ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)

[Original Alear]

18 hours ago, Integrity said:

i've considered the horror of working on a ys 100% - probably origins if i had to pick - but i'm constantly held back by the fact that ys games are hard and i'm not good at them at all

It would probably take me weeks if not more to 100% origins, IMO if you use a guide for the more esoteric achievements Ys I is a lot easier. There's only one hard boss: final boss on nightmare. In Ys origin u can't even nab a couple levels for the nightmare boss rush, and you have to beat it with every character (I think there's 6 different sets...) in order to 100% it. At least the origins boss rush leaves you at the last boss you died against if and when you die...

I personally think Napishtim is also easier than origins to 100% since there's no nightmare boss rush achievement. You can beat the boss rush on any difficulty for the achievement. If you consider 100% as more than achievements though, I guess you would have to beat the boss rush on the hardest difficulty...and maybe it is kinda fraudulent to say I 100%'d Ys VI now that I'm thinking that 😞

[Integrity]

@AlexArtsHere is a bitch ass mother fucker who took my disdain for sonic generations and turned it into a merry christmas and bought me sonic forces and lost world, both of which i am now honorbound to 100%.

 

punk.

[Integrity]

THE BIBLE (VARIOUS, XXXX)

Finished: 12/26/22. Playtime: 15 minutes.

I'm a genuine-ass dyed-in-the-wool Jesus boy. True believer and all. When some doofus announced that their Bible game on Steam was adding achievements, I saw stars. What a perfect stupid vanity project.

As a digital interpretation of the Bible goes, this sucks ass. Poor text presentation, slow narration, skipping is far too fast for real reading. The translations included are absolutely psychotic - I'm an NIV purist, myself, The NIV is literally not even included yet. The default is the WEB, a fork off the American Standard, which is an okay translation but, like, the NIV is right there. I'm far from a KJV apologist and, in fact, think it's a piece of shit that deserves to be buried as a historical artifact, but the historical impact of the KJV is undeniable and the Bible Game literally patched the KJV in. It didn't launch with what is, without question, the single most influential Biblical translation of all time. Absolute fucking scenes. If you're in need of the Bible, just grab one of the free apps on your phone. This one's pretty bad.

The achievements were not nearly what I hoped. You have one per book of each testament, and I hoped it would be something like Major\Minor, flicking through a visual novel. Nah. The skip function is unbelievably great and flicks through pages many per second. The Steam achievement popup for reading a book doesn't have time to go away before two more come up. The only other achievements are for beating the trivia mode, which is 100 questions in fixed order with fixed answers, and clicking the button to see the credits in the rudimentary menu. That's all.

God bless Jesus, but this ain't the finest implementation of His teachings I've ever seen.

[lenticular]

On 12/26/2022 at 5:54 AM, Integrity said:

THE BIBLE (VARIOUS, XXXX)

Oh, wow. It is wild to me that that actually exists. I looked it up on Steam and... yeah, the reviews are pretty much exactly what I would have expected. What I am genuinely curious about, though, is the motivations of the developer. Was this a cynical cheap cash grab, exploiting the fact that of course a bunch of people are going to buy this either because it's the Bible or just as a cheap gag? Or was it a genuinely well-intentioned but completely inept attempt to produce a good digital Bible? It kinda looks like the latter, but who even knows with something like this.

I'd assume that they chose WEB over NIV because the former is public domain while the latter is still under copyright. Not including KJV at launch is a completely baffling decision, though. I'm an atheist* and even I know the significance of the KJV.

*At least, that's the best first approximation descriptor of my religious position, and nobody needs to read the essay that it would take to give the full version.

[Original Alear]

Reg ebooks, which I guess a steam-book is. The boss who I stopped working for today told me her favorite book was "The Notebook." At first I thought she was trying to tell me that her favorite books are Naughty Books. Later I concluded that she probably meant she doesn't like e-books. Just because I remember you don't like puns Integrity. There's another meaning I think was being indicated, that one isn't a pun, but I'm going to pretend like no one knows what it is but me, including her, because like Severian in the book of the new sun said, there are three meanings to every sign, and one of them relates to the ineffable divine.

Edited December 29, 2022 by Original Johan Liebert

[Integrity]

MONSTER HUNTER WORLD (CAPCOM, 2018)

Finished: 4/1/23. Playtime: 806.7 hours.

I would like to note that this is longer than the sum playtime of the entire Kiryu saga of Yakuzas 0 through 6.

Monster Hunter's a special franchise to me in several ways. It's one of my favorites out there, but it's very difficult to actually recommend that people play it, because it's esoteric in all the worst ways and wildly disrespects your time. I met my wife in Tri, must have been thirteen years ago now, and went on to buy a Wii U exclusively to play 3U on it. I genuinely don't think I bought a second game for it until she moved in with me. Still got my money's worth out of the entire Wii U on the back of that game, though. I've put a hundred hours in a game here, three hundred there, but my time's dwindled as I've gotten older and found other interests. I'll still pick up the games and play through them, but none as exhaustively as I did 3U. Part of it was that I just didn't like anything after 3U as much as I liked 3U, honestly.

Until World.

World, and later World: Iceborne, was the first time I found the joy of the franchise hit like it did in the old days. I played the life out of it before the expansion, and even had a half-hearted crack at 100%ing it, but that never came even close to fruition. Iceborne put that oomph into the game, like 3U did to Tri, and catapulted it to the top of my list. Easily 500, maybe a whole 600 of those Steam hours were post-Iceborne specifically. I farmed one of the post-endgame monsters enough to make every one of the 14 weapons its parts could be cobbled into, and then made a whole suit of armor out of him for kicks. I've played through the whole main campaign, despite its pacing in multiplayer being ass, with at least three different people I can think of. It's still an obtuse, confusing, opaque game, but nowhere near as bad as before. It's actually possible to get people into it with a little handholding and a little babysitting. It's good enough that I kept on playing it with new friends coming in after the release of Rise, the next game in the series, which I'm just now starting to get to with my mate Sirius. I love Monster Hunter World, almost more than I can express in a forum post.

