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

[Integrity]

SNIPER ELITE V2 (REBELLION, 2012)

Finished: 22/8/21. Playtime: 26.1 hours.

Shooting Nazis is rarely a bad thing. Hell, even in Call of Duty: WW2, shooting and tricking Nazis was the fun part. Sniper Elite is the ultimate realization of that goal.

There's not terribly much to say about the game beyond that, honestly. My favorite bit of gaming journalism ever published salutes the 7/10 action game, where everything goes by breezily and frictionlessly and you just have a good time for eight to ten hours, and Sniper Elite is a franchise dedicated to that ideal. Solid shooting, solid levels, gory Nazi explosions. If you want that, you'll like it. Only downside, such as it is, is that the campaign takes a break from shooting Nazis to make you shoot Soviets instead. Later games in the franchise would address this disgusting oversight.

The achievements existed in three packs.

The campaign achievements were straightforward - beat the game on the top difficulty (imaginatively called 'Sniper Elite') and do a few tricks along the way, like waiting to blow up a bridge until a tank is on it, or not getting detected at all in a stealth mission.

The DLC challenge pack achievements were nightmarish. Each of the three missions had one trivial and one absolutely fuckular achievement.

• Neudorf Outpost tasked you with sabotaging a base; you can fairly trivially do it without alerting anyone for the first achievement, and then the second requires you to kill six smoking soldiers. Only about eight soldiers on the map smoke as part of their routine, it's completely random when they do it, and once alerted by anything they will never resume the pattern that allows them to smoke again. You have to play absolutely immaculately and stay in the right positions, sometimes for a long time, to be able to pick these guys off.
• Landwehr Canal tasked you with assassinating a group of three Nazi generals. You rig the room they're meeting in with explosives and, trivially, wait for a long time for them to finish their meeting so that you kill them all at once. Furthermore, there are five enemy snipers overwatching the city - you have to kill all of them without any of them ever, for a second, seeing you. And, since the map objective is still live, you're on a timer, because if the generals meet and you're not nearby, you'll fail the mission.
• Saint Pierre had you raid a weapons cache in a church and then shoot up a whole bunch of Nazis. Trivially, if boringly, you can rack up a total enemy kill distance of 4km by staying far away and nickel-and-diming 250m shots where you can. On the other hand, you also have to kill every single one of the thirteen patrolling guards that are hunting you in the first part of the map, without ever being seen by any of them. Some patrol fixed paths, some roam randomly, all will investigate if they see you or a body for a second or hear anything out of the ordinary. And if they do, you're cooked. Restart. This was one of the hardest achievements I've ever done, genuinely.

The multiplayer achievements were all part of a two-player-mandatory co-op mode. Not too bad, if a little grindy - one required victory in 10 games of Bombing Run, a mode with only three maps and where you'll get every other achievement within two - but these came with a huge issue. Nobody on my friends list who I'd talked to since my Team Fortress 2 days (you know, 2008) had the game. Typically that's not an issue - I'll wait for a sale and buy a cheeky copy for one of my close buddies and say 'hey play coop with me for a few hours please' - but Sniper Elite V2 got a remaster. And the original was removed from the Steam store. In a panic, I checked all my friends who had the game idle in their libraries, untouched. I found out that @Freohr Datia, my lovely wife and generally non-FPS gamer, had gotten it for free on a lark during a giveaway like six years ago and had never touched it. Graciously, she installed it and suffered some early-'10s good-enough cooperative Nazi shooting with me for about six hours.

My recommendation for the game is pretty meaningless, since it's literally unavailable, but assuming the remaster is about the same then yeah, if you just wanna click heads for eight hours for a fiver, you can do a hell of a lot worse.

[Integrity]

WOLFENSTEIN: THE NEW ORDER (MACHINE GAMES, 2014)

Finished: 5/10/21. Playtime: 23.3 hours.

I guess I really didn't have enough Nazi shooting there. The Wolfenstein reboots may be some of my favorite shooters ever made, even if The New Colossus is ...deeply flawed, to say the least. The New Order is a superb game, though, nearly without flaw and it's frankly a crime that its eight-way lean system hasn't be cribbed by every single cover-based shooter in the last eight years. I adored The New Order when I first played it when it was new, and I adored it again when I replayed it last year to put it on the shelf as a vanity project. It's one of those weird things where I don't have too much to say because you can list a bit of the game and I'll go yeah loved that bit.

Straightforward achievements here, too. Beat the campaign on ÜBER, which wasn't too much of a chore (no Mein Leben here), gather all collectibles and do all the challenges, neither of which was too much of a chore - a few challenges were thorny, like killing multiple guys with a thrown-back grenade, but no individual thing that took more than fifteen or so minutes of concerted effort. 

The New Order remains nearly the gold standard in FPS redesigns, only maybe beaten out by Doom (2016). Incredible game, very much worth the time. We'll see if The Old Blood or (God forbid) The New Colossus appear here later.

[Integrity]

GENERATION ZERO (SYSTEMIC REACTION, 2019)

Finished: 14/10/21. Playtime: 68.6 hours, maddeningly.

