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

[Integrity]

VALKYRIA CHRONICLES (SEGA, 2008)

Finished: 1/3/21. Playtime: 70.2 hours.

I don't have more complicated feelings about many games like I do Valkyria Chronicles.

Anime Belgium in WW2 is a pretty great aesthetic for a wargame, and Valkyria Chronicles almost nails it. The cracks of HyperAnime are there, and they get prized a little bit open anytime the titular Valkyria crop up, but nothing near as much as the, uh, subsequent games will. Despite everything, I like Valkyria Chronicles' narrative, and I very, very nearly love it. This feeling goes for the whole game as well - there's so much about it that I adore, but it somehow comes up as just short of the sum of its parts. Little things like the tank controls, the CP system, and the reward structure just barely do enough to drag down a fantastic gameplay core. I want to love Valkyria Chronicles, and I almost do, and that's just a bit frustrating.

It doesn't help that Valkyria Chronicles quietly has the single worst level in TRPG history: Chapter 15b, Selvaria's Last Stand. If you've played the game, you remember it. If you haven't, picture this: you're playing a turn-based third-person shooter in a courtyard where there is an invulnerable machine gun staring down over the entire courtyard, who will begin to fire at you the second it has line of sight, which kills you in a second flat on your turn, and which also gets its own turn. You shoot at the machine gun and, instead of the usual reaction, it dodges. Every time. You can savescum for an undodgeable shot, and it knocks off a twentieth or so of its health. You get your damage-dealers, your sturmtruppen, point blank, and you can damage her in the back if you provoke it to turn around with another sturmtrupp and game the system by ending their turn immediately. You have to kill it this turn or, on its turn, it will kill multiple people.

This machine gun has unbelievably immense, engorged bazubonglers. I'm talking fuckin' bazookin' zamboozlers. The machine gun is also a proper Fire Emblem style Camus, right down to not actually being sympathetic at all but desperately aching for you to sympathize with it.

Chapter 15b is not just the nadir of Valkyria Chronicles, it is possibly the nadir of video games with guns in them.

There's nothing hard about acing Valkyria Chronicles. It's just a grind. Top ranks in every map are fairly trivial for the most part once you've leveled your scouts, and the game has a completely unscaled NG+ to devour if you're not particularly good at shooting or tactics. Mostly, it's just getting more money to buy all of the upgrades that you had no use for, which takes about two runs through the whole campaign, and then we're right back to Empire: Total War. One achievement is to kill a thousand enemies. After two campaign runs, buying everything you needed and didn't need, and all the skirmish battles for the medals, you're probably 2/3 of the way there. Time to grind the sturmtruppen grinding map for maximum overwatch kills at minimum investment until you get there!

I want to end Valkyria Chronicles on a positive note, since I really do like the game despite everything said here, so here's a funny anecdote to follow up on Bad North, Empire: Total War, and now this game. One game I briefly considered getting platinum for and ultimately decided against was one of the various Space Hulk adaptations that came out in the last ten or so years. If you're not familiar with Space Hulk, the conceit is that you're commanding a tiny squadron of big men in huge armor with larger guns to kill giant bugs infesting a derelict spaceship. On average, you can expect to kill between about 20 and 60 of them per map, which takes, give or take, 15 minutes. There's a loose outline for you.

Because this is Warhammer 40,000: Space Hulk, one achievement is to kill 40,000 bugs.

If you don't want to do the math, I did it once as a joke. If you, hypothetically, had a single Terminator on overwatch with infinite ammo and perfect accuracy and facing a one-way corridor at an infinite Genestealer spawn that made a new bug every single time the previous died and never let you take a turn, with zero input from the player, this perfect situation would run for approximately six straight days of nothing but animations playing out before you got to 40,000 kills.

[Integrity]

PROJECT WARLOCK (BUCKSHOT SOFTWARE, 2018)

Finished: 24/3/21. Playtime: 16.5 hours.

A weird thing happened in the later '10s. Boomer shooters, fast-paced frictionless FPS games directly inspired by the likes of Doom, Quake, the Build Engine, etc. came back into vogue. They never really went away, but there was a resurgence of them that persists to this day. For the better, in my opinion - the style of game lends itself to some really solid simple action.

Back in the day there was a fork off of good old Doom, called Heretic. Heretic took the framework of Doom, replaced the shotguns and chainguns with staves and wands, replaced the demons with ettins and ogres, and strapped some crude RPG elements on top. Heretic gave way eventually to Hexen (German for 'witches' or 'to conjure', contextually), one of the most fascinating games of my childhood. Hexen strapped you up with a melee weapon and one of three fantasy classes - Fighter, Cleric, Mage - and set you loose in an open-seeming fantasy world to shoot and punch and stab your way through everything, solving puzzles as you go. This was unspeakably magical to my seven-year-old ass, reading my AD&D 2nd Edition Player's Handbook and then poking at the absolutely inscrutable Hexen, trying to figure out how to get out of the first hub world. Twenty-five years later, I would pick Hexen back up, and I would discover the truth of it once and for all:

 

Hexen fucking sucks, lmao.

 

It's not just that the nostalgia failed to trip properly and give the right chemicals to the right receptors. Hexen is a mazelike game with no signposting, unbalanced gameplay, a difficulty curve that may as well not exist, and esoteric puzzles. Hexen is just no fun, despite being built on the bones of one of the best FPS games of all time and having an enjoyable basic combat loop. Hexen, and I mean this genuinely, ought to be forgotten by time.

Now we come to the synthesis of these two facts. Project Warlock rode the wave of the boomer shooter revival, and it did something utterly fascinating: it triggered the synapses that kid Ike felt playing Hexen, not the ones that adult Ike did.

Having beaten it several times now? Yeah, it's actually completely linear. You have guns instead of maces and shields, and actual spells instead of guns masquerading as spells, and the spells are largely kind of underwhelming. The puzzles are largely absent or simplistic where they occur. The points of comparison between Hexen and Project Warlock are barely even superficial. But the fact stands, somehow: playing Project Warlock made me feel exactly how I felt when I was seven, trying to figure out how Hexen worked. It's rare, on the bright side of thirty, to find a game that captures that kind of magic, and Project Warlock needs to be enthusiastically shouted from the rooftops for pulling it off. Was it a perfect game? Nah. Nowhere near. There's one incredibly shit boss fight, some mazey levels that ache to be iterated on just one more time, and a questionable upgrade balance on your guns. But I can't even bring myself to criticize those, not in good faith.

Acing it was nothing short of a dream. Minor secrets dot the whole game, finding any fifty (out of way more than fifty) polishes you off. Finishing the game on Hard is not a particular chore. There's a single major secret per act that is just a cheeky little reference to laugh at and is a little better hidden - I had to pull up a guide for these. Finally, you have Hardcore difficulty. Hardcore puts you on regular Hard, but with no continues. There's a maybe-unintended interaction where, if you quit the game through the menu, you can only resume from the beginning of the level, which I think elevates this significantly. It's not a true ironman run anymore, it's a bronzeman - it's up to you whether you think you're in good enough shape to push on or if you want to mulligan and go back to the start of the level. The only thing that can truly end your run is your own overconfidence. I only quit out one time during the entire Hardcore run, but I found this to be an absolutely fantastic difficulty mode for a roughly four hour long game.

