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

[Integrity]

KATAMARI DAMACY (NAMCO, 2004)

Finished: 22/12/23. Playtime: 24.2 hours.

Here's a weird hole in my gaming knowledge to fill. I'd never played a Katamari game, despite being a largely Playstation 2 kid that generation. Weirdly, I always thought that it was a Gamecube game, even though the entire control scheme would make no sense with the stubby dual sticks, and also I owned a Gamecube too, so that wouldn't have changed anything. It's always existed at the periphery of my awareness, nothing more.

Now that I've played it? Honestly, hell yeah. This was a great time. Rolling shit up to get bigger to roll up bigger shit tickles a very precise cortex in my skull, and it's a cortex that enjoys being tickled. The frankly insane controls designed by insane people came very intuitively to me, outside of the dash, which I never got to work more than about a third of the time. The goofiness largely landed, and I never got tired of being negged by the King. I'm just straight-up Glad that I played Katamari Damacy, even if it wasn't some game-changing all-timer, and given as the Steam Winter Sale just kicked off I'm absolutely banking the sequel for a future weekend.

One thing that made me laugh a bit during it was the soundtrack. Specifically, that I'd been told variously over the last decade or so that the Katamari Damacy soundtrack is one of the best ever, never gonna get it out of your head, all that general hyperbole. I've heard it now! It's actually quite good, honestly. I enjoyed it. What made me laugh a little is that, like, have all these people who have crowed about how good it is not gone out and ...listened to music? The songs are good, but they just sound like notably-experimental J-pop B-sides. I mean that as a compliment, absolutely, but if you told me that the song that plays during Make Cancer was an unreleased Japanese demo tape by f(x) from 2012 I'd just nod along, makes perfect sense. Not really a commentary on the game itself (I suspect "weird 90s indie pop" was the vibe they were going for), but something that occurred to me during the game.

The achievements are weirdly paced, but absolutely straightforward. There's nine stars and the moon, which represent the game's core stages; no fluff, just get as big as you can. There's nine specific constellations which carry a certain challenge element to them, like getting all the crabs or fish you can, or grabbing the biggest cow possible. These are generally fun, with the two "get the biggest" ones (Taurus and Ursa Major) being asshole stages in the fun kind of way - you have no minimum size, and getting (for instance) a sign with a picture of a bear on it, or a carton of milk, fulfills the requirement. It's a good joke. Anyway, each of these stages has an achievement, for 19/21 total, and clearing all of them is about a ~six hour task.

One of the remainder is to collect all of the presents that the King leaves for you in most (not all) stages. All you get from the game is an indicator that a stage has a present, not how big it is or where it is. In keeping with the year of our Lord two thousand and four, some of these are psychotically hidden, but all they give you is wearable cosmetics. Honestly, by the standards of the time, it's hardly remarkable, and the game is so deeply documented at this point that it's hard to hold it against the game.

The final is, simply, to roll up one of every single thing in the game in a successful stage. Some items exist as only a single copy in a single stage, even though multiple stages may share the location. Some items require getting far bigger than the stage's requirement. Some items require you to beeline them before you get too big, since they'll either despawn or become inaccessible after you get big enough. The game doesn't give you any hints beyond a pair of category-sorts - location and type - that you could possibly correlate if you were down to very few left. The worst, or possibly funniest, of these are for getting the largest bear and cow in Taurus and Ursa, requiring meticulously building up your katamarus while dodging obvious and hidden cows or bears before tracking down the Holy Cow or Kintaro Bear to present to your dad. These are the only things in the game you can reasonably fail, but they only took a few hours of honest effort.

The game was just a nice, chill time. I feel like this whole writeup has been kind of meandering and pointless, and I'm going to choose to pretend that this was intentional and in the spirit of the game, rather than just me failing to figure out a productive way to talk about a weird, unique game. I'm a genius.

[lenticular]

15 hours ago, Integrity said:

What made me laugh a little is that, like, have all these people who have crowed about how good it is not gone out and ...listened to music? The songs are good, but they just sound like notably-experimental J-pop B-sides.

  To be fair, there is quite a gap between "do you guys not have phones listen to music?" and "do you guys not listen to experimental J-pop B-sides?". I'm not as high on the Katamari soundtrack as some people (except for this big band jazz cover of Lonely Rolling Star which I cannot get enough of) but what I will say is that it wasn't really like anything else that I've heard. Which isn't to say that it isn't like anything else that exists, of course. But it's tapping into a musical tradition that I know basically nothing about. And I would guess that it's similar for a lot of people who wax poetic about it. If you've never listened to J-pop before then it's going to be a very different experience than if that's your musical genre of choice.

On 12/18/2023 at 10:23 PM, Integrity said:

These weren't originally in the game's Windows release, which was handled through Games for Windows Live (rip bozo lmao), but as part of the death of GFWL, the Steamworks patch for Resident Evil 5 years ago included them and their achievements.

Every so often, something like this will happen to remind me that GFWL was a thing existed, and I feel compelled to momentarily give thanks that it is no longer a thing that exists.

[Integrity]

yeah i think that's fair, i'm probably bringing a little too much unelaborated baggage and an unusual background perspective to the matter lmao

8 hours ago, lenticular said:

Every so often, something like this will happen to remind me that GFWL was a thing existed, and I feel compelled to momentarily give thanks that it is no longer a thing that exists.

god, yeah. what a time that was, and praise the lord it's gone

[Integrity]

Serendipity! As I edit this for the last time, I'm hashtag blessed to drop a thread update on the new year. I didn't even have to fudge this one, and this post has been in the making for a week or so now. I feel like this deserves a big, pre-written post, because I'm tackling one of gaming's sacred cows, and boy is that always a fun time. Please put your hands together and keep your mind at least reasonably open for...

 

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS (OBSIDIAN, 2010)
Finished: 1/1/24. Playtime: 71.9 hours.

 

I have a very long history with the Fallout franchise. I talked about this a little bit in the Pentiment writeup last year, but I played the original Fallout (and 2) when I was just about the perfect age to appreciate Fallout 2's writing, which is to say I was eight years old and always felt like I was getting away with something when I played them. This would culminate in the absolutely legendary Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel (2001), a game I thought was shrimply incredible and I just wasn't big-brained enough to get really good at it, but fuck was it a great game. I'd move all the way over the continental United States to Europe, then finally move to the continental United States, then move almost all the way across the Lower 48 before Fallout would re-enter my life. I was no longer nine, but rather eighteen. I was still an idiot, but I was a distinctly different flavor of idiot. Fallout 3 was hot off the presses, and my buddy had a copy on Steam and let me log into his account to play it, and I was absolutely revved up by years of Oblivion.

