ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 160. sonic mania)

[Integrity]

BOYFRIEND DUNGEON (KITFOX, 2021)

Finished: 14/11/22. Playtime: 11.8 hours.

Boyfriend Dungeon straight-up rules. It's such a cozy little game, fun enough to keep you engaged in between talking to your assembled boyfriends but without enough depth to make approaching it any kind of chore. It knows exactly what it wants to be, it is that, and when you're done with it it says alright, see ya round and you do, in fact, see it round. The core game (which I finished out in a few days earlier this year e: according to steam i have only played boyfriend dungeon on 3 days: september 11 last year i played for most of the first dungeon, feb 11 this year i earned every single other pre-patch achievement, and today) felt like it needed just a smidge of extra content, and then Kitfox dropped a patch with a smidge of extra content, and that was what it needed. Now that I've put it down again, I probably won't play it again for a good long while, but it's got a very strong place in my heart.

Nothing special to the achievements, really. Finish the storyline (platonic or romantic) for all nine swords, finish the general storyline (beat all three dunj bosses), and find and craft all the recipes - the latter of which takes a little extra grinding, but a half-dozen or ten runs through the final bosses of the second and third dunj will get you done. There's a little minigame with no rewards except an achievement but I, god gamer, found it pretty easy to beat.

Took Isaac to the final exam, since you needed to know. Seven was a very close second, though, and was my mainstay in the post-patch additions.

Edited November 14, 2022 by Integrity

[Original Alear]

Integ, I don't know if you will hate me for this, but I am just going to mention that if you wanted to see one thing that I think might have inspired the Yakuza games, you should check out Afraid to Die starring Yukio Mishima, the famed Japanese author who starred in this movie under the condition that he 1: wore nothing but black all the time and 2: died at the end. He is basically a completely terrible person throughout the movie, and I kinda think the developers of the game saw the movie and decided they wanted to make a likeable Yakuza instead.

I don't know where it can be found or if it can be downloaded these days, though.

[Integrity]

i'll see if i can dig it up and give it a watch, i was unaware of the influence so i appreciate the rec

[Integrity]

On 11/16/2022 at 9:02 PM, Original Johan Liebert said:

Integ, I don't know if you will hate me for this, but

ten days later i remember to update you - i sat down and gave it an honest watch, and i can't say i liked it as much as i respected it, but i think i didn't like it for reasons (e.g. mishima's character) that i was supposed to dislike it for. i'm overall better off for having seen it, and the final scene is kind of masterfully bleak, and it's inspired me to pick up some other classic yakuza films when i've got the time

 

cheers man

[Original Alear]

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

ten days later i remember to update you - i sat down and gave it an honest watch, and i can't say i liked it as much as i respected it, but i think i didn't like it for reasons (e.g. mishima's character) that i was supposed to dislike it for. i'm overall better off for having seen it, and the final scene is kind of masterfully bleak, and it's inspired me to pick up some other classic yakuza films when i've got the time

 

cheers man

Cool, I didn't even know if there was an easy way to watch it so I thank you for taking my recommendation seriously.

[Integrity]

6 hours ago, Original Johan Liebert said:

Cool, I didn't even know if there was an easy way to watch it so I thank you for taking my recommendation seriously.

for the future justwatch is really good for finding stuff like that - it's on tubi, which is a free-with-ads streaming service

[Integrity]

SONIC GENERATIONS (SONIC TEAM, 2011)

Finished: 30/11/22. Playtime: 23.7 hours.

I like to cosplay as a relatively-openminded dude for the benefit of strangers on the internet. I prefer to take things I don't like and examine why it is that I don't like them, and in so doing maybe internalize why someone else would like the same thing. There's always going to be things which have merit (or are good) which I don't like, and there's always going to be things which lack merit (or are bad) which I do like. Film's an easy case to turn to here - I thought 2022's Dune fuckin' sucked. Hated the movie. Rave reviews everywhere, including some of my best friends, but I just didn't get it. Outside of one point of contention, though, it's all stuff like "this was boring" and "this took too long" and "it's just a wall of proper nouns" - stuff which is either subjective or not even necessarily a bad thing. It's hard to contend with the talent behind it and say it was bad, but I thought it sucked and I had no fun watching most of it. It's sitting on a 3/10 on my Letterboxd right now. Andrzej Bartkowiak's Doom (2005), featuring Karl Urban and The 'Dwayne Johnson' Rock, on the other hand, holds a perfect 10. It's so easy to point to the things that suck about it, both subjectively and objectively, but I had a fantastic time with it. I've watched it six or seven times since about 2008. There's a possibility it's the single film I've watched the most in my adult life. It's an indefensible 10/10, but by God, it's mine.

This is all preamble to lay down the conclusion that Sonic Generations is a bad game, which is not good.

Some of this almost certainly has to do with the quality of the PC port. The settings are contained in one of the most amateur-looking launchers I've ever seen, and need to be recalibrated (or the game will not run!) if you do advanced things like 'patch your GPU drivers'. I can't stress that enough. Performing routine computer maintenance breaks Sonic Generations until such a time as you, the user, manually rerun the settings launcher. On top of that, the game hard crashed a good handful of times just during regular gameplay - and that's not counting the Time Attack mode, which was prone to crashing on every single step of 'pressing the time attack mode button' until 'here's your score, btw exiting to desktop'. I crowbarred it into staying mostly stable for the latter half of Time Attack, but this is a really bad look.

