's a puzzle platformer that's both challenging, a bit unforgiving at times, but not so hard that it feels impossible. I've seen people complain about the "clunky magic system" (you use one button to switch between one of 3 abilities and you end up needing to go switching fairly quickly at times) but honestly I never found it that difficult. Timing is important of course, and I certainly messed up a fair bit, but again - doable.

Apparently Awakening took 12-13 hours for me to complete, and I got 100% secrets uncovered. There is a super cryptic puzzle in the game via hints here and there but it's not part of the 'secrets' you need to uncover/find to complete the game. It's basically an Easter egg of sorts. Apparently took the community a few weeks, pooling information, to crack the code. After I got 100% cleared I found out about it while reading some discussions on steam.

The ending was rather unfulfilling however, but then that's how they set up the second game, Legacy.

Legacy had you going through doing all the same things with a new land of Alwa. You're still limited to mainly 3 main spells/powers but they upgrade quite a bit more. I can't remember off hand how much time I spent on this one but it was probably close to the same amount, probably a little more as it took a little longer to obtain all of the secrets. The last few blue orbs (used to help power up your skills) were things that I had already found but kept having 'duuuuh' moments with trying to figure out how to reach them. This was in part due to not having some of the necessary power ups handy in order to obtain them, or just for some reason didn't notice when to use them. By the end of it however I still got all the secrets.

Legacy has a Pacifist mode as extra challenge - go through the game without killing anything. I started in on that but you leave pacifist mode as soon as you kill something. I accidentally killed something and lost pacifist mode and since it got saved there was no way to get back to it without redoing everything apparently. So ... yeah, not going to bother with that crap. I'm sure I'd rage if I got 80% through the game and then lost pacifist mode. In pacifist mode you don't even fight the bosses - however you manage that by finding specific rose points before reaching a boss which will de-spawn it. If you get to the boss without finding it, you'll either have to get a game over or lose pacifist mode. When I think about it, this is likely what happened to me in my run. Wasn't a boss, but pretty sure there was no way to get past it without killing or de-spawning it. Oh well.

Anyway, fun games. If they put out a new Alwa game I'll probably pick that up as well.

According to the article on kotaku, Helldivers 2 is currently being review bombed due to the devs/publisher reinstating a PSN login requirement for the game on PC.

Boss says sorry.

And that's the extent of it.

Apparently it originally had a login requirement at first until it became quite popular at the start of release - so they removed it due to the network issues it was causing them. So a lot of the players on steam are seeing it for the first time now.

Personally, I'd be pissed as well, and that's even with me having a PSN login.

If I want to log in to PSN to play a game, I will BUY THE GAME ON PSN TO BEGIN WITH.

*pauses to mark both Arrowhead Studios and Sony PC LLC on ignore - ignores are permanent for me so they'll never get another dollar out of me on Steam.*

I will of course continue to buy games on PSN, potentially. Although depends on the type of game when a PSN login is being required. An online game, sure, PSN login not a problem, for a PSN game. If the game was an offline game or had an offline mode that's locked behind a PSN login, then that would just probably solidify the fact that I'm not buying Playstation consoles anymore. (Still haven't bought a PS5 to this day, but it's only because there's nothing on the console I absolutely want to play. Certainly nothing worth the cost of the console. Microsoft can stop laughing since I stopped buying their stuff after the 360 ;)

Case in point. I already had Helldivers 2 ignored. Just the game. I'm not entirely sure why it was ignored anymore although I don't think it was the login thing. (I auto-ignore anything that comes up in my discovery queue that has a 3rd party login requirement.) Because Arrowhead and/or Sony decided to pull a fast one here with switching around the requirement, everything they touch got tossed under the ignore along with it. Do I expect Sony or Arrowhead to feel the weight of my ban? Hell no. :D But my wallet will feel a little heavier until I put that money they might have gotten to my other hobbies and that's more than good enough for me.

Just got finished Joe's angry ranting review of Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League review.

