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

[Integrity]

CALL OF JUAREZ: GUNSLINGER (TECHLAND, 2013)

Finished: 19/1/22. Playtime: 19.7 hours.

I loved Call of Juarez: Gunslinger. I loved everything about it. I loved the objectively kinda-floaty gunplay. I loved the narrative framing, and I loved the plays they did with the framework. I loved the game through, and I loved it more on the super hard mode. I loved the duels, I loved the challenge maps. I have nothing else to say about Gunslinger. I loved Call of Juarez: Gunslinger.

The achievements were what they needed to be. Beat the campaign, once on any mode and once on True West. Experience both endings. Get the collectibles. Beat the duel challenge and the arcade mode maps. There's nothing to say here, it's just 'play the game until all the game's boxes are checked.'

Big shoutout to Poland, always rated them.

Edited October 27, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

SPEC OPS: THE LINE (YAGER, 2012)

Finished: 21/1/22. Playtime: 22.1 hours.

Did you know there are actually nine other Spec Ops games? They're all standard, if pretty bad, milsim shooters. That means that The Line isn't just a satire / deconstruction / pick your pretense about modern shooters, it's coming out of a previously unironic version of the thing it's taking down. That's fuckin' wild. That's like Battlefield releasing One, waiting a few years, and then dropping All Quiet on the Western Front.

The Line is one of those games that a million people have shouted a million things about, and I don't think a review is really worth my time going in-depth about, even though there's a lot to talk about. I think it has a nearly-cohesive message that it fumbles awkwardly with at several points. It's a good game, maybe even a great one, but not an all-timer. The funniest thing about my original run in 2014 ended up being the famous White Phosphorous scene - the problem being that the game very clearly framed you as using the WP as a last ditch equalizer against a superior force, but the vantage they gave me was good enough that I just didn't die. I sat there farming kills for about ten minutes, never really getting close to danger, before finally throwing up my hands and going fine, I'll shoot the fucking warcrime juice. Then the game rubbed my face in the civilian casualties I caused with my reckless behavior, and man did that ring hollow. But, if nothing else, that was the only eye-roller in the game, which is pretty good.

To get platinum for Spec Ops: The Line is to fundamentally refuse to understand the game. It's a game best played once, knowing as little as possible, and then set down to percolate. Platinum is as straightforward as it gets: beat the game on the top difficulty to unlock the super-top difficulty, beat the super-top difficulty, and make every binary choice in the campaign both ways. I think replaying The Line let the cracks in the game widen, and experiencing Everything hollowed it a little bit. I'm not sad that I went back and did it, but it's not something I'd recommend anybody do, not because of the weight of time or effort (even FUBAR isn't that hard outside of two setpieces), but because I think it cheapens the experience. A weird sentiment for a game I don't even think is all that great, I know, but there it is.

Edited October 27, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

PORTAL 2 (VALVE, 2011)

Finished: 2/2/22. Playtime: 27.2 hours.

How the hell do you follow up Portal?? Without terribly much difficulty, it turns out. It was a huge point of contention back when Portal 2 was new whether it was better than its predecessor or not, and a lot of the debate, I felt at the time, kind of hinged on the fact that Portal had been so unexpected and so novel, and people weren't really arguing Portal 2 versus Portal, but rather arguing the quality of Portal 2 versus the novelty of Portal. That's always going to be weighted in favor of the thing the reader experienced first, and I found myself on both sides of the debate back in the dark ages of 2012. Now, looking back ten years, replaying both without any novelty left to them, there really isn't a question - Portal 2 is way better. Ignoring the co-op entirely, which is a fantastic mode I've replayed every time it's been long enough for me to forget the solutions, the big classic issue people had with Portal 2 was that a bunch of levels ended up boiling down to finding where you could put a portal and then doing it. The problem I have with this after replaying both is that this works exactly for most of the back half of Portal as well - not that it isn't a bit of an issue, mind, just that it's not an issue particularly unique to Portal 2. Besides that, Portal 2's got a meatier campaign which, it should be said, does have lower points than Portal's ridiculously tight 4 hour schlep, but has a lot more good packed into it to compensate.

Acing Portal 2 requires multiple friends, but isn't much of a chore besides. The campaign, the coop campaign, some genuinely cleverly designed challenge achievements for single player and coop, and then the slightly bizarre Professor Portal, requiring you to help someone who's never played Portal 2 complete the coop training course. This marks the first appearance of my alt, Dave from IT, who will make a few appearances later. In the age of Steam Library Sharing, Professor Portal isn't that hard to accomplish. For shoutouts, I've played the coop with multiple people over the years, but the achievement thrust was done with my good buddy @Darros, and he aced out the game alongside me.

It was really interesting to have a look back on the Portal campaigns after so many years, and I think I can pack them up for good with satisfaction now. A happy ending!

Edited October 27, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

ROAD REDEMPTION (EQ & PIXEL DASH, 2019)

Finished: 1/24/22. Playtime: 52.2 hours. Played on a Steam Controller and a Switch Pro controller.

Literally just overlooked this one when going to go Portal 2, oops.

Any of you guys remember Road Rash 3D for the Playstation? Man, I do. That was my jam. Battle Cars for the SNES primed me to ride around on a motorcycle and hit guys with a katana. The one problem of Road Rash was that it really wasn't very good. Good enough to entertain me: seven, sure, but ultimately it was shallow and uninteresting once you got past the novelty of drive-by smashing someone with a bat.

Road Redemption was developed to be explicitly That, But Good.

It mostly succeeds, in my opinion. It's not the deepest racer and it's not the deepest combat game but it's got just enough meat on the bones of both to keep things fresh for quite a while. A good depth of difficulty modes, and a roguelite kinda progression to the basic campaign, go a long way to capture and keep interest in the game, and the raw satisfaction of improving at the game yourself is hard to top. Sure, once you've gone through the whole campaign with a few racers, and maybe cracked into the Campaign+ and the Campaign++ a time each, you've seen it all, but there's nothing wrong with that.

The only problem seeps in with the achievements. With all that I described up there, you'd probably not figure that the achievements require you to beat the campaign on any difficulty twenty times, ten of those on the harder Campaign+. The good news, such as it is, is that the racers are modestly different to play, and with an achievement each for beating the game with a whopping sixteen of them, you'll have some variety as you go along. Even so, the meat's stripped from the bones by the tenth or twelfth run, and even when you're good enough to win most of the time, the last several campaigns were grueling to get through. There's a series of challenge races, too, but I kicked all of those out in quite literally half an hour. Eventually, you hit a point where you just have to go through the game as-is again, four or five more times, having seen everything. It's kind of a sour note for the game to end on, but I'm still glad that I ground it out, because I genuinely did like the game enough to suffer for it.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM (BETHESDA, 2011)

Finished: 21/1/22. Playtime: 179.9 hours.

THE ELDER SCROLLS V: SKYRIM: SPECIAL EDITION (BETHESDA, 2016)

Finished: 8/2/22. Playtime: 50 hours.

The next of my really bad ideas was when I was mopping up Skyrim's achievements, I DMed my buddy Wyatt and we were talking about routing for some of the nastier achievements, and I made a joke: SSE has its own, separately-tracked, executable, Steam entry, and achievements. What if I did both? How fast could I do it? haha

Well, here we are. I played Skyrim ordinarily for about a hundred and forty hours, largely pre-2017, and prior to executing the planned route had never touched the Special Edition. The answer's there: fifty hours, on the dot, is how long it takes me to 100% achievement an unmodded, no-console Skyrim.

