Underneath my yellow skin

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Balatro, me, and life in general

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Let’s talk more about Balatro (LocalThunk) and life in general. How am I going to tie them together? You shall see. I talked at length yesterday about the challenges in the game and how the last one wrecked me.

I do want to start with a positive. I just did a casual run with the yellow deck, black stake (which I had yet to win) just to see if I could apply what I learned from the Jokerless challenge to a vanilla run. I have been working on the different stakes on different decks for quite some time. White stake is the base stake. I have that on all fifteen decks. I also have the red stake on all decks (the next level up). I have green on all but three decks, and I have black on a few. I have gold (the highest) stake on four decks. I have been struggling with orange on plasma, and I am not having a good time.

After finally beating Jokerless yesterday, I was curious to see if what I had learned from it would help me with the vanilla runs. I did not want to do plasma deck because it’s its own thing and you need to have a very different mindset to play that deck. People in the Balatro know say that it’s the easiest deck of all, but I have really struggled with it. Blue deck was my fave (+1 hand per round) and erratic deck was the most fun (you didn’t know what cards you were going to start with. It changed every time, which was why it was the erratic deck.

I decided to try yellow deck, black stake just because. Instead of using either my two-pair build or my high card/pair build, I went for a straight build. This was all I did for the past two days, and it’s emblazoned in my brain. The yellow deck starts with $10, and now that I know one ace-high straight clears the small blind (300 chips), I would start over if I did not get one. I took the joker that lets you make straights and flushes with four cards and scary face (+30 chips for each face card). When I got the joker that makes every card a face card, well, that made things much easier. Plus Brainstorm that replicates the joker to the leftmost position.

I cruised this run, to be honest. Except for one round that just would not give me what I needed and I had to rely on some sloppy play to get through. Oh, and Mr. Bones, the joker that saves you if you make 25% of the chips you need (and then breaks). I got my straights up to level 18 or so and then did the dang thing. The final boss was Crimson Heart, which disables one joker per hand. Not the worst because it’s a different one per hand, and you can work around it.


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Some thoughts on Balatro–and, indeed, on life

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I can’t quit Balatro (LocalThunk). Every time I think I’m out, something pulls me back in. In fact, I am thinking about buying Monster Hunter Wilds (Capcom) just to tear me away from Balatro. And because everyone is loving it so I have some FOMO.

But I kept going back to Balatro. I was working on doing the stakes on the different decks. A person in the Discord forum had gotten his last gold stakke win and decided to look at the challenges. I had asked him about it because I had done 17 out of 20 of them, but could not do the last three. He said he was not going to even look at them before he got all the gold stakes.

I said that the first seventeen weren’t too bad, but he did mention two I had forgotten. They weren’t terrible, but they weren’t easy, either. He got to eighteen, and he acknowledged it was harder than the rest. Hearing him talk about it spurred me to try it myself, and it wasn’t as hard as I remembered it. It wasn’t fun or easy, either, but it wasn’t too bad. It is having to beat each round with one hand–which is one of the big bosses in the vanilla game. There’s also an economic aspect to it that made it a hassle, but not that big a deal.

The next was Cruelty, which had very strict restrictions such as only 3 jokers (though there are ways to game that) and no reward money from either the small blind or the big blind. That one fucked with me the first time around that I tried them, but it wasn’t as bad this time around. In fact, I think I found it easier than the one before (called Golden Needle).

It was the same with this one. The guy in the Discord announced he had finished this one, and I buckled down to do it myself. Not as a competition type of thing, but as a spur/encouragement. I got a few tips from him for the Golden Needle, but I beat Cruelty before he had time to respond.

Then, there’s the last one. It’s called Jokerless, and you can’t have any jokers in the game. Well, there is one way supposedly that you can get one. It’s very fiddly, though, and not worth counting on. If you’re saying that sounds really hard, you would be right. To make it even harder (and I did not realize this until my second day of intense trynig to beat this challenge) that you can only get one of two bosses for this challenge. One is the one that gives you 3 times the total you need to meet (300,000 v. 100,000), the one I call Violent Vessel. It’s actual name is, ah, *quick Google*, Violet Vessel. I actually came up with that on my own, but wanted to double check it.

The other boss is my most hated final boss, I think. It’s called Cerulean Bell (it is). It forces you to do something with the card it picks–either use it or discard it. When you’re running a straight build as I was for this challenge, that can be a heartbreaker. As I found out the first time I reached the final boss.