Some of this could go either way on the PC port or just the game itself. The camera getting stuck on geometry like it's 1997 all over again was a common occurrence. Dropped inputs were an every-level dessert for important things like jumping, let alone the trick system that just sometimes decided it wasn't the day to work. I fell through the world no fewer than four times, including once on the final boss. These are, objectively, technical issues, but there's no way for me to know from my experience if they're intrinsic, introduced by the port, or even introduced by some peculiarity of my own setup.

Some of this is just absurd design decisions made in the mature gamosphere of 2011. There's a lives system that means absolutely nothing unless you're grinding attempts for collectibles or practicing routes for times, and then it's just a thirty second timesink to die and get five lives back every so often or, worse, to go spend your infinite Gamer Points on one life at a time (note: that's five inputs each) at a shop in the hub you have to back out and walk to. There's occasional great big 3D environments that invite you to investigate for alternate paths, and there's no camera control whatsoever within them, which led me to quite a good few deaths trying to navigate Sonic out of a problem I got him into with absolutely no help establishing where he was in space. Hell, the last time that killed me was doing the Time Attacks roughly half an hour before finishing it. I cannot articulate how baffling a total inability to adjust the camera in 3D in 2011 is, especially when the camera has a habit of getting stuck on things or focusing on something other than what you want to focus on. It's maddening.

Then there's the little things sprinkled all over. The collectibles being music notes you either have to chase down or wait 17 seconds for their cycle to complete adds nothing and wastes time. The credits being unskippable every time you kill the final boss, in a game where you can just go back and replay him anytime, would suck a lot more if the final boss fight wasn't just a three-minute waste of time, but I'm feeling uncharitable. There's no reasonable way to see what missions you're missing in the hub without just traversing the place and looking for bells, only how many you're missing; there's no way at all to know which red coins you've gotten in a level, only how many you're missing. Dying and returning to the level start, but then completing the level deathlessly from there, sometimes doesn't count as a Perfect Clear, but sometimes it does - and some levels have really early checkpoints to tax you an extra load screen if you're going for the S. These are all things one could conceivably not notice or just not care about not going for completionism, but I did, so here they are.

I haven't even talked about actually playing the game yet! It's a tale of two Sonics. Nineties Sonic's half of the game mostly isn't bad. In a vacuum, if you just put Nineties Sonic's nine levels in front of me as a game, I'd probably play through them once or twice, have a reasonable if not fantastic time, give it a cheery 6/10 not terribly much depth and some of the latter levels just kinda blow, and move on. Aughts Sonic's half of the game peaks at brainless enjoyment in about two of the levels and troughs at some genuinely awful levels sprinkled throughout. Aughts Sonic's half of the game genuinely sucks, and I think at this point I can say it's not because I 'didn't get it' or something - I clearly got good enough to find everything and get S ranks on the whole set of levels and, hell, got an S by accident on one of them my first time through. I just think they're bad. Aughts Sonic controls like hell, with innumerable segments when pressing anything except boost has an even shot of making your rail connection not work as intended and have Sonic plummet to his death. There's plenty of red coins or alternate paths that require some precision in 3D platforming, but Sonic's controls are nowhere near as precise as the game wants them to be. The meanest thing I can say about Aughts Sonic is that he's at his most fun when you're in a fuckin' corridor holding boost and vibing when to feather jump. That's barely a damn game.

Aughts Sonic's levels in particular just have this edge of Created From Assets to them that Nineties Sonic mostly, but doesn't entirely, evade. I'm not saying I need bespoke destruction animations and Havok (tm) physics for every entity, but take the boarding sequence that opens up City Escape, probably my third-least favorite Aughts Sonic level. I'm not going to bitch about the red coin on this path, though I really want to. What I want to do is look at what actually goes into this segment: you go forward for sixty seconds and make a single choice: to go high or go left. There's ramps that lead up to cables that give you nothing except the right to play less of the game going on the same path. There's eight models of car which may have been taken directly from the Dreamcast, and which when hit ping away weightlessly and switch to their Dented model. Hell, to call back to the beginning of the thread, it's not particularly better than a single route of Crazy Taxi, visually. It'd be a fine indie team effort, sure, but is that the standard of Sonic fuckin' Generations? Man.

The achievements are both very straightforward and involve more playing through the levels than they should. Assuming the red coins are a run (for some levels it's 2 and for one it's 3 minimum) and the player didn't get an S on the blind run (I got maybe two S ranks in mine), 100% requires playing every level at least five times. Once to just play the game, once to get all the red coins, once to get the S-rank, once for the doppelgänger mission every level has, and once for Time Attack. Sure, by the end of it I knew the levels well enough that I was clearing any given one in between eighty seconds and five minutes, so it wasn't exactly a time sink, but it was utterly loveless by then. There were no surprises left. I was not going fast for the joy of going fast, I was going fast for the joy of being done. Among doing all of that, there's also seventy-two missions (90 minus 18 doppelgängers, I'm not going to double count to make Sonic Generations look bad) that range from reasonably fun ("get through a chunk of level with your selection of elemental shields periodically") to the worst thing ever put to games ("play tennis with sonic the crocodile"). Most of these are limited to sections of level, and I think make for better challenges for that, but it's unfortunately not a rule.

