Integrity

THE BIBLE UPDATE POST Here's a swerve of a post for you, and a completely-unasked-for screed. The The Bible Steam Game has had a wild pace of updates recently, largely focusing on introducing new translations and a free TTS DLC, stuff I think is absolutely fantastic to include. Many of these updates have included new quizzes, and thus, have included new achievements for acing each relevant quiz. I'm coming in here because I'm disappointed that it's just falling into the same issues that all crappy literary - let alone Biblical - studies inevitable fall into. Say what you will about religion as a concept (or don't), but I think it's uncontroversial among folks of intellect to say that the important parts of it are a set of values and actions that might not otherwise come naturally. Is it necessarily good to do charity because Christ would even though you have no other inclination to do it? That's between you and God, but it's better to do it than not do it. Do you need to be a literal Biblical scholar to not murder people at random? No, but one reckons if you're halfway competent at reading the thing you believe you won't do it. You get my point here, I hope. When reading a work from a literary standpoint, take Shakespeare or something, the specifics are nowhere near as important as the themes. How many watchmen arrest Conrade in Much Ado? Is the answer 2, 3, or 4? Does answering this question at all prove whether you read or understood Much Ado? No, it doesn't. It's far more important that you read that the point of the arrest is miscommunication and secrets badly held, the whole themes of the play. Any reasonable English teacher isn't going to focus on these literal details, but will want to know what you gleaned from a work, what you interpreted from it, even if "the interpretation" is singular and supposedly-correct. The issue I have with the quizzes that have been continually added to The The Bible Steam Game is that they're all completely literal and factual. They quibble over numbers and names, places and faces, rather than focusing on, for instance, the teachings of Christ. Did you get the number of days between his death and return right? Ah, nah, you said four, mate, you must not have read it. It doesn't matter whether or not you understood that his death and resurrection was a metaphor for the new covenant with the Lord who has changed his tack with his little creation down here, nah, you said four. It's like tasking someone to watch a theatrical production of Romeo and Juliet and then flunking their insightful essay on principle because they consistently thought Mercutio's name was Mercurio. It would be insane in an English Literature sense, and it's doubly insane in something that's supposed to be a teaching tool for what's supposed to be a philosophical - religious, even - reference. If you're tasking true believers with remembering the number of apostles or which minor prophet Micah was, it's just creating new gates to keep. If you're presenting these gates to nonbelievers, you're just walling them out. It's even worse because the potential is there to create even multiple-choice questions about the meaning behind verses and passages, and it's just not taken in favor of asking if you remember whether it was Phineas or Ferb of Kazakhstan who Paul watched die in a Turkish square. It's not a problem with The The Bible Steam Game, for sure, it's an endemic issue in Christendom since the concept was invented, but it's annoying me now and it's related to achievements I just got in a video game so it goes here, dammit. I'm still gonna reinstall the game consistently and keep cheating the quizzes to keep The The Bible Steam Game on my 100% achievements shelf, but if the developers happen to google "the the bible steam game quiz feedback" and land here: do better, dudes. thx

oh, god no, we can't stop them, but the brief period where they could crap a thousand threads onto the boards unhindered is over at least

alright, we're done being childish here

ok everything SHOULD be good again, as always get my attention if anything looks like it isn't supposed to look big up to @Imuabicus der Fertige for wrangling my and parrhesia's attentions right when spam attacks were getting going and accidentally getting me to figure out what had gone wrong on ip.board's side e: there was a skins issue @Moblin Major General brought to my attention! that's fixed - if your skin got reverted to default, you should be able to change it now

Hey folks! I've identified what's going on with the more recent influx of spambots and am presently deploying a fix, which means that for the next hour or two you may see some weirdness. Registrations are also being disabled temporarily while it deploys, so I can make sure I have a clean baseline to monitor. I'll update this thread when everything's cool again.

i have been officially plagiarized by a content farm i am so happy, i'm fuckin legit now

