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

[Integrity]

huh! mystery solved

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

Got any interest in Thronefall, EA as it is?

Looks a wee bit like Bad North, but more limited in scope.

[Integrity]

this is the first i'd heard of thronefall but yeah, i'm definitely interested in what i see

[lenticular]

Been a while since I posted any of my own 100%s here. Let's fix that with some of my recent ones.

XCOM: CHIMERA SQUAD (FIRAXIS, 2020)

Spoiler

Finished: 19 June, 2023. Playtime: 95.2 hours.

Yeah, we've talked about this already. And having 100%ed it, I stand by my opinion that it's a great game and possibly the best XCOM game of the lot. Yeah, its highs aren't as high as the best bits of War of the Chosen, but it's way more consistent. Pretty much every moment I had in Chimera Squad was fun, whereas War of the Chosen had more than its fair share of aggro management, hunting units in fog of war and other tedious nonsense. Also, my additional hot take is that post-war reconciliation and trying to win the peace is a way more compelling storyline to set a game to than Yet Another War Story.

The "Every Timeline" achievement sucks, though.

WE LOVE KATAMARI REROLL+ ROYAL REVERIE (BANDAI NAMCO/NOWPRO/MONKEYCRAFT 2005/2023)

Spoiler

Finished: 16 July, 2023. Playtime: 14.6 hours.

This is the 2023 remaster (with some new content) by Monkeycraft of the 2005 original by Now Productions, published by Bandai Namco and Namco respectively. Get it? Got it. Good. It also has one of the most ridiculous and convoluted titles that I've ever seen in a game that wasn't published by Square Enix.

If anyone has somehow managed to not be familiar with Katamari Damacy, the basic gameplay is this: you push a ball around, and when you roll into things that are smaller than you, you roll them up into your ball, growing larger in the process. So while you might start off by rolling up coins you end up rolling up mountains. I believe I am legally obligated to use words like "charming" and "quirky" to describe it, and to mention that it has excellent music. It's a fun time.

One of the fun things about the Katamari games is that they're pretty simple to beat, but they have a high skill ceiling. If you watch speedrunners or anyone else who has dedicated the time to achieve mastery, it's impressive to see just how good they can get. Fine control of the katamari, whizzing around at high speeds, learning the layouts of the various maps and the best routes to take through them, all that sort of thing. Getting 100% in this game asks you to do absolutely none of this. I went into this game as someone who was rubbish at Katamari, and I left it as someone who was still rubbish at Katamari.

Not only did it not ask me to achieve any degree of mastery, it also didn't ask all that much in the way of completionism. I had to beat every level (but only at the baseline completion, not any of the more challenging goals) and I had to complete one set of collectables by rolling up all the cousins. Three other sets of collectables (presents, stickers, and all items) were not needed. I can't think of any other game where 100% achievements has felt quite this hollow. But on the other hand, it did mean that it was a quick 100% and the game didn't outstay its welcome, so there's a decent chance I'll go back to this at some point to try for some sort of actual completionism.

DICEY DUNGEONS (TERRY CAVANAGH 2019)

Spoiler

Finished: 29 July, 2023. Playtime: 61.7.

This game is exceptional. It's practically a perfect game. By which I don't mean that it's my favourite game or the best game I've ever played or that it's going to suit everyone. What I mean is that pretty much everything that it tried to do landed for me and that there really wasn't anything that I'd want to change about it.

The elevator pitch for this would be "Slay the Spire except with dice instead of cards". As you progress, you pick up new equipment and choose which of them to equip. Then, on every turn, you roll dice (d6) and get to choose which of your equipment to assign each die to, with each equipment having different effects and wanting different dice rolls. So, if you roll a 6 maybe you want to put it into "Hall of Mirrors" which only takes a 6 but makes you roll an extra die every turn for the rest of the encounter, but maybe you just want to put it into a weapon that does damage based on the number you rolled. It's very much an "easy to learn, hard to master" sort of system.

And if you want to beat the game, and especially if you want 100% achievements, you absolutely do need to master it. It's not the sort of game that you can bluff your way through with stubborn persistence. There are 6 characters, each with somewhat different mechanics, each of which has 6 different episodes to get through which vary up the rules a bit. If you beat episode 6 with all characters, you then unlock the final boss. For 100% you then also need to complete an extra hard mode version of episode 6 as well as complete a few miscellaneous challenges like "beat a boss while at full health" or "get a stack of 30 poison on an enemy", that sort of thing.

And let me tell you, some of the episodes get tough. It's not hard to find reports on the Internet of people taking over 50 attempts at individual episodes. I didn't get anywhere close to that, probably managed more than half of the episodes on my first try, and beat almost all of them within a handful of attempts. And then I got to episode 6 hard mode with the Witch, who is the most difficult character. And that one episode absolutely wrecked me and destroyed any illusions that I might have had that I was good at the game. I still wasn't close to 50 tries, but it did take me over 20 tries, and beating it was a big endorphin rush that turn-based games seldom offer.

There are also no shortage of people online who like to bitch and moan about this game and say that it is entirely luck-based. Now, I normally like to meet people where they are on matters of taste and don't like to crap on people for their opinions. But in this case, I'll make an exception. These people are just plain wrong. I mean, yeah, it's a roguelike game about rolling dice. Of course there's a pretty deent chunk of luck involved. But it's mostly about learning how to set things up so that you can mitigate the bad luck when you inevitably get it. And once you get good, you absolutely can win consistently. I am pretty confident that the people who complain about this game being pure luck are the same people who are repeatedly attacking into 10% crit rates in Fire Emblem and then complaining when their units die, building a 50 card deck in Slay the Spire and then complaining that they never draw the cards they want, or betting on every hand of poker and complaining that their opponents always have better cards than they do.

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge that this was made by the same guy who made both Super Hexagon and VVVVVV, both of which are also great, with all three games being completely different in every possible way. I'm a little bit in awe of that.

Great game. Highly recommended.

SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION: BEYOND EARTH (FIRAXIS 2014)

Spoiler

Finished: 10 August, 2023. Playtime: 76.1 hours.

And then there's this. Which is not a great game. I do not know what possibly possessed me to 100% this one, except possibly that I subconsciously hate myself and want to see myself suffer.