Project Warlock rules. There's a sequel that not only promises, but seems to be delivering, to be everything the first was and more. I'm giving it a few more iterations of early access before I dig into it, but holy hell I've rarely been excited more for a game.

[Integrity]

SLAY THE SPIRE (MEGA CRIT, 2019)

Finished: 25/3/21. Playtime: 225.8 hours.

I would like to point out that I picked up, played, and put away Project Warlock in the course of trying to get a single Slay the Spire achievement.

Slay the Spire is the gold standard of deckbuilders, full stop. This is, very possibly, as good as it gets. Anyone with a passing interest in the genre needs to play Slay the Spire. There's nothing else to say in review, the game is just great.

The achievements mix up being fucked up hard and being fucked up random, and some of them occupy the entire space. Completing the true ending is a sincere challenge which I was proud of myself for managing. Once this is done, you're on the hook for beating the game, give or take, eighteen more times with increasing handicaps. Ascension 20 was one of the hardest things I've ever beaten in a game, and the only reason Ascension 18 wasn't was because Ascension 19 existed to also be superseded by Ascension 20. Some platinums can be earned through perseverance and patience without truly, as one says, 'getting good'. Despite the reputation of the phrase, the Dark Souls games can, in fact, be aced with patience without ever 'getting good'. Slay the Spire cannot. You must get good. You cannot fluke your way to Ascension 20.

And that's not even where it ends. Slay the Spire expects you to fulfill all sorts of weird outside challenges. Beat a run with no equipment! Beat a run with no uncommon or rare cards! Beat a run with a deck smaller than 5! Beat the game within 20 minutes! Kill the donut boss with the eat card!

Okay, that last one isn't terribly hard. It's funny, though.

Still, it's indicative of the breadth of shit Slay the Spire expects you to pull off. Many games expect you to go either wide, doing weird little handicaps and shit, or deep, doing something on super über nightmare+ difficulty. Slay the Spire expects you to do both. It's hell to pull off, but by God, it's satisfying to have done. What a hell of a game.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

14 hours ago, Integrity said:

PORTAL (VALVE, 2007)
Continuing a trek through all-timers: man, Portal. This shit was a phenomenon in 2007. We didn't even really have memes back then, so I'll posit that Portal just invented memes whole cloth, why not.

Maybe you didn't have memes. But you think we used to post images without captions in the early 2000s? The first time I read the word "meme" was when Reddit was starting to take off. I hated the word. Why would you take 'internet culture' and turn it into something so commercial. And I was one of the incredibly small minority of people that knew the scientific definition of a "meme" from having played Metal Gear Solid 2. Nowadays I think it's a pretty brilliant word for it. As ridiculous as it still sounds to say aloud.

5 hours ago, Integrity said:

I'm sure it came across in the review portion but genuinely, Modern Warfare 2's campaign is nearly as good as it gets for this kind of game, and you really don't need context to play it. If it's the kind of thing you think you'd like, get it for a tenner on a Steam sale and enjoy it.

yeah yeah yeah, the Battle of Burger Town is a nostalgic moment and whatever. How's the grenade spam on Veteran? About how much time percentage wise of a fire fight has at least one grenade indicated on your screen? Also, is there a writeup incoming for Hotline Miami too? You can't just namedrop that and bail.

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

VALKYRIA CHRONICLES (SEGA, 2008)

Little things like the tank controls, the CP system, and the reward structure just barely do enough to drag down a fantastic gameplay core. I want to love Valkyria Chronicles, and I almost do, and that's just a bit frustrating.

I'll bet there's an alternate universe where VC gives you less CP to work with, but allows one FREE turn for all of your non-tank units. And it's just a way better game because of it. For me the most frustrating part was not knowing the exact placements of enemy units, so even with Alicia the One Woman Army, maps felt very trial and error until I've mapped out what she needs to do and how she's going to get there.

[Integrity]

1 minute ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Maybe you didn't have memes. But you think we used to post images without captions in the early 2000s? The first time I read the word "meme" was when Reddit was starting to take off. I hated the word. Why would you take 'internet culture' and turn it into something so commercial. And I was one of the incredibly small minority of people that knew the scientific definition of a "meme" from having played Metal Gear Solid 2. Nowadays I think it's a pretty brilliant word for it. As ridiculous as it still sounds to say aloud.

i disrespected channers in 2006 and i continue to do so to this day. eat shit, nerd.

1 minute ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

yeah yeah yeah, the Battle of Burger Town is a nostalgic moment and whatever. How's the grenade spam on Veteran? About how much time percentage wise of a fire fight has at least one grenade indicated on your screen?

very little, that's a world at war stereotype, and that's why world at war fuckin sucks. mw2 mostly doesn't have this issue. also, burger town wasn't any of the three marine corps maps i listed, so try again.

2 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Also, is there a writeup incoming for Hotline Miami too? You can't just namedrop that and bail.

no, because i don't have any interest in 100%ing hotline miami - i beat it once, it was pretty good but pretentious as hell, i genuinely do not get the hype around it.

3 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I'll bet there's an alternate universe where VC gives you less CP to work with, but allows one FREE turn for all of your non-tank units. And it's just a way better game because of it. For me the most frustrating part was not knowing the exact placements of enemy units, so even with Alicia the One Woman Army, maps felt very trial and error until I've mapped out what she needs to do and how she's going to get there.

i'm sorry the game didn't cater to you trying to cheese it most incredibly, but like lmfao

the thing is vc is completely playable on a normal standpoint if you're not going for the ultimate low turn rewards

if you were getting trial and error, that means you were going for the Gamer Strats with no knowledge of how the Gamer Strats actually worked, and genuinely lmao my man

[Parrhesia]

25 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I'll bet there's an alternate universe where VC gives you less CP to work with, but allows one FREE turn for all of your non-tank units. And it's just a way better game because of it. For me the most frustrating part was not knowing the exact placements of enemy units, so even with Alicia the One Woman Army, maps felt very trial and error until I've mapped out what she needs to do and how she's going to get there.

Lowmanning and scout rushing was already a terrible meta, one that 4, at least, made some good attempts to counter. Just play like a normal human, actually using your squad and their various strengths. It's not like rewards matter that much with an infinite grind.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

23 minutes ago, Integrity said:

i disrespected channers in 2006 and i continue to do so to this day. eat shit, nerd.

Buddy I was thinking of like, Funnyjunk.com. People were posting jpegs, not words. I was prowling plenty of bbs, but I have never in my life browsed something on 4chan. I don't even think you can do that ironically.

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very little, that's a world at war stereotype, and that's why world at war fuckin sucks. mw2 mostly doesn't have this issue. also, burger town wasn't any of the three marine corps maps i listed, so try again.

wow, did not expect that joke to strike a nerve. World at War isn't here and it cannot hurt you.

Let's change topics. Call of Duty games have no online achievements? That's pretty weird for this genre right? Assuming the servers are still up, would you have taken on a suite of multiplayer achievements?

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no, because i don't have any interest in 100%ing hotline miami - i beat it once, it was pretty good but pretentious as hell, i genuinely do not get the hype around it.

It's a hard game with a coked out soundtrack. If Modern Warfare 2's completionist experience is a carefully planned dish, then Hotline Miami is a fast food order. And I don't wanna cook every night, I've got things to do.

