Integrity

TANK MECHANIC SIMULATOR (DEGENERALS, 2020) Finished: 18/6/23. Playtime: 37 hours*. I'm doing a little bit of a lie, here, and I'll fess to it in a moment. I love Job Games. I have a bunch of time in House Flipper, I spent a whole sick weekend once in Plane Mechanic Simulator, and I've always had a fondness for the very-adjacent farming sim game, whether it be Stardew Valley or putting way too much time into my panda garden in World of Warcraft. I'm quite sure that if I let myself sink my teeth into Euro Truck Simulator, I would never return. Actually, I'm going to go wishlist that right now. Point is, I love spending time doing menial things and making the world a little prettier. You will be seeing Powerwash Simulator in this thread at some point. On top of that, one of the first books I ever read when I was about three years old was Arms & Weapons, a 1980s encyclopedia of all of the many ways in which we've tried to kill one another over the millennia and the ways we've invented to stop ourselves from doing that. This spawned a lifelong fascination with all sorts of warfare, persisting to this day, and particularly tanks for whatever reason. I love tanks. Not exclusively, mind, but in the scheme of things tank development and design as a historical (and, hell, contemporary) subject is a source of eternal wonder for me. Enter Tank Mechanic Simulator. It's simple: you restore WW2 tanks. Fix shit and put it back together. The game speaks to me on levels previously unknown. There's honestly not much more to say about the game. You fix tanks. There's a test drive mode. It's shit. I never completed a course. I just fix 'em. Achievements involved an assortment of things which were... bizarrely designed. First up is to do everything - take an engine out, put an engine in, sit in the tank, sell something, fix something, recycle something, etc. No issues there. Second up is to do a lot of stuff. Finish fifty contracts, fix fifty tanks. Extract fifty tanks, which is a subset of contract and thus will always get you to fifty contracts. Fail fifty contracts, for some reason. You're given two tools that are generally worse than just taking things apart with your hands, remove 500 elements with each. Dig up a secret in one of the extraction maps. Then there's the meat of the game: fully fix one of each of the game's thirty-ish tanks and display it in your museum. You can cheat and pay in-game cash money for a fully-fixed copy of any tank, but I'm no coward. I subject myself to the RNG willingly. Each extraction mission gives you a random tank, and between missions some massively fucked up tanks can spawn in your scrapyard for cheap. For the most part, they just seem to spawn at random, though I'm told the Panzer 8 Maus doesn't spawn until you've done fifty contracts, but I got him before that. The KV-2 was the final one, taking me an hour or so of just reset farming contracts to get one to eventually spawn. My takes on the tanks were overall pretty simple - the halftracks, Goliath, and armored cars were pretty trivial; German tanks are massively overengineered and incredible pains in the ass, with a special shoutout to the Panzer 5 Panther for being the game's biggest pain; Soviet tanks were easy to get in and out of, and I suspect slightly undermodeled; the Churchill AVRE is the best. For the Americans, there's a whole DLC with nothing but extra variants of Sherman, and these guys are lovingly detailed, down to having to assemble individual gears within the gearbox. These were fantastic fun to rebuild, and they and the other later-patch American vehicles (the M18, mostly) were the highlight of the game. Finally, my lie. There's two achievements left. On Halloween and Christmas, the devs run an event which spawns a special contract, and you do it for the achievement. Rather than putting the game down for six months and then posting about it, I'm cheating and posting now, but I won't actually have platinum until late December. Ope.

i almost like iris' design, and that makes her the most frustrating of the lot. i said dark deity commits some spectacular own-goals and she's one of them - she's almost a solid design, and they just drop the ball for absolutely no reason

what do you mean it's not as bad as i'm making it out, the second literally has two booby cups on her boobs lmao it's something that i'd overlook an instance or two of, but this is all four women who are in any kind of armor. parr didn't withhold the good example because it disproves my argument or something, that's all of them in the game E: worth noting, as well, that the armored men of the game are covered tip to toe. this is not an equal opportunity hornzone.

