Integrity

bg3 would be utterly robbed to not win tbh

real

LIKE A DRAGON GAIDEN: THE MAN WHO ERASED HIS NAME (RYU GA GOTOKU, WEDNESDAY) Finished: 11/11/23. Playtime: 35.5 hours. Gaiden, hereafter, is a weird game. In many ways, I think it's the worst modern outing RGG have put together, and possibly even worse than the Ishin! remake, but it's an extremely hot and cold game. Gaiden, for better and worse (and worse), never commits the sin of mediocrity. When it sucks, it sucks out loud. When it lands, it's great. That makes it difficult to approach in a nice, simple, summed-up format, but I think it's fair enough to say that I often enjoyed my time with Gaiden, but I do not look back on it with any particular fondness, and if the next main game didn't have the absolute meathook of being set on my native Oahu, I'd be seriously reconsidering purchasing it. To get it out of the way first and foremost, Kiryu's new Agent style. It's a slow burn style that relies on upgrades and practice to a huge degree, and making it the only usable style for the first chapter of the game is a preposterously bad decision. That first chapter generally cannot decide who it's for - if the game is for newcomers who started with the JRPG and haven't played the brawlers, then the first chapter has a very non-straightforward brawling style and ramps up the difficulty too quickly; if the game assumes the player has played the brawler games, then it's even more railroaded and slow-burning than the first chapter of Kiwami. The other huge problem with Agent is that it's designed as a massive crowd control style, with the grapple fully upgraded being able to knock out a dozen+ guys in a single use, and the game's encounter design is perpetually designed around this. Enemy pods get into the 20+ guy level by the midgame, and by the endgame you're tackling fights like the climactic Tojo Clan fight in Yakuza 5 on the regular. The game becomes a lot more palatable once Kiryu decides to just fight as the Dragon of Dojima again, but Agent never stops impacting the game. Kiryu's got a new grapple that functions basically like Batman's grapple in the Arkham games. It's essentially magic, and Kiryu high-wire swinging creeps into the plot and has the permanent presence of random items in the world being grappled instead of found on the ground. The grapple, and to a lesser extent the other gadgets, represents a swerve out of traditional Yakuza stakes to Kiryu becoming, even more than before, essentially just a superhero with super gadgets. Random minibosses in the first chapter shooting you with laser rifles is, apparently, the exact point in the scale of ridiculousness that I can no longer stomach it. The most scathing thing I can say about the plot of Gaiden is that it feels like the cool Agent Kiryu reveal moment in 7 was written first, and then this game was entirely retroactively conceived of and written to fill out the lead-up to that cool reveal. I'm not going to go too deep into spoilers since it literally came out on Wednesday, but while being written to fill out a fun moment in 7 I felt like it stepped massively on 7's toes and represented Kiryu's ascension to a true Crime Jesus. I did not like it. The half of the plot that was filler (and it really is filler) starring Akame was by far the better half. Hell, to put some credit on the game, Akame was a genuine highlight. If the playtime didn't tip you off, Gaiden is both a short game (18 hours to credits doing almost all substories) and a game that you don't have to 100% to 100%. There's still a Completion Log, but you don't get it until about a fourth of the way through the game, and fleshing it out isn't even close to required. On top of that, the game doesn't have anything like Climax Battles to pad things out, and doesn't even have NG+ or Legend difficulty in any capacity. One time through the game and then cleanup and you're done, and the cleanup isn't even particularly bad. Even the substories aren't actually required, though I did all but one of them anyway (I never found the seventh golden ball...) just to see. I'll touch on them, though. The remaining things you need to do for completion fall roughly into minigames, coliseum, and hostessing. First up, the substories are fairly anemic compared to previous entries, unsurprisingly given the length of the game, and are all offered in huge batches from Akame like the request board in Yagami Detective Agency. There isn't a single one to stumble upon in the world, which is a huge shame. The actual content of them ranges from decent to quite good, with a particular shoutout to a crossover episode where Kaito and Higashi accidentally work the same case as Kiryu while trying to expand their operations into Osaka. It's a charming little skit. The worldly substories are replaced by Stroll-n-Patrol requests, which are the Ubisoft map design philosophy [derogatory] applied to an RGG framework. It's occasionally funny but mostly just feels like the busywork it is, and falls badly into the RGG standard of multiple levels of request for one person unlocked by walking around the corner from them and having no other gating. Either timegate it or just let me take the next request while I'm standing there! Jeez. You do have to splash into minigames to get all the achievements, but nothing in the actual Completion Log is necessary or even really worth doing. The notable minigame completion rewards are e.g. completing the hardest table of mahjong rewards 2,500 skill points, when a single substory can be worth up to five digits of them. They're a nice bonus if you're doing the minigames anyway, but there's no real reason to fill out the log besides saying you filled out the log. Bafflingly, the only minigames that have associated achievements besides "play it one time" are pool and darts. Darts you just have to win a single round against anyone, which is also an early Stroll-n-Patrol. Pool you have to beat the one-shot challenge on Normal (the second difficulty from four) and holy christ. I'm decent at video game pool (ask Parrhesia how I am at real pool) and even Normal was hard as hell. I guess they were really proud of bringing back pool in the Dragon Engine for the first time. The major minigame is Pocket Circuit, largely how you left it in 1988, and it's not a ballbuster. I found the physics worked better at 30fps - I fell out of the track a lot less - but it's entirely possible that was a placebo. Getting through the ten or so plot races (and eight or so rivals to get points for parts) took me about three or four hours without a guide. Not bad. The coliseum fights are, weirdly, the best they've ever been in RGG history, with a massive asterisk. The coliseum interrupts the main plot several times to task you to rank up and such, but the plot presence of the coliseum is responsible for both of the best bits in the story, and the fights tend to be at least neat and reasonably fair. The main new attraction is putting together the Joryu Clan of fighters, which walks the weird line of being canonical and referenced in-story but being comprised of largely characters from Kiryu's past who do not have any plot presence. It's a bit off for Kiryu to be told to ready the Joryu Clan for combat when the Joryu Clan consists of Majima, Saejima, Daigo, Patriarch Gondawara in his diaper, the random gimp he fought that one time, the robot who runs the Sotenbori Combat Dungeon that Ichiban plundered, Gary, that guy whose love life was a substory in like four consecutive games that RGG thought was a lot funnier than he is whose name always escapes me Aki-something, and Fumiya Sugiura for some reason. Still, the Joryu Clan fights are chaotic but in a fun way, like the realization of what they wanted to do with the Ishin! strikeforces, and I enjoyed them all except for the optional Four Kings fights. The Four Kings represent the ultimate coliseum challenge and the precursor to Amon (who is himself both a Joryu Clan fight and a solo fight, neither was remarkable) and two of the four are Joryu Clan fights. The notable thing with these fights is that they're psychotic DPS checks. You have three minutes to take out the enemy clan in its entirety or, even if the enemy clan has one guy and you've taken no casualties, you lose. Professional difficulty adds a shitload of extra health, and you can say I could have turned the difficulty down, and you'd be right, but I have some insane toxic pride. I was only able to pass the DPS check of the third King by restructuring my team to be all gold star level 20 guys (2 tank 2 heals 6 damage) and rigging a setup where I could stay in EX Mode for over two straight minutes. It was an even worse coliseum experience than the time I grinded Tatsuo Shinada up to the #1 overall rank only to flex on 5's shitty coliseum, and that's a goddamn statement. Last up is the hostess content. Man, I didn't miss these. Gaiden pushes the envelope to being even weirder and more uncomfortable than previous games by having the hostesses be superimposed FMV rather than just being modeled to look like their actresses, and the resulting effect is... uncomfortable, to say the least. I gave it the old college try for about two sessions and then began skipping all the dialogue as soon as I was able. Maxing out a hostess, of which there are five, gives you an unreasonably horny (but no nudity ofc) short video of that hostess doing something sexy which is also entirely unskippable, and then Kiryu has sex. Big shoutout to my wife for blithely continuing to play Final Fantasy XIV while a mostly-naked woman writhed around on the room's TV last night twice. Weirdly, though, one of the five hostesses ends in a actually fairly sweet scene that isn't weird or sexual in the slightest to watch, so, uh, shoutout to Kokoro, I guess! And that's Like a Dragon Gaiden. Don't recommend this one except for true completionists, especially not at the going price point of $50. I know it's gauche and Gamerific to talk about play time per dollar and all that but good lord, I pulled out all achievements for Gaiden on the highest difficulty (without any guides even existing yet) in less time than it took me to gut through the first clear of at least four of the Yakuza games and either Judgment game for the same starting price point. Shoddy effort, 5/10 game in the precise opposite way that Halfway was. Let's see if they pull it back for the next proper entry next year, or I suppose this'll end up being Ryu Ga Gotoku's next-to-last entry in this thread.