SUPER ALGEBRAWL (PUNKCAKE DELICIEUX, 2024) Finished: 23/3/24. Playtime: 6.9 hours (hell yes). Super Algebrawl is, in a word, fun. It's a cute little semi-puzzle game where you're given a small squadron of mice and the ability to add and multiply their numbers to make bigger or smaller mice. You go through a cycle of fighting enemies and adding more guys or spells to your repertoire, but the game hinges on a simple complicator: if you overkill an enemy, whatever remaining amount of guy you had attacking gets corrupted and becomes an enemy. You can also attack your own guys to reduce their numbers, though! Despite being called Algebrawl (a funny pun) it's really just a lot of on-the-fly arithmetic, but I find it to be fun as hell. There's three discrete stages, with their own enemies of increasing numbers and skills of their own, and each run only lasts 15-30 minutes at the absolute most. Nice, bite-sized, appropriately priced; a game I can put away with a smile. Punkcake DELICIEUX strikes again. The achievements are pretty straightforward, nothing like the absolute monsters Shotgun King threw at me. Beat all three stages without any of the optional helpers turned on and do a small handful of specific builds like making a guy with a hundred thousand hit points or having a mouse for each number from 1 to 9 in front of you at once, and that's it. I beat the game's core stages in about 4 hours and iced it in, well, about 7. Then I wrote a guide again!

thank you

HELLDIVERS 2 (ARROWHEAD, 2024) Finished: 22/3/24. Playtime: 82.8 hours. In a deeply rare moment, the thread is topical. Welcome to the game du jour. Helldivers 2 is the sequel to Helldivers, a game all but nobody played because its largest playerbase was on the, I shit you not, PS Vita. Yes, the PS Vita had a game. Much like Risk of Rain 2, the developers took the chance on swapping player perspective to a third-person shooter, and much like Risk of Rain 2, many predicted that the swap would crater. Suffice it to say that it did not. Helldivers 2 is a frontrunner for my game of the year 2024, a year that is going to include Space Marine 2, Mechwarrior 5 Clans, and Menace. The crux of Helldivers 2 is that you, a titular Helldiver, are tasked with going into enemy territory to accomplish various objectives, supported by orbital and strikecraft fire from your destroyer loitering above. Death is not only intended, but expected; a solo mission comes with the expectation of you respawning up to four times, and the more people you have the more that count goes up. This isn't Left 4 Dead or a Fatshark game; you are going to die repeatedly, sometimes unfairly, and the recourse is that reinforcements are cheap and plentiful. Dying to drop an orbital beacon that takes out twenty to thirty bugs is a good trade; you'll just be called in fresh with full ammo and health and grenades. Most tellingly, if you accomplish all objectives and fail to extract, losing every single reinforcement available for your team, it is considered a mission success and you're given the thumbs up. While dying is a deeply integral part of the game's systems, you don't have to just embrace it. Stealth is "supported" through a quote 'simple line of sight system', and it works really well when you need it to. When gunfights break out, the guns feel largely fucking incredible. Outside of a few flops, which we'll get to in a minute, the guns feel absolutely amazing. The basic assault rifle that everyone starts with is good at all nine difficulties, and most of the sidegrades you unlock only specialize you in different degrees or against different enemies. The basic pistol is, by my reckoning, the single best pistol in all shooty video games ever made. The other pistols are, according to others, upgrades; the weapons of Helldivers 2 are all so vibes-based that I can ignore the meta and perform on my own skill. The core of Helldivers 2 is the strategem system. Strategems are offmap callins, for gear or explosive strikes, that you do a Dance Dance Revolution-type button combination for and then send the beacon to get it. This is such an impossibly good system, because you can fuck it up. Up-right-down-down-right sounds easy as hell to press, but when you are steeling yourself to smash it as you're diving away from a bug who is actively eating you, you only usually manage it. With more experience, as you calm down, you can call in annihilation on yourself as you die and laugh at the bugs, but it is absolutely a part of your personal growth. As you play normally, you're going to flub these callins, and it's going to cost you your life and the lives of others. But it's worth it, because they can clear entire waves of enemies and even their villages if you can wield them correctly. It's such an impossibly fantastic approach to apocalyptic power that I feel like this paragraph is doing it a disservice. I feel like anything else about the game, talking about the missions or the campaign system that a dev actively maintains or the million weird gun customizations or all that is wasted on this post. I think anyone who cares about all of the particulars is already interested by what I already wrote, and I implore that guy to just ping me. Quote me here, DM me on the boards, drop me a note on Discord. This is the most fun I have had with a multiplayer shooter since Enemy Territory in about 2006, and I long onto to spread it to everyone who is even vaguely willing and/or able. With that said, achievements. They're a surprisingly reserved set considering how multiplayer games - let alone shooters - tend to be. Playing ordinarily up to the point where you're comfortable playing difficulty 7 out of 9 will handily get you about 34 of the available 38 achievements. Those are for things like beating bots and bugs, killing various hard targets, customizing yourself, living and dying in the world of Helldivers, and a ton of other simple mechanical interactions. There's only a few achievements that take proper attention to muster, and I think that one of them is actually really fun. First, the ones that I think suck and are dumb. One asks you to kill a Charger, the midweight bug spawn, with a resupply pod. This sucks because the pod itself, with its 6-second callin time, doesn't kill the Charger on its own. You have to soften it up correctly, or call in and dodge it for four minutes and call it in again. This is, in my opinion, a stupid meme thing that users should not be encouraged to try to make happen at all. The other is to, against bots, shoot both arms off a Hulk and extract while it's still there and angry at you as a Monty Python reference. As always, Monty Python has done irreversible damage to our society. Despite that, it's a reasonably easy thing to get done if you have a compliant squad helping you out, and it sucks if you don't. The one that I think is great is an achievement to complete a difficulty 5/9 mission without anyone firing a shot from their main or called-in weapons; only pistols and airstrikes allowed. This actually shakes up the game to a degree that it creates a new game. You cannot reasonably engage the enemy gun-to-gun, you can only make fights not happen by calling in strategems on them and then running away to try to make distance. It creates an entirely new dynamic in Helldivers 2 that, I think, honestly feels better to no small degree. I had a fantastic time running this one, and would do it again just for fun.

