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Boardgame Thoughts: King's Dilemma

Finished a campaign of King's Dilemma, and what a great legacy board game it was!

The game is fairly basic on the surface: your group plays a council of nobles advising the King, and each round you deliberate over an event and vote. Each outcome will move some resources up or down on a track (with each player aiming to finish the game with resources in specific locations), and may add short-term or permanent changes to the gameplay mechanics.

What started innocently enough -- free the chained lady, investigate some clues, join forces with another nation -- quickly devolved into making horribly corrupt and morally reprehensible decisions to further our houses.

The council has voted AYE to sacrificing several prisoners to be melted alive in experiments to alchemically create gold.

It was remarkable how truly awful we became to move a couple resources up or down while vying for first place each game.

There's definitely weak points, but they're not big enough to ruin the experience:

• some entire games had nothing interesting happen in the story
• some players didn't always pay enough attention to the story to know what was going on (it's very wordy!)
• setup got a little complicated / annoying by the end with so many things to remember to do. A checklist would have been useful in hindsignt
• I wasn't a fan of the ending sequence process. It was novel, but didn't have as much punch as it could have

I really enjoyed playing it through to the end. While I don't think I'd ever play a second campaign, the game will definitely sit in my top boardgames list for a long time.

Thoughts: First Day of School

My whole life I've loved the first day back to school (context: I work at a university). The slightly cool September breeze, the electric energy of excitement and nervousness, the fresh school supplies and just an overall feeling of high potential.

I've long since passed my epiphanic "I never have to go to school again" moment, but working at a university I still get to experience the nervous anticipation vicariously through students during their "frosh days" as they galavant around a campus that still seems a labyrinth on scavanger hunts and nerf-gun wars.

In two weeks' time they'll be struggling through workloads and drama and life in general, but today the world is new.

I work mostly remote these days, but I'd never miss the first day of the fall term just to soak in the excitement.

Game Thoughts: Digimon Survive

I've just finished with Digimon Survive after completing the Moral and True endings.

Despite a lackluster battle system and some points where the story got too repetitive or awkward or slow, I really enjoyed my time with the first playthrough -- Enough to watch 2 more endings online (in ultra-fast-forward) and play through the true ending myself.

The true ending featured some additional party members I ended up really liking, but dragged on far too long.

While I'm glad I played the extra ending for closure and for the warm fuzzies in the final scene, the true route really lacked any additional character development in chapters 10-13 -- in a story about the characters developing.

Since the whole visual-novel half of the game is built around talking to people and raising affinities, this results in several additional hours of repeatedly telling Kaito he's a good brother and telling Aoi she "has really grown" while being force-fed a bunch of not-really-canon digimon lore.

The 3 non-true endings are definitely the more interesting routes, though they have a lot of overlap (and don't feature my favorite character!).

But enough about the story, I came here for the Digimon!

There's quite a few Digimon to collect via recruitment in random battles and via your party 'mons evolving. Those attached to humans evolve with the story or once your affinity with that human is high enough, while recruited digimon are evolved with items

The recruiting mechanic is absolutely stupid, but once I started using a guide it was fun collecting and evolving lots of 'mons. I used another guide to minimize overlap, as many of your party's fixed final forms can be obtained through random recruits.

I did find it odd that many party and story digimon could be obtained through random encounters (+ evolving). It's a bit awkward when the story has a powerful digimon appear and threaten the fabric of reality... and you've already got the same 'mon in your party.

Likewise, it's a bit weird to have WarGreymon show up in a random battle and be recruitable by responding correctly to a query about nap preferences... There's lots of questionable decisions on the recruit mechanic.

Complaining aside, if you grew up loving digimon and enjoy the occasional visual novel, this is one of the best-looking visual novels I've played. While the story is about as deep as a kids-show about digital monsters, it's worth at least one playthough for nostalgia's sake.

Thoughts: Chronically Occupied

I've just returned from a brief 4-day vacation to find my mind in shambles. This always tends to happen -- I keep so many small threads of ideas and plans and micro-projects going on a regular basis that brief inattention turns the whole thing into a useless knot.

When in this state I find my mind begins to wander and reach out like hundreds of tentacles, grasping for any interesting avenue to do something. Should I take a university course? Build a DIY virtual pet with a Raspberry Pi? Work on designing that board game I always meant to build? So many new threads to begin! Of course, those old ones are hopelessly entagled and must be abandoned.

And so the cycle of the chronically occupied continues.

On my list of interesting roads I'd like to stroll down is the video series from 10 Minute Physics, by one Matthias Müller. According to the HackerNews thread I found the link on he's a very smart guy who developed some useful computer physics concepts which I'm very interested to learn about.

The tutorials are each done in a single HTML file which is handy. The first few videos are fairly basic implementations of bouncing balls, but it looks like it gets pretty meaty 6-7 videos in!