I haven't played literally every Civ and Civ-adjacent game that has ever been made, but I have played most of them. I've played all the main series from Civ 1 to Civ 6, as well as Alpha Centauri, both iterations of Colonization, Civ Revolution, Freeciv, and Beyond Earth. So I think that I can speak with a reasonable degree of authority when I say that this is the single worst entry in the 32 year history of the series.

It's not as if this game doesn't have good ideas. It absolutely does. Every so often, it shows glimpses of the game that it could have been, which makes it een more frustrating that it isn't. It's just far too full of little problems. Hardly anything about the game just works the way it's supposed to. There are UI problems, AI problems, pacing problems, balance problems, graphical and audio problems, loading and processing time problems. You name it, there's probably something about it that just doesn't quite work. My suspicion is that it was probably rushed to release before it was properly ready with the intention that it could be fixed with patches and DLC, but then everyone hated it and it didn't sell well, so they dropped it after one expansion, with a bunch of stuff still broken.

The achievements are, entirely predictably, a hot mess. There are separate achievements for beating the game at each difficulty level (all 6 of them), but they don't also credit you with lower difficulties. There are RNG achievements. There's a guide-bait achievement. There's a plethora of "do x action y times" style of achievements, some of which I was only about a quarter of the way through after completing all of the other achievements. There's one achievement that you have to disable the DLC for because the thing that you need was patched out of the game. There's nothing actually difficult here, but plenty of stuff that's just obnoxious to complete.

Bafflingly, there is also an achievement for downloading a mod (completed by 14.3% of players) and a different one for ever actually playing with  a mod (completed by 11.8% of players). Over a sixth of people who downloaded a mod never actually played with it. People are weird. But hey, I'm the one who spent 76 hours getting 100% on a game I hate, so it's not like I've got room to talk.

I now have 42 perfect games, and with the addition of a W and an X, the only letters of the alphabet that I'm missing out on are now E, J, N, Q and Y.

[Integrity]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

Yeah, its highs aren't as high as the best bits of War of the Chosen, but it's way more consistent.

i agree with this wholeheartedly. wotc has some immense highs when everything comes together (hell, this goes for all the five games before it too), but chimsqd is such a tight, reliable package, almost exclusively for the better

 

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

WE LOVE KATAMARI REROLL+ ROYAL REVERIE

i've been meaning to give this a crack someday! i've never actually played a katamari game, but i've been peripherally aware of them for forever at this point. maybe this'll spur me into grabbing it on the xmas sale cycle...

 

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

DICEY DUNGEONS

interesting writeup! i'd heard peripherally about this one (from a slay the spire stan who said it's all luck-based, unlike slay the spire, which of course has no luck involved) and discarded it since i had other games (slay the spire itself, finishing up ftl, and had just picked up monster train) of that ilk at the time, but i think i'll wishlist this one for the next cycle. well done!!

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

I also want to take a moment to acknowledge that this was made by the same guy who made both Super Hexagon and VVVVVV,

i don't know super hexagon but vvvvvv is a superb game, so that's a big point in this one's favor. looks like you can get a bundle with dicey + hexagon for like $3 more than just buying dicey, so i'll probably get that.

 

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

SID MEIER'S CIVILIZATION: BEYOND EARTH

i'm in a similar boat to you with beyond earth - i've been tempted to 100% beyond earth before, but keep getting held back by the fact that the game is just weirdly... bad.  i hadn't thought about it as such, but i think your suspicion that it was rushed out with intended post-launch support is pretty close to the truth, and really helps solidify why i never got into it. i kept trying to like it and just... never could.

 

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

Bafflingly, there is also an achievement for downloading a mod (completed by 14.3% of players) and a different one for ever actually playing with  a mod (completed by 11.8% of players). Over a sixth of people who downloaded a mod never actually played with it. People are weird.

god, i love these. i'm going to keep a hold of this one for when i'm talking about Weird Achievement Differences with people in the future, thank you very much

 

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

I now have 42 perfect games, and with the addition of a W and an X, the only letters of the alphabet that I'm missing out on are now E, J, N, Q and Y.

hell yeah!

[lenticular]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

i don't know super hexagon but vvvvvv is a superb game, so that's a big point in this one's favor. looks like you can get a bundle with dicey + hexagon for like $3 more than just buying dicey, so i'll probably get that.

Super Hexagon is a weird game. It's super minimalist, with just shapes lines and colours. And music. And it is also hard as balls. The goal is to survive for one minute. That's it. Then if you beat that, there's a second stage which is exactly the same thing except harder. To six stages in total. I only ever managed to beat the first stage and I considered that an accomplishment. Actually, thinking about it, it's kinda like Luftrausers in a way. It's not my favourite game ever, but like VVVVVV and Dicey Dungeons, it's a game that knows what it's trying to be and leans into it. Definitely worth a few bucks to try it out and see if you vibe with it.

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

i'm in a similar boat to you with beyond earth - i've been tempted to 100% beyond earth before, but keep getting held back by the fact that the game is just weirdly... bad.  i hadn't thought about it as such, but i think your suspicion that it was rushed out with intended post-launch support is pretty close to the truth, and really helps solidify why i never got into it. i kept trying to like it and just... never could.

If you ever do succumb to the temptation to 100% it -- which, for the record, you absolutely should not do -- then my main pieces of advice are: 1. know that you have to disable the DLC to get the "Fearful Symmetry" achievement, 2. read up on how artifacts work because they are not well explained in game and knowing the details makes getting all the artifact wonders way easier, 3. expect to do a lot of save and reloads to get all the "do x action y times" achievements, and 4. rethink your life choices that led you to trying to 100% this miserable game. (Yeah, I finished it earlier today and am still bitter at it.)

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

I only got 2 games to 100%, that being Brotato and Thronefall

Thronefall ( 12.2 hours, Grizzly Games)

The name of the game is short and sweet, you control a king and build your castle and defend it from preset waves of enemies of differing varieties of speed, damage, range and HP. By playing and scoring you get further unlocks, those being 2 additional weapons, a bunch of meta-perks chosen pre-map as well as enemy modifiers, which affect total score and upgrade paths for your buildings on map. There´s some fun stuff in there, like trampling the enemy under the hooves of your horse.

You don´t chose what to build where, that´s preset, but you do chose what to build when and that boils down to more money sooner, everything else leads to pain. There´s 4 maps, one being a preset tutorial map, every other map you can choose what you wanna do; however each map has some quests, challenging the player to play through it with certain enemy modifiers and sometimes specific weapons or reaching a ceratin score.