Everybody has already said everything there is to say about Skyrim at this point. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle, and yet I'm still fond of the fucker. It's a good game, for the most part. The base game's main quest is pretty trash, but is still a country mile over the main quests for Daggerfall, Morrowind, or Oblivion. The base game's guild quests are pretty forgettable but not particularly bad. The world's fun to explore and the side quests are often at least pretty good. It's quantity over quality, but there's at least a good amount of quantity. The expansions shake things up in their own unique ways, Dawnguard by being unbelievably shit and Dragonborn for weirdly being really good under no pressure.

Given as the only games I've had any excuse to plat twice have been the first two Dark Souls and Skyrim, and for the Dark Souls games I did them six years after the first time, Skyrim was the first (and only) time I've actually meticulously planned an achievement route through a game rather than simply vibing my way through with ad hoc goals. I really enjoyed the experience of planning, nearly as much as I did the execution. I made a shitty spreadsheet to figure out what to do and when, making modifications here and there while I went. It was a great time.

Skyrim's achievements aren't that bad, honestly. Summing them up as 'do all the big ticket stuff' is pretty much good enough - all the guilds, all the main quests, all the daedric quests, some of the bigger side quests, build all the houses, be a vampire and a werewolf, etc. The pain points were the more interesting ones. The base game's side quests achievement was weirdly nasty because a lot of things one would think are side quests are either simply objectives or just don't count as side quests. Dawnguard's Lost to the Ages sucks because, beyond Dawnguard being really bad, Lost to the Ages is a really neat idea for a map-spanning side quest that, instead of being neat in execution, blows. Dragonborn's Legend requires you to kill a Legendary Dragon, which only spawns above player level 78 - when literally all seventy-four other achievements can be achieved by level 50. That one just took a bit of innovation and maxing Illusion out a bunch of times to grind, but I wanted to list a crap one for each part of the triptych.

I'll probably never seriously play Skyrim again, which means I'll probably not play an Elder Scrolls seriously until 6 comes out whenever that happens. Still, I can't say I disliked most of my non-Dawnguard time with Skyrim, and it's pretty clearly the best of the games, even if I still have the Big Nostalgia for Morrowind, a really shitty game.

Thanks, Todd.

[Integrity]

BIOSHOCK (2K, 2007)

Finished: 11/2/22. Playtime: 20.6 hours.

Sometimes I use these projects as an excuse to revisit something long-forgotten and approach it with fresh eyes. Doing 100% achievements, a lot of the time, forces me to engage more fully with the game than I might have ordinarily, and the breadth of requirements usually means I'll complete more of the game, such as challenge rooms and the like, than I would have done. Dishonored is a game that's on the list, eventually, for this reason - it's largely regarded as an incredibly good game, but my first and only run of it when it was new was stealth and non-lethal, and I came out of it feeling incredibly whelmed. One wonders, then, did I actually not like Dishonored, or did I just not engage with the part of the game I'd have found fun? There's got to be a cutoff somewhere - there's no point in sinking 400 hours into a game and then writing a negative Steam review - and all the achievements seems to be a pretty good balance between 'I have given this a fair try' and 'I can say that I did or not like this'.

I say all this because my relationship with Bioshock has been tepid, to say the least. I played it back when it was literally Game of the Year every year, before weird gamers had taken it to be a statement on how rad libertarianism can and should be, and found it to be pretty good. 7/10 stuff, you know, maybe 8/10. Not as good as hyped, but I enjoyed it anyway. I skipped Bioshock 2, a move which I generally hold now to be a mistake and should rectify one of these sales, and then would play Infinite shortly after it released and would hate it. Dropped it three or four hours in. Time soothes wounds, though, and Bioshock Remastered would poke and prod at the crevasses of my brain. Did I actually just hate Infinite, or was Bioshock actually always bad and I was just a dumb teenager when the first one came out? I resolved, finally, to put the issue to bed and, begrudgingly, put Bioshock Remastered on the sigma grindshelf.

Neither was strictly true, as it turned out. Maybe I do still just hate Infinite, but I was also wrong as a kid - Bioshock is pretty fuckin' great. Nowhere near the hype it got back when it was the newest hotness, but it's aged very well and is still an easy recommendation in the year of our Lord this one. I went into Bioshock with low expectations, trying to keep my mind clear so I could be fair to it, and I ended up managing to enjoy my time with it very well. It's not a perfect game by any means, weapon and plasmid and enemy balance is all over the place, but people who moan about the Boring Optimal Wrench Build have dug their own grave and deserve their fate.

The achievements were straightforward in a fun way. One run of the game on the top difficulty, with respawns turned off, being fairly meticulous about researching enemies and exploring and getting Little Sisters, got every campaign-related achievement in one go. There were three challenge scenario DLCs, and all were pretty well designed and fun to play, with each coming with a 'win' a 'collect the thing' and two challenge achievements. Some of the challenges were ballbusters, but they never felt unfair, and I enjoyed practicing and performing all of them.

Moral of the story, I guess, is to challenge your perceptions. Sometimes you go back to something with fresh eyes and feel completely different about it.

[Integrity]

SOUL CALIBUR VI (BANDAI NAMCO, 2018)

Finished: 16/2/22. Playtime: 33.4 hours. Played on a Switch Pro controller.

Thursday Night Football is, as usual, really bad, so time to write more.

Soul Calibur, as a franchise, is near and dear to my heart. To be more specific, Soul Calibur 2 for the Gamecube has a lot of my happiest early-teenage memories of laying on the floor playing my boy Jim in versus matches for hours at a time, I never played anything before 2, 3 was shit and fail, and I didn't play 4 or 5. So when I say 'Soul Calibur is near and dear to my heart', I mean 2 and only 2.

Still, to recapture the old days, Jim and I grabbed Soul Calibur 6 as part of a yearly pact where our Christmas presents to each other are always the same game, and it was fine. The magic was gone, and that was okay, but we still had a pretty good time for a few hours at least. I set the game down for three years after that, until someone on the SF Discord (I think it was @CrimeanRoyalKnight) dared me to 100% it or I'm a baby, and I was off to the races. My initial assessment was pretty spot-on: Soul Calibur 6 is a very okay game. I can't really say I disliked it, and I can't really point to anything I loved about it. It's the replacement WAR of fighting games.

The achievements, now, there's enough to say about those. To get them out of the way: finish the Soul Chronicle story (a story mode where you jump around a lot) with 20 different characters, not a hefty task; beat Arcade mode once and get a gold rating (a REALLY hard task) once; win 5 casual and 5 ranked, and play 50 matches total, online. Add in some challenges, like getting 15 perfect matches in any mode and killing people with a specific Astaroth attack, and you hit something around 20 achievements. There are forty-nine.

All but one of the remaining are tied to Libra of Soul, the game's campaign mode, and Libra of Soul sucks ass. It's a long, samey campaign from about Thailand to Belgium, where all outcomes are scaled by a level and gear difference - and the AI ramps up fast and hard. Enjoy fighting enemies where you do about a third of the expected damage and are yourself three-shot in return sometimes. Finishing Libra of Soul isn't good enough, though, no. You have to level yourself up enough to tackle the super post-endgame missions. Once you've done that, you're about a fourth of the way to the Walking Achievement, which requires 'a walked distance of three times around the Earth'. You do this by setting a manual exploration waypoint and watching your pawn move. You do this, over and over, with random fights interrupting, for hours, because you're almost out of other things to do. By the time you've finished all of this, you've probably mustered about 70 of the 100 weapons you need and materials to upgrade about 20 of the 30 weapon upgrades you need, so pick out a fight and get to grinding. I cannot stress how much fucking grinding was waiting in Libra of Soul. It was miserable and it was interminable.