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Balatro–my final review, part seven

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It this point, I’m just amused by my neverending review of Balatro (LocalThunk). We all kknow that I will write another post about Balatro at some point because that is how I do. In fact, I am going to write one now and give my completely arbitrary rating for this game. I explained my rating systnems in the last post, but I’ll briefly sum it up here once again.

I have two different systems. One is for FromSoft games and the other is for all other games. The lowest rating I’ve given a FromSoft game is a 9.0 for Sekiro, and the highest rating is a 9.75 for Elden Ring and Dark Souls III. I am not gonig to go into it again about why those two games are basically tied at the top for me.

On the other list, at the top is Night in the Woods (Infinite Fall). I would give it a 9.5 off the top of my head. Then Spiritfarer (Thunder Lotus Games), which would be roughly the same. Maybe a 9.4 as NitW is the absolute pinnacle of non-FromSoft games to me. Spiritfarer is very close behind. Both of them made me crry buckets and think really hard about things. I platted the latter, but not the former because the former included a really difficult video game within the video game that was just no fun to play.

I’m grading Balatro in the non-FromSoft ranking system, of course, as it’s not a FromSoft game. It’s funny because before I started the grind, I probably would have given it a 9.3 or so. It’s really good and quite addictive. It has that ‘just one more run’ feel to it, and one run turns into hours. It’s such a good game.

I just…wish it could be a bit better. That’s not a knock on this game specifically beacuse you could say that about any game. Any game could be a bit better, really. Even Elden Ring, probably my favorite game in the world, I gave a 9.75. That’s just me–I will not give a game a 10. Nothing is perfect, and I know that most people use 10 to mean a game is as good as it can possibly be in relation to other games, but that’s not how I see it. To me a 10 is inattainable, and I’m fine with that.

Back to Balatro. I just got Big Hands (the achievement for which you have to get 80 cards in your deck), and it felt very hollow. Why? Because it was all down to chance. I got the Magic Trick voucher early on which allowed me to buy playing cards in the shop. Then, I got the Rocketjoker that gives you a dollar at the end of every round, and it increases by two dollars after beating every boss. Plus, I had Midas Mask which makes every face card gold, and if you hold them in your hand at the end of the round, each one gives you three bucks.


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Balatro–my final review, part six

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Yes, I’m back with part five of my ‘final’ review of Balatro (LocalThunk). Today, I have been grinding out the Big Hands achievement (getting 80 cards in a deck), and I haven’t geotten close. Well, I have gotten maybe 70 once? There are not as many useful tips when I Google as there were for Tiny Hands, the last achievement I grinded/ground out.

By now, I’m decent enough at the game that I had a vague idea of what I needed to do. Adding 38 cards to the deck meant, once again, radically changing up my play (and the deck I would use to do it). Also, I had to be careful because I was looknig for the Hanged Man tarot card and the Immolation spectral card when I was going for Tiny Hands. I did not want either of these for my current achievement hunting, obviously. Both these cards got rid of cards (2 and 5 respectively), which would be counterproductive for my current purposes.

Instead, I was to eschew the tarot cards completely as none of them add cards to the deck. Instead, spectral cards are my best friend, and only the Ghost Deck gives you a realistic chance to get them because they have spectral deck packs and spectral cards can show up in the shop. There are no spectral cards that straight-up give you more cards. You have to destroy one card to get two enhanced aces, or three or four enhanced cards (depending on the spectral card).

The other meta is to hopefully find the DNA joker because that duplicates one card per round and either Blueprint or Brainstorm (copies the joker to the right and to the leftmost, respectively) to copy that one card. Or both! Then you get two cards. Of  course, if you’re using your Blueprint and/or Brainstorm to copy a card, that means it’s not helping you win the hand. No, I’m not trying to win these runs, but I have to survive long enough to get the achievement.

The other other meta is to get really lucky and be able to buy the Magic Trick voucher in the shop. That allows playing cards to appear in the shop, which, obviously, means you can buy them. And they’re only a buck, so it’s usually pretty feasible to buy them. The upgraded version of Magic Trick can only be unlcoked if you buy 20 cards in the shop (doesn’t have to be in one run, fortunately). But you have to find Magic Trick on a run and then be able to last the run until you have the economy to buy the cards you need–and they show up.. There are playing card packs, too.


