What I Played This Week (9/13/2020)
This week has been most noted by being even more stuck inside than before. Last week I could go outside wearing a cloth mask to avoid catching or spreading COVID-19, but this weekend I couldn’t/shouldn’t go outside without an N-95 mask, which I don’t have, so I’ve spent even more time inside this week than I usually do, which didn’t seem possible a week ago. Also, as I’m writing this my apartment is the coolest it’s been all weekend, it’s 83 degrees, it’s gotten as warm as 89, it’s miserable.
Hearthstone: Spent a lot of time getting 5th or worse in Battleground games. I haven’t played a lot of constructed, except to get some quests finished. Opened a Legendary from a pack, that was neat. I did watch a fair amount of the Masters Tour Montreal Online this weekend and did see some Hunter decks that looked line a fun and fast deck to play in Standard. Might try those out when I get back into it.
Mini Metro: Continued to play a lot of dailies and did fine, not any top 10s or wins this week. But playing games on a phone generates much less heat than either a PC or console, so I tried for some more of the achievements that can be unlocked in the standard mode, the ones I did this weekend were “Reach Week 10 in Osaka” and “Reach Week 8 in Stockholm with one at least one station connected to all lines”. The Stockholm achievement was especially fun because it required a change in playstyle, Stockholm is a very water-heavy map and requiring a station to be on every line almost requires that every line uses at least one tunnel. The restriction forced me to generally never take extra lines, in the attempt that got the achievement I picked extra tunnels twice, one interchange, and carriages every other time. Mini Metro is still excellent and I’m still excited to try Mini Motorway whenever that happens.
Egg Inc: Finished a couple Contracts this week, I have one currently running. I should unlock a new egg type in the main game. Egg Inc continues to be a great idle game. Maybe next week I’ll write about the active portion of the game, and how strange it is to me to have to actively be playing an idle game to be SO much more efficient than just letting it idle.
Hotshot Racing: I saw this game on Twitter, it looked like a fun arcade-y racing game. It's a lap-based low-poly racing game with a very clever system to keep the races close. Both drifting, and slipstreaming build up a boost meter. Slipstreaming also increases the speed of the car behind, which does double duty in keeping all the cars in a tight pack, unless you crash into a wall while you're boosting and get back onto the track outside of slipstream range, then you restart.
The best part about this game is that the characters have personalities and backstories and when you win it plays a Tekken style cutscene about what the win means for that character. I won with the American man who turned his life around and wanted to prove to his newborn son that he was a success by winning this race. It was weird and funny, big thumbs up. This is a perfect example of a game that I wouldn’t have tried if it hadn’t been on Game Pass, I probably won’t go back to it, but I had a fun enough hour with it.
The Sims 4: Journey to Batuu: I watched this over Kay’s shoulder, and moved the camera around a little. I haven’t played a Sims game since The Sims 1 on GameCube. I’m not sure if i just wasn’t in the mood for it, or if The Sims isn’t the Series for me. Seeing all the Star Wars stuff was cool, but the story telling seemed to mostly happen in text bubbles in the corner. Our Sim got interrogated and all that meant was they got walked into a room by a stormtrooper and had to stay there for a while. I didn’t even notice the moment they got out because either there was no notification, or I missed it. Kay did Star Wars-ify a Lars Homestead house she downloaded that didn’t have the new items in it already.
Crusader Kings III: I thought that Kay would like CK3, so I downloaded it from Game Pass and played through the tutorial with her. I was totally right and she plans on starting her own matriarchal game this evening. Not sure if she’ll be able to play on her own account on our PC, we haven’t tried that with Game Pass games yet. The game itself was probably a bit too much for me, the tutorial was A LOT, but it did feel pretty good to win that first war, I was just at a bit of a loss as to what to do next. I didn’t put that much time in after the tutorial ended because we started making dinner, but I will try and go back to it. I need to scheme to make my neighbors like me enough to let me vassalize them, or maybe my armies will be encouragement enough.
Spiritfarer: I spent most of my Saturday, and plan to spend some of my Sunday afternoon finishing up most everything in Spiritfarer, I haven’t had the urge to complete a game this thoroughly in a long time. I have made every dish, smelted every metal, finished most of the side quests. After I finish writing this I plan to finish up the last side quests and bring these last spirits to the Everdoor. After having used each of the item-producing buildings over my hours playing I would like to rank them in order of most-to-least fun.