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

it's crippling to the game but a little bit too accurate to say that it looks and plays like shit and explains nothing well at all tbh the fact that i enjoyed it so much, let alone at all, despite that is a testament to the bones on the thing

yeah the dd2 announcement is actually what sparked me to give dd a real college try lmao if you get down to it, though, isn't a roguelike srpg just going back to the roots of good ol' X-COM? 😉

DARK DEITY (SWORD & AXE, 2021) Finished: 11/6/23. Playtime: 48.6 hours. I would like to issue a formal apology, if the guys who made Dark Deity spend any time looking up "dark deity review" and stumble onto this page. I've spent a fair chunk of time online talking about how great our new era of indie strategy games is, where all the classic franchises have picked up an indie that followed in the footsteps of a franchise and learned all the right lessons. Advance Wars got Wargroove, Ogre Battle got Symphony of War, Final Fantasy Tactics got Fell Seal, and Fire Emblem got . Even beyond that, I've talked active shit about Dark Deity. I played a map or two a good while ago and took that as my confirmation bias to continue chatting quiet shit about Dark Deity online. It's such an easy punchline, and the swimsuit DLC made it even easier. That sojourn into Dark Deity left me with simple feelings: the character designs are all over the place, the writing is cringey, the maps are ugly, the game controls like shit and tells you nothing. And you know? None of that is wrong. I've beaten the game twice, now. The character designs are all over the place, and a subset of them (primarily women in armor) are awful. The plot is incompetently delivered, badly structured, and embarrassingly written; and the supports are only a bit better. The best looking map in Dark Deity still looks better than Vesteria Saga, but if I'm comparing anything to that 1999 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Campaign Map Maker ass game, it's not a compliment. The game controls like shit and the controls are obtuse enough that I discovered checkpoint saves and enemy phase skips towards the middle of my second playthrough - and that's ignoring all the niggling command-cancelations and menu fuckups and bizarre design elements that tripped me up on the regular, every map. The game's tutorials are almost parodic in how awfully they're presented, and that's if you bother to seek them out and don't assume the game will explain things to you as you go. I haven't mentioned the bugs! About six total times in two playthroughs, units managed to move out of bounds or impose themselves in quantum superpositions and wouldn't respond to orders for a turn, or dead enemies would not clear off the board. The Danger Zone is proudly here from Shadow Dragon on, but doesn't account for adverse terrain or units who are flagged to not move. It's, objectively, a mess. Now take a breath, and please listen to me when I say I do recommend a certain kind among you to pick up and try Dark Deity, a game I would rank in the upper half of Fire Emblems overall. Beneath all that obfuscatory bullshit, beneath a layer of unforced grime and spectacular own-goals, is a tactical RPG with a shocking amount of depth and room for self-expression. Dark Deity take a lateral step, taking the concept of the weapon triangle, distilling it into 'a system of weapon advantage', and comes up with a small matrix of weapon and armor pairups. Every unit has a weapon type and an armor type, and during combat, each unit's weapon is matched against the other's armor when determining damage. The matches are pretty logical outside of magic - which is magic - where crushing weapons are better against heavily-armored targets, while swords tink helplessly off plate, etc. They also stay impactful through the entire game, to the point where you need an exceptionally good unit or some significant extracurricular support if you want to go completely against type and use a leather-wearing swordsman to take down a sword-bearing plate-clad knight. Adding to this is the progression systems, plural, stacked upon each other. The most obvious and basic is the class system' there's six basic archetypes - Warrior, Archer, Mage, Cleric, Thief, and Adept - that have commonalities. Each has a fixed utility skill: Warriors can Shove, Archers can Haste to let an ally move one more space this turn, Mages can Reposition, Clerics can (shockingly) Heal, Thieves can Disarm to remove all weapon stats from a target for one turn, and Adepts can Chain a target in place for one turn. Each has a promotion tree shared by all other members of that class, two-tiered, where the promotions have three effects. First, they change growths - and the changes to unit growths are shown on promotion, thankfully. Second, they add two skills to the unit permanently, which have huge impacts on the way a single unit works. Third, they can change the weapon or armor type, or both, for a unit. All these changes, with a new sprite and animations, combine to make promotion feel impactful. You don't actually gain a single point of any stats when a unit promotes, but it still feels like a fresh new unit right out the gate, and that luster doesn't diminish as you learn more about the system. Every second tier class has a third tier equivalent, but the promotions are completely uncoupled - you can go from any tier 2 to any tier 3 class. This creates a ton of fun once you know what you're doing, as the second tier becomes some stat skewing and permanent skill allocation to the final class. You can fuck it completely - I took Aurima a physical-centric promotion at tier 2, then a magical class at tier 3, and did the shocked Pikachu face when he was really terrible - or you can swerve your healer into the evil soul-stealing shadow priest tier 2 before taking them back to being a proper healer at tier 3, but