Fuck the enemy HP modifier, all my homies hate the HP modifier.

There´s 9 achievements, starting with kill a man, win every maps quest and ending with win everything. The achievments come quite naturally when playing.

[Integrity]

congrats op!

[Integrity]

PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY TRILOGY (CAPCOM, VARIOUS)
Finished: 12/8/23. Playtime: 44.4 hours.

Cribbing the format from my Mega Man post, it's time for another anthology! My experience with the Ace Attorney games is pretty minimal. My sister got Trials and Tribulations, the third game, for our DS back when it was fresh in 2007, and I thought it was pretty alright. Never played the first two, and managed to somehow not learn a single thing about them except for 'the miracle never happen' until I started the trilogy earlier this year. Don't know how I dodged that one. I'd eventually progress on through the series, to play Apollo Justice (which I thought kicked ass) and then never play another game in the series, leaving me having played only the middle pair out of six. The games have a nice easy breakdown thanks to the case structure, so let's get into it.

PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY (2001)
1.1: The First Turnabout
It's a tutorial. For what it is, it's fine. Parrhesia made a comment that it's essentially a perfect case for its scope, but its scope is limited to "here's what the buttons do, also please begin to care about Mia." That pretty much sums it up.

1.2: Turnabout Sisters
Good job I began to care about Mia, eh! With the tutorial out of the way, Ace Attorney honestly hits the ground running. The core cast is all here, they coalesce together well instantly, and the series' first take at investigations lands well. For your First Real Case, 1.2 was pretty much beyond reproach.

1.3: Turnabout Samurai
Well, damn. Every sin 1.2 deftly avoided, 1.3 dives deeply into. The cast of side characters in 1.2 were fun to talk to and accuse of committing perjury; the side-cast of 1.3, particularly Sal and Cody, and to a lesser extent Oldbag, were the pits. The investigation phase started to show a trend that future cases would slip into at their worst points, where your way forward is to go to an empty spot to get a dialogue about how someone isn't there, then go back to where you were to find out something unrelated had happened. Day 2 of 1.3's investigation had that and also a trade quest between two NPCs who were a staggering five zone transitions apart. It was a mess, but if there's any upside to it, it's where Edgeworth starts to get rolling.

1.4: Turnabout Goodbyes
I've been oversaturated on Miles Edgeworth for more than a decade at this point. The last contact I actually had with the guy was 2008ish, and through a number of longstanding friends who enjoy the Ace Attorney games and the fact that I've been on Tumblr ever, I've heard no end of the bastard. It's testament to his writing, then, that despite all that, I still really like the guy. Edgeworth is the glue that holds Ace Attorney 1 together.
What about the case, though? It's fine. It dragged a little bit, particularly any time you had to interact with the boatkeeper and watch his entire snot bubble popping animation every single time he does anything, but it was still compelling enough to keep me driving towards a superb conclusion. Overall, despite a slump, I can see why Ace Attorney captured hearts on that tiny screen in 2001.

1.5: Rise from the Ashes
So I didn't actually know that Ace Attorney was a GBA franchise. I learned this during 1.5, when I DMed Parrhesia to say that 1.5 feels weirdly tacked-on, like a DLC case or something, but the DS didn't have DLC, did it? That's when I learned for the first time that Ace Attorney wasn't a DS original, twenty-two years later.
1.5's a weird case. It's entirely too long by several degrees, and it bears the black mark of having inflicted Mike Meekins on me, with his terrible megaphone feedback sounds playing constantly. Loved seeing pre-jaded Ema, didn't care for Lana; Gant's an alltimer. The DS gimmicks (especially fucking video evidence) did not help matters at all. It wasn't without redeeming qualities, but it really did not land very well overall, and left Ace Attorney maybe feeling a little worse off than it really deserves to.

PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY: JUSTICE FOR ALL (2002)
2.1: The Lost Turnabout
It's a worse tutorial than 1.1, tutorializing the same mechanics, and it's completely disconnected to anything else that's happened before or since, except for introducing Byrde so she can be used later. Nothing about it is particularly bad on its own merit, it's just a complete sleeper.

2.2: Reunion Comma and Turnabout
I'm of two minds on 2.2. Psyche-Locks were absolutely necessary to spruce up the investigations phase, and I applaud the invention. Franziska wasn't nearly as obnoxious as my vague memories indicated she might be, but Ini Miney's gimmick ran thin almost instantly and was played for the entire case. Despite that, I still liked 2.2 overall, and it bears the twin glories of introducing Pearl, who I genuinely like, and being the only time that all the Mia channeling is warranted, given as the crime is happening in her own house. We'll get to that in a minute, though.
On the other hand, 2.2 introduces Hotti, and for that it should be destroyed.

2.3: Turnabout Big Top
I liked the damn circus, with a big star on liked. Max and Moe are both great, and almost nobody else really slumped, except for that Ben had possibly the single most obnoxious gimmick in a witness so far, and was a terrible character. The trial segments were fun, but that thing I grumbled about in 1.3 came back with a vengeance - go to the cafeteria to notice that nobody's there, go to Moe's room to notice that Moe's not there, and then go to the cafeteria to find Moe, but if you don't go to the cafeteria first, you don't get the middle event, so nothing else happens. A huge chunk of the investigation time in 2.3 was wasted just going back and forth between places looking for something new to happen, and I'm fine admitting I just used a guide past the halfway point of the case for the non-court bits. Due to that, I can't really give the circus the credit I want to, but it wasn't the worst at least.

2.4: Farewell Comma My Turnabout
This was, handily, the best of the cases I hadn't played before. Everything comes together well, with a few moments of unsure progress (I kept trying to make Nick figure out the knife was missing from the fucking plate, it's so obvious!!!) to make sure things weren't perfect. Still, my entire complaints about 2.4 can be summed up simply: please do not have brought Hotti back, and the final testimony stalling should have been about two rounds shorter - it made its point by the, what, fifth round of poking holes to buy time.
My last, and meatiest, complaint about 2.4 is something that has echoed since the first game but is really appropriate here: I don't like Mia as she's used by the games. Don't get me wrong, 1.1 Mia Fey is a good character, and we'll get to my thoughts (positive) on playing as her in Trials and Tribulations later. What I don't like is the Maya/Pearl As Mia defense counsel. I give it a pass gladly for 1.2 and 2.2, since those are dealing with Mia's own death (and is kind of a tutorial) and a murder in the Fey estate, but particularly in 2.4 it's just obnoxious and it both cheapens Mia's death and stifles Maya/Pearl's characters. With the amount of Pearl Mia in 2.4, there's a fair argument that the case would play out identically if Mia never died to begin with, which is just bonkers. The case would have been fine if Pearl herself just delivered the end-of-testimony you-got-this-Nick lines and the Judge had some jokes about a child in the courtroom.
Still, this is a complaint I've had for most of the cases so far. It's just the most pressing here. Even with that, 2.4's the highlight of the first two games, and now it's time to reexperience the one game I've played.

PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY: TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS (2004)
3.1: Turnabout Memories
This is great! This is a better tutorial than the original, even! It walks a very fine line, where I remember playing as Mia and meeting Young Nick fifteen years ago, before I even got to see Phoenix Wright, and thinking it was a cool prologue to the game. Now I'm playing it with context, and it's still a cool prologue to the game and excuse for a new tutorial, but from a completely different angle. I think the framing decision for 3.1 was absolutely bang-on, and it's the best of the tutorial cases by an insane margin.
There's one major note, though. Through his previous appearances, I found I really liked Grossberg and I was absolutely baffled why people had told me that he was an awful one-note character. I found him to be batting well above average for Ace Attorney side characters. Anyway, every single line 3.1 Grossberg has is about his asshole, and zero of his lines in any previous appearance were. What the fuck happened??

3.2: The Stolen Turnabout
Weirdly less than the sum of its parts. There was nothing dropped in the side characters - Andrews is good, I'm never sad to see the Butz, and as a fellow wife guy myself I identify deeply with Dessie DeLite - but something fell apart in the main thrust of the case. Luke isn't nearly compelling enough a character for the sheer amount of time he spends on the stand, but I did like Ron and did a little chuckle at the way his whole thing wrapped up as Mask Star The Mask. The testimonies had a few of those needly bits where I've figured out what's going on but can't figure out which piece of kit to show at which statement to show that Nick's figured out what's going on, but not especially more or fewer than previous cases.
I think what really broke 3.2 down was Godot, honestly. I remember him being vaguely tryhard but not a particular negative when I played the game as a kid, but he's just genuinely the fucking worst. One of the two or three things I remember about Trials and Tributlations is Godot's big secret background, so I'm seeing the foreshadowing of that, it's just not helping. The coffee gimmick is lame and the animations play far too frequently for their runtime. His fake pontifications run tiresome by the end of the first day of the trial, and he doesn't shake it up at all. He's just this unearnedly smug motherfucker who shows up with all the worst traits of all three previous prosecutors and none of the good ones, and he doesn't get any of the things that make the others satisfying to beat. The worst part is that I'm very sure the game thinks he's cool as hell, and when you get that wedge between player and intended experience, it's just a recipe for disaster. Christ.
Maybe he can pull it back, though.

3.3: Recipe for Turnabout
Eh, he kinda did. 3.3 just wasn't very good overall, but it wasn't Godot's fault. The framing from the jump was dumb even by the standards of Ace Attorney set out so far, with the "fake Nick" doing a trial a month prior and having to investigate a cold-ish case contributing absolutely nothing at all to the structure of the case. Armstrong, Tigre, Viola, and the old guy were probably the single worst crew of side characters so far, but none of them hit that Ben level of stank on their own. All-in-all, the flavor side of the case was just kinda neh. Hell, Godot was one of the better parts of the case, but that's meant more as an insult to the case rather than a compliment to Godot.
That brings me to the mechanical side of the case! I haven't harped on this much before, except briefly in 1.3, but the travel mechanic in the investigation phase is something that ought to be virtually invisible, and when it isn't, there's a problem. In 3.3, it isn't. The map of zone transitions is a line from Nick's office to the cafe, through the jail of all things, and then it sort-of fans out to most of the other places, except some only come off of the park which you can only get to from the cafe. It's, except for maybe 1.5, the best argument that the zone list should simply have been a menu in the remakes, though I assume it was this way because the GBA couldn't list more than four options at a time, considering how conversation topics overwrite each other.
The other, quicker, thing to bitch about is how the final witness is handled. Being penalized for pressing on statements sucks, it adds nothing but tedium to the game, and the healthbar is the quietly-worst part of these whole games, so dragging it to the forefront is just asinine. I don't necessarily mind the dramatic you-have-one-chance that crops up rarely in trials, but this was absolutely an unwelcome shakeup to the gameplay loop. Trials and Tribulations has just been a downhill slope since minute 1.

3.4: Turnabout Beginnings
This is a weird one to try to rank. It's obviously a prelude to the titanic 3.5, but it requires a level of buy-in that I think far outstrips its value as an actual case. Outside of seeing Godot: Unmasked! for the first time, we really don't get anything outside of facts that I presume will pertain to 3.5 that we didn't already get out of 3.1. Armando, Co-Counsel is much better than Godot, Prosecutor, but Terry and Dahlia, Again kind of let this one down badly. Better than the previous, but ultimately a nothing burger and kind of a pace breaker. At least the downhill momentum has been arrested.
Heh. Arrested.

3.5: Bridge to the Turnabout
Shit rules. Simple as. Best case in the trilogy.

BONUS: ACE ATTORNEY (2016)
I watched the anime! I needed something to kill time during work and decided I'd give it a whirl. It compresses the games into two 24-episode seasons, with the first covering Ace Attorney except for 1.5 and Justice for All except for 2.1, and the second covering 2.1 and then Trials & Tribulations.

Season 1
It was refreshing! To nitpick up front, compressing the cases did introduce a bit of incredibly wack logical leaps that Nick and co. make that you were forced to take many small steps towards in the games, but I don't think that dragged the season down overmuch. Franziska is, God help me, actually a really likable villain in the show compared to the games, and almost stands up to 1.X Edgeworth. The one anime-specific episode, centered on Nick, Edgey, and the Butz as kids and nestled between the games, does a good job of shining a light on a relationship the games really only hint at, and I think it does good things for the story of Justice for All.
One thing I found interesting about it is that it deeply leveled the playing field between cases. The ones I particularly liked, like 2.4 and 1.2, lost a bit of their charm in the adaptation - though 2.4 was a mixed bag, they really tackled it from a rather different angle and did some things I liked a lot more than the game equivalents. On the other hand, and why I think I might even have liked the show more than the games, the cases that dragged or full-on sucked in the games got a damn spit-shine put on them. 1.3 was fairly faithful to the game, but just a bit of rewrite to Oldbag and a change to her motivations and she became a surprising highlight of the case rather than a particularly-shitty roadblock. The circus benefited from this the most by far. They had a bit of fun and expanded things, retooling the other circus workers' roles in the case slightly, and that combined with me not having to figure out the investigation logic meant it was the standout of the show by far. Especially big shoutout to the guy who voiced Moe the clown for knocking it out of the fuckin' park.
In an unfathomably based move, though, the show surgically excises Hotti from the entire plot. Eat shit, fucker.

