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

[Parrhesia]

My experience of games as a teenager was of flicking through whatever options we had, pirated or in various CD cases, and of none of them ever quite feeling right. A lot of stop-start progress, a lot of the same old mainstays, a lot of ennui, because it was mostly about killing time, really. It was very rare that any one game would ever truly pick up any momentum, for whatever reason, and I have some fondness for anything that managed to hold my scattergun attention. Even you, Final Fantasy 3 for the DS.

Anyway, Rome TW and especially Med2 TW were two that I finished... but only ever one campaign of, and with so many annoyances, and all the while there was the sense that these were great games in theory and scope and only that. Honestly, I'd barely touched a TW since.

Then TWW3 came out and suddenly it all came together. It all made sense. It all worked... relatively. Sure, there's plenty of jank, but nothing close to the trauma of the way M2TW besiegers would initiate battle and then refuse to advance, meaning that if you turned off time limits because all teenagers are inclined to play very cautiously and conservatively - the classic 'Gain 7 life' is a good investment mindset, which makes sense until you understand things like tempo - you had to sally forth from your fortress and engage them in the open field just so the battle would ever end.

I got sidetracked. TWW3 is really good.

[lenticular]

21 hours ago, Integrity said:

Maybe-worst of all is the triumphant return of the Chaos Dwarves. The Chaos Dwarves have been absent from Warhammer Fantasy for a good while, and Total Warhammer 3 gave them a makeover and a new place in a shiny game.

Oh man. I did not know about this, and am way more excited about it than should be possible for someone who doesn't play either Total War or Warhammer. Total War looks like a fine game series, but just doesn't do it for me. One thing I've learned over the years is that I don't really enjoy games that mix together strategic and tactical layers. I love strategy games. Civ? EU4? They're great. I love tactics games. Sit me in front of XCOM, Battletech or Fire Emblem and I'm happy. Put both of them into the same game like in Total War or Age of Wonders and my brain just nopes out of there in no time flat. I have no clue why.

And then there's Warhammer. I don't play Warhammer, but I used to. The peak years of my Warhammer fandom were back when I was a teenager, in the 90s. And my favourite army back then was the Chaos Dwarves. And while the main reasons I drifted away from the hobby were things like "time", "money" and "having other people to play with", it certainly didn't help that Games Workshop just completely wrote my favourites out of existence (or shunted them into Blood Bowl obscurity). So hearing that they've been brought back? Yeah, that hits me right in the nostalgia. I mean, not enough to make me actually want to buy the game, but I'm still excited just to know that they're back. It's a shame that they suck.

[Integrity]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

I'm still excited just to know that they're back.

bro you hear squats are coming back too?

E: fun fact, battletech might actually show up in this thread this year! i only have the kerensky career to go, but i do have the kerensky career to go...

Edited May 12, 2023 by Integrity

[lenticular]

26 minutes ago, Integrity said:

bro you hear squats are coming back too?

Yeah, I heard about that one. That's even more wild. Squats were a little before my time, even. Partly because I got into 40k later than I got into Warhammer Fantasy. I did have a couple of Squat minis that I picked up as part of a mystery bag type thing, but they were more curiosities for me than anything else. I wonder what other random decades-old thing they'll bring back for no reason. Here's hoping for Man o' War. I always thought that game was underrated.

37 minutes ago, Integrity said:

E: fun fact, battletech might actually show up in this thread this year! i only have the kerensky career to go, but i do have the kerensky career to go...

I had to look that one up because 95% of my Battletech was played before any of the expansions came out. But having looked it up... oof. Good luck!

[Integrity]

holy hell i haven't thought about man o' war in decades. i used to leaf through my dad's extensive 80s collection of white dwarf issues and i always adored the man o' war spreads. given the relative success of the two battlefleet gothic games (which are, genuinely, fantastic) maybe we'll see one of those...

 

i mean, fuck, we're getting a full-on rogue trader CRPG through the guys who made the pathfinder CRPGs. games workshop has put their whole pussy into wild ass games recently and i'm absolutely living for it

 

E: speaking of, boltgun is out next week and i will absolutely 100% that game to prepare hype for space marine 2.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

DREDGE (BLACK SALT, 2023)

Finished: 13/5/23. Playtime: 12.1 hours.

Let's go over three consecutive aspects of my personality. Indulge me for a moment.

1. I am distinctly still finding my horror footing. As of four or so years ago, my horror experience was largely that I had watched The Sixth Sense as a kid and I was terrified of doing anything else. Our very own @Specta, horror aficionado she is, began to curate me my own slippery slope - slightly and slightly more horror films, tailor to what I could stomach and to the specifics of horror I found more palatable. Nowadays I can watch an occasional horror film mostly-blind, after a quick Letterboxd review skim and a few beers, but I would not describe myself as having a good stomach for it.
2. I adore videogame fishing. Hate the real stuff. Breath of Fire III and Dark Cloud primed me for a future where I have caught every single fish that appears in the core lands of Final Fantasy XIV. I got the vaunted Darkmoon fishing mount the patch it came out in World of Warcraft, and had near every fishing achievement up to Legion. If a game has a fishing component to it, I'll crack into it, try to bust it open, and have a wonderful time with it.
3. I am a complete baby when it comes to the deep ocean and the leviathans therein. I hate using the long words - ooh im so cool i know the thalassophobia woooord - and prefer to say it simply with more and smaller words. I washed out of Subnautica after about four hours. I used to get cold sweats swimming around the edges of continents in World of Warcraft, just thinking about that continental shelf under my guy. Speaking of that game for the third time, I had to kill the Whale Shark there for the first time just kind of vibeing at my other monitor and using my peripheral vision to steer my wildly overleveled guy into melee. I cannot handle the Lovecraftian depths.

With this information in mind, people recommending Dredge to me felt like a twisted (but pretty funny) joke. I love fishing, and everything else about the game's reputation is custom-tailored to eat me from the inside out. I couldn't shake it, though. Maybe I've built myself up enough to do it? I love fishing.

On 10/25/2022 at 12:58 AM, Integrity said:

Elderborn was a fascinating subtype of game. Those 18 hours were spread across the afternoon of the 28th, and the days of the 29th and 30th of July, and no other. I started to play it, it consumed me, and I would 100% it a few days later and put it down forever

Well, this happened again. I started up the game around 4 on a Friday, after work, and played it straight until just after midnight. I went to bed, had some bizarre creepy, fishy dreams. I woke up at 8, turned the computer on, opened Dredge, and finished everything else up. Two sessions, eight and four hours, that was Dredge in its entirety. I loved it. It gave me some absolutely fantastic feelings of dread. It forced me to go places and do things I did not want to do. I persevered. I fished. I am the ultimate fisherman. I own the waves. As I've said, more and more as I've aged I appreciate a game that knows the extent of its own concept, and Dredge knows exactly how much Dredge to feed you. The game has about twenty hours of life in it, and I won't be surprised if they add more achievements with the DLC late this year and I fire it up to get the rest of the blood from it, as Boyfriend Dungeon did. Sublime game.