Or wait, you think people play HM for the story? Wholistic lmao. It's No More Heroes minus the anime and minigames. I'm sorry to hear you took it so seriously.

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i'm sorry the game didn't cater to you trying to cheese it most incredibly, but like lmfao

the thing is vc is completely playable on a normal standpoint if you're not going for the ultimate low turn rewards

Technically Playable but it takes several magnitudes longer, more mental exertion to decide what every unit should be doing besides catch up to the scouts, doesn't guarantee I won't lose to something in the fog of war, and you get less exp from the slower, messier clear. If it takes me three attempts or less to Alicia a map, that is still faster and more lucrative than playing the game the wrong way.

4 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

Lowmanning and scout rushing was already a terrible meta, one that 4, at least, made some good attempts to counter. 

Thank you, and congrats on the third (jesus...) sequel addressing it.

[Integrity]

are you just here to troll my thread? answer honestly

E: nah i'll engage with your dumb ass

20 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

wow, did not expect that joke to strike a nerve. World at War isn't here and it cannot hurt you.

very cool and mature, i am inclined to take you seriously after this incredible statement.

in case you take this as another 'this guy is owned' joke: i'm saying that saying someone's dumb for not taking a joke as a joke means your joke sucked, it's a societal secret

20 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Let's change topics. Call of Duty games have no online achievements? That's pretty weird for this genre right? Assuming the servers are still up, would you have taken on a suite of multiplayer achievements?

i've already taken on suites of multiplayer achievements in this thread, let alone the games to come, which you'd have known if you gave a shit and weren't just here to stir shit. cheers.

20 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

It's a hard game with a coked out soundtrack. If Modern Warfare 2's completionist experience is a carefully planned dish, then Hotline Miami is a fast food order. And I don't wanna cook every night, I've got things to do.

hotline miami is a hard game in nearly precisely the same way dark souls is, which is to say it's not actually a hard game, it masquerades as one successfully enough to dissuade people. it's a great concept for a game that fumbles its own concept, and i strongly doubt you've actually tried to ace it given what it actually entails. if you have, please feel free to detail it to the thread.

20 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Or wait, you think people play HM for the story? Wholistic lmao. It's No More Heroes minus the anime and minigames. I'm sorry to hear you took it so seriously.

check out this cool dude who cares so little about everything, he rules

what i mean by this is shut the fuck up

20 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Technically Playable but it takes several magnitudes longer, more mental exertion to decide what every unit should be doing besides catch up to the scouts, doesn't guarantee I won't lose to something in the fog of war, and you get less exp from the slower, messier clear. If it takes me three attempts or less to Alicia a map, that is still faster and more lucrative than playing the game the wrong way.

i don't think you know what magnitudes are my brother in christ

i could prime a whole discussion about the right way to play vc as the game's systems imply but frankly i don't think you're even here to care about it. i think you'd just go 'oh yeah like anyone would think of that' and keep talking shit, so i'm not going to do that.

20 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Thank you, and congrats on the third (jesus...) sequel addressing it.

this is the thing that makes me think you're just awkwardly trolling your elders for attention tbh. yeah, how dare shit improve!

Edited October 23, 2022 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

7 minutes ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

wow, did not expect that joke to strike a nerve. World at War isn't here and it cannot hurt you.

...

Technically Playable but it takes several magnitudes longer, more mental exertion to decide what every unit should be doing besides catch up to the scouts, doesn't guarantee I won't lose to something in the fog of war, and you get less exp from the slower, messier clear. If it takes me three attempts or less to Alicia a map, that is still faster and more lucrative than playing the game the wrong way.

Thank you, and congrats on the third (jesus...) sequel addressing it.

mate the point was that grenade spam was only a thing in WAW. it's not an accurate point to make about MW2.

This is basically arguing that playing FE11 without warping max-forge wing spear Caeda to the boss, followed immediately by Marth, is playing it wrong. If you're unwilling to put in 'mental exertion', then why make the effort to pick up a strategy game? Sure, scout-rush works if you know the maps and the mechanics - which, judging by your success rate, you don't seem to have - but just like warpskipping FE11, its mere existence as a viable skip doesn't invalidate the rest of the game. Most people... simply do not warpskip 11, and do not let it dominate their thinking. Most people sufficiently keyed into FE mechanics understand that Seth and Titania are godlike throughout the entire game if you just let them kill 70% of every map, and that tha'ts easy, but don't. 

VC2 tried but was dogshit. Nobody except tragics played VC3 because it never released in the west. VC4 is a fundamentally very good game with an appallingly bad story that veers between hilariously bad and just plain frustrating, but if you skip the story relentlessly and then conveniently never do the final map - which happens after you win the war anyway - then it's a very good experience that fixes 90% of what was wrong with 1.

[Integrity]

tbh my favorite part about op's dipshit takes was the hotline miami one, like i had to think hotline miami had a serious plot that people took seriously for me to go about 100%ing it, and also that i would be a dumbass for thinking that people played hotline miami for the plot, lmao, what idiot would think anyone cared about the plot to it. which is it? God only knows

[Zapp Branniglenn]

48 minutes ago, Parrhesia said:

mate the point was that grenade spam was only a thing in WAW. it's not an accurate point to make about MW2.

yeah so I gathered, he just seemed so offended that I don't know some experiential difference between two ten+ year old Call of Duties on their hardest difficulty. Sorry I asked? I've played those games on their hardest difficulties too, but not any time in the last decade. The grenade spam that I do remember is what prompted the question. If I shared his opinion and was asked the same question my response would be something like "you know it's not so bad. World at War definitely comes to mind for grenade spam, but MW2 I'd say (em, let's take a guess) it's no more than twenty percent of each fire fight. Grenades can come in two or three at a time, but often in batches like that. Not a constant stream of once per second as you dive cover to cover. You have time to aim and shoot before you have to move again. Also your allies can throw them back occasionally. 

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This is basically arguing that playing FE11 without warping max-forge wing spear Caeda to the boss, followed immediately by Marth, is playing it wrong.

The reason why you don't warp skip every map in fire emblem is that you can use the experience. Scout rushing in VC1 awards the maximum exp because they only care about clear time as I recall. That's a remarkably big difference between VC and Fire Emblem. Also, ideally, the map design offers some objective beyond get Lord from point A to B. Even Wing Spear Ceada needs experience for LTC strats. I think. I've never dived into FE11's meta to know if that's strictly true. 

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 Sure, scout-rush works if you know the maps and the mechanics - which, judging by your success rate, you don't seem to have

What did I divulge about my success rate to prompt this statement? I beat the game. I don't remember the playthrough well enough to tell you my average Retry rate on maps or other pertinent details. I'd guess that I first tried a little over half of the chapters. And even if we discovered your first playthrough was way better than mine, great work I suppose. I'm sorry I played your single player game different.

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

are you just here to troll my thread? answer honestly

No. I'm actually enjoying these writeups. Why do you think I made a whole thread for people to post about the games they're playing? I know my responses and questions sound flippant, but they come from somebody who likes talking and writing about games. You're not on trial. If you don't like where a conversation is going, just cruise past it, I won't be offended.

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i've already taken on suites of multiplayer achievements in this thread, let alone the games to come, which you'd have known if you gave a shit and weren't just here to stir shit. cheers.