Browsing the internet recently I saw an artistic rendition of the silhouette of Spike from Cowboy Bebop.

Suddenly a realization came crashing home -- the most memorable game / comic characters I can think of are all recognizable by their outline alone!

Feeling like I had stumbled across a secret, I shared my observation with my wife who informed me this is very common knowledge amongst designers. I likely could have picked it up by reading any guide on character design...

That said, the things you discover yourself always stick the longest -- I'll be keeping this in mind from now on while doodling characters for my ideas!

My brother recently expressed interest in remotely watching me play some of my older games (after a weekend of PS2 gaming together). I grabbed an HDMI-capture dongle for the dual purpose of recording gameplay (for personal use) and enabling him to watch.

Now the dilemma: what platform do I use for streaming? I'm not entirely keen on Twitch/Youtube because I'm hippie trash, so I've been looking at open source alternatives like Owncast instead.

It is taking all my willpower to restrain myself from using this an excuse to learn Elixir and build my own shitty streaming platform...

I'm a sucker for nostalgia. As such, I've been very excited for the Digimon Survive game that recently released.

So excited that I not only accidentally pre-ordered a physical copy twice, but spent time playing some older Digimon titles while I awaited the fated day to arrive.

I must say, the series hasn't generated many good games. I recall Digimon World [PS1] being nigh indecipherable as a child, and that holds true now. It seems that the games were always caught between being a tamagatchi-style monster-raising affair and a coherent RPG, while never really landing on either. In my excitement I revisited Cyber Sleuth and Digimon World DS, which stand as the highest-rated entries in the franchise.

Cyber Sleuth had rave reviews from Digi-fans, but I couldn't play for more than 2 hours without cringing myself into a fetal position. The story, character design and dialogue was offensively bad, and the digimon raising system wasn't strong enough to make up for it. (No gameplay system would have been, I fear)

The DS game on the other hand had a great Digimon raising system with a cute little farm on the DS top-screen, and clear evolution routes. The story was just about the driest thing I've ever played, however. Essentially just a basic excuse to go and battle with your Digimon. I can usually stomach random RPG battles but this game bored me to tears.

Despite this I've got high hopes for Digimon Survive! The game thankfully takes a very different direction than its predecessors and I've already managed to put in a handful of hours without throwing away the cartridge in disgust.

I guess this technically makes it the best Digimon game I've played to date!

Thoughts: On Seniority and Fuckups

Seniority can be inferred by the number of large fuck-ups a person has made (and retained their position).

Being trusted enough to be given enough rope to hang by, then doing a little accidental hanging before getting yourself free is a guarantee a person has learned some valuable lessons.

Since I'm a lowly unwashed peasant without access to OpenAI's DALL-E 2 I've been entertaining myself with Craiyon instead.

It isn't nearly as good as DALL-E (I have friends with access, and DALL-E is too good), but it's still a tonne of fun and I've found it fairly useful as a creative tool.

If I'm not feeling particularly inventive or creative but still want to doodle I'll generate a couple of prompts for inspiration. The results are always a little wonky, but more than good enough to work with as rough concept art:

Look at those deformed goblins work! There's a lot of great little ideas to pick up from these: clothing, scenes, poses -- lots of details I probably wouldn't have thought of. It's great for doodle exercises!

Why spend time looking at reference art when an AI model has already looked at ALL the reference art?

Another excellent use case is generating horrific imagery from seemingly innocent prompts:

How is this free!?

Game Thoughts: Death's Door

I completed Death's Door (Switch Version) by Acid Nerve last night. By completed here I mean defeated the final boss and am done with the game; I did some research and it seems there's considerable post-game things to do, but many sound tedious and I've spent a satisfactory amount of time with it.

There were a lot of things I didn't like about Death's Door. I found the combat to be lacking in variety, the alternate weapons very useless, and the non-powerup-collectables a little pointless (though some do play into end-game content). The music was also very bland throughout, and had not one memorable piece.

That said, I did very much like the game as a whole! The tiny world they made is full of fun, the art and style were fantastic, and they managed to make every character lovable. This last point is something I'm still trying to figure out how to do -- games like Death's Door and Undertale manage to do something that brings characters to life, even when a character has only one or two lines. Compare this with a game like Eastward that had all the right ingredients but many of its characters just fell flat.

The humor in the game was excellent, and I now want a "Worlds Best Lord" mug. The boss fights were also spectacular, and in some cases very frustrating-in-the-good-way. The puzzling was quite fun, although some of the dungeons definitely outstayed their welcome. I would have liked to trade the second halves of the first and third dungeons (lab and rooftop) for a separate dungeon locale with an extra boss, then make the spell powerups a bit more useful and required for the final dungeon (as they stand the spell powerups were very underwhelming)

I've heard many say that the game is too short, but I thought it was a great length for what it is. A short, funny indie game with a tinge of sadness about a crow with a sword and a big ol' black door.