One of the biggest things to point out about the achievement set is that the game gives you enough information to fish and do everything without any external resource (staring at you, Final Fantasy XIV). I didn't consult a guide at all until after I'd gotten both endings myself, I had about four achievements to go, and I couldn't remember where I'd seen the fish shrines I had to finish up. I'd found all but one of them, I just didn't make a note of where they were. This is a kind of game (and minigame) that tends to be awfully opaque with regards to information, but Dredge is refreshingly transparent about everything except the horror aspect. It's a great setup. As far as content goes, it's completely straightforward: fish everything, do all the side quests. That's it.

Thanks for the times, Dredge. Hope I have less fishy dreams tonight.

[Integrity]

VISCERA CLEANUP DETAIL: SHADOW WARRIOR (RUNESTORM, 2013)

Finished: 13/5/23. Playtime: 80 minutes.

A funny thing happened after playing Dredge. I went out to see Frozen on Broadway on Tour (great musical btw), came home, ate a large dinner, and then wanted to just chill out with one beer and do something chill like playing Dredge. House Flipper and I are having a little lover's spat at the moment related to his not respecting that I did mow that entire lawn twice, so I consulted the depths of my library.

... wait, why the hell do I own this?

Viscera Cleanup Detail is just about the most Havok (TM) Physics (R) videogame ever made. The only thing that might jostle it from the top is, like, Garry's Mod. The concept is simple: some other guy has already space marined through the place and killed everyone therein. You're the next wave. Mop up all the blood, with a mop that gets bloodier as you put more blood into it and has to be wrung out. Pick up pieces of dude, bullet casings, glass shards, statues, and everything you can think of, put it all in buckets, and incinerate those buckets. Go get more buckets, fill them with more parts of dude, and repeat until the level is clean. There's collectibles to find, and co-op if you just want a cleaning bonanza with your buddies. It couldn't be simpler. I'm honestly a little shocked that, to my knowledge, nobody's tried to take another crack at it with a little more oomph behind it - get you different carpet cleaners, a metaprogression system like House Flipper's cleaning skills, drywall patches, shit like that. Hell, make it a class-based cleaning simulator, where you need to bring a crew with balanced skillsets and work together to clean up after the Duke.

Anyway, : Shadow Warrior is a freebie Runestorm did during Viscera Cleanup Detail's early access period. It's one level, fewer tools, and wads of cash to collect for no reason, all taken from the first act of the rebooted Shadow Warrior. Your guy does little Lo Wang quips as you go. There's one achievement to clean everything, and one achievement to get out with all the money. I figured the game out (never actually having played the original), got the cash, and got out blind in the length of a movie. And you know? It did bridge that too-full-of-hoagie gap between Frozen on Broadway on Tour and going to bed. Good times.

[Integrity]

WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE 2 (FATSHARK, 2018)

Finished: 29/5/23. Playtime: 94.3 hours.

Let's talk about Left Four Dead.

Left 4 Dead was, honestly, a proof of concept game. It was so impossibly novel when it was fresh - nothing outside of some really raw Source mods even compared - that we papered over all of the cracks and just cranked hour after hour into it. Most of it was due to the sheer brilliance of the Versus mode, to be sure, but the core game had so many great nuggets of ideas that it didn't quite recognize that, with literally no other options, we simply took it as it was.

Left 4 Dead 2 is among the finest games ever made. Left 4 Dead 2 is nearly immaculate. It's unapproachable on its throne, but in so being, has spawned a suite of successors, spiritual sequels, and genre fodder all its own. There's far too many to enumerate, though I would love to spend a paragraph or so picking on Back 4 Blood (I'm not just piggybacking Crowbcat's perfect video, I've played it myself), so today we're narrowing down on what is to my knowledge the only company to dedicate themselves to the Left 4 Dead Alike Game: Fatshark.

Fatshark is a Swedish company that flailed about putting out the B-versions of other games for a while. Probably their biggest splash was War of the Roses, which was Chivalry-at-home before Mordhau became the go-to for the PvP FPS melee game. At some point, they got the license for a Warhammer: End Times project, tying into the much-maligned new era of Warhammer Fantasy at the time which is being quietly rescinded as we speak. The resultant Warhammer: End Times: Vermintide: Colon Overload followed in the footsteps of Left 4 Dead solidly. It was a melee-focused FPS, where you roam through stages to accomplish objectives and extract at the end. The pattern follows Left 4 Dead closely, but they decided to strap some light progression elements in. There's five characters, of which four can be brought to any given mission, and each one has different gear choices which are locked in at the start of the stage. Those gear choices are not only different melee and ranged weapons and passive-buff trinkets, but also increasing strengths and rarities of these. You might want to bring a greatsword, or a sword and shield, or even the sword without the shield for a mix of mobility and damage, etc. Warhammer: End Times: Vermintide was a solid effort that earned its keep, but something was missing. It cleaved so closely to Left 4 Dead that it even remembered to be a proof of concept game priming for a sequel.

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a janky masterpiece. The core chopping-up of rats is completely intact, but there's just a bit more of everything. Instead of just rats, it's rats and northmen for variety. Beastmen were introduced in a later DLC for even more, if you're so inclined. Each of the five characters now each have three classes that change how they play distinctly. Initially you had five guys - Markus, the guardsman, your balanced type of fellow; Bardin, the dwarf ranger, defensive with a slight focus on ranged combat; Viktor, the witch hunter, doing high DPS and marking targets for allies; Kerillian, the elf, your mobile ranged character; and Sienna, the pyromancer, your wizard. Now each of those guys have three representations of what they could have been with a different career path in life, to focus on my boy Bardin for instance:

Bardin (Ranger Veteran) - killing special enemies drops ammo for anyone to pick up, can go into stealth briefly for flanking, Classic Bardin from Vermintide 1.
Bardin (Ironbreaker) - loses crossbows, but gains the ability to equip Drakefire weapons, essentially small handheld flamethrowers. Can shrug off attacks and taunt enemies, trading Ranger's flanker focus to make Bardin the center of attention and very much at home in a crowd.
Bardin (Slayer) - loses ranged weapons entirely, instead equipping two different melee weapons for flexibility. He moves faster and can leap into combat, and gains the ability to dual-wield axes for obscene DPS at the cost of anything else.

I won't go into all five characters, but suffice it to say that each has a similarly Interesting spread of choices of how to play them. The gear is also hugely expanded from the first game, and talent trees give you a choice of benefits to put onto your guy in the between-map hub.

Patches and DLC expanded all this tremendously. All of the characters but Sienna as of this writing have an extra career (in Bardin's case, combat engineer) that can be picked up for $4 apiece, and other paid and free expansions have added multiple additional campaigns and game modes in. The game, as it stands, is enormous for a 4-person coop slasher game. I cannot recommend it highly enough if that's even adjacent to your jam.