I was specifically curious about this game though. Would you still go for all of MW2's achievements if jumping online was required? How much do online achievements affect the desire to achievement hunt? 

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this is the thing that makes me think you're just awkwardly trolling your elders for attention tbh. yeah, how dare shit improve!

If it's not clear, I was thankful for the advice. "If this particular aspect of 1 bugged you. You can skip ahead to 4 where they address that". I then lamented that it wasn't addressed in the very next game instead.

[lenticular]

21 hours ago, Integrity said:

the timeline of the series is actually 3 - 4 - 5 - 0 - 1 - 6 - 2 - 7 thanks to remakes

Have Sega been taking lessons from Square? That's the sort of drug-addled nonsense of a numbering scheme that I would normally expect from Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy, and my head hurts just trying to make sense of it.

17 hours ago, Integrity said:

One game I briefly considered getting platinum for and ultimately decided against was one of the various Space Hulk adaptations that came out in the last ten or so years. If you're not familiar with Space Hulk, the conceit is that you're commanding a tiny squadron of big men in huge armor with larger guns to kill giant bugs infesting a derelict spaceship. On average, you can expect to kill between about 20 and 60 of them per map, which takes, give or take, 15 minutes. There's a loose outline for you.

Because this is Warhammer 40,000: Space Hulk, one achievement is to kill 40,000 bugs.

If you don't want to do the math, I did it once as a joke. If you, hypothetically, had a single Terminator on overwatch with infinite ammo and perfect accuracy and facing a one-way corridor at an infinite Genestealer spawn that made a new bug every single time the previous died and never let you take a turn, with zero input from the player, this perfect situation would run for approximately six straight days of nothing but animations playing out before you got to 40,000 kills.

Ah yes, the good old "we didn't actually bother to think about this" style achievement. The worst one of those that I can remember is also from a board game adaptation, weirdly enough. In Ticket to Ride, there's an achievement that asks you to complete 20,000 games, which obviously no reasonable human being is ever going to get because it would take over a decade even if you played 5 games of Ticket to Ride every single day. There is a guide on Steam about how to get the achievement. It involves having a bot play the game for you deliberately badly to try to lose games as quickly as possible. There is someone in the comments of the guide suggesting an improvement to the bot that would allow the achievement to be completed in "about 500 hours", which is over 20 straight days of tying up your computer doing nothing but watching a bot play Ticket to Ride really badly.

But most bafflingly of all: according to Steam, 0.3% of all players have this achievement. My takeaway from this is that approximately 0.3% of all players cheat on Steam achievements.

14 hours ago, Integrity said:

SLAY THE SPIRE (MEGA CRIT, 2019)

I was going to come in here and say that I think that Slay the Spire is a little bit over-rated. And I sort of do. But I also went and looked at my Steam stats for it, and I've played it for 125 hours. Oh. Yeah. If the worst that I can say about a £20 game is that I got kinda bored of it after 125 hours, then that's hardly a damning indictment. I still think it's a very good game, just maybe not the pinacle of excellence that a lot of people seem to rate it as. I didn't particularly enjoy its achievements and higher difficulty options (the true ending and ascensions). I recall feeling that they were quite restrictive and that I felt shoehorned into a relatively small number of builds, rather than having much in the way of flexibility and creativity. Mabe I should go back and look at it again at some time, and see if the higher difficulty options click better for me, but I don't really feel compelled to do so. Still a very good game though.

[Integrity]

12 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I was specifically curious about this game though. Would you still go for all of MW2's achievements if jumping online was required? How much do online achievements affect the desire to achievement hunt? 

it's genuinely impossible to say. there's no process that goes into it. multiplayer achievements count the same as anything - if i enjoy the game enough to play it, i'll probably go for them, unless they're obscene - e.g. i'm doing dawn of war 2 at this point, which will require rigging some matches on that dead game with a few mates, no worries. if mw'2 multiplayer achievements had included getting damascus (or whatever equivalent it had, probably gold) weapon camo, probably not

 

51 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Have Sega been taking lessons from Square? That's the sort of drug-addled nonsense of a numbering scheme that I would normally expect from Kingdom Hearts or Final Fantasy, and my head hurts just trying to make sense of it.

there were just yakuzas 1 through 7, with a prequel (0) released after 5, but they remade 1/2 (since they're ...pretty bad ps2 games) in the middle of it

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Ticket to Ride

love that achievement, i briefly considered going for t2r achievements and it stopped me in my tracks.

 

1 hour ago, lenticular said:

Slay the Spire

i'm a bit mixed on slay the spire - i do think it's an absolutely fantastic game up to completing the true ending, and i had a lot of fun with most of the challenge runs (special shoutout to the one-artifact one where i dogged myself twice by taking a third act event that gave me an artifact by mistake) as well as ascensions up to about 5, but everything past that was kind of just miserable. i still think it's an exceptional game overall, and among the best of its kind, but people do go ham calling it PERFECT a lot.

Edited October 23, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

CALL OF DUTY: WWII (SLEDGEHAMMER, 2017)

Finished: 29/3/21. Playtime: 22.1 hours.

Call of Duty: WWII is not very good. That's the long and the short of it. It wants to be Call of Duty (or maybe 2) take two, but it's Call of Duty 3 take two, but except without the interesting parts of Call of Duty 3. And if you're the at-home version of Call of Duty 3, man, something went wrong.

The elephant in the room was a return to health bars and medkits and man, Call of Duty swapping to regenerating health was for a reason. This wasn't as nasty as I expected it to be, turning out to mostly just be a campaign-long chore to keep hitting the medkit button once in a while, and the 'give me a medkit button' every bit longer. Besides that, the campaign went through the same old beats, the characters were serviceable enough, the gunplay was fuzzy, and the audio mixing was horrifically bad. Guns popped with so little force I typically couldn't tell when I was being shot, let alone from where. It was, all told, one of the most whelming experiences. Still, a Call of Duty campaign has at least a basic level of enjoyability to it.

Credit where it goes, though, it has a completely random top ten all time mission hiding in the otherwise-forgettable campaign: Liberation. Liberation tasks you with memorizing a cover story, infiltrating a Nazi garrison, talking your way out of situations, and committing a little sabotage to prepare Paris for liberation by the Allies. Shockingly, being a Call of Duty game, the sneaking and lying to Nazis is actually pretty fun and is kind of the highlight of WW2's campaign. After the sabotage, you cut perspective over to the Americans you've been playing in previous maps and kick off the liberation of Paris with a bang. Call of Duty always shines in street to street fighting and not only does this hold true for Liberation, but the game surprisingly doesn't forget that you're liberating. Every pod of Nazis that rushes to try to stop you sparks another wave of French partisans joining you from a side alley or running to catch up. Second- and third-story windows fly open to reveal Lebel rifles that lay down effective enfilade fire on any poor saps taking cover from you. A car full of Nazis speeds in at one point to be met with a French curse and a Molotov cocktail from above. It captures the role of the citizenry in a way vanishingly few milspec shooters, let alone Calls of Duty, have ever done, and it was a fascinatingly well-designed level in the middle of a lot of dreck.

There is absolutely nothing at all to say about the achievement suite. Beat the campaign on Veteran, get all the collectibles, do a handful of extra challenges that range from trivial (don't get caught sneaking through Liberation) to absolute horseshit (beat the tank mission without dipping below 80% health).

