Integrity Posted September 25, 2023 Author Share Posted September 25, 2023 SYMPHONY OF WAR: THE NEPHILIM SAGA (DANCING DRAGON, 2022) Finished: 25/9/23. Playtime: 64 hours. Put me on the record as thinking that complicated feelings are stupid. It's so much better when things are awesome, like Anne Hathaway in Brokeback Mountain, or terrible, like Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada, or even when they're awesomely terrible, like Anne Hathaway in Valentine's Day. I'll preface this by saying I did enjoy my time with Symphony of War, but that preposterously puts it below Dark Deity in the indie SRPG ranking. God is dead, and we have killed Him. Symphony of War follows what I'm told is the Ogre Battle school of design. I've never played anything out of that franchise, for reference as I go into all this - some of these critiques might just be things that Ogre Battle fans were looking for and I just don't have any idea. To be perfectly fair, Symphony of War starts out on its best foot, which is deeply uncommon in the SRPG field. Up til a plot event about a third of the way through the game, it's honestly one of the single finest SPRGs I have ever played. Right around that chapter, the game fumbles unfathomably hard. It builds some of its goodwill back up, but it never reaches the heights of the first third of the game, and the final few maps genuinely just suck ass. I'm used to SRPGs, like Fire Emblem, that are kinda snoozy early on, peak in the midgame, and either ride that momentum through or crater in the very-lategame, so this is a really unique arc for a game to take for me. That first third really highlights all the things Symphony of War does right. Unit customization is absolutely electric, and progression feels fantastic as you move guys around, form new units, and shore up squads. Maps almost exclusively offer you more deploy spaces than units, giving you options to overload a flank or the other and making your approach feel very much Yours. Resources are fairly tight, so you might have shit squads to pad out your force, or you might even just deploy short not deliberately, but because you don't have anything useful because you're too top-heavy. It's a fantastic first eleven maps. Spoilers always abound in these writeups, but spoilers REALLY abound momentarily. Chapter 12 has your rebellion up against the wall with nowhere to run and the Empire bearing down. You hold out against an assault with aplomb, and then the imperial artillery brigades show up to knock your shit down. Up to this point, you've been deploying twelve or fifteen guys, and your opposition fields twenty or thirty-ish across the map. This final wave is, itself, thirty squads of mostly gunners and cannon which will absolutely fuck you up. You cannot feasibly beat it. When your avatar inevitably dies, you're treated to a cutscene where your avatar is executed by firing squad. It's a reasonably bold storytelling beat, though I'll talk more about that in a bit. Chapter 13 is basically a playable cutscene where you control the imperial champions as they root out the last of your resistance. It's neat enough as an idea, and is skippable, which is good. The problem crops up when you take control again - you get your local giantess as a new lord, half your plot guys, a handful of generics, and try to scrabble something from nothing. The game takes an immediate nosedive here. The maps are far more limited and significantly easier. Your options are massively hampered right as the midgame stride is supposed to be kicking on. The game never recovers from this slump, unfortunately. You eventually get the rest of your army back, but the game's originally-tight design has completely fallen off. The maps stay less interesting, and the multi-front maps of the first third almost completely vanish. The next third of the game is just bad. During this third, your avatar comes back from the dead and you're given tactical Nephilim Powers. These are busted as hell and, generally, wreck map design when used with a modicum of intelligence. One of the big things keeping Symphony of War from falling into the Fire Emblem trap of having resource consolidation snowball out of control was that there were multiple fronts and many sub-objectives to handle. The first two Nephilim Powers you get are to refresh a unit and to teleport a unit five tiles freely. The latter of these charges obscenely fast, and can be used about every turn; the former about every other turn. Now your giantess or avatar can be tossed into so many more situations, and can carry in a way that it was just impossible to do before. It homogenizes the strategies the game requires, far for the worse. The endgame's shit, but I just expect that from an SRPG honestly. Only the exceptions are really notable. Fell Seal's final map was shit. Dark Deity's final map was the worst. Wargroove's final map was actually pretty good, but its next-to-final map sucked shit. It's a hard genre to make a satisfying conclusion for. Symphony of War falls more in the Fell Seal camp of being bad but not the worst. That's all I'll say about it. It's hard to unpack exactly why Symphony of War falls apart like it does. Part of it has to do with the structure, to be sure. Designing an SRPG difficulty curve is already incredibly hard under the best of circumstances, and throwing huge kinks into the mix like taking away most of the player's options in the midgame increases the space the developers have to design around massively. Symphony of War errs on the easy side, which is probably the right move, but then as gains snowball, the latter difficulty has a bad habit of evaporating as a series of easy maps turn into a large gain in ability for the player. Still, even if the handoff was a bit beefed, I've never been a guy for whom a lack of difficulty itself breaks a game down, so there's got to be something else. The map design does have a big part to play here. Symphony of War, as I found it, is at its absolute best when the maps are relatively open and have a plethora of objectives to grab across two or more fronts. Only really one map in the pre-12 bash isn't like this, being an interior prison-break where you're controlling only units comprised of single guys. Interior maps show up repeatedly in the post-12 slurry, and even the outdoor maps tend to have less going on than the maps before. The later ones in particular are really quite hard, but in very concentrated, traditional SRPG ways, rather than the spread-out conquest that Symphony of War had shown that it was great at. To really get into it, though, I gotta get into the story. Let's tackle the elephant in the room first: someone or ones in charge of designing Symphony of War has a very conspicuous Thing for very large women. It absolutely gets into the territory of "featuring: the writer's barely-disguised fetish". Diana's already a Sexy Tall Woman before her plot promotion, which makes your avatar slightly manlier and does nothing to the other two people who get it. When Diana gets it, it makes her into a twenty-foot-tall giantess who was, bluntly, really obviously drawn one-handed. There's a whole scene with a guy gratuitously and achingly being negged and dominated by another large woman with huge boobs as the pathetic simpering guy submits to her, and it was, again, really obviously written one-handed. These are the most obvious incidents, but they're only elements in a game-wide pattern that manages to hide its raging boner for the first about twelve maps and then just lays it out for the world to see. With that caveat out of the way, I can be more fair to Symphony of War's story: it's dogshit. I want to say it swings for the fences and misses, because it does try some daring stuff like the aforementioned killing off of the avatar (just to bring him back not-long later, natch), but sitting here at the end of two plays of the game, there's just nothing to recommend about it. It commits the combined sin of being far too wordy, having all but nothing to say, and bearing amateurish prose. You just kind of have a plucky resistance in a generic low fantasy setting, which gets blown up and revived into a different plucky resistance in the same setting, which then becomes your hell-army which suffers no setbacks as you march down the field to the endgame. That latter transformation happens around chapter sixteen of thirty. There is a lot of game where there is essentially no basic narrative impetus besides "the Nephilim army won again, but there are still a lot more Imperials". You even get an airship (the only airship in the world, and also the first time airships are mentioned) to give you an excuse to globetrot in your thunder run. There's no pace and there's no stakes, and then things get worse. Symphony of War's endgame is awful in every conceivable way. Your final run of maps is a massive difficulty spike followed by a really easy map, a dull indoor map, another larger indoor map where you're forced down to five single-model units which saps every single bit of Symphony of War's good design away, and then the endgame. The endgame is a single boss with a shitload of health who does big AoE and summons tons of adds and goes invulnerable every other turn. You can blitz him down in one phase if you're built right. The fight is basically a really shit version of the Ashera fight from Radiant Dawn. The plot drops whatever ball it was still holding as the endgame crops up. It almost, suddenly, has promise for those first two maps. You surge through the final imperial defenses and then your avatar loses his shit and becomes a green unit for a map, and you have to play around that - it's an easy map but a genuinely pretty clever idea, and by far the standout of the final six or eight maps of the game. After that, you corner the Emperor to find out that he's kidnapped Diana's (your giantess) son, and he teleports around after not, to my recollection, ever having done that. She gives herself up to him, despite being twenty feet tall and like five feet away from the kid, and the Emperor (of course) will now betray her and kill everyone. You rescue both. The map is remarkably shit, particularly because of the Nephilim powers - I literally teleported a guy up to save the kid on like turn 3, and then Diana got angry when I saved her because that must have meant I let the kid die, because I was told I could only save one. I saved both, and the narrative even accounted for that, and I'm told it actually can't go any other way, so lol. After that your entire army betrays you because of some prophecy. This is particularly galling because only one guy gets blamed for the entire mutiny. You have a really terrible map where you only have the core heroes and have to kill a mixture of cultists and what's implied to be your own dudes, after the entire army explicitly turned on you, and then it's framed for the rest of the game as just a cheeky mutiny this one guy engineered. It's absolutely fucking maddening. People joke about it in endgame as though they didn't say to your face they were doing a mutiny, but the one guy ends up in prison. Then your best friend from twenty chapters ago comes back, but then dies again, but then doesn't, and then because you used turbosatan's power to resurrect him you have to kill turbosatan. It's all contrived as hell and has zero weight and nowhere near good enough writing to carry it. The game ends. A shaky narrative, though, can be absolutely salvaged by good characters. Hell, we're Fire Emblem fans. Every one of us has a game where we'll cop that the story's kinda shit but still endearing to us precisely because of the characters who perform it (Awakening, for me). Great news, then, that Symphony of War's cast sucks. It reaches the high heights of 'average Blazing Blade character' and sinks to the absolute pits of Stefan and Beatrix. Stefan is a womanizer. Beatrix is a dominatrix. That's all you need to know. The character writing is poor, the character voices are inconsistent, and the supports have no identifiable arc and nothing of substance to say. They function more like Path of Radiance base conversations than proper supports, but they're a mix of lore dumps and ostensibly about people becoming friends or getting married. People can get married, incidentally. It's the most half-baked system. I got married to Abigayle, and then I died. Between when I came back from being dead and the actual end of the game, Abigayle had zero words for me. One feels like that would be the absolute minimum to account for with flags, if you can marry someone before being executed by firing squad and then come back, but Symphony of War is so incompetently handled that you don't even get that. I never reckoned Dark Deity's brand of Wattpad cringe would sit off the bottom of the big indie SRPG market, but I genuinely think Symphony of War's writing sits solidly below it on aggregate. I ended up skipping supports from about chapter 20 on, because they were serving so much nothing. Even Dark Deity kept me interested enough to read all of the ones I got, even the terrible ones, because they were terrible in innovative ways. To get into the final reason, and I think Symphony of War's biggest flaw, I want to briefly get into the achievements. There's only nineteen, and they're easy to segregate. Thirteen of them are just things you're almost-inevitably going to do during a reasonable playthrough where you interact with the systems the game presents you. Four of them are for doing specific challenges during specific maps - three are trivial, and I'll get into one later. The remaining two are to beat the game on the middle and the top difficulty. 