I have gone through multiple fits and starts in the platinum for World-post-Iceborne. I'd get motivated for a few dozen hours, get a crown or two, get some Felyne treasure, and sputter out. The catalyst to the final surge to glory was noted Serenes Forest poster @Darros and I making a pact to grind the fuck out of this game together. We'd get it done. We'd lean on each other, grind things out together, motivate each other in the droughts. This was in the summer of '22. He finished last night. I finished tonight.

Platinum World is something men were not meant to do. Among Completionist Games, a very loose umbrella of Yakuzas and Dark Soulses and the like, the numbers on Steam are actually pretty consistent. Any given Dark Souls's Dark Soul achievement, for getting all other achievements, sits around 4-5%. All of the Yakuzas are in a pretty tight range from about 2-3%. Nioh, which I found to be hair-rippingly hard, sits at 2.1%. Conqueror of the Hinterlands sits at a mighty 0.6%. The amount of work to get it done is absolutely fucking insane:

• Get a gold large and a gold small crown for every monster released before the Iceborne post-launch content. There are 56 such monsters, for a total of 112 crowns. 19 of those crowns come guaranteed from completing event quests you can find via guides. A further ~35 can be found across nine mega-hunt event quests, which each have five monsters with a 12% chance to spawn either mega or mini monsters. These are your best odds possible. The remaining 63 crowns have to come the hard way. In the top rank, any quest has a 2% chance to spawn a mini and a 1% chance to spawn a mega monster. You can increase those odds with investigations, which drop randomly while hunting monsters. Investigations come in three tiers - a low-quality investigation has the same chance as a regular quest, a medium-quality investigation has a 6% mini and a 3% mega chance, and the rare high-quality investigation has a 6% chance for both. That's it. That's what you get. You can do your own math to figure out how long this takes.
• Gather a series (8 or so) of 'rare endemic life' - non-combat monsters that have extremely rare and specific spawn conditions. The coelacanth only spawns in a single pool in one of the game's five maps, in the back of a camp. The jellyfish can only spawn at night on top of a mountain that requires significant parkour to climb in one zone - and given how long it takes to check, you're lucky to be able to check it a handful of times per night. The spawn rates on these are mind-numbingly low, and many of them require half a minute or more of trekking from the load-in to see if they spawned.
• Get all treasure from the Felynes. This requires leveling up a reputation bar with five different tribes of cats and then trading random items with them until they give you a random riddle-scavenger hunt, ten times each. This would be hell without a guide, but "only" takes a few days with one.
• There are also approximately 80 other achievements, but I genuinely see no way to avoid getting all of them in pursuit of the crowns one, unless you were actively trying to avoid some of them.

Would I do it again? Yeah, probably. I'm enjoying Rise so far in a different way to World and, if anyone can say anything about me, it's that I'm a massive dumbass who falls for a challenge every time - and Rise: Sunbreak's get-everything achievement is presently sitting at 0.2%. I'm really stupid and bullheaded.

Edited January 5, 2023 by Integrity

[Darros]

Hi, it's me, noted Serenes Forest poster Darros. I'll latch on for a couple of comments on Monster Hunter world. This isn't my thread, but it was Integ and mine's shared experience. For me, World was my first Monster Hunter and I enjoyed it so much after a very strange journey. Monster Hunter is a very opaque game, and doesn't quite tell you how to play it. I first tried to play it about 4 years ago, and didn't make it very far, getting insanely frustrated at not knowing how to do anything and not really finding the resources to learn. Here's the first achievement I got:

The end of 2018. I poked at it a bit over the next year or so in very tiny intervals and kept getting annoyed. I was playing with some IRL friends at the time and remember completely giving up when I was fighting Jyuratodus with them in the Wildspire waste because I couldn't for the life of me figure out how to stop doing 1 damage to monsters with attacks that I would learn later were being deflected. So I gave up, and picked it up again this summer when I started a fresh file and took the time to truly learn the game. Both Integ and another friend of mine noticed me playing, but were very patient with me as I told them I was not playing any multiplayer until I understood enough to do so.

 

And look how far we've come. My playtime wasn't as long as Integ's, but I still clocked in at a whopping 702 hours by the time I finished Monster Hunter World 100%. And I enjoyed nearly every second of it [we're not going to talk about Scarred Yian Garuga (hell monster), or Kulu Ya-Ku (easy monster that wouldn't spawn crowns for the life of me)] I'm early on in Rise and I'm finding it Different, in a way that's neither really better or worse but is best compared as somewhat of a sidegrade to World. I say I'm 50/50 on whether or not I'll go for 100%ing it, but if Integ does I'll probably join him again. The discussion here is achievements though, so I'll weigh in:

• Something Integ forgot to mention is that, beside the non-standard "you will do this anyway" achievements, is the absolutely grind-heavy in a different way "Nowhere to Go but Up" achievement for completing 50 arena quests. There are only 16 normal arena quests from Low Rank through Master Rank, and then an additional 37 "event" arena quests bringing the total up to 53. Several of the event quests have the same monster and conditions attached to it, however, and some of them are quite difficult and miserable fights, meaning it's a boring, repetitive slog that's largely held outside of the main gameplay loop. I believe it was Ike who described the arena as a "relic" that Capcom hasn't really gotten rid of, which is fine, but tethering an achievement to completing 50 quests (the only other arena achievement is for completing 1) is an unnecessary chore.
• You need the Iceborne DLC to 100% the game. It's fairly common in Steam games to have achievements based on DLCs and expansions as part of the "base game core", but half of the achievements are straight up tethered to Iceborne that you cannot get without it. The Iceborne DLC has the weird artifact of making some of the original achievements "obsolete", in the sense that while they may have required some work originally, they're now completely trivial. The ones that immediately come to mind are the armor and weapons ones: there are achievements for making 5 pieces of what was the original endgame armor and 5 original endgame weapons. In the game, these pieces are signified by weapon rank. The Iceborne DLC houses all of Master Rank, and endgame-grade High Rank armor and weapons are quickly made obsolete by Master Rank's existence. Versions of these original achievements now exist for endgame in Iceborne, but the old versions of the achievements are basically freebies now if you play the game through all the way.

