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

[Integrity]

RISK OF RAIN (HOPOO, 2013)

Finished: 26/4/15. Playtime: 19 hours.

RISK OF RAIN 2 (HOPOO, 2020)

Finished: 26/8/23. Playtime: 133.4 hours.

Finally. I've 100%ed Risk of Rain 2 several times, and they keep putting new shit in. Bastards.

Risk of Rain and its sequel are odd games. Risk of Rain, the first, was a pretty solid 2D action-platformy-roguelike kinda deal. You pick a character, get dropped into a random first stage, and have to find the exit while cleaning enemies up for money and looking for places to spend that money on items. Once you find the exit teleporter, you interact with it to start a defense event, and on completion of that you're able to move to the next stage. Rinse and repeat. Once you get to Stage 6, the stage instead ends with a boss fight, and you win. Various smaller meta-challenges in the game unlock more items to be seeded into the item pool, or unlock more characters you can pick from to start a round. It's a pretty simple game, but it comes together well to create a fun, bite-sized frenetic action game.

Risk of Rain 2 makes the absolutely preposterous move of successfully transferring every bit of Risk of Rain's DNA to a third-person shooter in full 3D. It's the precise recipe for disaster in every conceivable way, and Hopoo somehow stuck the landing immaculately. I never think of Risk of Rain 2 when I think of my favorite games ever, but it's pretty undoubtedly one of the finest examples of its genre ever put together. The only downside to it is that I find it gently exhausting to play.

I've only summarized the games at a very high level because so much of Risk of Rain 2 comes about in how its achievements are structured. Risk of Rain, while a hard game, is relatively smooth to 100%. If you're capable of crushing through the game on the middle difficulty of three, you're well past good enough to get everything done with a guide and a little luck. Notably, Steam 100% is not Risk of Rain 100%, which is a far bigger undertaking. I'm... not actually sure that Steam 100% even necessarily requires beating the game a single time, now that I think about it, which is pretty funny.

100% Risk of Rain 2 is an absolute goddamn monster. The overall game flow of the sequel is slightly different to the first. You go through five random stages and, at the fifth's teleporter event, you have the option to configure the teleporter to the moon (go to the final boss stage, analogous to Risk of Rain's Stage 6) or to the planet (loop back to Stage 1). Since difficulty is a factor of how many stages you've completed and how much time you've taken, each loop represents a fairly hefty difficulty spike. Every fifth stage is always the same map, and you get to make the same choice as many times as you can stay alive for.

First up, you basically have to interact with every single facet of the game. Raise every stat, one at a time, to large levels. See all of the bonus stages and, of course, beat them all. Beat the final boss. Beat the game the non-boss way, which involves getting to at least midway through your second loop and taking the alternate exit to obliterate yourself from existence. Kill a boss fast. Kill an elite boss. Kill a lot of other things. Kill a lot of things at once. There's a fucking load of these, and they don't represent anything near the hard shit.

Next up, let's introduce Artifacts. Both games had them, but 2 has an achievement for getting each. These are items you can find during runs that can be toggled on or off from the run setup screen to provide a permanent modifier to the game, such as all enemies in a stage will be the same type, or your doppelgänger will try to kill you every few minutes. There's twelve of these in total, and they can make getting a lot of other achievements a hell of a lot easier, either through making the game less random (Command lets you choose items instead of getting them at random) or through more direct methods (elite bosses only spawn after your third loop; Honor makes all enemies including bosses elite from the first level). They don't impact any achievements, so go wild. Command is widely considered to make the game significantly easier by removing one of the biggest sources of RNG, and I abused it flagrantly for the below. You'll see why.

Third are the victory achievements. There are, as of this writing, thirteen characters to choose from in Risk of Rain 2, and I don't suspect that number is going to go up. Everything I've said up to now is, thankfully, difficulty-agnostic; let's change that. You have to beat the game, through your choice of either method outlined earlier, on the highest difficulty with each character. Just getting good enough to beat Monsoon is already a task itself. Getting flexible and comfortable enough with the game to beat Monsoon with everyone is a hell of a task, even if you're using Artifacts to make the load a little lighter. Doing it au naturale? Christ, forget it. I got good enough to beat Monsoon one time with random drops just to prove I could, and then everything I did after that was with Swarms (double enemies but half health each), Command (choose items), and Sacrifice (no chests, but enemies drop items randomly) enabled.

Fourth and finally are the skill unlock achievements. Every character (but one) has alternative skills they can equip before a run, and your build is locked when you hit go. These skills get unlocked via achievements, and these achievements are often completely fucked-up to imagine doing without Command. Some of them are batshit no matter how you slice it, even. Going through the character list, and ignoring the ones that are pretty banal (like "beat the third stage as Huntress"):

Commando: Kill an Overloading Worm, which involves getting an Overloading Worm to spawn, which can only happen on the second loop and beyond after about 40 minutes of gameplay. Nothing guarantees it, just pray. This would be the worst, except the Commando's other one is to complete twenty consecutive stages in a single run. Recall that beating the game, nominally, is either six or eight.

Huntress: Hold twelve crowbars at once. This is pretty tame overall, but I want to bring it up to prime later ones. Crowbars are a common item, which means that without Command you're relying on a 1/40ish chance per common drop to get a crowbar, and for that to happen twelve times in a run. There's very rare spawns that can help out but the short of it is that this is just completely random unless you have Command on, and then it's completely trivial. We're going to talk a lot about item stacking later.

MUL-T: Much like the Huntress, the worst he's got is one random one: kill an Imp Overlord with a Preon Accumulator. The Imp Overlord has a chance to be the boss of Stage 3 or 4, and the Preon Accumulator is a rare equipment spawn with a single fixed instance on one of the three possible Stage 3s (you have to get there fast to get it though) so it's just a matter of rerunning a 10-minute game over and over until the stars align.