Would I recommend WW2 to anybody? No. But that's what makes Liberation so fascinating. It's like the worst guy you know making a great point, or Weezer putting out a great song. For about forty-five minutes, WW2 is nearly as good as Call of Duty has ever been.

Wild.

[Integrity]

AGE OF EMPIRES (ENSEMBLE, 1997)

Finished: 20/3/21. Playtime: 57.1 hours.

The daddy of modern real-time strategy. I played the Definitive Edition and, funny enough, never actually played original AoE1. Played a lot of AoE2, though; the 1999 original, its 2000 expansion, the 2013 HD remaster, and the absolute superb 2019 Definitive Edition all. The predecessor for such a long-lasting game - hell, Red Bull Wololo, a big AoE2 tournament, is ongoing right now - certainly has those nuggets of greatness in it, right?

As is very often the case, I am a fool.

Age of Empires is rough. The balance is exceptionally poor, progression through the ages is a complete scattergun, and the maps range from pretty good to some of the worst campaign maps I've played in an RTS ever. The Japanese campaign nearly dares to be good, I'll grant it that much, even if one of the maps is based entirely around some genuinely awful guess-and-check objectives. At its worst, maps like Spartacus, the founding of Babylon, and nearly the whole Ave Caesar! campaign, Age of Empires is truly miserable to play.

A special shoutout belongs to the bizarre civilization focuses. Much like many RTSes, Age of Empires differentiates factions by withholding units or technologies and buffing some fraction of what remains to create an identity. Age of Empires having poor unit balance to begin with means that some factions, like the Romans, simply don't have a game plan for the punching-up that campaign matches often require. A special shoutout, though, goes to the Choson faction, representing ancient Koreans. The Koreans, a culture with a long and proud tradition of archery, don't even get proper bowmen. Not even just 'they don't get anything special for their bowmen', they simply don't get the unit at all.

The achievements are awful. One for beating every campaign is pretty much what one would expect - no side objectives whatsoever to worry about, so it's just one per. There's a bunch of little skirmish ones - win without any cavalry, research everything in a single game, win by building a Wonder, etc. - that don't take terribly much time. There's one for winning a ranked multiplayer match which, once again, @Parrhesia covered me on, even though he slapped my ass back and forth horribly and then let me win. Weirdly, there's one for killing a Medusa, a unit who only spawns using cheat codes or can be used in the map editor.

After all of that, there's the global accumulation ones, and these are completely bonkers. 50,000 of each resource in all games isn't too ridiculous - you can easily go through several thousand of any given resource in a map, and it's not inconceivable to get all of these just doing the campaigns. Killing 1,000 enemies, similarly, accrues naturally. The production ones are where things get completely wild. They range in magnitude from 'train 21 centurions' (get it, the 21st century, haha) to 'train 1,000 Choson legionnaires'. For reference, the legionnaire only unlocks in the final age, is quite expensive, and can be trained by about a third of the factions in the game - but only Korean ones count. For a sense of scale, your population limit in campaign maps is fifty. You'd have to train your population limit (assuming infinite resources) of legionnaires twenty times over to hit that. For another point of comparison, there's a similar one for training axemen, the basic infantry that every civilization has access to nearly from the start, and that one is pegged at only 400. Another one requires heavy catapults, which are an extremely lategame unit only available to some factions that's gated behind a ludicrously expensive upgrade, which you might build as many as five of across an entire game to crush an already-defeated enemy. You need five hundred. Converting enemy units is something priests can do and it takes a completely random about of time and requires tasking a single priest on every conversion manually, it's deeply frustrating. Do this one thousand times.

Fortunately there's a map editor, so I just made bullshit maps to individually cheese all of these. It took a whole day to get them even abusing the map editor and cheat codes to give resources and make things build instantly, just making 50 Choson legionnaires and deleting them over and over again forever.

Do not play Age of Empires. Even as a historical curiosity, it barely has any merit. Age of Empires 2 is right there, waiting, and its Definitive Edition looks fantastic and plays superbly. Just go play that instead.

[Integrity]

TITANFALL 2 (RESPAWN, 2016)

Finished: 10/5/21. Playtime: 14.4 hours.

Titanfall 2 fell victim to its own hype. That's not to say it was a bad game - hell, it's in the upper half of FPS campaigns I've played - but anywhere you go, if anyone is talking about Titanfall 2, it's that it was a tragically underrated masterpiece that only didn't take the entire gaming world by storm because, depending on the brand allegiance of the Redditor posting about it, either naughty EA executively meddled to make sure it launched unfavorably as an excuse to kill Respawn, or Activision sheeple refused to stop playing their flavor of the month Call of Duty to try a real game. Instead, Titanfall 2 was just ...fine? The campaign was not the full-spectrum emotional tour de force I was promised. It was good. The few hours of multiplayer I did for some scant achievements and just to see what it was like wasn't the revolutionary FPS experience of all time. It was okay. There were a few dud guns here and there, and the robot combat was a bit wonky, but very little in either mode I'd peg below a 6 and above an 8, you know? It was a fine game. It just wasn't a masterpiece, and there was some part of even me (you are not immune to propaganda) that was expecting it to be.

The one level, the time travel one, was genuinely neat. Credit absolutely goes where it's due. A lot of the rest of the campaign relied on platforming that kind of just used the same few tricks, and rarely was integrated with anything else - shoot guys in the arena, do a platforming section, repeat. The emotional core of the story was the robot, so I was told, and while a nice relationship more or less, the cool and/or rad interactions between Mercer (fuck if I remember his name, it was probably Jack) and the robot weren't enough to carry the whole narrative beyond, like, Quake 4. That's not an insult, I like Quake 4 a lot more than most, but I just didn't see the depths and quality that so many peopleRedditors did.

Achievements were standard FPS fare, even packed into a nostalgic XBox 360 styled 50-achievement cube. Beat the campaign. Beat the campaign on the top difficulty. Get the collectibles. Kill an enemy robot with each of your own robot's weapons. Do some little challenges like killing guys while sliding or figuring out how to murder the innocent sabertooth tiger in the time travel level, you monster. I finished all these with an initial blind run on top difficulty, because I am a god gamer, and then an Easy run to get all the collectibles and a few challenge achievements I missed. Fairly simple. Multiplayer had you customize a loadout, join a clan, and win 1 game, which was so trivial as to be a little perplexing that they were even included.

The one stumbling point was that, like the Calls of Duty, there's a training F.N.G style map that you have to run through and you're timed. It's a kind of weak tutorial, honestly - it doesn't close to teach you anything beyond the absolute basics of movement in an FPS, let alone get into Titanfall 2's kind of janky momentum system. On top of that, the top score you need to reach is a ballbuster. It took me about two hours of solid grinding, which doesn't sound like much, but the entire course is about 60 seconds long on normal pace - the time to beat for the achievement is around 30. That's a lot of attempts, man. My hands hurt by the end.

For a fiver on sale just to run the campaign, I'd say Titanfall 2 is still worth it. It's, if nothing else, a solid milspec shooter campaign, even if not exceptional. Grab it if it's your thing, and if it's not, this will absolutely not be the game to convert you.

[Integrity]

DARK SOULS: PREPARE TO DIE EDITION (FROM SOFTWARE, 2011)

Finished: 28/12/14. Playtime: 114.5 hours. E: Played on a Steam Controller.