haha hell yes kongregate

CATS HIDDEN IN BALI (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2023) Finished: 30/9/23. Playtime: 16 minutes. Steam has a thing whereby small enough indie games have to go through a validation period before they'll count for profile metrics like Games Completed. Took a month, but the new Travellin Cats outing just did. The guy's getting more complex little interactions to click on while you hunt your cats with each iteration, which has been fun to see. The next one's out in a week. Look for cats and click on them.

they've actually continued to fuck with the mega drive classics thing since then too - very recently, they removed the bundle of (non-sonic) classic games from the mega drive store page, like it just literally lists nothing, and now the only way to get any of the mega drive classics is to look them up individually, on single-game pages that make no reference to one another, nor to the mega drive classics collection that they're technically DLC for it's frankly bizarre what a good job sega do as a publisher of pc games for just about everything except for classic sega fare, where they suck the rawest of ass

GHOST TRICK: PHANTOM DETECTIVE (CAPCOM, 2010) Finished: 5/11/23. Playtime: 9.8 hours. It's time for the Shu Takumi sweep. I guess I can just call myself a fan. What's there to write about Ghost Trick? If you've played, you know. If you haven't, you ought. Anything beyond the most basic summary - your two buttons are Ghost and Trick - gets into story spoiler territory, and I don't even want to allude to how it goes in a post like this. It starts fun, warms up fast, hits a smooth cruise, and wraps up perfectly. As a game, it's on the easy side, but there's enough to keep you engaged while the story pours into you, and I'd rather a game like this err easy than hard. Amazing little package. Extremely easy recommendation. Peanuts to 100%, too. 21/30 are all but guaranteed as you play the game - 18 progression achievements and 3 for pressing the game's two buttons, Ghost and Trick, certain numbers of times. I hit the last one in the final chapter. Five are for acing individual segments of the game without resetting the puzzles, trivial with a guide or a replay of those individual sections. Two are for putting the two puzzles that can be softlocked into their softlock states. One is for completing three 5x5 sliding tile puzzles, making this game literally impossible to 100% for like two-thirds of gamerkind, but fortunately I'm built different. The last one is for getting all the others. Peanuts.

PATHWAY (ROBOTALITY, 2019) Finished: 4/11/23. Playtime: 54.8 hours. Ah, so this is where it came from. I've now played Robotality's entire gameography in the strange 3-1-2 order. Wargroove 2 was absolutely fantastic, a shining example of its genre. Halfway was weird and raw, as you can see two posts above this, but I didn't hate it. Surely, there must be some kind of step between Halfway and Wargroove 2? Well, hey, there is. Pathway is an odd game. It's a cover-based shooter in the vein of neo-XCOM, but the game plays out mostly just like FTL with a splash of the progression mechanics of Darkest Dungeon. You put together a squad of three from a roster of up to sixteen unique combinations of traits and kit options, and go out into north Africa to fight Nazis and find shit. You're dropped into a branch-and-node map with strategic (fuel, supplies) and tactical (ammo, supplies) resources, and told to get to the end. Fight Nazis and zombies, see weird shit, get random event resolutions based on the backgrounds of your chosen three guys, and so on and so on. There's five Adventures each of one to three Acts. Progression is permanent - experience your guys earn, and loot they equip, stay on them when they return to the roster to be redeployed in a subsequent Adventure. It's a very tidy little progression system that incentivizes you to find a group of guys you want to main, but the wrench in the works is that you cannot deploy a fourth member, but your party size is four. The fourth comes from a recruitment event randomly seeded into the node-and-branch map, and can be anyone on your roster, coming in with their current level and skills and kit. This means that even if you use the same three guys all game, you'll get a taste of most or all of the roster just through having a fourth guy being better than not having a fourth guy. It's a strangely fantastic decision for a game like this. The core combat loop also takes some daring risks that I think would really betray their future in Wargroove 2. The biggest change to the accepted cover shooter format is that every attack made against a target who is not in cover automatically hits. End of story. Shotgun at max range? Accuracy-debuffed disintegrator? Doesn't matter. 100% hit outside of cover. Your aim stat doesn't even matter. Inside cover, things work around a baseline of 50% hit and go up and down from that - a good sniper can get into the 80s, while a disintegrator can sink into the 30s. Out of cover? 100%. All the time. I think it's genuinely a fantastic way to do the genre, honestly. The core gameplay loop of Pathway feels amazing. It goes both ways, too - if you leave a guy out because you overextended for a kill or fucked up a positioning, the AI has 100% hit on that flanking shot. In all those 55 hours I was only almost-fucked by pure RNG one single time. Everything else was a matter of me messing up or going for variable plays and failing to compensate. Balance, it should be said, feels a little funky. Pathway has an actual relationship with armor that most games lack - shotguns are completely walled out by it while they shred unarmored targets, for instance - and while this is superb, the actual progression of the game doesn't match up to it quite perfectly. Since knives and other melee attacks ignore armor (as they should, being flak jackets and the like), if you want a proper all-rounder to fight both Nazis (often-armored, lower health) and zombies (rarely armored, high health), you gravitate towards the psychotic shotgun-and-knife kit. Sniper rifles end up falling in a weird place where they're just not very good at anything except zone control, in a game that deeply rewards decisive movement and removing pawns from the board. Pistols and assault rifles both have the capability to take multiple enemies off the board instantly, but you have to get higher gear or stack modifiers to get it to work. The shotgun and knife combo, in its singular Brazilian representative, is just the best of all worlds. That isn't to say anyone is useless. I was discovering new combinations of guys and new uses for guys all the way up through my final run of the game. I do think some are significantly better, but there's no composition that couldn't clear an adventure except for maybe taking all the non-Pereira shotgunners and a sniper into a lategame Nazi run and having no real answer to armor. Even so, Omar can flex into assault rifles and do enough of a job, so it's really on you for doing that. Still, despite any criticisms I have, the raw Vibes of the game carry it hard enough for a whole single clear without any real thought. I found this to be a fantastically underrated little strategy game, easy to recommend to anyone who likes the Cover Shooter style of putting pawns in places to kill other pawns, and also easily recommendable to anyone who likes that criminally-underrated world-at-peace 1930s killin-Nazis vibe. It's basically, at a review, FTL-In-Syria with all the great and bad that entails. Do not 100% Pathway, for a single reason. The game is five adventures, spread across eleven acts, with an act being a screen of node-and-branch map to explore. Going through it once on the default difficulty and then once on the top difficulty shows you everything the game has to offer, and you can take off with 21-odd hours played and say that hey, Pathway was fun as hell, I should recommend it to my friends. Failing to abide by that restriction opens you up to Pathway's hell. Very much in the spirit of FTL, there are about thirteen random events that can only spawn during certain adventures (or even certain acts thereof) that each count for an achievement. There is no guarantee that one spawns even if, for instance, it only can spawn in 2-3. You can claim every single node in 2-3 and not find it, repeatedly. I have read testimony of someone who combed 4-2 for a single event ten times before he found it. I wasn't quite so unlucky, but it is beyond frustrating to go in with no other reason than to comb for an event you don't get. Some of them are even random outcomes of common events, so you can happily get the event early on, not get the achievement outcome, and then reset because the event won't recur in this run. It's torturous, and it doesn't even represent the worst part. Back in Pathway 1.0, the zombie faction was a proper swarm where you had tons of enemies to fight all the time, or so I'm told. As such, the final Nazi-killing achievement was fixed at 1,000 Nazis, and the final zombie-killing achievement was fixed at 1,500 zombies. These were not adjusted as the zombie faction was completely retooled to not be terrible to fight, and while they're in a great place now, they only occur in numbers similar to the Nazis but in fewer maps. After completing every single random event, it took two days of idly grinding Adventure 5, with maps of 7-13 zombies each, to get up from the at-the-time 350 to the final 1,500. After that is something genuinely interesting. Pathway includes a Hardcore mode, which has you go from adventure to adventure without any return to the deploy screen or any ability to reselect guys. You pick three, drop, and your supplies are constant as you go from 1-1 to 5-2. It was actually a fantastic little run, where I ran the entire gamut from it's joever to we're barack at least twice, and crunched through it on my first try. It's honestly, genuinely, hard. I loved it. I went with Omar, Natalya, and Miguel, and found Dr. Chandra as my fourth. If I did it again, I'd absolutely drop Miguel for Pereira. Little spot of advice for you. Spec Natalya hard into disintegrators, too - I took her pistols, and while pistols are fantastic, having four party members completely reliant on bullets was a recipe for running completely out of ammo in the third adventure. All-in-all, I can only strongly recommend Pathway while strongly cautioning against 100%ing it. It's a fantastic game, for what it is, and what it is is a ~30ish hour tactical RPG. You can grab it off sale for $15, or I'm sure get it for far cheaper in the upcoming fall/winter sale cycles. I genuinely implore you to do so. I think Pathway has been critically slept on.