Generation Zero is a really weird game. It wants to be a survival-action-maybe-a-little-gentle-horror coop open world shooter, and it's pretty good at that, but I found it worked best for me as a quiet solo walking simulator with robots and guns. The first Stranding-type game, if you will.

The premise is that the robot uprising swept over 1980s Sweden, leaving devastation in its wake, and you have to rummage through the remains and avoid (or kill) the robots while you scavenge. As a basic gameplay loop, it's fairly compelling - you start out properly underpowered and outgunned and have to play very smart, using tricks and traps to conserve your precious bullets and placing shots very carefully when you can. The gameplay curve is bizarre from there, though - the midgame sees you variously vastly outstripping the robots and then being stomped into the fucking dirt by bigger ones and then destroying those in swathes too, and it isn't really clear without outside resources what things are working and what things aren't. In the lategame, even with the best stuff you can get, the largest robots are immense damage sponges even to neutralize a component or so, let alone to kill.

Fortunate, then, that the (genuinely impressive) robot hitbox data is all contained in game! Problem is, it's contained in well-concealed blueprint collectibles all over the world, and the locations of those don't at all correspond to where you'll be encountering the robots. It's frustrating, because all of the data necessary for Generation Zero to be a tremendously satisfying game - crafting recipes, enemy blueprints, etc. - is all in the world, just not when or where you need it. There's just one more pass of item placement, and making the blueprints more accessible somehow, that the game needed. The shooting feels great, the damage feedback is very good when you know what to look for, and it's not too hard to overlook the overtuning of some lategame (and DLC) enemies, but there's just this one hurdle too much to Get to that step. I loved my time vibing in post-apocalyptic Sweden, and even at the game's most tedious or overtuned never was having a bad time, but it's a hard game to recommend to people on merit alone.

Platinum was... whew. A main campaign (and two DLC ones) to complete and a bevy of sidequests, then you're tasked with gathering every instance of no fewer than six different categories of collectible, some with in-game effects and some just to collect, across a very large world where you're both not particularly fast and not particularly able to handle a fight in open ground. I was only half-joking when I called it the first Stranding-type game, given what an unbelievable amount of walking you have to do for 100% collectibles. But it's walking through a very pretty, very atmospheric Swedish island, and all sorts of little things like a view of the mainland or a transmission from a Russian warship (go fuck yourself) to give you little ooh and ahh moments. By the time you've done all of that, it's just a few little cleanup challenges which are fairly difficult - a 300 meter killing shot is legitimately hard to make in one of the three spots in the game you can even get a 300 meter sight line on a target you can kill in one shot, and a ski slope speedrun challenge is already very difficultly tuned without considering that a robot might come and screw your run. The road to 100% Generation Zero is long and unforgiving, but I found it to be ultimately very rewarding.

There's a few multiplayer-only achievements, which I got completely by accident the first time I played the game with my boy Jim, before I'd even thought about going all the way solo. My experience with multiplayer is that it makes things quite a lot less difficult, but not less atmospheric, so if someone here's done a deep multiplayer campaign with friends maybe they can chime in. I played maybe two sessions with that group and then they moved on to do other things and I finished the whole game myself, ope.

Like I said earlier, it's a hard game to recommend, but a game I really liked while I was playing it. There's a lot of good in the game that just isn't quite put together in quite the right way, and it's a fascinating little thing in that.

[Integrity]

WARGROOVE (CHUCKLEFISH, 2019)

Finished: 20/10/21. Playtime: 110.7 hours.

I've never jived with Advance Wars, particularly. Days of Ruin was a LAN classic when my boy Jim would come to sleep over when we were teenagers, and I played it once and enjoyed it and never went back to try it again. My attempts in later years to play Dual Strike and (very briefly) Advance Wars 2 have ended in a kind of tepid set the game down and never touch it again. Something about the games just does not hold my interest at all.

On the other hand, I piped nearly five days of my life into Wargroove, and I consider it time well spent. It's a lot of little things that it iterates on - the crit system, being completely conditional and not random at all, is superb and puts just a little more shine on the core gameplay loop. The factions are nothing but cosmetic, but they're different enough visually to tickle the right part of my little simian brain in a way Advance Wars couldn't. Hell, just the whole aesthetic of the game kept me going in general, down to the little things like the transport ship guys tapping their feet all the time. Everyone's having a good time. The campaign's beefy, rarely tedious, and only occasionally unfair. The penultimate mission, oddly, is the absolute horseshit of it all - the missions before and after are both fun and fair. If I'd just played this for the campaign, I think I would have left pretty satisfied all told.

Achievements were straightforward, but took a long time. S-ranks on every campaign map wasn't a too nasty, a few maps aside; I got about 60-odd% S-ranks just playing through blind. The bulk of what was left was completing Every puzzle (find lethal on the enemy commander in 1 turn, about 30 of these) and completing Every arcade run. Arcade mode was actually a quiet highlight of the game - a short run of maps of increasing difficulty with a tiny story behind it, one for every commander. Just getting through all of these on Hard took a long time, but I was always enjoying myself during it. They made a great background task to the old Praetorium in Final Fantasy 14, side monitor Wargroove while the dumb nerds talked about whatever bullshit was going on. There was a single multiplayer achievement for winning a single multiplayer match, but coop worked just as well.