Engineer: Finish a teleporter defense with no enemies left alive. This is one that just sucks for dumb reasons - enemies do not have to be killed to finish the defense, and it's very frequent that one just gets stuck trying to path to you or one spawns a second before the event ends. You can brute force it eventually, it's just - again - random. The first set of characters (up to here) are pretty tame, overall, except the Commando.

Artificer: So let's go apeshit. Kill a teleporter boss in a one-second window. The Artificer is naturally fragile and bursty, but does considerable AoE. It's very easy to poke the boss with the tiniest amount of splash damage while clearing guys who will kill you fast, and then you're just hosed. I genuinely have no idea how you're supposed to do this outside of turning on the Artifacts of Glass (500% damage, 10% health) and Command, and even then you need a hefty portion of luck to pull it off.

Mercenary: Here we go. Every day, a Prismatic Trial is generated. This has you complete two stages with certain parameters on the run, and is meant as a daily challenge kind of deal. As the Mercenary, complete a Prismatic Trial without falling below 100% health. I don't need to explain to you how completely horseshit this is, do I? I will also add the information that Risk of Rain 2 has falling damage.

Captain: It's a fair question whether it's less onerous for an achievement to be one difficult action, but you only get to make the roll after 40 minutes; or to be a ballbuster, but you pass or fail within 10. The Mercenary's one was the latter, and here's the former. The Captain can call down two Supply Beacons per stage. They're solid buffs that you can configure in the pre-game screen and reinforce the Captain's identity as a positionally-defensive character. They take a few seconds to deploy and do a modest chunk of damage to anything under them as a joke. Kill the final boss with a Supply Drop. This sounds really funny, but I have to stress - they do modest damage and take a while to deploy. You get two shots per stage. You get to the final boss after 40 minutes to an hour of gameplay, at least at my pace. If you miscalculate the damage you do - which you can't easily see, because you'd have to use it to check - and leave the boss alive? Eat shit. If you miss? Eat shit. If you fuck up and kill the boss by mistake? You guessed it! Eat shit. It's a remarkably terrible achievement.

Bandit: Here's the punchline. Kill the final boss with Lights Out. You know what Lights Out is? Reusable. This isn't even a bad one, it's just astonishing in contrast with the Captain one which was added in the same update.

Railgunner: Do a million damage in a single shot. This is what the Huntress was setting up for. To get this million damage, I had to stack twenty-six crowbars and five glass shards (a rare item you will typically see 0 to 1 of per run) to get to that million. Much like the Artificer, I have no earthly idea how this is possible to get to organically outside of just being good enough to loop 20 stages. It took me almost a full run with Command to get the items together for it and those shards tanked my prospects of actually winning.

REX, Loader, Acrid, and Bandit (so 4/12) I have nothing to complain about. REX and Acrid's achievement sets actually just reward you for properly using their kit, and Loader's are all about going fast but not so insanely fast that you need Command to stack speed. The thirteenth survivor (Void Fiend) has no alternative skills. My complaint with these is that they're extremely specific (and often exceptionally difficult) challenges that unlock options for you that can dramatically change how the survivor plays. These should be locked behind things like REX and Acrid have, where you're rewarded for using your skillset well with changes to your skillset, as opposed to having to prove either utter mastery of the game or wildly cheese a build in order to replace a skill you don't like. If Risk of Rain 2 has a glaring and unignorable flaw, I think, it's the skill unlock achievements. They suck.

The good news is that that's it, though. If this were a narrative, at this point, you'd be done or all but done. The process of getting all these alternative skills and skins (skins being the rewards for beating Monsoon) will almost certainly get you everything else. While I have massive issues with the structure and format of unlocks in Risk of Rain 2, it clearly hasn't stopped or slowed me from coming back to the game over and over again to crunch through a new set of achievements or to buy a new DLC. Risk of Rain itself is getting a full remake, including content from Risk of Rain 2, sometime this year, and you bet your ass I'm going to throw another set of dollars and hours at Hopoo. The thing is, whatever negatives I can point to, the simple fact of the matter is that they get it, on a fundamental level. They make fantastically playable games that feel incredibly good to master, and I've really mostly just wasted your time in a huge series of nitpicks about optional content.

Edited August 26, 2023 by Integrity

[lenticular]

12 hours ago, Integrity said:

Risk of Rain itself is getting a full remake, including content from Risk of Rain 2, sometime this year, and you bet your ass I'm going to throw another set of dollars and hours at Hopoo.

Oh, nice. I didn't know that was a thing. I played and liked Risk of Rain, even though I was completely terrible at it. Then there was Risk of Rain 2, which might be a great game but I'd never know because it's not something I can even watch for more than about two minutes at a time without horrific nausea. This isn't Hopoo's fault, mind. It's hardly something that's unique to their game. I get pretty awful motion sickness and sim sickness, so a lot of 3D games are off-limits for me, even ones that have absolutely no right to make me sick. Like, I've had to give up on games like What Remains of Edith Finch and Dear Esther, and am probably the only human being ever born who has complained that Dear Esther needed to slow down. But even though it isn't the game's fault, I still always got a little melancholy thinking about the series. So it's exciting for me that they're going back into 2D and I'll actually be able to play again. Maybe I'll be marginally less terrible at the remake.

[Integrity]

SONIC FRONTIERS (TEAM SONIC, 2022)

Finished: 7/9/23. Playtime: 21.1 hours.

Sonic Frontiers is a game that coasts almost exclusively on vibes. The good news is that the vibes are really good, but any attempt to take the game apart from an objective standpoint is, ultimately, going to be fairly unkind to it, I think. The game's kind of a mess, suffering from bloated and opaque systems and a world map that's got one of the worst cases of Ubisoft Syndrome I've ever seen. The game constantly struggles to find a difficulty curve that's between frictionless schmoovin' and blank staring with no idea how to proceed. There's at least two upgrades that are actually kind of downgrades. There's quite a lot to dislike about Frontiers.