i had no idea there was even an 8-bit sonic game. fascinating writeup dude e: WAIT I'VE PLAYED THAT the neighbor boy four to my left had a game gear and i got to play it one time and i'm remembering sonic on that fucking duke now

oh shit did i never remember to do that? that's entirely on me i'll go fix that up right now e: it's up! apologies again i just totally forgot that i'd never gotten around to it

god bless one of the tank mechanic simulator devs put in one final patch to put toggles for the halloween/christmas events so the achievements would always be gettable as the team moves on to other projects. that's officially on the shelf

HALFWAY (ROBOTALITY, 2014) Finished: 27/10/23. Playtime: 11.1 hours. You know what I've been too much of here recently? Positive. Wargroove this, Great Ace Attorney that, several nostalgia trips, one of my favorite games ever. Eeeugh. Makes me wanna hurl. So, anyway, I went back in the catalogue of Wargroove 2's co-devs to find they'd made two games: 2014's Halfway, and 2019's Pathway. A year ago (to the day, that's a weird coincidence) I brought up the concept of WAR to define the wild and abiding neutrality I felt about Soul Calibur 6, and I didn't really elaborate beyond a link, as I was still figuring this whole process out. See, baseball is the land of all of the coolest and stupidest ways to measure stats, and Wins Above Replacement is the absolute best. It's a nebulous concept that seeks to define how many wins a player contributes to a team as compared to if they were to go on strike and be replaced by a "replacement player" instead. Nobody agrees on how it's calculated, it's calculated differently for multiple positions even by the same source, and even what the "replacement player" does isn't agreed upon. It's the greatest statistical measurement in the history of professional sports. Halfway is the "replacement player" against whom XCOM has a hefty WAR. The entire game takes play isometrically in a big ol' spaceship that's gone derelict. Your one crewman awakened from cryosleep becomes a party of (eventually) eight, from whom you generally deploy four per mission. The campaign isn't long, registering a mighty 27 mandatory missions with 7 optional ones, most of which take ten or so minutes to bite through. Your guys are fairly simple, being defined as health and aim (both obvious) and agility, which is a horrible mishmash of movement speed and hit avoidance. Each guy also has an active and a passive skill unique to them, which we'll get into momentarily. Progression is... well, weird. It's entirely gear-based, and you get nothing for killing enemies besides the right to loot whatever chests they were guarding. There's generally about four tiers of weapon and five of armor, and the only way to buff your guys' stats is via stimpacks. Stimpacks function as statboosters, but with two twists that I think completely thunderfuck the system when taken together. First is that any given unit can only eat five stimpacks, in total, without "suffering dramatic consequences". I did not test this to figure out what it meant. Second is that there are rare dual- or even triple-stat boosters that you can find, which means that eating five basic one-stat boosters does gimp someone's future potential. On top of that, not every stat is equal when one is "the ability to do damage" and both others are "not that", particularly as your ability to tank damage goes up significantly with better armor and your ability to hit enemies does not go up significantly with gear, moreso your ability to do damage when hitting. I ended the game with a pile of health and agility stimpacks just gathering dust because I didn't want to burn stimpack points on those stats when I might find more aiming stimpacks - or, God, multi-stat stimpacks - to fill out those capacities. To get into the balance of the game, which is weird and I think deserves talking about, I think a brief description of combat's in order. Every unit has a two-action economy, where your choices are basically move, shoot, skill, and item. You can use any combination, in any order, or double up if you like, with the only noteworthy part of this being that you can spend both action points on a single shot to boost its hit rate significantly. Accuracy is in the absolute worst place possible, with a point-blank assault rifle shot on an uncovered opponent capping out at 58% for your main character early on, and every tile of distance and anything in the way degrading that significantly. Even in the deepest lategame, my absolute marksman I had pumped every possible aim statbooster into who was using a peak sniper rifle against enemies standing three tiles away in the open was hitting the mid-80s for hit. Enemies, meanwhile, don't have any trouble hitting you. Early on, bulk is fairly even - a sniper rifle can generally one- or two-shot enemies, while the ones will go down in 2-3 assault rifle shots and the twos will go down in 4-5. You're, on the other hand, losing guys to 2-3 enemy hits. There's no permadeath, and units who go down are revived at minimal health as soon as the fighting's over. Enemy bulk massively outstrips yours as the game goes on, with some enemies taking 4+ sniper rounds to bring down, but they don't tend to occur in significant numbers so you can at least pile on. First up on the chopping block of balance is the weaponry. Everything fits fairly neatly into close-range, assault rifle, and sniper rifle. Each class has its own ambiguous 'accuracy curve' whereby e.g. sniper rifles have a sweet spot and fall off if the enemy is too close or too far, and close-range weapons have a dramatic 0% hit at five tiles away but ramp up hugely with each tile closer. It's not a bad system, theoretically, were it communicated better, but it plays very poorly with enemy bulk. When enemies take multiple hits from even the close-range weapons, and your guys are relatively fragile, you cannot pull off XCOM flanking maneuvers. A few low rolls (weapons have shockingly huge damage variance as well) on your shotgun and you've left a guy inevitably in poor or no cover and spent turns to not remove a pawn from the board. The comparatively-safe-and-boring 'just get in cover and snipe em' strategy works better and is more straightforward. One may note that this is true for most games - obviously the close-range aggressive strategy is higher risk and higher reward - but due to the high enemy bulk and large variance on your damage output in a turn, the close-range aggressive strategy is higher risk and at the very best equivalent reward. Your shotgunner can flank and, with a high roll, kill an enemy in a shot. With the same roll, your sniper would have killed an enemy in a shot and not had to reposition, so can do it again. Given that the enemy AI is very simple, either closing to attack you if you're not closing the distance or trying to make space if you get in close, you're almost never incentivized to make bold plays. The skills play into this, as well. Most are extremely forgettable, though I'll give a big shoutout to your main character, force-deployed on every map, having a skill that lets him bypass the RNG once per few turns. I think that's an absolutely fantastic skill to give to the forced unit, beyond reproach. Three are pretty middling and I won't even address them. One is insanely shit and is going to get its own paragraph. The remaining three will get some time here. The fourth guy you get, Josh, has the ability to drain an enemy's entire shield without rolling to hit. This is decent, at worst it's a free shot that always hits, provided it's the first attack you levy at an enemy, but really underwhelming considering that every enemy is health-heavy on the health-shield spectrum for the entire game, and you're never given the ability to see how many health or shield points an enemy actually has beyond a bar showing what proportion are left. If you make the mistake of benching Josh for the middle 20 chapters of the game because he's pretty bad, though, in the penultimate mission you get attacked by enemies with approximately 200 shields and about eight or ten health. There's only one map after this, so it's completely feasible that you simply whiff what would be Josh's finest hour, and I think that's awesome. The final two skills come on the final two units you get, and they're completely fucking obscene compared to everything else in the game. One is the ability to paralyze an enemy for two turns with a five-turn cooldown, no saving throw necessary, she just has to be able to see the guy. Just from a sheer action economy perspective, ignoring enemy bulk being pretty high and enemies being dangerous, this is obviously nutty - trading a single action for four of the enemy's. The other one is, simply, for a single action, Jenna dumps her magazine and attacks every single enemy in sight. I rammed every aiming stimpack into her, gave her the biggest sniper rifle I had, and had such spawns as "two guys combined to kill a single enemy in three total actions, while Jenna killed six of the seven guys she attacked with her first action and reloaded with her second". It's completely busted. Her passive is even a higher crit chance with sniper rifles, making those juicy oneshots all the more common. There's literally no reason, on aggregate, to not deploy Nia and Jenna anytime you can deploy two units. Dr. Schaffer is the holder of the final - well, fifth - skill, and a fellow so odious I'm dedicating a section of the post to him. As a unit, he's terrible. He's got poor stats, and his passive skill increases his armor's shield at a time when you don't have significantly-shielded armors yet. His active skill takes the cake, letting him spend an action to reveal all enemies on the map. Don't let that trick you into thinking it's good, because enemies spawn around you for arena fights, never hide from you, and are only rarely even out of your line of sight. In the deeply rare occasion that they are, the camera still pans to their locations when their turns begin. Dr. Schaffer's skill is absolutely, truly, worthless. The action you spend using it would be better spent, in almost all circumstances, giving a magazine of ammo from him to someone else. Compounding this is that Dr. Schaffer, as a character, is the insufferable genius scientist type, abrasive and rude, and Halfway does not have nearly the quality of writing nor time to breathe to give the archetype any payoff. He's just an asshole, all the time, to everyone, he's called on it a single time, and he's force-deployed in approximately a third of the maps after he's introduced. He would be bottom-of-the-barrel writing tier for Symphony of War. The funny thing, though, is that I didn't dislike my time with Halfway. It annoyed me periodically, I'll remember almost nothing about it in six months, and when examined critically the systems fall apart with spectacular ease, but I still managed to enjoy myself. It's pretty breezy, it's not terribly difficult, and the writing is forgettable in a kinda-bad but not super-bad way. For the, what, four bucks I paid for it, I'm still pretty satisfied. It was a Game. This is what 5/10 review scores ought to be for. It's not hard to platinum, either. One run through the campaign is guaranteed to get you all but four achievements. One is to do all seven optional missions, and you get these by just talking to your guys between missions. I got them all without thinking about it. One is to kill 500 enemies in total. I left the first run of the campaign at, to my recollection, 387. About a third of a second campaign, done in about two hours, polished that off. The remaining two are secret achievements, and the only guide to getting them on Steam is in French. Good news is my buddy Wyatt's sister speaks fluent French, and she sent me back translations for them. Networking is important! I dedicate this post to her. One of them is for getting a Portal reference (in fucking 2014? yeesh) in the map where you raid Josh's apartment. The other, which I had to get on my for-kills rerun, is for letting a certain amount of dialogue play out without clicking to fast-forward, only clicking once all the words are on the screen. That's psychotic, but also pretty funny. Sorry I read fast, geez.