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Balatro–my final review, part five

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Ok. I promise that this is the last post about Balatro (LocalThunk)*. In the last post, I talked about the grindiness of playing for higher stakes wins and

*SPOILER*

chasing my white whale, Stuntman (the last joker I needed to complete my deck). Now, I’m trying to do two of the last five achievements I have–well, one of them first. It’s called Tiny Hands, and you have to whittle your deck down to 20 cards. The best bet is to start with the Abadonned Deck because it doesn’t have the face cards. That’s twelve cards left from the rip. Then, you have to get enough Hanged Man cards from the tarot deck (destroy two cards) and Immolate (spectral deck) that destroys five cards for $20.

There are a few problems, obviously. One is getting all the special cards you need to trim your deck that drastically, and winning enough hands to be able to sustain losing so many cards. Some people suggest other decks (oh, and by the way, it’s always recommended to use white stakee, the lowest stake, whenever you’re trying to get an achievement) beacuse they have more chances to get tarot and/or spectral cards, which I may try next. I have not come even close to trimming my deck that far. You can also make glass cards which then have a chance of breaking.

This is s ofucking tedious. I have just done a few hours and gotten nothing for my trouble. The closest I got was down to maybe 35 or so? The closest I’ve gotten overall is 30. I hate this one. This one is so fucking boring. The next one is Big Hands, and you have to get your deck to 80 cards. I’m expecting this one to be as painful. Oh, for Tiny Hands, there is a joker called Trading Card. If the first discard of a hand is one card, that card is destroyed (and you get three bucks). I have yet to see this in any of my attempts, by the way.

Unfortunately, the hundo chievo (for the whiny PlayStation stans who get mad if you say you got the plat, but not on PlayStation) in this game falls into the same trap as many plats do–make it as unpleasant and grindy as possible. A lot of devs seem to forget that you still want your player to like your game by the time they’re done getting the plat. Or maybe they don’t care. It’s quuite possible that some don’t care how you feel once you plat the game because they’ve wrung every ounce of emotion out of you that they possibly can.

FromSoft is notorious for this. I have platted five of the games, and until Elden Ring, they were terriblewith their plats. And I think it’s because they don’t care about them or actively don’t want to do them, but feel they have to (and by them, I mean Miyazaki. He is FromSoft, basically). Elden Ring is different. It’s their first try to be a commercial and mainstream success (while sticking to their ideals/beliefs/tenets). I believe that’s why they made the plat so much easier. I got everything I needed except the three separate ending in my first run. If my save-scumming had worked, I would have been able to plat it in one playthrough. That’s so different the rest of the games! Of course, my first playthrough was over two-hundred hours, which was double my time for the first Dark Souls–with DLC.


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Balatro–my final review, part four

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I’m back for my fourth and definitely last post about Balatro (LocalThunk). I am sure I will be able to get everything I want to say written in this poist .Easy-peasy! (That’s sarcasm in case you can’t tell, given that this is the fourth post on the subject.) And, of course, there will be

*SPOILERS*

At the end of the last post, I talked about unlocking the final joker I needed. Before I get to that, though, I want to talk about the challenge runs for a bit. There are twenty of them, and after you get five wins on any stakes with any deck, you unlock the first five challenges. I do wonder if you can have challenges that use jokers you don’t have yet and then if you have to use them for the challenge, if you’ll get to keep it in the main game. I have no idea because after winning one challenge, I put them aside until a few days ago (after I got the last joker unlocked and bought).

It’s funny because when I tried out the challenges when I first unlocked them, they seemed so hard and undoable. Even the one I won felt more like chance than anything else. They all have a theme, which I liked. Such as, the first one has five egg jokers (they go up in sell value with each round) and you won no money. So the only way to get money was to sell the egg jokers, get a blind-skipping reward that was money-based, or buy jokers that gave you money under certain conditions.

I also like that when you win one, you unlock another one. I have over half of the twenty unlocked–I think maybe thirteen or fourteen? I had assumed that they would get harder as I unlocked more, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The last two I unlocked, I won fairly easily. In fact, I think I won both on two runs. And the one before that took three tries at most. There are some earlier ones that I still haven’t beaten yet.

They’re good fun. That’s the point I’m trying to make about the challenges. Most of them. And a nice break from the grind.

Speaking of the grind.