Season 2
I'm still amid it as of this writing, about halfway through, but it's showing the same signs as the first. 3.3, which was really quite a bad case in the game, is very good in the show. With a tune-up to his script (particularly varying his nicknames for Nick) and a solid vocal performance, Godot flips from being the thing tanking 3.2 to a very enjoyable part of the case, and of the case after. There's still a good bit of compression, like in the first season, but Trials and Tribulations had a lot of cruft to it that needed compressed, so it ends up being rather appreciated overall. I'm  excited to see how 3.5 shakes out tomorrow, honestly.
Season 2 does have a bit more anime-specific content compared to the first. There's another episode that focuses on Nick, Edgey, and the Butz as kids that offers some oddly humanizing moments for Manfred, of all the guys. There's an episode I haven't gotten to that seems to exist as more context for 3.5. Most of all, there's an entire three-episode case that the show invents outside of the games - and it's, shockingly, okay. It bats about average for Ace Attorney [Game] cases, which means it bats a bit below average for Ace Attorney [Show] cases. I don't think experiencing Northward Comma Turnabout Express is particularly necessary, but it doesn't outstay its welcome and it doesn't drag the experience down.

All-in-all, I think the show is a perfectly good surrogate for the games. I wouldn't consider it as a substitute, mind; while it does a very good job capturing the silly energy of the games, the arcs of the cases end up quite different, and if anyone had interest in the games I'd recommend playing them before watching the show. That said, I'd absolutely recommend the show to anyone who liked the games, and if someone had zero interest in a detective visual novel I'd still recommend it as a fun as hell little show instead of trying to push the games hard.

BACK TO THE GAME: THE ACHIEVEMENTS (2023)
Ace Attorney Trilogy's achievements split into two big categories: progression and 'do this shit'. The progression ones are as simple as you get: there's one per case and one for beating all three games. The 'do this shit' ones are largely having you get to funny lines, at a rate of about one per case. These, further, split into ones that are fine and ones that suck. The ones that are fine are pretty straightforward, and most of them are pretty unremarkable. Generally, you get these for pressing a certain statement in court, as in 1.3 and 2.2; or showing someone an evidence, like showing Maya Max's profile in 2.3 to get her spiel about how Nick needs a cooler stage name. There's a genuinely great one for inspecting every ladder across the entire trilogy - none of them are particularly out of the way, and there's only about eight or nine in total, so it's just kind of a funny through line.
The bad ones aren't the worst, but they're bad because it's shit you really wouldn't - or shouldn't - do without a guide. Getting the bad end in Justice for All (the miracle never happen...) is okay, if a bit odd. The real bad ones come about from doing specific or obviously-bad things, like presenting yourself as Mia in 1.1, or getting Viola's first Psyche-Lock wrong in 3.3. The worst pair of these have to belong to 1.5 and 3.3. In 1.5, already a bloated case with too much going on, occasional statements and lines of questioning with a particular character (Angel) will cause her to offer you a lunchbox. You have to find every lunchbox, which includes making a few false statements and some evidence presentation to Angel across both investigation days and her trial day, but the final lunchbox isn't given until she's well out of the picture by almost an entire day. Really sucks to miss one, there. 3.3 holds the worst, though: hear every French word that Armstrong has to say. Probably. I'm not even sure that the unlock description is quite accurate. Anyway, to get it, you have to talk to him about everything, present your magatama to give you the option of Psyche-Locks, do the completely-unprecedented talk to him about the locked option (NOT break it, talk normally about it to be stonewalled), then get every single option in his Psyche-Lock interrogation wrong once before getting it right. After that, present every single profile and piece of evidence that he has unique commentary on, across two days, which I'm pretty sure includes Maya once on each day. Then he'll come in on trial, and you have to press every single statement he makes across three testimonies - EXCEPT! There's one which leads you to a choice, and if you choose correctly, he amends the testimony and you have to press on that line again. This is crucial, because one of the words is in the fork you get for choosing wrong first, and after the testimony is amended the line no longer exists to choose the wrong option. It's a clusterfuck. It's an awful achievement.

So where do I stand at the end, here? I'm glad I gave the series a real run. It's not the greatest thing ever - hell, it's not even the greatest Ace Attorney can be (that's 4) - and bits of it dragged badly, but it had a lot of heart in it and I had a good time throughout. See you next year, Nick.

[Integrity]

DUNGEONS OF DREDMOR (GASLAMP, 2011)

Finished: 13/8/23. Playtime: 189.1 hours.

 

This is something of a melancholic post for me. Dungeons of Dredmor, warts and all, has been a constant companion for twelve years now, even as it grew more unstable as Windows moved on and I grew dissatisfied with big swathes of it as my tastes grew and changed. There was always something about it, though. Something irreplaceable, to a big degree something magical, about Dungeons of Dredmor. This is kind of an elegy for Gaslamp Games, who gambled it all and lost. A studio of three, they dropped an experimental game in 2011 to relative success, went for broke on a big simulator that flopped, and folded. It's the story of the harsh reality of the society in which we live. Yet, somehow, long past the disbandment of the studio and the complete cessation of support for their games, Dredmor lives on past their legacy.

Roguelikes didn't always have the accepted reputation that they do now. Time once was they were the realm of grognards, the kind of guys you'd run into on IRC who would talk about how it wasn't like back in the good old days of Usenet. The crack in the facade was, honestly, Spelunky. Losing was always fun, of course, but Spelunky brought the right amount of spectacle to the presentation, the right amount of spunk and chutzpah. That opened the floodgates for the first wave of properly-accepted, accessible roguelikes. Ed McMillen, much as I might think he's a total dipshit, threw himself into the ring quickly and productively, as did the folks behind Subset developing a little game called FTL: Faster Than Light. But just a little before them, while the edge was still bleeding a little harsher, was Gaslamp Games.