It isn't much to say at the end of the day, but I've dusted off my SF account for this specifically. I've really enjoyed doing this with you, brother, and I've had an absolute blast doing it. I'm extremely thankful that I've picked this game up again.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Darros

[Integrity]

LOST JUDGMENT (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2021)

Finished: 6/1/23. Playtime: 99 hours, sort of.

There's a big old asterisk on the playtime here because the area under my TV is a wifi deadzone for some reason, and leaving the Deck plugged in there for several days caused some desync of playtime on the Steam servers. One time I closed the game and the playtime flashed up by 14 hours and then back down, so we'll say that's the disconnect. The listed playtime on Steam is 85 hours, but for a good chunk of the last parts of completion my save file time was larger than my Steam playtime, which is, you know, impossible.

Lost Judgment was not the masterpiece that Judgment was. It had a lot going on - and a lot of it was genuinely great - but I think it tried to be too many things and, similar to Yakuza 5, fell into the trap of being the Most Game. Everything was a mixed bag of some variety compared to the first. The gameplay feels very solid and a step up from Judgment, and Snake style makes a fun addition, but your options all end up wildly outclassed by performing the same Tiger charged finisher combo forever. The story makes some pretty great shakeups to the core cast for the exclusively-positive, but is undermined by a few decisions, including a main villain I never bought into, despite how much the game very obviously wanted me to. The side content is all over the place, quality-wise, but that's any RGG game for you. Climax battles are back, though, and that's just great. I liked those even in the shit games like 3 and having them in a game where I actually want to engage with the combat is aces. Despite the mixed feelings, I did really like Lost Judgment overall, though. It was never likely to surpass Judgment, and I can enjoy it for what it was instead of calling it a disappointing sequel or something like that.

Completion for it was more miserable than the time suggests. Despite clocking in ~20 hours shorter than Judgment, there was a lot more miserable meniality to 100% Lost Judgment. The high school is the perfect example of this - you have to cozy up to ten clubs and complete requests for them for a side story that, honestly, has a pretty great payoff to it. The completion metrics for the clubs are all over the place, though. The Photography Club can be completed 100% just by doing its little side story. The eSports Club's story requires you to win 5 bouts of Virtua Fighter 5; but the completion metric requires you to win 16. No extra content, just fight 11 more battles of Virtua Fighter 5. The Robotics Club is the absolute worst for this; while the story is already very meaty and requires you to win a dozen or maybe twenty bouts of its little minigame, the completion metric is to invent everything your robots can use, which involves grinding approximately a hundred minigame rounds. This was absolute torture. The same 'get 50 pickups in the lightgun shooter' achievement from Judgment came back for some reason, and pickups were just as sparse. That's an hour or two of just grinding a single stage of Hama of the Dead up to the pickups and quitting out, over and over. You have to play with cats 100 times, despite playing with cats not even being a minigame - just a menu selection - and being able to befriend every single cat in the game fully in about 30 play sessions. There's just shit like that all over Lost Judgment that made it irritating and helps explain how slowly I went through it compared to its predecessor.

However, Lost Judgment gives you a dog. Greg Chun incessantly praises him and showers him with loving words whenever he's around. Perfect game, 10/10.

[Parrhesia]

It sure looks like the RGG team lost their judgement on achievement scaling! Wahey!!!

[Integrity]

13 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

It sure looks like the RGG team lost their judgement on achievement scaling! Wahey!!!

[Original Alear]

I met my wife in Tri, must have been thirteen years ago now, and went on to buy a Wii U exclusively to play 3U on it.

Not to pri but I always thought you two met here. Neat.

[Integrity]

we did meet through sf, but had no reason to talk until i was bitching on irc about mh tri one day

[Integrity]

FASHION POLICE SQUAD (MOPEFUL, 2022)

Finished: 12/1/23. Playtime: 11.3 hours.

I always appreciate when a game tries to take the essence of its genre and distill it. Get in deep, work with the why of game systems. I've talked about it in a few earlier recaps, but Fashion Police Squad is a superb example of it. Why do you switch weapons in a boomer shooter? What encourages a player to use a varied weapon loadout rather than falling back to a favorite with common ammo, like how every WW2 FPS ends with the player using the MP-40 for over half its runtime? Doom (2016) kinda cut through the meat of it - by having common ammo pickups, but low ammo capacities, you can force the player to flex through their weapon wheel in any given encounter, trying to map weapons to scenarios based on remaining ammo. Fashion Police Squad cuts straight through the whole flesh and bone of it: every enemy can only take damage from one or two of your four weapons. Late-midgame encounters see you use your entire weapon wheel, because you have to use your entire weapon wheel. It creates unique encounters that I can say I had fun with quite honestly all of - even the gimmick sequences, sniping and turreting (obligatory) were significantly more enjoyable than their traditional FPS equivalents thanks to the damage system. The turret section was the big shocker because it was, unlike every vehicular turret section in every other game ever, fun. On top of that, the game goes for thirteen maps and introduces its final new weapon in map 11 and its final new enemy in map 12. It doesn't give itself time to run out of ideas. It presents every novel idea it has, gives them some time to breathe, then you crush the final boss (with its own fun gimmicks) and the game's over. No back half with nothing new except locale to show off. It ends when it ought to, and that's deeply admirable. High. high recommendation.

Achievements were largely straightforward, with one caveat. There weren't many and, clearly, they didn't take long, but they hit the usual notes. Beat the game, beat the challenges, collect the secrets, top-rank the sniping sections, and fuck around a little on the golf course in map 11 (I actually got both of these by accident just playing normally). There's one for stunning 250 enemies with your whip but, presuming you're playing relatively-normally, that's two playthroughs of the game tops. The weird one was actually the '100% all maps' one - as one might expect, killing all enemies and finding all secrets on every map is required for this, but that's only 2/3 of the requirement. The third third is picking up all armor, of all things. The armor isn't, like, psychotically hidden, but with no in-mission checkbox to see how many you've grabbed, or if you've grabbed it all, manually sleuthing it became really tedious really quickly, particularly when I left a map thinking I'd scoured everything to end up with 12/13. Thankfully, some dude has completely no-frills runs of every map grabbing all the armor and secrets. Thanks, that guy.