After all that, there's a challenge achievement per stage, including the final boss. Some of these are impossible to miss if you're getting other things (e.g. Speed Highway just asks you to get a specific red coin), and some you're unlikely to get without knowing to go for them (e.g. complete Chemical Plant without entering the water). The final boss one is for not taking damage while fighting him, which isn't hard so much as it's tedious, and it's not always easy to know when Super Sonic even got hit by him - plus it's a bad fight and anything making me grind it sucks. The one I want to highlight, though, and the one that I think encapsulates how I felt about Aughts Sonic, was for Crisis City. There's a section at the end where you're running forward very fast while a fire tornado throws debris and shit at you, and the achievement is to dodge every single debris it throws at you. I started the segment, stopped, got up in real life, grabbed a LaCroix, and sat down about 25 seconds later. At this point, I ran forward to the end normally with nothing to dodge, because the fire tornado simply progresses all the way to the end of the level at approximately your boosted speed, assuming in good faith that you'll chase it, and makes no adjustment for simply going slow. As soon as you go off its script, which is tenuous to begin with, Sonic Generations just doesn't know what to do.

Glad this one's done.

[Parrhesia]

Parrhesia — Today at 3:15 PM
you have successfully murdered any desire for me to ever play a sonic game
Ike — Today at 3:15 PM
then i have done my job

[AlexArtsHere]

Ike is very mean and I will never recover from the deep emotional pain he has inflicted upon me.

[Integrity]

WARHAMMER 40,000: SPACE MARINE (RELIC, 2011)

Finished: 3/12/22. Playtime: 102.6 hours.

The legend itself. The poster child of the greatest piece of gaming journalism ever created. Relic's second crack at action games after the intensely-forgettable The Outfit. The spitting image of every derogatory design stereotype of the Xbox 360. A feminist masterpiece. Easily one of my favorite games of all time.

Space Marine is the five-hour 7/10 action game, with a capital the. Chunky movement, big guns, blood everywhere, ambient explosions, a chainsaw, audio logs, extreme party vibes. I can play Space Marine nearly forever. Not even sure I won't have the itch to replay it again at some point in the future, though with a sequel on the way that could be unlikely. Different developers, though. We'll see how that pans out. I'm excited.

In the later aughts, Relic decided to, weirdly, put two different 40K games together, each with the same three distinct game modes, but one was a strategy game and the other was a third-person shooter. That's a bit weird to me, and it's a bit weirder that it worked so well. The campaign is the star of the show in both - in this case, it's laser focused on putting you from setpiece full of aliens to setpiece full of aliens and letting you go balls out on everything in sight. There's a plot. It doesn't interfere very much. You're supposed to care about blowing shit up and hacking things to bits and the game gives you all the tools you need to accomplish both.

The competitive multiplayer is fine in Space Marine. It's extremely a post-Gears of War / Call of Duty 4 game, but space marine themed. The theming does carry it pretty well, but this is definitely the slouch of the game, and the one you have to spend the most time in for achievements. We'll get there.

Exterminatus is the third mode, putting you and some mates in a wave defense mode across a few maps against loads of enemies. It's very fun for what it is, but also has two issues: first that there's no real variety in how the mode goes (it is, however, quite hard to compensate), and second that it uses your unlocked abilities from the competitive multiplayer directly instead of either having its own or sharing a reward track. That kinda sucks, and there really isn't a way around it.

I played the life out of Space Marine back in '11-12, when I was just starting college. It calls back to the massive Sonic writeup - it's a flawed game, in quite a lot of ways, and none of them cause any friction with me. There's no earthly reason for it to be anywhere outside of the 6-8/10 range, and there's no heavenly way I'd give it anything less than a perfect 10. God bless fucking Space Marine.

The achievements are... something. We'll plug through it by mode, in descending order of quality of game. The campaign accounts for half-ish of the overall - progression, ambient kill ones (which can be done in Exterminatus as well), audio logs, and a suite of gentle weapon-based challenges, like completing a chapter using only plasma-based weapons. There's two difficulty-based ones, for beating the game on Hard and beating the first chapter on Hard without dying, but even on Hard Space Marine is not a particular ballbuster.

Exterminatus has a fair handful of achievements related to it, and hybridizes weirdly. Many of the campaign-based kill achievements can be progressed here, and kills in Exterminatus level up your multiplayer character (but don't unlock weapon perks) so can be used to unlock some things, including the multiplayer level-based ones. All of the Exterminatus-specific achievements come from the Chaos Invasion DLC, which is another set of maps to defend with two caveats: one, that you're a chaos space marine; two, that it's hard as hell. Everything is essentially unlocked by the time you get the final one, Heretic, among my proudest achievements on my whole account. Heretic requires that you clear the Chaos Invasion Exterminatus arena in a public game. No queueing with mates. This was such a motherfucker to accomplish that I still remember precisely the build I used to get it ten years later: Lascannon Havoc with combat stims, Artificer Armor, and Fast Stomp. I carried the final five waves essentially solo, with one guy (who was reasonably competent) popping in every time I farmed an extra life. I felt like a god.