I'd say he's pretty much spot on with pretty much everything he said about it - keeping in mind I never bought/played it personally. Watched reviews, watched some let's plays, etc. That's as far as I'm willing to take any live service crap pretty much. But you don't need to play it to understand the flaws and see the effect being churned out as a live service game had on the game design process.

However there is one comment near the end I have to take exception with. Starting at about 1:15:09, he talks about how "A once great company gets gutted even further. (if it doesn't meet it's revenue stream expectations in a live service shitshow)."

In particular it's "Only thankfully the smart ones have already left. The founders have peaced out of Rocksteady when they saw the writing on the wall and formed their own new company HundredStar. I wish them well. That was the right move. Rocksteady had sold it's soul and we're all worse off for it."

Who SOLD the company Joe? Why, the FOUNDERS did. With a treasure trove of documented evidence at this point of what ALWAYS happens to a game dev that sells itself - it's soul - regardless of any promises given during the sale. The founders sold the company for a profit, then fucked off to build a new company where they'll likely just end up doing it all over again.

So yeah, I'm not going to be singing any praises for HundredStar. They're just, at best, another disaster waiting to happen.

It was on sale on PSN so I went ahead and picked it up. Essentially Final Fantasy 1 to 6.

As much as I loathe what Square Enix has become, this will likely end up being a Final Fantasy winter as I play through these, and then possibly start playing through the other Final Fantasy games I have. I realized I own most of the FF games in various incarnations, but according to my games complete list, I haven't actually completed any of them. Thinking back I think the only game I actually completed was FF1 on the original NES back in the day. However, the requirement I set for myself to add something to the game complete list is for the game to be completed AFTER the list was started. Mostly to avoid the headache of trying to remember for a fact what I completed growing up. Besides, it would give me an excuse to play my favorite games from back in the day all over again.

The immediate goal is to play through and finish Final Fantasy 1 remaster. After I finish that, I'm going to hook up the NES and play through the original and try to note what's different beyond some obvious things like the graphics. (It's all still pixelated and mostly like the original, but they don't hold themselves to the original system's palette restrictions.)

Barring no unexpected complications I plan on really starting in on FF1remaster Saturday night.

I would be surprised if Dreamwidth accepted the full title, so below is what the title should read:

Game Night #17: Is It Wrong to Try to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon? Familia Myth Infinite Combate

So trying to get back into playing the insanely long backlog of games I haven't played since I'm on vacation and I randomly chose this one - mostly because it looked like it be simple enough, and I felt like having some "zelda style" combat. Didn't get what I hoped, but that was the logic going into the decision.

This game has a metacritic score of 46 I believe. Didn't know that going in but I'd agree overall with the reviews I saw on gamefaqs. Poor execution. Fairly bland. And little effort. (Particularly for the player I find...)

The game is part visual novel based on the anime/etc, and part dungeon crawling hack and slash. It follows the events of it's source material for the most part with the game being told in a Chapter format.

Essentially at the start of the game you'll do "Chapter 1" as Bell (The main character) then after 2 story quests you'll do a "Chapter 1" as Aiz - the Sword Princess adventurer he admires. After about half way I found I stopped having Aiz chapters and it was Bell Bell Bell. And it followed the anime. I'll have to double check a few things to see if I have to replay the game to get an Aiz series of laterchapters...

In each chapter you'll have to do two story related quests to advance the story. There's no real meaning to level in this game. Your stats will improve automatically as you advance the story quests. There's also two special quests per chapter that aren't story related but can only be done once each. After that there's "practice quests" you can do over and over to grind for materials/skill points/money.

After finishing the story mode for Bell I unlocked a special post-story dungeon. During this extra chapter, it looks like you just grind through the special elemental related dungeons to get "date points" so you can unlock special encounters/story events with the other characters in the game. At this point you can freely switch between the two main characters. They each have their own people to "go on dates" with.

It's hard to say much about this one... if you're a fan of the anime/manga/light novels, it's probably not bad. Could have went so much further though... Make sure you get it on a big sale like I did though.