All told, Wargroove ended up being exactly what I always wanted Advance Wars to be, for whatever reason. Maybe I'll never put my finger on quite why that was, but that's fine too. Thanks, Wargroove.

[Interdimensional Observer]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

My attempts in later years to play Dual Strike and (very briefly) Advance Wars 2 have ended in a kind of tepid set the game down and never touch it again. Something about the games just does not hold my interest at all.

On the other hand, I piped nearly five days of my life into Wargroove, and I consider it time well spent.

 

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

All told, Wargroove ended up being exactly what I always wanted Advance Wars to be, for whatever reason. Maybe I'll never put my finger on quite why that was, but that's fine too. Thanks, Wargroove.

For me it was the opposite. I don't quite regret buying Wargroove, and I did finish the campaign (well, not the secret final missions), yet it wasn't anywhere near as addictive as Advance Wars, it wasn't comfort food. I accepted that Wargroove wasn't Advance Wars and I acknowledged some nice changes from AW.

Naval units being cheaper was good because it made it more possible to integrate water warfare into maps without devouring the entire map, the addition of Amphibians made the thorny challenge of establishing beachheads a tad easier too. Knights and Golems don't dominate land warfare quite as much as Tanks Mid/Neo/Mega/War Tanks did. Properties can be untaken by non-infantry but not claimed, and infantry units have greater variety, both of which made for easier and faster decreases and increases of income. Ditching fuel and ammo made for less micromanagement and I didn't have to keep my air and naval forces close-ish to APCs anyone. -I liked all these things, in part because of how familiar I was with AW and how these were attempted solutions to old AW problems. And I liked the critical hits, the Mages packing area-healing, and the medieval fantasy aesthetic as well.

But I don't quite understand, how did it not click enough?🤔

One of the few things I can possibly tweeze out is the economy. Unit prices are on the whole deflated compared to AW, yet the average map seemed like it deflated my day-to-day income even more than that. I struggled to save funds for stronger units because I could just about output enough stuff at my income level to keep the front stable and gradually expand. Overall, compared to Advance Campaign AW2 and DoR's story (DS being too easy even on Hard and AW1 on Advance Campaign being madness I dropped it three missions in), Wargroove felt harder and I gave up any pretense of getting all the stars, especially on predeploy maps where my units were finite.

Could it have been just deflation and overall difficulty (I did turn it down to Normal, Hard was out of my reach for sure) that made the difference? I wouldn't think so. Which ends up leaving this game an enigma to me. Although I don't dislike it, I very rarely dislike a game. I'd rather blame myself in this case than the product.

[Integrity]

kinda weird that we had opposite reactions to it but both for kinda-nebulous reasons that we can try to justify post-hoc but that don't really get to the heart of it, huh

[Integrity]

QUAKE (ID, 1996)

Finished: 10/25/21. Playtime: 28.7 hours.

The award for shortest bold header possible. Five-letter title, two-letter studio.

Quake here refers to a lot of different things. It refers firstly to the surprise 2021 remaster of Quake released by Machine Games, of Wolfenstein reboot fame. That Quake refers, in turn, to 1996's Quake, the official 1997 mission packs Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity by Hipnotic [sic] and Rogue (both of which would cease to exist a few years later), the 2017 mission pack Dimension of the Past by Machine Games to commemorate Quake's 20th anniversary, and the 2021 mission pack Dimension of the Machine by Machine Games special for this remaster. That's a lotta Quakes.

Honestly, twenty-five years later, Quake is shockingly good. That's not news to a lot of people, I know, but I'm very used to people telling me how playable a game is X years later and it almost always turns out to be clunky and sluggish. Quake, in all but graphics and mouse support, could be released today - and the remaster polished the graphics a bit and added mouse support. The original game is a superb package even now, without even delving into either coop in the campaign or the famous deathmatch mode.

The mission packs are a mixed bag. Scourge of Armagon is fairly solid even by Quake standards, and fits in pretty well as 'ya want more Quake?'. Dissolution of Eternity is distinctly less good, leaning too hard into the hardcore gamer challenge style of game design to be particularly enjoyable. Dimension of the Past is a bit too huge and sprawling for its own good, and Dimension of the Machine's reach exceeded its grasp, but like in a fairly party way that I still had fun with.

Achievements were as straightforward as they get. Completing the original game and all four mission packs in singleplayer on Nightmare lands you about 70% of the bunch, finding all the secret exits and easter eggs lands you almost the rest of the way there, and you're left with a smattering of challenges. Completing E1M1 on Nightmare without firing a shot was a neat challenge and quite hard, but only took a half hour or so of attempts. Completing E4M6 on Nightmare without taking damage was a total motherfucker. The final achievement was also the only multiplayer-required one - if you're swimming and fire the lightning gun, it discharges the entire ammo supply into the entire water body you're in, killing everybody therein including you. The achievement is rewarded for surviving this, so you need a level with an invulnerability powerup, a lightning gun, and water, a combination which only one default map has. @Parrhesia graciously stood in the water and let me fry him.