Vermintide 2 breaks from Vermintide 1 for achievements, much for the better. Vermintide 1's achievement set is absolutely deranged, requiring beating every map as every character on the highest difficulty and a series of challenges on every map besides. Vermintide 2 reserves these to Okri's Book of Grudges, giving ingame rewards, usually cosmetics, for all of these esoteric and often insanely hard challenges. The Steam achievements, meanwhile, have been stripped down. Beat the campaign, do every kind of crafting, equip every rarity of item, and you have the lion's share. Leveling each character to 30 is a grind, and thank God for the double XP weekend that just dropped for me to finish off my last three, The challenge achievements have been condensed to their most simple - beat the final map of the original campaign on each difficulty level. None of the patches or DLC contributed any achievements, though they contributed many challenges. One could make the easy case that I haven't finished Vermintide 2 by any stretch, but at a hundred hours + the time I put into its predecessor, I'm pleased for now and can turn my attention more to Darktide.

E: a fun final fact - the Vermintide games take place in the city of Ubersreik, and Total Warhammer 3 included a special building you can make in Ubersreik that adds five heroes (a captain, a witch hunter, a bright wizard, a dwarf engineer, and an elf handmaiden) to the town's garrison. I think that's really cute, personally.

Edited May 30, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

MEGA MAN LEGACY COLLECTION (CAPCOM, VARIOUS)
Finished: 6/6/23. Playtime: 82.3 hours.

I'm writing this post unbelievably out of order. Given as this is a collection of games, I'm writing this intro paragraph on the tail end of Mega Man 6, having written each of the below paragraphs as I finished their games, while my thoughts were fresh, then writing this one after the games and before the challenges, and then I'll write about the challenges when I do them, and then I'll write something to close it all out. It's ever so complicated.

I do not have a historical relationship with the Mega Men. We owned a Famicom and Super Famicom and, later, a NES and SNES, but this wasn't ever a franchise that captured my dad's eye, so it wasn't one we ever had. The very first time I played a Mega Man was on one of those emulation sites in circa 2009, I played about two bosses of Mega Man 2 and less than a stage of Mega Man after Airman ga Taosenai hit what passed for viral back then. I thought Mega Man 2 was not very good and 1 was atrocious, so I never played another one of the games. The closest I would come in the next twelve years is being incredibly shit at One Step from Eden, which is Mega Man adjacent through a subseries, I'm told. I'd just never found the games to be particularly interesting, so I never went in and gave them a proper try.

Well, for some reason, I own Mega Man Legacy Collection Volume One. Whether I like them or not, this is genuinely a huge hole in my Cultural Knowledge of Gaming, like being a film bro and somehow never having seen a single Kubrick film. Irregardless of quality, they're important. It sounds insanely dweeby, but I felt like I owed it to myself to have an opinion about Mega Man, so let's go about it and pick the Blue Bomber apart. The achievements are simple - beat each of the six games, and get a gold medal (time-based) in each of fifty Challenges, which are mixups of stage segments and bosses from various games chained together - so I won't really talk about them outside of my thoughts about the games and challenges below.

MEGA MAN (1987)
Mega Man was, honestly, shit. I did not enjoy it. It peaked, roughly, at 'okay, if you're very hungry'. The iconic get boss weapons to counter other bosses setup of the franchise felt far more like guessing at the proper weapon in order to have a decent time against any given boss, rather than smugly pulling out a counter. Hell, the weapons themselves felt like shit with a single exception, Thunder Beam, which felt like the fist of an angry god. The Magnet Beam was janky utility that I never got my head around using particularly efficiently. There's something to be said for this, you know, 36 year old game being a bit unintuitive, frustrating, and unsatisfying, but I'm not giving it any leeway. Sorry, Mega Man. We'll see if the series improves from here.

Outside of 'anytime there was precise platforming' and 'ice physics' being awful, the only really notable bits of the game were two boss fights. Guts Man fucking sucked, and there's a real chance he's still the Worst Man by the end of this six-game rampage. The Yellow Devil, on the other hand, is one of the worst bosses in a video game I've ever fought. I gave him old college tries for about twenty minutes, almost got to where I could jump the yellow blocks without taking damage once every other time of asking, and consulted ancient AGDQ knowledge from decades past to do pause buffer damage strats to one cycle him. Fuck that noise. I'm not above exploiting.

MEGA MAN 2 (1988)
Mega Man 2 built up a lot of goodwill from the word go. The game controls just a little better, the drop rates are just a bit more forgiving, the stages are just a bit better designed. The weapons were far more satisfying, outside of two, than the original, and I found myself swapping a lot more than I ever did in the first. The bosses swung a little too hard in the opposite direction of 'completely hardcountered by the right weapon', but I prefer that to 1's 'fair fight with, slog without' approach. Air Man would not be defeated. I can genuinely say that I pivoted completely from the original - I had an actual good time going through the eight robots of Mega Man 2.

Then the game threw every bit of that goodwill away.

Wily's Castle was bad in 1 and fucking awful in 2. The individual fights are shit, to some degree - the dragon was just no fun at all to platform up to and fight, The Room was either zero difficulty or instant damage for each wave, the tank, and then it got worse. The Wall of Turrets that can only be destroyed by Crash Bomb, which is one of the two weapons I alluded to not enjoying earlier, was awful and I thought it was going to be a one-off miss, not a portent of things to come. From here, we hit a long sequence of having nowhere to recharge the guns and having entire bosses who aren't damaged by half, or even all but one in two occasions, of your arsenal. The Wily Robot was a shit fight, in both phases, but at least the default buster could do the job. For the Wall and the Alien? With no way to recharge your guns except a game over + continue? To have only their Weakness Weapon be capable of doing damage? Sure, if you wipe in the Wall, you can farm the annoying shield dudes on your way back to recharge the Crash Bomb, but once you're through there you have the stocks you have. The fact that everything except the bubbles heals the Alien is just a footnote here, that's how badly I felt about everything after entering Wily's Castle. Here's hoping that when people say this is the best of the original games there's always an unspoken 'except for the parts that are really bad' afterwards.

To be fair to Mega Man 2's back third, I did enjoy the boss rush of the regular bots, but that's not really the fault or credit of Wily's Castle.

MEGA MAN 3 (1990)
I think I liked Mega Man 3 less even than the original.

To give it the most basic justice, the very core hop-n-bust loop has the quality of 2's, which is an improvement on 1. This is where my praise for Mega Man 3 ends. The robosses have an absurd theming, and the fights are almost bad to a man. Proto Man's invasions wreck the pace of the stages, and his fight is both tedious and high-risk somehow. Hell, between those two, I felt like almost every high-stakes fight was entirely against collision, and the projectiles were just there to distract me from the fact that the enemy was going to jump relentlessly at me and do insane damage if he connected. The stages were poor, and Wily's Castle did not redeem them. Remixed versions of earlier stages, all eight 2 bosses, a do-over for the Yellow Fucking Devil, and a Wily robot fight that I straight up had to look up a strat for because I could not discern the part of his body that was taking damage. I genuinely do not have a single word of praise for any of the combat encounters in Mega Man 3.