shuffling this over to its real home byee

wargroove 1, while i loved it, is absolutely a game that turns into a slog. there's just a bit too much to the S-ranks and the puzzles, and way too much to arcade, and even the campaign drags on at points (the Floran maps in particular). wargroove 2 is a far, far tighter game, both just basically to play-and-complete as well as to 100%, compared to its predecessor. if you liked wargroove 1 for the most part but it ground your will to keep going down, the sequel may just do enough to keep you in the game. grab it over the xmas sale, i reckon

BATTLE BROTHERS (OVERHYPE, 2017) Finished: 23/10/23. Playtime: 656.1 hours. I don't know how to begin talking about Battle Brothers. It's in a similar boat to Dungeons of Dredmor and Monster Hunter World, where it's a deep relic of a long-gone part of my life that has persisted for untold years, and which I have attempted time and again to muster the courage to finish it out and been walled out time and again. I played Battle Brothers through my grad school years, always kinda-trying to get those deep achievement runs, never quite. I played Battle Brothers through Covid lockdowns, thinking this would be the time to really knuckle down, never was quite. It's been the central star of my strategy games thread on the Discord server I think four distinct times, and I have at least one failed Let's Play on this very site. Battle Brothers, in many ways, has been my white whale for a long time. First up: Battle Brothers is one of the single finest games ever made. It's a ballbuster, to be sure, but nothing I have ever played has captured the raw tactical depth of this little shitty mercenary game. The only thing to even come close is Harebrained Schemes' Battletech, and I say close for a reason. You're put in control of your mercenary company, in a world that sucks the rawest of ass, and you're told to make it work. You'll lose guys, you'll lose companies, but you'll keep coming back. The worlds procedurally generate in fun ways, and the sheer breadth of ways to approach squad building is unparalleled in the TRPG sphere. There's no plot to bog you down or to give context to things except for the flavor text in the world and the importance you assign to your little pawns. Make it work. How do I even address the gameplay? It's a TRPG, clearly you're all familiar with the type, but it's a TRPG built of utter mastercraft. Every enemy faction requires distinctly different approaches to handle, and the way you build out your squad is inevitably going to leave you with a hole, somewhere, that you have to patch up with some advanced tacticizing. Until the deep, deep postgame, all of these ways to build out a squad also, themselves, play differently, some to absolutely bonkers degrees. This is a game where the core systems are strong enough that you can play a midrange skirmish composition, and that's by far the hardest element for a tactical game to represent. However you want to play Battle Brothers, you can - but the particular Brothers and kit you get offered might not be conducive. Don't try to force the square peg in. A campaign of Battle Brothers generally starts you off with three-to-five guys, where you can field twelve at once. You spend a few dozen in-game days scrabbling for any work you can do, building your guys up, hiring shit guys to die in the place of your good ones, and then your Plan begins to take off in earnest, whatever it is. You go through a midgame surge, acquiring talent and kit at an accelerating rate, until you hit the crisis around two or three months into the game. The crisis represents some worldstate-altering threat, such as a feudal war or a massive Waaagh! from the edges of the map, that you can sell your talents to attempt to resolve and win. Once you do, you'll be presented with the option to retire and register a company score. If you don't, you can keep going through another crisis every eighty or so days, as the world devolves into madness, essentially forever. It wasn't always this way - time once was that things would get burnt down during the battles in these crises and never be rebuilt, so every world was doomed to eventually not have enough food for you to feed the company. This has since been changed, I think for the better, but it was an interesting design decision at the time, and I think eventually would betray Battle Brothers' singular Achilles' heel. I've outlined the flow of the game in order to help me communicate what an obscene amount of labor 100% Battle Brothers represents. There's a solid load (a hundred and one) total, but many of them are incremental steps that you'll inevitably get in a serious run trying to get any of the real ones. The big three, for length, which I only got all of today in a quick flurry, are to survive for 365 days on a Veteran (the original, punishing normal difficulty) campaign, amass 250,000 gold pieces, and accrue 8,000 renown. I want to point back to the previous paragraph, that the intended gameflow basically ends after about a hundred days - seventy or eighty to spawn the crisis, and a month to resolve it, give or take. I got these three in a row, within about two hours of each other, at the end of one final campaign which I started back in July, and have played fairly regularly since. This is an endurance test, no two ways about it. It's not even the nastiest endurance test, though. There's four total crises: the noble war, the holy war, the greenskin invasion, and the undead plague. One is selected at random for the first one, then the other three iterate after a 60-80 day pause, and this continues until you've seen all four, then one is chosen at random to be the next first one and it loops. Savior requires you to complete three crises, on the same file, on ironman. These days, there's easier difficulties to use. When I did it, the only difficulty was fuck-you. If you follow in my footsteps, I strongly recommend you don't go on Veteran. This is where the DLC becomes unignorable. Battle Brothers got the honor of being the source of one of the most pathetic review bombing campaigns I've ever seen, years ago, when the developers made it through early access and released a feature-complete, enjoyable product, and said they were moving on from it to pursue another project. Some dipshits started a downvote bomb campaign on Steam (to wild success, it peaked at 9% positive reviews falling from a previous level of 89%) to express to the developers that it was unacceptable to release a finished product and not to support it with later paid DLC, which continues to boggle my mind to this day. Sic semper gamers. Fuck the load of them. In any case, eventually three DLC packs would come out - Beasts & Exploration, Warriors of the North, and Blazing Deserts. Two of them are fantastic and beyond reproach, and Beasts & Exploration is merely good and worth your money. Each one, if nothing else, adds fantastic mechanics and terrible achievements. Beasts & Exploration came first. It adds a host of new beasties and things-in-the-dark for you to fight, and these are a mixed bag. Some are very interesting fights, with Webknechte fill out an early-midgame monster niche that was sorely needed, and I hold the controversial opinion that Alp fights are some of the most engaging in TRPG history. Hexen and the similarly-timed-but-actually-free-not-in-this-DLC Lindwurm are ass, though. The problem with Beasts & Exploration, though, is that it represented Battle Brothers' first toe-dip into post-crisis content, and Battle Brothers is not well-suited to it at all. The expansion retools the Black Monolith, the previous "endgame" location, and adds the Kraken and the Rachegeist. These fights are Battle Brothers at their worst, and each one has an achievement tied to it. I won't drag the game too hard for them, though, given as they're essentially Final Fantasy superbosses, and really I'm the one owning myself by expecting myself to do them. Warriors of the North is the runaway standout. In the original game, you start with a defensive Brother, an offensive Brother, and an archerial Brother. Warriors adds Origins, which give you significantly different starting laydowns and often campaign-altering rule changes. The peasant militia can field up to 16 men in combat, but cannot recruit from any of the "advanced" backgrounds such as witch hunters, hedge knights, or disinherited noblemen. The lone wolf start gives you a guy who starts at level 5 in midgame gear, but if he dies the campaign ends. Shit like that. It's a fantastic expansion, and it adds the worst achievement in the game. Not its superboss, the Ijirok, no. That's actually a pretty good fight. The cultist start gives you a set of cultists (wow) and some quiet new mechanics to let you get more cultists and to sacrifice guys to Davkul for infernal endarkenment. Every 21 to 50 days, give or take, you'll get that sacrifice event. Afterwards, every cultist in your party has a 50% chance to have their enlightenment level go up by one. You need to get a brother with Enlightenment Six to pop the achievement, essentially savescumming to win six consecutive cointosses over the course of, at minimum, hours of doing nothing. That's what I did, baby. Blazing Deserts adds a southern reach to the map complete with Arabesque city-states and a holy war crisis for you to choose sides on. It's also a great expansion, and it hugely fleshes out the weapon design space for the better while including a bunch of generally-sidegrade cosmetic alternatives to northern kit. It also adds the Retinue, allowing you to customize out-of-combat bonuses for your company. It rules, completely... and also adds the Lorekeeper. The Lorekeeper is a huge postgame fight with a ton of spells and magical mechanics, it sucks ass, and it bugged out and softlocked on the last 5% of the Lorekeeper's health for me. This is my one instance of cheating: after taking an hour picking that fucking fight apart, I gave Josh Groban 999 action points, had him solo the fight in a single turn, and reloaded to before I did it. You don't need a single save to do all the postgame fights, you just need to do it once for Steam. One insanely long campaign and all of the worst fights in the game later, I still think back fondly on Battle Brothers. Not even the most tedious and most annoying parts of the game all experienced in sequence were enough to tarnish its legacy. It's genuinely in my top five all-time games, and it's got a Switch release if that's more your speed with a pretty slick interface. However, the final point I'm here for has nothing to do with Battle Brothers itself. That aforehintedat "next project" was finally revealed this year, and Menace looks absolutely fully fucking sick. I swore to myself, with the Menace trailer, that I would pack up Battle Brothers by the end of the year and, by God, I've done it.