It sucked. I have essentially no good memories of my time with Fallout 3, just a mush of occasionally-passively-enjoyable brown and greenish-brown and bloom. I didn't hate it, sure, I didn't care enough about it to muster any proper hatred. It was just such a bleh game, through and through. To this day, Fallout 3 is the only entry in the franchise that I have not revisited since grad school, and I truly have no desire to do so. I don't think I'd hate it if I did. I think it would just still be bleh. My time with Fallout 3 almost had me pass up New Vegas entirely. I'd get it a few months after launch, Steam Winter Sale 2010, and play through it over the course of a month to thunderous applause, relatively speaking. It was a fine time, honestly, a 7 or 8/10 game that I had very little desire to pick back up or to explore after that single playthrough where I accomplished most of the major side content and sided with the NCR, with no desire to side with any of the other three options on a repeat playthrough.

I'd then spend the next twelve years watching the almost-immediate mythologization of New Vegas with utter bewilderment. Sure, it was pretty good, but the rhetoric around it turned unapproachable. Eighteen months, 84 Metacritic, publisher sabotage, all these talking points repeated forever to explain why ...Obsidian made a sorely unfinished game? Like they always did? I was sure then (as I am now) that none of this helped matters, but New Vegas just seemed in keeping with Obsidian's entire catalogue going back to Icewind Dale. I'd develop a bit of a resentment for the game, and end up skipping Fallout 4 entirely because of it. I did pick up Fallout 4 for my dad, though, and he loved it after skipping straight from 2 over 3 and New Vegas, so there's that. He also skipped straight from Daggerfall to Skyrim, which (completely unmodded, mind) is one of his favorite games ever, and he thinks Morrowind and Oblivion were both trash. My dad's awesome.

The time eventually came, sometime around my late 20s, to revisit Fallout. I had no desire to replay the new ones, but I had the old ones off a deep Good Old Games sale from half a decade prior, and there was a lot of time for me to play older games on a crappy laptop (a craptop, if one will) or my lab computer as my grad research spooled up. Fallout came first, as it ought to, and I found it landed with a resounding thud. I didn't hate it, but it was far more "my memories of 3" than "my memories of New Vegas." I played through it, felt largely nothing, and set it down to move on to Fallout 2. I made it halfway through Fallout 2 and stopped. I have no idea what people like about Fallout 2, it's just juvenile slop strapped onto a gameplay skeleton that was already wonky in 1998. That's a post for another day, though. Tactics, that old lion, would finally come third. Its legacy, surely, would not be tarnished? Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel is far worse than 2. It's a genuinely awful game, and on top of that, it's about twice as long as it needs to be. I did not finish Tactics, suffice it to say. With that, I simply resigned myself to a simple truth: I just don't like Fallout. The best one, New Vegas, is just pretty good. None of the others are above, I dunno, a 5/10 for the original.

It'd always itch at my brain, though. I'd start to see something odd happen, where the modded form of New Vegas would seem to become the canonical representation of it, a game that really never was for me. People started to post like New Vegas wasn't actually a tremendously unstable game, creaking under its own not even particularly significant weight. Was it a better game than I remembered? Was it worse, actually? Are people memory holing the game's issues, or am I just misremembering? I'm intelligent enough now, I think, to tease these things apart when playing a game, and not just stop enjoying because of crashes and hangs. It became time, in late 2023, to pick New Vegas back up. Unmodded, just like I did in 2010. And, hell, when I was an idiot kid I already beat the whole game on Hardcore for some reason, so if I grind out the platinum I won't need to do that. Thanks, the me who was half the me that I am. Let's dig into Obsidian's second-best game.

Let's get the bugbear out of the way first: the game was unstable as hell in 2010, and it's worse now if anything. I got slapped with the infinite-load bug on my save in the third session, which is generally remedied by starting a new game from the main menu and then loading your save, rather than just loading from the menu. I ended up with 24 backup hard saves between this occurring and me making various saves to take split decisions. That's a lot. In addition to that, just the simple crashes that were ameliorated by relaunching and reloading were plentiful and got worse as the game went on. I'd say I averaged a crash per two or three hours of gameplay, across a file that took approximately 50 to wrap everything up. The peak came today, in fact, as I was doing one of my last achievements to get banned from all three casinos on the Strip. Out of six loads (into and out of each casino), New Vegas crashed four times. Technically, it was seven loads, because the first one came when I was leaving Ultra-Luxe after getting banned, and the crash was before the autosave, so I had to get banned from the Ultra-Luxe again.

Bugs came along with the instability, though usually they weren't particularly show-stopping. The funniest was easily when I first ran into Lakelurks, an enemy I had zero recollection of (because they're a total non-threat, turns out). I went into a fishing shack on the lake, looted it, heard the combat sting, and turned around to see a Lakelurk T-posing in the doorway, deactivated and unresponsive while I shot it. An NCR sniper meant to slow me down on multiple ending routes never loaded his shaders or AI package, and just snarled at me as I walked around him. Uncountable overworld encounters had a scorpion or other assorted bug - in one case a Legionnaire - stuck in a rock, under the floor, or clipping through a wall. One of the times I fought Ulysses at the end of Lonesome Road, he opened the fight after my first punch by walking off into the void and dying instantly. This wasn't limited to NPCs, either; I fell through the world twice, got hard stuck one or two times, and saw many more world seams I could have dropped into had I so chosen. Fortunately, I always had a save handy thanks to the instability, and nothing of particular value was stuck in any floor, so it was mostly just a chuckle and move on.

Even beyond this, though, and all the assorted nonsense that Gamebryo brings that I'm not going to put onto Obsidian's shoulders, there's just a general sloppiness to how the game is put together. I'm not talking bugs anymore, I'm talking design. I'm talking the pile of grenade crates the NCR owns at McCarran, except they don't own the ammo crates among them. I'm talking how the Legion owns everything in one bathroom in Cottonwood Cove but not the other - though that might just be abortive commentary on the Legion, since the unowned bathroom is the womens' one. There's invisible walls in places there shouldn't be, on slopes you could easily walk up, and none in places where you can walk up past the seams in the world. The spread of skill-versus-reward and even placement of lockboxes and terminals is completely random and lacking in any focus of design, with my favorite being a Req. 25 locked door that holds absolutely nothing but a Req. 50 locked box, which itself held like 120 caps in pre-war money and, well, caps. There's a bunch of dialogue and quest flags that don't look for, like, if you've ever talked to the person before. I hadn't met the NCR before I went into McCarran and talked to Cook-Cook's victim (shopping for where to take the heads I picked up) and my first dialogue option with her, before anything else, was to inform her solemnly that I dealt with Cook-Cook. Why can I tell Joshua Graham the first time we meet that I killed Caesar for him? That latter one even broke his dialogue tree and kicked me back out into the world, and then he was cross with me for taking so long to ponder his offer which he'd never given me. A lot of this is, honestly, similar to what I pondered with regards to Black Mesa. In trying to feel more organic, New Vegas makes its videogameyer fuckups feel more jarring to me.