It's really not hard at all to see why Quake was as successful as it was, or why it spawned speedrunning as a concept. Sometimes the simplest answer is the right one, and the simplest explanation for Quake is that it was just really fuckin' good.

[Integrity]

CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE (INFINITY WARD, 2007)

Finished: 31/10/21. Playtime: 15.2 hours.

The game that launched the modern milspec shooter. Not pictured: something to the tune of 600 hours of multiplayer logged on my Xfire account (R.I.P.)

Returning to Call of Duty 4 was a little bittersweet. All Ghillied Up is just as good as the day it came out, and One Shot One Kill is every bit as horrible as I remember. The optics on the AC-130 mission, so famous a satire on it is the most famous part of Spec Ops: The Line, have only become worse with age, but not to the degree of a No Russian or something coming up in Modern Warfare 3. The SAS side of the campaign, in general, is impressive for the time, but more than a bit tepid with modern eyes, and gets incredibly bad as it ends. Jackson's levels haven't aged a day, and Shock & Awe / Aftermath still have an immense impact even now, ignoring how absolutely blindsiding they were in 2007. It's overall regressed to a solid 8/10 campaign from the blockbuster masterpiece it was in its day, but that's still pretty respectable for a genre that tends to age like crap. Let's ignore the Quake retrospective.

The platinum was a bit of a chore. Complete the game on Veteran, get the collectibles, of course. This was notable, though, because one level (One Shot One Kill) is the only Call of Duty challenge I have ever attempted and failed. Teenage me attacked it with gusto and did the Chernobyl amusement park defense on Veteran with just his hands, his nuts, and his sheer sense of bravado. Thirty me got to the end two times out of about eighteen tries and, both times, was gunned down en route to extraction. At that point I threw up my hands, summoned the old knowledge, and camped the corner the AI couldn't see. Still works in the remaster. I still had to do this three times, being gunned down twice en route to extraction. One Shot One Kill is an awful, awful map when scaled to Veteran.

It's not all bad, though. There's some fun challenges - finish any level without ever reloading a gun, a lovely continuation from Modern Warfare 2's fun achievement. Find the secret Desert Eagle in the first level and kill five enemies from seven bullets with it. Beat All Ghillied Up wrong as a joke. Snipe the guy who makes Modern Warfare 2 happen and then go on to finish the map, creating an ideal future. These are a good bunch of fun little challenges. There's two, though, that stand out as particularly awful. The first is Weapon Master, asking you to kill an enemy with every single weapon accessible in the campaign. In theory, this is a neat idea. In practice, there are several weapons that only appear in one level - or in one spawn - and there's no tracker whatsoever on what you've bagged a kill with and without. Keep your own notes, baby!

The second is one thing I think Call of Duty 4 is absolutely to blame for in the scope of modern military video games. Dogs as a unit in a military war setting aren't strange at all. The earliest I can think of is Wolfenstein 3D (id, 1992), which almost certainly was not the first. They even creep into strategy games, being a notable unit in Command & Conquer: Red Alert (Westwood, 1996) at least and many more besides. What Call of Duty 4 does, though, is introduce vitriol towards enemy dogs. The brutal neck snap QTE, at least two characters remarking how much they hate dogs, the surprising resilience and instant kills, and finally, the achievement. Dogs. I Hate Dogs. Carrying forward into MW2 and MW3 it will become incredibly obvious that this isn't a gameplay gimmick - some guy developing for Infinity Ward really, really fucking hates dogs. And so, loathsome enemy dogs to be slaughtered became a mainstay of the most successful FPS of its time - World at War would have attack dogs aplenty, I'm faintly sure Black Ops did too. Other franchises would get in on this, and it would become the only criticism I have with no possible defense of the Wolfenstein reboots. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is a fantastic game that is sullied by the fact that a major part of it is sneaking around and shanking dogs with a rusty chunk of rebar in first person, and I fully believe that the sole recipient of blame for this is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

EDIT: the official stance of serenes forest dot net is that dogs are amazing and among the best things put on this planet by God. if you dm me on discord and ask i will send you many pictures of my dog.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

ROCKET LEAGUE (PSYONIX, 2015)

Finished: 29/11/20. Est. playtime: 600ish? hours. Played on all sorts of pads.

The one downside of going through my Steam catalog sorted by Last Played is that some games I played a lot of after getting all the achievements will be out of order. I'm currently at 685.9 hours played, haven't played it in a year, so I'm going to put a Guess down for playtime.

Rocket League is, to date, the second most-played game on my Steam account, and it's legitimate. The only thing that could possibly challenge it is all the days I sunk into Counter-Strike: Source before Steam tracked hours. No multiplayer game since Team Fortress 2's original days has captured my attention quite like it. While I've gone through three or four breakups with it of increasing finality, probably leading to this most recent one being a real 'the rocket leaguers still around are way better than me', it still holds a very dear place in my heart. I've sunk shitloads of time into Rocket League, bought skins and cars, stood by it in the transition to EGS, and at one point was a more or less respectable top 20% in the world in competitive matchmaking. I played the life out of Rocket League. I can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I love Rocket League.