Dungeons of Dredmor was a real attempt to bring the sheer merciless punishment of classic Rogue-alikes to the masses. In 2008, the International Roguelike Development Conference was held in Berlin. The result of a big keynote panel in this conference was the now-heralded Berlin Interpretation, which laid down the classic foundations of what mechanics comprised a game like Rogue. There needed to be some way to separate games with superficial similarity, like Diablo, from the original, you know? The interpretation of this, uh, Interpretation to Spelunky is, as far as I'm aware, what led to the invention of the term roguelite, for games that appropriated a certain amount of the Berlin characteristics but didn't really go all-in. Roguelites would spin off to become a hell of a genre and create many incredible games, but that Interpretation would hang heavy. Dredmor, in the very early days of this chaos, wanted to be like Rogue, calories and sugar and all.

Dungeons of Dredmor would release on my mother's 43rd birthday to muted fanfare. It got generally solid review, but little raving, and many decried its seeming- and actual- randomness, as well as how utterly unforgiving the game was. I was a deeply different guy back then, and thought I'd just crunch through this goofy-looking game, and picked it up. It was pretty cheap - $20 if I recall - and my sister and I played it for hours back in my freshman year of college, as she finished high school. We'd swap builds, die all the time, try to figure out how Necronomiconomics worked, the whole nine yards. We never killed Dredmor - hell, we never got close. That wasn't ever the point. It was always about getting a little deeper, getting some weird new kit, trying a new skill line.

When you roll a new guy in Dredmor, you pick seven skills from a pool of, initially, I think twenty-three, and eventually forty-odd. Your character is entirely defined by those skill tracks and the gear they get. You might get completely hosed by drops, a thousand swords when all you need is an axe, and the game has no mechanic nor interest in adjusting for it. The skills run the gamut from the obvious, like weapon specializations, dual wielding, various magickries, and crafting specializations; to the exotic, like burglary, ley line senses, mushroomancy, or literally just being a vampire; to the weird, like being such a dedicated communist you become some kind of socialized wizard. The wackier ones tended to come from the later expansions, but the thread was there from the beginning. Dredmor was a silly game with serious variables. Dredmor was Plants vs. Zombies' skin stretched over the fabric of competitive Starcraft. Dredmor wanted you dead, with a smile.

This goofy veneer worked, though. Eating mushrooms to heal, getting silly reference swords, dying to whatever the fuck diggles are - it all worked. It hit the right balance of goofy and threatening. It landed. For nine floors of dungeon, increasing heavily in difficulty, Dungeons of Dredmor was a fantastic dungeon delver with a superb sense of humor. It all falls apart at the end, of course. Much like its later cousin FTL, Dredmor's titular Dredmor is a horrible fight and is terribly designed. I, a much more mature person, put together the work to actually kill the bastard, and found it not at all satisfying. The game was far better when I didn't have a chance to win, oddly. I don't know what to make of that, but there it is.

Even so, after all the runs I've done, playing the game every year for the last twelve, I have nothing but love for Dredmor. I started playing it before I met the woman I'd go on to marry years later. I'd get married the same year Gaslamp folded, and celebrate my sixth anniversary a few weeks ago. In a weird way, I feel like I'm one of the last few carrying the torch of Dredmor, and I think that's kind of a tragedy. It was so great, and it could have been so much better, but the harsh realities of life took that potential from us. Nobody has really landed that level of accessible, turn-based, kinda-goofy dungeon delving that Dredmor did, and I'd even hold most of the game up against the original Rogue and Nethack in the glorious halls of RPG history. For all its warts, for all its faults, for all the bits about it that just fucking suck, I love Dredmor deeply, and a lot of me is kinda sad to finally pack it away.

Do not try to 100% Dungeons of Dredmor. The achievement set is awful. It used to be basically-impossible - when the studio was solvent, one of the achievements was to have a beer with the devs in real life and give them your Steam profile so they could award it to you. They took that one out, making this post possible. Do not do what I have done.

 

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

13 hours ago, Integrity said:

It used to be basically-impossible - when the studio was solvent, one of the achievements was to have a beer with the devs in real life and give them your Steam profile so they could award it to you.

lifehack for free beer tho

5d chess move, tbh

[lenticular]

12 hours ago, Integrity said:

Time once was they were the realm of grognards, the kind of guys you'd run into on IRC who would talk about how it wasn't like back in the good old days of Usenet.

Ooh! Ooh! Me! Pick me! That was me! I was, in fact, an active poster on rec.games.roguelike.adom back in the late 1990s. Though I do try not to grognard too hard.

But yeah, I also have a big soft spot for Dungeons of Dredmor. I currently sit at 80.1 hours played and 48/122 achievements, mostly between 2011 and 2014. And, remarkably, I do have the achievement for beating Dredmor (on easy with permadeath) but not the achievement for losing to Dredmor. I can't actually remember the fight, but given that pretty much everyone who isn't me says that it's badly designed unfair garbage, I assume I just lucked out.

I always described the game by saying that it was to Rogue as Monkey Island was to Adventure. I think I still stand by that description.

I remember being excited for Clockwork Empires when it was first announced. It was a cool concept. But then it also happened right about the time I was getting disilusioned about paying money for Early Access games that were cool concepts but not much else. It was right about the same time as Spacebase DF-9, which was the game that pretty much killed Early Access for me. And then the more I saw of Clockwork Empires, the more glad I was that I hadn't just jumped right on it. Which is sad. It probably had the potential to be great if they'd had more time and money for it, but alas, they did not. With hindsight, yeah, trying to make something that would feel like Dwarf Fortress but with an actually usable UI was probably overambitious for their second project as a studio.

I actually recommended Dungeons of Dredmor to a friend last year. He was searching for something to play and looking for recommendations, so I looked through my Steam library and said, "hey, did you ever play this..." He actually has more hours in the game than I do at this point. I tried picking it up again last year as well, to play alongside him and so I'd actually know what he was talking about when he told me about different builds he was using or whatever. And, sadly, for me at least, the magic was gone. The whole thing just played so damn slowly. All the attack annimations and the likes are great, but having to sit through them for every single attack made things drag.

I do wish that more developers had jumped on the idea of Berlin interpretation roguelikes except with graphics and a UI and stuff. They probably do exist somewhere, but are so buried underneath the modern understanding of the term "roguelike" that they're harder to find than they should be.