DARK SOULS: REMASTERED (FROM SOFTWARE, 2018)

Finished: 29/5/21. Playtime: 62.4 hours. E: Played on a Switch Pro controller.

The game that launched a million sweaty keyboard wars. If nothing else, Dark Souls deserves credit for being essentially compelling enough for me to enjoy playing it all the way through before any mods made it particularly playable, and still go back and ace it in the dark ages of 2014. For whatever negativity I'll have here, that basic fact remains true - there's a certain kind of magic to the first Dark Souls that defies regular old analysis.

It's a spectacular game despite the astonishingly unfinished back half of the game. People like to point to Lost Izalith like it stands out as the one unfinished area in an otherwise-superb game, but there's a wild quality drop after the Lordvessel and the game never picks its head back up off the floor. Lost Izalith is a really awful entire map from a lot of standpoints, frankly starting at Endless Jizz himself, but the Tomb of the Giants, Seth's tower, and - especially - the Crystal Cave and the final area are no slouches. They feel untested, cobbled together because the game had to ship and it was only about fourteen hours long. New Londo might be the exception to the rule, but I got all kinds of beef with the Four Kings fight and how it's accessed, so I'm not gonna give New Londo any quarter here.

It's a spectacular game despite a solid third of the bosses ranging from poor to really bad fights. Have you ever tried to fight Neverending Ejaculation on his own terms, and not led him off the ledge to his silly unanimated demise? His hitboxes are obscenely untuned. Paper tigers like the Gaping Dragon, three flavors of Asylum Demon, RNG clown fiestas like the Capra Demon, whatever the hell was going on with the Bed of Chaos, there's a lot to hate about the Dark Souls bosses across its runtime, and I don't find it to be a fun kind of hate like the way I hate the Pontiff in Dark Souls 3.

It's a spectacular game despite, for a good while after the PC launch, an entire core facet of the game (the multiplayer) just not working, and as of this writing I'm fairly sure it's still offline from the security issues earlier this year. The fact that this game, built and billed around always-online coop and PvP, can be easily recommended despite completely not having those systems, is a testament to something, at least.

I don't know what it is. On paper, there's a lot I dislike about Dark Souls the First, and yet I would never be able to bring myself to say I don't like the game anyway. Shit's weird.

Platinum followed almost precisely the template of Dark Souls 2. Get through to around midgame NG++, get all the spells, visit all the covenants, do the Game's Uniquely Long Grind for something, pack it up. Dark Souls' One Weird Grind is that you have to make every single boss soul weapon, which is only annoying because you need to upgrade (seemingly arbitrary) trash weapons to various points to be able to make them. With a guide and a checklist, it's trivial. Without it, It would be a nightmare.

Is it still worth playing solo, offline, in 2022? Yeah, absolutely. The front half of the game is worth $20 easily, and if the nosedive in quality coincides with a nosedive in your enjoyment, just put 'er down and walk away. Or slug through it so you can tell your friends you beat Dark Souls, you know, either way's good.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

DOOM 64 (MIDWAY, 1997)

Finished: 4/6/21. Playtime: 11.9 hours.

I have literally no idea how Doom 64 garnered a reputation as being an underappreciated hidden classic gem.

It's still Doom at its core, even if it's a little janky compared to the legendary originals. It's unquestionably impressive from a technical standpoint that Midway strongarmed this into running on the N64, let alone as well as it did. The things they cut to save precious cartridge space and working memory were generally the right things to cut. The only real problem is that the game, once you strip out the absolute core it inherited from Carmack, kind of sucks.

Doom's Achilles' heel has always been map design. The core duology, for everything they absolutely nailed the first try, have maps of wildly differing quality, and you can tell the hands of several different capital-M Mapmakers shared the load, but even the individual mapmakers put out things of wildly differing quality. Sandy Petersen was responsible for some of the best maps in both the originals and is obviously an insanely talented guy, going on to help invent Age of Empires in the weirdest crossover episode I've ever heard of, but also made several of the outdoor levels of Doom 2, which are miserable and certifiably The Worst, including MAP19 The Citadel, which just whomps. Romero made most of the generally-incredible E1, and then also made MAP26 The Abandoned Mines, one of my least favorite levels in either game.

I say all of this because I want to stress a point: Doom 64 peaks at approximately 'a poor Sandy Petersen level'. Any level in Doom 64 would probably be American McGee's worst in his Doom resume.

When the fundamental gameplay, done so perfectly by the originals, is (miraculously) ported over mostly-intact, all that's left to really judge fairly on is map design, and Doom 64 comes up short almost everywhere. It's not a bad game entirely on the core of Doom. If you really desperately need more Doom, and you don't have access to all the wads that people have spent 25 years perfecting the art of making, and you really don't want to play Romero's new level pack, here you go, man.

The achievements are a weird grab bag. Finish the campaign, get the three secret thingies to power up your unmaker, do a special challenge map, finish very specifically the first map on Hard. There's only ten total, and very little cohesion to them.

E: im also REALLY mad about the chainsaw, like REALLY mad. the whole fuckin point of a chainsaw is to create a single breach in a hard object that takes continual effort to work through and cannot simply be cut through in a stroke so adding a second blade to it is literally counter to the intention of design of a fuckin chainsaw!!! its not even awesome!!!! it's just lame!!! fuck!!!!!!

Edited October 24, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

DARK SOULS 3 (FROM SOFTWARE, 2016)

Finished: 19/6/21. Playtime: 97.5 hours. Played on a Steam Controller and a Switch Pro controller.

Dark Souls 3 is a strange beast, and one that I largely don't think works. The complete slavish devotion to referencing Dark Souls 1 gets tiresome - as a celebration of the franchise, it fails; as a standalone game, there's too much that rides on 'remember this from Dark Souls?'; it only truly functions as a twist on the first game, which feels like an apology for the second game, which sucks. The increased pace of combat could be welcomed - if I want slower paced Souls-type combat, I'll play Monster Hunter - but it's halfassed. Someone, a long time ago, described it as you playing a slightly faster Dark Souls man, and the enemies coming from Bloodborne instead, and I think that's a bit of an exaggeration but with a grain of truth in it. When the increased pace and lethality of combat works, e.g. in the Pontiff and Dancer boss fights, or Champion Gundyr, the game jives. When it doesn't work, like any time you have to fight the Pus of Man, it seriously doesn't work. Hell, I'd say in general that Dark Souls 3 is a far less enjoyable slog through trash enemies culminating in generally better bosses than either of its predecessors. It's not dogmatic, but I think I feel it as a generalization of the game.

While combat is faster and (usually) more responsive, builds felt even more shoved towards The Sword And Board Guy With Some Light Magic Support than either of the previous two, which also had that issue to various degrees. The broadsword from the first area can just be a high DPS high flexibility carry weapon for the entire game - which has been something of an issue in both predecessors, but I felt it more acutely in 3. Leveling in 3 felt the most like 'making numbers go up with no real goal' of all the games. It's still a good game, largely, but the only real changes to my playstyle that ever happened after about a quarter of the way through NG was whether I could do three, four, or five hits with the weapon I had before running out of juice in me.