I do not recommend that anybody try to get all of the achievements. It was really fairly breezy for me, honestly, but only because of past sunk effort. Rocket League's set of achievements require you to do everything in the game, and a bunch of it is just random bullshit. I couldn't imagine the pain of actually targeting and trying to do all of these achievements, relying on random drops and matchmaking, with a set that require at least one willing participant (the clan-based ones) to help you out for a handful of matches. Once again, @Parrhesia and I clowned on some Singaporeans for an hour or so.

Rocket League is absolutely one of the finest games I've ever played. I think, despite what I said earlier, that I could be convinced to pick it back up and give it another go. And maybe, some night, I'll hit the download button and crunch back into it like I never left. It's League of Legends, but socially acceptable.

[Integrity]

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.

Edited October 26, 2022 by Integrity

[Zapp Branniglenn]

*sniffs ahh is that Wolfenstein The New Odor I smell?

7 hours ago, Integrity said:

My favorite bit of gaming journalism ever published salutes the 7/10 action game, where everything goes by breezily and frictionlessly and you just have a good time for eight to ten hours,

Michael "Swimming in Sevens" Huber of the Easy Allies is another champion of the ideal. A 7 is a 10/10 to the right person in the right mood. Hard to say to what degree the meme was immortalized before that article was written, but it definitely dates back to the GameTrailers days. The Easy Allies are the only outlet I can think of with Best Seven as a category for their end of year awards show.

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

Other franchises would get in on this, and it would become the only criticism I have with no possible defense of the Wolfenstein reboots. Wolfenstein: The Old Blood is a fantastic game that is sullied by the fact that a major part of it is sneaking around and shanking dogs with a rusty chunk of rebar in first person, and I fully believe that the sole recipient of blame for this is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.

The Wolfenstein dogs are robot fascist dogs. And don't tell me dogs can't be Nazis when their defining personality trait is Unquestioning Loyalty. And dog lovers assure me that dogs always know when humans deserve a chomp. The only way for Evil to triumph is for Good Boys to do nothing. That's a MW death quote, right?

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

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.

I was made aware of this game just last week. So the characters are pre-set? Part of what I like about XCOM and Fire Emblem is the game deciding for me which units end up being good and which ones end up dead. How expansive is the character progression compared to the previous games: level ups, equipment etc? I hear they ditched base building too.

[Integrity]

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

The Wolfenstein dogs are robot fascist dogs.

the old blood dogs are literally just regular dogs. the robot dogs are from the other two games. that's why i specified the old blood.

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

So the characters are pre-set?

basically there's a stable of twelve agents from which you start with 4 (either chosen or randomly assigned) and get opportunities to draft one from a random selection (not all) of the remaining ones four times over the campaign, so at the end you'll have some combination of eight from the twelve. each agent is pretty comparable to getting an XCOM guy with their class already locked in, so there's essentially twelve classes and one representative of each. you can definitely double and sometimes triple down on Abstract Roles (e.g. the shotgunners can be used similarly if you want), but no two copies of the same dude

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

How expansive is the character progression compared to the previous games: level ups, equipment etc?

basically a sidegrade to how XCOM did it. five ranks, some give a fixed skill and some give a skill choice. each agent has a weapon (with mods), armor choice isn't really a thing, and a selection of (expanded) accessories. they added a series of Trainings that take your guys out of commission for a certain number of turns (the geoscape, such as it is, is discrete) in exchange for stat buffs or tailored skills to their kit.

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I hear they ditched base building too.

yep. doesn't really work in the game scope. they replaced it with other, mostly agent-based strategic decision making.

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

5 minutes ago, Integrity said:

the old blood dogs are literally just regular dogs. the robot dogs are from the other two games. that's why i specified the old blood.

Y´know what they say about German Sheperds and Dachshund, no?

[Integrity]

MECHWARRIOR 5: MERCENARIES (PIRANHA, 2019)

Finished: 8/7/21. Playtime: 195 hours on Steam, 50ish on EGS, I have genuinely no idea what at time of platinum. 60 hours? That seems reasonable. But that would be sort-of 110 hours thanks to EGS time. Lord knows. Missed this one in 2021 given as I've continued playing it as recently as Saturday.

I've got a longer history with the Mechwarrior franchise than I do with pretty much anything else on the planet. When I was six months or so old, I was a little piece of shit (some things never do change) and the only thing that would reliably stop me from crying was for me to sit on my dad's lap and watch him blow shit up in the original Mechwarrior for DOS. When I was five or so, I'd sit on the floor behind my dad's chair and just watch him play Mechwarrior 2, and then Mercenaries. Mechwarrior 3 arrived when I was eight, and I'd have listed it among my favorite games ever up until only five years ago, give or take. Mechwarrior 4. So when Mechwarrior 5 was announced under the wing of the guys who ran the overall pretty great Mechwarrior Online, my expectations were through the roof. This was either going to be the greatest game ever or a disappointment on the scale of Dawn of War 3.