now they leech health on attacks forever. The system is genuinely fucking fantastic and I do not have a bad word to say about it that isn't related to little balancing issues here and there. The other system, strapped around the outside of it, is a bit more esoteric and badly explained by the game. Every enemy you kill in every map nets you a gold bounty, and finishing any map gets you a further bounty based on how few turns you took to get through it. Gold is spent in the intermap base at the shop, but not on what you might expect. Weapons are simply skills affixed to a character, with four color-coded ones equipped by every unit at all times corresponding to might, hit, crit, and balance. Weapon tokens upgrade these weapons from tier 1 through tier 4, adding chiefly to its respective stat (and secondarily to the others), and increasing weight (which is unmitigable) as you go. Unupgraded weapons are worse, but lighter, organically corresponding to something like Fates' bronze weapons, so keeping a weapon unupgraded strategically is a really good idea, but you're going to want the extra hit and might on better weapons to hit faster enemies by the midgame. Gold is used to buy these weapon tokens and statboosters, which makes it an incredibly interesting system that sort-of follows the vein of BEXP, but targeted. Essentially, gold just becomes a resource you spend directly on stats, one way or another, on the units you want to spend it on, and you're rewarded gold both for how fast and how thoroughly you go through a map. It creates a fantastic dynamic where you feel like you're being rewarded with extra supplies no matter how you choose to go through maps, and you have tremendous liberty in how to spend those supplies to augment your army in a very straightforward way. I'm a huge fan of this system. I do want to spend a little bit of time talking about the levels, too. Dark Deity swings for the fences and, honestly, I can't say that it misses. It has multiple setpiece boss fights, easily the nadir of any Fire Emblem besides, peculiarly, Revelation and Radiant Dawn, and they're both fun, imaginative fights that evoke what they mean to. Sure, one's a bit too easy, but I'm not going to hold that against the game. There's a common misconception among Fire Emblem players that a map is defined by its objective - you've heard it at some point, I know, that Birthright had 'less interesting' maps because they were all Rout, unlike the cool Conquest maps which had objectives like Seize* (*: you practically have to kill every enemy to get to the seize point) and Defend* (*: you could rout the map before the defend timer wound down). That's a bit petty, to be sure, but I hope the point is taken - map design is so much more than the objective bolted on to guide the player. Dark Deity's got an unconventional set of objectives, but they're often in service of maps that force you to split your party, allow you to choose how many ways to split your party, force you to build independent task forces, ask you to defend and attack together, and a good number of other scenarios. To call them escape, kill boss, etc. maps on the face of it distills them to Fire Emblem's frequently-unimaginative uses of those. Dark Deity has maps that actually require fairly different approaches and a system that doesn't let you juggernaut them nearly as easily as you can Fire Emblem. In fact, that brings me to a big thing. A non-refreshing part of many spiritual successors, re-imaginings, etc. is an adherence to the source material 'because it's that way'. A re-imagining of a beloved franchise that refuses to bear down and Introspect on why systems operate the way they do is, in my opinion, doomed for failure at worst and cargo-culting at best. Dark Deity, for good and ill both, has no qualms about slaughtering the sacred cows of Fire Emblem. You can smell the DNA of Fire Emblem all over the game, but nothing in the game is imported from the source material without inspecting Why it worked. This does create a disconnect in a lot of the reviews on Steam, which I regrettably trawled through, where people treat it like it's Fire Emblem, rather than a game inspired by Fire Emblem, and have a terrible time with it. It isn't Fire Emblem. It's got the vibes, it's got the feel, it's got the pattern, but if you just try to play it directly like Fire Emblem you're going to have a terrible time. Think, people. Engage media on its terms. It's far healthier. In the end, the thing I want to impart most dearly onto you, the reader, is this. If you play Fire Emblem for the tactics, if you have a game where you skip the cutscenes on every replay but still like seeing how things shake out, if you dabble in the Lunatics, give Dark Deity a shot on sale at least. It skews hard sometimes, but if you're the kind of person who thinks Birthright or Awakening Lunatic is a fun difficulty for having a good time in that applies your brain but doesn't overload it, Hard Dark Deity will tickle your strategic needs if you let it and if you meet it where it is. There's a lot of jank, many totally-unforced errors, and an incredibly bad final map in this stew, but it's all masking a core game with a lot of heart and thought put into it, even when it goes a little bit off the rails. If you fit the mold I laid down, and you're willing to let Dark Deity love you in all its warty glory, I'm confident you'll find an experience you at least look back fondly on, if not a new favorite for the ages. After that whole screed, the achievements were nothing. Winning on Lunatic-equivalent gets you all but about four achievements almost inevitably, and none of them take more than a map to clear up. There's three challenge achievements; two I got by mistake, and one that's psychotic to speedrun Chapter 6 in 8 turns, which is a huge rout full of mixed-range pods well before you have a squad you can rely on. I did it on Easy in 7. Ok bye