[Integrity]

On 8/14/2023 at 1:07 PM, lenticular said:

I was, in fact, an active poster on rec.games.roguelike.adom back in the late 1990s.

considering our posting interactions, this doesn't surprise me in the least to learn

 

On 8/14/2023 at 1:07 PM, lenticular said:

Though I do try not to grognard too hard.

but you do a very good job of avoiding being the stereotype, don't you worry about that. you're fun to talk videogames with

[Integrity]

CATS HIDDEN IN PARIS + CATS HIDDEN IN ITALY (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2023)

Finished: 17/8/23. Playtime: 41 minutes.

It's easy to forget, for us hardcore giganerds who need our heads flushed in toilets, that gaming takes a lot of forms to a lot of people. Yeah, there's Paradox games and Fromsoft games and all sorts of ways to get one's teeth kicked in, but that's not always the point to many people. And if I love anything, I love silly little passion projects like this.

Our lovely own @CrimeanRoyalKnightbought me Cats Hidden in Italy as a silly little pre-birthday gift. It was, roughly, a dollar. You click play, you are treated to a cheery little looping song, and you are shown a cute hand-drawn block evocative of a certain city. There are one hundred cats. Find them and click them. That's it. Paris has an achievement for speedrun clicking all the cats in 3 minutes. It took me three tries. My favorite cat was Isidoro.

Was this less gaming than trying to figure out a hard fight in Baldur's Gate 3? Was it, somehow, more pure? I don't know. I don't think that's answerable. I mostly just think it's worthwhile to remember how easy it is to get caught in our little bubbles of what things are or ought to be, and to poke around outside sometimes. Go click on some cats. I'm gonna go hug mine.

e: cat hidden in ohio

Edited August 17, 2023 by Integrity

[lenticular]

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

CATS HIDDEN IN PARIS + CATS HIDDEN IN ITALY (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2023)

I had never heard of this until you posted. I now have 100% achievements for Cats Hidden In Paris. I can't say it was the single most fun that I have ever had with a game, but it was absolutely worth the princely sum of 0GBP (that's roughly equivalent to 0USD or 0EUR) that I paid for it. The speedrun achievement was surprisingly tough, though. Turns out that I can either go fast or go without missing any, but not do both at once. I ended up having to take written notes for how many cats there were in each area, otherwise I'm not sure I could have managed. In the end, It took me 6 tries, with the whole thing taking me 75 minutes.

4 hours ago, Integrity said:

e: cat hidden in ohio

I'm terrible at this game. I can only find one cat here. Maybe I'm missing the other 99 because I'm too distracted by the cuteness of the one I can see?

[Integrity]

15 minutes ago, lenticular said:

I'm terrible at this game. I can only find one cat here. Maybe I'm missing the other 99 because I'm too distracted by the cuteness of the one I can see?

it's a trick game - there's only one cat, but locutus of morb is worth 100 other, better cats

[Integrity]

YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! (MONKEYCRAFT, 2023)

Finished: 18/8/23. Playtime: It's gonna be 44 hours but that's off for a few reasons.

Yeah, you want "those games", don't you? 98% of people fail this - can you succeed???

Those Games (henceforth) is a collection of minigames that are meant to represent the kinds of games you see in mobile game ads that just don't exist. Cash Run asks you to spend cash to walk to choose to Casino or Study, or to Vaccine or Virus, on your way through the path of life. Pin Pull has you pour lava on your stick man because you didn't pay attention. You've seen Number Tower before, as the advert attacks a guy with 18 power to increase his own power to 38 power, and then hurls himself into a guy with 41 power and dies - FAIL. Download now!

The joke largely lands. Parking Lot is genuinely fun, and Color Lab and Pin Pull have fun in them. Cash Run sucks, and Number Tower is either dull or frustrating at best, but for a tenner there's absolutely ten bucks of fun in it. You're graded entirely on the time you take to clear things, which is usually to the detriment of the standard game, but is used to make a half-baked monthly challenge system.

Those Games has eleven achievements. Five of them are for beating all levels, between 25 and 100 depending on the game, of each game. Five of them are for getting three stars, again based on time, on every level of each game. The eleventh is for getting one million coins. Beating one level gets you between 100 and 500 coins. The math does itself. There are missions to beat certain stages in certain ways, which can add up to two or five thousand coins to your total. Out of a million. Beating every single stage, competing in several leaderboard challenges, and going out of my way to accomplish missions got me somewhere north of 200,000 coins.

At this point ,you can do dailies (worth about 10k coins/day), or you can cheat. I cheated. If you set up a macro to spam controller-A, or keyboard-Enter, about every six frames, you can just crank through Pin Pull level 6 every about six seconds for a hundred coins. Then, you go to bed. The first night I did this, I forgot to turn on the macro. Tonight, the macro will actually happen and the game will finish. It's a bullshit achievement in the most bullshit way, but the joke of the game is good enough that I feel like stressing about 100%ing this game is owning yourself automatically, so I'm going to give it a pass.

e: i was right for date - the achievement popped at 4am today. i was wrong for time - the final playtime was 43 hours. damn

Edited August 18, 2023 by Integrity

[Soapbar]

On 7/27/2023 at 12:44 PM, Integrity said:

BIOSHOCK 2 (2K, 2010)

Finished: 27/7/23. Playtime: 18.2 hours.

Regarding Bioshock 2's lukewarm reception and lack of presence in modern discourse: The widest and most far-spread criticism of Bioshock 2 at time of it's release was it's "failure to distinguish itself from it's predecessor", a statement I disagree with but one which shows up extraordinarily often throughout reviews of that era, with Zero Punctuation's review of it (back when people took Yahtzee any kind of seriously outside of Extra Punctuation) calling it a "knock-off piece of shit". If my memory isn't failing me (something it does worryingly often) There was a prevailing idea in the Late 2000's-Early 2010's in gaming culture that sequels ought to be completely distinct from their predecessors, likely as a backlash to the growing trend of annualized franchises. Innovative, was the buzzword of that era, and Bioshock 2, for as much as I love it (I think it's the best Bioshock game by a wide margin, gameplay and story wise.), doesn't really fit that word. This kind of attitude is why Bioshock Infinite was so positively received on release, as the switch in setting and other gameplay changes were perceived as innovative and distinguishing.