The most indicative element of all of it is, I think, the combat system. Sonic's got a small pile of combos and unlockable abilities to help you to optimize DPS at different ranges and from different angles, with a parry and a dodge mechanic strapped on top... and total mastery of it basically boils down to whether you two-cycle or three-cycle a given boss fight. Most enemies are dispatched in a hit, and most minibosses require you to do some mechanic (be it platforming, parrying, etc.) to put them into a vulnerable state whereupon you can apply your damage. Since these windows are timed, 'just mashing the hit button' will not do enough damage to kill the guy in two phase cycles, but instead three; while perfect combat mastery will do enough damage to kill the guy in two phase cycles, but not one. Depending on how diligent you are at upgrading your attack stat, it's entirely possible to be in a space where mastery of the combat isn't enough for a one cycle, but brute punching still gets you a two cycle - or, hell, if you upgrade enough, where brute punching is just a one cycle victory, and total mastery only lets you win the fight slightly faster. What does this add to the game? I genuinely don't know, but I do know one thing: I had fun playing with it for some reason.

That's the crux of Frontiers, to me. There's some of it that's genuinely indefensible and dragged the game down, like the wild interconnecting pathways of rails that you create to make island traversal easier not having quite enough draw distance to be as useful as they ought to be. For most of the game, though, I can type a big takedown of why the system is pointless or even in some cases counterproductive, and then end it off with "but I had fun with it anyway." The cyberspace levels, little bite-sized throwback stages that just crib themes from past games like everything I disliked about Generations, are generally really easy and fairly samey and most of them are under two minutes long on a first clear. I still had a bunch of fun with them, even though none will stick with me in the long run. The cyberspace stage music fuckin' rocks, though. That's just objective fact.

Hell, the plot of the game even follows up on this. It kept my attention and I ended up not skipping anything, unlike the three Sonic games before this, where I made it between a third of the cutscenes in (Generations) and the intro cutscene (Forces) before I started skipping everything like it's Final Fantasy XIV. But why didn't I skip? The first entire two islands were the low point in the story. I didn't particularly care for Amy and I found Knuckles to be boring as sin, but I kept watching anyway. I did get invested in the Eggman half of the plot, and genuinely liked whatever the hell was going on with Sage, but I really ought to have tapped out hours before the things I liked were getting center stage. I guess the vibes were there. I had fun with them anyway, for some reason.

The open world's incredibly cluttered and only gets more cluttered as you complete objectives in the map. The map has no fewer than I think fourteen filter modes, one for each kind of icon, and there's whole parts of island you just straight up can't see on the map through all the icons. It looks like shit, and the information the map screen gives you is extraneous, redundant, overwhelming, and often opaque. The world itself suffers from this too, a bit. Completing challenges eventually makes every island a horrible spaghetti bowl of platforms and rails to help you get around, industrializing the beautiful islands into Californian nightmares. One of the islands is a bit of a pain in the ass to get around, and one is horribly designed, which doesn't sound bad until it's pointed out that there are only four islands. That's half the game indicted in one fell swoop. On the other hand, just going fast is really enjoyable and I had a lot of fun gathering collectibles, for some reason.

All of these complaints and more just kind of washed over me while playing the game. Beneath some spectacular attempts to self-sabotage, and a game absolutely creaking under its own weight, Frontiers carries a kind of simple joy of speed with it that I was completely able to deactivate my rationality cortex and vibe into, unlike the previous Sonic games I've played. I don't know, and I don't think I could ever justify, why I enjoyed Frontiers as much as I did. The simple fact remains, though, that I had a lot of fun playing this kind-of bad game. For some reason.

Sonic Frontiers would be one of the worst chores imaginable to 100% if you hate fishing, but good news: I love fishing. Most of the game is really trivial to finish from an achievements standpoint. You don't need to get anywhere close to 100%ing the game to get all the achievements, and I didn't force myself to. Beat the game, kill everything one time, and see all the side cutscenes, and you're basically done. You don't even need to complete all the missions (S-rank time, red star rings, finish with X rings) for every cyberspace level, and in fact you don't even need to play every cyberspace level. At the end of all of that is maxing out your stats and skill tree, which takes hundreds of various stat-up doodads which are generally rewarded to you in singlets for doing platforming challenges. This would take eons of samey overworld jumping and running to complete, except that catching a single fish on the fourth island can be worth up to 24 of the stat-up doodads. It took 76 fishes to max all my stats, max the skill tree, and get a few dozen affection tokens to unlock the last of the side content. Thanks, Big.

[Patrick]

Stuck…. Please help.  I’m at the end of defeating Wyvern in Sonic Frontiers. it’s showing to press Y.  I have tried holding it down, pressing it excessively, and even pressing it slowly and every time the boom blows me up.  What am I supposed to do with the Y button?

Edited September 8, 2023 by Patrick

[Integrity]

to memory the two quicktime events at the end are mashing and the timed press where you have to hit the button when the white circle overlaps the red one (same thing as fishing)

[Integrity]

QUAKE 2 (ID, 1997)

Finished: 15/9/23. Playtime: 11.7 hours.

Quake 2, on release, was lauded as not only the best first-person shooters had ever been, but possibly as good as they could ever be. It looked and played unbelievably well - so good, in fact, that id had to adjust design philosophies towards map design focused around fewer enemies because your brand spanking new Voodoo graphics card couldn't handle the fidelity of Quake numbers of enemies on screen at a time. It had interconnecting levels, split into 'units'. where travel back and forth from maps was possible and all actions you took were persistent until you moved to the next unit. It had this, regrettably. Bless you, the 90s.

Quake, interestingly, held up like a damn wine. It was not only playable largely blind in 2022, I'd say directly it was good and full-up still just as recommendable as when it was new. Quake 2 did not. Quake 2 is a fine enough shooter for if you're very hungry for more shooters from the 90s, but its reputation as one of the best of all time is entirely unearned, I think. I'd put forth that not only is it the worst Quake, not only was it not the best shooter of its time, it wasn't even the best shooter of 1997. It's not a bad game, it's just ...well, it's something. I'll try to peel apart why Quake 2 is so completely whelming.

