What I Played This Week(11/14/2020)
New consoles came out this week, and I don’t have either of them. I’m sure I will get both of them eventually, but I don’t need to spend $500 to play the Demon’s Souls remake, a prettier Spider-Man: Miles Morales, or slightly prettier versions of Xbox games I already don’t play that often.
Tetris Effect: Connected - Speaking of Xbox games, Tetris Effect: Connected came out this week for all of the Xboxes this week. The original Tetris Effect was the second game I bought for my PS4 after Marvel™’s Spider-man™for PS4™ and I played the hell out of it there, I beat all of the campaign levels on normal and hard, and spent a while getting my Marathon score up as far as I could on the leaderboard. (I was 648th at one point, but I’m sure I’ve been pushed down in the last 2 years. Now it’s out on Xbox with a new subtitle and new multiplayer modes. It has a traditional VS mode, called Zone Mode, where each player sends trash lines to their opponent when their own lines are cleared, a score attack mode where the player with the highest score after 10 minutes wins, then there’s the most original new mode: The titular Connected mode.
Connected mode is a co-op Tetris mode against constellation-themed bosses. Those bosses send strange and terrifying attacks at you while the 3 human players fight back in a turn-based phase where all three players’ wells merge into one mega-well and the players try and get as many lines as they in a turn-based phase. This is the most interesting mode, but I think it has some issues. I’ve run into some issues with vibration, the game is supposed to vibrate the controller along with the rhythm of the song, and also when it is your turn to go in the turn-based phase. But my game, or maybe my controller, aren’t working consistently. One game will have the vibration working as expected, but the very next game will have absolutely no vibration. This makes the core frustration of the mode even worse, where it’s one player’s turn and they don’t realize it, making the entire trio wait for them to figure it out. This has happened to me several times while playing, both me not realizing it’s my turn and having to agonizingly wait for the other player to realize it’s their turn. The game has no system for the other 2 players to ping the third player to remind them. It would probably be worse with that though, annoying people would spam it.
Each boss in Connected Mode takes about 10 minutes to beat and the blocks stay in each player’s well after each boss, so that the second and third boss fights start with the potentially messy wells. I had a few attempts where all three of us human players died while trying to beat the third boss after playing for about 20 minutes. It was very demoralizing.
If you haven’t played Tetris Effect I could not recommend it higher, it is the prettiest version of the best game ever made. If you have Game Pass you have no excuse to not play it.
Tabletop Simulator: I have been sitting on a half designed deckbuilding meets minion combat (like Hearthstone or Magic: The Gathering) card game for an embarrassing amount of time. This week I finally figured out how to import custom deck into Tabletop Simulator. So maybe now I’ll finally get around to having somebody other than myself or Kay play this thing. But wow figuring out what I was doing wrong was not easy, instead of giving any sort of instruction about file size, or dimension the game just crashes when you try and use a file that is too large, that’s like software engineering 101, tell the user what they can or can’t do and stop them before they break your code. But whatever, an hour of googling and resizing images finally got a deck of cards into TTS.
Hearthstone: Last week I said I probably wouldn’t talk much about Standard any more in these, but then I played more Standard this week than I had in a while. They added a new progression system to Hearthstone with a Battle Pass like system that grants rewards when you pass thresholds of points earned by doing things like completing daily quests, weekly quests, or by unlocking some of the brand new achievements. The achievements are part of what has gotten me back into playing Standard more than I was. Of course with a change to how rewards are earned in-game, the whole community is up in arms about it. I haven’t done the math about how much gold is earned in the old vs. new system but the new system seems fine to me, it has rewards other than gold and gives more ways to earn your way towards those rewards. Playing Battlegrounds now gives me points towards my next level. We’ll see if they change it.
Spider-man: Miles Morales: I haven’t actually played Miles Morales yet, but I’m a weirdo and like having physical media I ordered a disc for my PS4. But it’s apparently taking a road trip across America, it’s currently in Minnesota. I hope it enjoys the trip