100% achievements involved two back-to-back runs: one on Captain where I gathered 17/19, and one on Warlord for the final two. There's a further difficulty now, but I'll get into that later. One interesting thing about higher difficulties is that they can really betray fundamental issues in a game's systems. People focus a lot on the raw difficulty, but whether something is particularly hard or not, just turning the intensity up a bit can either put the lie to something fundamentally shaky (Path of Radiance) or reinforce a fundamental soundness (Pyre). Warlord really puts the lie to Symphony of War, unfortunately. Something that Symphony of War coasted on heavily was vibes. Every unit is up to nine models, and every model has its own stats. In combat, every unit can hit, miss, crit, or deliver a glancing blow. After up to two rounds of combat, every unit has a chance, independently, to act again, depending on morale. Targets are chosen largely-randomly, but can be weighted slightly based on the attack tactic you choose. Some units attack once only, but if they get a free action it's a massive boost to the team. Some units can attack once or twice depending on tech. All this is to say combat is a crapshoot. You build a set of heuristics based on the models involved, but at no point did I ever grok the combat formula, or really understand why what I was doing was working outside of first principles. A single combat can go a dozen ways. Your fire mage hits a whole row: does he attack the front row full of armored guys with no resistance, or does he target the back line with one healer with colossal resistance? The squad gets a free action, does it go to the healer with everyone at full health, or to the rifleman and now he's just obliterated an extra model? Your archers fire their volley: does it hit the sentinels, and the healers heal every single point of damage you do; or does it hit the healers, killing them and crippling the unit? It's unfathomably random, and combined with the many dudes whose stats you need to check, you just go on vibes. You can weight the RNG in squad construction and in tactic selection, but all this does is modify the vibes. You never really know how shit is going to go unless you massively overpower the other guy to the point where there's hardly gameplay left. I want to note that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Fire Emblem's unsung, but massive, competitive advantage in the SRPG field is that it has an extremely simple and easy to understand combat formula. This brings with it a ton of issues, but the core strength - transparency - is Fire Emblem's most powerful strength in the market. One could conceive of 'SRPG Combat Systems' as a spectrum from transparency to opacity, where Fire Emblem's generally on the far left end and something like Disgaea or the Final Fantasy Tactics games are closer to the right. Symphony of War is far on the right, and it largely works for Captain difficulty. One problem with the far-left is that it can be too easy to optimize; the problem with the far-right is that it can be too hard, or even completely inscrutable, to optimize. Warlord is hard enough that it encourages optimization, but nothing in Captain requires optimization or even encourages or even tips you onto how to optimize. Things that work in Captain just don't in Warlord, and it's not really clear why. It doesn't feel like a refinement of the skillset you develop beating Captain, it just feels like a new skillset you have to develop, because of the complete lack of transparency and incredible randomness involved in the most fundamental combat loop. I've got two more topics to delve into, but before I get to them, I want to stress something completely at odds with everything I just said: I had quite a lot of fun with the first run of Symphony of War. Story's shite, sure, but it's a very good SRPG and deeply recommendable and, when it's firing on all cylinders, it's almost unparalleled. With that said... Symphony of War released its Legends DLC about a month ago. I played the first eight maps pre-DLC, loved it, and put off the full play til the DLC came out. It's... a mixed bag. The two headline features of the DLC were maps and classes. Both are bad, but a certain nother change is worse: the patch that came with the DLC enables canto on enemy horsemen. A lot of the reason I hated the lategame maps was because of huge pods of enemy cavalry that were designed to be stopped by a pike wall and then dispatched - good game design, I should think. The patch adding canto to these removes all counterplay outside of either sitting on the very edge of their range and then counterattacking or, more feasibly, 'just throw an omnitank in', which is where SRPGs are at their absolute blandest. Not only was this change actively detrimental to the game, NG+ includes an option to turn it off which as of this writing full-on does not work. It does nothing. This is presumably a bug, but it's a bug that's far to the game's detriment. Anyway, the actual content! It's also bad. Legends is a minicampaign of about ten maps, and about eight of the maps are bad. Taking the game on a first play, they're unlocked in an absolutely inscrutable order, and often go deep into the backstories of characters that you haven't even met yet, and the maps themselves are massively overtuned or just shittily designed. The classes include a bunch of undead-wielding classes for if you want to totally miss the point of the campaign (hell, it missed its own point) and command the living dead, and also the two most imbalanced pieces of shit classes you can get, which the AI doesn't. Oracles cast a shield over the unit before combat initiation, which could intelligently be balanced with the other cleric line's healing, but in practice means that your tank squad just takes no damage ever. Field cannons are regular cannons but cavalry move type for some reason, which means that you can mass cannons with 7-move and canto. I cannot begin to state how fucking busted this is. It's insane. Another thing invented by Legends was NG+, where you can recall all the guys from your last run (for a currency) scaled to the chapter you're at, and change a number of parameters generally to make the game even harder. We'll save the tangent about the Darkest Dungeon School of Design for another writeup, but for now I'll say I think this is really cute and a cool invention and dovetails into the achievement I mentioned earlier. ...How? [sic] tasks you with beating the unbeatable fight that plot-kills you in chapter 12. You're still killed after, don't worry. The game doesn't even admit that you beat it. This was an achievement that required basically planning your entire army from the first map on the easiest difficulty, and you could still wipe on it because it's that hard. NG+ makes it approachable, but with recalling my insane piles of cannon men to create about twenty-two squads of guys (out of the fifteen I could deploy) I still lost the entirety of about seventeen of them. This is, absolutely, an unreasonable achievement even after it's been accidentally made far easier, and Symphony of War is not at all enriched for having it. Legends also includes a bunch of quality of life updates that I still don't know the extent of, so I can't exactly disrecommend it. Get the pack, I guess, since I think the canto enemies were part of the patch and not the DLC. At the end of the day, though, I still think fondly on Symphony of War as a flawed game that bats well above its average, despite massive swathes of it sucking raw ass. Out of the SRPG core four outlined eons ago, it's an easy third ahead of Fell Seal and behind Wargroove and, absurdly, Dark Deity, but I still liked it. I'd still recommend it, with a big * on the recommendation. Get it on sale. It's odd enough that, while it didn't quite do it for me, it might be your favorite game ever. The last thing I alluded to earlier and saved for here was a really funny bug: in the final third of the game, Symphony of War just casually transed my dude. He got the girl sprite for all idle and walking animations, and would flash back to the dude for any special animations he did. Given as the girl avatar is canon (per all promotional materials, and unfortunately given as her design is kinda crap and her voice actor does a significantly worse job than the guy's), I assume someone just beefed something with the DLC patch, which introduced new graphics. It still did a great job of undermining the gravitas that Symphony of War was already failing to muster, where my guy with his big titties was walking alongside a woman whose cloak completely outlines her ass and talking about the end of the world. Shoutout to you, FIGHT, trans icon (?). 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Parrhesia Posted September 25, 2023 Share Posted September 25, 2023 (edited) 25 minutes ago, Integrity said: SYMPHONY OF WAR: THE NEPHILIM SAGA (DANCING DRAGON, 2022) Finished: 25/9/23. Playtime: 64 hours. huge kinks TLDR version. I have many thoughts about Simp, and I'll say them for topicality even though I still need to go out and acquire ...How??? at some point. But Ike covered all the like, actual facts, so I'll instead focus on my feelings. I'm hugely indebted to Simp of War. I adore OB64 but hate playing it. OB64 is a fantastic game with a lot of clunk, an absolutely horrific interface, bad translation, and completely broken core alignment system that requires wrestling with aforementioned horrific interface to tame. A playthrough takes about 80 hours and about 2.5 of those will be item-duping and then using Urns of Chaos, or else you will simply not be able to engage with the class system and will get the bad ending. Simp of War is like if OB64 had a merely poor interface. It arrived at a time when I needed it to. I played it basically on release. I was abroad in a foreign country, struggling to assimilate, in a very dysfunctional environment, sleeping either 2-3 or 12 hours a night and let me tell you that I fucking inhaled Symphony. I needed something to just sink my teeth into, and Symph was that something. And I played its like 20-hour campaign, then shelved it, content with the world. I will always be grateful for that time. And I do think, fundamentally, The Game Is Good. However. I can't pretend the replay was that great. It's still a pretty easy game, even on Warlord (which used to come with permadeath; which might work in theory, but the Preps screen is like pulling teeth, so it would get old fast). But the existence of the cruft they threw in... it just softens the gameplay loop. The peak time to play Simp was probably about three months ago. Pre-DLC and, pivotally, pre-enemy canto. Also probably on a challenge run where you simply do not use the Nephilim spells, but I'm not going to pretend I didn't abuse them. There almost isn't a midway ground between abusing them and using them normally, it's like fucking FE11 Warp. Post-DLC, hurling 10 maps into what had been a markedly tighter gameplay loop, Simp's campaign is just kind of flabby now. I know that, as above, my judgement is compromised by liking OB64 and by getting the game at a rough time, and also by it just being ages back, but I swear to God that Simp's campaign held firm for a lot longer in week 1, before the Monty haul of 10 DLC maps (in a 35-map campaign!) crashed in. The story-writing felt a lot more forgivable on day 1, even going down to the portraits. Before they were improved, they were just... pretty bad. Diana didn't look so much like a kinky muscle-woman as someone who had been burn-dodged into the Twitter idea of a Strong Female Character. But now they're actually competent, and... eugh, she's actually meant to look that way? And the story seemed bad, the writing poor, but in a way that seemed phoned-in, not completely incompetent. Then Legends came out, and put the lie to that. Yes, it seemed that Legends' maps really were trying to expand on... pff, these iconic characters? We can finally find out the deal with, with the fuckin' love story of general whatsherface and the Russian dude? Wow, finally! Oh, maps where we get the backstory of Captain fucking Antilles, my God! And they're a car-crash in gameplay as Ike said, and they completely fuck the experience curve. Also, man, there's some... there's a couple of telling moments. Abigayle/Zelos was not written by a well mind. So without Legends, it mostly just came across like they didn't care much and just wanted a couple of Big Moments (well, the metaphorical kind of big, their least favourite). Controlling red units for a map as you shitstomp through good guys, fuck yeah! Evil cults setting up child hunts, yeah, I played FE4 too, baby! And this reading of the game was also improved by the Bad Ending, which they very quickly patched out. Basically at the end of the game Arthas is like 'hey let me grab the sword' and if you haven't really been paying attention you could go 'sure, take the big power' and he ushers in the apocalypse and an eternal empire