One way to compensate for poor encounter design is with a solid gameplay loop, though, and fortunately, Mega Man 3 also completely fucking flubs this one. The weapons are, to a unit, more gimmicky, flaccid, harder to use, and without any of the punch of 2's generally great suite, or even 1's weird loadout. The armory of Mega Man 3 is among the worst I've experienced. The standout weapons were, honestly, the two that were basically 'it's the buster but it does more damage to some enemies'. The worst part about the weapons was that they were more gimmicky and less generally applicable, but also had disgustingly low ammo counts to discourage experimentation. Combined with enemies getting increased i-frames, there were entire bosses who were weak to the Magnet Missile who I failed to kill with my entire stock of the Magnet Missile thanks to shooting too early, having it blocked by Air Man's tornados, or just hitting i-frames without realizing it. It took me most of the game to figure out what was going on with that.

I said I wasn't going to give Mega Man much of a pass on account of it being 36, but I've learned that I subconsciously did. I did not extend nearly the same indulgence to Mega Man 3 on account of I've seen them do better. 1 was an experiment, floundering around in the dark to try to invent a new style of video game. 3 is a failure.

MEGA MAN 4 (1991)
What the fuck happened? Mega Man 3 was so bad. It was a remarkably terrible game. Why is Mega Man 4 good? It certainly wasn't my favorite game ever, but I'd say it was the most fun I've had with the Mega Men so far as a whole package, and not by a small margin, either. The robosses still had a stupid theming, but it was more memorable than 3's at the very least, and the weapons actually had use cases in stages outside of 'apply to the correct boss so you don't have a terrible time.' The stages themselves were a little repetitive - I did start to notice repeating rooms - but there wasn't terribly much Bad about them outside of Cossack's opener, which masterfully combined ice and snow physics to be shockingly terrible. Drop rates and ammo counts hit a nice midpoint between the generosity of 2 and the bleak scarcity of 3.

Hell, the part of the game that's been universally the worst - everything after the robosses - wasn't, somehow. The Mike Cossack stages, outside of the first minute and a half, were pretty good. The bosses were fun fights. The Wily stages got a little rude with placing enemies under blind drops and shit, but the fights weren't anything too bad. I'd say the final Wily fight was the worst of the bunch, but even he wouldn't crack the bottom rungs of the post-roboss ladders from any of the previous games. I don't even need to pin a caveat on it like I did for 2, I just liked Mega Man 4 and thought it was a good game. Wild.

MEGA MAN 5 (1992)
I'm building a theory that Mega Men are like Star Trek films - the even ones are worth seeing, skip the odd ones. It doesn't really scan to my experiences with the films but hey, it's a fun axiom. Mega Man 5 wasn't as bad as 3, and it was more polished than 1. It was just kind of regular-bad. Kind of unremarkably. The weapons weren't very good, but only a few were notably terrible. The stages weren't very good, the bosses weren't very good, it was just an exceptionally 4/10 experience. I really don't have much to say about Mega Man 5 besides "i didn't like it very much". I appreciate the invention of M-tanks to refill all your guns after the roboss rush, at least. That's a solid check for 5. Annoyingly, I missed exactly one letter going through the eight stages, so I didn't get the bird.

They did make Mega Man's eyes not track the roboss you have highlighted in the stage select though. What the hell! That was the only cool thing 3 did.

MEGA MAN 6 (1993)
I liked Mega Man 6. If 5 was just a kind of neutral bad, this was just a kind of neutral good. There's a lot of stuff in here, individually, that I'd like to see in a better game. The transformation suits took a bit of warming up to. I complained earlier about how weapons felt like counters you swap in for bosses rather than alternate weapons for different situations in the bad games, and they felt like that here. It took a good bit of playing (until X's castle, really) to realize that the weapons did have decent use cases in-stage, I was just using the jet as a platforming/mobility crutch. Looking back on it, I think that's actually pretty good design. I sacrificed combat utility for platforming, not because the combat utility was worth less than the platforming, but because I was covering for my own weaknesses. I think with a quick change mechanic, even caching two forms for fast swap rather than something like a modern weapon wheel, would have gone a long way towards realizing the design Mega Man 6 was going for - but I do recognize that the game was made for a NES controller's utter paucity of buttons.

Besides that, though, I had a fine enough time. The weapons were a little hit and miss, the theming was silly (Tomahawk Man!) but stronger than the last few games, nothing hit either the heady heights or turpid lows of Mega Man 2. The X/Wily stages were a bit of a drag, but nothing in them was notably bad. I think that one was more down to burnout on me than any fault of Mega Man 6, honestly. Now, however, I can say confidently:
Mega Man 4 > 6 > 2 > quite a gap > 5 > 1 > 3.

CHALLENGES
This kind of small-bite optimization is honestly the shit I breathe. Taking a small scenario and practicing it until I have it reasonably-perfect speaks to me on an irrational level. This is a lot of why, like, the Yakuza minigame completions appeal to me so much, or even to a lesser degree the Just Cause wingsuiting and suchlike. It's weird, because one could completely encapsulate the Sonic games I don't like in that statement, and yet they don't appeal to me for some reason. Still, the conceit of these challenges is that they take a series of screens from one or multiple games and send you through them on a time attack. It's a good conceit. The execution is kind of terrible.

The first problem comes up really rapidly - the grab-bags favor a few screens per game immensely. The long Quick Man instant-death screen shows up in almost every single mixup that includes Mega Man 2 in any form, showing up I think seven times out of 46 total non-bossrush challenges, of which about nine include Mega Man 2. Various Men show up bizarrely often, as well - Pharaoh Man shows up in nearly every relevant mix, despite his strategy being 'hold triangle until he dies'. Metal Man is in most of his possible mixes, despite being twoshot by his own weapon and being trivial to clear without damage. Some of the preferred screens are just long and uninteractive, like the Mega Man 2 postgame one where you're shooting bird eggs and then have to sit on Item-2 for like nine seconds. It's not like they're choosing the hardest screens, even, because a few of them include screens that are just 'Eddie gives you an item' as part of them. It's too consistent to be random, but too weird and bad to be curated. I'm unsure if it was just incompetence or what.

The second problem follows - the times are often utterly draconic considering how many screens involve instant-death platforming. The timer runs irregardless of what you do, so swapping weapons is a few-second tax, dying is a ten-second tax give or take, watching a boss's spawn animation is a five-to-eight second tax, etc. Dying to a late instant-death platform, particularly in Mega Man 5-inclusive mixes, can cost 30 seconds or more, where many mixes have a 10-30 second margin for Good Execution to get gold. The later ones are a bit more lenient, and some are insanely so (I watched a guy die twice and fuck up weapon choices repeatedly and still beat a stage by 2 minutes and change), but it absolutely is a recurring issue. It creates a strange difficulty curve where you unlock challenges sequentially by pair of game, but the hardest challenges are at the end of each pair of game, rather than being clustered; and they ease off as you go, and the All Game megamixes are more forgiving than their paired counterparts. It's odd. It's even kind of random within that ruleset - with two extra deaths in the 6 All Robosses compared to the 5 All Robosses, I got gold in 5 by a solid 45 seconds, and I missed gold in 6 by two and a half minutes.