Edited January 18, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

METAL GEAR SOLID 5: GROUND ZEROES (KOJIMA, 2014)

Finished: 30/1/23. Playtime: 22.1 hours.

Technically, I still have to finish Jamais Vu on Hard one more time to 100% it, but I have downtime during a Total Warhammer 3 session with some mates and completion is literally inevitable tonight, I've already beaten Jamais Vu once on hard. The only way it gets to be a tomorrow game is if I get unfathomably drunk watching the Bengals tonight and fuck up every input. e: this is precisely what happened lol

I always have a bit of apprehension towards games that have such an insane universal acclaim as does Metal Gear Solid 5. I've been burned more than once - Final Fantasy Tactics being a very high-profile, if not the only, example - and I've just learned to accept I have that nagging worm in my skull that judges Acclaimed Things more than other things. My takeaway from Ground Zeroes is that MGS5 is actually as good as everyone has been saying for like ten years now. It took about a run and a half of Camp Omega for it to click, it wasn't a trivial investment. Once it did, I binged the rest of the game in what was basically a feverish two-and-a-half-day session, interrupted only by this ongoing TWW3 session. I'm still itching here to get out and kick out the last run of Jamais Vu and to start The Phantom Pain. I had a fantastic time with Ground Zeroes. It's the only of those stealth-action games (Dishonored, Hitman, etc.) that has actually seen me being perfectly happy when I go loud, murdering a few guys and vanishing and continuing the mission instead of just checkpointing.

This was my second Metal Gear Solid experience after Revengeance, for the record. I played the demo of 1 on a Pizza Hut disc in the 90s and thought it sucked, partially because i was like 7 and partially because it did.

The path to platinum was not terribly straightforward and I'm glad I had a Steam guide to follow. You essentially have to run the main, and each of the five side, ops four times each, with different requirements. The usual run was beat on normal -> beat on normal and mark all enemy targets -> beat on hard twice. I found it pretty satisfying, except for the 'mark all targets' - that was just a pain in the ass half the time and I didn't really enjoy it. Still, it's not much of a detriment, just an extra hour or two here and there. There's a few extra things as well - an extra objective per mission, plus collectibles - that are pretty well-placed and don't go too far, but if you don't know about them you probably won't get them.

My final statement is that the Steam guide for 100% achievements has a far worse strategy for S-ranking the destroy the anti-aircraft guns mission. Mine rules.

Spoiler

You only need a B-rank at best - you can actually do this with default kit if you have better eyes than I do. Make sure reflex is off - you're almost guaranteed to spark an alert you can't avoid.

Grab the sniper rifle behind you and then sprint down and immediately unlock the door to Camp Omega.

Sprint to the edge of the fence around the AA gun in front of you, headshot the guy attending it, and plant a C4 on the gun.

Sprint to the concrete barrier, stop and headshot the guy patrolling around where the truck usually parks.

Sprint to the edge of the first warehouse, stop, and headshot the guy patrolling between the first two warehouses.

Sprint up to the fence to the heliport, take aim, and shoot the explosive barrel next to the AA gun. One down.

Breathe, count two, equip the sniper rifle, and go through the fence. Turn right and shoot the explosive barrel by the AA gun near the bridge. If you have great eyes or aim, you can pick this out with the silenced rifle instead and maybe dodge a combat alert. Two down.

Turn around and sprint (if discovered) or crouch run (if not) out the fence and back to the far western entrance you come in through for the intel operative mission.

Call Morpho to the original LZ, detonate your C4 (three down), and slam the rest of your C4 into the ground.

Detonate the C4 when the APC drives over it and run to Morpho.

The recoilless strat is probably easier, but mine is doable with no kit or a B-rank instead of an A, so I'll claim the victory here.

Edited January 30, 2023 by Integrity

[riariadne]

METAL GEAR

[Integrity]

METAL GEAR?!

[Hawkwing]

On 10/25/2022 at 11:40 PM, Integrity said:

XCOM: CHIMERA SQUAD (FIRAXIS, 2020)

Finished: 29/12/21. Playtime: 66.2 hours.

I really wanted to close out 2021 before I went to sleep tonight, so have all the posts in a row.

Here's perhaps my most absolutely nuclear PC gaming take I've ever had: XCOM: Chimera Squad is the second-best game in the entire franchise, 1994-today, only surpassed by XCOM 2 War of the Chosen.

Everything I said about Doom 64's reception is the opposite here. I genuinely do not understand the tepid reception this game got. The best I've got is that, if you've got a tiny brain, it's easy to believe that it gives you 'fewer choices' in tactical combat. In reality, the tactical combat has way more depth than any previous game except maybe XCOM 2, but the critical thing that it isn't is Bigger. It's like Fire Emblem Heroes was at its peak: it creates far more tactically interesting situations than the main games do by limiting you, but there's a huge subdivision of PC grognards that cannot see any number besides Scope. You only get four guys instead of <6 or 16>. There's only 4 to 10 enemies instead of <up to 5 pods of up to 4 / like 30? in the original?>. Do you understand? Chimera Squad's numbers are lower. That means it's less good.

It's unbelievably annoying. Chimera Squad has the audacity to try something new, and it works, and it still catches flak for not doing the same thing. It's still an isometric tactical command game, and it controls literally the same as the XCOM reboots, but it is lesser to the fanbase, because _. The good old Fire Emblem permadeath argument comes up a lot too - "the game gives me a game over when one of my chimera agents dies!" whines man who reloads whenever an XCOM agent ranked higher than Rookie dies. Every criticism I've seen of the game belies such a fundamental refusal to understand basic concepts like 'games design' and 'writing' that it makes me want to throw a gamer through a fucking brick wall. "There's fewer weapon options!" whines man who outfitted entire Terror from the Deep squad with sonic cannons. There's very few games whose Discourse makes me madder than Chimera Squad's does, and most of them are Baldur's Gate: Enhanced Edition.