Multiplayer only has, unique to it, about ten of the sixty achievements (sharing the level one with Exterminatus), and it has the second-longest single achievement in the game. Keeper of the Armory requires you to complete every single weapon-specific challenge in multiplayer only, kills in the other two modes don't count. The problem is that there's eleven weapons that each require 250 kills, as well as the two pistols each requiring 150 and, for no reason I can piece together, the Plasma Gun requiring 200 only. A standard game of Annihilation has a kill limit, total across a team of up to 8, of 41. If you're working on this legitimately, at maximum efficiency, and we assume you're getting an eighth of those 41 kills in every match and win them all, and we'll round that up to 6 kills per match to be fair, my napkin math says that that's five hundred and forty-two games of Space Marine, at eight to ten minutes each. That's even misleadingly low, because each each except the pistols and melee weapons has a secondary challenge (such as headshots) specific to the weapon, and the three bolter-type weapons require 100 killstreaks each. A killstreak is 3 kills without dying and, crucially, no matter how long the killstreak is it only counts as one. So that's at least 300 kills, if you're always killing precisely three guys and then dying. Practically, this could take a thousand matches or even more. It's an insane timesink, and you get nothing for the final tier of any of these challenges except a +1 towards the achievement.

It's also the second-biggest timesink in the game. If you have a mate or an alt account and dual-box, you can grind out about a kill every sub-ten seconds, and thus the achievement in eight or so really boring hours. You need two people for multi-kills on three weapons, but farming one guy forever works for everything else. Good old Dave from IT came back on the Steam Deck and I became quite adept at maneuvering him with my left hand while I shot him with my right hand on the computer. Parrhesia came back for the multi-kills, sliding me into his schedule between America being knocked out of the World Cup and Australia being knocked out of the World Cup. So it's insanely large, but still not The grind of the game.

That honor belongs to True Son of the Emperor. This is a Warhammer 40,000 game so, of course, it has to have an achievement for killing 40,000 guys. As a matter of fact, as far as I'm aware, Space Marine was the first 40K game to put one of these in, so it's directly to blame for the later trespasses of Space Hulk etc. At 100 hours into the game, with about 94 of those being legitimate gaming (and the last 6 or so being farming Dave for achievements), heavily slanted towards playing the campaign (give or take 6 times) and Exterminatus (the best overall source of kills) and away from multiplayer (the slowest form of kills), I was still about 3,000 short. If you'd just gone into this and played straight for the achievements, I'd be shocked if you crested 20,000 - maybe even more like 10 or 12,000. It's a really silly number that, had Freshman Ike not spent so many hours working on, would probably have walled me out of putting this on the shelf as an insane vanity project.

As a final note: the Melta Gun in Space Marine is fuckin' slept on as one of the greatest video game shotguns ever. Ever.

[lenticular]

Welp, I've gone and added three more letters to my A-Z challenge since I last posted. C, U, and Z are all in the books. Let's talk about them, and all the different ways that their achievements sucked.

Unpacking!

Spoiler

UNPACKING (WITCH BEAM, 2021)

Finished November 15, 2022. Playtime: 5.1 hours.

Unpacking was, to me, an interesting concept. Rather than try to describe it myself, here's its description on Steam: "Unpacking is a zen puzzle game about the familiar experience of pulling possessions out of boxes and fitting them into a new home. Part block-fitting puzzle, part home decoration, you are invited to create a satisfying living space while learning clues about the life you’re unpacking." Obviously a "this is not going to be for everyone" kind of game, but I liked the idea. In practice though... well, I wouldn't say that it was bad. It was fine. I played it. I didn't hate it. I had an OK time with it. I quite liked some parts and didn't really like other parts. It was fine. I'm certainly not going to go out of my way to recommend it to anyone.

The achievements sucked, though. Every single one of them was a hidden achievement and hidden achievements almost invariably suck. They're understandable when they're story based achievements that you can't miss as you play the game but actually describing what you do to get them would be a spoiler. They make sense there. This is not what these were. These were hidden because once you actually knew what they were, they were all trivially easy to do, but actually guessing what to do was the hard part. So there are three possible ways that you can get these achievements:

1. You can stumble across them completely by accident.
2. You can try random things that you think might count as achievements and hope against hope that the things you thought of were the same ones the developer thought of. (They probably aren't.)
3. You can use a guide to look them all up, and spend about quarter of an hour (after having already beaten the game) to knock out all the achievements.

I am having a seriously difficult time imagining who is finding these satisfying or worthwhile. I mean, outside of someone doing an A-Z of 100% achievements challenge but who didn't want to play Untitled Goose Game or Uncharted.

Zachtronics Solitaire Collection!

Spoiler

THE ZACHTRONICS SOLITAIRE COLLECTION (ZACHTRONICS, 2022)

Finished: December 8, 2022. Playtime: 73.8 hours.

Do you like solitaire? Great! You'll probably like this.

Do you like solitaire and achievements? Great! We can soon cure you of that!

This is a good collection of eight different solitaire games. None of them are the standard solitaire games you've played a million times before. All of them have decent theming and aesthetics rather than just being "generic deck of cards against a solid green background". There's a nice range of different styles and difficulties of solitaire, meaning there's something for every taste and every mood. A few minor interface quibbles, but if you like solitaire and want something to sit back and chill with while you listen to music or podcasts, then this is a good time.

Unless you want to do the achievements.