Then you get to the final set of challenges. The Challenge Challenges are simple - complete any four of the following with golds, and most of them with any medal, for completion: beat all robosses of Mega Man <X> with only the Buster, beat all 46 robosses with only the Buster, and beat all the appearing-block screens without items. This is, I think, the ultimate challenge of the Mega Man Legacy Collection. I didn't do Mega Man 2's challenge because I didn't have to and, frankly, because fuck that. There was enough to deal with learning the perfect-timing Electricity Man stunlock, cursing God while Dust Man or one of the legion of Men who can turn invincible spammed the invincibility move and burning clock like hell, or wearing my thumbs down charging shots forever in the 4+ games. The final challenge was all robosses, all games, Buster only, and this was torturous primarily for the Mega Man 3 bosses. It all comes back to that shithole of a game, to the point where I even ended up grinding out the Buster-only 3 robosses challenge (not needing the medal) just to be able to practice them for the All Robosses Buster Only. Mega Man 3 will haunt me until I die, I swear.

The final hurdle came with the fiftieth gold. The first 46 came without too much difficulty each, just a lot of grinding. The Mega Man 1, 4, and 5 robosses (no items) fell without too much difficulty, surprisingly in the case of 5. My time for All Robosses Buster Only came in 15 minutes over estimate, and fucked if I was gonna do that again to try to make that the one. That left 2 and 6 Buster Only, or All Appearing Blocks Buster Only. I drilled all of these a bit and came to a realization. When I watched Austin Powers for the first time, and for the second time, I laughed at this ridiculous parody of the Bond films. When I finally knuckled down and watched some of the classic Connery and the ilk Bonds, I realized that Austin Powers was hardly a parody. I had the same realization here, but for I Wanna Be the Guy and the appearing blocks stages. I thought that was a psychotic overtuned take on a silly platformer game, but no, actually, the Mega Man appearing blocks are actually almost that shitty and stupid. Gold on the stage requires basically doing every single screen perfectly, so I ditched it and drilled hard on the 6 Buster Only rush. I was not going to yoke myself to killing Crash and Quick Man with any semblance of speed or reliability, respectively. Doing these All Buster challenges deeply raised my level of contempt for these games' fight designs, and this was no different. About half of the Mega Man 6 robosses share the simple attack of rushing at you a short distance with no tell at high speed, and for all of them it's the most dangerous thing they can do. It's deeply irritating to lose a run because Blizzard Man decided to, instead of using his attacks, simply keep using the Walk Towards Mega Man attack, his highest damaging and least-punishable one. It really stresses how fundamentally shaky these games are, that if any boss's entire loadout were replaced by hopping at you (as Shadow Man's is) they would become infinitely more threatening. I ground it out and, frankly? I'm pretty fucking proud of myself for it.

[Integrity]

i have a special surprise for the 100th but i'm way too tired to roll it out tonight check back tomorrow

 

EDIT: i got sick check back the next time i post 😞

Edited June 6, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

Let's have some fun with numbers. I'm still a bit sick, but it's not as bad as the last few days. I decided to put together a spreadsheet for the 100th game and track basic stuff about the games I've been doing, This is not intended to give any particular insight into my gaming habits or anything, it's just a fun little sideshow.

 

1. THE DATA

For each game, I noted down the year, developer, publisher, genre, date of first achievement, and date of final achievement. Some caveats to the data: for developer/publisher/year, I went with the absolute original in all cases, and for the collections used the date of the first game in them. Quake, as said, is a remaster from 2021, including mission packs from various points from 1997 to 2021, and the license has passed around a few times during that time, but I decided to go with id developing, GT publishing, in 1996. Additionally, there's a handful of games where I got my first achievement before some point in 2008-2009 when Steam started to reliably keep the data. Most notably, achievement timestamps from my first play of The Orange Box are just Absent, so all my Half-Life 2: Episode 2 achievements are either unstamped or from the same week in 2021. In these cases, I didn't try to estimate when I got my first - I just used the first timestamped one.

 

2. WHAT KIND OF GAMES DO I PLAY?

Let's look at some charts for a few sections.

There's nothing particularly surprising here, I'd say. "Action" is kind of a catch-all including third-person brawlers, isometric hack-n-slashes, and generally anything where your primary mode of interacting with the world is to improve upon your Violence Loop. Given that the Soulslike and Yakuzas together account for sixteen of those twenty-three on their own, it's obvious why it makes second place here. FPSes being #1 is absolutely unsurprising, with five Calls of Duty leading the pack and with FPS being historically one of my favorite genres. The small-scale ones actually map to my tastes fairly well in the lower 50% - a predisposition to strategy, with real-time slightly leading turn-based, but only because I elected to flag the Total War games as RTS first. I'll play a third-person shooter if I'm very hungry for a first-person shooter, but distinctly don't prefer them; platformers are largely here on the back of Sonic the Hedgehog. Most everything else is a blip.

 

3. WHO MAKES THE GAMES I PLAY?

Loads of these are 1-count developers, and there's not too much interesting here. The developers that get flagged over 1% are almost exclusively developers that did a franchise I did multiple games of - TCA with Total War, Sonic Team with ...Sonic, Infinity Ward with Call of Duty, etc. We can laugh at Bethesda for being there at 2% with two different copies of Skyrim and nothing else; I think I'm doing Father Todd proud. Bizarrely, the only developer there with multiple franchises represented is the Islamic state of Crapcom, handing Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Mega Man all up for consideration. Good on you, Capcom.

 

4. BUT WHO COMMISSIONS THE GAMES I PLAY?

Here's a slightly more interesting chart. To get the lion's share out of the way: if a company only published games by their in-house dev studio, that's what I defined as 'self' published. Tripwire, for instance, largely only publish their own in-house games, but they have acted as a publisher for other developers before, so they didn't get the self-published moniker even though Killing Floor 2 was developed and published by Tripwire. I felt like that was a reasonable way to get a catch-all category where 'self' actually means self-published indie games, shit like Zachtronics or Supergiant (well, since Bastion). With that in mind, nearly a quarter of my shelved games being indies makes perfect sense for a variety of reasons - more likely to have gotten them in Humble Bundles, often shorter games, lower cost if I didn't get them for free, just to name a few. Sega pulling up the rearguard also doesn't surprise too much, given as they command the licenses for Yakuza, Total War, Warhammer, Sonic, and a bunch of other franchises. I'm actively working on four more Sega games, only one of which was developed by Sega, as we speak. I guess Sega is the savior of PC gaming. One fun shoutout does go to 2K, providing the in-house Bioshock along with publishing Spec Ops: The Line and XCOM: Chimera Squad. That's a fun little set of games!

 

5. WHEN DID THE GAMES I PLAY COME OUT?

I'm just including this one for completion. Shocking nobody, almost every game has come from after Steam launched in 2003. The only reason anything's before that is remasters like Mega Man, Crazy Taxi, Doom 64, etc. Otherwise, there's no discernible pattern to the data.