E: uncoincidentally, both games have a significant portion of the fanbase mad at how 'woke' they are. never change, gamers.

To cut myself off, platinum was a chore for a single unintended reason. Most of the achievements are straightforward - there's a cheeky little challenge for using each unit which is flavored to them, beating the campaign on Impossible, and a grab bag of general little challenges. The only stumbling block is Every Timeline. The way the campaign is structured is fairly simple: there's three gangs that you're hunting, and you hunt them sequentially. Whichever one you hunt second will be scaled up to match you, with new tricks and toys; and whichever one you hunt third will have a significant power boost thematic to the gang. Every Timeline asks you to complete all three versions of all three gangs' final takedown missions across any number of campaigns. Theoretically, this means doing Gang A first, second, and third; Gang B first, second, and third; and Gang C first, second, and third. Three runs through, and two ways to mix them together for you combinatorics nerds like me. Problem is, the achievement was coded to only unlock upon completing of the three campaigns A-B-C, B-C-A, C-A-B. If you do it the other possible way (A-C-B, C-B-A, B-A-C) then the achievement doesn't unlock. Technically, I've beaten this game six times, but I have no shame in admitting that after I finished that second string of results, didn't get the achievement, and figured out why through creative googling, I cheated my way through beating the next three campaigns in the first string of results.

Still, despite being thrown through the game for an extra ten or so hours to cheat through three runs, I hold Chimera Squad up among the best turn-based tactical games I've ever played. Scope isn't everything, kids.

Huh. I know this was months ago, but this is the first time I've seen a take like this. I suppose the people I've seen talk about Chimera Squad knew it was an experimental title to test out some new mechanics, and the price tag was reasonable for that. I haven't seen anyone dismiss or dislike the game so much as they say their piece about the mechanics then go back to talking about XCOM 2. Interesting to see a different perspective.

While I do prefer Enemy Unknown/Within over it (mostly because I love how well the base building and tactics sides of the game feed into each other. I want to do well in one to get more tools in the other), I still love Chimera Squad. The breach system consistently provides interesting options, it's refreshing to have every enemy on screen at once instead of dealing with the pod system, and the timeline works better than I expected. I adore playing as the aliens the most, and XCOM 3 needs to keep this aspect and expand upon it.

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

METAL GEAR SOLID 5: GROUND ZEROES (KOJIMA, 2014)

I haven't played Ground Zeroes, but I did play The Phantom Pain last year, and it was easily one of my favorite games I played in 2022. It's a game I could legitimately talk about for hours, so I'll try to keep it brief. People do not joke when they say there are ten different ways to approach a single problem, and while missions can blend together, you're given so many different tools and scenarios that it never gets old. Even "joke" tools like the carboard box and water pistol have a surprising amount of intricacy and legitimate applications. Despite infamously being unfinished, the attention to detail and the amount of polish rivals and even surpasses games that are far shorter and less complex. If you're into the stealth genre, I can't recommend the game enough. (That's the short version. I could easily write a few paragraphs on how many different ways you could deal with a single tank.)

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

It's the only of those stealth-action games (Dishonored, Hitman, etc.) that has actually seen me being perfectly happy when I go loud, murdering a few guys and vanishing and continuing the mission instead of just checkpointing.

You won't be getting an S rank, but there were several times my stealth attempt went south and I ended up going the "guns blazing" route, and was surprised I still managed to get an A rank. You won't get as many rewards compared to successfully being stealthy, obviously, but as long you play well, you can still get far by playing aggressively, and the game gives you loads of guns and equipment to do so.

 

Since you seem to 100% games, I'd say keep in mind that MGS5 is one of those games that can have varying levels of "completion" The in-game marker just tracks if you've completed the side missions, side objectives, and how many missions you've S-ranked. You can reach 100% there without having researching every technology or still having things to unlock for the online component (which while I'm not a fan that you're forced to get an FOB whether you want one or not, at least you can set security to max and call it a day if you don't want to bother, while if you do engage with the online, you are legitimately rewarded for your time).

I also give a heads up that despite not being buggy, the game is unfinished and it does show at points. While it's most glaring with the plot, where the second half could be summarized as "things happen", there are parts of the open world that are empty which seem like there was something planned there, and while no mission is impossible, some definitely seem like they could have gone through a few more rounds of playtesting.

[Integrity]

2 minutes ago, Hawkwing said:

If you're into the stealth genre

i'm not really

 

3 minutes ago, Hawkwing said:

I can't recommend the game enough.

i'm excited to move onto TPP from my experience with G0. look forward to the TPP post in several weeks because it's a difficult plat and my will is indomitable.

 

4 minutes ago, Hawkwing said:

While I do prefer Enemy Unknown/Within over it (mostly because I love how well the base building and tactics sides of the game feed into each other. I want to do well in one to get more tools in the other), I still love Chimera Squad. The breach system consistently provides interesting options, it's refreshing to have every enemy on screen at once instead of dealing with the pod system, and the timeline works better than I expected. I adore playing as the aliens the most, and XCOM 3 needs to keep this aspect and expand upon it.

i'm glad to see someone else who loved the firaxis games and still saw the glory in chimera squad as a completely different thing, honestly. i'd love to hear your takes on the other games since you seemed to be biting your tongue about them here

[Hawkwing]

3 minutes ago, Integrity said:

i'm excited to move onto TPP from my experience with G0. look forward to the TPP post in several weeks because it's a difficult plat and my will is indomitable.

I have over a 100 hours in the game, and I still have some side missions left to complete. I'm personally not aiming to 100% the game, since I just don't have the patience for some of the missions.

5 minutes ago, Integrity said:

i'm glad to see someone else who loved the firaxis games and still saw the glory in chimera squad as a completely different thing, honestly. i'd love to hear your takes on the other games since you seemed to be biting your tongue about them here

I own the original series on GOG, and one day I want to complete at least the original game. I've tried it before, and I just need to be in the mood to deal with a game with some archaistic elements (biggest one being manually tracking time units).