There are 24 achievements in total, 3 for each game. Win it once, win it ten times, win it a hundred times. And it has to be said, none of these are that bad, on their own. Playing a hundred games of solitaire is not that many games of solitaire. The problem comes when you try to do all of them. You know how in some games, there's one achievement that's a little bit grindy, but it's not awful, so you just spend the time to get through it and go your merry way? This is like that, except that once you finish it, you have to do the same thing again seven more times. 800 games of solitaire is a lot of solitaire. It is more solitaire than anyone should reasonably play in a short time period. So the 70 or so hours that I played this ended up being about 30 hours of fun followed by 40 hours of bloody-minded stubbornness to get me to 100%.

If you do decide to get this, please don't be like me. Don't try to power through and get all the achievements in a month or two. That way lies madness. Instead, take your time with it. Let the achievements come in their own time. It will be much more pleasant.

Chrono Trigger!

Spoiler

CHRONO TRIGGER (SQUARE ENIX, 2018/1995)

Finished: December 11, 2022. Playtime: 41.6 hours.

What can I possibly say about Chrono Trigger that hasn't been said already? If, through some miracle, you have never played it but are in any way interested in either JRPGs or SNES-era retrogaming then you really should go and play it.

The Steam port is pretty good. I never played the SNES original because basically none of the SNES's great library of RPGs were ever released in Europe, but I had previously played (and still own) the DS remake, and I don't regret dropping the money for the Steam version so I could play it on a bigger screen. Yeah, the mouse and keyboard controls are a complete disaster, but they're easily avoided by just using a controller. And yeah, there were a few stability issues and crashes, but the auto-saves were robust enough that I never lost any amount of progress that I cared about.

And like its mid-nineties beloved time travel game sibling Day of the Tentacle, which I've also talked about in this thread, this has the problem of being a remake of a game that was originally made before achievements started to be a thing. And while Day of the Tentacle failed by trying too hard to come up with achievements that just weren't there, Chrono Trigger failed by not trying hard enough. There are only 13 achievements here, one for getting each ending. Which means you don't get any achievements until you actually beat the game. And then you do a second playthrough in NG+, branching off save files to do all the different endings, and get the other 12.

There's nothing that's wrong with these achievements, btu there are so many more that could easily have been added if they wanted this to feel like something other than a low-effort port. Arrive in each time period. Recruit each character. Do all the optional side quests. Fight Spekkio. Get a given score on the racing mini-game. Be found not guilty at the trial. Perform all the triple techs. And so on. So much potential that they just couldn't be bothered with.

Still a great game, though.

 

On 10/26/2022 at 4:40 AM, Integrity said:

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.

I don't suppose you happen to remember the correct configuration for this, do you? I'm thinking of making this one of my next achievement hunts, and don't want to go the wrong way.

[Integrity]

13 minutes ago, lenticular said:

don't suppose you happen to remember the correct configuration for this, do you? I'm thinking of making this one of my next achievement hunts, and don't want to go the wrong way.

i do - it's A-B-C .B-C-A, C-A-B, in the order they're presented to you in the interface, across three playthroughs.

 

18 minutes ago, lenticular said:

UNPACKING (WITCH BEAM, 2021)

i can easily vibe with 'it was a good time until i went for completion and then it fucking sucked' honestly

 

19 minutes ago, lenticular said:

THE ZACHTRONICS SOLITAIRE COLLECTION (ZACHTRONICS, 2022)

yeah that sounds like my experience with mobius front cribbage, but a whole game - god bless you for sticking it out, i salute you.

 

19 minutes ago, lenticular said:

CHRONO TRIGGER (SQUARE ENIX, 2018/1995)

chrono trigger is an interesting game for me because i liked it a lot but just stopped playing it for no reason about 2/3 of the way through. i don't quite get how people hold it up as the peak of jrpgs foreverially from now onwards, but i still enjoyed all my time with it. 

the achievements for it, by your account, sound really shitty, so good on you for getting them. it's really demoralizing to have achievement sets like that.

[Interdimensional Observer]

47 minutes ago, Integrity said:

chrono trigger is an interesting game for me because i liked it a lot but just stopped playing it for no reason about 2/3 of the way through.

Happens to me all the time with JRPGs. And with games in general. Even if I like or downright enjoy the game, with only minor and tolerable flaws, I still have issues finishing basically everything.😆 It annoys the heck out of me b/c it bloats my backlog with incompletion. Consider yourself lucky if this has only happened once to you.

47 minutes ago, Integrity said:

i don't quite get how people hold it up as the peak of jrpgs foreverially from now onwards

Reminds me that I had read a book on languages explaining how the canon of Greek literature that the Greeks themselves complied back in Antiquity, is basically the same narrow list of classics that has been prescribed to this very day or close to it. If Aristotle and the typical 1900s classics professor could assign the same syllabus, Chrono Trigger enduring as the proclaimed Zenith of JRPGs in the 2020s is no miracle.

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

There's nothing that's wrong with these achievements, btu there are so many more that could easily have been added if they wanted this to feel like something other than a low-effort port. Arrive in each time period. Recruit each character. Do all the optional side quests. Fight Spekkio. Get a given score on the racing mini-game. Be found not guilty at the trial. Perform all the triple techs. And so on. So much potential that they just couldn't be bothered with.