The very most basic thing to judge a game by is how it looks, and Quake 2 looks like shit. Part of it, certainly, is that mid-90s 3D has aged badly, but I'm not going to pick on model quality or anything - we use the tools we got. A lot of it is down to the fact that everything in Quake 2 is fucking brown. Everything. There's a bit in Quake 2 64 where you have to stare into the darkness from your brown platform to see a different brown platform ascending up a brown column. I'm not even exaggerating. Parrhesia could not see it before I pointed it out. That was the worst instance in the game, but everything is just browns on browns. Every joke about X360 shooters sparked by Call of Duty and Gears of War was a joke that was almost ten years too late, because holy shit. Quake's aesthetic, weapons and enemies and environments, coasted by smoothly on how alien and gothic everything was. Quake 2's weapons and enemies are just kinda standard cybernetic body horror (I implore you to click the earlier link, or to do it again) and, while the designs are mostly interesting enough, it just doesn't hold up like Quake's unique weirdness did. Quake 2's environments are awful, shitty future-industrial mazes.

Quake 2's gameplay loop is also just inherently unsatisfying compared to its predecessor. The weapons are more standard faux-militaristic shit, rather than the wack junk of Quake - and they feel like shit to use. Quake operated with an almost unfathomable simplicity of design: you had the Axe, the Shotgun, the Shotgun++, the Nailgun, the Nailgun++, the Exploder, the Exploder++, and the Ultimate Weapon. Four ammo types and, except for the ultimate, a low-grade and a high-grade way to expend each. There's some argument, to be sure, that having a weapon basically obsolete a previous one isn't great design, but I think in Quake's case it worked gangbusters. Quake 2 has a shitload of weapons (and far more added in expansion packs) and many of them have overlapping roles to the point where you're never using a weapon for a situation, you're using which of the fairly-equivalent-power weapons has ammo right now. It also clogs the hell out of the weapon lineup, because (for instance) while you will use the machine gun after you get the chain gun (unlike Quake's equivalent nailguns), the shotgun is absolutely pathetic and has no place post-super shotgun, and you can throw grenades before you get the grenade launcher and you keep this ability on your weapon lineup forever for some reason. Combine this with the lower-number high-health enemies, and you never build any momentum going through a level. Fighting always feels like stopping to burn a bar down, but the game wasn't designed as an arena shooter like a predecessor to neo-Doom or Boltgun. It wants you to freeroam and explore the (large!) levels, but you can't do that easily when enemies have a significant barrier to kill and pose a distinct threat to you. It's a game waiting to be Boltgun, but Boltgun hasn't been invented yet.

Enemy and map design? Dross, generally. I didn't mention it before, but the 2023 remaster that I played incorporated a bunch of later AI and moveset improvements to the base game which generally made the game more dangerous but in good and interesting ways. In the original, enemies had crippling weaknesses like "slow and melee-locked", "reloads before he shoots for some reason", and the godly "cannot attack and move at the same time". Skyrim bears had an ancestor, I guess. This does distinctly improve the game, but it also means that a good number of enemies can flip between original behavior (which is harmless) and expansion pack behavior (which is lethal) on a dime. Your government-issue elite gunners can either shoot you (for fairly piddly damage) or launch a volley of three to seven grenades in rapid succession. The melee guys from earlier who could not move and attack at the same time now can, for ignorable damage, or they can leap at you for some damage and massive displacement. The maps are winding and poorly-laid out (but do attempt to have signage!) and, honestly, this would have taken twice as long if the remaster had not introduced my best friend, Compass-kun. Compass-kun, when activated, lays out the path to your next objective. It's obscenely good games design: always there if you need or even just want it, never present in your interface if you don't press the button to bring it up. Compass-kun fucking rules.

I'll put a note in about the music since I tend to when I do these fuller breakdowns: Quake's score was legendarily written by Ohio's own Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, and he created one of the greatest soundtracks to a game ever made, which has stood the test of nearly thirty years now. Quake 2 was scored by some young composer in one of the first jobs of what would become a very respectable career, and the result is very much Nine Inch Nails At Home. It's not very good. I'm glad he went on to create good things later, but this is absolutely early career growing pains, and I'd wager the poor guy was asked to follow up on Reznor's obscene effort directly. I do not blame the composer for Quake 2's music. One of his very next jobs was Unreal Tournament, a game with a good enough soundtrack that Parrhesia and I literally played it over the musicless Quake 2 64.

At the end of all this, did I like Quake 2? Not really, honestly. It was okay. It was not the worst shooter I've ever played, but it really did nothing to elevate itself from the myriad gunk of games like Duke Nukem 3D. It doesn't even have enough character, like Duke3D, for me to see why it would be somebody's weird stan game. It's just kind of an evolutionary nothing that would eventually inspire Quake 4, a game I have a lot of absolutely unearned love for, and really not much else. Sayonara, weird and kinda-sub-mediocre game.

The 2023 remaster contained five campaigns, and 100% achievements means nothing more or less than beating all five on any difficulty. This does not disclude co-op multiplayer, so Parrhesia (my man, my boy, my platonic love) ran the entire gamut with me. Take a moment to stop reading, cover your heart, and say a prayer for some unbelievably homie behavior here.