At the same time, Dark Souls 3 has largely good and occasionally superb map design, including my favorite section in all three games hands down - Untended Graves. Nothing in any of the three games has had the atmosphere of my first, blind, go through Untended Graves. Even at its worst - Farron Keep and Smoldering Lake - Dark Souls 3 is still a strong cut above the worst maps of 1 or 2, and the average map is usually enjoyable and fun to explore.

Since these aren't allusions to the ending, but rather just complete textual spoilers, I'm going to be nice and actually use a spoiler here. Spoilers for all three Dark Souls endings.

Spoiler

I've saved this through the 1 and 2 retrospectives for now. I think the Dark Souls 3 proper ending is fantastic, and I'll be gutted if there's a Dark Souls 4.

The Dark Souls 1 endings felt half-baked. I know, I know, "the Dark Souls plot is all implication! you just have to read into it!" I read into it, thought about it, and decided I didn't like it. You relight the fire, become the new king of everything, and the cycle repeats; or you walk away, become the new king of everything, and the cycle repeats. I get the symbology of a false choice - nothing you do in Dark Souls matters everything repeats etc. etc. etc. - but understanding the intention and execution doesn't make it satisfying for me, and it being unsatisfying on purpose is a really cagey argument.

Dark Souls 2, I thought, had a good ending that Scholar kind of spoiled. Rather than giving you a false choice, you beat the game and simply climb on the Throne of Want. You have what you wanted, and it's meaningless. You're back in Majula now, uncommented on. There is no secret ending, there is no option to walk away. You've come this far to sit on the Throne of Want, and you do, and that's it. Scholar of the First Sin adds a second ending, unlocked by following the added story bits (mostly letting Aldia talk at you after bosses) and then killing the titular Scholar of the First Sin as a special True Final Boss. This gives you the option to walk away from the Throne of Want, like in 1, and then things get dark and Aldia pontificates at you from beyond the grave about what it means to want or whatever. It's both tremendously unsatisfying and, I think, undermines the whole point of 2's original ending - despite everything, at the end, you don't have a choice. Get on the throne, Shinji. Dark Souls 2, I feel, conveyed this far better than 1 did, and I think that's what 1 was ultimately trying to convey.

Just like how Dark Souls 1 had 2 endings and Dark Souls 2 had 1 ending, as expected, Dark Souls 3 has 3 endings, and I rather like how they're done. By default, all you can do is rekindle the First Flame and restart the cycle - the Dark Souls 1 ending but done better. Despite grumbling about the referential nature of Dark Souls 3 to 1 earlier, I like this as a bookend to the series.

If you prod around, however, you can get two other endings. In the hypersecret ending, involving doing an NPC quest that works and doing specific things on an NPC quest that really doesn't (I literally never got Anri to spawn in the Catacombs and still managed to move the quest on), you can get yourself anointed as the scion of darkness. This lets you do an echo of the walk-away Dark Souls 1 ending, but while it's essentially the same non-choice as in Dark Souls 1, with the cycle of course repeating eventually, I appreciate a lot that it requires your agency to pull off and I also appreciate the kickass army of skeletons you have in the ending cutscene rather than the dorky serpents from 1. Both these things elevate the ending and the addition of agency to the choice makes the false choice have an impact to it - you're not just getting to the end of the game and deciding to pick Ending A or Ending B (author's note: both endings go the same place), you're putting actual work into unlocking Ending B for it to turn out, in the ultimate long run, the same as Ending A.

The third ending, and the one I saved for last, is how I'm glad I put down the five Dark Souls games for good. If you go through the Untended Graves, the ironic echo of your starting area, and go through a hidden wall in the ironic echo of your hub area, you can find the Fire Keeper's Eyes. Giving them to your girlfriend lets her see the other cycles, and this weird jaunt through a place-out-of-time unlocks the End of Fire ending, where you and your girlfriend kill Gwyn, kill the fire, and sit there in the dark for untold eons waiting for something to happen. Not relighting the fire and becoming the king of everything, not stealing the fire and becoming the king of everything, just seeing if you can end it like this. The Fire Keeper has a little line about how something, inevitably, must happen again, but the game ends on that black screen. This, implicitly, hasn't happened before. It might loop back to the entropic spiral of Dark Souls, it might not. It's a superb ending to the series, in my opinion.

The achievements follow the Dark Souls pattern, but kind of worse. Instead of midgame NG++, you have to go all the way through NG++ to NG+++ to finish everything. Find the covenants, learn the spells, do the Long Grind. In this case, the Long Grind is the rings, and the covenants are no slouches. There are one hundred and seven rings to acquire, and anytime a ring has an improved version you need every unique version of it - e.g. the Life Ring, the Life Ring +1, the Life Ring +2, and the Life Ring +3 are all required. These require all sorts of acrobatics to get, from regular old spelunking to joining covenants to doing NPC quests (which are real janky in 3) to not joining covenants and probably other stuff I've forgotten. In addition, the +X rings are scattered throughout NG+ and NG++, all the way up to the final ring being locked behind beating the secret superboss (the Nameless King) on NG++ specifically. It's a nasty, prolonged scavenger hunt through multiple iterations of the world. Hope you don't miss any!

Some spells, and some rings, are locked behind more online-requisite covenants than the previous games, but the good old failsafes are still there. The problem is, the failsafes are often miniscule drop percentages from a single kind of enemy where there's literally one farm run with an expected drop value of between 0 and 1 per circuit, and you'll need generally 30. Just farming Proofs of a Concord Kept, which you ordinarily get for counter-invading and killing the invader, something I was rarely pulled into and didn't usually succeed when I was, took about six hours (with item drop boosts) of running a circle and killing the same three guys over and over and over again. That was the worst of the ?five? covenants that required item farming. It was atrocious.

I have basically the opposite feelings towards Dark Souls 3, in the end, as I do 1. I can make a laundry list of things I don't like about 1, but I can't bring myself to say I dislike the game. On the other hand, I can list quite a number of things I think 3 does just straight up better than the other two games, but I can't really say I love the game. It's a weird one, and a kind of liminal way to end the Dark Souls saga.

And to think, I did all of that on what was essentially a really extended joke: a Steam achievement showcase.

Edited October 24, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

SPYROS THE DRAGON (INSOMNIAC, 1998 1999 & 2000)

Finished: 23/7/21 (my 4th anniversary!). Playtime: 35.8 hours. Played on a Switch Pro controller.

Back to my childhood for a trilogy that are about as un-Dark Souls as possible. The three Spyro the Dragon games were among my quiet favorites on my old PS1, with even kid-me having the attention span to 10X% all three of them, and twice in the case of Year of the Dragon. These were legends of the 90s and I was real curious to see how they'd hold up in the new millennium with the (fantastic, by the way) Reignited trilogy, and I'd say I was surprised in a lot of ways.

The first shocker was that Spyro the Dragon is actually really good. I'd say, softly, that it might be the best of the three. There really isn't a bad level in them, even if the flying bits are a bit undercooked and the bosses are pretty trivial. For a platformer collectathon for ten year olds, it holds up really well and benefits the most from the graphical equalization that the Reignited trilogy brought, because man 1 looks rough next to the sequels on original hardware. Equalizing that really lets the core design of 1 shine, and for almost the entire part it manages to.