Weirdly, it was neither. It was good! I enjoyed it! It just wasn't great. More Mechwarrior was more Mechwarrior, so I was satisfied, but after the raucous success of the turn-based Battletech adaptation from a few years prior, it was a little disappointing. Still, it kept my attention up to the first DLC launch, and that first DLC and its associated patch knocked all the little loose bits into place. The HUD looked just a little better, the weapons felt and sounded just a bit more right, there were a few more mission types and minicampaigns and biomes to shoot just a few more kinds of mech in. Heroes of the Inner Sphere was when Mechwarrior 5 became great. Two more DLCs thereafter only piled the gravy onto those potatoes, and Mechwarrior 5 in its current state has evolved into one of my favorite games ever made, if not objectively one of the best or anything.

The achievements were pretty trivial. Running the story once to the end will get you absolutely everything except about four achievements - and none of those are particularly difficult except for In The Zone. There's a mission type called Warzone where you're dropped into a (wait for it) active warzone and tasked to just create chaos as a distraction for some other military operation going on somewhere else. You're given a kill quota and, when you reach it, an evac point and a bonus for anything you kill past your quota. In The Zone requires you to get a tremendously large bonus in each of ten Warzone missions, and it's quite fun to plot out and do with friends. It would probably be annoying with the AI, though.

And that's Mechwarrior 5. Best in the series without a doubt, a strong game in its own right, and one I'm utterly incapable of being objective about in any meaningful way. At any given time I have one or two careers spinning with combinations of a few friends, and I'll probably play it again this weekend or, hell, maybe tomorrow morning.

[Integrity]

5 hours ago, Imuabicus said:

Y´know what they say about German Sheperds and Dachshund, no?

i'm scared to ask

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

5 minutes ago, Integrity said:

i'm scared to ask

German Shepards don´t go for a walk, they MARCH.

Dachshunde don´t shit, they lay mines.

[Integrity]

i regret everything

[Integrity]

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN (HANAKO, 2013)

Finished: 9/1/22. Playtime: 25 hours.

I'm not a VN kinda guy, just in general. Clicking through text boxes next to .png heads bores me pretty quickly, and there's a really easy dunk to be levied at me about also being a Fire Emblem fan, curious, participate in society, etc. but the fact remains. I had a pretty good time with Apollo Justice a million years ago and I, like many of my kind, failed an honest effort to read Fate/Stay Night for the promise of boobs later, and things haven't really gone up since then. I'm also not a Princess Maker kinda guy, not really. I've tried a few of the classics and, while I don't have any scorn for the genre, they really just weren't for me.

For some reason, Long Live the Queen overcame the odds and I jived with it completely. Sort of. I never finished it in 2013, just made it into the midgame and died three or four times and stopped playing it, but like not with any kind of prejudice. I still thought kindly on it. Then in 2022 I just said to myself one day 'why don't I ace out Long Live the Queen?'. Made a spreadsheet to keep track of outcomes here and there and resolved to crack through it without a guide as far as I could. And you know? Had a superb time with it. It kept my attention for a solid eighteen more hours, and I couldn't fulfill the original goal, having to look up when some of the achievements were supposed to pop or, in two cases, just straight up guides for it (the favor of cats and the girlfriend ones). Still, I picked it up on a sleepy Saturday morning and put it down, finished, late the following Sunday night, and keeping my attention like that is incredibly commendable.

The achievements were, largely, sleuthable within the confines of the game and really fun to strategize and aim for. They're all over the place - die in every way, get every ending, major set pieces going every which way and what, and so on - and really represent a checklist of what you've seen in the game. Browsing the wiki after packing the game away, getting all the achievements really did represent seeing basically everything. Sure, there was a scene here and a different line there that I read about on the wiki for the first time, but I really came out of the game feeling like I'd done it all and there was nothing new to squeeze out of Long Live the Queen. I really do respect a game like that.

[ping]

1 hour ago, Imuabicus said:

German Shepards don´t go for a walk, they MARCH.

Dachshunde don´t shit, they lay mines.

Where is even the funni

Like, I'm genuinely confused. This is joke-shaped, but what's the funny?

[lenticular]

On 10/24/2022 at 12:59 AM, Integrity said:

AGE OF EMPIRES (ENSEMBLE, 1997)

I played and loved this when it first came out, but haven't touched it since. And also kinda haven't had much to do with RTSs in general since. I was majorly into Dune 2, then also played a decent amount of Command and Conquer, Warcraft II, and Age of Empires... and then that was pretty much it. I poked at the genre a little after that with stuff like Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds and Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War, but never really cared about either of them. I don't actually know enough about the genre to truly have a clue what I'm talking about, but I wonder if it would be fair to call AoE something of an inflection point from the early RTS games of the mid 90s into the modern genre as it is today?

16 hours ago, Integrity said:

XCOM: CHIMERA SQUAD (FIRAXIS, 2020)

And that's now four games that you've mentioned here that I want to replay. And I agree with pretty much everything you had to say about it. For my money, Chimera Squad is great because it cuts out one of the worst aspects of modern XCOM, which is aggro management. Inching across the map bit by bit making sure that I only aggro enemies in the most beneficial-to-me way possible was never fun. But at the same time, being more reckless and accidentally aggroing two groups at once and getting slaughtered because of it was also never fun. Smaller engagements more or less completely killed all of that, and I for one loved it. And I also loved that my soldiers could have actual personalities and things, rather than just being "generic soldier 108" who I only care about for their stats.