E: it was so bad that i literally forgot to point out that you have to do the really long campaign twice because the time that took paled in comparison to the postgame grinding lmao

I actually did crack at the multiplayer for a bit, legitimately. Instead of rigging the five ranked wins, I queued up legitimately and fought real other people, including this Russian who I hopelessly outclassed twice, for about eleven matches until I got my five wins. Then, honor satisfied, I rang up my boy Jim and asked if he'd reinstall it, and we played thirty-nine best of one casual matches against each other in a row, to pack up Soul Calibur 6 for good. I didn't have a fighting game on the shelf, so go me.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

4 RESIDENT EVIL (CAPCOM, 2005)

Finished: 24/2/22. Playtime: 29 hours.

This undersells my time with Resident Evil 4 quite a lot - I had the Wii edition when I was the perfect age for the Wii edition of the game to seem like the greatest game ever. I beat it countless times through, using every combination of NG+ and NG, all difficulties, every sort of combination of weapons. I got 5 stars on every single Mercenaries map, and practiced until I could get a full combo through every single one with HUNK. It's no stretch to say this was my single favorite console game of the mid-late aughts, only beaten by Enemy Territory and a few other PC games. On account of all of that, picking Resident Evil 4 back up on the PC, having not played it since probably 2011, was a bit of a gamble. This is a game with a lot of baggage for me and, no matter a game's reputation, there's always a risk I just fail to jive with it.

Fortunately, it didn't happen.

Unlike when I was a kid, I was able to see flaws in the game. The castle drags on entirely too long, the mines could have been cut completely from the game while losing nothing, Separate Ways is both too long and not particularly good for what it contributes. They're mostly nitpicks or preferential things at the worst, though. On aggregate, Resident Evil 4 is still a fantastic game even today, and while I wouldn't put it among my Absolute Favorites, it certainly remains in an A-tier of sorts among the pantheon of games. That's still pretty good for a game that's pushing the legal voting age, honestly.

Achievements were as simple as they get. Beat the game, then on Professional, and beat Separate Ways to get all but one - which you get just for beating the merchant's shooting galleries any time. Easy.

remake looks sick as shit too. put it upon me, the islamic state of crapcom.

[Integrity]

MÖBIUS FRONT '83 (ZACHTRONICS, 2020)

Finished: 25/2/22. Playtime: 23.6 hours.

Möbius Front '83 is a weird little game. You play as the U.S. army of the 80s, against the U.S. army of the 80s, in the warzones of roughly Virginia to Ohio to Wisconsin. It's a turn-based wargame on hexes where the balance is kind of fucked on purpose - attack helicopters are Jesus in the sky, and at one point you get one of the first M1 Abrams tanks and it shits violently all over everything else on the battlefield. It ends up being a kind of puzzle TBS of sorts, where you're at some kind of severe disadvantage in most maps but have the correct answer somewhere in your toolbox, you just need to figure out what tool to apply and where. It's a very neat little game concept that doesn't outstay its welcome, but it's a bit of a hard one if you're not proficient at TBS games. I still liked it a lot, and at an asking price of five bucks during a sale, you might too.

There are only six achievements. Two of them are awarded for beating the campaign on Normal and for beating the campaign on any difficulty. The other four come from the alternate game modes. In several campaign missions are enemy signal corps, and taking out the signal corps units unlocks a new SIGINT puzzle from the main menu to deliver the other half of the story. The SIGINT puzzles are fun little logical puzzles - you're given a set of signal inputs and tasked to make a circuit map to unscramble them to a certain output form. They're good. The remaining half of the achievements come from, of all games, cribbage solitaire. Win one, ten, and one hundred games of cribbage solitaire. It's random, and it took quite a long while to grind out, even interspersing a cribbage win or two between every campaign map, but at least I like cribbage.

I don't know what else to say, I just don't want to end this on 'I like cribbage.' Check this weird little game out.

[Integrity]

MARK OF THE NINJA (KLEI, 2012)

Finished: 17/3/22. Playtime: 26.2 hours.

Finally, they made Dishonored but good.

Weirdly pointed shade aside, Mark of the Ninja is a fantastic game. I played it when it was new and loved it, picked it back up to polish up this year and loved it again. It's an absolute masterpiece. Instead of complexity, it focuses the gameplay on small spaces and a few robust systems that all feed wonderfully into each other. The game can be approached in many slightly different ways that all feel reasonably meaningful. The game's got enough length on it to let you master it, and enough depth to feel really good about mastering. I'm not sure I've played many finer put-together games than Mark of the Ninja, and certainly not a single stealth game. If the stealth action genre is even adjacent to your wheelhouse and you haven't played it, I implore you to fix that.

The achievements followed a pattern I've listed a dozen times now. Beat the game, then again on NG+, get all the collectibles, and get the top end post-level challenge rewards like never being seen. There's a handful of individual challenges (like knocking out a guard who had been knocked out and revived by an ally, or having guards walk past you in the shadows ten times in one level), but nothing particularly onerous. Just a nice, cozy game to polish up and an amazing game to play.

[Integrity]

TOTAL WARHAMMER (THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, 2016)

Finished: 19/3/22. Playtime: 250.3 hours.

This is what Total War has been building towards for sixteen years. Shogun, Medieval, Rome, the 2 versions of all of those, Empire, Napoleon, and all of their spinoffs were just dry runs, nailing the concept and the systems down; a sixteen-year beta for Total Warhammer. Previous games showed that they could substitute visual diversity and style for a relative mechanical sameness, and Warhammer asks a bold question: what if there was significant mechanical diversity as well as absurd visual diversity? It turns out, in this case, Total War finally clicks together like a perfect machine. I had the really stupid idea this year to get all of the achievements in all three of the Total Warhammer games. I now know this to be a mistake, but that doesn't change the fact that the breadth and depth of Total Warhammer's content is incredible, and it's also handily the worst of the three.

Platinum required playing every single campaign, including the minicampaigns, on Very Hard, and picking one to finish on Legendary. None were particularly hellish once I got my brain around the necessary strategies for the increased difficulty (I did Dwarves for Legendary), but the highlights for me were definitely the Beastmen minicampaign and the Ork grand campaign. The Ork grand campaign in particular managed to pit me against increasingly nasty consolidated AI races before culminating in a full momentum Chaos invasion breaking on my green shores, which was a superb campaign narrative. The Beastmen minicampaign was short, incredibly tightly-designed, and far better than the other (Wood Elf) minicampaign. Each race also had a handful of campaign challenges, such as securing a certain far-flung city or fielding an army of a certain unit, that were neat to weave into a general campaign conquest.

Much like Empire, there were also multiplayer achievements and a final, kill-based, one that was tuned a bit too high, though I knocked this one out in an afternoon after everything else rather than several days of constant churning. The only ones that required another real human were the viral achievement (donated graciously by a guy from the Steam forums, in the first nice thing the Steam forums have ever done), and the twin achievements to play and win a multiplayer campaign. Jim graciously let me crush his empire in a single battle to get those, and in so doing got the only solo achievement I could not crowbar into working against the AI.

One of the Ork campaign challenges is to siege and raze the Imperial capital at Altdorf, which starts about 2/3 of the way across the game world from you. The Empire uniquely shat the bed in my campaign and Altdorf was already razed by the time Chaos arrived, and Chaos usually is what does them in. By the time I was fighting with Chaos, humanity was pretty much gone - but the shittier Vampire faction was barely holding them off. Given as the Vampires can colonize human settlements, I flooded his lands with a green tide and pushed back and broke Chaos, then destroyed any enemy he could have between him and Altdorf. I fucked around for about fifty turns after I won, trying to coax him into colonizing Altdorf so that I could break our truce and raze it, and he just wouldn't do it. Eventually I gave up and asked Jim if he'd please play the Empire in our victory lap campaign so I could come burn his capital down and add that to my pile. Dammit, Kemmler. You almost made me look really smart.

