KD^3C^3 - 20251012 Tryin' to act like something else
Last week, I said I'd talk about video games this week, so here's that.
One of the sillier games I’ve played recently was Q-Up which is a little hard to describe. It bills itself as “the future of esports,” but the “esport” in the middle of e erything is a literal coin flip. You queue up for a match, get randomly assigned a side and watch a coin flip 3-5 times. Each success or failure increases our decreases your “Q ratgin” which determines which players you are matched agains in future matches. The idea is to create the first “Perfectly” fair esport, where you always have a 50% chance of winning, and are perfectly matched against other players who also have a 50% chance of winning. Because it’s a coin flip.
But the game (which only has a demo out, the full game is “coming soon” is being developed by Everybody House Games, who II mostly know for Universal Paperclips, an idle/clicker game where you are a rogue algorithm who eventually turns all of reality into paperclips. They’ve also created a party game where you try to trick your smart speaker (think Amazon Echo or Google Home) to say certain words without saying the word yourself, and they created Babble Royale a Battle Royale game like PubG or Fortnight, but crossed with Scarable, which works far better than a game with that premise should. So my suspicions are that Q-Up has a little more going under the hood.
My suspicions were given evidence when the in-game email client started sending me new messages after every match including a stealth employment contract, and a chose-able path adventure. Plus the more matches I played, the more “skills” I unlocked which gave my player avatar special abilities that drastically improved my ability to succeed in Q-up matches, even if I failed the coin flip.
There’s a lot going on under the hood, but in 90 minutes of play I managed to hit the demo-cap and was told I’d have to wait for more. I’m not even fully sure it’s multi-player, or if that’s just another ruse. I saw some of the same player names pop up in matches, and if I’m honest, they all seemed a little too normal. The game itself seems to exist outside the game, and I love games like that.
But the Demo is out there on Steam if you want to check it out it even runs on my 10+ year off Mac, so that’s something.
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A buddy of mine and I get together online every week to play co-op video games. We started with Divinity Original Sin 2, but have also finished Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, Orcs Must Die 2, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, We Were Here (The first one, not the whole series) and are about to start making our way through the campaigns in Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Recently we both picked up a Humble Bundle of Lego games, the keystone of which was Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. This is the latest in a long series of video game adaptations of lego versions of popular movies. The original Lego Star Wars was a really fun game, combining simple puzzles, collect-a-thons and strong humor poking fun at the movie it was adapting. IT spawned dozens of other Lego games, including multiple in the Marvel and DC Comics universe, Indiana Jones tie-ins, The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and even the Lego Ninjago Movie! (I don’t know what the Lego Ninjago movie is). The games are all silly fun, and great hangout games, because from the very beginning they had co-op play. You could sit on the couch and your friend or sibling or spouse could grab the player 2 controller and drop right into playing alongside you. So you could both punch Jawas or Nazis or Dinosaurs.
This week we tried to boot up Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, or as I’m going to abbreviate it Lest Wath Sky Sag. The first tie we boot up a game always has a little bit of finagling. This is just part and parcel for playing games on computers in my experience. It’s exacerbated by the fact that we have different operating systems (I’m on linux he’s on windows) and any-online play is a little finicky to begin with. This time we were both stymied by controller issues. We have both used controllers successfully in our online games (TMNT: Splintered Fate was entirely played with controllers) and our different setups meant we probably weren’t having the same problems. He started installing new drivers and started plugging and unplugging things into various USB ports. Eventually we got everything working only to discover: Lest Wath Sky Sag doesn’t support online co-op. In fact none of the Lego Movie Games support online Co-op play. It’s a couch co-op only series, and always has been. It’s the 2020s and neither of us ever considered that a game wouldn’t support online co-op out of the box, so this was quite a shock.
We briefly tried Remote Play Together, but it was janky at best and unusable at worst. So we switched back to Orcs Must Die 3, which is our default backup game. We played a couple levels and had just nailed the pathing on n a big challenging level when Steam’s online systems seems to shut down completely. So we called it a night and now we’re downloading the Halo games.
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I made the [mistake/wise choice] of finally downloading Slay the Spire to my phone this week. It's a game I've been playing since I dunno, 2019?
The mechanics are that nice combination of complex and solvable. It's a rogue-like deckbuilder which basically means every time you play you start over from scratch (that's the roguelike) and you play through collecting a set of cards that help you accomplish your goals (that's the deckbuilder). With the sheer amount of time I have put into the game, I can basicaly play it without thinking, as long as I'm doing the easier difficulty levels (which aren't easy, but not nearly as hard as it can get). It's the sort of game I can play when I need to keep my hands busy while doing something else with my brain.
I've tried other games like it, and enjoyed many of them, but there's something about Slay the Spire that keep scratching a familiar itch in my brain. I don;t even know if I play it for enjoyment anymore, or if I'm just doing it because I can go through the motions with relative ease.
The best thing I can say about it is it's a really good one of these kinds of games, if ou like these kinds of games.