Let's move on, though. I haven't even talked about the game. My feelings on the actual game is weird. I think I'm ultimately coming out of this project feeling kinder to it than I did when I went in, but I'm definitely not feeling particularly warm. I went absolutely hard utilitymaxxing for my skills instantly and early, deciding to see how much this would let me influence things through the vaunted skill checks being expanded to more than just Speech. I didn't even put significant (>35) points into a combat skill until, I think, level 21. What I found from this was that I used the shit out of Speech and Science, and... nothing else. There was a Barter check here or there that I could use to get inconsequentially more money compared to picking up one more carbine in a dungeon. There were a bunch of non-standard skill checks in the first tutorial quest, setting up expectations! Then it was just Speech, and Speech again. The single-digit times I wished I could have hit a skill check, I just chugged a magazine down and hit it, and then generally didn't get as much impact from it as I expected. Me being decent at shooting and my guy being good at Speeching, Sciencing, and Lockpicking was just fine in about 98% of cases. The whole "you use things other than Speech in dialogue!" reputation that New Vegas has, I think, is wholly unearned.

That's just the talkin' part, though. How about the action part? I had to engage with all facets of the action loop to finish off achievements, and I remain confident in saying that New Vegas is unspeakably more fun to play than any of its predecessors, and it isn't close. It's still not particularly great. Low skill levels (in game) can be compensated for to some degree by higher skill levels (out of game) and to a huge degree by just finding better kit. Until the true lategame, having 23 Guns and 6 Perception doesn't really matter if you're packing a scoped rifle or 12.7mm SMG, let alone the truly bonkers stuff from the DLC. I got Love & Hate fairly early and, even with an Unarmed skill of I think 31 and a Strength of 5, they were genuinely insane DPS for punching through most anything, and didn't fall off until my 20s. Then I got the unique puncher from Lonesome Road, and it was twice the DPS and change. I never felt underpowered except in specific circumstances (that's momentary), but very little felt actively good to use - primarily firearms after my skill hit, I dunno, 60 or so, and the M79 grenade launcher at all times. The Thumper in New Vegas feels pretty fantastic, if nothing else.

Having proper weapons and a Guns skill of about 60 does make the game into a fairly decent stealth action game, Metro 2033 on a budget, but it's deeply let down by the game's actual mechanics. I'm not going to mathematically break into it, but the impact of how New Vegas's damage formula works massively overvalues critical hits, whether random or from sneak attacks, and seeks to cut down on chip damage significantly. The end result of this, for me, is that you need critical hits to make automatic weapons fire worth doing on anything tough enough to use automatic weapons on, and getting a first shot from stealth is just a fight-ender. I resisted the Stealth Archer Gameplay as long as I could, but once I got into my 30s and was tackling Lonesome Road, the difference between a sneak attack crit with my rifle and not getting that was the difference between instantly overkilling a guy with a single shot and taking 5-6 hits to do the job. The changes to damage mitigation genuinely hurt the game more than simply taking Fallout 3's dumb, simplistic system directly as-was, and it only makes sense that it was in service of making it more faithful to the isometric Fallouts.

Even so, most of nobody praises New Vegas for its enthralling and customizable gunplay. The world's the star of the show, and I can't deny that it's got Vibes to it. As a representation of Vegas, having lived there for my whole adolescence, I don't think it does a particularly good job, largely due to engine restrictions I'm sure. Ignoring that, it's mostly an interesting and good time to explore. I don't think it's perfect - I'd be thrilled to pick nits at how in the hell they designed Nellis and the general sparsity of shit north of Vegas itself - but I think that's stuff that handily falls under the 18 Months criticisms. I still found myself enjoying wandering the Mojave despite everything, except for anytime Deathclaws or Cazadores became involved, but everyone has written screeds about how garbage those boys are, so I'll refrain.

Oddly, the Vibes around the Mojave don't really extend to its main quest. There's plenty of neat-enough side quests and crannies to explore, even around Nellis, but I find New Vegas's main quest to be both pretty unengaging and way overblown for choice. The first is easily a personal problem; I don't particularly like or even like to hate Benny, I'd generally just rather he shut up, and I don't think New Vegas's introduction does any favors for investing me into its plot. With the way the rounding path to Vegas was obviously structured to introduce you to the factions as you go, I'd rather more effort have been put into streamlining that pathway to Vegas and then having the game open up from there rather than the way they did it. Even now, having done it four times, the main plot's real estate in my head is get thing from Benny damn Benny stole thing white noise Hoover Dam. I wouldn't place it above, hell, even Oblivion's main quest, if we're adjusting for Oblivion's gameplay being a Hague-grade atrocity.

The factions take up the second issue with the main quest. It's structured to funnel you to a point where you choose your allegiance, balloon out, and then reorient everything on the pivotal battle at Hoover Dam. I don't think this is a bad structure, honestly, but I think it's executed notably poorly. Part of the problem is the Hoover Dam fight itself. It plays out very similarly no matter what optional preparations you took or which side you're on, and I can't say any of the runs stood out from any of the others. Lanius comes from nowhere and he's a dogshit fight if you choose to take it, just utterly wretched to deal with, but fortunately he can be talked down by good old Speech in the single most Avellone-coded conversation in the entire game. It's boring, it's so full of itself, and though I'll thank the game for giving me a really easy option to not fight the worst enemy they designed, it's a really boring climax. It sucks more when you're on the independent-Vegas line, because you have an army of deathbots that will not intervene in your honorable gun-or-debate duel with Lanius, but they'll absolutely show up to fuck up the NCR general, because he's a weedy loser unlike the chad Lanius. It's Avellone wank to the extreme. Lanius is just the worst part of the game, full stop.

The other problem is that the factional choice is... well, it's telling on itself, honestly. You've got four options, and I'd make an argument that three of them are bad, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but is made bad by the fact that New Vegas isn't in on it. The Legion are the biggest source of this, in that people make the argument that the game knows they're irredeemably evil people and that you're not supposed to think that they're trains-on-time Mussolini strongmen types. I'm not convinced, though. I think that New Vegas very desperately wants you to think that the Legion are a legitimate alternative and not cartoon villains, but it never shows you anything besides the Legion being cartoon villains and then putting the most pathetic both-sides "but the NCR" in there. Maybe it just hits far more sour in a post-Trump America, I don't know. Mr. House and the Wild Card ending, to me, are kind of just the same thing. You're either setting up an authoritarian king of Vegas, or you're setting yourself up as an authoritarian king of Vegas. So right there, you've got three endings (four, technically, if you count the Lanius ending) where all you're doing is setting up different flavors of despot for Vegas, and one where you're adding it to a flawed democratic state, but the game wants you to think that this is a morally grey decision with no true right answer. It falls completely flat. New Vegas would have been far better if it had focused around the NCR as the primary faction and explored its faults in more nuance, or even put some commentary into the fact that all states are ultimately prone to the same corruption and taken a hardline anarchist bent, rather than the nothing burger it concocts with a good guy it doesn't want you to think is the good guy.