there's three brothers

oh my fucking god his dev notes with the release open with king. i kneel. i kneel eternally.

real

CATS HIDDEN IN GEORGIA (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2024) Finished: 21/3/24. Playtime: 26 minutes. Feeling emboldened by my success at the tutorial game, Lies of P, I decided to throw myself straight into the lion's den. That's Tbilisi Georgia, not Atlanta Georgia. It's neat that there can still be things to think about and analyze while playing little games like these. This is, absolutely, the most ambitious Travellin Cats game so far, but that comes with consequences. The map is a lot larger, noisier, and full of even more non-cats things to click on, which is great for interest, but does represent a relative scope creep from the previous games. I think it will be an interesting tack for him to explore, but it was definitely a little clumsy in Georgia. At its core, though, it's still clicking on cute cats to a chirpy tune for 30 minutes and feeling happy. What's not to like? A feature that I think flies a little under the radar is that he figured out multiple scrolling levels (as opposed to just selecting zoomed or not zoomed from the menu) controlled via scroll wheel. That's a good thing just on its face, but it actually functions as a difficulty selector to a small degree! These games have had a hint system that takes you to a random point from which there is an unclicked cat on screen. These two systems interact to let you, completely organically, decide how much help you want - zoom all the way out and click the hint bulb, and you're essentially taken to whichever quadrant has a cat; zoom all the way in, and it's a far more reasonable space to search. Interesting how these little interactions can come about, huh? I'm becoming strongly pilled that anyone who claims to be a "gamer" as part of their identity and doesn't have a stupid little love like clicking cats on a map or playing the Property Brothers match3 game for unreasonable amounts of time is a poser and utterly undeserving of my time.

fuck me i didn't even think about making shitty puppet puns while writing this. goddammit