One of the sillier games I’ve played recently was Q-Up which is a little hard to describe. It bills itself as “the future of esports,” but the “esport” in the middle of e erything is a literal coin flip. You queue up for a match, get randomly assigned a side and watch a coin flip 3-5 times. Each success or failure increases our decreases your “Q ratgin” which determines which players you are matched agains in future matches. The idea is to create the first “Perfectly” fair esport, where you always have a 50% chance of winning, and are perfectly matched against other players who also have a 50% chance of winning. Because it’s a coin flip.
But the game (which only has a demo out, the full game is “coming soon” is being developed by Everybody House Games, who II mostly know for Universal Paperclips, an idle/clicker game where you are a rogue algorithm who eventually turns all of reality into paperclips. They’ve also created a party game where you try to trick your smart speaker (think Amazon Echo or Google Home) to say certain words without saying the word yourself, and they created Babble Royale a Battle Royale game like PubG or Fortnight, but crossed with Scarable, which works far better than a game with that premise should. So my suspicions are that Q-Up has a little more going under the hood.
My suspicions were given evidence when the in-game email client started sending me new messages after every match including a stealth employment contract, and a chose-able path adventure. Plus the more matches I played, the more “skills” I unlocked which gave my player avatar special abilities that drastically improved my ability to succeed in Q-up matches, even if I failed the coin flip.
There’s a lot going on under the hood, but in 90 minutes of play I managed to hit the demo-cap and was told I’d have to wait for more. I’m not even fully sure it’s multi-player, or if that’s just another ruse. I saw some of the same player names pop up in matches, and if I’m honest, they all seemed a little too normal. The game itself seems to exist outside the game, and I love games like that.
But the Demo is out there on Steam if you want to check it out it even runs on my 10+ year off Mac, so that’s something.
-------
A buddy of mine and I get together online every week to play co-op video games. We started with Divinity Original Sin 2, but have also finished Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Splintered Fate, Orcs Must Die 2, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion, We Were Here (The first one, not the whole series) and are about to start making our way through the campaigns in Halo: The Master Chief Collection.
Recently we both picked up a Humble Bundle of Lego games, the keystone of which was Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. This is the latest in a long series of video game adaptations of lego versions of popular movies. The original Lego Star Wars was a really fun game, combining simple puzzles, collect-a-thons and strong humor poking fun at the movie it was adapting. IT spawned dozens of other Lego games, including multiple in the Marvel and DC Comics universe, Indiana Jones tie-ins, The Lord of the Rings, Jurassic Park, and even the Lego Ninjago Movie! (I don’t know what the Lego Ninjago movie is). The games are all silly fun, and great hangout games, because from the very beginning they had co-op play. You could sit on the couch and your friend or sibling or spouse could grab the player 2 controller and drop right into playing alongside you. So you could both punch Jawas or Nazis or Dinosaurs.
This week we tried to boot up Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, or as I’m going to abbreviate it Lest Wath Sky Sag. The first tie we boot up a game always has a little bit of finagling. This is just part and parcel for playing games on computers in my experience. It’s exacerbated by the fact that we have different operating systems (I’m on linux he’s on windows) and any-online play is a little finicky to begin with. This time we were both stymied by controller issues. We have both used controllers successfully in our online games (TMNT: Splintered Fate was entirely played with controllers) and our different setups meant we probably weren’t having the same problems. He started installing new drivers and started plugging and unplugging things into various USB ports. Eventually we got everything working only to discover: Lest Wath Sky Sag doesn’t support online co-op. In fact none of the Lego Movie Games support online Co-op play. It’s a couch co-op only series, and always has been. It’s the 2020s and neither of us ever considered that a game wouldn’t support online co-op out of the box, so this was quite a shock.
We briefly tried Remote Play Together, but it was janky at best and unusable at worst. So we switched back to Orcs Must Die 3, which is our default backup game. We played a couple levels and had just nailed the pathing on n a big challenging level when Steam’s online systems seems to shut down completely. So we called it a night and now we’re downloading the Halo games.
-------
I made the [mistake/wise choice] of finally downloading Slay the Spire to my phone this week. It's a game I've been playing since I dunno, 2019?
The mechanics are that nice combination of complex and solvable. It's a rogue-like deckbuilder which basically means every time you play you start over from scratch (that's the roguelike) and you play through collecting a set of cards that help you accomplish your goals (that's the deckbuilder). With the sheer amount of time I have put into the game, I can basicaly play it without thinking, as long as I'm doing the easier difficulty levels (which aren't easy, but not nearly as hard as it can get). It's the sort of game I can play when I need to keep my hands busy while doing something else with my brain.
I've tried other games like it, and enjoyed many of them, but there's something about Slay the Spire that keep scratching a familiar itch in my brain. I don;t even know if I play it for enjoyment anymore, or if I'm just doing it because I can go through the motions with relative ease.
The best thing I can say about it is it's a really good one of these kinds of games, if ou like these kinds of games.