Underneath my yellow skin

Tag Archives: AAA games

Indie games vs. Triple A games, part three

More about indie games and AAA games.

Side note: And, yes, this is probably the earliest I have done this. Sony is talking about buying FromSoft’s parent company. Not because of FromSoft, per se, but that’s just a cherry on top of the deal. And it made me immediately worried because Sony looooooves themselves an exclusive, and I have no intention of buying a PS5. Plus, my PS4 is busted, I think. Totally my own fault. I hate the PS4, anyway, and the DualShock 4. I HATE that controller so much, and I can’t even tell you why. Anyway, if From games suddenly become exclusives for the PS for the first year or so, well, that is going to make me very unhappy. But I doubt I would actually buy a console, anyway.

Just finished up a cute little game called Supurr Cat Cafe: Sandwich Rush by 2 Nerdy Nerds. At first I thought it was initially a mobile game, but now, I’m not so sure. It doesn’t really matter; I played it on the PC. The basic gist of it is that you (Olive. That’s your name, not just a fruit/vegetable/ingredient in your sandwiches) re-open (I think?) of a cat cafe. You and your cat, Maka.

It has a simple premise. Olive races around the cafe with a big platter over her head. She catches ingredients as they fall to make sandwiches. Gotta start with bread (with or without butter) and then add to it. You can slap a piece of second piece of bread whenever you want as long as there is one other ingredient between the two pieces of bread. If you put three different ingredients on the piece fo bread, then another piece of bread, it’s a stack (I think?). That’s the whole point of the game–making as many stacks as you can.

As the game goes on, you get different items you can buy to make your sandwiches better. You also can buy some things to decorate your cafe with. Oh, and of course you can adopt cats and put them in cute costumes. If you level them up, they will help out with the sandwiches. Unfortunately, they aren’t discriminatory about what ingredients they put on the sandwiches, which is a problem. You can’t put three of the same ingredients on the sandwich in a row, and you can’t serve a sandwich without bread on top of it. The cats will throw the ingredients on the sandwich so fast, I can’t always avoid the ones I don’t want.


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Indie games vs. Triple A games, part two

I was musing about Triple A games vs. indie games in yesterday’s post. Today, the nomination for Geoff Keighley’s game awards came out, and there was much consternation per usual. One of the controversial issues was that Shadow of the Erdtree (FromSoft) was named for Game of the Year. Why? Because it’s DLC. There are obvious reasons why this may be problematic. One, you have to play a big chunk of the base game just to get to the DLC. Well, you don’t have to as there is a way to get there much earlier, but you probably will have a miserable time in the DLC if you manage to do that. Like a really miserable time.

Let me put it this way. I went into the DLC for the first time, I was level 200 and something. I think.  It’s been a while. I had 38 Vigor, and I died to the first field boss (Nameless Mausoleum) for an hour solid. There was no running back to the boss arena, so that’s a pure hour of deaths. Why? Because he could one-shot me. Which I HATE in a boss. That’s not the point, though. The point is that I was not having any fun at all. I could have went elsewhere, but I was infuriated at this point. I had put in 225+ hours into the game thus far, was over level 200, and was getting absolutely decimated.

I respecced so I had 60 health, made a few other changes for this fight (like using a certain sword that is considered OP for its Ash of War) and got the boss in two more tries. Like that. I could not have done it  without all those points in Vigor, which I maintained throughout the DLC. it made things so much better for me.

I’ve been dipping into the indie world once again because I needed a break from Elden Ring. Do not get me wrong. I still love the game and will be playing it until the end of time. However, I needed a little bit of indie goodness. And I have so many demos on my Steam client from past indie game fests.

I just put a good hour into a game I bought some time ago called Crypt Custodian (Kyle Thompson). It’s about a black cat, Pluto, who dies and goes to the afterlife. He is prevented from entering the good place and is doomed by Kendra, the arbiter), to be a janitor cleaning up the afterlife. It’s a Metroidvania, and you can change accessibility options at any time. There are three modes, too. I have it on regular/normal at the moment and no accessibility options turned on, but I might change that. Why? Because I’m getting frustrated with the fall damage.


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Indie games vs. Triple A games

I’ve been thinking about games that I buy. Or rather, when I buy games. I’m not someone who buys big games on day one.

Side note: Yes, already. I want to preface this post by saying that when I talk about Triple A games, I am not referring to FromSoft games. I will buy any game they put out day one if it’s anywhere in the Soulsborne realm, and I don’t mean physical worlds. I mean anything with that kind of gameplay and story-telling. What I’m trying to say is anything not Armored Core.

They are the top tier for me, obviously. So much so that  I have two different lists of favorites. There is the FromSoft list which includes Elden Ring/Dark Souls III at the top, Dark Souls II, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro. Sekiro is not my favorite, but it’s still better than 80% of the games out there.

Here’s my problem. This is my standard for a Triple A game. Dark Souls was one of the first hardcore games I ever played. along with Torchlight (Runic Games) and Diablo III (Blizzard). Before that, I played casual games that included Hidden Objective Games (HOG), Match-3s and such. Needless to say, it was a leap to playing hardcore games.

Dark Souls broke me. It was unlike anytthing I’ve ever done before. Not just in games, but in life. It’s like speaking English all your life and then trying to recite a poem in Greek. You’re supposed to be able to play the game fifty or so hours. So I’ve read over and over. “No one” would ever need over a hundred hours to play the game. Except me, apparently. I’m not taking it personally because I have my physical limitations and because I’m just not good at these games. But it’s a patented untruth that no one would take a hundred hours.

I know that whatever anyone says is the time to play one of the From games, I just double it. It took me roughly 225+ hours on my first playthrough of Elden Ring. That’s double what most other people put into it, if not triple. Granted, I found most of the secrets (with a bit of help from the forums), but still. That’s a hefty time investment. I’m not saying it as a negative, mind. I definitely get more bang for my buck than most people. And  I have put in countless more hours than that with several more playthroughs.


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