45 minutes ago, Integrity said:

LONG LIVE THE QUEEN (HANAKO, 2013)

Finished: 9/1/22. Playtime: 25 hours.

I'm not a VN kinda guy, just in general. Clicking through text boxes next to .png heads bores me pretty quickly, and there's a really easy dunk to be levied at me about also being a Fire Emblem fan, curious, participate in society, etc. but the fact remains. I had a pretty good time with Apollo Justice a million years ago and I, like many of my kind, failed an honest effort to read Fate/Stay Night for the promise of boobs later, and things haven't really gone up since then. I'm also not a Princess Maker kinda guy, not really. I've tried a few of the classics and, while I don't have any scorn for the genre, they really just weren't for me.

Weirdly, I'm pretty much exactly the opposite to you on this one. I very much am someone who plays visual novels and princess maker style games, but LLtQ just didn't do it for me. I didn't hate it and don't think it's bad. It just didn't click with me, and I couldn't tell you why. Maybe I should revisit it at some point and see if it clicks better for me now than it did in 2013.

[Integrity]

34 minutes ago, lenticular said:

I wonder if it would be fair to call AoE something of an inflection point from the early RTS games of the mid 90s into the modern genre as it is today?

rts is a weird genre and i could pontificate for hours about its evolution, but aoe, besides being kinda bad, i think fits right in with the trajectory the 90s rts was taking

the way i saw it, the 90s kinda created two tracks of rts style - basebuilders and skirmishers, for lack of a better set of terminology. the originals (we're talking westwood and blizzard here) were the basebuilders, the dune 2 and the c&c and the warcraft and the starcraft. aoe (and later aoe2, aom, ron, etc.) fit right into this trajectory, with a heavy emphasis on building your economy and macro basebuilding for technologies (and some degree of defense, depending on the game).

the skirmishers, some people prefer real-time tactics but i think that doesn't really capture it, came a bit later. relic's homeworld (and to a lesser degree impossible creatures) and bungie's myth duologies (both products of precisely 1997 if i recall) are some good examples, and relic would really be the ones to shove this genre forward in the aughts with the dawns of war and the companies of hero. these are probably more what you're thinking when you say the "modern" rts, since they tend to emphasis basebuilding and tech trees far less (with myth straight up not having one, you spend points making an army before the match and that's what you get) and putting the economy directly hand-in-hand with map control. as opposed to warcraft's setting up a new town hall and maybe some towers to get peasants on a gold mine, your ability to generate income is simply your ability to project force. this also leads to them feeling more streamlined and, in some cases, less deep than the basebuilders, but it's hit or miss on whether that's really the case.

so re: the examples you brought up directly - dawn of war was when relic really made that Map Control Is Economy swap and it was deeply impactful on a subset of rtses, but the traditional train absolutely trucked on. galactic battlegrounds was actually a reskin (?) of age of empires 2 and, from memory, was a traditional rts of the 90s in every way but was kinda bad. the tradition of the 90s rts is still around - age of empires 2 definitive edition was a huge unexpected hit and has led to a renewed interest in the franchise, even spawning an age of empires 4 (weirdly, after the previous paragraph, by relic) which is itself a very modern traditional 90s rts. age of mythology is getting a complete remake as well, we just learned this yesterday. command and conquer (and red alert) just got a remaster and it's quite good as well, even if its mechanics are a bit clunky by modern standards.

to answer your question, then, i don't think aoe1 was an inflection point in the development of rts, but i do think that 1997 was a fork in the road for the genre, and aoe1 was the next step along the original path.

so the question is really what are you looking for in an rts? the game exists out there; if you want something in the absolute high apm command and conquer vein, it's still around. if you want something in the age of empires or total annihilation veins, they're both still around. there's a lot of options floating about and the genre seems to be making a bit of a comeback after kind of dying in the twilight of the obama administration.

hell, forgotten empires are making an xbox port for age of empires 2 and 4, which sounds an absolutely psychotic vanity project but i'm here for it.

55 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Weirdly, I'm pretty much exactly the opposite to you on this one.

interesting that that's pretty much the same post and sentiments as i had with the other dude earlier about wargroove. isn't the brain neat?

[Integrity]

DUKE NUKEM 3D (3D REALMS, 1996)

Finished: 11/1/22. Playtime: 19 hours.

The third of the originals, alongside Doom and Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D was the subject of so much childhood fascination for me. The maps were not only big, they were open, and they had all sorts of things you could break and changes you could make to them in-game. That sounds pretty blasé now, being as I'm basically talking about GBA Fire Emblem snags from a complexity standpoint, but in the mid-90s in a first-person shooter it was absolutely jawdropping. Later Build Engine games would do much more with the interactivity, and eventually we'd get immersive sims and the spectacle shooters of the 00s, but Duke Nukem 3D was a strangely groundbreaking game for the time, bubbling with color and personality compared to its predecessors - and even its successors.