Ripto's Rage was a weird one. When I was young, it basically superseded any desire to ever play 1 again, and now I can definitely say that it was the game was Way Prettier and there was More Of It rather than it being particularly better. It tries more things than the first game and, in so doing, scores more hits and lands a few harsh misses. Whether a tight quality game or a scattergunned quality game with the same rough average is better is really up to personal preference, but I think in this case the tight originality of 1 very slightly outweighs 2's more daring heights and unfortunate troughs.

Year of the Dragon was my runaway favorite as a kid. Bizarrely, it was kind of a miss for me as an adult. 3 is one of those The Most Games, like Yakuza 5, where you can't really peg an average because it tries to do so much and so much of it lands and so much of it flops. It's got some superb levels but, at the same time, has the only parts of the three games where I was really feeling the tedium and wanted to get shit over with, particularly in the buddy maps. Not Sparx, though, I'll still go to bat for those top-down shmups. Despite the pedestal I had it on going in, I'm not even particularly sure that I liked Year of the Dragon on aggregate, which is really kinda sad.

I will say that Agent 9's one-off Doom clone level plays bizarrely well for being a gimmick level in a Y2K platformer. That was probably the biggest surprise of the three games.

Acing the trilogy was mostly just a matter of doing everything all over the games. 10X% in each game gets you most of the way there, and what's left are various little level-specific challenges - don't get hit by the bosses in 1, keep all the sheep alive in Cloud Temples, shoot the distant vultures with the cannons in Lost Fleet, and so on. Probably half or so of the levels have some challenge achievement associated, and many of them are more or less required en route to 10X% in their game, but not all.

I did still enjoy my time with the Spyro games, though. Even with Year of the Dragon being a bit of a disappointment, it was still a fine game, just more like a 6/10 and less like the perfect 10 I'd remembered. And when that's the worst the games get, hell, I'll take it.

[Tryhard]

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

AGE OF EMPIRES (ENSEMBLE, 1997)

I remember the original campaign difficulty just being downright unfair at points. some highlights being The Great Hunt, Nineveh and I'll Be Back. The former being especially egregious. I may have just been younger and bad at video games but some of it just seemed ridiculous and it had a reputation for being a unforgiving RTS on anything above Easy. I think it's pretty much confirmed that the AI cheats resources (and does on higher difficulties of AoE2 as well). And the pathfinding is just atrocious.

I will say I do love the music to this day. It's simple, sure, but catchy and even though I do also love AoE2's soundtrack, most of the AoE1 songs are very nostalgic to me.

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

DARK SOULS: REMASTERED (FROM SOFTWARE, 2018)

"how dark, is this soul" ~ john dark souls

i do feel somewhat like an insane person sometimes because I've seen many people act like the only bad thing about dark souls 1 second-half is Lost Izalith, even though there is a prevailing attitude that the quality drops after Anor Londo. But people rarely describe anything other than Lost Izalith.

And the fact that the bosses are pushed as some kind of standard for the series when the average is Moonlight Butterfly and Gaping Dragon. Indeed people have a problem with later games and the bosses and compare them unfavourably to DS1, which I've never understood. I'm glad it rocketed From into mainline status but I can barely bring myself to play it anymore. I did pvp a lot back in the day but then I realised Souls PVP is bad, and dumb, after getting lag backstabbed while facing an opponent for the 500th time.

I do enjoy DS3 considerably more although I have always conceded that it relied too highly on callbacks to DS1. But at least the game doesn't feel like I'm moving through an oil pool whenever I try to control my character.

 

any plans for Eldong Ring? I would say Bloodborne as well but we all know that a pc port is never happening.
(despite the many, many rough edges ER has I'm starting to consider it my favourite From game just because of the sheer variety compared to any of the other games, and a lot actually feels viable after recent patches)

[Integrity]

1 minute ago, Tryhard said:

any plans for Eldong Ring?

i'm completely unsure what my plans for smellden ring are. i still haven't played it and haven't really felt a need to, but the ol' brain worms could bite at any time honestly. i reckon if i do it, it will be on the other side of 100% nioh 2 and sekiro at the very least.

2 minutes ago, Tryhard said:

 I would say Bloodborne as well but we all know that a pc port is never happening.

we got fuckin' spider man and the uncharted games, who even knows what sony is thinking nowadays. i would definitely give a pc port of buttborne a second try despite kind of bouncing off it on the ps4.

4 minutes ago, Tryhard said:

i do feel somewhat like an insane person sometimes because I've seen many people act like the only bad thing about dark souls 1 second-half is Lost Izalith, even though there is a prevailing attitude that the quality drops after Anor Londo. But people rarely describe anything other than Lost Izalith.

And the fact that the bosses are pushed as some kind of standard for the series when the average is Moonlight Butterfly and Gaping Dragon. Indeed people have a problem with later games and the bosses and compare them unfavourably to DS1, which I've never understood. I'm glad it rocketed From into mainline status but I can barely bring myself to play it anymore. I did pvp a lot back in the day but then I realised Souls PVP is bad, and dumb, after getting lag backstabbed while facing an opponent for the 500th time.

i know, right? lost izalith this, lost izalith that, my brother in christ have you ever for a single second been to the crystal cave? that shit is even worse than lost izalith and no, it's not a rick & morty situation where my iq isn't high enough to understand the level gimmick. seth's barely even a better boss than bed of chaos, he's a magic turret that waggles and rotates and sometimes you take damage from him.

 

[Tryhard]

cutting off seaths tail for the moonlight greatsword with a magic build was peak fun, truly (it was ass)

imo bloodborne is the "best" of the recent from games, at least from the standpoint of having a polished mostly linear experience. but sekiro goes hard on the depth of gameplay and is also super good, while elden ring goes anti-sekiro and goes full breadth gameplay style. some people are going to hate either of those depending on their preferences. if you hate open world games ER isnt really gonna change that

maybe ill actually try armored core if thats their next game

[Integrity]

ELDERBORN (HYPERSTRANGE, 2020)

Finished: 30/7/21. Playtime: 18 hours.

I just namedropped this game with the dude above with respect to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic a few hours ago, weirdly.

Elderborn was a fascinating subtype of game. Those 18 hours were spread across the afternoon of the 28th, and the days of the 29th and 30th of July, and no other. I started to play it, it consumed me, and I would 100% it a few days later and put it down forever. Elderborn is a fucking fantastic melee FPS. Elderborn is the proper successor to Dark Messiah of Might and Magic mechanically, if not at all in RPG builds. I would recommend anyone who just wants to put a sword through a guy to pick up Elderborn and play it. It's genuinely astonishingly good.

Acing it was nothing short of charming. Beat the game. Beat the game on NG+. Beat the game, but never die. Beat the game, but kill everything. Beat the game, but never level up. The whole game is only about six hours long on a normal playthrough, and three or four tops on a repeat, so it doesn't have the room to get stale. Instead, it feels like working on a world of Super Meat Boy or N++ or one of the classic platformers - you're tuning how you go through these levels. I've played through Elderborn I believe four times, not including some deaths on the ironman run, and I always felt gratified to be doing it.

Elderborn is a fucking game and a half. I genuinely, with all my heart, loved my time with it.

[Integrity]

16 hours ago, Integrity said:

It's a spectacular game despite, for a good while after the PC launch, an entire core facet of the game (the multiplayer) just not working, and as of this writing I'm fairly sure it's still offline from the security issues earlier this year.

hahaha holy shit i murdered the dark souls 1 online services forever by posting about it