Despite all that, I still enjoyed base New Vegas fairly well on the replay. I don't think it holds up to its reputation, same as I did when I started this project, but I also don't think I was giving it enough credit before. It's a flawed game, and some of those cracks run deep, but it isn't a bad one, and I'm more-or-less glad that I tackled it for this project. Largely-unfortunately, though, the game had DLC. I played the game before any of it came out the first time, and experienced all of it fresh in the last week. Gun Runner's Arsenal adds nothing but weapons and challenges and isn't worth addressing outside of the achievements section, so chalk that one off in your brain. We'll go over the base game achievements (and Gun Runner's ones) first, then go over the DLCs and achievements they added, then wrap things up.

100% New Vegas, vanilla, is almost exclusively a matter of persistence. Completing the main quest all four major ways, resolving a handful of high-profile side quests, getting all companions and snow globe collectibles, and interacting with game mechanics many times gets you almost all the way there. Dealing 10,000 damage with each kind of weapon becomes fairly trivial once you're in the late game, where you're inevitably going no matter what if you're in it for the long haul, whether you're built for the weapon type or not. Healing 10,000 hit points with food is an insane one, though, so just grab every food you can get your hands on and eat it as you go. As long as you were below full health when you ate it, you'll get the full amount notched onto your progress bar. Two of the DLCs (Dead Money and Honest Hearts) make this a lot easier to finish, as a word of advice. Installing 20 mods onto weapons requires you to be about as rich as God, but you're probably going to get about as rich as God while doing everything else anyway, and Gun Runner's Arsenal adds a bunch of new mods at the titular Gun Runner merchant, so this becomes trivial with DLC. Speaking of, Gun Runner's Arsenal adds a bunch of challenges to your log, like killing Caesar with a knife or killing robots with a tire iron, and achievements to finish any three of each difficulty level of these. These took a little forethought but weren't particularly difficult to do. The only thing that threw me off on them was, for killing Cazadores with long-fuse dynamite, the game checks the "killing" weapon based on what you're holding, so if you throw your last stick you won't get any credit. On the other hand, that means you can armor yourself to fuck, throw a big-ass frag grenade at your feet, equip long-fuse dynamite, and get credit much more easily that way. You can also just not do that challenge.

The most tedious part is the minigaming. Caravan is this game's signature thing, and people massively overstate its complexity. New Vegas itself does an absolutely abhorrent job of explaining how you play it, but reading the tutorial and playing one game led me to the winning strategy and I lost two more games in the entire rest of my time with New Vegas. The achievement is for winning 30 games, and boy oh boy does the game run thin far before that, largely because the game is slow as hell and controls like garbage. There's another achievement for winning 3 games which I didn't get until the end, and I have no idea what went wrong there. I made a new guy and went straight to the first Caravaneer, but didn't have the challenge in-game to win games of Caravan and could not figure out how to gain it. Eventually, I tracked down one of my hard saves that had the challenge in the log but hadn't done it yet, tracked down a Caravan player, and beat him three times to get the achievement. I still have no idea what the issue here was. Playing ten games each in the three casino games is another set, but these control pretty breezily. The real meat of the casino game is to get banned from the three main casinos, which took about two hours of just spamming blackjack with 10 Luck for 400 caps per hand, winning about 90% of them. It was boring as hell, but not exactly challenging.

The last thing, which I can't really speak on, is to beat the main quest on Hardcore difficulty without ever turning it off. Hardcore adds weight to ammo and adds survival (eat, drink, sleep) mechanics to the game. I did this in 2010 as a dumb kid. I have no idea if it was good or bad, and I did not play my new game in 2023 on Hardcore just to prove a point. Condolences if it turns out this sucks really bad, but thanks teenage me.

The first DLC I did was Honest Hearts, which was, uh, not great overall. Its tribals hit that precise level for me of I'm not sure if this is actively racist, but I definitely don't like it. The main character, Joshua, was really obviously some writer's pet Special Boy, and I'm not going to say it was the writer who was also named Joshua, but I will imply it heavily. There just really isn't much to say about Honest Hearts. The enemy variety was nil, the area was pretty-for-New Vegas, and neither the story nor characters did a single thing to hook me. The only thing that stuck in my head is how much Giant Green Geckos fucking sucked. Honest Hearts was, by far margins on both sides, my second-favorite of the DLCs. Do the main quest, and the final quest both ways, siding with Daniel and with Joshua, for plat.

Next came Old World Blues. I've always found Fallout to be at its absolute most insufferable when it's about capital-S SCIENCE!!, and Old World Blues is an expansion pack entirely about capital-S SCIENCE!!. I had a fucking miserable time here. I hated, individually, every single character you're brought in contact with. The primary enemy you fight, which is ambush spawned on you, has approximately infinite hit points. The ending is a complete anticlimax if you're versed in, say it with me, Speech or Science. Old World Blues brought me around to thinking that Futurama, despite being funny itself, was the single worst thing to happen to our modern culture. I hated Old World Blues. It ranks third overall. Do the main quest and the main sidequest for plat.

Dead Money was up third. I didn't jive with the characters (sensing a theme here) but I liked them a hell of a lot more than whatever the fuck was in Old World Blues. The conceit of a heist was fine in a vacuum, but it completely failed at being a fun heist. While Old World Blues was shit in almost all regards, it was fairly easy to navigate. Dead Money's little village and casino setting is one of the worst levels of any first-person game I've played, let alone leaving it down to just RPGs or just shooters or anything like that. It's all traps that blend into the environment, and sometimes just instantly kill you, and enemies who are unreasonably bulky for the tools it doesn't give you, to encourage you to avoid combat. It just, all around, plays to the worst of New Vegas's vices. I didn't have a bit of fun with Dead Money, and I ended up looking up how to progress several times both to get it over with quicker, and in some cases because I straight-up couldn't figure it out. Just bad all around. It's also the first with any real meat to the achievements, in this case having to scrounge 500 casino chips from across the whole DLC, which is fewer than you'd think (I finished about halfway through being reasonably thorough), and which can at least be traded for thousands of health worth of food to finish that achievement before reloading to get them back. Then, you have to finish the final quest two different ways, neither of which was notably difficult to do.