of darkness and everyone gets horrific endings fighting a losing battle in the hell war. I think it's telling that this came across as hilarious to me in the moment, and that I never went back to go get the good ending, until the replay a year or so on. But no, they actually cared, and this is what they came up with. And that's depressing, frankly! I still love Fell Seal, though I never did quite push through to the end of that second campaign. I wish I still loved Symphony of War. Edited September 25, 2023 by Parrhesia Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 27, 2023 Author Share Posted September 27, 2023 COUNTER-STRIKE: SOURCE (VALVE, 2004) Finished: 27/9/23. Playtime: c. 98 hours* The aughts were a strange time, both for games in general and me in specific. From the span of 2000 to 2009 I lived in five houses in four places in three continents, and that kind of constant shakeup left me with two friends (one being my sister) and a lot of time for gaming. On top of that, online gaming had finally blossomed in the later 90s and become accessible in the 00s, but was very much still in the 'fuck around' phase of general proficiency. This was long before it was rude to suck at Warcraft. The concept of a 'meta' was something the top 1% of a game cared about, and they'd be bullied for preaching it in a public server. Was it better? In a lot of ways, hell no. I'll leave the breakdown of the incredible issues with the online community of the aughts to smarter men than me. I still have a copy of the fuckin' Maddox book (The Art of Manliness, I think) floating around my basement. While it wasn't better, what it certainly was was exactly what teenage Ike needed. I joke, but it isn't a joke, that I lost an entire year of my life to playing Enemy Territory. That was just 2004. The whole thing. I didn't play the singleplayer of Return to Castle Wolfenstein until a decade later because I had a bad fear of zombies in my youth, and I had heard on GameFAQs that it had them. Fast forward to 2005, and my dad comes home with a copy of Half-Life 2 for me! I ran into the headcrab zombies and quit. I wouldn't wait quite so long before playing it for real, but I was enjoying it until then so I swapped over to Half-Life 2: Deathmatch for a while before the shallowness of that game became apparent even to me at 14. Fortunately, the game was also packed with Counter-Strike: Source. I spent most of the latter half of 2005 and the start of 2006 playing Counter-Strike. Thousands and thousands of hours spent primarily on glass servers, break maps, and my usual haunt, a clan server I remember only for the tag [7th]. Counter-Strike would eventually give way to Battlefield 2, and Battlefield 2 itself to Call of Duty 4, and Call of Duty 4 itself to Team Fortress 2, but nothing would ever command my attention again quite like Counter-Strike: Source. Nothing would hold that kind of unshakeable sway over me, partly because I got older and my ability to hyperfixate like that diminished as I became more cognizant of good and bad things, and partly because we finally stopped moving and I was able to spread out my mass and gather some moss. I don't really miss the game, and I don't really miss how the gaming community used to be, but I do have a lot of fond memories of this comfort in a tumultuous time of my life, which is why I decided to put Counter-Strike: Source on the shelf as a vanity project, despite the game having absolutely no gameplay novelty left for me. Despite, as well... ...the achievements. Counter-Strike: Source, being contemporary with Half-Life 2, launched Steam as a concept long before Steam had achievements. I played such a preposterous amount of this game back in the day that I would certainly have every single thing I'm going to present to you if they had existed back then even with a complete lack of trying. This is a proper statement, since earning all of these legitimately would take nothing short of a preposterous amount of time. Let's break down exactly what goes into a 'standard' round of Counter-Strike first. As 'intended', Counter-Strike is a five versus five shooter, with rounds lasting up to five minutes of regulation and more often one to three. In DE_ maps, the terrorists are on the offensive and have to plant a bomb at one of two locations and defend it until it explodes. In CS_ maps, the counter-terrorists are on the offensive and have to bring four hostages back to a rescue zone, typically their own spawn. Time to kill is low and each player has only one life per round. All this is to say that, if you're batting .500 exactly in W:L and K:D, you'll expect to get about a kill a minute and a win every five minutes, give or take. Keep those figures in your head. First up are the bomb achievements. Most of these are banal stuff - kill a defuser, pick up the bomb from a dead teammate and plant it, plant the bomb really fast, etc. Four stand out, but technically one is in another category and I'll get to it later. The first of the three remaining is to kill 5 enemies with a single bomb's blast. Now, the bomb's blast is big, it must be said, but the explosion is completely telegraphed and any competent player isn't going to get caught in it unless they're making a last-ditch effort to defuse, in which case you might bag a kill or two. Getting this one legitimately is, by my reckoning, basically impossible. You can play on servers with inflated numbers, of course (back in the day I played mostly 8v8), but then that limits the amount of time you get to spend with the bomb, and you still need five at once. The other two that stand out are to plant the bomb 100 times and defuse the bomb 100 times. These are just unreasonable number-go-up ones, particularly since zero to one people plant the bomb per round of a DE_ map. You're maybe, if you're lucky, planting the bomb once per ten rounds of regulation rules. It's one of those things that seems not bad, but really is. Second up are the hostage achievements. One unspoken thing here is that CS_ maps are wildly less popular than DE_ maps, and always have been. I'm not going to address how that complicates things, just putting it out there. There's only five hostage achievements, and the one-timers are simple. The umbrella one is to rescue 500 hostages, in a game mode that far more often ends in the death of an entire team, and where the hostages spawn four to the round generally inside the terrorist's spawn. This, like the bomb ones, is another one that seems fine if grindy on the face of it but, legitimately, is a complete nightmare to do. The kill achievements are up next. Not too much here really stands out because even the nasty stuff actually falls cleanly under the umbrella of everything else you have to do. There's three of note that aren't hard so much as they're strange, though: two are grenade related, one being the mentioned one from the bomb achievements, and will come up later. One is to kill an enemy who is using dual pistols while also, yourself, using dual pistols - which sounds fine, except for that only terrorists can buy dual pistols. What's the unicorn situation where someone buys the dualies (already an uncommon thing to do), dies with them, the killer thinks to pick them up instead of their favorite pistol they have, and you also have dualies and find that guy and kill them? Like, when was that supposed to ever come up outside of rigging it with a mate? Now we get to the bulk of the time: map and weapon achievements. The game comes with 18 maps; win 100 rounds on every single one of them. Going back to that napkin math earlier, 3,600 rounds of the game (batting precisely .500 and not wasting a game on any map already complete) comes out to the neighborhood of 300 hours in the absolute ideal situation. This is the short grind. Counter-Strike: Source has six pistols (two of which are team-locked), two shotguns, five submachine guns (two of which are team-locked), ten rifles (eight of which are team-locked), a light machine gun, and the knife/grenade. For each of the pistols, log 200 kills for each of the four generic and 100 kills for each of the team-locked ones. For each of the shotguns, log 200 kills. For each of the submachine guns, log 1,000 kills for each of the three generic and 500 kills for each of the team-locked ones. For each of the rifles, log 1,000 kills for the two generic rifles as well as the M4A1 and AK-47 and 500 kills for each of the other 6 team-locked ones. Log 500 kills with each of the hand grenade and light machine gun, and 100 kills with the knife. Note that the kill achievements also require you to win 100 knife fights, so every time you backstab a guy with their gun out is essentially a nothing for the stats. In case you lost track, that's 13,500 kills. Nominally shorter than the maps one, on paper, so let's throw a wrench in the works. The special achievements are where the game's heartache lies. Let's start with grenades. You can buy one hand grenade per round and, if you manage to clip it into an enemy, it can do up to 72 damage from the person's hundred health, with harsh falloff. Grenades are great for chipping and poor for killing outside of situations engineered for it or desperation. Five hundred kills with these potatoes is already a challenge, but other achievements ask you to kill the guy defusing the bomb with a grenade, kill three guys at once with a grenade, and kill an enemy with a grenade after you die. On top of that, one achievement asks you to take >80 damage from enemy grenades and survive a round, which is dicey because two good grenade can absolutely kill you. The safest way to do this is actually to camp on top of an enemy grenade while unarmored, which does >90 damage but cannot kill you. With grenades out of the way, the other special achievements have a few nitpicky nasty ones. A World of Pane asks you to shoot out 14 windows in a round of CS_Office, a map with... 14 windows. I doubt anyone has done this without rigging it, ever. Killanthropist asks you to 'donate' 100 weapons to your teammates, which entails buying a gun that they could not afford and dropping it to them, which is reasonable but altogether too long. Gift Grab was the Christmas... I want to say 2011? achievement and was broken for a long time but there's a workaround now - I got it when it was new, fortunately. Piece Treaty asks you to win 250 pistol rounds, which is only the very first round after a map swap. Now we get to the unreasonable grind ones. One asks you to win 5,000 total rounds, if you'll recall is a full 40% more than is required to get every single individual map win achievement. Blood Money asks you to earn $50,000,000 total dollars across all games. I haven't given any context of cashflow before this, though fifty million probably sounds naturally like 'a lot of money' to you without context. Here's the scoop: each kill is worth $300, each win is worth $3,250, and each loss is worth $2,000. Calling the average round one kill and you win exactly half of rounds, and rounding up from $2,925 to $3,000 per round, you pull out an insane figure of nearly seventeen thousand rounds to get to this point. Even in the best case scenario, where you win every single round and kill the entire enemy team yourself, you'd still need to pull that stunt northwards of ten thousand times to get the fifty million. It's grindy to an insane degree - and I probably would have had it, back in the day. As it stands, I got half of the cash needed at part of gathering everything else, and by my quick calculation, I should get the remaining $25,000,000 in approximately 6 more hours of letting a farm map idle - hence the estimation in the playtime. Fortunately, for all of these there's bots. There's varying levels of 'honor' you can use farming bots for the achievements. You can just play normally, and it will take an absurd amount of time. My preferred method for most of this was to set up glorious 1v20 matches and lock the bots to knives only, where the loose gunplay would see me winning about half to two-thirds of the time, depending on the map. Made a game out of it, as it were. For map wins, you can set up a bot match and make it as lopsided as you like, then go to work or bed or whatever and come back to your couple-hundred free wins. At the extreme end of abuse, people have made maps that literally spawn waves of T-posting guys in front of you while the terrain shuffles you left and right to catch stragglers while automatically firing in bursts, replacing your weapon, and resetting the round periodically. I succumbed to doing this but only for the real good weapons, the M4 and the AK and shit. I did my time with all the hard ones. If you've made it this far, great! You're not done yet. There's three achievements in this hell set that you need other people for, and one's reasonable. Avenging Angel tasks you with killing someone who, previously, killed someone on your friends list this round. Straightforward. Clan Warfare gives you the bonkers task of playing a round of 5v5 where the entirety of both teams are repping the same (per-team) clan tag. Friendly Attire tasks you with playing a round on a team with four of your friends while all wearing the same skin. It's impossible to get this without, essentially, nine other willing participants. Luckily, there's a Steam group that sets up fortnightly or so meets to just have a bunch of people pile into a server repping that group and add each other to friends and die a few times to get it for everyone, so shoutout to the Clan Warfare Achievement Group. And here we are. Nothing in this whole set was a particular challenge. I did this as a vanity project, and it's on the vanity shelf now. Will I do Global Offensive too? ...probably, yeah, lmao. I'm over halfway done from a hundred-odd hours of actual play of the game, so hell. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 27, 2023 Author Share Posted September 27, 2023 27 minutes ago, Integrity said: And here we are. Nothing in this whole set was a particular challenge. I did this as a vanity project, and it's on the vanity shelf now. Will I do Global Offensive too? ...probably, yeah, lmao. I'm over halfway done from a hundred-odd hours of actual play of the game, so hell. LMFAO between writing this post and posting this post counter-strike 2 officially replaced global offensive on steam. seems to have kept progress but no, i will certifiably not be doing global offensive Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted September 27, 2023 Share Posted September 27, 2023 On 9/26/2023 at 12:13 AM, Integrity said: A shaky narrative, though, can be absolutely salvaged by good characters. Hell, we're Fire Emblem fans. Every one of us has a game where we'll cop that the story's kinda shit but still endearing to us precisely because of the characters who perform it (Awakening, for me). Yeah. I have a lot of sympathy for the people who write TRPGs. How the hell do you actually make a compelling plot when you're forced to fit it around the basic skeleton of "army has a couple dozen pitched battles and wins all of them"? A shit narrative is pretty much to be expected here, and games that manage to attain the heights of "vaguely competent" should be celebrated. So I'm willing to cut the writers a whole lot of slack. On 9/26/2023 at 12:13 AM, Integrity said: Symphony of War has a very conspicuous Thing for very large women. It absolutely gets into the territory of "featuring: the writer's barely-disguised fetish". ...but not that much slack. Yikes. 49 minutes ago, Integrity said: The aughts were a strange time, both for games in general and me in specific. From the span of 2000 to 2009 I lived in five houses in four places in three continents, and that kind of constant shakeup left me with two friends (one being my sister) and a lot of time for gaming. On top of that, online gaming had finally blossomed in the later 90s and become accessible in the 00s, but was very much still in the 'fuck around' phase of general proficiency. This was long before it was rude to suck at Warcraft. The concept of a 'meta' was something the top 1% of a game cared about, and they'd be bullied for preaching it in a public server. Was it better? In a lot of ways, hell no. I'll leave the breakdown of the incredible issues with the online community of the aughts to smarter men than me. I still have a copy of the fuckin' Maddox book (The Art of Manliness, I think) floating around my basement. While it wasn't better, what it certainly was was exactly what teenage Ike needed. Great. I'd somehow managed to have never heard of Maddox until now, and my curiosity made me just have to go and look him up, didn't it? Thanks a lot for that one. That aside, I have nothing to say about Counter Strike, so I will instead meander super off-topic and share my own story of weird online gaming from the noughts. My game of choice back then was Guild Wars. I have a frankly embarrassing number of hours in that, which I am mercifully spared from being reminded of due to it being a standalone client and not through Steam. It was also the cause of the single naffest interpersonal drama that I have ever been a part of. There was an achievement (or technically a "title") in the game called Survivor. To get this to its max level you had to created a new character, and then play without ever dying until you got 1,337,500xp (for comparison, getting a character to max level required 140,600xp). This had all the usual challenges of requiring you be both good and consistent at the game, but also the expected stuff like "what if my internet drops?", "what if my teammates are idiots?" and "what if I die during a cutscene but it still counts?" I honestly didn't find it that difficult to do, but I had a decent net connection and the experience of multiple thousands of hours in the game. I dunno how hard it was without those things, but it had a Reputation. Someone in my alliance (read: a group of guilds that form together to form a super-guild) had been going for it for ages, and then finally picked it up after multiple failed attempts. My response was something along the lines of "Congrats. Dying is for nubs." (And yes, I definitely said "nubs" and not "newbs" or "noobs". It was, as you say, a strange time.) This made several people go absolutely ballistic. Just full on frothing rage. And on the one hand, sure, I will readily admit that mid-twenties lenticular was not as diplomatic as early-forties lenticular and that I would have been well served by being more careful with my wording. But on the other hand, I am still absolutely baffled that I managed to attract such vitriol for it. Apparently they thought that I was mocking them for finding the achievement difficult or something? I don't know. Next thing we know, my guild leader is getting PMs demanding that she kick me from the guild over this most heinous crime. Which, if memory serves, she didn't even know what they were talking about and was just trying to pootle about in game doing her own thing at the time. Poor sod. Long story short: lots of people got very angry, lots of words were said, lots of tears were shed, and in the end, my guild just ended up leaving the alliance, because wtf? I'm actually still friends with a bunch of the people from the guild. We have our own little Discord server these days, where we chill and talk shit. Today's topics of conversation have included Astarion from BG3 and how weird it is that Fran Drescher is a union leader these days. Shitty internet drama forms lasting bonds, you know? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 28, 2023 Author Share Posted September 28, 2023 dying is for nubs, it's true  god, guild wars had some deranged title grinds, didn't it. i never got anywhere close to survivor, i never even really tried to do it. i did try to get all skills and managed to get tyria 100% mapped on my warrior. i also managed to solo the entire prophecies campaign, pre-expansions, with only henchmen - except thunderhead keep. i broke after weeks of attempts and joined a party, and then soloed the entire ring of fire set with henchmen. i was a stubborn shit in my teens. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Parrhesia Posted September 28, 2023 Share Posted September 28, 2023 2 hours ago, lenticular said: Yeah. I have a lot of sympathy for the people who write TRPGs. How the hell do you actually make a compelling plot when you're forced to fit it around the basic skeleton of "army has a couple dozen pitched battles and wins all of them"? A shit narrative is pretty much to be expected here, and games that manage to attain the heights of "vaguely competent" should be celebrated. So I'm willing to cut the writers a whole lot of slack. Yeah, the need to structure around that can lead to a few interesting issues. There's definitely a reading for Drums of War that could say it's an argument in favour of military junta. You can detail an overthrow of a bad system a whole lot better than you can get into how a new system shapes up. The alliance drama story is fantastic. Glad you're all still tight-knit! I know my father still keeps in touch with at least a couple of his old EQ guildmates, from his high-end guild back in that day (supposedly including The Allakhazam, though I take everything my father says with several grains of salt...) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 28, 2023 Author Share Posted September 28, 2023 1 hour ago, Parrhesia said: There's definitely a reading for Drums of War that could say it's an argument in favour of military junta. the intended one? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imuabicus der Fertige Posted September 28, 2023 Share Posted September 28, 2023 Elden Ring (From Software 2022) Finished 2023/09/27, Playtime 228.6 hours. Elden Schwing, where you play as John or Joan Ring and kill gods, because everyone has a boss and shat shit falls down so somebody gotta clean up and that´d be us, the Maidenless Tarnished. It´s probably the most hyped game, besides Cyberpunk and unlike Cyberpunk, ER didn´t just crash and burn before being put out, to my understanding ER was a complete and utter success. Not that I´d know, I played Code Vein, then Lords of the Fallen to prepare for DS3, then picked up DS3. Liked DS3, got Sekiro and so here we are, playing ER. Since then I´ve also picked up DS1. To get it out the way, ER has 3 kinds of achievement, "Kill that Man" "Find X Legendary Stuff" and "Get these Endings." And one achievment for forging a weapon to max rank, one for using ERs equivalent of an Ember and one for getting all achievments. Kill Boss is selfexplanatory, the legendary stuff you have to find is separated into the categories weapons, spells, talismans and ashes, what those are I´ll go over down below. Endings you have to get three, the basic bitch one where you just sit down and the others require you to either 1) get married (in other words a quest line) or 2) comit global genocide (not sure if questline is mandatory). The GG ending locks you in, but there is a singular way to get out of it, hidden behind the most frustrating boss in the game and then you have to find the place to use it, which is a hidden arena. Oh well. Thank fuck there is no pvp achievment. That´s it, 8.8% players have platinumed the game. Anyway, let´s talk what´s new in Sekiro Souls: Bloodborne Dies Twice. It´s kind of fascinating to see the evolution of a gameconcept, as it´s founding father intends. Obviously it´s open world, or well, open world occasionally gated behind a boss. I like it, because of it´s differences to DS. Let´s forget open world-closed sorld for a second. In DS everything is always in some state of dying or dying again. There is all that green shit outside the Havel tower in DS and the DLC but still, you turn a corner, boom, some undead tryna nibble your toes. Elden Ring has animals, and not just the DS3 I-will fuck-you-up-Crustaceans but deers, birds and penguins and turtles and weird Xenoblade-looking rabbit (grebbit or smth?) things. Also, you get the best equipment for vehicular manslaughter one could ever ask for, a Honda Accord by the name of Torrent. Yes, you can "joust" if you want to feel like a FE6 accuracy issue. Not only do you parry, dodge or block you can also duck, jump and guard counter (attack after block). Somehow Power Stancing hath returned. Jump attacks are excellent especially with heavy weapons because a jump attack is the shortest distance between a heavy weapon and it´s target. Crafting exists and it´s useful if a) you are one of these curious anime people who just wanna know what the inside of a rat looks like after spaghettification or 2) you watched a youtube tutorial. Canonical Summons! Remember the Legendary Ashes I mentioned above? These are divided in common and special, a select few of the special you have to find for the achievement. You can also upgrade them like a weapon. Summoning a companion, when looking at it from the perspective ofhaving played Code Vein, has a problem, that ER also hasn´t solved, but let´s focus on the good. Ashes makes fighting easier, unless you summon shitty base sorceror guy. The good ashes are exactly that, very very good. One might say they are better than the player. Weapons are separated into two upgrade categories, regular smithing stones (+25) and somber smithing stones (+10). Somber smithing stone weapons are the equivalent to boss weapon of DS. ER also let´s us, I think exclusively for smithing stone weapons, chose the weapon art if you have it. You can DS3 Stomp -> Upward Slash with you Great Sword in DS3, you can also sommersault pancake a guy with the same weapon. This mechanic serves as the DS equivalent of infusing, provided you have found the correct items to do so. Not all Weapon Arts are availabe for all weapon though. Dungeons and Legacy Dungeons! The former are areas marked through some kind of special entrance, sometimes present a puzzle and otherwise end in 1 or 2 bosses. Dungeons are cool for the first few runs, but after that you´ll notice that they are almost always the same, with only some differences in layouts. Legacy Dungeons are the Sen´s Fortresses, the Castle Ashinas, the Lothric Castles of ER, except much bigger. Here you´ll find most of your big story bosses. They are very cool areas, especially Leyndell, Royal Capital, as well as Stormveil Castle and Miquellas Haligtree. That´s wuz poppin, let´s talk about an important part of souls like, perhaps the most important thing, ze bosses. Jokes on you, I won´t do that since it´s kind of diffcult ot talk about ER bosses because there´s a whole lot of them (apparently around 230) and a lot of them get reused with minor or no difference or become common enemies or both. Instead I´ll make it short, so here´s 2 things: there´s pretty clearly a slider of DS1 or Sekrio style combat in ER and FromSoft couldn´t decide where to put it. 2) I don´t think the game has a single boss on the same level of Champion Gundyr, Nameless King, Sister Friede, Demon in Pain/from Below, Darkeater Midir, Slave Knight Gael, either of the Isshin fights, either of the Owl fights. I don´t think ER bosses are bad fights, they just don´t get to sit at the big boy table. Fuck it, most of them don´t get to crack open a cold one with Guardian Ape or Lady Butterfly. Most bosses aren´t worth mentioning, because hurrdurr reuse, a lot of bosses are too big for themselves (fight by belly-/nutslap) and some bosses feel like you are fighting 1v2 with the amount of shit they put out at the same time.  