fitting that this is number 151, my mew game

LIES OF P (NEOWIZ, 2023) Finished: 19/3/24. Playtime: 48 hours. "Soulslike" is such a fudgy term. At this point, it can mean anything from "takes on all the trappings of Dark Souls itself" to "has bonfires and is hard" to "Nioh kind of has the same vibes as Dark Souls, right? Soulslike." Many smarter and many dumber people than me have written screeds on whether this is or is not useful as a category of video game, but I'm not here to do that. What I'm here to say is that Lies of P calls itself "soulslike" because it's essentially Dark Souls Gaiden. The team behind it sat down, examined the entirety of Dark Souls, trimmed the fat with exceptional grace, and produced their own product very much in its vein. There's differences, certainly, but of all the heirs to the Fromsoft throne, these are the guys who most fundamentally understood the assignment. Or, at least, put together a game that's most to my visions of what I wanted out of a Dark Souls Gaiden. It feels bad to talk about another game to open up talking about this exceptional one, but the comparisons are genuinely impossible to avoid. Lies of P puts you in the shoes of the titular P, and he tells lies. The title is not, in any way, joking - though it is a really dumb title. Your romp as Anime Timothee Chalomet through Anime Central European City in pursuit of what it means to be a real boy is butt-ass hard at many points, and I think that difficulty is compounded by the game not really wanting you to play it like it's Dark Souls. You're relatively nimble, with a reasonable but not strong dodge that's really more for recovery and positioning than evading through attacks, though you can do that if you need to. P's more of a guard-focused guy, with a large portion of blocked damage being recoverable on the counterattack and a perfect parry not only blocking all damage if timed well, but conferring the stagger you would have received onto the enemy. Staggering an enemy coats their health bar in white, prompting you to hit them with a charged attack to set up a riposte state for huge damage. That's the crux of P's combat all game long: parry and counterattack, not dodge and punish. There's nits to pick about it, such as many trash enemies having attacks that are far too snappy to reliably get a read on, but where it needs to work is the boss fights - and brother, a lot of these shine. The final boss might be my single favorite fight in a soulslike game, end of story, and the game even manages to make a gank squad boss encounter fun, a task that I've never seen pulled off successfully before. Much of the credit for this working out so well goes to crisp controls and clear feedback, but the star of the show is actually in P's variety. One of the things that Dark Souls flounders on, in my opinion, is that in trying to establish such a broad range of possible ways to approach combat (swords, big swords, magic, bows, etc.), it really fails to give any meaningful mechanical depth to any particular playstyle. The difference between two guys greatswording their way through Dark Souls is a couple numbers and an R2 that thrusts instead of sweeps and really not much more, and some playstyles like archery are just desperately poorly supported to begin with. On the other end of the Fromspectrum, you get something like Sekiro which puts a lot of mechanical depth into exactly a single playstyle. You're not approaching anything with different kit, you just have to master the deep kit you've got in your hands. I generally prefer this kind of focused approach rather than the do-anything style of the core Souls games, and I'm happiest when you get something like Nioh or Monster Hunter which has a handful of deep and varied kits to master. P takes an interesting approach to all this in that individual weapons aren't deep, but they are varied. All weapons are one-handed melee weapons of some stripe, including the greatswords and spears. Any given weapon has a set of light, heavy, and charged heavy attacks that seamlessly combo into each other as well as a blade skill and a handle skill that pull from a meter that charges while you fight. Of the thirty-odd weapons to find in the game, there are very few or possibly even no repeated moves, making finding a new weapon a fun treat on its own. What brings this all together is the weapon assembly system. Every one of those thirty-odd weapons can be split into a blade and a handle, and blades and handles can be attached to one another in any combination you can dream up. The handle conveys the moveset, the stat scaling, and the handle skill; the blade conveys the length, the speed, and the damage type, as well as the blade skill. You get penalties if you're using a blade "wrong", like using a hammer head (which is mechanically a blade) for thrusting, or using the point of a spear (which is also mechanically a blade) for smashing, but the game lets you do it if you want to. Really like the Acidic Curved Greatsword's moveset, but don't need the acid damage because you're fighting primarily puppets? Rip that sucker off and put the Greatsword of Fate's blade on to make it a little slower and do a lot more damage. Or, hell, maybe put a greatsword blade on the kukri's handle, because the leaping charged heavy attack on the kukri is really good but you wish it had more oomph to it. Put the heaviest hammer head you can find onto the police baton to tighten up your swings for tight quarters while maintaining some of the damage of the huge hammer. It's an insanely fun system to interact with and never, across the game's entire runtime, loses even a bit of its luster. And we haven't even gotten into the mechanics of P's left arm, which is an upgradeable bag of tricks you can swap in and out at bonfires! Without getting too into it, the gameplay is also buoyed by the context around it. Lies of P has a solid grasp of how much plot to inject, which is to say slightly more than Dark Souls but never slowing the game down for it. Its relatively small cast of characters are all interesting, well-acted, and fun to be around, with the star of the show being your lantern, Gemini. Gemini comments on your journeys through Krat, giving a bit of personality to your otherwise-stoic avatar and giving you companionship as everything falls apart around you. I love the guy, and I'm not totally sure why. Whoever voiced him absolutely nailed it down. The rest of the cast doesn't slouch, but the game knows it's here as a mechanical showcase first and the plot is gravy - tasty gravy, but still gravy nonetheless. I won't say anything more because I do think it's best experienced fairly cold, but it's not the main draw of the game. Nothing about the achievement set will be surprising at all if you've examined a Fromsoft game's achievements before. Resolve everyone's sidequests, which are easy to follow in the game itself with no outside help. Gather all the weapons, of which only two are missable; all the boss soul weapons, all of which are missable (you can forge boss souls into either a weapon or an accessory, a nice change); and all of the gestures and records, several of which are missable of both. However, getting all music records requires a sojourn through most of NG+, so there's no need to worry about any of the missables at all. Just go in, vibes forward, cock out, clean up what you can after the final boss, and grab everything you missed on your way through NG+. Much like with Dark Souls, as well, there are three mutually exclusive achievements for the three endings, which are very clearly structured as The Bad Ending, The Neutral Ending, and The Good Ending. It's so clearly structured that, in the aftermath of the bad ending, an in-universe voiceover all but mocks you for failing to understand the themes of Lies of P. It rules incredibly hard. That said, it is a single-save game, so you will either have the play the game through thrice or do some save trickery to get multiple endings in a single clear. For myself, I wormed my way into the Good Ending on the first playthrough, since the requirements are not at all esoteric - you can handily luck into them just by engaging with the game in the way that it asks you to. On NG+, when I hit the final divergent choice, I saved and quit and turned off cloud save syncing. Boot up the Steam Deck, get the bad ending; boot up the PC, get the neutral ending. Two playthroughs. The game absolutely would have stood up to being played a third time either in NG or in NG++, but I'm pleased with how it shook out this way. In the end, Lies of P was just a comprehensive package designed for me. Everything about it works. The big stuff like the gameplay loop and the characters all land. The flourishes of level design, non-respawning minibosses and asshole traps and unlockable shortcuts, are almost all well thought out. The little touches, like the way that P's arm horrifically overrevs when opening huge rusted-shut doors or the stupid hipster glasses that you can put on your twink puppet, all glue everything together immaculately. The progression walks perfectly between always-progressing marginal-upgrade Souls and ding!-type MMORPG leveling systems, cribbing the best of both. The complaints I have, an overreliance on two-phase bosses later and the occasional completely horseshit trash mob, wash away in the sea of things I like. Lies of P might not be the game for everyone, but it absolutely was the game for me.