Lonesome Road was the only DLC I knew anything about prior to starting this, and the only thing I knew about it was that you were constantly being talked at by a Chris Avellone Avatar. And you know? Ulysses was absolutely that. I grew tired of him before the midway point of the DLC, which is real bad because he's exactly half the people you interact with - the other being a robot who only either chirps or plays audio recordings, who was fine. I got no beef with ED-E. Lonesome Road's story whiffed for me, but I'd still say it was the strongest of the four, which is a bit of a backhanded compliment and I absolutely mean it that way. It was my favorite DLC by a long shot, though, entirely for reasons aside from the writing. You see, the thing with Lonesome Road, unlike every other bit of New Vegas content, is that it's linear and (reasonably) carefully curated. New Vegas's gunplay isn't exactly the game's draw, but it isn't particularly bad, either. I made a comment about New Vegas being Metro 2033 on a budget when it's firing on all cylinders, and Lonesome Road is where it fires on all cylinders. Despite Ulysses, and despite a single arena fight with a named Deathclaw who literally just dead oneshot me, I found myself generally just having fun with Lonesome Road as a pure action experience, completely antithetical to what New Vegas (and especially Lonesome Road) wants to be. Shame a bit about the achievements, which require you to locate and neutralize 30 brown warheads in brown environments, a third of which are required to progress, and two of which are locked behind going back to an optional area after killing Ulysses. That's a guide moment, and it's tedious, but it's far from New Vegas's worst sin. Glad I saved this one for last.

Here we are, a weight lifted from me. New Vegas, its legacy, and my feelings about it despite its legacy, have all been plaguing me to various degrees for a decade. If nothing else, this was cathartic to write. There's a very reasonable chance that, starting from here, I never play a Fallout game again. And honestly, now that I've gone and unpacked all of this crap from my skull, I'm content with that. Fallout and I can move on from one another, a twenty-five year relationship that never really worked for either of us, but that I kept coming back to in order to try to find something like closure. This was, by complete accident, an absolutely perfect way for me to ring it in. Happy New Year, dudes.

[Integrity]

lol i just realized that because of whatever caravan bug happened and the achievement name being wrong, as i write this sappy shit about finally packing fallout away for good, my final achievement in new vegas is Know When To Fold Them. i guess i figured out when to fold them, huh

[Tryhard]

new vegas good upvotes to the left

I have an admitted soft spot for Joshua Graham, because even though he has like 15 lines total and the whole militaristic vs spiritual divide of the tribes in Honest Hearts is played out, I can't deny that it was refreshing to see a high-profile positive depiction of a religious person which tends to be uncommon. Aside from that, there isn't much to say though.

Lonesome Road really does feel like the only DLC that has any real thought put behind it. I like New Vegas, but mostly the base game.

59 minutes ago, Integrity said:

The last thing, which I can't really speak on, is to beat the main quest on Hardcore difficulty without ever turning it off. Hardcore adds weight to ammo and adds survival (eat, drink, sleep) mechanics to the game. I did this in 2010 as a dumb kid. I have no idea if it was good or bad, and I did not play my new game in 2023 on Hardcore just to prove a point. Condolences if it turns out this sucks really bad, but thanks teenage me.

There isn't much to it, other than making explosive weapons functionally unusable, since every grenade you carry around now has weight. It is not particularly challenging other than occasionally going back to wherever you drop everything at to eat one of the 10,000 bighorner meat you have and drink radiated water from the sink. And to amusingly make the game unwinnable sometimes since you can die in some loading screens (i.e hardcore mode will determine that you haven't ate or drank anything in the 2 weeks it takes to travel to the honest hearts dlc, and will freeze your game in the loading screen. without a patch. really does make me wonder how everyone is so surprised that new vegas got a 84 metacritic on launch and that big bad bethesda were so mean for withholding their supposed bonus)

Edited January 1 by Tryhard

[lenticular]

Number of Fallout games that I own on Steam: 6 (1-4, NV, and Tactics)

Number of Fallout games that I've ever actually played: 2 (3 and 4)

Number of Fallout games that I've ever enjoyed at all: 1 (3)

Number of Fallout games that I have any desire to play as of 2024: 0

Yeah. I played Fallout 3 when it was originally out, and I liked it a lot. Then I skipped New Vegas because of a bad interaction with community managment. Then I played 4 when it first came out, and thought it was complete garbage. I do not know if that's because 4 actually was notably worse than 3, if it wasn't as attuned to my preferences, or if I'd just developed better taste in teh intervening years. Possibly all three. I've occasionally thought in the intervening years that maybe I should stop holding my petty grudge on New Vegas and actually play it, since it is one of gaming's sacred cows, so I'm really glad to read this post that tells me that no, I'm really not missing anything and I can happily go back to forgetting about the series.

25 minutes ago, Tryhard said:

really does make me wonder how everyone is so surprised that new vegas got a 84 metacritic on launch and that big bad bethesda were so mean for withholding their supposed bonus

The way I've always heard that particular legend be retold isn't so much "this should have got a higher metacritic score" but "why on earth are we using metacritic score for anything important".

On an unrelated note, my most recent 100% was MINI METRO by Dinosaur Polo Club, which I completed on Saturday, scoring my 50th perfect game on Steam, which I am quite happy with myself for. My review of the game is as follows: fuck Auckland. That's about it. Any questions?

[Tryhard]

30 minutes ago, lenticular said:

The way I've always heard that particular legend be retold isn't so much "this should have got a higher metacritic score" but "why on earth are we using metacritic score for anything important".

I don't disagree with that. Although it's uncertain if this particular story is even true to begin with, considering I believe it came exclusively from the accounts of Chris Avellone, who I am not so sure is the most trustworthy individual (and his relationship with Bethesda obviously turned sour). I don't even remember other Obsidian employees corroborating this story.

Edited January 1 by Tryhard

[Integrity]

5 minutes ago, lenticular said:

On an unrelated note, my most recent 100% was MINI METRO by Dinosaur Polo Club, which I completed on Saturday, scoring my 50th perfect game on Steam, which I am quite happy with myself for. My review of the game is as follows: fuck Auckland. That's about it. Any questions?

fun fact! i taught stochastic simulation (grad/undergrad hybrid class, industrial engineering) at university for a few years, and i would always show off mini metro in the first week of class and have a worksheet on representing it as a discrete event simulation to get my students' brains in the right order. absolutely nothing but love for that game - and mini motorways, if you haven't poked it yet. both of those are gonna show up in this thread at some point on my end too!

 

congrats on 50 btw huge milestone!!

[lenticular]

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

fun fact! i taught stochastic simulation (grad/undergrad hybrid class, industrial engineering) at university for a few years, and i would always show off mini metro in the first week of class and have a worksheet on representing it as a discrete event simulation to get my students' brains in the right order. absolutely nothing but love for that game - and mini motorways, if you haven't poked it yet. both of those are gonna show up in this thread at some point on my end too!

Heck yes. That is a fun fact! When you do get around to going for 100%, I'd say that the two hardest achievements, by quite a distance, are Auckland and Berlin. The rest were just a case of sitting down to do them, maybe taking a couple of tries, but no big deal. But those two felt genuinely difficult to me. I have poked a bit at Mini Motorways too, but it didn't hold my attention in quite the same way that Mini Metro did. Maybe I will give it another chance at some point to see if my brain is in a more receptive state for it.