With the benefit of hindsight, I do find that a lot of opinions on Bioshock 2 have softened, and Infinite is now regarded a lot more harshly, especially in certain circles.

[Integrity]

that all does scan to my memories of the time, actually. that's a pretty sensible breakdown, thanks op

[Integrity]

POWERWASH SIMULATOR (FUTURLAB, 2022)

Finished: 19/8/23. Playtime: 72.8 hours.

On 6/18/2023 at 7:43 PM, Integrity said:

You will be seeing Powerwash Simulator in this thread at some point.

I don't lie.

Powerwash Simulator, to put it bluntly, rules. You have a pressure washer. You wash. That's the entire game. You unlock stronger washers to combat stronger mucks. There's coop, and I've beaten the entire game twice, once as Parrhesia's guest and once in my solo campaign. Either this sounds like a good time or it doesn't. Instead of going through the game's silly houses and goofy cars you have to wash, I'm going to talk about my second monitor, which I stole from my university when my advisor's lab closed. I watched two shows, two Youtube channels, and a sport while pressure washing, and I think all five worked just about perfectly.

I already talked about my time with the Ace Attorney anime, and watching it was, in large part, the sideshow to pressure washing things. 3.5 followed the trend of 2.4, where it wasn't as good as the game case on aggregate but had some spins it took that I think benefited the case a lot as a whole, and particularly in the medium. The other show I watched while washing was Quarterback on Netflix. It's not award-winning, as documentaries go, but it's good and if your primary goal is to think Kirk Cousins is a bizarrely likeable dude, or to feel bad for Marcus Mariota, man you're in luck. I've found it to be very compelling and a fascinating look into the lives of a bunch of guys who are entirely unlike anything I could imagine being. Easy recommendation.

One of the biggest helps during the late stage solo washing goes to the Youtube channel Stu. Stu's gimmick is simple - uncommentated speedruns of Starcraft's campaigns, 1 and 2, with cutscenes and dialogue left unskipped. They're absolutely fantastic sidebar material, without peer. Similarly, in the strategy space, Jethild produces pseudo-documentary videos about various topics in the Command and Conquer universe, sort of in the conceit that it's historical or real, and is an easy rec if you enjoy either those games or just generally a good-hearted dork talking about something he really likes.

This has finally been the season I managed to get myself into baseball. I played a lot as a kid - I was the star pitcher in my Little League for a year, then played shortshop (which I liked a lot more) - but stopped when I was about eleven. Problem was, baseball just kind of sucked to watch. When I'd start caring about sports, Three True Outcomes baseball was at its worst height. On top of that, I grew up first in Hawaii, then in Germany, then in Vegas, and really had nothing like a home team considering my local (Cincinnati) team was chronically mismanaged and shit. The changes made this year as a result of the World Baseball Classic to MLB made the games weirdly... watchable. finally. I was in a bar earlier this year, in Pittsburgh, watching a game, and I fell in love with Ji-hwan Bae. I'm a Pirates man, I guess. If you've bounced off baseball before this year, but wanted to like watching it, it's finally become a fantastic thing to watch while you do something not especially engaging, like the step up from a podcast.

Anyway, 100% Powerwash Simulator involves a simple set of achievements. Pressure wash your way through the campaign and one DLC, and for about 2/3 of levels do some optional objective. For almost all of these it's simply "do <this part> <first or last>". If you check them, there's not much to say about them. They don't tend to make the levels particularly harder or easier, but they do add a bit of gameplay flavor, and I wish they were presented as secondary objectives when you loaded into a map instead. The one DLC is the Spongebob Squarepants tie-in, and as someone who did not grow up on the show nor knows, uh, anything about it besides listening to LS Mark talk about it, it was actually really fun for the most part. Goofy texts, and the levels varied from "just a solid Powerwash level" to "a funny gimmick they couldn't do in the main game." The final level was fucking trash on ice, but I won't drag it too hard for that. There's also a challenge mode which grades you on either the time or water you take to finish a job, and you need any five gold medals from that complete (20+) set, and I found it trivial to finish at the end. All in all, very satisfying, incredible game, easy recommendation to anyone. Don't let my paucity of words about the game fool you - I had so few words, and yet sunk three entire days into the game and think it was great.

wosh u soul

[Integrity]

question for the chat

 

when a game gets an update / dlc that comes with a few more hours of gameplay and a new set of achievements, should i:

1. go about my work in dutiful silence
2. post about the new achievements / content only if they're notable or somehow at odds with the original verdict (e.g. if i'd played fell seal's dlc after the fact)
3. Just Post

e: this is sparked by the amid evil dlc, which was really good

e2: this doesn't include stuff like killing floor 2 or golf with your friends, which update to include A New Map and Two New Achievements, ofc

Edited August 21, 2023 by Integrity

[Darros]

23 hours ago, Integrity said:

question for the chat

 

when a game gets an update / dlc that comes with a few more hours of gameplay and a new set of achievements, should i:

1. go about my work in dutiful silence
2. post about the new achievements / content only if they're notable or somehow at odds with the original verdict (e.g. if i'd played fell seal's dlc after the fact)
3. Just Post

e: this is sparked by the amid evil dlc, which was really good

e2: this doesn't include stuff like killing floor 2 or golf with your friends, which update to include A New Map and Two New Achievements, ofc

Just post. Not like forum space is a limited resource. And imo also ignore e2, I crave your opinions on golf with your friends. Even if you DM me them anyway, everyone should see them

[lenticular]

On 8/21/2023 at 3:21 AM, Integrity said:

when a game gets an update / dlc that comes with a few more hours of gameplay and a new set of achievements, should i:

1. go about my work in dutiful silence
2. post about the new achievements / content only if they're notable or somehow at odds with the original verdict (e.g. if i'd played fell seal's dlc after the fact)
3. Just Post

Don't overthink it. Post if you have anything to say, don't post if you don't. Treat each game on its own merits rather than trying to come up with a single hard and fast rule.

[Integrity]

57 minutes ago, Darros said:

I crave your opinions on golf with your friends. Even if you DM me them anyway, everyone should see them

the new map sucks shit

 

18 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Don't overthink it. Post if you have anything to say, don't post if you don't. Treat each game on its own merits rather than trying to come up with a single hard and fast rule.

fair enough!

[Integrity]

cats hidden in italy achieved steam verification so it counts for metrics now so the thread gets to go up by 1 number with no extra work fuck yeah