Catch-Up #2: New Year, New Games

First things first, regardless of whether these are read or not, its a great way for me to log my thoughts and I really should be doing more of these, whether they be general thoughts on something, a catch-up like this, or just a post regarding what game I am in the process of trying to complete. This will definitely be easier given that I just got a new laptop, my previous one having been broken for quite sometime. In fact, first thing I did when I got my computer is set up Steam again and downloaded 4 games: Stardew Valley, The Talos Principle, SpeedRunners, and Pony Island. For Christmas, I am also proud to say that I was able to get a hold of the NES Classic Edition, and have been using that as a little something to go to occasionally just to play a game of Mario or a few rounds of Bubble Bobble before I try going through and actually attempting to finish any of those games. In addition, I am nearing the end of Crash Bandicoot on PSX and might be posting about my progress and struggles with that game soon. For now, I want to go through and discuss the Steam games though.

Firstly, SpeedRunners I have wanted for a while, because it will be a really fun game for me and my friends to play together. I have not even downloaded it yet, let alone played it myself, but have seen various others play it and am convinced that we will have a great time.

Pony Island is a game that I was introduced to through Jesse Cox, who played the game for a Fan Friday he did a little while back, and I just got hooked from watching that, but had no way to play it since my computer was pretty well busted at the time. I downloaded the game, played through it, got all of the tickets in order to get the "secret" ending, if you can call it that, and got all of the achievements for the game. I hate to say that I had to look up two of the tickets, both of which were in the Second Act when the player is roaming the inverted adventure world map. One involved going way down and below the castle (which is in reality your actual destination) in order to talk to a demon who says some dialogue and proceeds to give you a ticket. The second involved going to the Pokemon-inspired section of the map, going in the water, and moving up and down on the shoreline which will spawn a sprite of MissingNo. from Pokemon and a ticket, which is in its entirety a reference to the MissingNo glitch in the original Pokemon games. As soon as I obtained the ticket I understood what the puzzle was alluding to, but going into that area I had no idea that's what I was supposed to do there. Just an instance of not putting two and two together I suppose.

I played up to the first 20 days of Stardew Valley before stopping and moving on to The Talos Principle. I like the game, but I feel like its one of those where I'll have to go back to it every now and again for fear of growing to loathe it. Its just the style of game and how it effects me, because I'm interested thus far and I've had fun playing it. Just need to step back for a little while before going back in.

Finally, The Talos Principle, and I am by far closest to completing this compared to the other 3. The Witness was a hoot to play and I love puzzle games in general, so I got The Talos Principle hoping it would be like The Witness. Well, I was only sort of correct in my hopes, because the game features areas with puzzles that you must solve, but it has a fully-coherent story that uncovers itself as opposed to you trying to piece even a tiny one together, and The Witness has one style of puzzle that they add variations to, whereas The Talos Principle is more like Portal, with multiple objects and motifs added in throughout the games progress. Regardless, I still love this game, and am currently in the middle of my second playthrough. My first time through, I just went through the motions of the story, but know, I am fully aware in what I'm doing, going through and gaining all of the Messengers while also making sure that I don't use any hints, gather all sigils, all stars, all terminal files, and all audio logs. Which is a decent amount of things to collect, all things considered, but I am going through without a walkthrough for those items, looking up minor hints if I end up stuck for, like, 20 minutes or more. The only guide I have continuously up is the terminal interaction guide, in order to minimize playthroughs. There are various outcomes of dialogue that you can achieve while talking to the Milton Library Assistant in the terminals that assist you, mainly involving getting to a certain point, choosing specific dialogue choices, and then reloading a previous save to obtain the others. This is made more important by that fact that there are three outcomes you can get in terms of talking to the terminal, but only one of them gives an endgame achievement, impacting the end of the story. As far as I know, there are 3 or 4 endings, because I still am not sure if gathering all of the stars will effect the ending at all, and I have gotten 1 of them in my normal playthrough, which by all accounts is the "neutral" ending. So, I persevere, with not that many left to gather and most of the normal puzzles still fresh in my mind, which is allowing me to make it through much faster this time than before. After this, I'll probably play a little bit of Stardew Valley and then see about completing Crash Bandicoot.