2 hours ago, Integrity said:

congrats on 50 btw huge milestone!!

Thanks!

[Integrity]

36 minutes ago, lenticular said:

Heck yes. That is a fun fact! When you do get around to going for 100%, I'd say that the two hardest achievements, by quite a distance, are Auckland and Berlin. The rest were just a case of sitting down to do them, maybe taking a couple of tries, but no big deal. But those two felt genuinely difficult to me.

salut. i will keep this in mind and refuse to let my spirit be broken

[Imuabicus der Fertige]

So what would be the biggest gap in achievements in terms of diffculty to, well, achieve, be you´ve done so far? Cuz I´ve been looking through the accumulation of WoW achievements (around 4500 I think XD) and damn, some of them seem like obsessions and then others are like, Gratz on the Haircut!

[Integrity]

any mmorpg is going to be like that tbh, those will always run from "you hit level 10" to "completed hypermythic heroic raid wing 7 on curve" just by virtue of how huge the games are. that's not even counting extracurriculars like getting to a certain competitive mahjong rating in xiv, etc., or ones that require actual years of consistent effort (e.g. the darkmoon faire) even if the effort itself is pretty low-grade.

 

out of the more-limited singleplayer pool i've done, the obvious answer would be a paradox game where, to take ck2 for instance since i've done most of that one, the easiest achievement is "get married" (literally three interface clicks) and the hardest i have is something like "convert both rome and constantinople to the same indian religion". they even added some harder shit after i stopped keeping up, like starting as one of the eight chinese characters on the map, getting independent from china, and owning all of africa yourself.

 

my dark horse answer is gonna be space marine, though. you'll get the first achievement within minutes of gaining control (kill 5 enemies with a grenade; the enemies that attack you at that point are oneshot by grenades and attack in swarms of up to about fifteen) and no matter which of the three game modes you're focused on your ultimate achievement is either bonkers hard or takes a shitload of time. campaign lends itself best to the 40,000 kills achievement, which by my rough math would take about ten complete runs of the campaign to do. the multiplayer route has an absurd amount of work involved, with my napkin math from the blogpost about it coming to 542 competitive multiplayer games as a theoretical mathematical floor. exterminatus not only requires you to beat the chaos invasion arena, which is hard as hell to do with coordination and friends, but to do it in a public lobby with randoms.  all three of these are difficult, time-consuming, or both, and all operate in nearly disjoint theaters of gameplay.

[Integrity]

GIBBON: BEYOND THE TREES (BROKEN RULES, 2022)

Finished: 12/1/24. Playtime: 12 hours.

Cheating a little here just to be able to plug myself, plus I don't think I'm going to finish anything between now and Friday anyhow.

It's time to put some God-damn propaganda on this list. Gibbon: Beyond the Trees is a 2D platform autorunner produced in concert with various NGOs as absolute save the gibbons propaganda. Discard your negative associations with the word: gibbons are amazing and deserve a pretty good game to push their cause into the world. You have three buttons: swing, run, and flip. Flipping gives you a speed boost if you land it, and is only used in conjunction with swinging and running. The maps are designed in a way that really makes me think of what I wanted from 2D Sonic games, where going high is harder but faster and convertible to speed easily, while going low is generally easy and slow. Most of the game is a simple gameplay loop repeated for about six hours, and even the rarest achievement to complete the codex is just contained in that.

Twelve, though, you note? I beat this game twice, basically. I did this because, as I closed in on just needing to do the daily quest five more days to finish the game, I realized that there wasn't a single English-language guide for the game on Steam. Be the change you want to see, lads.

Edited January 10 by Integrity

[Integrity]

On 1/9/2024 at 11:35 PM, Integrity said:

Finished: 12/1/24. Playtime: 12 hours.

lol nailed it to the decimal fuck yeah i'm a genius

[lenticular]

On 1/10/2024 at 4:35 AM, Integrity said:

I realized that there wasn't a single English-language guide for the game on Steam. Be the change you want to see, lads.

90% of everything that I create derives from this feeling. "Oh, ffs humanity is that the best you can do? Why has nobody made this properly yet? Fine. Fine! I guess I'll do it myself then." This has given birth to everything from game guides to fanfiction to entire wikipedia articles. Exasperation is a powerful creative force.

[Integrity]

30XX (BATTERYSTAPLE, 2023)
Finished: 17/1/23. Playtime: 73.3 hours.

What if Mega Man............ was fun?

30XX is the (allegedly) vastly-improved sequel to 20XX, which set out to make a Mega Man X roguelite. I haven't played 20XX, but the mission statement encompasses 30XX perfectly. There's eight robot masters, you fight them in an order largely of your choosing, difficulty escalates from stage to stage but you find augments to increase your own power, etc. etc. It's a familiar loop, but 30XX nails it perfectly. The actual meta-progression is fairly light and happens quickly, and the game generally feels good to play even on a crap build, which combines to make the game feel much more like your success is based on you rather than the build you get. On the other hand, when a build pops off, you get to feel godly for fifteen or twenty minutes until you cruise out the endzone and deflate back to your bases. It's a fine balance, but combined with the map scaling and generation being fairly spot-on, it gives 30XX a hell of a lot of longevity.

Fortunate that it does, too, because the road to platinum in 30XX is obscenely long and is so closely tied in to progression that I'm already interrupting the review to move into it. Beating a run of 30XX, eight stages plus a two-part final stage, assuming you get an absolutely bonkers build and gather a couple of optional ones along the way, gets you like seven of the fifty achievements. There's, loosely, four sets of achievements to work towards from that point: the true ending, entropy, challenge runs, and boss challenges.

The true ending is a process. Every time you die or kill the final boss you return to your extradimensional time fortress and take the lessons learned from one more doomed/saved world into another tine on the infinity fork. Beating the game once unlocks a room for weird artifacts you can find by doing specific shit, and there's some esoteric shit you gotta put in there. Two require you to get three (and four) specific drops in the same run and then also go to a specific stage eighth, holding all of them, to get an alternate form of it which drops one of the true ending items. One's hidden in the tutorial, dropping a key you need to bring to a lore terminal in a different specific stage. One requires you to go to the RNG seeder and start a run with the seed waveformcollapse to get to a weird map with one of the items, and once you have all those, you get a cutscene and can finish the second half of the hunt. Do a Boss Rush, get three prototype augments (powerful buffs with big debuffs attached) and then go to another specific stage eighth, do a run without picking up any equippables to get an alternate final stage and another item, scrap fifty points worth of augments and go to another specific stage eighth, and only after collecting all of that can you attempt a genuinely difficult challenge stage without any of your metaprogression buffs. Beat that and, finally, you still need to get an RNG drop during a normal run of the game to get the true ending. Whew. One branch down.