Let’s go back to the hunt for the last joker I needde to complete my decks. I still twitch when I think about it. It’s Stuntman, and it became my white whale. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, you have to get 100,000,000 chipps in one hand to unlock it. Also as I mentioned, the highest I got in one round was 7,00,000 chipps. You do the math and tell me how fucked you think I felt at the time.

I put off unlocking this joker beacuse I knew that it was going to fuck with me. I don’t like having to think when I play video games, and I knew this was going to be a thinking joker. I tried my best to do it organically, but I wsa not even coming close. I had to do what I hate to do–which is maximize my build. Again, I was using the Plasma Deck because I knew that was the one with the most potential for high scores. I was plugged in enough to the meta to recognize that.


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Balatro–my final review, part three

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I still have things to say about Balatro (LocalThunk), so this is the (probably) last post on the game. In the last post, I mentioned that I knew the game was deep, but I was having more and more dissatisfaction with how deep the game was. I mentioned that it took actual days to get two Legendary Jokers, which made the game not fun at all. In fact, in reading up on the best way to do it, someone said that you should just play the game and not worry about it because focusing on those kinds of things took the fun out of the game.

It’s so true. I just sat there mechanically playing the game, feeling no joy in my heart. I know the grind is real, but this grind felt so unnecessary. It really should not have been that hard to unlock them or that random. I mentioned in the last post how Baldur’s Gate 3 has something that I now know is Karmic Dice. I thought it meant it made your rolls better so you won’t have a truly terrible bad streak of rolls, but apparently, it also makes enemies roll better? Apparently, it’s a heated option, and there are arguments on both sides.

I do think in general, though, that the idea of bending the rolls (yes, rolls, not rules) so that the player does not fail a 90% roll three or four times in a row is fair play in a video game. I know that’s not how probabilities actually work, but I’m not going to play a game that does that to me over and over again. I know there are people who feel differently, which is why it should be an option and not the default.

In Balatro, I felt empty when I got the last Legendary. Relief, yes, but also just an intense weariness. It really should not have been like that, and while I realize that my luck was exceptionally bad, I can’t forget the hours upon hours upon hours of grinding I had to do to get two Legendary Jokers, neither of which I actually like. In addition, those two Legendaries are so specific, they’re pretty much useless. Well, not useless, but not very helpful.

*SPOILER*

You know what is a good Joker I slept on? And quite possibly the best overall Joker in the game? Hanging Chad. It’s a Common, and it replicates your first card twice (so you get all the effects of the first card three times. This includes any modifiers that card has and any other Jokers that are affected by the card. I didn’t know how powerful it was until I was going for my last Joker–Stuntman.


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Balatro–my final review, part two

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I’m here to talk more about Balatro (LocalThunk) and when the joy started seeping out of the game for me. At the end of the last post, I talked about how you get the Legendary Jokers and how soul-sucking it was for me to get the last two. When I alked people in the RKG Discord Balatro channel if they had the same issues, no one else had the amount of angst I did in unlocknig the legendaries.

Side note: I have been doing a loose play-along playthrough of Rory (R of RKG) playing Elden Ring, and he has been incredibly lucky with item drops. Except one time that took hours and 69 (nice) misses to get one chest piece. That was the best episode of the series so far, though, so there’s that. There’s a 4% chance to get the chest piece, which is the same percent chance to get any other armor piece from this particular knight.

They were on their way to fight a big boss, and Krupa wanted to get this particular piece of armor just so they could get a bit of lore before the fight. He figured it would take a few tries. Several hours later, they were loopy, but determined not to leave without it. They had reached that liminal stage where everything was hilarious and nothing made sense. It was glorious.

In my own playthrough, it took me 150 attempts to get the same drop. Over twice what it took them–and five hours. Let’s not talk about it. I still shudder when I think of it.

I bring it up, though, because it illustrates how shitty my luck is. I blame it on dying (twice). Coming back from that used up all my luck for the rest of my life. It’s a fine trade-off, but it does make these little things very irritating.

The reason I brought this up is because those five hours for that one chest armor was nothing compared to what I went through to get those last two Legendary Jokers in Balatro. Literal days it took to get them, and no joy to be had at all. At least with the farming in Elden Ring, I can just put on a video and watch it as I mindlessly grind for runes (or that one chest piece). I did not have to think about it because when I farmed, it was on easy mode. There is one particularly famous farming area in which you can kill one enemy for over ten-thou runes a pop, or kill a bunch of enemies in that area fairly easily for thirty-thou (I think. I did not go that route until NG+, and then it was close to a hundred thou a run). If you choose to go for the singular enemy, you don’t even have to fight it–you just shoot an arrow at it from afar, and it runs off a cliff.