Why though?

First, I get your point. The techs, the trial, I could see those being

But, I'm one of those people who don't see too much of a point to achievements. I like the silly ones and the ones with quippy names that reference things, and I made a failed serious attempt to get the Bushido ingame achievement in Surviving Mars, but I have no issues ignoring these things. Isn't progressing the story and getting to Prehistory b/c it's a mandatory part of the story the only incentive you need to do it? The fact that """games""" exist which are basically cheap pay-to-earn platinums, makes it easy to load up on fake trophies if one is so desperate for appearances' sake ruins their trustworthiness if you're trying to discern how "accomplished" a fellow gamer is. -And while it's nice to for a game to provide some ideas of goals to reach, since some/most of us need that to varying extents, there is also the case for gamers to be free to define what they consider accomplishment on their own terms.

Not having more achievements isn't exactly wasted "potential" to me. It's a lack of lace trim on your fancy window curtains if that. That's all. Just my perspective.🙂

Edited December 12, 2022 by Interdimensional Observer

[Integrity]

19 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

But, I'm one of those people who don't see too much of a point to achievements.

so, to put it gently, why the fuck are you posting in this thread about achievements, op? i know it's fun to share perspectives and all but this thread is literally about getting achievements and the satisfaction therein. dropping in to post some smug-ass shit about how you don't feel that the achievements dragged an experience down is massive goon shit here

[Interdimensional Observer]

11 minutes ago, Integrity said:

so, to put it gently, why the fuck are you posting in this thread about achievements, op? i know it's fun to share perspectives and all but this thread is literally about getting achievements and the satisfaction therein. dropping in to post some smug-ass shit about how you don't feel that the achievements dragged an experience down is massive goon shit here

I didn't mean it with any harshness behind it, I'm not going to criticize how others' play their games. I do enjoy reading other peoples' playlogs -which is why I've been looking through this topic- and I haven't minded seeing all the talk of achievements.

I just felt like once -and just once and never again- couching it in language that I thought showing signs of my consideration of others, that calling a lack of sufficient achievements "wasted potential", was a tad odd to me personally.

Okay, maybe the initial "why though?" was too much. But was my wording of the rest not sufficiently countering that?

I'll shut up now, sorry.

Edited December 12, 2022 by Interdimensional Observer

[Integrity]

11 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

But was my wording of the rest not sufficiently countering that?

it wasn't. you brought up several strawmen in your post that make it very clear you have disdain for achievements as a concept that make the whole thing discountable without too much work from me here. you say you meant no harshness, but you gave zero ground at all in the initial post - it reads only as backing up because you got called out on making a shitty statement that you didn't expect to be told was a shitty statement, simple as.

  e:

11 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

I'll shut up now, sorry.

then maybe don't post, dude

Edited December 12, 2022 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

Slotted in Fit for a King as the F in my list. Without really thinking. That was Fell Seal's slot. But honestly, basically all that was left in Fell Seal was a bunch of grinding with a monster party, so not really much of a loss... I'd 100%ed the game in terms of content. Anyway, FFAK's conceit is basically that it's Ultima, but you play Henry VIII and can act in a debauched and brazen fashion as you, er... well, it basically turns into a collectathon, to find all the stashed money you need to acquire everything. Which isn't necessary, but in lieu of a clearer endgame - and with the game being so short! - it feels kind of churlish to go for anything less. Which is an issue, because, well...

My suspicion initially was that FFAK was a cute concept that would struggle not to outlive its welcome. It did outlive its welcome, but only because I was going for full completion; and full completion pretty much completes your whole achievement log. 2.3 hours, of which I enjoyed about one and a half, because the collectathon aspect is... finding about 80% of it is enjoyable, finding the rest is really tedious. It feels very much like a game jam kind of experience. Base price is ... decidedly enthusiastic, but if you pick it up on a heavy sale and commit to going to finish the game the moment it stops being fun, it's a good time and the essentially two jokes won't have time to get old.

I feel like that's going to be the story with a lot of my alphabet. I don't have the patience in me to grind the shit out of a bunch of games, so I'll probably end up picking up a lot of minuscule indie titles I wouldn't usually bother with and exploring them. For some of them, that'll inevitably mean trying to squeeze blood from a stone; but that's a course hazard with this kind of activity generally, isn't it?

[lenticular]

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

i do - it's A-B-C .B-C-A, C-A-B, in the order they're presented to you in the interface, across three playthroughs.

Sweet, thanks. That will save me some hassle.

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

yeah that sounds like my experience with mobius front cribbage, but a whole game - god bless you for sticking it out, i salute you.

There are few forces in this universe as strong as spite and stubbornness. With both of them, I am unstoppable.

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

chrono trigger is an interesting game for me because i liked it a lot but just stopped playing it for no reason about 2/3 of the way through. i don't quite get how people hold it up as the peak of jrpgs foreverially from now onwards, but i still enjoyed all my time with it. 

Agreed. I think it still holds up well today, and I think that there's a solid argument to be made that it is the best JRPG for the time that it was made, but in terms of absolute quality, I do think that other more recent JRPGs have surpassed it, simply in terms of being able to do so much more thanks to a quarter century of technological advances. I'd call something like Dragon Quest XI a pretty unambiguously better game than Chrono Trigger. Though I will say that I'm an absolute sucker for time travel stories, which certainly helps bias me in favour of Chrono Trigger more than it necessarily deserves.