I'm working on Total Warhammer 2, and that one's just big and nasty. Much better game! Many more campaigns to do, and it's still got a fucking viral achievement at the end staring me down. Someday, though.

(note: technically the games are called Total War: Warhammer, but the pun was right there and i refuse to let TCA leave it)

Edited October 28, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

JUST CAUSE 3 (AVALANCHE, 2015)

Finished: 1/4/22. Playtime: 70.2 hours.

In March, while wrapping up Total Warhammer, a horrible idea hit me. Could I platinum a game for every letter of the alphabet? I raided my library and found out I was only missing five letters: J, N, U, Y, and Z. I slammed into the Discord and asked for some help concocting games for the missing letters, and both @Ironthunder and subsequently @sauce proposed a Just Cause game. Just Cause 3 went on sale with all DLC for the price of a Whopper later that month and I was locked in.

It was a proper 7/10 game. I almost never didn't have a good time, in a generally incredibly shallow way, and that's completely alright. Without 100%ing it, the game probably would have lasted a perfect 20 or 30 hours and I would have been perfectly content with my time with it and talked back on it with some fondness.

That, of course, didn't happen. The achievements require you to do everything. All of the challenges, with max ranks on every one, every main and DLC mission, every vehicle and weapon for your garage, every skill. This is a simply obscene amount of shit to get done, as shown by the playtime compared to the earlier estimate - or so I thought. More on that later. Some of the challenges (particularly the wingsuit ones) were absolute motherfuckers, but no individual thing was particularly awful outside of simply being hard except for the one that required saving rebels to unlock safehouses in random encounters. After finishing the entirety of the rest of the game, I had three of these out of ten. It took hours of roaming to get the random encounters to pop to finish this one off, and it was an extremely sour note for the game to end on.

Two achievements required a friend to play, asking you to beat someone's score at one of the minichallenges and to beat one that you were Called Out on, but these were completely asynchronous, so Dave from IT came back to trash my score on something and call me out so he could be usurped. Thanks, me.

It's a surprisingly little amount to say for what amounted to three days and change of my life, but it really was mostly just vibes all the way through. Four letters to go.

[Integrity]

UNTITLED GOOSE GAME (HOUSE HOUSE, 2019)

Finished: 5/4/22. Playtime: 3.6 hours. Played on a Switch Pro controller.

What else could possibly stand in the U slot? I sat down a bit past 5:00 after work on Tuesday the 5th of April, and stood up at 8:47 the same evening to close Untitled Goose Game, 100% complete. Irregardless of the playtime, a game that keeps me enthralled to play it through in a sitting is a good feat, and I adored Untitled Goose Game. I've had no desire to play it since, but I'll still shill for it.

Unsurprisingly, the achievements were quick and straightforward. Do everything, then speedrun everything, and do a handful of little cheeky challenges. That was it for Untitled Goose Game. Three letters to go.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

NIOH (TEAM NINJA, 2017)

Finished: 16/4/22. Playtime: 111.6 hours. Played on all three of the Steam Controller, Switch Pro controller, and Dualshock 4 at various points.

Nioh is funky. @Esme bought me a gift copy for Chistmas in 2019, minutes before the pandemic, and I tried it and thought it was okay but confusing. I'd bounce off it a few more times, each time thinking closer to the idea that I'd enjoy the game a lot if I could just sink the time into it to properly enjoy it. In the wake of packing all the Dark Souls games away, I no longer had a reason to preserve that game's muscle memory, and Nioh entered my brain again. Maybe this time it would stick, and it could fill my N for the alphabet challenge, finally justifying my best little dude's gift?

It stuck.

I loved Nioh end to end more than any of the From games. It was distinctly harder than any of those, but had more depth for mastering to compensate. Nioh was occasionally unfair, often a motherfucker, and I spent about a third of the game figuring out the combat systems, but with that amount of elbow grease I ended up falling in love with it.  At the beginning, I thought it was going to be a reskin of a From game; as I played, it became obvious that the similarities were superficial at best. Nioh is an action game, and it's a fuckin' bombastic one. People have, correctly, criticized the loot system; if you play the game, I highly recommend that you go scorched earth and just vaporize everything you get that isn't what you're wearing. It ain't worth it. By the time you know well enough to argue with me about that, you understand the systems enough that it's far less of a chore.

100% Nioh, and I say this with love and aloha in my heart, sucked. Every one of two collectibles was required over an obscene number of maps, and the achievements required a thrust into NG+++++. Eat your heart out, Dark Souls 3. And these were, relatively, the easy ones. The post-postgame Abyss is extremely challenging to begin with, and requires you to scale up to the twentieth level of progressively-harder bosses. This was hell on wheels. I genuinely almost gave up at this point, like a hundred hours in, it was just so nasty. I persevered, setting the seed in my brain that would turn out to be watered by a later game: my will is iron. I am unconquerable. Nioh could not beat me. I am Nioh.

There's a sequel that I'm looking very forward to sinking my teeth into soon that @Esme also bought me, this time as a birthday present in 2021. What an amazing little dude he is. Two letters to go.

Edited October 28, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

YAKUZA 0 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2015)

Finished: 10/5/22. Playtime: 184.6 hours. Played on a Switch Pro controller.

I went into Yakuza 0 about as blind as one can get. I hadn't seen the bakamitai memes or really heard anything about the franchise since I decided not to buy it for the PS2 a million years ago. A good mate bothered me to play it until I did, and that's how it all kicked off.

I wouldn't describe Yakuza 0 as one of my favorite games ever, but it did scratch a particular itch for me, as I'll get into in a bit. Mechanically, it was fine and occasionally great. The story was also fine and occasionally great. I've got nitpicks here and there, like the texture of the upgrade system and the kinda-flat ending and the two weirdly-horny minigames and Mr Shakedown, but it's not enough to detract from Yakuza 0 being a pretty great game and an easy recommendation.

100% Yakuza 0 is 100%, and that's a lot of shit. Since it will recur later, spoiler alert, I'll introduce the Completion Log here. Most Yakuza games are fairly patterned: if you beat the game, beat the game again on Legend difficulty, finish the whole completion log, and beat a series of challenge battles, you're either done or very close to done. The completion log's contents vary from game to game, but generally involve eating everything, doing all the side quests, fighting a buttload of people, performing at a certain level in every minigame, and finding some number of hidden collectibles in the open world. I'll sum up the Yakuza 0 one in a spoiler due to length.

Spoiler

• Talk to 300 people
• Eat 100 times, including eating and drinking every food and drink at all 24 establishments across Tokyo and Osaka
• Eat 30 food and 30 medicinal items from your inventory
• Buy random items from vending machines 50 times
• Travel 100 kilometers on foot, at least 10 of which while sprinting, and take a taxi 30 times
• Earn 50 billion yen, spend 10 billion yen, and throw 10 million yen on the streets
• Collect all of the telephone cards, and watch all of the porno videos
• Beat up 200 enemies in each of the four stances on each of the two characters in any circumstance, 500 of which should be random street fights, 10 of which should be noveau riche, 1 of which should randomly be named Sega, and 100 of which should be using any kind of weapon
• Rescue 30 citizens-in-peril
• Beat roaming miniboss Mr. Shakedown 10 times on each character
• Win 50 coliseum tournaments, knocking out at least 25 unique opponents
• Use special attacks 40 times on Kiryu and 30 on Majima
• Break 100 random objects during combat
• Find or buy 100 different weapons and 70 different accessories
• Complete training for all six masters
• Collect a billion yen and buy everything, hire everyone, upgrade everything, and finish the plot of both characters' business minigames
• Complete all side quests (including beating the superboss) and befriend all possible friends on both characters
• Start 100 minigame sessions of any kind
• Meet all three Telephone Club women you can fuck
• Complete all five disco songs on each of three difficulty levels (15 songs minimum, do not propagate down)
• Win all cups and collect most of the parts for slot car racing
• Win 100 million yen betting on cage matches
• At Sega arcades, get: 5 million points in Space Harrier and Out Run and Super Hang-On, and 100 thousand points in Fantasy Zone; and get all unique prizes from the claw game
• At gambling halls, earn 10 million yen in poker, baccarat, and roulette; 5 million yen in blackjack; and 1 million yen in cho-han, cee-lo, koi-koi, and oicho-kabu
• Earn 10 million yen in darts and get 10 hat tricks
• Earn 10 million yen in pool and perform 3 combination (sink a ball with another ball) and 3 carom (sink a ball by knocking the cue ball off another ball) shots
• Earn 5 million yen in the batting cages
• Earn 10 million yen in bowling split challenges and bowl 10 strikes
• Win 5 games of shogi
• Earn 10 million yen in mahjong, and build a winning hand 10 times, including 5x mangan and 1x each of haneman, riichi ippatsu, and full straight
• Fish up every fish in both fishing locales
• Get a high score at all nine karaoke songs