Duke Nukem 3D has kinda aged like shit. I never made it out of Episode 1 as a kid, always wiping out in the San Andreas Fault level, and it turns out this was the best thing that could have happened for Duke's legacy. E1 is still fairly good and has some imaginative level design, but it's all downhill from there. E2 is miserable and samey, E3's dripping with some weird classic 90s racism, and the also-1996-released E4 has a few decent maps out of eleven and none of those are the final boss.

The Megaton Edition (the game has been released, on the PC, eleven separate times) contains a smattering of level packs, similar to Quake from earlier. Duke It Out In DC (Sunstorm, 1997) varies wildly between being terrible and being better than much of the base game. Duke Caribbean (Sunstorm, 1998) almost promises to be a fun time but can't quite deliver, as the game would succumb to the same overscoping issue that plagued the Quake map packs. Duke: Nuclear Winter (Simply Silly, 1998), bringing up the back of the pack, is a tremendously-bad Christmas-themed pack. None of these had anything on the core game, save for DC's smattering of non-awful levels. They're all fairly short, at least, none of them cracking four hours long.

The achievements themselves were nothing to write home about. Beat the campaigns, all of 'em, and find the secrets. The lasting saga of Duke Nukem 3D's achievements was in a single sequence of three: kill 100/250/500 players in multiplayer deathmatch. Sniper Elite V2 struck again - the Megaton Edition was unlisted on the Steam store thanks to later rereleases by good ol' daddy Pitchford, Most of nobody on my friends list even had the game, and literally nobody on my friends list had played it longer than about an hour. Once again, though, an unexpected hero emerged - @Tryhard was among the few who had the game and had never touched it, and very graciously let me shoot him in the face with a shotgun over and over again for 20 minutes.

Has society moved past the Duke? Maybe. I'm not really qualified to sus out whether Duke Nukem Forever was just uniquely terrible, if Duke Nukem was never funny and the 90s were just a cultural void, or something along a third axis entirely. What I know is that I did not particularly enjoy my time with Duke Nukem 3D and, despite only taking about three days to finish, it felt interminable at times.

[Tryhard]

2 minutes ago, Integrity said:

DUKE NUKEM 3D (3D REALMS, 1996)

Most of nobody on my friends list even had the game, and literally nobody on my friends list had played it longer than about an hour. Once again, though, an unexpected hero emerged - @Tryhard was among the few who had the game and had never touched it, and very graciously let me shoot him in the face with a shotgun over and over again for 20 minutes.

i don't even know how I had the game to begin with either

but duty called and i answered

[Integrity]

i can but salute you

[Integrity]

INFESTED PLANET (ROCKET BEAR, 2014)

Finished: 15/1/22. Playtime: 17.4 hours.

Infested Planet is a hidden gem and it's on sale for about three bucks right now so if you're interested at all go give it a whirl.

The thrust of the game is simple - it's a reduced RTS where you're tossed into command of a handful (roughly 3 to 10) marines and set to clear a randomly spawned cavern full of bugs. The map lasts about five to ten minutes, during which you'll turn the money from killing bugs into more marines, better marines, upgrades, and turrets. Then you do it again. Forever. There's no multiplayer, just one-off skirmishes, a story campaign, and a strategic campaign where the bugs develop technology to react to your onslaught on a multi-map basis. It's not a terribly deep game, but it's very engaging for its scope. One fascinating thing it does it is almost obsoletes micromanagement - for most given engagements, your marines will win or not based on strategic factors, like which direction the flow of bugs towards their objectives is taking vs. the approach vector you chose, or attributes you've bought for them like upgraded weapons or grenades, and very little on what you do with the marine once contact is made. Left alone, standing in position, a single marine can be an unapproachable tower for the bugs in the early game, only able to be overwhelmed if he's caught moving or multiple bug lines converge on him. Upgrades can keep that true for most of the campaign, until things really ramp up later.

Upgrades themselves are investments of a cash maximum, and there's no way to permanently lose money you've attained, but every dollar you spend can be refunded at some cost, usually time. Move a marine back to a captured base to send him back up to the ship for a full refund. If the bugs destroy a turret or an upgrade on the map, you can repair it via placing marines in the area and then either continue to use it or sell it for its full value. It's an interesting system that lets you make strategic mistakes and hunker down, taking some tactical losses while you recenter your focus - and this is good, because on most maps, as you conquer, the bugs get new attributes to make the remaining ones harder or add new factors for you to deal with.

Infested Planet is an RTS reduced to its most basic elements, which then set about making those most basic elements shine as brightly as they possibly can, and I think it pretty well succeeds in it. The one-minute video on the Steam page is a perfectly good, if a little goofy, showcase of the game.

Platinum wasn't an issue, and the game did not outstay its welcome. Beating the campaign, a secondary challenge each for most of the maps, and a few optional hard mode maps was sufficient to pack it away. That's pretty much all there is to say on that.

Check it out. Maybe buy it. It's cheap as anything and goes on sale pretty frequently.

Edited October 27, 2022 by Integrity