 

6. HOW LONG DO I TAKE TO FINISH GAMES?

The short answer is 'usually within a year'. This is skewed slightly for games like, for instance, Boyfriend Dungeon, which took me "over a year" but was really played in precisely three sessions, so 56/100 games falling into 'within a year' is even lowballing it. The averages reflect this - the mean days to completion is 906, or roughly two and a half years, but the median is only 170 days. The outliers are where the fun is, though, right?

The longest between first and final achievement is almost certainly one of the Orange Box games, but data from the beginning of those games just doesn't exist. Presuming I got my first achievement for Portal in November of 2007, it would come in at around 4,800 days, or 13 years and change. Instead, the earliest achievement I have recorded in this set comes from Audiosurf, recorded October 1st, 2009, where I did my first Ninja Mono run. Christ, I was barely eighteen at the time. Audiosurf itself would get put on the platinum shelf, with help from Dave from IT, about a year ago for a total of 4,612 days, or twelve and a half years. Nothing else even cracks the 4,000 day barrier, but Space Marine puts a legendary effort into it, coming in at 3,999 days. Three other games make up the Over Ten Years bin: Empire: Total War, Skyrim, and Mount and Blade: Warband.

What about the other end of the spectrum, though? I've completed three games in a sitting each: Save Room, Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior, and Untitled Goose Game. These were all short games that I picked up, got everything in a few hours, and put down, satisfied. Interestingly, there's no game between 3 days to completion and a week to completion, so I suppose that those 3-day-and-under games are the Extended Session ones - games where I started and didn't think about much other than it for a frenzied few days. Portal is here, but unjustly - that was just my replay/mopup to get whatever I didn't get in 2007. Dredge is here, as are three Calls of Duty: Modern Warfare, lacking only MW3. Elderborn, Crush the Castle Legacy Collection, and Crazy Taxi round it out. Nothing awful surprising there, Call of Duty campaigns don't tend to be super meaty when you do them on Veteran first-try, and the remainder are split between games where a bug bit me awful bad (Elderborn, Dredge) and pretty beer-and-pretzelly games (CtC, Crazy Taxi). 

There is no median game, interestingly. There's a huge gap between 140 days (The Bible) and 201 days (FTL), though FTL has a similar caveat to the ancient games - Subset didn't add Steam achievements until I was a hundred hours deep, and my in-game challenges all converted to Steam achievements. The mean game, or at least within a month of the mean, is Road Redemption, clocking in at 875 days. That one was a grind I stopped several times.

Outliers show some fun in franchises, too. I mentioned the Calls of Duty: Modern Warfare earlier, at 2, 1, and 3 days for the original, 2019, and MW2 respectively, but Modern Warfare 3 shatters their average at 2,222 days. This was fueled in part by the long Survival grind, in part by needing Parrhesia to not be in Australia for Spec Ops help, and in part because I played the campaign on Hardened back in 2016 just to get a feel for it after a deep Steam sale. The two versions of Skyrim come in at 3,688 days (the original, which I played for fun) and 7 days (Skyrim Special Edition, which I played only for achievements).

The real franchise fun is in Yakuza. I've said that Yakuza 5 is the Most Game before, and the numbers play out to how that game nearly broke my resolve. Yakuza 0 clocks in at a healthy 101 days, which makes sense - I started and stopped once, then I had to formulate all of the strategies that would carry me through the rest of the games, and on top of that 0 is still one of the beefiest games in the saga to complete. You can then track the trend down: Kiwami in 15 days, as the strats settle in and I become more proficient at a variety of things; Kiwami 2 in a mere 7, given as Kiwami 2 is one of the easier ones to complete balanced against this being early in my run; 3 and 4 each in 9 days, as I'm really getting into the flow. Yakuza 5 then took 27 days, longer than 2, 3, and 4 combined. Not from an hours standpoint - I put roughly 250 hours into those three compared to 170 into Yakuza 5 - but it just ground my resolve down. The single digit Yakuza days were over. 6, despite being fairly straightforward, took 15 days; 7 took 18, and would have taken a lot longer had I not had the Steam Deck to grind on. Judgment only took 17 days, despite being the third-longest by hours, which is pretty telling for just how much I loved Judgment. Then the opposite shows up; Lost Judgment, which I had reservations about, finished up over 71 days; and Ishin! came in at a whopping 101, taking us exactly back to Yakuza 0's numbers except without a multiple month break in the middle. Yowch.

 

7. CONCLUSION

I don't intend to meticulously update these metrics as I go. Maybe I'll do a 200 games special update, but this was just a fun project for a big milestone. There's a couple games cookin' for the prospective next one, but it'll be at least a week yet unless I get a huge break in Dawn of War 2. This has been a pleasure, fellas, and thanks for listening in to all my rambling bullshit. Here's to a hundred more!

[lenticular]

21 hours ago, Integrity said:

6. HOW LONG DO I TAKE TO FINISH GAMES?

You made me curious enough to look up my own stats for this, for my considerably less impressive (but still pretty impressive) 38 perfect games. Technically my fastest completions were three games by Freebird Games (A Bird Story, Finding Paradise, Impostor Factory) since they all have exactly one achievement, awarded for completing the game, so they all clock in at exactly 0 minutes between my first and last achievement. If you don't include them, my fastest game is A Kiss For The Petals - Remembering How We Met, an extremely meh visual novel, which took me 1 hour and 9 minutes between the first and last achievement. My longest duration game was Stardew Valley, which lasted 2473 days between first and last achievements. Which is over 50,000 times as long as A Kiss For The Petals - Remembering How We Met. My game with most potential to break my record, though, is Braid, which I played in 2010 and got all but one achievement. If I ever decide to pick up that last one, then it'll be close to 5,000 days.

Anyway, good job on breaking three digits. It's not exactly the most meaningful achievement in the history of the world, but it's still a cool one. Congrats!

[Integrity]

DARK DEITY (SWORD & AXE, 2021)

Finished: 11/6/23. Playtime: 48.6 hours.

I would like to issue a formal apology, if the guys who made Dark Deity spend any time looking up "dark deity review" and stumble onto this page. I've spent a fair chunk of time online talking about how great our new era of indie strategy games is, where all the classic franchises have picked up an indie that followed in the footsteps of a franchise and learned all the right lessons. Advance Wars got Wargroove, Ogre Battle got Symphony of War, Final Fantasy Tactics got Fell Seal, and Fire Emblem got . Even beyond that, I've talked active shit about Dark Deity. I played a map or two a good while ago and took that as my confirmation bias to continue chatting quiet shit about Dark Deity online. It's such an easy punchline, and the swimsuit DLC made it even easier. That sojourn into Dark Deity left me with simple feelings: the character designs are all over the place, the writing is cringey, the maps are ugly, the game controls like shit and tells you nothing.