That's a lot of shit to do. Compounding this, I'd never played and in some cases never heard of the Sega games, the Japanese gambling games, or shogi or mahjong, so a lot of time had to be spent actually learning how to play the fuckers even before addressing getting the completion metrics done, or in the case of the arcade games while getting them done. Arcade games aren't known for having complex rulesets to study before you compete, after all. I'm glad I did for sure - I splashed on a decent real-ass mahjong set and taught my family to play so I could torment them, and it's a perennial pastime for me now - but it contributed a lot of brainpower and time to the achievement. I thought Just Cause 3 took time, boy, I was a dumbass and a moron.

This checklisting, taking over a hundred of the 180 hours the game lasted on its own, unlocked my second chakra. Nioh had taught me I was unbeatable, and Yakuza 0 had taught me that I loved following an unreasonably big checklist. These two would clasp hands like Arnold and Carl Weathers to ensure that I made the next biggest mistake of my achievement hunting career in June, but we'll get there. One letter to go.

[Integrity]

ZOMBIE NIGHT TERROR (NOCLIP, 2016)

Finished: 11/5/22. Playtime: 26.7 hours.

Remember Lemmings? That was a fascinating time in gaming. I barely remember them - we had an old copy of Lemmings 2 for DOS as long back as I can remember, though it's long been sold off by now, and I haven't touched the franchise since the mid- or late-90s. Near as I remember the games weren't very good, just novel in a weird Dawn of Gaming way.

Anyway, someone remembers Lemmings, because the concept got crowbarred into you masterminding a zombie apocalypse. It works pretty well all told - some maps and challenges require fine control you don't have by design and it's more annoying than I think was intended, but when the game gels and you're sending your little pixelly dead dudes across the map and eating guys to create more dead dudes, it's a legitimately fun time. Worth checking out if you're a fan of slightly-abstract strategy and/or schlocky old horror.

Achievements were more challenge than anything. Completing the campaign and doing all the secondary objectives fulfilled about 95% of the gameplay, leaving only three real things left to do. A multi-map secret hunt that I just used a guide to get through took a bit of time, the absolutely bizarre 'wait for 104 minutes on the credits screen' achievement, and then the old classic: kill more guys than you reasonably had to for the whole game by an order of magnitude. In this case, I came out of everything with two thousand or so kills out of ten thousand. Some guy set up an auto churn map to just spawn and dispose of zombies and humans and it ran for an hour and a half or so to finish me off. Thanks, Steam Workshop guy.

With that, the alphabet was complete. Age of Empires, Bastion, Call of Juarez, Dark Souls 2, Elderborn, FTL, Generation Zero, Half-Life 2, Infested Planet, Just Cause 3, K hasn't come up yet because it got patched with new achievements and I haven't gotten back to the last time I played it, Long Live the Queen, Mechwarrior 5, Nioh, Orcs Must Die! 2, Portal 2, Quake, Rocket League, Soulcalibur 6, Total Warhammer, Untitled Goose Game, Valkyria Chronicles, Wargroove, XCOM Chimera Squad, Yakuza 0, Zombie Night Terror. It was a silly project, but it made me happy.

EDIT: i fuckin forgot j under no pressure lol

Edited October 28, 2022 by Integrity

[Integrity]

CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE 3 (INFINITY WARD, 2011)

Finished: 17/3/22. Playtime: 39.3 hours.

Modern Warfare 3 is not a good game. I'll say it straight up. I alluded to some troubling trends of Modern Warfare 2, of Hard Men being driven to make the Hard Decisions and perform Hard Deeds, and Modern Warfare 3 just dives off that deep end. Captain Price goes from being a legacy character for you to recognize to being right all the time about everything, and when he's wrong it's because there was no right decision and he did what he had to do. There's no arguing that the first two Modern Warfares are at least a good bit jingoistic, with I think a credible argument that they're aware of it and do enough to remind us that we're not the Good Guys necessarily; Modern Warfare 3 has no mitigating factors. Modern Warfare 3 is a Clancy wet dream. The game literally ends with you (as Price, in the insanely dumb Juggernaut suit) hunting down and murdering a guy for revenge while the world burns and your previous PC dies nearby, and then he does a cigarette cause the job's done as it had to be. They looked at No Russian and said 'how could we be more tasteless?' and included a London bombing where you literally cut out of playing the special forces handling it to play as a nine year old on vacation for fifteen seconds to get blown up. If that's not gauche enough, the opt-out dialogue when you start a campaign is basically like "I PROMISE I WON'T BE OFFENDED BY THE VIDEO GAME" <YES/I AM A BABY>. It's pathetic.

The campaign itself isn't ...even that bad, really. It's probably the worst of the three, but not by a particular distance, and it still has its own highlights. Most levels are just kind of tepid or alternate between being pretty fun and kind of annoying. It's not a particular masterpiece, but if you need more Modern Warfare, it's more Modern Warfare. It's better than the reboot's campaign, at least.

Drill's the same. Campaign on Veteran, all the collectibles, all the Spec Ops missions (shoutouts to @Parrhesia again). There's a series of DLC maps with unique challenges and achievements which are pretty nasty, but not interesting enough to talk about. Modern Warfare 3's innovation to the formula is Survival mode. It's... it's okay. It's not great, it's not bad, it's a fine four or five hour diversion. Of course, it can't be a four or five hour diversion - the achievements require one to get up to wave fifteen (probably 30 to 40 minutes, give or take) on each of the sixteen maps. It wasn't terribly uncommon for me to bomb out in the wave 12-14 range, which was frustrating as hell, and the required strategy for each map was essentially no different, making it feel even grindier. Better yet, doing all that didn't level me all the way up, which meant I had to pick a map and simply grind for several hours to level up to be able to buy everything one time. The four or five hour Survival diversion ended up taking somewhere around twelve, all told, and the skeleton was barren by then.

Sucks to pack up a series with the doubtless worst entry, but sometimes it happens.

[Integrity]

AUDIOSURF (DYLAN FITTERER, 2008)

Finished: 18/5/22. Playtime: 27.9 hours.

Ah, Audiosurf. I had a fascination with it back when it was fresh, and a brief resurgence in 2011. Load up your music and get a track racing cum match making puzzle game based on the song? Hell yeah! 2008 was right when I was starting to really establish my own musical tastes outside of just 'things I inherited from my dad' too, so it was perfectly poised, and priced where a seventeen year old could pick it up on the cheap. Ultimately, it's an arcade game - if a good one - and only has so much shelf life, but damn did I enjoy my time with it in 2009.