poor dude happened to press the spam button right when i was doing a vanity check of the viewcount on my steam platinums blog. you hate to see it

Let's have some fun with numbers. I'm still a bit sick, but it's not as bad as the last few days. I decided to put together a spreadsheet for the 100th game and track basic stuff about the games I've been doing, This is not intended to give any particular insight into my gaming habits or anything, it's just a fun little sideshow. 1. THE DATA For each game, I noted down the year, developer, publisher, genre, date of first achievement, and date of final achievement. Some caveats to the data: for developer/publisher/year, I went with the absolute original in all cases, and for the collections used the date of the first game in them. Quake, as said, is a remaster from 2021, including mission packs from various points from 1997 to 2021, and the license has passed around a few times during that time, but I decided to go with id developing, GT publishing, in 1996. Additionally, there's a handful of games where I got my first achievement before some point in 2008-2009 when Steam started to reliably keep the data. Most notably, achievement timestamps from my first play of The Orange Box are just Absent, so all my Half-Life 2: Episode 2 achievements are either unstamped or from the same week in 2021. In these cases, I didn't try to estimate when I got my first - I just used the first timestamped one. 2. WHAT KIND OF GAMES DO I PLAY? Let's look at some charts for a few sections. There's nothing particularly surprising here, I'd say. "Action" is kind of a catch-all including third-person brawlers, isometric hack-n-slashes, and generally anything where your primary mode of interacting with the world is to improve upon your Violence Loop. Given that the Soulslike and Yakuzas together account for sixteen of those twenty-three on their own, it's obvious why it makes second place here. FPSes being #1 is absolutely unsurprising, with five Calls of Duty leading the pack and with FPS being historically one of my favorite genres. The small-scale ones actually map to my tastes fairly well in the lower 50% - a predisposition to strategy, with real-time slightly leading turn-based, but only because I elected to flag the Total War games as RTS first. I'll play a third-person shooter if I'm very hungry for a first-person shooter, but distinctly don't prefer them; platformers are largely here on the back of Sonic the Hedgehog. Most everything else is a blip. 3. WHO MAKES THE GAMES I PLAY? Loads of these are 1-count developers, and there's not too much interesting here. The developers that get flagged over 1% are almost exclusively developers that did a franchise I did multiple games of - TCA with Total War, Sonic Team with ...Sonic, Infinity Ward with Call of Duty, etc. We can laugh at Bethesda for being there at 2% with two different copies of Skyrim and nothing else; I think I'm doing Father Todd proud. Bizarrely, the only developer there with multiple franchises represented is the Islamic state of Crapcom, handing Resident Evil, Monster Hunter, and Mega Man all up for consideration. Good on you, Capcom. 4. BUT WHO COMMISSIONS THE GAMES I PLAY? Here's a slightly more interesting chart. To get the lion's share out of the way: if a company only published games by their in-house dev studio, that's what I defined as 'self' published. Tripwire, for instance, largely only publish their own in-house games, but they have acted as a publisher for other developers before, so they didn't get the self-published moniker even though Killing Floor 2 was developed and published by Tripwire. I felt like that was a reasonable way to get a catch-all category where 'self' actually means self-published indie games, shit like Zachtronics or Supergiant (well, since Bastion). With that in mind, nearly a quarter of my shelved games being indies makes perfect sense for a variety of reasons - more likely to have gotten them in Humble Bundles, often shorter games, lower cost if I didn't get them for free, just to name a few. Sega pulling up the rearguard also doesn't surprise too much, given as they command the licenses for Yakuza, Total War, Warhammer, Sonic, and a bunch of other franchises. I'm actively working on four more Sega games, only one of which was developed by Sega, as we speak. I guess Sega is the savior of PC gaming. One fun shoutout does go to 2K, providing the in-house Bioshock along with publishing Spec Ops: The Line and XCOM: Chimera Squad. That's a fun little set of games! 