DAI and Thumper
Feb. 1st, 2021 12:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
got_quietI've been writing a lot about video games lately but I've been playing a lot of video games so that makes sense.
So I finished DAI a couple days after I started because I was going hard with it over that weekend. While the combat is still a real frustration I did mellow out a bit on the different locations and whether questing through them were engaging. There was a lot more plotty content than I recalled, especially once you get out of the hinterlands or whatever they're called. I also noticed that Dorian's romance is whirlwind fast. Like he went from introducing himself to sticking his tongue down my throat within a half hour, and his romance scenes were wrapped up really early on. I kinda wanted more, but I don't think I would have been satisfied no matter how much Dorian they put in!
There were also zones that I didn't remember at all from previous games, mainly because there is so much busy work that you get through the main story while dodging a huge portion of the game. I'm not sure how I feel about that. But whatever, it was a fun and very quick playthrough and now I've deleted the game again.
The last couple weeks I've been playing Thumper. My two favorite genres of games appear to be games that require no mechanical skill whatsoever, like VNs, and games that are very twitchy and reflex based, and Thumper definitely falls into the later category. Theoretically it shouldn't be as difficult as it is, because the inputs it demands are not dense. Its complexity relies on speed, visual confusion, and heavy syncopation. Once you've got a better sense of the pattern a lot of the difficulty drops away, but getting that sense can take a bit. There were a good handful of parts where I really struggled to get by because of one or two bits that required unusual input. But I just beat it tonight, and am very satisfied with the experience, even though it was short. I might go back and try to get an S grade on a level or two, but there are so many other games I need to finish up I probably won't.
---
And in other news I'm trying to watch more Japanese TV since it's good practice and I want more practice. The end of Javascript means a handful of channels have now gone offline, which sucks, but the big ones like TBS are still available, so I've been watching shows like Hiromeshi Tabi, which is just reporters walking around towns and asking people to show them the meals they eat at home. It introduces interesting people, and shows interesting food that tends to be easy to make at home (although often the ingredients are harder to get. It's really frustrating to not easily be able to find thinly sliced meat because it's so common in Japanese cooking, but doesn't seem to ever appear here where I live.)
So I finished DAI a couple days after I started because I was going hard with it over that weekend. While the combat is still a real frustration I did mellow out a bit on the different locations and whether questing through them were engaging. There was a lot more plotty content than I recalled, especially once you get out of the hinterlands or whatever they're called. I also noticed that Dorian's romance is whirlwind fast. Like he went from introducing himself to sticking his tongue down my throat within a half hour, and his romance scenes were wrapped up really early on. I kinda wanted more, but I don't think I would have been satisfied no matter how much Dorian they put in!
There were also zones that I didn't remember at all from previous games, mainly because there is so much busy work that you get through the main story while dodging a huge portion of the game. I'm not sure how I feel about that. But whatever, it was a fun and very quick playthrough and now I've deleted the game again.
The last couple weeks I've been playing Thumper. My two favorite genres of games appear to be games that require no mechanical skill whatsoever, like VNs, and games that are very twitchy and reflex based, and Thumper definitely falls into the later category. Theoretically it shouldn't be as difficult as it is, because the inputs it demands are not dense. Its complexity relies on speed, visual confusion, and heavy syncopation. Once you've got a better sense of the pattern a lot of the difficulty drops away, but getting that sense can take a bit. There were a good handful of parts where I really struggled to get by because of one or two bits that required unusual input. But I just beat it tonight, and am very satisfied with the experience, even though it was short. I might go back and try to get an S grade on a level or two, but there are so many other games I need to finish up I probably won't.
---
And in other news I'm trying to watch more Japanese TV since it's good practice and I want more practice. The end of Javascript means a handful of channels have now gone offline, which sucks, but the big ones like TBS are still available, so I've been watching shows like Hiromeshi Tabi, which is just reporters walking around towns and asking people to show them the meals they eat at home. It introduces interesting people, and shows interesting food that tends to be easy to make at home (although often the ingredients are harder to get. It's really frustrating to not easily be able to find thinly sliced meat because it's so common in Japanese cooking, but doesn't seem to ever appear here where I live.)