Entropy is 30XX's postgame scaling mechanism. If you're familiar with Heat from Hades, or any similar itemized difficulty system where you turn things on to raise your Difficulty Level, it's the same thing. Various achievements are rewards for going up to 30 Entropy, which puts a whole slew of debuffs on enemies and buffs on you and is generally just an awful time. Entropy, I'd say, around 20 is when you start having to make the hard calls about including shit that makes the game way harder. Entropy 30 is just balls-to-the-wall horror. Less to explain, but this is the meat of the game - if you can conquer Entropy 30, everything else in the game will feel trivial in comparison.

A handful of achievements come from very specific challenge runs and modes. Completing the game fast, completing the game while finding every single optional zone and getting a gold medal in each, completing the game without taking damage more than ten times, completing the game without ever picking up any money, gathering a shitload of money without spending any, completing the game taking all eight boss powers, completing the game taking none of the eight boss powers, completing the game with three prototypes and no debuff cleanse, having an absolutely massive 500 hit points, completing the game with only 10 hit points left, and completing the game with only 10 maximum hit points encompass the ones in the main game. On top of that are to complete five Daily Challenges, which is just a fixed seed for everyone and a leaderboard to compete on, and to complete a boss rush, which you also have to do for the true ending. 30XX also comes with a mapmaker and two achievements to complete ten maps made by other people and to complete Ellie's Challenge with three lives, which has you go through your choice of three random community maps for each of the base game's worlds. It wasn't hard, but it did suck for two reasons, one being that people are really bad at making good maps and the other that I'll get to in a bit. Still, it's interesting that given their own boundless creativity and a huge toolbox with which to curate an experience, most people make things that are just worse than what the algorithm slaps together thoughtlessly.

The boss challenges are straightforward but difficult, except there's a workaround. Every boss has a special kill to achieve only if you fight them as their powered-up Stage 8 version. These range from things like killing the owl who runs away from you before he gets to his final arena, finishing off the entire multi-entity boss in a single attack, or dodging attacks from the guy who sets up ricocheting projectiles for an entire minute. The workaround trivializes all of these except for that last one.

Let's introduce the last element of 30XX: everything in the game except for, specifically, the tutorial and that challenge map at the end of the true ending is two-player co-op capable. 30XX was a birthday gift last year from my good mate Sirius, and we've gone through the platinum process hand-in-hand the whole way. It's wonky, sometimes unstable, and sometimes achievements only count for one or the other, but it makes everything a whole lot smoother. Also to reintroduce, here, is the "RNG drop" from the end of the true ending paragraph - this is a flower that lets you bypass all remaining boss fights and end the game early to get the true ending. For some reason, while Player 1 bypasses the fight, for Player 2 the boss "dies" instantly. This means that, for 7/8 of the boss challenge kill achievements, simply being Player 2 in a co-op game where the host found the flower will see the boss challenge kill achievement for whatever Stage 8 you go to unlock as soon as the boss door opens. I don't generally mod my games, but I am absolutely not above cheese. We traded hosting duties and got each other the nastier of these over the course of eight or ten games.

Both of these also ripple back through the previous categories, too. Ellie's Challenge only unlocks for the host, but you can still co-op it to smooth out the burden of choosing a bad map. Taking damage fewer than 10 times in a run is a hell of a lot easier with a partner to carry you; if you find the flower, Player 2 can conceivably just idle while Player 1 takes as much damage as they want to while clearing, with the only risk of damage being the mandatory mini-boss in the middle of each stage. We traded that achievement in this way too. Getting gold medals in every challenge sub-zone across the entire game is also unnecessary for Player 2 - as long as you visit all of the rooms and complete them at all, Player 2 gets the achievement even if Player 1 doesn't. The true ending components all drop a second copy if you get to their weird stages in co-op, and the true ending itself can be trivially accomplished together with a mate. A funny one that is fucky in co-op is that there's an achievement to die 50 times across all playthroughs, and deaths as Player 2 simply don't count. I've died a hundred times or more, and Sirius got the achievement months ago, but because he habitually hosted for the entire Entropy grind, I ended up not getting this until everything else was wrapped up, I was bored one night waiting for dailies, and I went into Stage 1 to die repeatedly. Owns.

I don't think I'd have ever had the grit and chutzpah to see 30XX through solo. It's a good game, I'd say great even, and I've enjoyed all the solo play I had to do for things like the true ending and beating a run without collecting any money (money gathered by both players counts. do not do this co-op). With a friend, deliberately slowplaying through it just an hour at a time? The game goes from great to absolutely fantastic. Huge recommendation.

Edited January 17 by Integrity

[Integrity]

this does mean that i have a game for every letter AND one with a number now 😎

[Dr. Tarrasque]

17 minutes ago, Integrity said:

On the other hand, when a build pops off, you get to feel godly for fifteen or twenty minutes until you cruise out the endzone and deflate back to your bases

Zookeeper's Burden is a hell of a drug.

Also, no mention of the 2 characters (with a 3rd coming soon) because we just ditched Ace since Nina becomes the safer and better DPS at higher entropies.

Edited January 17 by Dr. Tarrasque

[Integrity]

THE GREAT WAR: WESTERN FRONT (PETROGLYPH, 2023)

Finished: 20/1/23. Playtime: 70.4 hours.

This is gonna be a bit of a more philosophical one, because I've got twin feelings in my head about Great War, henceforth. I'll put my own thoughts up first and foremost: Great War is going down in my head as the biggest what-if of this decade so far. Petroglyph (known for the Command & Conquer remaster, among other RTSes) put a hell of an effort into creating a very unique RTS, and they almost made it all the way there. Further support, not even paid DLC just a few patches, could put this among the finest singleplayer RTSes ever made. That support's not coming, though, so we're left with a game that is good, if not great, and is inches away from being great. Thematic for World War I, ain't it.

The War of Inches' western front is replicated in this game. You're plopped into a turn-based hex map from Belgium to Switzerland, split down the middle, and told to handle it. Hex-to-hex combat follows Total War rules - autoresolve it or zoom in and handle it yourself in real time, with its own caveats. Every hex-to-hex map is fixed (from a pool of about ten), and each version is saved from action to action. If you attack Kaiserslautern from Saarbrücken and lay down trenches in the deployment phase, those trenches will all be present exactly as-in if you attack Saarbrücken again, or if the Hun attacks Kaiserslautern. It organically creates the trench nests of the western front over time, starting from the virgin fields of France. It's a genuinely commendable bit of games design. Repeated attacks on the same hex confer stacking morale penalties on the defender, and casualties and shells spent both count against global supplies, leaving you able to bleed or be bled commensurately.

The tactical combat is better than serviceable. It's quite good. Not in that it's a snappy, control-forward Starcraft-type RTS, but in that it understood the briefing, to cop a phrase from Parrhesia. The vibes are perfect. You'll send hundreds of men over the top into machine gun fire with the cold knowledge that the machine gun can only destroy the first company before the following ones take it down. You'll deploy ten companies of heavy artillery and drop an unfathomable number of shells on Jerry. Tanks are horrid superweapons if you haven't researched any of the counters to them. Men are immune to rifle fire while in trenches, and die in seconds when out of them. As a game goes, it's distinctly above-average, and capable of being incredible.