Sawmill - The most skillful of the production minigames, in my opinion. Lining up the saw with the line was both tricky and something I got better at as I kept doing it. Succeeding and failing were both fun, I could tell what i had done wrong. Also, the consequence for failure was never very harsh, perfection was not required to get the maximum reward for each log. 10/10
Foundry - A simpler minigame than the Sawmill, run between the 2 bellows and push them to keep the heat dial between 2 markers, but it was still possible to get better at. It simply boiled down to figuring out how low to let the dial go down to before pressing the belows again. Most of the metals were very simple: “Just press it when it’s at the lower marker”, but both Silver and Gold moved further on the dial with each bellows press than the markers were apart. This means that you have to let the dial go below the markers before you press the next bellow It also means that you have to intuit the location where the press has to happen, unlike the rest of the metals where you just press the button when the dial reaches the bottom marker.
Fishing - This minigame starts very simple where you just hold the button until the fish is caught, it quickly adds the restriction that if the fishing rod turns red then you have to release the button until the rod returns to yellow. Like my other favorite minigames this one gets difficult, especially when trying to catch one of the 3 varieties of Tuna across the map. The tuna require very precise timing because they swim back just about as far as they get realed in each time, so you have to stop reeling as late as possible and/or start reeling again as soon as possible to make any progress. There’s a good variety in how the different fish behave also.
Loom - This minigame is much simpler than the ones above it, you hold the button down to make an arrow move down a line and release the button when the arrow is inside a zone that is marked on the line, hitting the exact center of that zone gives the player extra items from the minigame. Each item you use in the Loom has a different zone size, zone location, and arrow movement speed, which means that you get a different set of circumstances every time you try to use the Loom with a new item. The starting item (Linen) is pretty easy to hit the bullseye, but most of the other ones I found pretty difficult to nail, which felt great when i did manage it.
Kitchen - From here on down, there aren’t really any more mini-games left. The fun of the kitchen comes not from a minigame, it’s about combining 2 items together and seeing what comes out. I did get discouraged from experimenting early on when all the fruit and vegetables I had planted appeared to be just “a fruit” or “a vegetable”. But i did discover that later on there were certain recipes that required specifically apples, or pears, and not just “fruit”. Having more combinations accessible in the early game might have stopped me from having that moment where I stopped wanting to experiment.
Chicken Coop - Like i said above, not much of a minigame here, but you do have to keep placing eggs in the incubator to fill it up. It also has a unique method for keeping the chickens fed; there is a feed silo outside of the coop where you can place seeds that get automatically eaten by the chickens. I think this is the only building that can be interacted with from the outside (other than the door).
Garden/Field/Orchard - Plant a thing, water it, it grows. Or don’t water it, and it still grows, but slower. Or also play it a song and it grows really quickly. I found myself leaving the Garden and Field full of fully grown plants because that meant there wasn’t a WATER icon there all the time telling me how neglectful I was being to my poor plants. The Orchard doesn’t require watering the trees once they are fully grown, which I greatly appreciated.
Sheep Corral/Cow Stall - Only 2 things you can do to a sheep or cow: 1) Feed it 2) Sheer/Milk it. Nothing interesting, but it is easy to do, I especially liked that the feeding animation could be skipped when feeding then shearing the sheep. Made that task much less annoying.
Cellar - Boring, but not overly so. Just place a thing in a box and come back when it’s done. Things can be left for too long, but other than that not much going on here.
Windmill - I barely understand how this one works, and I had to look it up. I’m not sure i can accurately explain how this one works, you put stuff in it and move a thing at the top until the windmill starts to spin. Why does it start? I have no idea.
Crusher - Just mash the button, takes longer than you want, and is boring the whole time.
Smithy - This one also confuses me, the tutorial (that I read some of) mentioned something about each metal having a best amount of time to pull back the hammer but I couldn’t figure out what that was for any of the metals, so this ended up being the same as the crusher: Just mash the button until it’s done. I ranked this lower than the Crusher because you have to sit around before mashing the button, but not enough time to go do something else. Not a fan.
Splashing Cold Water on My Face: Splashing cold water into my face, and taking the coldest showers I can remember, have been my favorite activities this weekend, they are the only things that are keeping this weekend bearable. 10/10 would recommend.