i'm generally completely indifferent to it. had fun with red when i was a tiny child, and eventually beat it as an adult, but outside of individual mons i don't have any particular or enduring love for it outside of a brief tenure with pokemon go as a nostalgia trip

wargroove eases you in better than days of ruin does, and has some decent difficulty options - i definitely give it a full-throated recommendation

porque no the dos

WARGROOVE 2 (CHUCKLEFISH, 2023) Finished: 21/10/23. Playtime: 32.8 hours. It's unfair, isn't it? The other indie SRPGs took between fifty and a hundred+ hours, and yet this one, by far the shortest, is by far the best. Wargroove 2 picks up right where Wargroove left off, gameplay-wise. There's been some decent shakeups, unit-wise - most notably, that cannon ships can no longer engage seaborne targets - but strictly for the better. The core cast of units feel like they fit better together, and the new additions help out tremendously. Sea combat, by far the most one-dimensional part of Wargoove, has been augmented with several new units. The riverboat is a cheap melee unit meant to control coasts and break down enemy houses and ports, occupying a niche that aquanauts previously had to fill until you had warships. The kraken is a long-ranged defensive sea unit who dumpsters enemy boats, but is itself eaten by the other sea creatures. The frog, finally, is a medium-cost medium-bulk medium-damage unit with the ability to pull a unit within three spaces one tile towards it, friendly or enemy, which includes dragging land units into the water and boats onto the land if you're clever. On top of this, sea and land melee units can mutually fight each other while on hybrid terrain like beaches or rivers, which makes the sea gameplay feel significantly more integrated than any other game of its ilk I've played before. It's weird to have the sea be anything besides a gimmick you reluctantly have to engage with or ignore depending on the map, so hats off to Wargroove 2 for pulling it off and making a very satisfying tactical gamescape. It's a good job they did, too, because Wargroove 2's campaign has a lot more water and a lot more island hopping than its predecessor. It's a simple structure - a short prologue campaign, three independent middle campaigns you can tackle in any order, and a short finale campaign after all of those are done - but it's the right amount of content and doesn't contain a dud map among it. It's a map set that's obviously put together by a veteran team who know better what they're doing and have the knowledge to do more daring concepts, and they stick the landing. The pirate campaign in particular has some really interesting maps, and was generally a highlight of the game. Not that there was a lowlight, mind, even including the final map, which might err a little easy but it's a thematically strong map that I enjoyed quite a lot. Honestly, that sums up Wargroove 2: it errs a little easy overall, but it's a fantastically put-together game that I thoroughly enjoyed, even if it really never walled me out. I won't do into too much detail about the story since it's deliberately pretty light, as was the case in the first, but what I'll say is that I think they actually managed to handle some fairly significant emotional punch despite the lightweight story. While I can see why the particulars of the ending might turn someone off, I actually found that it landed perfectly for me, and I was fairly surprised at the angle it took. Absolutely no complaints on this end. The new mode, replacing Arcade and Puzzle, is Conquest. While I had good things to say about those modes in Wargroove, fact is that they were honestly quite repetitive and only held up by the strength of the core gameplay. Arcade, in particular, was essentially just five consecutive skirmish maps where you're at a harsher and harsher disadvantage going in for each run. Conquest takes from both to create something distinct from just playing consecutive maps, and honestly something pretty unique in its own right. Essentially, in Conquest, you select a commander from a list of three with a permanent (for the run) buff to the army, and then you select an initial laydown of units. You then go through a Slay the Spire type roguelite branching map towards a boss fight, where each fight is a small, fixed-laydown, no-recruitment duel, and where all damage and losses you take remain. Commanders don't regenerate, and there are no structures from which to replenish, but there are rest spots in the branching map to let you heal the army. All kills grant gold, which can be used on recruitment spots in the branching map to add units to your force, or can be used by mages to chip-heal units. There's other army buffs you can get, random events, and items you can permanently recruit to units which creates a very enjoyable and replayable experience. Playing gives starshards you can spend in a global upgrade tree to give you more commanders, more conquest routes, and starting laydown buffs to let you tackle higher difficulties. New routes get longer until the final, which is short like the first and reverses all buff cards to debuffs, It's a fantastic little mode that doesn't outstay its welcome and which I finished long before I was tired of it. I'll definitely go back to run Conquest a few more times, particularly if they add more to it with patches or DLC. There's almost nothing to talk about with respect to platting Wargroove 2. Simply completing the campaign, at any difficulty, gets you over half of the achievements. There's one more for getting all S-ranks, which are largely divorced from turncount (unlike the first) and entirely based on finishing the side-objectives. Some of these were a bit difficult, but none were unenjoyable, except for two bugged ones. In the kraken introduction map, you have a side-objective to get 10 critical hits with the kraken. This is ...weirdly bugged, but in a way I haven't figured out. It used to be that critical hit kills didn't count, but now they sort of count. I got it after the baffling nine critical hits and three critical hit kills. The other asks you to knock units into two holes on a map, and there's two holes and three enemies you can feasibly knock into them. I gave up on it, waited for a patch, tried again, and gave up on it again. Local Discord weirdo Ron the Auraknight came to the rescue, though - specifically knocking the first enemy into the left hole first, and then the top of two enemies into the right hole second, fulfills the star. No other combination of units, holes, and orders appears to work. There's one for winning a multiplayer match - who else but @Parrhesia? - and one for opening the map editor. Beating Conquest on Hard in all four routes gets you two more, and you'll inevitably get enough starshards to unlock all of the global buffs while doing that. The final two are to try to clone your commander in the clone-a-unit event in Conquest and have it fail, ending your run; and then to find all birds with Mercival II's groove. The fish recur from Wargroove, but aren't necessary. Only one of the birds is unreasonably difficult to find, and my only complaint with this is that the codex doesn't hint at how/where to find any of them at all - you either need to go through exhaustive iteration (which sucks when one has a very low spawn rate) or just look up a guide. I did the latter. I found Wargroove 2 to be nothing short of exemplary for its genre, and absolutely beseech you to go pick it up at your earliest convenience. Fantastic game. It's good to be back to just unequivocally good strategy games after the complicated run of them I've had since the first Wargroove. I guess I really don't have any excuse not to go back to Engage now, eh.