One thing I've noticed about the game, to a huge degree, is that player reviews home in on a single "issue": that the AI is 'solvable' and then the game no longer holds any challenge. Here's where I go philosophical. I also found this to be true, and agree with them to some degree that Great War is nowhere near the game I can easily imagine it to be, but I'm struggling contemplating this specific takeaway. It's worth noting that a bunch of dorks play an hour and say shit like "you can't turn trenches against your enemy" (you can lmao it's automatic) and I'm not addressing them. I'm addressing these guys who played two-three campaigns, twenty-twenty-five hours, and then left a negative review because the AI is too simple to keep their attention forever.

What's wrong with that? The AI is solvable, this is factual. Once you know their ways, you're only going to lose in deeply disadvantageous situations, like if you're defending with a single conscript corps. I found this to be true, and I also fell into AI cheese deeply as I closed in on plat. What's wrong with that, though? Is solving the AI not, itself, a game? What are singleplayer games if not figuring out the strategies that the AI copes worse with and exploiting them, or improving your execution such that you can outplay the AI with your non-cheese strategy of choice? That's every single singleplayer game that I can think of, if we're distilling things down long past when they're useful. Great War is, unfortunately, uniquely solvable - there's about two or three different strategies you can just bust the AI open with - but it still took me 25 hours to get to one. What were those 25 hours? How does this factor into "oh the AI is solvable it's not a challenge"? How much life should Great War have had? Most of these guys never delved into the difficulty options, which include more aggressive AI! This AI is also solvable, but it's an entirely different game to figure out how.

I think that last rhetorical question is the issue. Great War has all the trappings of a hundred-hour RTS experience. It's balance changes and AI tweaks away from being the bespoke version of Company of Heroes 2's Ardennes campaign. There's something about the particular entitlement of RTS gamers, maybe, that says a 30-hour singleplayer experience is somehow invalid. Is Great War invalid for only being that, and not managing to be what it ought to have been? Maybe invalid is too harsh a word, but I think the point is more succinctly put with it. It's, apparently, a disappointment, a failure, for only delivering twice the dollar value ratio done by Bioshock. There's a mismatch of expectations, and I'm inclined to put it largely on the fans, given as the fans are Gamers, but the blame is not exclusive to them.

I loved my time with Great War. I ground it out long past when I'd sleuthed out the AI and long past when I'd exploited every novel tactic I could think of. It annoys me, deeply, that people generalize it to what it ought to have been, thoughtlessly, and refuse to engage with the game as it is. Hell, that goes back to the guys I alluded to earlier - the guys who say "you can't turn trenches against the enemy" when you literally do, they just didn't engage with the game enough to realize it. It's definitely partly the fault of the game for not communicating it, but so it goes. I absolutely recommend the game on sale to anyone who likes quirky RTS, and it cuts me badly that I can't just recommend it at its $35 MSRP, because Petroglyph could easily have turned this into a masterpiece.

The achievements are not at all difficult to attain; play the game about 3 times through and you're good. One each for winning as the Central Powers and as the Allies, and one each for ahistorically taking Paris/Kreuznach before 1918 or dragging the war out to 1920. One normal campaign, one campaign as the other faction to drag out, a third campaign as the favorite faction to win fast. There's an achievement to spam the shit out of aircraft and to spam the shit out of chemical weapons, easy to wrap into those. There's an achievement to win a multiplayer battle; @Parrhesiashowed up for me as always. King. There are six Historical Battles to get a Gold Medal for achieving all Side Objectives on; do them all. Some of these are nasty, but nothing is affected by difficulty, so you can just turn it down when desired. That said...

In the geoscape, you get Events. Events are strategic mini-quests - kill 10 German companies, build a supply depot, research aircraft, shit like that. The final, and I do mean final, achievement of Great War requires you to finish 300 Events. After about 3.5 campaigns of the game, about the blood I expect in the stone, I had fifty-one. I had a save where I had two single-click (build a hospital, research siege artillery) Events ready to go, and spent two hours watching football and clicking through both events and reloading. It was agonizing. I don't regret anything, but holy hell, this was the worst part of a great game.

I'm mad as hell that Petroglyph isn't supporting Great War further, but I'm equally mad as hell that people don't recognize the good game it is in favor of the great game it could be. Two minds. Look it up, buy it on sale, play a campaign, get your money's worth. It's a genuinely innovative game, and the haters' complaints are often all correct, but they've got the wrong conclusions. The bastard of the day is Gamers, as always. Fuck the load of 'em.

[Integrity]

i didn't say this in the post but i took the multiplayer match against parrhesia as catharsis to fucking eviscerate him like he did to me in the age of empires multiplayer match i needed for an achievement

 

there are vanishingly few rtses i'm unequivocally better at than he is and this is one of them

[Parrhesia]

knew it was a mistake to rely on minoan composite bowmen again

[lenticular]

41 minutes ago, Integrity said:

It's worth noting that a bunch of dorks play an hour and say shit like "you can't turn trenches against your enemy" (you can lmao it's automatic) and I'm not addressing them.

I remember reading a review of this game on a history blog that I read which approached it in terms of historical accuracy more than gameplay, and one of his comments was that it was weird how easy it was to turn trenches against your enemy, because obviously real historical trenches weren't designed that way. I don't think that needs any further commentary from me.

[Integrity]

oh i'm excited as hell to read this post tomorrow

Edited January 21 by Integrity

[Integrity]

11 hours ago, lenticular said:

I remember reading a review of this game on a history blog that I read

tomorrow later: oh shit it's bret devereaux lmao that guy rules. i love this blog, parrhesia links it to me all the time, including some of his writings on trench warfare from before this post. i wholly agree with everything he said in the post and, frankly, should just replace my post with his. two particular comments:

he notes that trenches are equally effective in both directions but vulnerable from the sides, which is just about right - infantry always start facing the front and always reset to facing the front, and there's a not-insubstantial delay before they 'aggro' enemies approaching from the back. once they do, though, they're just at full firepower in that direction instead. he's fully correct in principle, though, that trenches are too easy to hold wrongways.

there's another thing that he talks about for a bit that i also meant to get into in my post and completely forgot to. i, like him, went into the game with the Knowledge of the Future! and immediately set about with very effective late war defense-in-depth techniques and ad-hoc rolling barrages through micro even though i didn't have them researched. the fact that the game's systems mostly organically rewarded me for bringing the strategic experience of hindsight back into the war, i think, speaks very highly of it at a fundamental level, even if it fumbles a little bit on the idea

anyway yeah instead of reading my post about the great war just read devereaux's lol