And you know? None of that is wrong. I've beaten the game twice, now. The character designs are all over the place, and a subset of them (primarily women in armor) are awful. The plot is incompetently delivered, badly structured, and embarrassingly written; and the supports are only a bit better. The best looking map in Dark Deity still looks better than Vesteria Saga, but if I'm comparing anything to that 1999 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Campaign Map Maker ass game, it's not a compliment. The game controls like shit and the controls are obtuse enough that I discovered checkpoint saves and enemy phase skips towards the middle of my second playthrough - and that's ignoring all the niggling command-cancelations and menu fuckups and bizarre design elements that tripped me up on the regular, every map. The game's tutorials are almost parodic in how awfully they're presented, and that's if you bother to seek them out and don't assume the game will explain things to you as you go. I haven't mentioned the bugs! About six total times in two playthroughs, units managed to move out of bounds or impose themselves in quantum superpositions and wouldn't respond to orders for a turn, or dead enemies would not clear off the board. The Danger Zone is proudly here from Shadow Dragon on, but doesn't account for adverse terrain or units who are flagged to not move. It's, objectively, a mess.

 

Now take a breath, and please listen to me when I say I do recommend a certain kind among you to pick up and try Dark Deity, a game I would rank in the upper half of Fire Emblems overall.

 

Beneath all that obfuscatory bullshit, beneath a layer of unforced grime and spectacular own-goals, is a tactical RPG with a shocking amount of depth and room for self-expression. Dark Deity take a lateral step, taking the concept of the weapon triangle, distilling it into 'a system of weapon advantage', and comes up with a small matrix of weapon and armor pairups. Every unit has a weapon type and an armor type, and during combat, each unit's weapon is matched against the other's armor when determining damage. The matches are pretty logical outside of magic - which is magic - where crushing weapons are better against heavily-armored targets, while swords tink helplessly off plate, etc. They also stay impactful through the entire game, to the point where you need an exceptionally good unit or some significant extracurricular support if you want to go completely against type and use a leather-wearing swordsman to take down a sword-bearing plate-clad knight.

Adding to this is the progression systems, plural, stacked upon each other. The most obvious and basic is the class system' there's six basic archetypes - Warrior, Archer, Mage, Cleric, Thief, and Adept - that have commonalities. Each has a fixed utility skill: Warriors can Shove, Archers can Haste to let an ally move one more space this turn, Mages can Reposition, Clerics can (shockingly) Heal, Thieves can Disarm to remove all weapon stats from a target for one turn, and Adepts can Chain a target in place for one turn. Each has a promotion tree shared by all other members of that class, two-tiered, where the promotions have three effects. First, they change growths - and the changes to unit growths are shown on promotion, thankfully. Second, they add two skills to the unit permanently, which have huge impacts on the way a single unit works. Third, they can change the weapon or armor type, or both, for a unit. All these changes, with a new sprite and animations, combine to make promotion feel impactful. You don't actually gain a single point of any stats when a unit promotes, but it still feels like a fresh new unit right out the gate, and that luster doesn't diminish as you learn more about the system. Every second tier class has a third tier equivalent, but the promotions are completely uncoupled - you can go from any tier 2 to any tier 3 class. This creates a ton of fun once you know what you're doing, as the second tier becomes some stat skewing and permanent skill allocation to the final class. You can fuck it completely - I took Aurima a physical-centric promotion at tier 2, then a magical class at tier 3, and did the shocked Pikachu face when he was really terrible - or you can swerve your healer into the evil soul-stealing shadow priest tier 2 before taking them back to being a proper healer at tier 3, but now they leech health on attacks forever. The system is genuinely fucking fantastic and I do not have a bad word to say about it that isn't related to little balancing issues here and there.

The other system, strapped around the outside of it, is a bit more esoteric and badly explained by the game. Every enemy you kill in every map nets you a gold bounty, and finishing any map gets you a further bounty based on how few turns you took to get through it. Gold is spent in the intermap base at the shop, but not on what you might expect. Weapons are simply skills affixed to a character, with four color-coded ones equipped by every unit at all times corresponding to might, hit, crit, and balance. Weapon tokens upgrade these weapons from tier 1 through tier 4, adding chiefly to its respective stat (and secondarily to the others), and increasing weight (which is unmitigable) as you go. Unupgraded weapons are worse, but lighter, organically corresponding to something like Fates' bronze weapons, so keeping a weapon unupgraded strategically is a really good idea, but you're going to want the extra hit and might on better weapons to hit faster enemies by the midgame. Gold is used to buy these weapon tokens and statboosters, which makes it an incredibly interesting system that sort-of follows the vein of BEXP, but targeted. Essentially, gold just becomes a resource you spend directly on stats, one way or another, on the units you want to spend it on, and you're rewarded gold both for how fast and how thoroughly you go through a map. It creates a fantastic dynamic where you feel like you're being rewarded with extra supplies no matter how you choose to go through maps, and you have tremendous liberty in how to spend those supplies to augment your army in a very straightforward way. I'm a huge fan of this system.

I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about the levels, too. Dark Deity swings for the fences and, honestly, I can't say that it misses. It has multiple setpiece boss fights, easily the nadir of any Fire Emblem besides, peculiarly, Revelation and Radiant Dawn, and they're both fun, imaginative fights that evoke what they mean to. Sure, one's a bit too easy, but I'm not going to hold that against the game. There's a common misconception among Fire Emblem players that a map is defined by its objective - you've heard it at some point, I know, that Birthright had 'less interesting' maps because they were all Rout, unlike the cool Conquest maps which had objectives like Seize* (*: you practically have to kill every enemy to get to the seize point) and Defend* (*: you could rout the map before the defend timer wound down). That's a bit petty, to be sure, but I hope the point is taken - map design is so much more than the objective bolted on to guide the player. Dark Deity's got an unconventional set of objectives, but they're often in service of maps that force you to split your party, allow you to choose how many ways to split your party, force you to build independent task forces, ask you to defend and attack together, and a good number of other scenarios. To call them escape, kill boss, etc. maps on the face of it distills them to Fire Emblem's frequently-unimaginative uses of those. Dark Deity has maps that actually require fairly different approaches and a system that doesn't let you juggernaut them nearly as easily as you can Fire Emblem.

In fact, that brings me to a big thing. A non-refreshing part of many spiritual successors, re-imaginings, etc. is an adherence to the source material 'because it's that way'. A re-imagining of a beloved franchise that refuses to bear down and Introspect on why systems operate the way they do is, in my opinion, doomed for failure at worst and cargo-culting at best. Dark Deity, for good and ill both, has no qualms about slaughtering the sacred cows of Fire Emblem. You can smell the DNA of Fire Emblem all over the game, but nothing in the game is imported from the source material without inspecting Why it worked. This does create a disconnect in a lot of the reviews on Steam, which I regrettably trawled through, where people treat it like it's Fire Emblem, rather than a game inspired by Fire Emblem, and have a terrible time with it. It isn't Fire Emblem. It's got the vibes, it's got the feel, it's got the pattern, but if you just try to play it directly like Fire Emblem you're going to have a terrible time. Think, people. Engage media on its terms. It's far healthier.