Anyway that´s probably the last game I´ll ever do all achievements, except maybe Sekiro where I only need 2 more endings and Nier Automata, mainly cuz I heard you can just buy achievements in Nier. On 9/26/2023 at 1:13 AM, Integrity said: SYMPHONY OF WAR: THE NEPHILIM SAGA (DANCING DRAGON, 2022) I think the refunding of ressources is pretty neat, the fact that they even had a tech tree and um... mercenary back ups and canonical revival? The random merchant tables where interesting too. Benching Diana should be it´s own challenge category. If she can´t take it, noone can. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted September 28, 2023 Share Posted September 28, 2023 10 hours ago, Integrity said: god, guild wars had some deranged title grinds, didn't it. My first reaction to you saying this was "nah, most of them were fine". But then I thought. And I remembered. Most of the ones that I did were fine. Many of the ones that I refused to touch with a bargepole were utterly deranged. I did pretty much all the ones that were "complete all of these different things": Cartographer, Sklill Hunter, Guardian, Vanquisher. Those ones. They were fine. But then there were the ones that were "do this one same task a ridiculous number of times" which I didn't touch with a bargepole. Stuff like "have your character spend 10,000 minutes drunk". But the absolute most ridiculous one of the whole lot was "Legendary Defender of Ascalon". Since you played, you might remember this one, but if not, and for anyone else playing along at home, settle down because this one is a wild ride. The tutorial area in Guild Wars was also, essentially, the prologue to the story. There was this lovely idyllic bucolic setting with mostly easy and low-stakes quests. "Oh no, the bull got loose!" That sort of thing. You play through that, learn the game, and then at the end of the prologue enemies invade, rocks fall from the sky, lots of people die, the land is scarred and blighted. You then cut forward in time a few years and the game proper begins. And since the tutorial area was a different time rather than a different place, once you leave you can never go back. Every player character in the tutorial area has never been outside of it. One of the consequences of this is that there was an absolute hard limit on how much xp you could earn while you were there, and so what level you could potentially reach. These numbers are all pulled out of my arse because I can't actually remember them, but they're illustrative. See, the amount of xp you get for killing an enemy scales based on your relative levels. Once you get to be 4 levels higher than the enemy, it stops giving you any xp at all. Now, most of the enemies in the tutorial area are no higher than about level 3, so you aren't leveling too high from them. But there's a small group of enemies in one specific place that you aren't really meant to fight, and they go up to level 8. So if you grind out killing them over and over you could potentially get up to level 12 and then there was nothing else that you could kill for more xp. But if you save all quests until after you've done this, then you could turn in all the quests for the quest reward xp to reach a theoretical maximum hard limit of level 13. But that was it. Going higher wasn't possible. The Legendary Defender of Ascalon title required you to reach level 20 (max level) without leaving the tutorial area. Which I just told you was impossible. Well, I lied to you. It's only impossible if you are a sane and rational human being. But. Well. Gamers. See, when your whole party died in Guild Wars, you would respawn at the nearest resurection shrine. So some bright spark figured out that if you carefully kited enemies over to a resurection shrine and let them kill you, then you could get into an endless loop where they kill you, you respawn, they kill you again, and so on. And due to a weird quirk in the way the game was coded, when enemies kill you, they gain xp. Not very much xp, but if you leave them endlessly killing you at a resurection shrine then eventually they would get enough xp to level up. At which point, you could then kill them and be able to gain a few xp from them again. You can see where this is going. If you wanted the title, you would lead a handful enemies to the resurection shrine last thing at night before you go to bed, leave your computer on over night hoping that your internet connection didn't crap itself, wake up in the morning and kill them for a paltry sum of xp. Then you'd do the set up again and leave the game idling for hours again while you went off to work or college or whatever else you were doing. And if you were diligent about always doing this twice a day, this tiny trickle of xp would eventually be enough for you to hit max level after... I don't know? About a year? Maybe more than that? The first person to do this did so before the title existed. Just because they could. Then the devs added in the title as a way of marking this achievement. And then the existence of the title just made other people want to try to do it as well. Eventually, the devs just caved and added a separate way of getting to max level that was within the scope of intended mechanics and which could conceivably be actually fun to do. 10 hours ago, Integrity said: i also managed to solo the entire prophecies campaign, pre-expansions, with only henchmen - except thunderhead keep. Yeah, THK was an absolute killer. Since it needed you to split the party and be at least slightly coordinated. And since the computer controlled henchmen were pretty terrible. It ended up being pretty simple to solo once they'd added in Heros with custom builds and the ability to flag the computer controlled characters to tell them where to go. But at launch, it was somewhere between nightmarish and impossible to solo it. Aurora Glade was the other big one that sucked to solo, but that one wasn't so much of a big deal because you could just run around it and skip to the next mission if you wanted to. But completing THK was the only way you could possibly get to the Fire Islands, so you had to do it if you wanted to go further. 9 hours ago, Parrhesia said: Yeah, the need to structure around that can lead to a few interesting issues. There's definitely a reading for Drums of War that could say it's an argument in favour of military junta. You can detail an overthrow of a bad system a whole lot better than you can get into how a new system shapes up. Yeah. This is why I love stuff like Radiant Dawn part 2 and XCOM Chimera Squad. Actually showing what happens next and the struggles of trying to win the peace after you've won the war. I find that stuff so much more compelling than yet another war of resistance against the evil empire. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 28, 2023 Author Share Posted September 28, 2023 1 hour ago, lenticular said: But the absolute most ridiculous one of the whole lot was "Legendary Defender of Ascalon". Since you played, you might remember this one, but if not, and for anyone else playing along at home, settle down because this one is a wild ride. god i do remember that, but thank you for writing it down for the benefit of others. legendary defender of ascalon deserves to be remembered, it sucked so impossibly bad  2 hours ago, Imuabicus der Fertige said: Elden Ring (From Software 2022) fuck i have to give up my john darksouls title because you're ahead of me in how dark is your soul now : ( Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 28, 2023 Author Share Posted September 28, 2023 COUNTER-STRIKE 2 (VALVE, YESTERDAY) Finished: 28/9/23. Playtime: Uh, a minute or so. 86 hours of Global Offensive, though. Apparently the Counter-Strike 2 update stripped out the achievements and replaced them with 'play the game' and that's it. So... uh, I guess CS2 is on the shelf now. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Imuabicus der Fertige Posted September 28, 2023 Share Posted September 28, 2023 (edited) 1 hour ago, Integrity said: fuck i have to give up my john darksouls title because you're ahead of me in how dark is your soul now : ( bout this dark: dw, i never played DS2 and Bloodborne or Demon Souls so your soul will forever be darker than mine Spoiler   Before I forget: Elden Ring is actually the first game that made me recognize Voice Actors, though not strictly in the game itself. Rannis VA is also the VA for Xenoblade 3s Mio and imagine my fucken surprise as I am walking through Michael Zaki land and suddenly Shadowheart speaks directly in my head 3 times. Damn near died irl. I dunno why I recognized these two specifically, I mean duh Rannis/Mios Voice is very recognizable but this be the only time I ever became aware of VA work. Edited September 28, 2023 by Imuabicus der Fertige Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Punished Dayni Posted September 28, 2023 Share Posted September 28, 2023 35 minutes ago, Integrity said: COUNTER-STRIKE 2 (VALVE, YESTERDAY) Finished: 28/9/23. Playtime: Uh, a minute or so. 86 hours of Global Offensive, though. Apparently the Counter-Strike 2 update stripped out the achievements and replaced them with 'play the game' and that's it. So... uh, I guess CS2 is on the shelf now. I can't help but laugh reading this. Because the game had a series of achievements in the game it replaced..... only to throw them all out in what would be Valve's Overwatch 2 if things keep going downhill. That being said, there's every chance it doesn't do what that did, but as an outsider I'm seeing a parallel and have to mention it somehow. Also, obligatory Valve can't count to three joke Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 28, 2023 Author Share Posted September 28, 2023 this is nothing comparable to overwatch 2 lmao Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lenticular Posted September 28, 2023 Share Posted September 28, 2023 Meanwhile, Ticket to Ride has announced that they're doing basically the same thing which has earned them at least three angry reviews on Steam. The same shit happens regardless of what scale you're looking at. (Though Ticket to Ride is Asmodee which is part of the Embracer Group now, so they probably deserve whatever shit they're getting.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted September 28, 2023 Author Share Posted September 28, 2023 On 9/25/2023 at 7:13 PM, Integrity said: The last thing I alluded to earlier and saved for here was a really funny bug: in the final third of the game, Symphony of War just casually transed my dude. He got the girl sprite for all idle and walking animations, and would flash back to the dude for any special animations he did. Given as the girl avatar is canon (per all promotional materials, and unfortunately given as her design is kinda crap and her voice actor does a significantly worse job than the guy's), I assume someone just beefed something with the DLC patch, which introduced new graphics. It still did a great job of undermining the gravitas that Symphony of War was already failing to muster, where my guy with his big titties was walking alongside a woman whose cloak completely outlines her ass and talking about the end of the world. Shoutout to you, FIGHT, trans icon (?). Quote -Protag gender graphics in cutscenes fixed noooo they untransed him Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted October 12, 2023 Author Share Posted October 12, 2023 (edited) TONY HAWK'S PRO SKATER 1 + 2 (VICARIOUS VISIONS, 2020) Finished: Ought to be in the early hours of 14/10/23. Playtime: Let's guesstimate 62 hours. Finished: 3 in the morning, 16/10/23. Playtime: 72.3 hours, but with 10 of those being wasted thanks to a cat. I'm doing the same thing I did with Tank Mechanic Simulator and Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them! where I'm not done as of the writeup, but I'm completely out of gameplay and the entirety left is letting a macro run for untold hours. Well, it's told hours. It's about twenty more of them. We'll get to that, though. If it wasn't clear, these are total remakes of Neversoft's seminal Playstation games from 1999 and 2000, games I have an absolutely enduring love for. I got the first off the classic Pizza Hut demo disc (the one with Metal Gear Solid, which I hated and will get to revisit later this year as well), and I grinded the shit out of Warehouse for hours and hours. I got the full game eventually, and it was everything I could have hoped for. The next year came about and Pro Skater 2 was even more of everything