5. WHEN DID THE GAMES I PLAY COME OUT? I'm just including this one for completion. Shocking nobody, almost every game has come from after Steam launched in 2003. The only reason anything's before that is remasters like Mega Man, Crazy Taxi, Doom 64, etc. Otherwise, there's no discernible pattern to the data. 6. HOW LONG DO I TAKE TO FINISH GAMES? The short answer is 'usually within a year'. This is skewed slightly for games like, for instance, Boyfriend Dungeon, which took me "over a year" but was really played in precisely three sessions, so 56/100 games falling into 'within a year' is even lowballing it. The averages reflect this - the mean days to completion is 906, or roughly two and a half years, but the median is only 170 days. The outliers are where the fun is, though, right? The longest between first and final achievement is almost certainly one of the Orange Box games, but data from the beginning of those games just doesn't exist. Presuming I got my first achievement for Portal in November of 2007, it would come in at around 4,800 days, or 13 years and change. Instead, the earliest achievement I have recorded in this set comes from Audiosurf, recorded October 1st, 2009, where I did my first Ninja Mono run. Christ, I was barely eighteen at the time. Audiosurf itself would get put on the platinum shelf, with help from Dave from IT, about a year ago for a total of 4,612 days, or twelve and a half years. Nothing else even cracks the 4,000 day barrier, but Space Marine puts a legendary effort into it, coming in at 3,999 days. Three other games make up the Over Ten Years bin: Empire: Total War, Skyrim, and Mount and Blade: Warband. What about the other end of the spectrum, though? I've completed three games in a sitting each: Save Room, Viscera Cleanup Detail: Shadow Warrior, and Untitled Goose Game. These were all short games that I picked up, got everything in a few hours, and put down, satisfied. Interestingly, there's no game between 3 days to completion and a week to completion, so I suppose that those 3-day-and-under games are the Extended Session ones - games where I started and didn't think about much other than it for a frenzied few days. Portal is here, but unjustly - that was just my replay/mopup to get whatever I didn't get in 2007. Dredge is here, as are three Calls of Duty: Modern Warfare, lacking only MW3. Elderborn, Crush the Castle Legacy Collection, and Crazy Taxi round it out. Nothing awful surprising there, Call of Duty campaigns don't tend to be super meaty when you do them on Veteran first-try, and the remainder are split between games where a bug bit me awful bad (Elderborn, Dredge) and pretty beer-and-pretzelly games (CtC, Crazy Taxi). There is no median game, interestingly. There's a huge gap between 140 days (The Bible) and 201 days (FTL), though FTL has a similar caveat to the ancient games - Subset didn't add Steam achievements until I was a hundred hours deep, and my in-game challenges all converted to Steam achievements. The mean game, or at least within a month of the mean, is Road Redemption, clocking in at 875 days. That one was a grind I stopped several times. Outliers show some fun in franchises, too. I mentioned the Calls of Duty: Modern Warfare earlier, at 2, 1, and 3 days for the original, 2019, and MW2 respectively, but Modern Warfare 3 shatters their average at 2,222 days. This was fueled in part by the long Survival grind, in part by needing Parrhesia to not be in Australia for Spec Ops help, and in part because I played the campaign on Hardened back in 2016 just to get a feel for it after a deep Steam sale. The two versions of Skyrim come in at 3,688 days (the original, which I played for fun) and 7 days (Skyrim Special Edition, which I played only for achievements). The real franchise fun is in Yakuza. I've said that Yakuza 5 is the Most Game before, and the numbers play out to how that game nearly broke my resolve. Yakuza 0 clocks in at a healthy 101 days, which makes sense - I started and stopped once, then I had to formulate all of the strategies that would carry me through the rest of the games, and on top of that 0 is still one of the beefiest games in the saga to complete. You can then track the trend down: Kiwami in 15 days, as the strats settle in and I become more proficient at a variety of things; Kiwami 2 in a mere 7, given as Kiwami 2 is one of the easier ones to complete balanced against this being early in my run; 3 and 4 each in 9 days, as I'm really getting into the flow. Yakuza 5 then took 27 days, longer than 2, 3, and 4 combined. Not from an hours standpoint - I put roughly 250 hours into those three compared to 170 into Yakuza 5 - but it just ground my resolve down. The single digit Yakuza days were over. 6, despite being fairly straightforward, took 15 days; 7 took 18, and would have taken a lot longer had I not had the Steam Deck to grind on. Judgment only took 17 days, despite being the third-longest by hours, which is pretty telling for just how much I loved Judgment. Then the opposite shows up; Lost Judgment, which I had reservations about, finished up over 71 days; and Ishin! came in at a whopping 101, taking us exactly back to Yakuza 0's numbers except without a multiple month break in the middle. Yowch. 7. CONCLUSION I don't intend to meticulously update these metrics as I go. Maybe I'll do a 200 games special update, but this was just a fun project for a big milestone. There's a couple games cookin' for the prospective next one, but it'll be at least a week yet unless I get a huge break in Dawn of War 2. This has been a pleasure, fellas, and thanks for listening in to all my rambling bullshit. Here's to a hundred more!

