Zodiac Challenge: Interlude - A Monkey and a Dog

Dan and Remy head off back to university for their final semester.  They're both taking 18 credits, which is a full course-load.

Remy and Dan were invited to a party their first evening back, but stayed home instead (in this cute-ass house I built!) because it was a full moon.  One of Dan's exes turned up in zombie form and stood outside growling all night.

Speaking of exes, Dan heads to the coffee shop after his first day of classes and runs into Veronica.

...she has not totally forgiven him.

He suggests that they try to be friends and form a study group instead.

After mixing drinks with study, they're back on again.

Both Remy and Dan have three exams on Friday, so Dan doesn't spend Thursday with Veronica.  Instead, he goes fishing.

Remy and Dan spend the last night before their exams playing music together and socialising.

It pays off!

After graduating, Dan wants to ask Veronica if she'll come move in with him, back home in his boat on his parent's estate.  She...doesn't seem to have fully forgiven him.

They row for hours.

...and then Dan has to watch her walk away, knowing they will probably never see each other again.  Veronica is not the One.

Sims 3: Zodiac Challenge - Chapter 5, The Dragon(s)

Almost immediately after Bunny and Sequoyah arrive home, the family dog dies.

This depresses everyone.

While her parents were away, Hialeah did some remodelling of the basement.  For example, by creating a basement.She presents it as a museum for the family trophies and their findings, but it has another purpose.

Yea, Hialeah has hidden a coffin-bed down there, for vampiric slumber.  She does also have a normal bed, but what's the point of being a vampire if you don't have a secret crypt?

A day or so after arriving home, Bunny sees a disturbance on a nearby lot and runs over to meet...a time traveler from the future!

She and Sequoyah head into the future to have a look around.  Weirdly, they have no future descendants.  It's especially weird and disturbing because three of their children (and Sequoyah himself) are immortal.

Bunny decides to forget all about the future, and we have some nice family moments, especially as Sequoyah masters the piano.  His - and Bunny's - favourite composition is "I'm in Love with a Ghost".

Speaking of ghosts, Dan wishes to be one.  Maybe it's because his best friend/brother is one, or maybe he thinks it would lessen his impact on the planet.

Bunny and Sequoyah decide to take their youngest children - Richard and Saoirse - out to the spring festival.

After hunting for easter eggs and having a family photo taken, Bunny and Richard practice skating together while Sequoyah and Saoirse play horseshoes!

NB.  I haven't been playing as much recently because I've been focusing on other games, because my final year project is almost due, and because I don't want Bunny to die, but I also don't want to make her immortal because we all need to move on.

1BitHeart

I bought 1BitHeart for 99p from HumbleBundle a week or so ago.  It's made by the same company who made Alicemare, which I enjoyed, and it was cheap, so I gave it a go.

Gameplay-wise it has a lot in common with the Phoenix Wright games - you can have conversations with people, and, in some of those conversations, you can ask for more information or present other topics to either get more out of them or point out a contradiction.  In some ways, it's a bit too much like Phoenix Wright - you can ask someone to revise their statement even though you're literally just a kid having a conversation with someone and not a lawyer in court.  My biggest issue with the game is that the mysteries and how they are solved are not logical and obvious.  They're nitpicky and require good guessing.  There's not even a logical way to just try all the options.  Quite early on, I just thought "fuck it" and followed a guide to get through because I entirely lost interest in trying to play the game properly.  To be fair, maybe that's on me, maybe my brain just doesn't work the way the designer's does.

There are also elements of Persona 5 (and possibly the others which I haven't played) in that you need to make friends with people.  How many friends you have define which of the three possible endings you see, and whether you unlock the bonus chapter (which contains a better mystery than the actual chapters).  This...is ridiculously overdone.  You can make 44 friends in the main game.  A game that took me about 9 hours to play.  I cannot care about 44 people in 9 hours, so the vast majority just became irritating background noise quite early on. To make friends, you need to make their "friendship points" - which the game doesn't tell you about and which are invisible - 100.  You do this by giving them gifts.  Each has 3 - out of, like, 40 or so (guesstimate) possible items that they like, and there are only vague hints as to which 3 they are.  Luckily, everyone likes chocolate so I just defaulted to handing that over.  When you get their points to 100 you receive an item from them and unlock an achievement, so at least there's some indication of how many total friends there are.  Really, they could have halved - or even quartered - this element of the game.  It's too many to actually be fun.

So, yeah.  The game was fine, I guess.  I'd have liked it better if it were more balanced, for example, better, more interesting mysteries for a longer game to balance the number of friends, or just less friends and a more logical progression through the game.  I got through it, which I guess is not the sentiment you want people to have towards your game.  At least it was only 99p, so about 10p per hour of gameplay.  Which, again, fine, I'd spend that much on a book that I'd read in a third of the time.

I've been wanting to play the .Hack series again.  I couldn't find a copy of the iso online so I just booted my old - as in, 2004 Christmas present - PS2.  Still works great!  The next steam game on my list is the Banner Saga, though I've still not finished FF8.

BAD END and Phoenix Wright

...I bought more games because Steam had a visual novel sale.  I quite liked BAD END.  It's a short horror visual novel, which took me about two hours to play through to get every achievement.  It only cost £1.04, so that seems about right.  Plotwise, it's like a B horror movie, with some translation issues.  It's not anywhere near the scariness level of something like Doki Doki Literature Club and it's not as atmospheric as something like Sunless Sea, Project Zero/Fatal Frame or Koudelka, but it's fun for what it is.

I'm still playing through Phoenix Wright.  It's a very satisfying trilogy.  Each one only has a few - I think 4-6 - mysteries, but they're kind of intense and you feel a real sense of accomplishment for solving the puzzle.

I'm still aiming to play through all the games on my Steam account this year.  The next one is The Banner Saga, but one of the games I've bought recently - 1bitHeart - is higher up in the list because it's earlier alphabetically.  My intention was to play through the list alphabetically, unless there was something else I felt like playing first.  The goal is to play through all of them and to enjoy the process, so as long as I keep moving down the list it's fine.  So, I think I'm going to keep going alphabetically - again, unless I really want to play something else first - and do a second pass through the list for any that have snuck in above the point of the alphabet I've reached.

Bad End - Spoiler-Free Guide

The endings marked in blue end the game (which autosaves before your last choice) and unlocks achievements.  The one ending which is not explicitly spelt-out is End#12.  You get that one by choosing any 'BAD END' choice twice in a row.  

You unlock endings #4, #6, #7, #9, #10, and #11 by choosing two different 'BAD END' choices, marked in orange.  This is easy to do in the earlier sections, where you have three choices, but when you only have two choices you will need to have made a wrong choice earlier.

Endings #13 and #14 depend on an earlier choice.  This is mentioned in one of the green commentary boxes.