What Did We Play Yesterday?

For some reason, my only takeaway previously was this update would give us fish ponds. Well, as usual, it gives us so much more. Check out the spoiler-free announcement here. New content and QOL updates that look like they will eliminate the need for some of my mods. No ETA on the Switch update yet.

After I logged my millionth hour for my most recent SDV farm on Switch I started looking into other games like Stardew Valley to fill that niche but give me a little something different to look at. I didn't find anything (though I've had a general eye on Fantasy Farming: Orange Season for some time). My next plan was to set up an epic Stardew Valley Expanded game and play on SteamLink. I never got around to it and now I'm content to wait for the Switch update because playing SDV handheld while curled up on the couch is one of my very favorite things.

If you love ConcernedApe as much as I do, consider voting for Stardew Valley for the Labor of Love Steam Award.

The Good Time Garden is a short surrealist adventure in which you pleasure (?) various moist creatures and then use their offspring to feed the gaping maw.

When I reached the point where I was willing to sacrifice the newly-born tit child to the gaping maw, I questioned every aspect of my self and being. In the end, I did what I must.

I almost typed, "I know what you're thinking..." but I realized I now know nothing. Where rational thought once dwelt there is now only moistness.

Also you're welcome.

Breath of the Wild is an open-world Zelda game with opportunities for physics mayhem. I've been putting it off for so long, in part, because I had open-world fatigue. I personally find the story a little boring, but if you like to run around climbing trees and picking herbs, and I do, there are plenty of other things to occupy one's time. My friend told me one of the great things about this game is there's the 'expected' way to beat shrines, etc., but you can always pull some creative twist out of your hat to meet an objective. I like that. I blow things up a lot to test the theory.

BOTW is truly open. You can climb any mountain, provided you have the stamina. You obtain a paraglider, but I learned the hard way this takes stamina too, so you can't just coast endlessly.

It seems one of the more controversial design choices was weapon decay. Weapons degrade until they break, and cannot be repaired. Thus, the limited weapons starting inventory adds a new level of strategy, you never know when you'll need a crappy weapon to beat off some low-level baddies. Unfortunately, I must have hit some sort of glitch early on. Shortly after leaving the starter area I had a run where every single weapon I owned broke in 1-hit, including the new guardian sword I'd just gotten from a shrine. After breaking 6 or 7 weapons consecutively with 1 hit I went online to see what I'd screwed up. I didn't find an answer to that, which lead me to believe it really was some weird fluke/bad luck/glitch, but I did see a fair bit of tooth gnashing over weapon decay in general.

To be blunt, these open world games tend to blur together after a while no matter how good they are, and weapon decay adds a strategic element I don't see too often. The point is that you're always scrounging for weapons, and you have to 'save' the really good ones for an enemy that deserves it. I don't have a problem with that. Since you can't repair weapons, the game is gonna compensate for that by throwing A LOT of weapons at you. I haven't played enough to know how serious of a limiting factor this truly is.

So far I like playing BOTW but it hasn't captivated me. I like the fantasy technology in the game and the physics puzzles and items, but the story is the usual boring epic fantasy backstuff. It has a few of my pet peeves too, like collectibles gone wild (900 korok seeds? Really?).

IIRC BOTW swept the GOTYs in 2017. Nier: Automata was released the same year and that's more where I'm at right now, as a player. That doesn't mean BOTW won't grow on me, and it has a really excellent exploratory component, which I enjoy, and I appreciate having to climb towers to get topo maps and so on. But BOTW also seems to emphasize how Nintendo and I have grown apart over the years. These fine hand-crafted First Party titles are perfect, some would say, but they have a weird sterility to me and they don't hit, and stick, the way a lot of smaller, messier games do. I guess these days I'm just a hot-mess kinda gamer, happiest when I gaze upon imperfection and brilliance not-quite-fully-realized.