Quake 2's original 1997 release was the first and the longest, of course. The following year, 1998, would give us The Reckoning and Ground Zero, the original expansion packs to Quake 2. The Reckoning was developed by Xatrix Entertainment, who you may better know these days as Treyarch, the architects of all the Call of Duty games that people play when there's nothing else to do between Infinity Ward releases. It's insanely fucking bad. The Reckoning is, genuinely, among the worst FPS experiences of my entire gaming life. The Reckoning is fucking terrible. It's full of poorly-signposted backtracking, there's no ammo anywhere, it adds more weapons that add nothing to the experience, and it really loves to use a particular enemy. I didn't harp on this in the enemies section so that I could harp on it specifically with regards to The Reckoning, but there's an uncommon enemy type who has a claw and a railgun. The railgun is hitscan, but takes a moment to acquire you and you can strafe-dodge it. It does fifty damage of your hundred-or-so health. The Reckoning adores to have them in trios or more, or to put them in such places where the railgun side sees you first and it gets a first strike, and it does this a lot. It's unfathomably tedious. At no point during The Reckoning was I having an ounce of fucking fun. Parrhesia and I had a rhythm where we would play a game or two of Starcraft 2 co-op together, shoot the shit, warm up, and then play Quake 2 for a unit or so, each night we had nothing else going on. The Reckoning was so bad that we swapped this routine, weeks in, because if we played Starcraft 2 first we'd just decide to play more Starcraft instead of swapping games. We had to change our behavior to force ourselves through this fucking thing.

Ground Zero was honestly fairly good, which is interesting because it comes from the minds at Rogue, who I introduced in the Quake writeup as having made Dissolution of Eternity, a campaign where their reach distinctly exceeded their grasp. While The Reckoning introduces weapons that do absolutely nothing for the gameplay loop (like fucking traps. TRAPS! in Quake!), Ground Zero adds things that actually fill niches that Quake 2's design philosophy needed, like a Machinegun+ with its own ammo so you're not splitting bullets between the machine gun and the chain gun. This is also the expansion that invented most of the behavior changes that the remaster backported into the main game, correctly, like the gunners not reloading before they shoot and enemies making token attempts to dodge projectiles. It's just, on aggregate, better than the original game, and its tepid contemporary reception both confuses me and further convinces me that gamers are inhuman. This will get worse later in this post.

1999 would produce a Nintendo 64 port of Quake 2. Doom had been "ported" to the N64 before and had gotten an entirely unique game out of it, which is also in this thread and which I thought was kinda bad (but better than Quake 2 vanilla, honestly). Quake had also been ported to the N64, and it caused some discontent on account of being a shit demaster of the original game instead of an experience designed for the N64. id, seeing patterns, decided to go the Doom route for Quake 2 64, rather than the Quake route. Quake 2 64, by Midway (as was Doom 64 and Quake 64), is unfathomably okay. Except for the aforementioned platforming brown bit, in the penultimate level, it's fine. It's okay. There isn't enough ammo, but it's never hard. It was designed to be played on the fucking N64 controller, that aberration, and took Parrhesia and I literally an hour to beat on Hard in a single take. If you're extremely hungry for just a crumb more 90s shooter, it's there. There's nothing (else) offensively bad about it. It's just there. It's in the remaster, for the first time outside of the N64, because Bethesda has a bizarrely healthy relationship with its retro shooter franchises.

Finally, there's Call of the Machine. As with Quake's Dimension of the Machine, Bethesda commissioned Machine Games of neo-Wolfenstein fame to make their own expansion map pack for the game as an event for the game's 25th anniversary last month, launching with the remaster. Call of the Machine, as with Dimension of the Machine, is very obviously made by multiple disparate directors of distinctly differing aptitude. Of the six units, one is really bad, most are fine, and Corpse Run. Corpse Run is perhaps the single finest FPS experience I have ever had in my entire life. I am absolutely fucking floored by how good Corpse Run is, and I have no idea why. There's an enduring capital-G Gamer thought that I try to push back against at every possible opportunity, that the value of a game is measured in hours per dollar spent. I'm sure you've seen it, that a dollar per hour is the expected minimum for a game. It's really stupid, but things like Corpse Run really put the lie to it, in my opinion. The entirety of Corpse Run, co-op with Parrhesia, took about 50 minutes (lol, about the same as Quake 2 64). I bought Quake 2 off-sale for $10. If the game had been only Corpse Run, I would be singing its praises. This unit, genuinely, was worth ten dollars on its own. Quake 2 technically beat out the $1/hr metric that Gamers hold games to, and the 10.5 hours of it that weren't Corpse Run were fine. Adequate. Bad, sometimes - hell, often. Was Quake 2 improved because I put more than one hour per dollar into it, beyond the absolute joy I got out of Corpse Run? No, it wasn't. It's a terrible metric for evaluating entertainment. Buy Quake 2, play Corpse Run, and refund it if you must. This is my plea.

e: lol i forgot there were two followups on the 'gamers are inhuman' bit - the first is above, the second is that people are unironically mad that machine games didn't include the linked Naked Titty Bitch enemy, who is a shit enemy even ignoring the optics, in Call of the Machine, and tried to use it as a rallying cry for how games is woke now. like fucking lmao. i saw some idiot mad because machine games included "every enemy" from return to castle wolfenstein (what, all the different flavors of nazi) except for the she-wolf of the SS leather dominatrix women because they're woke now. the actual takeaway is that i hate everyone who posts about videogames online in any capacity.

Edited September 16, 2023 by Integrity

[Integrity]

ok editing works again i fixed it. fixed the image links too

Edited September 16, 2023 by Integrity

[Parrhesia]

21 minutes ago, Integrity said:

It had this, regrettably. Bless you, the 90s.

Yeah I... spent a lot of my time with Q2 really wanting to like Q2 more than I did, and it just eroded that gradually over the course of the vanilla campaign before Reckoning calcified my negative feelings.

I didn't like Quake 1 as much as Ike, though I broadly agree with his feelings (and certainly with its place in the historical record), and a constant low-level annoyance was the lack of a second proper Reliable, Workhorse weapon. The icing on the cake for Quake 1 would have been if it had invented the shock rifle. It didn't - because Unreal is the superior series - but Q2 figured it out! And before long there was the super shotgun back, and now the SMG, fine and good, the hyperblaster, the railgun, uh, more added in later... but nothing actually spectacular. There was a rocket launcher, and it was a good rocket launcher. But - especially in the expansions - enemies frequently jumped you from blind angles at close range, and encounters happened more and more frequently either in tight corridors or against erratic flying/jumping enemies, not the mid-range, mid-mobility settings at which the launcher excels.