I could have hoped for. Was it the perfect game? No. Pro Skater 3 would come out shortly thereafter and would be, though (my God, those PS2 graphics!!). Weirdly, despite my absolute devotion to those three games, I'd not buy a skating game of any flavor after that until, of all things, Downhill Jam for the Wii, a game I think is pretty unfairly maligned but that's another story for another day. It's not like I burned out on the concept or picked up a dud game and swore it off, I just played three increasingly fantastic games and then stopped for absolutely no reason. First things first: I think these are just about as perfect as remakes get, fundamentally. Outside of issues I had with the base games (which I'll get to), I didn't have a single complaint about the Vicarious Visions implementations of Tony Hawk's Pro Skaters 1 and 2. The customization options are neat, the game's got actual girls now, and the roster made the absolutely fantastic decision to include the original cast at their current ages as of 2020, defaulting you to playing a past-it Hawk in his 50s. I think that's probably the single best decision a remake has ever made. The soundtrack's been expanded and some of the new songs are shit, but honestly some of the old songs were shit too, and I think they picked modern songs that fit the vibe, aesthetically. While I'm deeply embarrassed on behalf of the state of Ohio that Machine Gun Kelly is representing us on a national stage, he was correct to include on the soundtrack of a modernized Pro Skater. Hell, there's even a song (Billy Talent - Afraid of Heights) that I'd put right up with When Worlds Collide and Guerilla Radio on the Pro Skater Sound List, and I'm going to go check those bastards out on my own time. The game looks great overall, generally keeping the feeling of the original levels completely intact. As a remake of a pair of pre-9/11 games, I'd peg 1+2 as basically flawless in any reasonable regard. What's interesting, then, is that playing the remake did expose some of the cracks in the originals. Something kind of analogous to the Spyro games ended up happening, where equalizing the controls and the graphics really made the (comparatively anemic in my memory) original game stand out for the better. While some maps (Burnside especially) are uninteresting, there isn't a true dud in 1's map lineup. Comparatively, 2 starts off very strong but starts to fall apart really fast. Hangar, School II, and Marseille body Warehouse, School, and Skate Park, and while I prefer Downtown to New York it's not by much. Skatestreet and The Bullring are bad maps, even worse than the boring as hell Burnside and basic Roswell. Venice is easily my least-favorite goal-based map in the collection. The bonus maps are then Chopper Drop, which is just a goofy concept and not worth hating or stanning; and Skate Heaven, a wildly trash map. On the other hand, that hell march of bad maps brackets Philadelphia, probably the best map in the collection. Swings and roundabouts overall, but I think I gently prefer 1's set to its sequel. As for actually playing the game, it's a classic for a reason. Nothing to complain about there. I don't know if it's just ancient muscle memory, but I could not imagine playing the game with an analog stick, which is probably why I had a bit of fun with the Switch version three years ago and then slid off it, given Nintendo's propensity for producing the biggest piece of ass d-pads in existence. Playing through it here with a Dualshock, as God intended, was satisfying to figure out all over again. Honestly, if you take anything away from this, it's that not 100%ing 1+2 is a simple 10/10 game and easy to recommend to anyone for the price point ($20 on Steam as of this post). So what about yes 100%ing 1+2? Don't. The game has an in-game challenge system which isn't required in its entirety for achievements, which is good because it includes insane things like "have a skatepark you made get 5,000 upvotes" and "manual for a total of 10 hours". The best place to start is by beating the Solo Skate Tour with three pro- and one create-a-skaters. Four loops through the game, and the game honestly stands up to it. I went through as Aoki Nishimura, Tony Hawk, some Australian guy, and then of course my OC Bavid Smythe. Bave for short. Each pro skater also has a series of challenges that either replicate their iconic tricks or play to their IRL strengths in some way, and you gotta get those done too. I think this is all very cool, and having it be a pick-your-favorite-three out of the roster of 25-odd guys is a good compromise. This is a theme for the parts of the game's completion I'll praise, but it shows proof of mastery rather than absolute completionism. If I can do all the challenges for three pro skaters, and they were all designed to be the same rough difficulty, I've shown that I could do the remaining 22 without terribly much issue, and I think that's a great design space for a Steam achievement to occupy. Similarly, each stage has a platinum score (for going way beyond the sick score) and, for the goal stages, a speedrun time (time stops when you accomplish all goals rather than at 2:00). The Legend challenge collection (which is tied to an achievement) requires nailing any two of each of those, pick your favorite stages to grind it out on. Again, I think this is an awesome way to do it. That's where the praise starts to end and 1+2 falls into proper completionism. The most tedious of these is the gap collections - for the uninitiated, jumping between certain ramps of houses, or grinding certain (combinations of) rails, or doing a wheelie across a particular thing, etc. gives bonus points and a named Gap. You're tasked with finding all of these - about a thousand in all - with nothing but (usually jokey and not helpful) names to go off or a guide on Youtube. Some of these are a bit janky with how they register, but the worst are the lip gaps. Lip tricks are done by skating completely perpendicular to a ledge and hitting the grind button. Being off by a handful of degrees causes you to grind instead, which is both not what you wanted to do and also takes you well out of the way of your run for a redo. Still, you can get used to this... except that a handful of the lip gaps require you to, for instance, jump past something grindable and up to something else to lip on that. I will never forgive Burnside or Chopper Drop. Skate Heaven is the absolute pits for this, with dozens of gaps with often janky detection and unhelpful names in a map with bad geometry and eye-searing neon. I'm not a fan of Skate Heaven, if you missed that. The next big thing is the unhelpfully-named "Hard Get-Theres". The name means nothing, but in essence they're concocted as really hard combinations of gaps you have to nail all of in a single combo, one per map. I actually really enjoyed doing these, and I think if they'd been required instead of all gaps rather than in addition to, I'd have many nicer things to say about 1+2's achievement set. Some individual ones (Marseilles, School II, and would you believe it, Skate Heaven) were nightmares, but that was largely due to poor gap placement or being Skate Heaven rather than a flaw in the concept. Getting the Hard Get-Theres was probably the most fun I've had with Pro Skater 1 or 2 in my entire life. Following this is a handful of things. Playing multiplayer is dull but over quickly and can be done split-screen. The entire set of multiplayer achievements took maybe an hour. There's an alien plushie tucked into each level; find them all. Again, took under an hour with a guide, and honestly most of them aren't fiendishly hidden and are reasonable to expect the player to scour for. Get 10,000,000 points in a level, which I'm capable of doing but I find top-end Pro Skating to be incredibly tedious and fortunately there's a workaround using custom parks to get the score trivially. Get a single combo of a million points, which I did a few times outside of the above. This brings up the other true problem, though: some people find these achievements don't unlock when they ought to and the only recourse, for some, is to back up your save data, completely delete and scrub and reinstall the game again, and try again from a fresh profile. 1,000,000 combo is the only one that did this for me, which pegs me as one of the lucky ones, and I'm absolutely meticulously backing up my save data in case the last achievement doesn't unlock as it should. Don't expect fixes to this, either - in 2021 Vicarious Visions were folded into Blizzard and work stopped on 1+2 and an in-progress 3+4 remake was also canceled, if you needed to add on to Blizzard's list of sins. Caveat emptor. Last up is to get to level 100 on your profile. As of finishing every single other achievement in the game, I was level 67. I set up a macro to, with all assist mode cheats on, do a combo of ten 900s into manuals (which hits the "high score" and "max combo" experience caps if it all goes well) on Philadelphia and then automatically reset the map. Programming these into the Logitech Gaming Software is, incidentally, nightmarish and owns. I went to bed around 2330, and came back to my computer at 0930 (when I discovered the spam, topically) to find Aoki Nishimura still grinding away at level 86. Ten hours of running a stage for basically-maximum experience in under a minute per run, and the experience requirements to level up get significantly larger in the 80s and again in the 90s. My rough estimate is that it will take two more sessions and, as always, I'll edit the post when I have it actually done, but for now I'm done actually playing 1+2. It was a good run, and I'm glad I was able to have it. Maybe Microsoft can resurrect that 3+4 project, eh? That'd be a nice header. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 (Blizzard Albany, 2025). A man can dream. Edited October 16, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted October 15, 2023 Author Share Posted October 15, 2023 god have mercy 12-13 oct: turned the computer off out of habit rather than starting the macro 13-14 oct: started the macro as it should be, but somewhere around 1 in the morning the cat (hidden in ohio) walked over the keyboard and so i spent the next seven hours cycling graphics options at level 88 14-15 oct: got a full session in to end up at level 97, and learn that individual levels this high take twenty thousand experience apiece. for reference, doing the entire platinum scores challenge set, including the meta-achievements for doing X platinums and the individual rewards for each stage, would reward something in the realm of 10,000 experience. each of these macro runs, if they go perfectly, rewards 300. 97-98 on its own is an unreasonable amount of experience. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Punished Dayni Posted October 16, 2023 Share Posted October 16, 2023 On 10/12/2023 at 4:33 PM, Integrity said: No. Pro Skater 3 would come out shortly thereafter and would be, though (my God, those PS2 graphics!!). As someone with several titles, playing the PS1 version of 3 is an experience that feels closer to the first two, but seeing as I never had 2 the changes felt more significant for me then. On 10/12/2023 at 4:33 PM, Integrity said: I think that's probably the single best decision a remake has ever made. I want to ask if younger versions are available, but I'll assume no. On 10/12/2023 at 4:33 PM, Integrity said: ($20 on Steam as of this post). ....And it's good on Proton too! I guess I'll go for this version after all. On 10/12/2023 at 4:33 PM, Integrity said: a speedrun time (time stops when you accomplish all goals rather than at 2:00) That's kinda sick. On 10/12/2023 at 4:33 PM, Integrity said: and an in-progress 3+4 remake was also canceled The world is cruel indeed, FFS Actiblizz. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted October 16, 2023 Author Share Posted October 16, 2023 3 hours ago, Punished Dayni said: ....And it's good on Proton too! I guess I'll go for this version after all. yep! played a few sessions on the steam deck without any issues whatsoever. the only reason i didn't play it there more is that i started going hard in the paint on great ace attorney, which is probably gonna be the next post here in a few days  3 hours ago, Punished Dayni said: That's kinda sick. yes, sick score is in fact one of the speedrun goals Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted October 20, 2023 Author Share Posted October 20, 2023 Happy birthday, thread! It's actually a happy coincidence that this post is ready on the thread's one-year anniversary - I had intended to fudge things a little, deliberately rush or delay Great Ace Attorney to post today since it was going to land within a day or two of today, but it ended up landing precisely today. Thanks to all of you who read and post nonsense alongside me, and here's to more of it. Without further ado... THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY CHRONICLES (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 20/10/23. Playtime: 51.7 hours. There's three sets of Aces Attorney in total. I've already done the Phoenix saga, and the Apollo saga is coming in January, but there's a third! The Great Ace Attorney is the surprise (to me, at least) localization and rerelease of the Great Ace Attorney duology, focusing on the birth of the Japanese law system as an ancestor of Nick travels to Imperial London to practice law at the turn of the century. I genuinely had no idea these games existed until the localization was announced, and I had absolutely no expectations going into them. I won't waste words up here: let's get into the games. I've started writing this as of finishing the third case of the first game, so those three will be retrospectives with additional context; the rest will be live. THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY: ADVENTURES (2015) -1.1: The Adventure of the Great Departure Tutorial cases aren't a high bar to clear, to be fair, but holy hell does Adventures come out swinging. Much like all the way back in 1.2, the real original case, the cast cement themselves instantly and winsomely. Ryunosuke is a great protagonist, Kazuma is a preposterously hot second, and it's goofy enough in a fun way to see a proto-Payne in early Imperial Japan. It's not perfect. The debate goes on about a round too long, a common issue with Ace Attorney. The witnesses go way too hard in the paint (you couldn't waterboard Kyurio Korekuta, the curio collector, out of me), but this is fortunately a vice that seems to be held mostly by this case. Susato takes a long time to be properly integrated and she really isn't in this case, and I think that's an absolute shame. It probably was to facilitate the bait and switch of Kazuma, but Susato is great enough that I think extra time for her early would have been absolutely warranted. Still, despite concrete gripes, -1.1 is a fantastic tutorial case and even a good case in its own right. -1.2: The Adventure of the Unbreakable Speckled Band Oh. Oh, we're beginning to cook. -1.2 is a purely investigation-based case that exists entirely to introduce us to Herlock Sholmes and the Dance of Deduction. There's no courtrooming in solving the death of Kazuma, we're just solving. Walk, look, talk, and Deduce. This is an odd angle for Ace Attorney to take, and it could very easily torpedo the pace of the game. However, Adventures has an ace up its sleeve: I'm nowhere close to exaggerating when I say Herlock Sholmes might be one of my favorite fictional characters ever invented. I might get into him more deeply after the games, but for now suffice it to say that he slots in perfectly, filling a role in the cast that it wasn't even clear was empty, like a kind of party Gumshoe. The Dance of Deduction, his mechanic for investigation phases, is by a far margin the most fun I've had with an Ace Attorney game each time it's come up so far. If -1.1 showed instant promise, -1.2 sprints off the fucking line. What about the case itself? It's a little silly that the game opens with Ryu being accused falsely of murder in two consecutive cases, but that's not even top five ridiculous Ace Attorney case framings and I'm missing a third of the games for even more candidates. I won't hold that against it too harshly. It's fun, though, once you get past the premise. It's got good emotional beats, good characters, and it's shockingly... bleak, honestly. It's a good look for Ace Attorney to wear. -1.3: The Adventure of the Runaway Room This is almost the best Ace Attorney has ever been, and I'm really starting to think that Great Ace Attorney is going to run the fuck away with the favorite title Apollo currently holds. This is another almost-purely court case, like the first, but it's not a tutorial. It's a proper case. Shifting to England, Ryu a fish out of water, is obscenely good for the game. Susato-as-cultural-guide brings everything together perfectly, and the jury bullshit is fun as hell to interact with. Genuinely, the only thing keeping this from being the single finest case I've played for this thread is that 3.5 had three entire games of characterization and stakes building up to it. -1.3 nearly pulls the same level of quality off with about six hours of setup. McGilded is such a little fuckhead, he's easily my favorite client I've gotten so far. The game's hugely on the up-and-up, and this case didn't even have Herlock Sholmes in it. -1.4: The Adventure of the Clouded Kokoro Sholmes is back!!!! This was a weird case, but I think exclusively in a good way. Iris is a good addition to the cast, meaning Ace Attorney is batting disgustingly high with child characters by my estimate so far. The core of the case being that trying to prove non-intention and wild coincidence is actually pretty hard is a good one, and unique for my experience with Ace Attorney so far. Nobody was really at fault. It was just a big misunderstanding. I thought that was a fun tack on the usual formula, and I appreciated the small continuity of jurors with Bruce coming back from the witness stand to be on the jury. It lends a little minor continuity to the world which, while the Phoenix games didn't suffer for lacking, is appreciated for being there. There deserved to be some daylight between 3.5 and 2.4 on the rankings list, and Adventures is filling that space up. Also, if anyone knows what the hell was up with the author posing and doing alliterations, I'd appreciate learning. I did a cursory look around but couldn't find anything. -1.5: The Adventure of the Unspeakable Story I finished -1.5 two or three days ago as of this writing, and I haven't properly figured out what to write about it. Not in a bad way, mind, but sort of in the same way where the only thing I thought coming out of 3.5 was 'yep, that lived up to expectations'. Almost nothing misses about this entire case, from the recurring characters to the new witnesses to even the main thrust of the plot creating a good and cool mystery to pick apart. I'm really interested to play Apollo again, because as things stand, I may have been wrong for years when I said that was the best game in the franchise. One thing I do want to hold up about -1.5 is the liminal bit right after the case and right before the ending. The judge has delivered his verdict and left, the police have taken the witnesses away with the guy you implicated. The witness is exonerated and waiting for you with your co-counsel in the antechambers. Nobody's left in the big old courtroom except for Ryu and van Zieks. It's a prime setup for any number of goofy, dramatic showdowns, for van Zieks to point out your shady bullshit from the case makeing you the same as him, or for Ryu to say that the Reaper of the Bailey has nothing before good honest lawyering. They don't go with that. They let it be a quiet moment between two professionals with similar convictions who only happen to stand opposite one another, and this is a much stronger scene than I expected them to make. It puts the right amount of weight onto the end of the game, and I think it's quietly one of the single best scenes put together in all these games I've played so far. THE GREAT ACE ATTORNEY 2: RESOLVE (2017) 0.1: The Adventure of the Blossoming Attorney Just as -1.5 finally elbowed 3.5 out as the best case I've seen, 0.1 elbows 3.1 out as the best tutorial case. As you, obviously, need an excuse to learn the basic mechanics again, you take charge of Ryu's cousin, Ryutaro, taking the stand in Japan in his first-ever trial. It's Susato in disguise, of course, but she's only ever advised you, not done the lawyering herself. It's a good framework, and the case is solid behind it. It's, as ever, a little held back by being a tutorial case, but not to a sincere degree. The biggest knock against it is how long it took me to realize why the journalist was named Raiten Menimemo, and when I did I was equally furious with the game as with myself. 0.2: The Memoirs of the Clouded Kokoro Well, if this is Great Ace Attorney's flop era, I can't be displeased. The case never really comes together for reasons that are kind of nebulous; it's just not the sum of its parts. Part of the blame lies in the structure of the games, to be sure. Great Ace Attorney was absolutely and clearly conceived as an eight-ish case project and was split into two games. This leads to the problem that, unlike the Nick games, Resolve assumes complete knowledge of Adventures, which means that 0.2 being a weirdly paced sort-of jury tutorial case is way out of place here. The first tutorial case was excusable both for legacy's sake and for having a pretty unique framing, but this just sticks out. On top of that, going from the rookie case in London to a much more advanced case in London (which I had no end of praise for) back to moments after -1.4 was a strange pacing decision that I don't think panned out for anything. And part of it, certainly, is that Soseki Natsume is just not quite a good enough character to star in three cases from four across two games. Two from three was fine. Three from four was too many. This isn't to say I didn't enjoy 0.2! Despite poor pacing, the core of the case wasn't bad, just a little repetitive. It's the worst Great Ace Attorney has been since the jump, but it's still in the upper half of Ace Attorney overall. And, hey, Resolve has a lot of room to work towards the better now, right? 0.3: The Return of the Great Departed Soul The game rallied instantly. The weird step back into the past was just a blip. 0.3 moves the timeline forward past -1.5 and massively benefits from it. It's a very solid case on its own, without even an 'ah hell it's him' witness unlike other solid cases, and the buildup and resolution are all very satisfying. It even dovetails into what's gonna be the crux of the rest of the game, I'm assuming, nicely, with a great animated sequence featuring van Zieks. It lacked the je ne sais quoi of the truly excellent cases - so far only 3.5 and -1.5 - but certainly sits atop the pile of the rest of the cases I've played so far across these five games. It's in the same boat as those top two, though, where I really just don't have much to say about it because everything just clicked together. Most importantly, though, Gina is a cop now and she has a dog. If anything happens to her I am going to fly to Japan and I am going to find Shu Takumi. 0.4: Twisted Karma and His Last Bow Oh, baby. Things are heating up. This is Ace Attorney firing on all cylinders, and it's really only a first half of a two-parter that goes straight into 0.5. Nobody's having an off day, the mystery presented is both juicy and peels apart delightfully, and even the callbacks to 1.5 like taking on van Zieks as a client for a murder-by-pistol land completely on their feet. If there's any concrete thing to complain about at all about 0.4, it's that the investigation phase is notably linear compared to the previous cases, but that's only even arguably a downside. Two things that the case really brings into light are to follow, though. For all the praise I did generally have for the old trilogy, characters and their relationships were pretty binary: the way they treat each other during the case where they meet, and the way they treat each other in each interaction thereafter. Even Nick and Maya, and Nick and Pearl, fall prey to this - while I adore both those girls, the Nick/Maya dynamic is completely cemented in 1.3 and doesn't really move along, and the Nick/Pearl dynamic is completely cemented in 2.3 and doesn't really move along. Nick's relationship with Gumshoe might get far more cooperative as a case heats up, but the next case will act as a reset back to that baseline, pal. The one relationship that absolutely doesn't fall into this is Nick and Edgeworth, and I think there's a really good reason their interactions are so strongly remembered by the fandom. Great Ace Attorney's characters, in contrast, do feel more dynamic, making the games feel more like a comprehensive experience rather than a series of (enjoyable!) vignettes. There's much more continuity in the world, and even little things like juror choices and recurring locations create a good flow to the world that really starts to pay off in 0.4, primarily as the climax of Lestrade's character arc but in other, smaller ways too. Plus, you know, the balls to kill off a principal cast member. The second and sillier thing is that the original trilogy's witnesses have so many dopes, liars, and people secretly tied to the crime. Great Ace Attorney has several people who are just fucked up little guys trying to live their lives, and they're complete weirdos, but they're not malicious or trying to hide anything. The wax carver in 0.3 was legitimately the most helpful witness I've run across in five games of this, just some weirdo French lady trying to survive in London and trying to make your job easier to do. I love that. The apprentice coroner in this episode might turn on me in 0.5, and if so I'll point back to this and laugh at myself, but she's following in the same footsteps so far. Just a fucked up little weirdo, but that doesn't make you a bad person. 