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Balatro–my final review

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I have put countless hours into Balatro (LocalThunk). Seriously. I don’t want to even look at how many hours because then I would have to acknowledge that it took over my life for several weeks. I took a break from it when I was getting stuck on–oh.

*SPOILERS*

Orange Stake. Or maybe earlier. This was my last post about the game when I had gotten my first few wins. I have to laugh as I reread my past posts on Balatro because the one theme that ran through them was how complicated and deep this game can get. I didn’t even know. I did not even know. 

Where am I now? Let me sum it up the best I can before getting to the meat of this post–what is bothering me about the game. I mentioned in past post that there are several decks, many of them you have to unlock. Fifteen in total (plus, apparently, the challenge deck. You also unlock the challenge runs, which, meh. I’ve tried a few and won one, but I’m not wild about them. And you only unlock new ones after winning old ones. Double meh). I have unlocked all the decks, and my mission for the past month was to win all the stakes on one deck and unlock all the jokers. I thought that was doable and shouldn’t be too hard.

Boy, was I wrong about that. And this is one of my issues with the game. Unlocking the jokers took a lot of the joy out of the game for me. There are 150 jokers in the game. Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Legendary. Some you just have to buy as you come across them in the shops or pick them up as rewards for skipping a blind.

Then, there are the ones you have to mess with the decks so you can get a certain hand in order to unlock a joker. Such as discarding a Royal Flush (Ace, King, Queen, Jack, and Ten of the same suit) in order to unlock Brainstorm (Rare), a joker that copies the leftmost joker in your hand. Or Glass Joker. You have to have five glass cards in your hand to unlock this one. There’s a deck called the Checkered Deck that has only spades and hearts, so you have a much better chance of getting a Royal Flush with this deck (for the first joker I mentioned).

These weren’t bad at all. The only thing that was irritating was that you didn’t actually add the joker to your collection by doing this–you just unlocked it. You had to see it and afford to pick it up, and you’re not guaranteed to get it in any given time, either. The other danger was that I would forget I was looking for a specific joker because as I’ve said, my memory isn’t what it used to be.


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My (non-From) game of the year, 2024

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My usual schtick for my game of the year is to have two. One From game and one non-From game. I thought this year was going to be different (only the one From game) because other than the obvious, I didn’t really love any other game I played this year. The two I mentioned in yesterday’s post, were enjoyable and worth my time. However, I would not consider either of them even close to game of the year, even if either of them had been released in 2024.

By the way, when I talk about my games of the year, I am talking about the games I played this year, not games that were necessarily released in this year. Hey. It’s my list, and I’ll do whatever I want with it. That means making up silly names for the awards and handing them out almost haphazardly. I wanted to give a shout-out to games I quite enjoyed this year, but that did not make it onto my top tier list.

It’s late, so I’m going to wait until tomorrow for that. For tonight, I’m going to write about one game. I’m calling it…ah…let me think.

The game that I studiously ignored for several months because I knew better, but it really is the indie GOTY

Balatro (LocalThunk)

I was not ready for this game. At all. It released on February 20th, but it didn’t become a part of the collective consciousness until it was released on mobile in late September. Then, everyone was playing it and everyone was talking about it. I didn’t pay much attention because I’m not really into card games. I tried several that just did not grab my attention, and I thought this would be more of the same.

Let’s be real. If you just hear about the game, you’re not going to be impressed. “It’s a poker game, but it’s also a roguelike/roguelite. Oh, you can buy different kinds of cards to supplement your build (stone cards, glass cards, steel cards, etc). And you can level up different hands (one pair, two pair, three of a kind, etc.). In addition, there are different editions of the cards, and there are tarot cards, planetary cards, etc., as well. I  have included the launch trailer below that summarizes the game neatly. Now that I’ve played it, the trailer makes sense. If I had watched it beforehand, I would have been confused and probably not into it.

The look of it is very simple. Yes, there are swirls of colors, but it’s pretty basic. I turn the music off when I play because I like to watch videos as I play games, and the music on repeat bothers my brain.


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