i feel vaguely owned but i'm not entirely sure why

colder take than mine but go off

you're going to be sickened because i think vaan rules lol

he's wrong in that it's super inflammatory for absolutely no reason, but he's not wrong in that people leap quickly and often to "x character got done dirty" in the only piece of fiction they have ever existed in, because it's such a silly thing to say - a missed opportunity compared to the other version of the character you concocted? it's a weirdly prevalent criticism for how baseless it is on the flip side that's a really silly opinion to hold, tons of competently written games have interesting protagonists, and holding the games that deliberately don't have them like every single nintendo game and just cause in the calculus that leads to "almost never" is just disingenuous e: i guess this is your unpopular game opinion and you're actually postin' correctly. damn.

yeah wesnoth thrives on chaos and adaptation far more than fire emblem ever has. it's a fantastic game and i adore it to pieces despite itself, but it's very much not fire emblem in any fundamental way and agreed on the high hit chance hexes - the quite good zachtronics strategy game möbius front '83 is hex-based with high hit rates and short times to kill if you have an appropriate weapon (being based on late cold war tech). the counterpunch and sweep is, appropriately, obscenely prioritized compared to any kind of defensive play, which generally exists to let you have a screening force die to alert you to an enemy push or to take an extra turn dying so as to provide vision afterwards. that's also a really fun form of strategy! it's not at all fire emblem.