The thing I clung to throughout was that at least there was a sense you were nickelling and diming away at an enemy stronghold, running about the place activating various triggers to unlock the way forward in a way that felt more organic than just FIND THE RED / BLUE / YELLOW SKULL KEYS (though did sometimes involve that). And the flavour was fun; they had a great time inventing various bullshit Rube Goldberg machines to murder your fellow marines. Almost enough to make me go back in time to when I was playing single-player Enemy Territory and main the Stroggs over the Steve Blums. Almost.

But Q2 Vanilla is just... progression at the start is slow and painful, and you're left with the shitty basic weapons for far too long. And then at the end there are nothing but swarms of needlessly bulky but not actually threatening enemies. Time to die is just huge on both sides (except on the handful of threat enemies that Fucking Vapourise the player). My thoughts soured as it became clear this running around was really just busy work, Gauntlet asking for more quarters as my life ticks down by a point every second. And then all the fun gets sapped out of the Reckoning. The gun progression is slower. Enemies are tankier. The fun Strogg flavour evaporates, and I was confronted, head-on, with the mush that is the Q2 Core Gameplay Loop. It's evidently salvagable - play Call of the Machine and Ground Zero and get the good parts without the bad. But Quake 2's makers did not understand what made Quake 1 good, and the Reckoning's makers did not understand any aspect of the human condition. Didn't help that the first fucking level crashed like four times, dumpstering our progress every time; and wiped my inventory twice, knocking me back to the fucking blaster and whatever weapon it deigned to hand out a second time.

All this to say that Dark Souls 2 improves on the original in every regard worth tracking, and no, you don't sincerely enjoy Blight Town. But I have 100%ed a Q-game now and now I don't need to play Queen's Wish 2 on Torment for the alphabet, an experience I fear would have made me stop loving Queen's Wish.

The Great Work continues.

[lenticular]

I have nothing much to say here, since FPSs are not my think, except that I agree in the strongest possible terms that both the 1990s and The Gamers™ are obnoxious, disgusting and extremely fucking stupid. Why did I think that clicking that link was a good idea?

Oh, wait, I actually do have something to say.

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

I'd put forth that not only is it the worst Quake, not only was it not the best shooter of its time, it wasn't even the best shooter of 1997.

And this is why we laugh at everyone who claims that a newly released game is going to go down in history as one of the best of all time. Because most of the time, they will be ridiculously wrong. At an absolute minimum, everyone should have to wait at least 5 years before they start making hyperbolic claims about best game ever.

Also, I wish I didn't hate FPS games, because finding actually competent games starting with Q is difficult and I'm on the verge of wasting my money buying a garbage shovelware game that I can complete inside of an hour just to tick that box. Maybe I should sell off some Steam trading cards and use the SteamBucks™ to buy something really cheap and nasty.

[Punished Dayni]

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

the actual takeaway is that i hate everyone who posts about videogames online in any capacity.

Completely fair.

10 hours ago, Integrity said:

1999 would produce a Nintendo 64 port of Quake 2. Doom had been "ported" to the N64 before and had gotten an entirely unique game out of it, which is also in this thread and which I thought was kinda bad (but better than Quake 2 vanilla, honestly). Quake had also been ported to the N64, and it caused some discontent on account of being a shit demaster of the original game instead of an experience designed for the N64. id, seeing patterns, decided to go the Doom route for Quake 2 64, rather than the Quake route. Quake 2 64, by Midway (as was Doom 64 and Quake 64), is unfathomably okay. Except for the aforementioned platforming brown bit, in the penultimate level, it's fine. It's okay. There isn't enough ammo, but it's never hard. It was designed to be played on the fucking N64 controller, that aberration, and took Parrhesia and I literally an hour to beat on Hard in a single take. If you're extremely hungry for just a crumb more 90s shooter, it's there. There's nothing (else) offensively bad about it. It's just there. It's in the remaster, for the first time outside of the N64, because Bethesda has a bizarrely healthy relationship with its retro shooter franchises.

So this port was with the remaster?

They do have the tendancy to bring as much as they can together with these old FPS rereleases.

[Integrity]

10 hours ago, lenticular said:

Also, I wish I didn't hate FPS games, because finding actually competent games starting with Q is difficult and I'm on the verge of wasting my money buying a garbage shovelware game that I can complete inside of an hour just to tick that box. Maybe I should sell off some Steam trading cards and use the SteamBucks™ to buy something really cheap and nasty.

yeah Q's one of the nasty ones. the only candidates off the top of my head are the quakes (which, to be fair, quake 2 is very not-long and could probably be done in six or so hours co-op on easy) and queen's wish, a game i haven't played but parrhesia loves him some spiderweb software crpgs. i don't even own a non-quake game that starts with Q on steam, and there isn't a single one in my huge spreadsheet of unclaimed games.

2 hours ago, Punished Dayni said:

So this port was with the remaster?

the quake 2 one, yeah. quake 64, to my knowledge, was largely just a shittier linearized version of quake's campaign rather than its own thing like doom 64 and quake 2 64 were. it's apparently included in the quake remaster but i didn't bother playing it, lmao

[Parrhesia]

Yeah the two Queen's Wish games - soon to be joined by a third - is great, so if you're an RPG fan I'd go for them. Mathematically it looks like you can get the full sweep in a full playthrough (20-25 hours), if you reloaded right after making key decisions to make the opposite key decision... but given you'd need to play on the highest difficulty, and need to do some stretch goals that aren't necessarily on the highest difficulty, two is probably more realistic. Play them anyway tbh.