0.5: The Resolve of Ryunosuke Naruhodo The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles might be in my top ten favorite games ever made, let alone being the best Ace Attorney has been. ESCAPADES A set of eight mini-episodes, each one not particularly long, that focus on two or three characters apiece. There's no gameplay to them, and nothing particularly memorable. They're fine bonus content, particularly if you're just hungry for more of whichever character/s they feature. You wouldn't be doing yourself a particular disservice just reading a transcript of them. BONUS: THE ANIME It doesn't exist, and for this I curse God. BONUS: ACE ATTORNEY (2012) To cope with that, something I didn't finish in time for the Phoenix Wright post. Between then and now, I watched Takashi Miike's live-action Ace Attorney film. I think it was more of a straightforwardly good film than his take on Yakuza, but man, I can't shake this feeling that Takashi Miike is a genius filmmaker that I just don't quite jive with. Fun movie, though, and made the bizarre move of making Gumshoe into a tremendously hot twink. You won't see me complaining. BACK TO THE GAME: THE ACHIEVEMENTS The Great Ace Attorney follows in the footsteps of the Phoenix Wright Trilogy for achievements. Do all ten cases and all eight escapades, find a few 'hidden' dialogues, and get all of some themes of conversations, such as both conversations about ladders and all eight conversations about shovels. There's two major changes from the first, though: one, that there's nothing as dumb as getting the bad ending in Justice for All; and two, that the Accolades screen in the main menu gives you checklists of hints such as "Discussed the stepladder in Tuspell's wax museum with Susato in Resolve case 3". It's enough to go by without any guide, and even the individual scenes have hints like "for having investigated the fireplace whilst with Susato in Adventures case 5". It's a very good iteration on the system in the Phoenix Wright Trilogy, and I don't even have anything to nitpick about it. Now at the end! I really don't have anything to add onto the "summary" of 0.5. This was an absolutely fantastic package, two spectacular games that almost strictly just got better as they went. There's absolutely no knowledge of the older six games necessary, even. They're just straightforwardly recommendable to anyone. Superb on every level, no notes. 25 to life for Gina Lestrade, simple as. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted October 21, 2023 Author Share Posted October 21, 2023 (edited) WARGROOVE 2 (CHUCKLEFISH, 2023) Finished: 21/10/23. Playtime: 32.8 hours. It's unfair, isn't it? The other indie SRPGs took between fifty and a hundred+ hours, and yet this one, by far the shortest, is by far the best. Wargroove 2 picks up right where Wargroove left off, gameplay-wise. There's been some decent shakeups, unit-wise - most notably, that cannon ships can no longer engage seaborne targets - but strictly for the better. The core cast of units feel like they fit better together, and the new additions help out tremendously. Sea combat, by far the most one-dimensional part of Wargoove, has been augmented with several new units. The riverboat is a cheap melee unit meant to control coasts and break down enemy houses and ports, occupying a niche that aquanauts previously had to fill until you had warships. The kraken is a long-ranged defensive sea unit who dumpsters enemy boats, but is itself eaten by the other sea creatures. The frog, finally, is a medium-cost medium-bulk medium-damage unit with the ability to pull a unit within three spaces one tile towards it, friendly or enemy, which includes dragging land units into the water and boats onto the land if you're clever. On top of this, sea and land melee units can mutually fight each other while on hybrid terrain like beaches or rivers, which makes the sea gameplay feel significantly more integrated than any other game of its ilk I've played before. It's weird to have the sea be anything besides a gimmick you reluctantly have to engage with or ignore depending on the map, so hats off to Wargroove 2 for pulling it off and making a very satisfying tactical gamescape. It's a good job they did, too, because Wargroove 2's campaign has a lot more water and a lot more island hopping than its predecessor. It's a simple structure - a short prologue campaign, three independent middle campaigns you can tackle in any order, and a short finale campaign after all of those are done - but it's the right amount of content and doesn't contain a dud map among it. It's a map set that's obviously put together by a veteran team who know better what they're doing and have the knowledge to do more daring concepts, and they stick the landing. The pirate campaign in particular has some really interesting maps, and was generally a highlight of the game. Not that there was a lowlight, mind, even including the final map, which might err a little easy but it's a thematically strong map that I enjoyed quite a lot. Honestly, that sums up Wargroove 2: it errs a little easy overall, but it's a fantastically put-together game that I thoroughly enjoyed, even if it really never walled me out. I won't do into too much detail about the story since it's deliberately pretty light, as was the case in the first, but what I'll say is that I think they actually managed to handle some fairly significant emotional punch despite the lightweight story. While I can see why the particulars of the ending might turn someone off, I actually found that it landed perfectly for me, and I was fairly surprised at the angle it took. Absolutely no complaints on this end. The new mode, replacing Arcade and Puzzle, is Conquest. While I had good things to say about those modes in Wargroove, fact is that they were honestly quite repetitive and only held up by the strength of the core gameplay. Arcade, in particular, was essentially just five consecutive skirmish maps where you're at a harsher and harsher disadvantage going in for each run. Conquest takes from both to create something distinct from just playing consecutive maps, and honestly something pretty unique in its own right. Essentially, in Conquest, you select a commander from a list of three with a permanent (for the run) buff to the army, and then you select an initial laydown of units. You then go through a Slay the Spire type roguelite branching map towards a boss fight, where each fight is a small, fixed-laydown, no-recruitment duel, and where all damage and losses you take remain. Commanders don't regenerate, and there are no structures from which to replenish, but there are rest spots in the branching map to let you heal the army. All kills grant gold, which can be used on recruitment spots in the branching map to add units to your force, or can be used by mages to chip-heal units. There's other army buffs you can get, random events, and items you can permanently recruit to units which creates a very enjoyable and replayable experience. Playing gives starshards you can spend in a global upgrade tree to give you more commanders, more conquest routes, and starting laydown buffs to let you tackle higher difficulties. New routes get longer until the final, which is short like the first and reverses all buff cards to debuffs, It's a fantastic little mode that doesn't outstay its welcome and which I finished long before I was tired of it. I'll definitely go back to run Conquest a few more times, particularly if they add more to it with patches or DLC. There's almost nothing to talk about with respect to platting Wargroove 2. Simply completing the campaign, at any difficulty, gets you over half of the achievements. There's one more for getting all S-ranks, which are largely divorced from turncount (unlike the first) and entirely based on finishing the side-objectives. Some of these were a bit difficult, but none were unenjoyable, except for two bugged ones. In the kraken introduction map, you have a side-objective to get 10 critical hits with the kraken. This is ...weirdly bugged, but in a way I haven't figured out. It used to be that critical hit kills didn't count, but now they sort of count. I got it after the baffling nine critical hits and three critical hit kills. The other asks you to knock units into two holes on a map, and there's two holes and three enemies you can feasibly knock into them. I gave up on it, waited for a patch, tried again, and gave up on it again. Local Discord weirdo Ron the Auraknight came to the rescue, though - specifically knocking the first enemy into the left hole first, and then the top of two enemies into the right hole second, fulfills the star. No other combination of units, holes, and orders appears to work. There's one for winning a multiplayer match - who else but @Parrhesia? - and one for opening the map editor. Beating Conquest on Hard in all four routes gets you two more, and you'll inevitably get enough starshards to unlock all of the global buffs while doing that. The final two are to try to clone your commander in the clone-a-unit event in Conquest and have it fail, ending your run; and then to find all birds with Mercival II's groove. The fish recur from Wargroove, but aren't necessary. Only one of the birds is unreasonably difficult to find, and my only complaint with this is that the codex doesn't hint at how/where to find any of them at all - you either need to go through exhaustive iteration (which sucks when one has a very low spawn rate) or just look up a guide. I did the latter. I found Wargroove 2 to be nothing short of exemplary for its genre, and absolutely beseech you to go pick it up at your earliest convenience. Fantastic game. It's good to be back to just unequivocally good strategy games after the complicated run of them I've had since the first Wargroove. I guess I really don't have any excuse not to go back to Engage now, eh. Edited October 21, 2023 by Integrity Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Punished Dayni Posted October 23, 2023 Share Posted October 23, 2023 On 10/20/2023 at 6:14 PM, Integrity said: 0.5: The Resolve of Ryunosuke Naruhodo The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles might be in my top ten favorite games ever made, let alone being the best Ace Attorney has been. That every case before it got several paragraphs and you give one for this? Oh you tease. On 10/20/2023 at 6:14 PM, Integrity said: Fun movie, though, and made the bizarre move of making Gumshoe into a tremendously hot twink. I'm sorry what. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: There's been some decent shakeups, unit-wise - most notably, that cannon ships can no longer engage seaborne targets Damm, RIP Cannon ships. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: The frog, finally, is a medium-cost medium-bulk medium-damage unit with the ability to pull a unit within three spaces one tile towards it, friendly or enemy, which includes dragging land units into the water and boats onto the land if you're clever. Utility Frogmen. No notes. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: On top of this, sea and land melee units can mutually fight each other while on hybrid terrain like beaches or rivers, which makes the sea gameplay feel significantly more integrated than any other game of its ilk I've played before. It's weird to have the sea be anything besides a gimmick you reluctantly have to engage with or ignore depending on the map, so hats off to Wargroove 2 for pulling it off and making a very satisfying tactical gamescape. Okay, happy to hear about a degree of integration that I'd say Advance Wars never got to, it always felt like Sea was it's on domain with few interactions even with aerial combat. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: It's a map set that's obviously put together by a veteran team who know better what they're doing and have the knowledge to do more daring concepts, and they stick the landing. It's funny to say that, there's a different studio behind development for this game (Robotality, AMA here) who asked to make this game and got clearance from Chucklefish, so it feels to me like people who were willing to take those directions got a good deal of input this time around, to seemingly good results. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: Arcade, in particular, was essentially just five consecutive skirmish maps where you're at a harsher and harsher disadvantage going in for each run. Can confirm the gremiln was able to clear this on the lowest difficulty with no experience for the genre by spamming Golems, so yeah, I'd say they weren't that tight. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: Essentially, in Conquest, you select a commander from a list of three with a permanent (for the run) buff to the army, and then you select an initial laydown of units. You then go through a Slay the Spire type roguelite branching map towards a boss fight, where each fight is a small, fixed-laydown, no-recruitment duel, and where all damage and losses you take remain. Okay, now I'm not sure how to feel about the rougelite as a gaming concept, so I''d have to try it to see where I stood, but this does seem like it's fine setup to me. On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: There's one more for getting all S-ranks, which are largely divorced from turncount (unlike the first) and entirely based on finishing the side-objectives. My non-LTC ass: On 10/21/2023 at 7:15 PM, Integrity said: I guess I really don't have any excuse not to go back to Engage now, eh. Be prepared to either laugh or die of cringe. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Integrity Posted October 23, 2023 Author Share Posted October 23, 2023 porque no the dos Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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