this is actually a great point that i didn't touch on - a huge strength of the fire emblem formula is its relative predictability in addition to relatively lower mobility. the actual combat mechanics of fire emblem really take a backseat to that, and adding intrigue to it (like via hexes) dilutes that strength and goes back to the question of why the mechanical base is fire emblem instead of something else, imo

alright, gomenasai for the delay (work! work!!) but badges are working on skins again and the calendar issue should be solved direct any complaints to me thank you much love

i used to be strongly hexpilled but i've cooled on them recently. they have their place, absolutely, but there was a time when everyone would scream about how hexes were simply better (i was among them ofc) and i think that's a pretty poor way to look at it zapp's pretty much got the right of it that hexes both increase mobility (depending on the diagonal movement rules you use) and decrease any ability to set up a front, which generally leads to less defensive play and more ability to create and execute a sweep. mechanics can change this, for sure, but it's a loose generalization. i think for fire emblem style combat - e.g. generally fast times to kill, simple mathematics, positioning fairly agnostic - it's a pretty bad idea unless you've got a really solid reason to be going for hexes. by the time you've strapped enough mechanics onto the combat to make using hexes a good idea, i think you're necessarily going to move away from "fire emblem type combat", if that makes sense. battle brothers is a fantastic use of hexes that would not work with squares, for instance, but plays nothing like fire emblem outside of the very top-level "it is a tactical role playing game" sense. e: for a concrete example of that, zone of control mechanics are all-but-mandatory to have a functional hex system, whereas they're far less needed (but sometimes appreciated) in a square system

this actually made me think long past my bedtime kefka, as a character, is really two elements of guy: a representative of the empire and the genocide clown who blows up the world. ff6's core issue is, then, twofold: that the empire doesn't really exist outside of as an enabler of kefka's omnicide, and there is absolutely no real handoff between those two versions of kefka. if the guy who shows up at figaro and the guy who poisons doma had been two different, non-kefka, guys, the plot of ff6 would have almost exactly the same weight that it does. he doesn't really exist within the power structures of the empire, because the empire doesn't really exist. it's only gestahl, leo, and plot-convenient invincible goons to shuffle you to the right parts of the world and not the wrong ones. there's no real oppression to it, and as such he's just a guy who suddenly becomes a god and blows everything up. so this goes into him "winning" - winning what? i'm not disagreeing with you that it gets held up as kefka winning, because people absolutely do, but he isn't a character as of when he wins. he's just a natural disaster in the SimCity vein. the empire's gone, the clown's gone, his personality's gone, he just regresses to JRPG Nihilism Villain standards. he's no deeper than medeus now, but because you saw him before he became medeus, people hold him up as so nuanced. but the problem is that nothing about him before this led to him blowing up the world; he wanted to become the most powerful, sure, and there's a real point to be made about unintended consequences, but that's a point that needs to be followed up on and it never is. he's just the funny clown who you kick the ass of, and then he becomes impossibly powerful, and then he blows up the world, and then he stops being a character at all. what i'm saying by all this is that kefka is nothing more than a silly elemental evil, which is fine, but ff6bros tend to degrade the story of ff5 for not having a proper villain. who is exdeath, an elemental evil. what is actually the difference between exdeath and kefka? exdeath wins too, he literally collides the worlds and destroys a bunch of both. he gets three montages to a sweet electric guitar of him removing cities you've been to. kefka does an entire fucking biblical flood and most (all?) of the towns you've been to are still there, and why? what did he win? his intention was never communicated as blowing up the world at any point in the entire game before this. he accomplished something big, absolutely, and that is not the same as him achieving his goals. there's a point to be made about this all happening out of pure spite because of the blow celes deals him in the sequence where he blows up the world. the problem with that, for me, is that sabin literally has to kick the shit out him repeatedly before this, and celes is never portrayed as either narratively or mechanically particularly stronger than anyone else in the party. when kefka is fully powered up, celes deals him such a blow that he tilts into blowing the entire world up out of spite. how is the person who does that the same guy who survived having his ass kicked by sabin three times, while sabin let him walk away every time (a different issue, to be sure)? there is no contiguity between the kefka of figaro/doma and the kefka who blows up the world. there is no kefka who blows up the world. he's lesser than exdeath, a cartoon villain. i have brought myself around to a new mode of thinking during this freeform writing exercise at one in the morning: kefka actually sucks shit. he's actually a terrible villain. the only reason he's well-regarded is because a ton of people online grew up with him, because he came out in that crucial 1994-1999 period where all the GOAT games suspiciously come from, and people don't critically examine media. i have become radicalized.