[lenticular]

I have Queen's Wish: The Conquerer, but I bounced off it pretty hard. Played for about 3/4 of an hour, and while it wasn't bad, I just found that I didn't have any desire at all to get back to it. I also have Quadrilateral Cowboy, which has some reasonable receptions, but pretty much hated it and didn't get even 10 minutes in before turning it off and never going back. And I have Quest for Glory Collection, except that doesn't have any achievements so isn't valid here. I know that The Quarry also exists, but that's horror and I get along with horror even worse than I get along with FPSs. My current idea is to try something like this which looks like complete garbage and certainly worse than any of the games I've just mentioned, but cheap enough and short enough that I don't feel guilty for wasting my time and money.

[Integrity]

lol hell yeah shovelware ftw

[lenticular]

QUEEN OF SEAS (KOMBITS, 2017)

Finished: 19 September, 2013. Play time: 100 minutes.

Oh boy. This game. This game is not good. But then, I knew that before I started playing it. You knew that before you started reading this. The question was never going to be whether or not it was good. The question was always going to be just how bad is it? To that, I will say that it's pretty bad, but probably not quite as bad as I was expecting.

Let's step back a moment. This game typically costs £0.89, but as I write this, it is on sale with a 51% discount (for some reason) bringing it down to £0.44. Before I bought it, I had exactly £0.43 sitting in my Steam wallet from selling trading cards. This means that I spent exactly one penny on it. (For those of you reading from other countries with other currencies, that's approximately equal to €0.01, US$0.01, CA$0.01, CHF0.01 or AU$0.02. Sorry Australia, you always get screwed on game prices.) This equates to 167 hours of game play for every pound that I spent on this, which -- if The Gamers are to be believed -- might make this the best value for money game ever made.

The game describes itself as a platform game but this seems to be something of a misnomer since there are no platforms in sight. You play the role of a diver who walks across the sea bottom. Sharks and jellyfish will spawn in randomly and you can jump or duck to try to avoid them. You can also jump to collect coins, which you use to buy upgrades between runs, which will let you walk faster, jump higher, and take extra hits before dying. The ultimate goal is to walk 200 steps without dying. And that's it. So, a full 100% run looks something like this: you start off by collecting coins to buy upgrades, starting with the higher jump upgrade since that one lets you grab more coins. Once you have all the upgrades, you then actually bother trying to beat he game, which I managed in my first fully-upgraded run. You then spend a while longer at the end farming deaths to get the achievements for being killed by sharks 100 times and by jellyfish 50 times, because of course they exist and of course you complete the game far before you get them.

Causes of death, ordered from most to least common:

• Death farming for achievements
• Tried to rush due to impatience and boredom
• Something spawned in right on top of me and there was no reasonable way to avoid it
• The awkward controls and really floaty jump made dodging too difficult
• I misjudged the hitbox of the shark
• ("Fun and engaging difficulty" would go here, but I don't think that actually happened)

So, of those 100 minutes that I played, how much of the time was actually spent having fun? Well, there was one time when I did a pretty sick dodge that was pretty fun. So let's say... 3.5 seconds of actual fun? Which, as it happens, is about how long it takes to earn £0.01 at current UK adult minimum wage.

Honestly, though, I don't want to rip on this game too hard. It does have the feeling as if someone was actually at least trying to make a competent video game here. They just didn't actually succeed. Which does at least place it above the scores of cynical asset flips that infect the bowels of Steam. But I've played a bunch of games that were made by a single person inside of a weekend for game jams that were much more fun than this, so I'm not going to give it too much credit.

And that's Q knocked out for me. Only EJNY remain.

Edited September 19, 2023 by lenticular

[Integrity]

congratulations on having a fart's worth of fun

[ping]

11 hours ago, lenticular said:

And that's Q knocked out for me. Only EJNY remain.

I think I remember you being a EU4 player, soo.....

3.5 seconds of fun for a single cent doesn't sound too terrible, really. A 60 € purchase would have to provide 5 hours and 50 minutes of concentrated fun to match that ratio, which... well, I think I have both better and worse purchases in my Steam library.

[lenticular]

9 minutes ago, gnip said:

I think I remember you being a EU4 player, soo....

Hahahaha. My 1754 hours in EU4 were only good enough for 51% of achievements. Which is steadily falling as they release new ones with every expansion, while I haven't actually played in 2 years. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest there may be easier choices for me here.

[ping]

42 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Hahahaha. My 1754 hours in EU4 were only good enough for 51% of achievements. Which is steadily falling as they release new ones with every expansion, while I haven't actually played in 2 years. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest there may be easier choices for me here.

And I expect that many of the... slower achievements are in the 49%. At least that's the case for me Did you know there's a new achievement that requires you to start as Frankfurt, form Jerusalem, flip to Animism, flip to Inti, and form the Inca? You'd probably get halfway through another alphabet challenge faster than getting just that one achievement.

[Integrity]

i 100%ed crusader kings 2, probably the easiest of the paradoxes to do it all in, just before the reaper's due came out at a bit under 700 hours. that tracks for fewer than half now.

[lenticular]

11 hours ago, gnip said:

And I expect that many of the... slower achievements are in the 49%

Yeah. I do have a few of the gnarlier ones. World Conqueror, The Third Way, An Unlikely Candidate, Academical, African Power, etc. But there are certainly a lot of them left. And basically nothing left on the scale of "have a royal marriage". Probably a handful of pretty easy ones that have been added since I last played, but not many.

11 hours ago, gnip said:

Did you know there's a new achievement that requires you to start as Frankfurt, form Jerusalem, flip to Animism, flip to Inti, and form the Inca?