Happy birthday, thread! It's actually a happy coincidence that this post is ready on the thread's one-year anniversary - I had intended to fudge things a little, deliberately rush or delay Great Ace Attorney to post today since it was going to land within a day or two of today, but it ended up landing precisely today. Thanks to all of you who read and post nonsense alongside me, and here's to more of it. Without further ado... THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY CHRONICLES (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 20/10/23. Playtime: 51.7 hours. There's three sets of Aces Attorney in total. I've already done the Phoenix saga, and the Apollo saga is coming in January, but there's a third! The Great Ace Attorney is the surprise (to me, at least) localization and rerelease of the Great Ace Attorney duology, focusing on the birth of the Japanese law system as an ancestor of Nick travels to Imperial London to practice law at the turn of the century. I genuinely had no idea these games existed until the localization was announced, and I had absolutely no expectations going into them. I won't waste words up here: let's get into the games. I've started writing this as of finishing the third case of the first game, so those three will be retrospectives with additional context; the rest will be live. THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY: ADVENTURES (2015) -1.1: The Adventure of the Great Departure Tutorial cases aren't a high bar to clear, to be fair, but holy hell does Adventures come out swinging. Much like all the way back in 1.2, the real original case, the cast cement themselves instantly and winsomely. Ryunosuke is a great protagonist, Kazuma is a preposterously hot second, and it's goofy enough in a fun way to see a proto-Payne in early Imperial Japan. It's not perfect. The debate goes on about a round too long, a common issue with Ace Attorney. The witnesses go way too hard in the paint (you couldn't waterboard Kyurio Korekuta, the curio collector, out of me), but this is fortunately a vice that seems to be held mostly by this case. Susato takes a long time to be properly integrated and she really isn't in this case, and I think that's an absolute shame. It probably was to facilitate the bait and switch of Kazuma, but Susato is great enough that I think extra time for her early would have been absolutely warranted. Still, despite concrete gripes, -1.1 is a fantastic tutorial case and even a good case in its own right. -1.2: The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band Oh. Oh, we're beginning to cook. -1.2 is a purely investigation-based case that exists entirely to introduce us to Herlock Sholmes and the Dance of Deduction. There's no courtrooming in solving the death of Kazuma, we're just solving. Walk, look, talk, and Deduce. This is an odd angle for Ace Attorney to take, and it could very easily torpedo the pace of the game. However, Adventures has an ace up its sleeve: I'm nowhere close to exaggerating when I say Herlock Sholmes might be one of my favorite fictional characters ever invented. I might get into him more deeply after the games, but for now suffice it to say that he slots in perfectly, filling a role in the cast that it wasn't even clear was empty, like a kind of party Gumshoe. The Dance of Deduction, his mechanic for investigation phases, is by a far margin the most fun I've had with an Ace Attorney game each time it's come up so far. If -1.1 showed instant promise, -1.2 sprints off the fucking line. What about the case itself? It's a little silly that the game opens with Ryu being accused falsely of murder in two consecutive cases, but that's not even top five ridiculous Ace Attorney case framings and I'm missing a third of the games for even more candidates. I won't hold that against it too harshly. It's fun, though, once you get past the premise. It's got good emotional beats, good characters, and it's shockingly... bleak, honestly. It's a good look for Ace Attorney to wear. -1.3: The Adventure of the Runaway Room This is almost the best Ace Attorney has ever been, and I'm really starting to think that Great Ace Attorney is going to run the fuck away with the favorite title Apollo currently holds. This is another almost-purely court case, like the first, but it's not a tutorial. It's a proper case. Shifting to England, Ryu a fish out of water, is obscenely good for the game. Susato-as-cultural-guide brings everything together perfectly, and the jury bullshit is fun as hell to interact with. Genuinely, the only thing keeping this from being the single finest case I've played for this thread is that 3.5 had three entire games of characterization and stakes building up to it. -1.3 nearly pulls the same level of quality off with about six hours of setup. McGilded is such a little fuckhead, he's easily my favorite client I've gotten so far. The game's hugely on the up-and-up, and this case didn't even have Herlock Sholmes in it. -1.4: The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro Sholmes is back!!!! This was a weird case, but I think exclusively in a good way. Iris is a good addition to the cast, meaning Ace Attorney is batting disgustingly high with child characters by my estimate so far. The core of the case being that trying to prove non-intention and wild coincidence is actually pretty hard is a good one, and unique for my experience with Ace Attorney so far. Nobody was really at fault. It was just a big misunderstanding. I thought that was a fun tack on the usual formula, and I appreciated the small continuity of jurors with Bruce coming back from the witness stand to be on the jury. It lends a little minor continuity to the world which, while the Phoenix games didn't suffer for lacking, is appreciated for being there. There deserved to be some daylight between 3.5 and 2.4 on the rankings list, and Adventures is filling that space up. Also, if anyone knows what the hell was up with the author posing and doing alliterations, I'd appreciate learning. I did a cursory look around but couldn't find anything. -1.5: The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story I finished -1.5 two or three days ago as of this writing, and I haven't properly figured out what to write about it. Not in a bad way, mind, but sort of in the same way where the only thing I thought coming out of 3.5 was 'yep, that lived up to expectations'. Almost nothing misses about this entire case, from the recurring characters to the new witnesses to even the main thrust of the plot creating a good and cool mystery to pick apart. I'm really interested to play Apollo again, because as things stand, I may have been wrong for years when I said that was the best game in the franchise. One thing I do want to hold up about -1.5 is the liminal bit right after the case and right before the ending. The judge has delivered his verdict and left, the police have taken the witnesses away with the guy you implicated. The witness is exonerated and waiting for you with your co-counsel in the antechambers. Nobody's left in the big old courtroom except for Ryu and van Zieks. It's a prime setup for any number of goofy, dramatic showdowns, for van Zieks to point out your shady bullshit from the case makeing you the same as him, or for Ryu to say that the Reaper of the Bailey has nothing before good honest lawyering. They don't go with that. They let it be a quiet moment between two professionals with similar convictions who only happen to stand opposite one another, and this is a much stronger scene than I expected them to make. It puts the right amount of weight onto the end of the game, and I think it's quietly one of the single best scenes put together in all these games I've played so far. THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY 2: RESOLVE (2017) 0.1: The Adventure of the Blossoming Attorney Just as -1.5 finally elbowed 3.5 out as the best case I've seen, 0.1 elbows 3.1 out as the best tutorial case. As you, obviously, need an excuse to learn the basic mechanics again, you take charge of Ryu's cousin, Ryutaro, taking the stand in Japan in his first-ever trial. It's Susato in disguise, of course, but she's only ever advised you, not done the lawyering herself. It's a good framework, and the case is solid behind it. It's, as ever, a little held back by being a tutorial case, but not to a sincere degree. The biggest knock against it is how long it took me to realize why the journalist was named Raiten Menimemo, and when I did I was equally furious with the game as with myself. 0.2: The Memoirs of the Clouded Kokoro Well, if this is Great Ace Attorney's flop era, I can't be displeased. The case never really comes together for reasons that are kind of nebulous; it's just not the sum of its parts. Part of the blame lies in the structure of the games, to be sure. Great Ace Attorney was absolutely and clearly conceived as an eight-ish case project and was split into two games. This leads to the problem that, unlike the Nick games, Resolve assumes complete knowledge of Adventures, which means that 0.2 being a weirdly paced sort-of jury tutorial case is way out of place here. The first tutorial case was excusable both for legacy's sake and for having a pretty unique framing, but this just sticks out. On top of that, going from the rookie case in London to a much more advanced case in London (which I had no end of praise for) back to moments after -1.4 was a strange pacing decision that I don't think panned out for anything. And part of it, certainly, is that Soseki Natsume is just not quite a good enough character to star in three cases from four across two games. Two from three was fine. Three from four was too many. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy 0.2! Despite poor pacing, the core of the case wasn't bad, just a little repetitive. It's the worst Great Ace Attorney has been since the jump, but it's still in the upper half of Ace Attorney overall. And, hey, Resolve has a lot of room to work towards the better now, right? 0.3: The Return of the Great Departed Soul The game rallied instantly. The weird step back into the past was just a blip. 0.3 moves the timeline forward past -1.5 and massively benefits from it. It's a very solid case on its own, without even an 'ah hell it's him' witness unlike other solid cases, and the buildup and resolution are all very satisfying. It even dovetails into what's gonna be the crux of the rest of the game, I'm assuming, nicely, with a great animated sequence featuring van Zieks. It lacked the je ne sais quoi of the truly excellent cases - so far only 3.5 and -1.5 - but certainly sits atop the pile of the rest of the cases I've played so far across these five games. It's in the same boat as those top two, though, where I really just don't have much to say about it because everything just clicked together. Most importantly, though, Gina is a cop now and she has a dog. If anything happens to her I am going to fly to Japan and I am going to find Shu Takumi. 0.4: Twisted Karma and His Last Bow Oh, baby. Things are heating up. This is Ace Attorney firing on all cylinders, and it's really only a first half of a two-parter that goes straight into 0.5. Nobody's having an off day, the mystery presented is both juicy and peels apart delightfully, and even the callbacks to 1.5 like taking on van Zieks as a client for a murder-by-pistol land completely on their feet. If there's any concrete thing to complain about at all about 0.4, it's that the investigation phase is notably linear compared to the previous cases, but that's only even arguably a downside. Two things that the case really brings into light are to follow, though. For all the praise I did generally have for the old trilogy, characters and their relationships were pretty binary: the way they treat each other during the case where they meet, and the way they treat each other in each interaction thereafter. Even Nick and Maya, and Nick and Pearl, fall prey to this - while I adore both those girls, the Nick/Maya dynamic is completely cemented in 1.3 and doesn't really move along, and the Nick/Pearl dynamic is completely cemented in 2.3 and doesn't really move along. Nick's relationship with Gumshoe might get far more cooperative as a case heats up, but the next case will act as a reset back to that baseline, pal. The one relationship that absolutely doesn't fall into this is Nick and Edgeworth, and I think there's a really good reason their interactions are so strongly remembered by the fandom. Great Ace Attorney's characters, in contrast, do feel more dynamic, making the games feel more like a comprehensive experience rather than a series of (enjoyable!) vignettes. There's much more continuity in the world, and even little things like juror choices and recurring locations create a good flow to the world that really starts to pay off in 0.4, primarily as the climax of Lestrade's character arc but in other, smaller ways too. Plus, you know, the balls to kill off a principal cast member. The second and sillier thing is that the original trilogy's witnesses have so many dopes, liars, and people secretly tied to the crime. Great Ace Attorney has several people who are just fucked up little guys trying to live their lives, and they're complete weirdos, but they're not malicious or trying to hide anything. The wax carver in 0.3 was legitimately the most helpful witness I've run across in five games of this, just some weirdo French lady trying to survive in London and trying to make your job easier to do. I love that. The apprentice coroner in this episode might turn on me in 0.5, and if so I'll point back to this and laugh at myself, but she's following in the same footsteps so far. Just a fucked up little weirdo, but that doesn't make you a bad person. 0.5: The Resolve of Ryunosuke Naruhodo The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles might be in my top ten favorite games ever made, let alone being the best Ace Attorney has been. ESCAPADES A set of eight mini-episodes, each one not particularly long, that focus on two or three characters apiece. There's no gameplay to them, and nothing particularly memorable. They're fine bonus content, particularly if you're just hungry for more of whichever character/s they feature. You wouldn't be doing yourself a particular disservice just reading a transcript of them. BONUS: THE ANIME It doesn't exist, and for this I curse God. BONUS: ACE ATTORNEY (2012) To cope with that, something I didn't finish in time for the Phoenix Wright post. Between then and now, I watched Takashi Miike's live-action Ace Attorney film. I think it was more of a straightforwardly good film than his take on Yakuza, but man, I can't shake this feeling that Takashi Miike is a genius filmmaker that I just don't quite jive with. Fun movie, though, and made the bizarre move of making Gumshoe into a tremendously hot twink. You won't see me complaining. BACK TO THE GAME: THE ACHIEVEMENTS The Great Ace Attorney follows in the footsteps of the Phoenix Wright Trilogy for achievements. Do all ten cases and all eight escapades, find a few 'hidden' dialogues, and get all of some themes of conversations, such as both conversations about ladders and all eight conversations about shovels. There's two major changes from the first, though: one, that there's nothing as dumb as getting the bad ending in Justice for All; and two, that the Accolades screen in the main menu gives you checklists of hints such as "Discussed the stepladder in Tuspell's wax museum with Susato in Resolve case 3". It's enough to go by without any guide, and even the individual scenes have hints like "for having investigated the fireplace whilst with Susato in Adventures case 5". It's a very good iteration on the system in the Phoenix Wright Trilogy, and I don't even have anything to nitpick about it. Now at the end! I really don't have anything to add onto the "summary" of 0.5. This was an absolutely fantastic package, two spectacular games that almost strictly just got better as they went. There's absolutely no knowledge of the older six games necessary, even. They're just straightforwardly recommendable to anyone. Superb on every level, no notes. 25 to life for Gina Lestrade, simple as.