9 hours ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Not having more achievements isn't exactly wasted "potential" to me. It's a lack of lace trim on your fancy window curtains if that. That's all. Just my perspective.

Not going to go into this in detail because most of what needed saying has already been said, but I want to clarify one point. When I spoke of wasted potential I do not mean "there was potential for Chrono Trigger to be a good game but because it phoned in the achievements it has wasted that potential and is now a bad game". What I actually meant was "Chrono Trigger is a good game. On top of that, it also had the potential to have a good and interesting set of achievements, but it wasted that potential and instead has a mediocre to bad set of achievements." I was talking about potential for the game's achievements only. Not for potential in any larger sense.

6 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

I feel like that's going to be the story with a lot of my alphabet. I don't have the patience in me to grind the shit out of a bunch of games, so I'll probably end up picking up a lot of minuscule indie titles I wouldn't usually bother with and exploring them. For some of them, that'll inevitably mean trying to squeeze blood from a stone; but that's a course hazard with this kind of activity generally, isn't it?

I feel you. A friend who knows I'm doing this challenge recommended me a game for it last night. Weaves of Fate. I don't have a W yet and it's a little indie game that he says only took him 2.5 hours to get 100% on. And the temptation is strong. I'm planning to at least look at some other W titles before I take that road, but knowing I have a fallback is going to make me less inclined to be excessively stubborn on any of them.

[Integrity]

10 hours ago, Parrhesia said:

Fit for a King

makes me glad for some reason that we have fit for a king and long live the queen on our respective lists

[Integrity]

On 12/11/2022 at 8:52 PM, Interdimensional Observer said:

Reminds me that I had read a book on languages explaining how the canon of Greek literature that the Greeks themselves complied back in Antiquity, is basically the same narrow list of classics that has been prescribed to this very day or close to it. If Aristotle and the typical 1900s classics professor could assign the same syllabus, Chrono Trigger enduring as the proclaimed Zenith of JRPGs in the 2020s is no miracle.

i was grouchy about the whole dumbass achievement takes that i totally missed this - dude, do you know literally nothing about how literature is handled? the equivalence of the clouds and chrono trigger is absolutely fucking insane, and if you're using it as a genuine question says far more about the state of video games that it stagnated over the course of like twenty years instead of over the course of like two thousand, holy shit lmao

[lenticular]

STARDEW VALLEY (CONCERNED APE, 2016)

Finished December 15, 2022. Playtime: 703.7 hours.

Stardew Valley is one of my favourite games of all time. But I would bet good money that literally everyone who reads this post has heard of it and either played it or decided that it's not for them and they have no interest in playing it. Which means there is no point in my talking about the game. However, my journey to 100% completion was interesting enough that I want to talk about it.

There are 40 achievements for Stardew Valley. I got my first achievement on March 9, 2016. I got up to 38 achievements on 17 December, 2017. Then I got my 39th achievement on 14 December, 2022 and finally grabbed the last achievement on 15 December, 2022. This is pretty unusual in and of itself, btu not unprecedented. I have a few games with achievement dates that look like that. What it normally means is that I played the game a bunch, got most of the achievements, then lost interest, didn't play for years, and then finally came back to finish off the last couple. But that's not what's happened here. As I said, Stardew Valley is one of my favourite games of all time. I think I've played it to some degree in every year since it released. And I would guess that I had something like 200 hours in the game when I hit 38/40 achievements, before getting to 40/40 at about 700 hours. So what's going on.

Well, of the 40 achievements, there are 37 that I would characterise as being stuff that you get just by playing Stardew Valley. Sure, some of them are considerably more difficult or time consuming than others, but they're all along the same line. They ask you to do things that you're gong to do anyway if you play enough. That leaves only three remaining. Two of these three are for success in a specific mini-game. If you go into the saloon in Stardew Valley, you can find an arcade machine, and you can actually play it. The game is a twin-stick shooter which plays completely unlike anything else in Stardew Valley, is occasionally janky, and is actually legitimately tough. One of Stardew Valley's achievements asks you to beat this game. Another asks you to beat it without losing a single life. These have been achieved by respectively 1.6% and 1.0% of all players, making them the third rarest and the rarest of the game's achievements. Back in 2017, I managed to beat the minigame and earn the first of the achievements, but I decided that I just wasn't good enough to have a realistic shot of beating it without losing a life. 100% achievements was a lost cause. It just wasn't going to happen for me.

Time passed. I played a bunch more Stardew Valley. Found a bunch of other things to do. New content dropped for the game, and I played that too. But 100% was still the impossible dream. And then the 1.5 patch came out at the end of 2020, and added a new feature where you could leave the arcade machine part way through your game, come back to it later, and carry on where you left off. And this opened up a new possibility: savescumming. I made a mental note of this at the time, but never got around to trying for the deathless run until just recently. And with savescumming, I managed it without too much difficulty. It took me maybe about an hour a day, for 4 or 5 days, something like that.