I did not know that, and damn, that's wild. Is it a reference to something, or did Johan just have a stroke in the middle of designing achievements? It doesn't sound too difficult, though. The hardest part would probably be breaking out of HRE purgatory quickly enough to get to Jerusalem before that formation stops being available. Once you do that, forming the Inca shouldn't be too bad, just super fiddly, obnoxious and annoying. I'm pretty confident that I could do it if I really wanted to, but even more confident that I don't want to. I do kinda want to play EU4 again now after thinking about it, though. Just when you think you're finally out, they pull you right back in.

[ping]

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

The Third Way, An Unlikely Candidate

Tried that, Iberia said "no".

It's pretty similar for me, too. I have a handful of the rough ones - toughest is probably the "Conquer Germany as Theodoro" one, gnarliest a One Faith (as Coptomans). But there's a bunch where I couldn't get the ball rolling and quit in frustration. It's not very motivating to try again when you put like 5-10 hours into a campaign, manage to overcome the regional competition, and then Spain or the Ottomans decide to kill you and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

3 hours ago, lenticular said:

I did not know that, and damn, that's wild. Is it a reference to something, or did Johan just have a stroke in the middle of designing achievements?

It's a reference to something that happened at one of the big LAN parties, yeah. I didn't watch any of it, though, so I don't know if one of the players actually managed to legit do this in a multiplayer setting or (which seems more likely, tbh) somebody went Frankfurt->Jerusalem and then got killed and given the Inca as their new tag.

[lenticular]

On 9/20/2023 at 7:56 AM, gnip said:

It's pretty similar for me, too. I have a handful of the rough ones - toughest is probably the "Conquer Germany as Theodoro" one, gnarliest a One Faith (as Coptomans). But there's a bunch where I couldn't get the ball rolling and quit in frustration. It's not very motivating to try again when you put like 5-10 hours into a campaign, manage to overcome the regional competition, and then Spain or the Ottomans decide to kill you and there's nothing you can do to stop them.

I once nearly got One Faith by accident. I was playing as Poland and doing the achievement to reach max level in all techs, so was basically just playing a full campaign from 1444 to 1821 with a very strong country, and I just kept growing and growing and growing. I think I ended up with only something like 50-100 non-Catholic provinces left at the end, and I probably could have got the achievement if I'd really wanted to, but late-game conquest in EU4 is soul-crushingly boring and repetitive once your past the point when there's anyone left on the map who can even vaguely threaten you, so I just couldn't muster up the will to push on and finish it.

I've definitely had a few achievement runs end in frustration as well, though. The worst ones for me were always the ones with time limits. I had multiple attempts at some of them, and it's very disheartening to be just barely behind schedule and then have to restart when you don't quite finish on time.

Anyway, I'm on a roll, because I just finished getting another 100%:

NEVER ALONE (KISIMA INGITCHUNA) (UPPER ONE GAMES, 2015)

(Finished: 21 September 2023. Play time: 11.8 hours)

This is a bit of an odd one. Ostensibly, it's a puzzle platformer with optional co-op. Think of something like Trine or Lego Star Wars. There are different characters with different abilities and you need to use both sets of abilities to solve the game's puzzles, which you do either by playing co-op or by playing single player and switching back and forth between which character you're controlling. In this case, the two characters are an arctic fox (who is good at climbing and has the ability to control spirits) and a girl called Nuna (who is good at having hands).

Except that that's not really the main point of the game. The main point is that the game is actually about Iñupiat (native Alaskan) people, their culture, and their stories. The story is based on an Iñupiat story and has an Iñupiaq language narrator (with English subtitles), some of the art is based on Iñupiat art, and as you play through the game, you unlock "cultural insights" which are basically just short videos of interviews with Iñupiat people, talking about their lives, culture, etc. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call it edutainment, but it is definitely leaning in that direction.

The basic gameplay is mostly fine if unremarkable. There are definitely moments of indie jank that can be frustrating to deal with. For instance, in single player, the computer will control the character you aren't using at any given moment, and typically just follow along behind you. Except that sometimes they will miss the most basic jump and instead plummet to their death. Fortunately, checkpoints are pretty damn regular, which kept the frustration to a fairly low level. But in purely mechanical terms, I couldn't really recommend the game. It's not bad, but it isn't particularly good either.

But, ultimately, if you're buying this game because you're excited about tight platforming and intricate puzzles then you are absolutely doing it wrong. This is not a mechanics game. This is a vibes game. If you're playing this, you're doing it because you're interested in Iñupiat people and culture, or because you really dig the Arctic setting, or because you love the art style (which I saw someone compare to Studio Ghibli, which I think is overselling things but not absurd), or because you think that Nuna and fox are really cute. And if you go into it with that mindset and are willing to put up with a bit of jank and frustration, then it's a charming and really quite good game.

Achievements are pretty straightforward. They're a combination of progress achievements that are impossible to miss as you play the game, and achievements which you get for finding and unlocking the cultural insights throughout the game. These vary from "pretty much impossible to miss" to "kind of out of the way, but not too hard to find if you look for them". My overall play time includes one full play through in 2015 and then another full play through in 2023 to get 100% achievements, so the "real" completion time is probably about half of what it took me overall.

And that's N completed. Now I'm down to just E, J and Y.

[Integrity]

2 hours ago, lenticular said:

NEVER ALONE (KISIMA INGITCHUNA) (UPPER ONE GAMES, 2015)

i've had this sitting in my library for ages - i picked it up when it was new and i was dating a pacific northwest first nations girl (we're married now) and it looked like an interesting (nearby, if not wholly related) cultural exploration. never got around to it, for no particular reason. i think i'll join you in this one!

[lenticular]

1 hour ago, Integrity said:

i've had this sitting in my library for ages - i picked it up when it was new and i was dating a pacific northwest first nations girl (we're married now) and it looked like an interesting (nearby, if not wholly related) cultural exploration. never got around to it, for no particular reason. i think i'll join you in this one!

I'm really interested to hear what you make of it, even if you don't end up 100%ing it. It's really not like anything else I've ever played, and I'm really curious if other folks' experience of it lines up with mine.