yep! played a few sessions on the steam deck without any issues whatsoever. the only reason i didn't play it there more is that i started going hard in the paint on great ace attorney, which is probably gonna be the next post here in a few days yes, sick score is in fact one of the speedrun goals

this guy is completely correct. 4's the first real roadblock (of sorts) in por, and you'll know by then if hard will work for you. for rd, just take it on easy. normal's a real challenge and the game stands up to many replays, so don't feel bad about tackling it with a low difficulty early on e: for rd, think of it this way: if you don't enjoy the game, you'll appreciate getting through it quicker. if you do enjoy the game, you'll enjoy replaying it with some sincere engagement and maybe some units you didn't get to use earlier

god have mercy 12-13 oct: turned the computer off out of habit rather than starting the macro 13-14 oct: started the macro as it should be, but somewhere around 1 in the morning the cat (hidden in ohio) walked over the keyboard and so i spent the next seven hours cycling graphics options at level 88 14-15 oct: got a full session in to end up at level 97, and learn that individual levels this high take twenty thousand experience apiece. for reference, doing the entire platinum scores challenge set, including the meta-achievements for doing X platinums and the individual rewards for each stage, would reward something in the realm of 10,000 experience. each of these macro runs, if they go perfectly, rewards 300. 97-98 on its own is an unreasonable amount of experience.

fully sick, the spammer overnight had the traits that would have gotten through the loophole and it didn't

TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER 1 + 2 (VICARIOUS VISIONS, 2020) Finished: Ought to be in the early hours of 14/10/23. Playtime: Let's guesstimate 62 hours. Finished: 3 in the morning, 16/10/23. Playtime: 72.3 hours, but with 10 of those being wasted thanks to a cat. I'm doing the same thing I did with Tank Mechanic Simulator and Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them! where I'm not done as of the writeup, but I'm completely out of gameplay and the entirety left is letting a macro run for untold hours. Well, it's told hours. It's about twenty more of them. We'll get to that, though. If it wasn't clear, these are total remakes of Neversoft's seminal Playstation games from 1999 and 2000, games I have an absolutely enduring love for. I got the first off the classic Pizza Hut demo disc (the one with Metal Gear Solid, which I hated and will get to revisit later this year as well), and I grinded the shit out of Warehouse for hours and hours. I got the full game eventually, and it was everything I could have hoped for. The next year came about and Pro Skater 2 was even more of everything I could have hoped for. Was it the perfect game? No. Pro Skater 3 would come out shortly thereafter and would be, though (my God, those PS2 graphics!!). Weirdly, despite my absolute devotion to those three games, I'd not buy a skating game of any flavor after that until, of all things, Downhill Jam for the Wii, a game I think is pretty unfairly maligned but that's another story for another day. It's not like I burned out on the concept or picked up a dud game and swore it off, I just played three increasingly fantastic games and then stopped for absolutely no reason. First things first: I think these are just about as perfect as remakes get, fundamentally. Outside of issues I had with the base games (which I'll get to), I didn't have a single complaint about the Vicarious Visions implementations of Tony Hawk's Pro Skaters 1 and 2. The customization options are neat, the game's got actual girls now, and the roster made the absolutely fantastic decision to include the original cast at their current ages as of 2020, defaulting you to playing a past-it Hawk in his 50s. I think that's probably the single best decision a remake has ever made. The soundtrack's been expanded and some of the new songs are shit, but honestly some of the old songs were shit too, and I think they picked modern songs that fit the vibe, aesthetically. While I'm deeply embarrassed on behalf of the state of Ohio that Machine Gun Kelly is representing us on a national stage, he was correct to include on the soundtrack of a modernized Pro Skater. Hell, there's even a song (Billy Talent - Afraid of Heights) that I'd put right up with When Worlds Collide and Guerilla Radio on the Pro Skater Sound List, and I'm going to go check those bastards out on my own time. The game looks great overall, generally keeping the feeling of the original levels completely intact. As a remake of a pair of pre-9/11 games, I'd peg 1+2 as basically flawless in any reasonable regard. What's interesting, then, is that playing the remake did expose some of the cracks in the originals. Something kind of analogous to the Spyro games ended up happening, where equalizing the controls and the graphics really made the (comparatively anemic in my memory) original game stand out for the better. While some maps (Burnside especially) are uninteresting, there isn't a true dud in 1's map lineup. Comparatively, 2 starts off very strong but starts to fall apart really fast. Hangar, School II, and Marseille body Warehouse, School, and Skate Park, and while I prefer Downtown to New York it's not by much. Skatestreet and The Bullring are bad maps, even worse than the boring as hell Burnside and basic Roswell. Venice is easily my least-favorite goal-based map in the collection. The bonus maps are then Chopper Drop, which is just a goofy concept and not worth hating or stanning; and Skate Heaven, a wildly trash map. On the other hand, that hell march of bad maps brackets Philadelphia, probably the best map in the collection. Swings and roundabouts overall, but I think I gently prefer 1's set to its sequel. As for actually playing the game, it's a classic for a reason. Nothing to complain about there. I don't know if it's just ancient muscle memory, but I could not imagine playing the game with an analog stick, which is probably why I had a bit of fun with the Switch version three years ago and then slid off it, given Nintendo's propensity for producing the biggest piece of ass d-pads in existence. Playing through it here with a Dualshock, as God intended, was satisfying to figure out all over again. Honestly, if you take anything away from this, it's that not 100%ing 1+2 is a simple 10/10 game and easy to recommend to anyone for the price point ($20 on Steam as of this post). So what about yes 100%ing 1+2? Don't. The game has an in-game challenge system which isn't required in its entirety for achievements, which is good because it includes insane things like "have a skatepark you made get 5,000 upvotes" and "manual for a total of 10 hours". The best place to start is by beating the Solo Skate Tour with three pro- and one create-a-skaters. Four loops through the game, and the game honestly stands up to it. I went through as Aoki Nishimura, Tony Hawk, some Australian guy, and then of course my OC Bavid Smythe. Bave for short. Each pro skater also has a series of challenges that either replicate their iconic tricks or play to their IRL strengths in some way, and you gotta get those done too. I think this is all very cool, and having it be a pick-your-favorite-three out of the roster of 25-odd guys is a good compromise. This is a theme for the parts of the game's completion I'll praise, but it shows proof of mastery rather than absolute completionism. If I can do all the challenges for three pro skaters, and they were all designed to be the same rough difficulty, I've shown that I could do the remaining 22 without terribly much issue, and I think that's a great design space for a Steam achievement to occupy. Similarly, each stage has a platinum score (for going way beyond the sick score) and, for the goal stages, a speedrun time (time stops when you accomplish all goals rather than at 2:00). The Legend challenge collection (which is tied to an achievement) requires nailing any two of each of those, pick your favorite stages to grind it out on. Again, I think this is an awesome way to do it. That's where the praise starts to end and 1+2 falls into proper completionism. The most tedious of these is the gap collections - for the uninitiated, jumping between certain ramps of houses, or grinding certain (combinations of) rails, or doing a wheelie across a particular thing, etc. gives bonus points and a named Gap. You're tasked with finding all of these - about a thousand in all - with nothing but (usually jokey and not helpful) names to go off or a guide on Youtube. Some of these are a bit janky with how they register, but the worst are the lip gaps. Lip tricks are done by skating completely perpendicular to a ledge and hitting the grind button. Being off by a handful of degrees causes you to grind instead, which is both not what you wanted to do and also takes you well out of the way of your run for a redo. Still, you can get used to this... except that a handful of the lip gaps require you to, for instance, jump past something grindable and up to something else to lip on that. I will never forgive Burnside or Chopper Drop. Skate Heaven is the absolute pits for this, with dozens of gaps with often janky detection and unhelpful names in a map with bad geometry and eye-searing neon. I'm not a fan of Skate Heaven, if you missed that. The next big thing is the unhelpfully-named "Hard Get-Theres". The name means nothing, but in essence they're concocted as really hard combinations of gaps you have to nail all of in a single combo, one per map. I actually really enjoyed doing these, and I think if they'd been required instead of all gaps rather than in addition to, I'd have many nicer things to say about 1+2's achievement set. Some individual ones (Marseilles, School II, and would you believe it, Skate Heaven) were nightmares, but that was largely due to poor gap placement or being Skate Heaven rather than a flaw in the concept. Getting the Hard Get-Theres was probably the most fun I've had with Pro Skater 1 or 2 in my entire life. Following this is a handful of things. Playing multiplayer is dull but over quickly and can be done split-screen. The entire set of multiplayer achievements took maybe an hour. There's an alien plushie tucked into each level; find them all. Again, took under an hour with a guide, and honestly most of them aren't fiendishly hidden and are reasonable to expect the player to scour for. Get 10,000,000 points in a level, which I'm capable of doing but I find top-end Pro Skating to be incredibly tedious and fortunately there's a workaround using custom parks to get the score trivially. Get a single combo of a million points, which I did a few times outside of the above. This brings up the other true problem, though: some people find these achievements don't unlock when they ought to and the only recourse, for some, is to back up your save data, completely delete and scrub and reinstall the game again, and try again from a fresh profile. 1,000,000 combo is the only one that did this for me, which pegs me as one of the lucky ones, and I'm absolutely meticulously backing up my save data in case the last achievement doesn't unlock as it should. Don't expect fixes to this, either - in 2021 Vicarious Visions were folded into Blizzard and work stopped on 1+2 and an in-progress 3+4 remake was also canceled, if you needed to add on to Blizzard's list of sins. Caveat emptor. Last up is to get to level 100 on your profile. As of finishing every single other achievement in the game, I was level 67. I set up a macro to, with all assist mode cheats on, do a combo of ten 900s into manuals (which hits the "high score" and "max combo" experience caps if it all goes well) on Philadelphia and then automatically reset the map. Programming these into the Logitech Gaming Software is, incidentally, nightmarish and owns. I went to bed around 2330, and came back to my computer at 0930 (when I discovered the spam, topically) to find Aoki Nishimura still grinding away at level 86. Ten hours of running a stage for basically-maximum experience in under a minute per run, and the experience requirements to level up get significantly larger in the 80s and again in the 90s. My rough estimate is that it will take two more sessions and, as always, I'll edit the post when I have it actually done, but for now I'm done actually playing 1+2. It was a good run, and I'm glad I was able to have it. Maybe Microsoft can resurrect that 3+4 project, eh? That'd be a nice header. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 (Blizzard Albany, 2025). A man can dream.