I was going to mark this beat after I played around with the extra dungeons a bit first but I think it's safe to assume the story mode is what counted here. I'll update it to "completed" after I've unlocked all the events, assuming I bother to stick with it that long. I'll likely just be doing a few dungeon runs here and there going forward while playing other games.

Found something before Kane for once! So the owner of the Epic Store, Unreal Engine, apparently Bandcamp, and a bunch of other things, is laying off 16% of it's workforce - about 870 or so jobs.


From the article: “For a while now, we’ve been spending way more money than we earn,” says the memo, sent to staff by CEO Tim Sweeney. “I have long been optimistic we could power through this transition without layoffs, but in retrospect I see that this was unrealistic.”

Perhaps if they just didn't throw money like crazy at game devs and publishers to release their games exclusively on the Epic Store, MAYBE they wouldn't have been bleeding money like water. Not to worry though - when the going gets tough due to mismanagement, the staff get going - to pay for mistakes of said mismanagement. Probably just my opinion, but it certainly looks to be the case.

I suppose I can sum up my feelings on the topic pretty simply. There's no way a billion dollar company merging/swallowing another "smaller" billion dollar company will have no negative impact on the industry as a whole.

The more concessions you're willing to accept, and especially the ones you offer yourself to get the merger to happen, shows the more likelihood you're fully aware of the damage you're going to be doing to the rest of the industry (ie: your competition). And of course it's very safe to say that the ultimate payoff will always exceed in spades whatever cost you'll suffer from the limited time concessions.

Take into account just one concession Microsoft has offered. They promise, if the merger goes through, that they will make sure Call of Duty is available on the Playstation for the next 10 years (or was it for the lifetime of sony's current machine, the PS5?) What does that really amount to? A handful of games over the next 10 years. After that, once the merger has been cemented and there's no longer any way to rationally separate the two again, ALL of the negative effects of the merger can happen in full force. The promise is basically another way of saying "Heeeey, no problem. Let us have this really big thing and we won't deliberately try to bankrupt the competition for a good 5-10 years... but after that shit gonna be real."

Really, any concession that's time based should immediately be thrown out as no concession at all. It's just kicking the concerns further down the road until it's impossible to fix the damage.

In short, mergers of billion dollar companies really shouldn't be happening imo.

So had the Deck since last Monday but I had a hell of a time trying to figure out how to connect to the Wifi. Essentially had to change up the encryption and the like. But also my wifi modem sucks shit - after it connected finally on the first go it did it's required update and rebooted.

.. And promptly forgot about the Wifi. Tried signing in to Steam and kept getting error 56. Which according to the internets, is wifi issues. Not signed in.

So I tried signing it in again and it failed repeatedly. So after disconnecting and trying to reconnect a couple times, I said fuck it and went into the living room where the modem is and tried again. And it found it. X_x

So tried signing in again, and it failed again. Finally after a few other issues I was able to sign in to Steam.

One good thing I'll say about it, when I look at the icons for my games on the Steam Deck it shows me the compatibility ratings for the game. So I don't have to go searching the store for every game. I'm guessing about 20% of my library is marked verified. Give or take. Probably another 20-40% is 'playable' (yellow ! sign) which means it'll run, but there are some issues with it and I think that means Valve is working with the devs to try to get the issues resolved. Whether the devs are willing of course is another matter.


Right now installing Vampire Survivors. It's just about finished installing. I'll probably install another couple games on it but then I'll leave it until I get an external microSD card to put in the thing.

... actually it's already almost out of power after all this shittery so I'm probably going to turn it off to charge it up.

I clicked on the steam cloud bar where it said it couldn't sync up and it worked this time. Probably failed because the download was sucking my pitiful bandwidth away...

So in case it helps anyone, with my wifi setup, originally my ancient modem was still using WEP encryption. I changed it up to WPA so I could just feed it the SSID and passkey then it would negotiate all the details on it's own. However being physically close to the modem helped me as well if just for the connection phase. I was able to bring it back into the bedroom after that without it losing connection.

If it's going to rot my brain it can rot yours too!