I nearly aced out the guy by mistake in the dark ages. There's nothing particularly off the wall here - overperform in general and overperform with some specific characters who modify how the game is played - but the final three achievements (of nineteen) I hadn't gotten are worth noting. Ambush requires you to beat a friend's score on a song within 15 minutes of them posting it - asynchronous multiplayer called for good old Dave. Bizarro requires you to fill out your entire board with no matches within 15 seconds of a song starting, which requires some quick reflexes and/or planning and also a song which kicks off instantly with at least 18 blocks in the first 15 seconds. Stealth Master stumped me back in the day, though. See, one of the classes is Ninja. Ninja eschews the matching part of the game and colors everything one of two colors - grey blocks give you a penalty, white blocks give you points. You're awarded Stealth for going through a song without ever hitting a grey block, and there's three related achievements - one for a song at least 3 minutes long, one for a song at least 7 minutes long, and one for a song at least 11 minutes long. I got the 3 minutes one without ever trying, since I just liked playing Ninja, and went for the long one back when I was eighteen or whatever. Loaded up Enigma's full Principles of Lust on Audiosurf, 11:44 total, and Stealthed it perfectly. I got the 11 minutes one and didn't get the 7 minutes one. Confused, I did it again. It must have been bugged. There was no other explanation. I stopped trying to 100% Audiosurf.

14 years later I'm smart enough to realize that the conditions aren't length >=3, >=7, >=11; they're 3 <= length < 7, 7 <= length < 11, and 11 <= length. Man I was dumb. Got it now, though.

[Integrity]

SAVE ROOM (FRACTAL PROJECTS, 2022)

Finished: 19/5/22. Playtime: 76 minutes.

A silly little puzzle game based off the famous inventory system from Resident Evil 4. That's it. 40 puzzles, three bucks when not on sale, worth the money for a cheeky little distraction.

Every achievement comes naturally or simply if you missed it.

[Integrity]

CRUSH THE CASTLE (ARMOR GAMES, 2009)

Finished: 21/5/22. Playtime: 10.3 hours.

There's no way I need to introduce Crush the Castle, right?

For some reason, earlier this year, someone decided to pack Crush the Castle and its two sequels up into a package and drop it on Steam for a tenner. It's every bit as good as it was on Flash. I've had my times with Angry Birds but there's just something, memes aside, about a fucking trebuchet. Great little nostalgia trip.

Achievements were straightforward for the second time in a row. Crunch through the three games (and not even all of 3) with max ranks.

[Integrity]

KILLING FLOOR 2 (TRIPWIRE, 2016)

"Finished": 22/5/22. "Playtime": 263 hours.

Here's the alluded-to K.

Killing Floor 2 may not be the greatest FPS ever, but it's very possibly my favorite. Even over the classics, over the Wolfenstein and Doom reboots, over the Calls of Duty, all of it. Everything about the game clicks right for me - the gunplay, the enemy diversity, the level diversity, the class diversity, the melee system, the gore feedback, everything. Playing the game solo is basically a comfort food for me, put on a Youtube video and julienne some frickin' zombies with one of a hundred guns, swords, swords with guns attached to them, guns with swords attached to them, and guns with guns attached to them. It fulfills a primal need for carnage that not even Doom (2016) does for me. Even the shit parts of the game, like the bosses, just don't bother me a bit, because I've sunk so much time into the game that I can just dome them on the top difficulty solo with no worries. My risk of failure in any given run of Killing Floor 2 is essentially zero, and this doesn't drag the game down a single bit.

The achievements are not something one can do as a jobber. The only way to ace this game as a labor of love, and I'll detail why in a moment. First, to make the magnitude of the achievements make more sense, I have to describe the gameplay loop of Killing Floor 2. There are ten classes which level up depending on kills, map completion, etc. as you play the game. Each one goes from 0 to 25, and the benefits for leveling up are tremendous. Fittingly, the experience rewards for later difficulties (out of four) are far higher, and classes take a lot more experience to level as you go. Each round is completely independent outside of your class levels. You spawn with a knife and a starter weapon, which is generally a dependable sidearm but hopelessly outclassed in the later stages as a primary weapon. Depending on selection, you start a round with a fixed difficulty (easy, normal, hard, hell on earth [HoE hereafter]) and a fixed length (short, medium, long). You then fight through four, seven, or ten cycles of killing a set number of enemies that spawn from offmap and come in to eat you, then taking a minute to shop up. Enemies get harder as you go, ramping up extremely fast in short games and much slower in long games. The final (i.e. 5th, 8th, or 11th) wave is one of the four bosses selected at random. A short HoE map, for experience reference, gives about a sixth of the 24 -> 25 experience requirement for a single class.

Let's get into it, then.

First, there are twenty-four maps that you have to complete on each of the four difficulty levels. That's four playthroughs of each map, no propagation upwards. While doing this, there's a separate achievement for winning a map with each perk on each difficulty level, so you need to be able to perform with everything on the top difficulty at some point. Every one of those maps has a hidden type of collectible that, depending on the map, you have to find somewhere between most or all of. Three of those maps also have an Objective mode, which is a genuinely ballbustingly hard thing to solo (I did it!) where you're presented with nine rounds with themed waves or objectives you have to fulfill and sometimes infinite enemies until you do it. Each of those three maps' Objective modes has to be done on each of the four difficulty levels. There's an Endless mode as well, which gets progressively harder to obscene levels; there's a special map to showcase it (you can play it anywhere though) which you have to beat up to wave 25 on, you guessed it, each of the four difficulty modes. That's, all told, a hundred and twelve rounds of Killing Floor 2 at the bare minimum, or if you prefer the base measurement system, six hundred and eighty-eight waves, presuming that you never die. That's still not enough to have leveled every class up to 25, another requirement, maybe unless you play during the occasional quad XP weekend.

Fortunately, that's not the whole game. The system changed slightly after a certain patch, but the maps kept flowing. There have been, to date, fourteen more maps added, chiefly with the formula of (God bless) 'beat on hard or higher' 'beat on HoE' and 'find 10 collectibles'. Assuming you just run them on HoE and get the collectibles first try, that's only 70 more waves of the game so far to go through, but more have been added up to and including about last week, which I haven't done yet. So on top of all this, 100% Killing Floor 2 is a source of continuous maintenance.

This 758 wave marker is only an absolute lower bound. Chances are good you'll have to take time to grind some Endless out (the best source of XP) just to level classes to be able to tackle the higher difficulty achievements for them, and chances are good by the end of all of this you don't have every class to 25 unless you took specific effort to do that. If you didn't do it along the way, there's a handful of achievements that require proper multiplayer - heal teammates, give them money, and the Versus achievements. Killing Floor 2 has an absurdly terrible Versus mode. Nobody plays it anymore, fortunately. Back in 2019 or so, though, people did, and I tried for several hours to get its only two achievements: 'win as the survivors' and 'win as the monsters'. Every single round was won by the monsters. I had to ask Jim, eventually, just to let me beat him in a simulqueue versus game so I could finally kick it out.

Finally, here I am, in maintenance mode, eleven real days of time later. I'm still not tired of the game - every time a festival and new map drops I free up 70 gigs, reinstall it, play a short HoE game on the new map as one of my favorite classes, and have just as great a time as always. I'll keep this up as long as the devs do, and that's a fucking challenge.

Edited October 29, 2022 by Integrity

[lenticular]

On 10/26/2022 at 10:35 PM, Integrity said:

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.