I adore XCOM: Enemy Within and consider XCOM2 to straight up be the best tactics game I've ever played. The numbers are readable and every shot dealt or taken is meaningful. The skills offer new tactical options instead of a higher number, and even then skills that do increase damage offer new strategies. The games are well paced about consistently giving you new toys, as well as new threats to deal with. Especially XCOM 2; Legitimately every single enemy in that game counters a strategy or habit of the player and forces you to adapt your tactics. Even the lowly grunt fulfills this purpose, as they don't bother with anything fancy and just shoot you, and sometimes that can be enough.

I also love the base building aspects and how well they compliment the tactical layers. You want to research new weapons and armor to do well in battles, and you want to do well in combat to have more things to research. The various buildings unlock more options on how to approach either layer. They feed into each other, and I always look forward to entering the other side of the game.

I even enjoy the non-gameplay related aspects of both games. I could talk for a while about how much I love the art style of the aliens in EW and how they have their own twist (like Thin men being inspired by the "men in black" cliche, except they're on the aliens side, or how cyberdisks look super sleek and futuristic, until they unfold and reveal a more monstruous design) or how ADVENT troopers from XCOM 2 look uniform yet distinct, while also being massly produced. I even appreciate how the stories are handled. The developers knew which events were important enough for cutscenes, and backed off elsewhere, because they knew that the players experiences and stories of the first time they met a new alien or lost their entire squad, or blew up a side of a building with a grenade so the sniper could make the life or death shot, or the time the soldier customized to look like their best friend turned out to be a powerful psychic and so on would be more memorable than anything they could come up with.

So yeah, I love the XCOM games. Easily one of my favorite video game franchises.

[Integrity]

Just now, Hawkwing said:

own the original series on GOG, and one day I want to complete at least the original game. I've tried it before, and I just need to be in the mood to deal with a game with some archaistic elements (biggest one being manually tracking time units).

have you picked up openxcom? it smooths the curve a LOT from experience

1 minute ago, Hawkwing said:

So yeah, I love the XCOM games. Easily one of my favorite video game franchises.

nothing to add or counter, i feel largely the same about them. thanks for the post op

[Hawkwing]

5 minutes ago, Integrity said:

have you picked up openxcom? it smooths the curve a LOT from experience

I've heard of it. I'll definitely check it out later.

5 minutes ago, Integrity said:

nothing to add or counter, i feel largely the same about them. thanks for the post op

You're welcome

[Parrhesia]

Re: XCOM -- yeah, Chimera Squad was exactly the right move for the franchise, and it's infuriating that Gamers had to go and be Gamers about it. That's how we ended up with Dark Souls 3, ffs! OpenXCOM beautifully modernises the old game, still very worth playing for any tactics grognard, and I do have to take a moment to underline: turn on 'Psionics require line of sight'. The worst part of original XCOM is that the midgame becomes you getting invisibly mindfucked from infinite range, and then the endgame is that you invisibly mindfuck the enemy from infinite range. Turn on Psi-LOS and you actually get to keep having the firefights that are the core appeal of the game. You also rack up casualties in the high 200s because there isn't that point at which you just stop losing units! It's great!

Anyway, I return to announce that I've finally done what I've threatened to do and 100%ed Pyre. I've never heard anyone call it less than good, but it's still generally the black sheep of the Supergiant catalogue (which should be Transistor, which is still exceptional). I suspect it's because Supergiant don't care about gamer instincts and force them to have a good time, creating an experience centred around several things that the audience instinctively shies away from.

1) At the end of each season, you nominate one of your veteran footballers - and it has to be one of your most experienced - to return from whence they came and effectively leave the gameboard.
2) You're allowed to restart on anything but the hardest difficulty, but the game encourages you gently but firmly that it's designed to be Ironmanned. 'Regardless of result, the game will continue,' soothes the loading screen refrain. 'You need only see it through.' Famously, you can still reach the ending even if you lose all 26 matches, and it won't be a bad ending at that.
3) It's about the two things gamers hate most - books, and sport.

Now, a run of Pyre takes about 9-10 hours, and by the very nature it's going to change a lot between any two playthroughs. Different people will leave, in different orders, leaving you with different teams to make sense of. And there's also a beautiful alignment of gameplay and story; Rukey the cur has the most pressing need to get home, but he's also your most accomplished goalscorer in the earlygame. Can't he wait just one or two seasons before leaving? Three, four? A couple of characters don't really mind staying in the Downside at all, while your harpy will actively hope you lose if it means her sister can go free. Can I afford to bring back the treant when he starts at a very low-level and honestly is kind of bad?

I do think Pyre should be played twice, then maybe every so often again after that, when you're feeling like it. It's certainly a comfort game to me, though I think I'm done with it now (having just beaten playthrough 4 and, well, 100%ed it). There's a really strong emotional through-line through it, about picking yourself up and moving on, that putting your best foot forward is the most important thing. The outcome is there to be striven for, but you can be at peace with yourself so long as you went for it with all your heart. And you'll see different storylines play out every time, different characters' backgrounds get revealed, different interactions, et cetera.

And those second etc. playthroughs should be done, I feel quite strongly, on the ultimate difficulty. True Nightwing pits you against strong, well-equipped enemies with the best AI, it enforces ironman, and it unlocks the full range of the shop and of the bonus challenge stars (like appear in most Supergiant games, in one form or another) from the start. Let your plans go awry. Make yourself adapt. Or triumph against the odds despite that, as I did on my final run.