And with that, I was at 39/40 achievements. The final one being, essentially, the closest thing that Stardew Valley has to the evil route. See, for anyone who isn't aware, a big part of the plot of Stardew Valley is about a conflict between, on the one hand, a quaint and idyllic rural community and the nature spirits that watch over them, and on the other hand, the completely amoral profiteering megacorp that is looking to exploit the heck out of them all. And the game gives you the choice: which of the two do you want to side with? And, of course, most people choose to side with the local community against the megacorp. Because of course they do. Not that there's anything wrong with just wanting to greedily make as much money as you possibly can in a video game, but if that's what someone wants, why did they choose to pick up Stardew Valley, of all games? It would be like trying to play Hearts of Iron and complaining that the whole game was too hawkish and bellicose.

But the route exists, and it has an achievement, and I had never done it, partly because most people don't (only 3.9% of all players have the achievement) and partly because I'm a bleeding heart. And anyway, I never felt compelled to do it for the achievement, because it wasn't as if it would put me up to 100%. Up until it would. At which point, I finally sat down to do it, and picked up that achievement too, the very next day. It's super easy if you have the sort of game knowledge that comes from having sunk 700 hours into a game.

[Integrity]

hey my buddy who's been doing this with me actually has stardew on his shelf too, and i've been tempted to make it a project for me sometime. maybe this is a big 2023 hours inspiration?

9 hours ago, lenticular said:

It would be like trying to play Hearts of Iron and complaining that the whole game was too hawkish and bellicose.

to! be! fair! a big problem with hearts of iron 4 imo, it's far too bellicose - can hardly have a good border scrap in paraguay without the guy you're invading swearing absolute fealty to the axis powers, and now the war won't end even if you occupy all of paraguay, so now you're in the forever war, so you invade bolivia and they swear up with comintern, and now what the hell

[Original Alear]

On 12/13/2022 at 11:53 PM, Integrity said:

and if you're using it as a genuine question says far more about the state of video games that it stagnated over the course of like twenty years instead of over the course of like two thousand, holy shit lmao

Well u know in some ways it's harder to not stagnate in 2022 due to (possibly) an increased awareness of what's already out there in the "it's been done" world.

So anyway I have 100% achievements for Ys VI: Ark of the Napishtim. I don't want to write a full journal on my thoughts on that game, but I do have something to share. The mysterious thing about this game's play statistics on steam is that 33.2% of players have the achievment for defeating the penultimate boss of the game, and 34.2% of players have the achievement for beating the final boss of the game. I'm not sure if this is from cheating or what, but it's true that in Ys Origin, there are players who beat the first boss of the game in boss rush mode in like 3 seconds, which I'm pretty sure is impossible without cheating or glitching. Detective dipshit is no longer on the case tho.

Finally, I don't think Chrono Trigger is that great as a game. Maybe if u do low level or something it's interesting, but I don't even think there's an esape option from random encounters and there are lots of encounters ur required to run into. I do like it, especially the part where you're in Zeal or whatever it's called, but I think FF6-10 and 12 are better. Ya I include FF8 in that, you may now hate my guts for liking that game.

[Integrity]

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

[lenticular]

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

hey my buddy who's been doing this with me actually has stardew on his shelf too, and i've been tempted to make it a project for me sometime. maybe this is a big 2023 hours inspiration?

I would recommend it. The achievements are actually pretty good, generally. They mostly strike the right balance of coming in at a decent pace but not too quick, and with the hardest ones being challenging enough to be interesting but not so hard and grindy as to be frustrating. Provided that you actually like the core Stardew Valley gameplay, and you're good enough at twin stick shooters to beat the minigame, doing the achievements is a good.

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

to! be! fair! a big problem with hearts of iron 4 imo, it's far too bellicose - can hardly have a good border scrap in paraguay without the guy you're invading swearing absolute fealty to the axis powers, and now the war won't end even if you occupy all of paraguay, so now you're in the forever war, so you invade bolivia and they swear up with comintern, and now what the hell

You know, I can't even argue that. When you put it like that, you are right, I am wrong, and HoI4 is far too bellicose. What I meant was that buying SDV specifically to be a hypercapitalist is a lot like buying HoI so you can do a pacifist Switzerland run. But that wasn't what I said.

5 hours ago, Original Johan Liebert said:

Finally, I don't think Chrono Trigger is that great as a game. Maybe if u do low level or something it's interesting, but I don't even think there's an esape option from random encounters and there are lots of encounters ur required to run into. I do like it, especially the part where you're in Zeal or whatever it's called, but I think FF6-10 and 12 are better. Ya I include FF8 in that, you may now hate my guts for liking that game.

The only one of those that I've played is FF7, and I pretty much hated it. Honestly, I've only played three mainline FF games (7, 13, 15) and I didn't like any of them. As far as I'm concerned, the best Final Fantasy game is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life As A King. And if you're getting hate for liking FF8, I'm getting more hate for saying that I like FFCC:MLAAK way better than FF7. I do intend to get around to trying FF6 at some point, though.

For Chrono Trigger, though, there aren't any random encounters. Even the most basic mook fights are in set locations, and mostly have the enemies appear on the map where it's often possible to dodge them. The good side of that design is that it means that there's no need to grind, and you don't get into the tedium of being interrupted by endless random encounters when you're just trying to go from point A to point B. The down side is that it's difficult to go much faster than the pace the game prescribes for you. If the general pacing that it offers works for you, then it's great; if you want something either faster or slower, then I can imagine it being frustrating.