First off, it was really interesting to hear your thoughts about the genre, since you clearly know way more about it than I do. I really don't know what I'd be looking for in an RTS if I were to try to pick one up today. The way I always played them back in the 90s was always single player, and typically on low difficulty settings. I'd basically just play as a base builder, focussing on building up my infrastructure and economy (in as much as they existed in those games), then once I had built up an unstoppable military force, I'd just send them all en masse into the middle of the enemy base and rely on sheer weight of numbers to win. And I absolutely could not do any of the high APM clickfest anything. My manual dexterity is, and always has been, terrible. Teenage me may have loved 90s RTS games, but she was pretty terrible at the them.

On 10/26/2022 at 10:35 PM, Integrity said:

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?

Brains are wild, man. But luckily for us, there are so damn many video games out there, that we all can find something that works for us. There are approximately a billion games releasing on Steam every minute, and approximately another billion on Switch. There's something out there for everyone. It's one of the things that I like about video games as a hobby.

On 10/27/2022 at 10:54 PM, Integrity said:

How the hell do you follow up Portal?? Without terribly much difficulty, it turns out. It was a huge point of contention back when Portal 2 was new whether it was better than its predecessor or not, and a lot of the debate, I felt at the time, kind of hinged on the fact that Portal had been so unexpected and so novel, and people weren't really arguing Portal 2 versus Portal, but rather arguing the quality of Portal 2 versus the novelty of Portal. That's always going to be weighted in favor of the thing the reader experienced first, and I found myself on both sides of the debate back in the dark ages of 2012. Now, looking back ten years, replaying both without any novelty left to them, there really isn't a question - Portal 2 is way better. Ignoring the co-op entirely, which is a fantastic mode I've replayed every time it's been long enough for me to forget the solutions, the big classic issue people had with Portal 2 was that a bunch of levels ended up boiling down to finding where you could put a portal and then doing it. The problem I have with this after replaying both is that this works exactly for most of the back half of Portal as well - not that it isn't a bit of an issue, mind, just that it's not an issue particularly unique to Portal 2. Besides that, Portal 2's got a meatier campaign which, it should be said, does have lower points than Portal's ridiculously tight 4 hour schlep, but has a lot more good packed into it to compensate.

I always came down on the side that Portal was better than Portal 2, mainly because of its length. Playing Portal for the first time, damn near every second of it felt immaculate, but even on the first time through Portal 2 there were parts of it that felt like they were a bit padded to make a "full length game" for the bigger numbers are always better crowd. Looking back on it now, I find myself thinking that I really don't give a damn which one was better. They were both fantastic, and that's enough. And Portal 2's co-op is probably the high point of the pair of them.

On 10/28/2022 at 12:36 AM, Integrity said:

Any of you guys remember Road Rash 3D for the Playstation? Man, I do. That was my jam. Battle Cars for the SNES primed me to ride around on a motorcycle and hit guys with a katana. The one problem of Road Rash was that it really wasn't very good. Good enough to entertain me: seven, sure, but ultimately it was shallow and uninteresting once you got past the novelty of drive-by smashing someone with a bat.

I'm sufficiently old that I don't remember Road Rash 3D on the Playstation, but do remember the original Road Rash on the Mega Drive/Genesis. Which I have the same verdict on. It was rad as hell when I was 10, but not actually any good.

On 10/28/2022 at 1:40 AM, Integrity said:

The next of my really bad ideas was when I was mopping up Skyrim's achievements, I DMed my buddy Wyatt and we were talking about routing for some of the nastier achievements, and I made a joke: SSE has its own, separately-tracked, executable, Steam entry, and achievements. What if I did both? How fast could I do it? haha

Dear gods, why would you do that to yourself? I mean, don't get me wrong, I like Skyrim. Skyrim is a good game (except when it's occasionally being a shit game or less-occasionally being a buggy game, but mostly it's a good game). But 100%ing it twice sounds like a miserable experience.

On 10/28/2022 at 3:38 PM, Integrity said:

There are only six achievements. Two of them are awarded for beating the campaign on Normal and for beating the campaign on any difficulty. The other four come from the alternate game modes. In several campaign missions are enemy signal corps, and taking out the signal corps units unlocks a new SIGINT puzzle from the main menu to deliver the other half of the story. The SIGINT puzzles are fun little logical puzzles - you're given a set of signal inputs and tasked to make a circuit map to unscramble them to a certain output form. They're good. The remaining half of the achievements come from, of all games, cribbage solitaire. Win one, ten, and one hundred games of cribbage solitaire. It's random, and it took quite a long while to grind out, even interspersing a cribbage win or two between every campaign map, but at least I like cribbage.

I've played a few Zachtronics games, though not this one. But they're all pretty weird. The only one I've 100%ed is Opus Magnum (fun game, would recommend) which also has weird achievements. One for beating the game, one for beating any ten of the more difficult bonus levels, and then three for playing the weird peg-matching solitaire side game (1/10/100 times).

On 10/28/2022 at 7:23 PM, Integrity said:

In March, while wrapping up Total Warhammer, a horrible idea hit me. Could I platinum a game for every letter of the alphabet? I raided my library and found out I was only missing five letters: J, N, U, Y, and Z.

That is a terrible idea, and I also kinda want to do it now. (Un)fortunately, I am still missing way more letters: C, E, G, J, N, Q, U, W, X, Y, Z. But I have 8 games starting with S and 5 starting with H. Weird. Probably too many missing for me to start on as a proper project, but the idea is stuck in the back of my head now.

On 10/28/2022 at 7:53 PM, Integrity said:

UNTITLED GOOSE GAME (HOUSE HOUSE, 2019)

Another game that just didn't land for me at all, though it's easier for me to put my finger on why for this one. I just didn't care for the humour. Sense of humour is incredibly subjective, and if something doesn't make you laugh then it doesn't make you laugh. And there's very little as boring and awkward as sitting through a comedy skit that you don't find funny. Nothing against the game, mind, just wasn't for me.

21 hours ago, Integrity said:

ZOMBIE NIGHT TERROR (NOCLIP, 2016)

Finished: 11/5/22. Playtime: 26.7 hours.

Remember Lemmings? That was a fascinating time in gaming. I barely remember them - we had an old copy of Lemmings 2 for DOS as long back as I can remember, though it's long been sold off by now, and I haven't touched the franchise since the mid- or late-90s. Near as I remember the games weren't very good, just novel in a weird Dawn of Gaming way.

I absolutely loved Lemmings. I mean, I was a nerdy kid who was 10 when it came out and then was a teenager in the 90s. Of course I loved Lemmings. From memory, I think I had Lemmings on three different platforms: Amstrad CPC, SNES, and MS-DOS. I do remember it as being legitimately good for its time, though I'd guess that it probably wouldn't hold up all that well today. It could certainly be frustratingly janky at times, clicking multiple lemmings to try to make them build a bridge in exactly the place that you wanted rather than two pixels to the left. But it was a good time.

I'd be tempted to check out any sort of spiritual successor if I wasn't so completely over zombies at this point.

9 hours ago, Integrity said:

AUDIOSURF (DYLAN FITTERER, 2008)

Audiosurf was great. And also a product of its time. It could only really have existed in the decade where mp3s had become ubiquitous but hadn't yet been largely replaced by streaming music. I didn't get anywhere close to 100%ing it back when I last played it in 2011, but my memory is that achievements were really weird because they were so dependent on the song you used. Find the right song and they could be really simple, but with the wrong song, they'd be either extremely hard or impossible.

[Zapp Branniglenn]

On 10/27/2022 at 10:56 AM, Integrity said:

Did you know there are actually nine other Spec Ops games? They're all standard, if pretty bad, milsim shooters.

There's also at least a dozen Rainbow Six games before Siege. The counter terrorism stuff was big even before the Iraq War. Folks seem to think they were only WW2/Saving Private Ryan simulators before Modern Warfare dropped bars (of Soap). 