100%ing Pyre is pretty easy and not too time-consuming. A first run on normal or hard, a second run on True Nightwing and a third True Nightwing run to clean up should be all that's required. It requires a bunch of miscellaneous shit you'll unlock accidentally over the course of three runs, plus:

1) Inflicting 200 goals with every character. I unlocked this organically on everyone but the treant, then got him there with some training matches on my final run; this was actually the last achievement I got.
2) Winning a bunch of friendlies in the skirmish mode with various team compositions.
3) Inflict 40 goals in a single blow. My penultimate achievement. The thing with Pyre is that better goalscorers inflict fewer goals with each strike. It's hard to score with Jodariel because she's slow and fat and old, but she massacres the enemy if you can make it happen, and can hit 40 pretty easily. Your crone, who is a lot better at scoring goals, can also reach 40 damage under the right circumstances, though she'll need a max-rank trinket and the full benefits of squad training; just take Vocations at every opportunity, which you probably want to do anyway.
4) Win a match with all 12 challenge stars: this cranks the enemy's stats, means they cheat at some fundamentals of the game, gives them a 60-goal head start and gives them straight-up better AI. In my final run, I tried this on the two tutorial battles and got completely rolled, two of the defeats in a run that ended 21-5. But I managed it twice in the end; first in the first battle against the Pyrehearts, who are an abysmal joke team, and second in... a lategame battle against the Pyrehearts, who remain an abysmal joke team. They managed to score once in the first match and zero times in the second. Notably, it's actually easier to unlock in True Nightwings, because all the challenge stars unlock from the start rather than gradually over the course of the game.

Also in the best ending, there's the implication that you fuck a ghost. Play Pyre. Then give it a bit to rattle around in your skull and play it again.

[Integrity]

2/4 supergiant rep now, i'm assuming you'll do transistor at some point and i'll eventually get hades?

[Integrity]

TOTAL WARHAMMER 2 (THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, 2017)

Finished: 23/2/23. Playtime: 407.6 hours.

This is, by a distance, the longest it's taken me to 100% a game where I set out from the outset to do it. The only two games with hour totals over that are Rocket League, where I actually finished the achievements somewhere in the middle of the near-on 700 hours I have logged; and Monster Hunter World, where I didn't even start the final thunder run until I was ~500 of my 800 hours in. Four hundred hours, starting from a base of about twenty. The fact that I had the jujubes to slug this out is a little bit baffling to me. I started this back in November.

Total Warhammer 2 takes almost everything that I could complain about from its predecessor and squashes it mercilessly. There's a funny sum-up I like to tell about the old gods, Westwood, that Dune II was where they figured out what to do, Tiberian Dawn is where they learned what not to do, and Red Alert was where they finally got the entire act together - a pretty impressive turnaround for basically inventing RTS. Total War kind of sits in the same boat for me. Pretty much everything before Total Warhammer was the developers figuring the formula out - with Shogun 2 being, notably, when things finally began to click. Not having played Rome 2 myself, we'll call that the Dune II equivalent. Tiberian Dawn, then, was Total Warhammer; they finally nailed it all but for the details, little niggles here and there. Total Warhammer 2 takes all the right lessons from Total Warhammer. It's a fantastic game.

Outside of units behaving better and balance (generally) being more sound and all the boring things a sequel really ought to improve, the biggest quality 2 brings to the table is a change of scenery. The Warhammer Fantasy world is fairly analogous to ours, and 1 focused entirely on It's Just Europe. Consequently, it had pretty safe factions - all the big boys: Men, Wood Elves, Chaos, Orcs, Dwarves*, Beast Men, North Men, Dead Men, and The French. 2 sets the entire campaign around fantasy-Americas and Africa. Instead of the safe titans, we've got lizardmen and weird elves and vampire pirates and da rats. The variety in army composition and playstyle compared to 1 is baffling, and that's just counting the new races. Through DLC, a Mega Map condensing both 1 and 2's campaign worlds a little bit for playability can be accessed with all of the first game's factions playable or fightable. It's a superb mode.

This is where the problem creeps in. Much like its predecessor, platinum Total Warhammer 2 involves winning a campaign on the high difficulty as all of the game's factions - six in total. It also requires winning a campaign on the high difficulty as all of the original factions as well. If you're not counting, that's fifteen completed campaigns. It's such a staggering amount of labor that it almost feels pointless to talk about all the other, smaller achievements - for each of the major skeleton factions, you have to do at least a mini-campaign to grow to a certain size or conquer a certain amount of land, et cetera. The research achievements that took so long from 1 resurge, but they're not as bad, given as you only have to do them for the core game's four factions - elves, other elves, lizards, and da rats - and da rats can stack enough research speed modifiers to make it trivial to crunch out before you even win, no lingering. There's also two multiplayer-exclusive ones - to play a campaign with another player (just start one session, you get it during the first load screen), courtesy old mate Parrhesia, and a viral one that the same top bloke who got me the one for 1 helped with. Big ups to Felzear on Steam. As God is great, 3 does not have a viral achievement, spoiler alert.

With a single exception (the Northmen campaign was fucking balls ass hard and no fucking fun at all), Total Warhammer 2 was a joy to go through. It absolutely got a little tiring by the end, but the fact that I was still able to get hyped for my fifteenth campaign because I'd finally be playing da rats after nearly-400 hours at that point really puts the point on just how great this game was. It blows 1 out of the water by nearly the same insane margin that 1 blew the entire previous Total War library out of the water, and that's a fucking feat.

The sick thing is 3 is even better. We'll get there.

(* yes i know they're dwarfs in the warhammer universe; no i do not care)

[Integrity]

CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE (INFINITY WARD, 2019)

Finished: 11/3/23. Playtime: """11.8""" hours.

First thing out of the way: this is the best Call of Duty has ever been. I hold firm to that. That """11.8""" hours is because I played the living hell out of this game during the pre-pandemic and early lockdown - Battle.net doesn't track hours, but I have easily hundreds of hours in Modern Warfare. It was released on Steam finally the other day and I figured $30 for a quick romp was worth my time and money.

The reason I get that little statement out of the way early is that Modern Warfare's campaign blows. It's not WW2 bad but it's on a level with the bad parts of Modern Warfare 3. I made fun of all three classic Moderns Warfare for their SAS maps largely being bad and their American maps being generally way better, but 2019's [hereafter its shortened name] American bits ascend to the lofty heights of those SAS missions. The SAS missions are slightly better, at least, but not significantly.