In the end, the thing I want to impart most dearly onto you, the reader, is this. If you play Fire Emblem for the tactics, if you have a game where you skip the cutscenes on every replay but still like seeing how things shake out, if you dabble in the Lunatics, give Dark Deity a shot on sale at least. It skews hard sometimes, but if you're the kind of person who thinks Birthright or Awakening Lunatic is a fun difficulty for having a good time in that applies your brain but doesn't overload it, Hard Dark Deity will tickle your strategic needs if you let it and if you meet it where it is. There's a lot of jank, many totally-unforced errors, and an incredibly bad final map in this stew, but it's all masking a core game with a lot of heart and thought put into it, even when it goes a little bit off the rails. If you fit the mold I laid down, and you're willing to let Dark Deity love you in all its warty glory, I'm confident you'll find an experience you at least look back fondly on, if not a new favorite for the ages.

 

After that whole screed, the achievements were nothing. Winning on Lunatic-equivalent gets you all but about four achievements almost inevitably, and none of them take more than a map to clear up. There's three challenge achievements; two I got by mistake, and one that's psychotic to speedrun Chapter 6 in 8 turns, which is a huge rout full of mixed-range pods well before you have a squad you can rely on. I did it on Easy in 7.

Ok bye

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

The game controls like shit and the controls are obtuse enough that I discovered checkpoint saves and enemy phase skips towards the middle of my second playthrough

skill issue

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

DARK DEITY (SWORD & AXE, 2021)

I think there were some updates after it came out, to address the sheer fucken brokenness of dodgy women with knifes and mages in general, both of which did not, in fact, care about what the enemy had or did.

I think they also have further cusomization? Growths, stats, weapons and the ole randomize everything? That kinda meta-options is something FE has lacked I feel.

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

Think, people.

no

[Fabulously Olivier]

Speaking of DD, Dark Deity 2 just got announced a few days ago. You'll be playing Irving's children, and there will be various gameplay improvements. 

 

They also announced a Roguelike mode for 2 that shortens the campaign and randomizes teams. Never heard of a roguelike SRPG before, but it should be great for replay.

[Integrity]

yeah the dd2 announcement is actually what sparked me to give dd a real college try lmao

 

if you get down to it, though, isn't a roguelike srpg just going back to the roots of good ol' X-COM? 😉

[Shanty Pete's 1st Mate]

I actually just started Dark Deity a while ago! The weapon forging system, armor type weaknesses, and manifold promotion options are all quite promising to me. The most frustrating thing, I'd say, is the presentation. The animations end abruptly, so while going into combat is smooth, getting out of it is jarring. I tried to "fix" this by turning animations off, but it still takes me to a black screen where my unit gains EXP. Thus negating the whole point (not having to change from the map screen) of such a switch.

Anyway, at its core, it looks like a solid turn-based strategy game. And I'm interested in what direction the story and characters are headed. But to call it "rough around the edges" is putting it lightly.

[Integrity]

it's crippling to the game but a little bit too accurate to say that it looks and plays like shit and explains nothing well at all tbh

 

the fact that i enjoyed it so much, let alone at all, despite that is a testament to the bones on the thing

[Fabulously Olivier]

I reckon I agree with most of the criticisms made, especially the art, story, and some of the maps. But also, as an overall package, I rate it better than about half of the actual FE games. I'd play it before I play FE 1-3 (and their remakes), 5-6, or Fates.

 

And I hope this sequel really improves on the thing. Especially the art. They could afford to be more consistent.

[Integrity]

i'm tentatively looking forward to the sequel. all of the things i could grouse about - and did in that paragraph - are things one could reasonably expect a sequel to address directly, particularly since they've said they're doing a complete codebase do-over and they picked up a new writer who parrhesia trusts to do good work, and i trust parrhesia. the art is a sticky point because it was such a mixed bag - some of the sprites and animations were unfathomably awful (archer) and some were unspeakably cool (the promoted version of reverie, forget the name). the character designs were all over the place but generally okay, they just lacked cohesion, except that some were really bad. we'll see!

[Fabulously Olivier]

Oh, one of my favorite things about Dark Deity is the Brandon Sanderson references. Multiple classes are named and themed for Stormlight Archive knight archetypes, and I hope they stay in the sequel.

 

Especially Windrunners. They're freakin awesome.

[Parrhesia]

7 hours ago, Integrity said:

they picked up a new writer who parrhesia trusts to do good work, and i trust parrhesia.

Most encouraging is that the guy generally dislikes the writing in JRPGs. Regardless of one's thoughts on JRPGs, a disdain for them is the kind of energy DD's writing needs.

Along with some developer notes I've seen about how they'll address feedback and generally tighten the game, I'm honestly pretty encouraged. Bit of egg on my face given I've freely talked shit about the game based largely on reputation, screencaps and word-of-mouth, but hey

Edited June 14, 2023 by Parrhesia

[Armchair General]

On 6/12/2023 at 6:41 AM, Integrity said:

isn't a roguelike srpg just going back to the roots of good ol' X-COM?

At least XCOM 2 can be cheesed by heavily investing in an psychic supersoldier. It sounds more like Darkest Dungeon.

 

On 6/11/2023 at 7:06 PM, Integrity said:

the maps are ugly,

I actually found it funny that it went from fighting within an village to killing an dragon in an volcano to raiding an castle to fighting an cosmic horror twice

 

 

On 6/11/2023 at 7:06 PM, Integrity said:

a subset of them (primarily women in armor) are awful

I'm going in completely blind, here. But I kind of doubt if this is actually that bad.

 

On 6/11/2023 at 7:06 PM, Integrity said:

The plot is incompetently delivered, badly structured, and embarrassingly written;

But this is kind of believable, considering how the map design started going an little bit off the rails after Ch 9.

 

I might get the sequel somewhere down the line, but as it is, it's not really worth it

[Parrhesia]

14 hours ago, Armchair General said:

I'm going in completely blind, here. But I kind of doubt if this is actually that bad.

I can't believe that I'm looking at the TV Tropes Characters page because that's unironically the best nexus for full-body character arts, but here goes...

In isolation, no real problems here. Sexy valkyrie, in kind of a GW2 Vigil way, it's fine.

In isolation.

Our second woman in heavy armour. It's not even just a titty-plate, it's two little hats. It genuinely looks like the tits were bare and have been clumsily censored out, it has no coherency with the rest of the design. 'Armour but a bit feminised' was already accomplished by the lace.

Just a confused design, top to bottom. Like with the second compared to the first, it's honestly more compromised by just having the single random patch of flesh, and it's surrounded by low armour in, uh, kind of an important place to be armoured.

Looks like a level 43 Warrior in vanilla WoW, still wearing a couple of holdover Mail pieces and with engineering goggles for some reason. What's with the furry shin-cuffs? There have to have been better ways to break up the steel. This design just doesn't work.

Four for four, compromised by a very shallow and oddly sexless idea of horniness. It's not the only time it comes up, either; Sloane, one of the magi, has an honestly good design that's solely but cripplingly let down by an extremely poor attempt to have her robe stretch to contain the sheer magnitude of her bosom.

[Armchair General]

Well, they're not as bad as what you're making it out to be, imo. But the last two kind of felt like they were trying too hard. They were onto something with the second one; but as you said, the corset/breastplate combo kind of killed it