On 10/26/2022 at 6:58 PM, Integrity said:

CALL OF JUAREZ: GUNSLINGER (TECHLAND, 2013)

Now we're at the good stuff. Dying Light fan that I may be, I think it's their best work. God I hope nobody decides they "have" to play the whole series chronologically before they get to this one. That's how people miss out on stuff like this, the homework barrier.

On 10/26/2022 at 6:27 AM, 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.

They're regular until they turn into zombies. Oops, spoiler.

On 10/28/2022 at 7:09 AM, Integrity said:

4 RESIDENT EVIL (CAPCOM, 2005)

Unlike when I was a kid, I was able to see flaws in the game. The castle drags on entirely too long, the mines could have been cut completely from the game while losing nothing, Separate Ways is both too long and not particularly good for what it contributes. They're mostly nitpicks or preferential things at the worst, though. On aggregate, Resident Evil 4 is still a fantastic game even today, and while I wouldn't put it among my Absolute Favorites, it certainly remains in an A-tier of sorts among the pantheon of games. That's still pretty good for a game that's pushing the legal voting age, honestly.

I've had the pleasure of seeing a couple streamers do their first runs of RE4 over a decade after release. It holds up from that perspective, but being a rosetta stone of third person shooters means it can feel like a less polished version of several games you've played in the years since. The mid 2000s flavored espionage thriller cutscenes are very charming though. And I always get a kick out of the game's puzzle solving consisting almost entirely of Leon shooting faraway objects. 

You know what bugs me: RE4 has that concept of shooting a zombie in a vulnerable area, which opens up a neat martial arts move. Why isn't that in every video game? Did people not watch Equilibrium? Heck, we're in a post-John Wick world, there's no excuse to see so little gun-fu in video games.

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Achievements were as simple as they get. Beat the game, then on Professional, and beat Separate Ways to get all but one - which you get just for beating the merchant's shooting galleries any time. Easy.

Huh. kind of disappointing. Assignment Ada isn't Peak RE4, but it's a quickie. And I'm sure that 4 star on all stages of Mercenaries is a reasonable enough ask. Far be it from me to tack on extra homework for achievement hunters, but I'm imagining people ending their "completionist" run of RE4 completely unaware that you can play as Krauser. That's a shame. Kids these days can't even fathom a time where games just...had extra modes and playable characters unlocked by playing the game rather than inside of a lootbox unlocked with Mom's credit card. If you ask me, Achievements should guide the player to see everything worth seeing. Then again, from a developer's perspective everything in their game is "worth seeing". Or even worth seeing forty times in a desperate grind for that last, bullshit achievement.

On 10/28/2022 at 1:20 PM, Integrity said:

YAKUZA 0 (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2015)

Finished: 10/5/22. 

100% Yakuza 0 is 100%, and that's a lot of shit.

Oh. Lemme check...March 19th, that's when I platinumed the game this year. I wasn't sure I'd ever go through with it, but I had played the Kiwamis, and the 3-5 remasters, and Zero is easily the only one I'd want to do that for. The side content of Yakuza 0 IS the game. I only recall not having fun during the catfights, that weapon shop stuff, and Mahjong. Come to think of it, one achievement asked for more catfighting than the CP list asked for. So really it's 105% for the platinum. Thank god you don't have to do all the minigame stuff once each for BOTH characters. I hear that's what you can expect out of 4 and 5.

On 10/28/2022 at 11:23 AM, Integrity said:

In March, while wrapping up Total Warhammer, a horrible idea hit me. Could I platinum a game for every letter of the alphabet? I raided my library and found out I was only missing five letters: J, N, U, Y, and Z.

This sounds obnoxiously like me. The letters I'm missing would be I, L, O, Q, V, W, X, and Z. Though if we expand the scope from specifically "games with achievements" to "games with any extra unlockables/trackable tasks/side quests beyond just beating the game", then I think it's just Q and Z. I don't...think Zelda 2 had any stuff that isn't mandatory for progression. I'd be interested to know what your Q game was. 

[Integrity]

YAKUZA KIWAMI (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2016)

Finished: 21/6/22. Playtime: 92.6 hours.

A really bad thing happened in the month after Yakuza 0. I watched speedruns of Yakuza 0 to pass the time in the Legend playthrough while I was replaying everything, and found them to be enjoyable side bits. Gently resolved to not play anymore Yakuza games, I put on speedruns of the other Yakuza games while working on other games, some of which are still unfinished, and playing a bit of FFXIV here and there. One day, watching a run of Yakuza 5 and thinking back on how much I enjoyed the checklisting in Yakuza 0 and, to a lesser extent, Just Cause 3, I heard the most awful words.

"I'd really pity anyone who decided they wanted to fill out the completion log for this game."

My ears perked up. The gears started to turn. Possibly...? No... Unless...?

So it begins.

Yakuza Kiwami is an okay game. I've got mixed feelings about it. Majima Everywhere I found, controversially I now know, to be a great system that helped keep my interest in the game consistently up. Most of the plot was fairly naff (man I'll long for naff in a minute!), and most of the substories were forgettable or bad, but the Kiwami side story content like Majima Everywhere and the return of Pocket Circuit Fighter was enjoyable. And it's not like it was all bad - there were still good moments here and there, and clearly it was good enough to not dissuade me from continuing the rest of the franchise, but it was definitely all-told in my bottom two Yakuzen. The biggest problem, I think, is that Nishiki was a really weak villain for me, and the Yakuza 0 context didn't help him nor did the Kiwami-added flashback scenes of his descent. I just wasn't invested in Nishiki-as-final-boss, which made it two Yakuza games in a row where the final guy Kiryu fights felt kind of disappointing and man this'll become a trend.

The achievements for Kiwami were significantly gentler than those of 0. The Completion List, and related activities, covered basically all of them, with little exceptions like finding the last Majima Everywhere random encounter here and there and Sexy Ron: play mahjong with a hostess. Haruka's Whims was the highlight of this, easily. I enjoyed walking around town with her and doing random bullshit quite a lot, even when she asked me to do ragequit-worthy stuff like winning against the hardest opponent at pool. I like pool but I'm nowhere near good enough for that, girl. Still, I persevered through the expert billiards and the horny card fight minigame and all that, packed up Kiwami in half the time of 0, and looked to the heavens.

[Integrity]

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

There's also at least a dozen Rainbow Six games before Siege. The counter terrorism stuff was big even before the Iraq War. Folks seem to think they were only WW2/Saving Private Ryan simulators before Modern Warfare dropped bars (of Soap). 

i played the pre-siege r6 games quite a lot, and unlike spec ops it had several reasonably big hits like the absolutely fantastic vegas duology, and was always a mainstream presence, and also siege (nor any of them before it) wasn't a weird expectation-subverter that only gets talked about like with the line. the situations aren't really comparable.

 

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Thank god you don't have to do all the minigame stuff once each for BOTH characters. I hear that's what you can expect out of 4 and 5.

i'll get into that (spoilers) in a few more posts but the short of it is no, 4's possibly the single easiest game to plat out of the franchise and 5 is hell on wheels but not for any minigame-related reasons

 

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

Come to think of it, one achievement asked for more catfighting than the CP list asked for.

that catfight achievement is one of the most miserable pieces of shit i've done for this project. fun fact: game's rigged. i got tired of mashing for the prompts and just rigged a macro to press E every single frame for the mash sequences and that brought my win percentage up to about 65%.

 

6 hours ago, Zapp Branniglenn said:

I'd be interested to know what your Q game was. 

the list of games was in the post right after yak0, but it was the quake remaster

 

15 hours ago, lenticular said:

 

nothing in specific i just wanted to say i enjoy your memory sharings

Edited October 30, 2022 by Integrity