First, the good. 2019's gunplay is, simply put, unparalleled in the arcade shooter genre to this day. The guns of 2019 feel absolutely fantastic, with none of the weightlessness and lack of boom that plagued every single previous Call of Duty, and which seems to continue to plague Cold War and Vanguard. The raw action loop of 2019 is intoxicating. Creeping up on my 30s, career-track job in hand, I still found the hours to do the camo grind for getting every challenge done with every weapon in multiplayer. I did nearly every operator challenge. I did everything 2019 had to offer, and I still sunk several months into Warzone afterwards. I cannot overstate how phenomenal 2019 is to simply play. Even now, doing a replay of the campaign and remembering all of my little criticisms and spots of hatred, the game still occasionally clicked into place. Everything, from a player perspective, works. All of the non-campaign game modes are, in my opinion, about the absolute seen peak of multiplayer shooters.

Unfortunately, the Steam achievements are all campaign-focused except for one, so the main focus of these musings about 100%ing the game is going to be about the campaign - and the campaign is bad. All the self-aggrandizing issues that 2 flirted with and 3 threw itself headlong into are here and they're all worse. Price is insufferably the Only Man Hard Enough To Make The Hard Decisions. He's simply awful in this game, and you're stuck with him all the way past the end. He's introduced to you in the second map (a terror attack in London which, to be fair to it compared to 2/3, manages to make a decent argument to be a level) and within a minute he's hurled a civilian strapped with bombs to his death, dooming him to an explosive end to save the others. Price makes it nearly a minute before having to make the Hard Call. He gets worse from there. Maybe more tellingly, there's a Call of Duty tradition whereby dying gets you some snappy quip about the horrors of war, troublingly often by Stalin. 2019 buys into itself so thoroughly that these death screen quotes include a hefty smattering of incredibly cringey quotes from the game's own characters. They're awful. It's all awful.

That's not even getting into the campaign itself. As I said earlier, it's not all bad - the core gameplay carries hard enough that, when you have a fairly standard Call of Duty level (I went to the level list for examples and realized I really just mean Hunting Party), everything feels perfect. 2019 does everything to make sure you don't have those. Going down the list, we've got: the tutorial level, terror attack chaos, a setpiece-heavy sneaking and roleplay mission (and not a weirdly good one like WW2's Liberation), a fairly standard Call of Duty level but it's really fucking hard, SAS breach and clear, Hunting Party, the world's longest defense mission, the world's longest defense mission [sniping edition], another setpiece-heavy sneaking and roleplay mission, a largely-solo tunnel fight, another setpiece-heavy sneaking and roleplay mission, a chase through a city capped by Price doing a big war crime, Going Dark, and the atrocious finale. Discounting the tutorial, which is hardly a proper mission, that's three relatively-classic Call of Duty levels (two of them really hard), two run and guns among civilians, two hellish defense missions, three roleplay missions, and three miscellaneous ones. 2019 creates the perfect Call of Duty gunplay loop, and then does its absolute hardest to make sure you don't get to enjoy it in its ideal form. It's absolutely maddening.

I did mark out Going Dark, though. While Hunting Party is 2019 just letting the Call of Duty game be a Call of Duty game, and as a result ends up being a genuinely superb mission, Going Dark leans completely into what 2019 wants to be, but does it superbly. You're tasked with finding a dude in a town, given nightvision goggles and a silenced marksman rifle and pistol, and Price is on overwatch. How you approach the town is entirely up to you. There's three places to sweep in whatever order you like, followed by a fourth when all three are done. You can go as quiet or as loud as you see fit, peeling guys apart Hitman-style and cutting power to buildings and shooting out lights, or just taking an AK from the first guy you mook and challenging the roving technical to a fight. Exploring the map nets you better silenced weapons than your fairly-tepid M14 and pistol, including a silenced automatic shotgun tucked away near one of the first three areas. The only thing dragging it down is that they had to get Price to do his 'we are leaving' line from the Modern Warfare (original) demo level, framing and all. It's annoyingly self-referential, but the rest of the map is fantastic enough that I'll forgive it a little slight. So that's two maps from fourteen that I think are actually quite good. Terrible batting average.

Achievements are nothing surprising if you've done any other Call of Duty, and I actually think they're a pretty great set compared to the predecessor trilogy. Beat the game on Veteran (or the new hyper-Veteran, Realism) and do one or two challenge objectives per mission. Some of them don't require a specific mission, but a specific mission lends itself particularly well to a particular one. The only particularly-nasty ones are Golden Path, asking you to beat the SAS breach-and-clear without missing a shot, killing each threat with a single hit, and never being hit yourself; and, regrettably, We Own the Night, which tasks you with killing all the enemies at all three locations in Going Dark without, well, going light. This latter one sucks ass because there's no indicator whatsoever how many enemies remain, and the village is pretty large for a Call of Duty level. I ended up just looping the church about seven times, nearly giving up, before finding some guy smoking about thirty feet away and getting the achievement for dropping him. Still, one particularly-annoying one out of 26 isn't terribly bad.

The final achievement is for beating 'all of' the Spec Ops missions, and it's a bit misleading in a few ways. The first, and funniest, is that the achievement was added as a profile challenge on 2019's release, when there were only four Spec Ops missions, and it therefore only requires those four (there's now, like, twelve, and two extra Spec Ops modes on top of that) - but the Steam achievement simply imports the original description. The second, and less funny but still pretty funny, is that the Steam release, via an Activision account, cheerily imports your multiplayer and Spec Ops progress, but doesn't import the achievements. So if you've done them all, as I have, you just have to pick one and finish it again to get it to pop. For someone just getting the game for the first time, this might be a bit annoying, given as Spec Ops uses your multiplayer unlocks and you don't start with shit, and it's quite a hard game mode, but from my few runs in 2023 the remaining players actually queueing for missions know everything about all the missions now, so there's that at least.

Still, as the dust settles, I'm glad I gave 2019 a revisit. I might even keep the multiplayer installed and fire up a few matches for kicks again. It's really one of my favorite shooters I've ever played, and no amount of mediocre-to-shitty campaigning can take that away from me. Shine on, you beautiful little game.

Side note: today's my dog's birthday she is four : )

Edited March 12, 2023 by Integrity