i have a special surprise for the 100th but i'm way too tired to roll it out tonight check back tomorrow EDIT: i got sick check back the next time i post 😞

MEGA MAN LEGACY COLLECTION (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 6/6/23. Playtime: 82.3 hours. I'm writing this post unbelievably out of order. Given as this is a collection of games, I'm writing this intro paragraph on the tail end of Mega Man 6, having written each of the below paragraphs as I finished their games, while my thoughts were fresh, then writing this one after the games and before the challenges, and then I'll write about the challenges when I do them, and then I'll write something to close it all out. It's ever so complicated. I do not have a historical relationship with the Mega Men. We owned a Famicom and Super Famicom and, later, a NES and SNES, but this wasn't ever a franchise that captured my dad's eye, so it wasn't one we ever had. The very first time I played a Mega Man was on one of those emulation sites in circa 2009, I played about two bosses of Mega Man 2 and less than a stage of Mega Man after Airman ga Taosenai hit what passed for viral back then. I thought Mega Man 2 was not very good and 1 was atrocious, so I never played another one of the games. The closest I would come in the next twelve years is being incredibly shit at One Step from Eden, which is Mega Man adjacent through a subseries, I'm told. I'd just never found the games to be particularly interesting, so I never went in and gave them a proper try. Well, for some reason, I own Mega Man Legacy Collection Volume One. Whether I like them or not, this is genuinely a huge hole in my Cultural Knowledge of Gaming, like being a film bro and somehow never having seen a single Kubrick film. Irregardless of quality, they're important. It sounds insanely dweeby, but I felt like I owed it to myself to have an opinion about Mega Man, so let's go about it and pick the Blue Bomber apart. The achievements are simple - beat each of the six games, and get a gold medal (time-based) in each of fifty Challenges, which are mixups of stage segments and bosses from various games chained together - so I won't really talk about them outside of my thoughts about the games and challenges below. MEGA MAN (1987) Mega Man was, honestly, shit. I did not enjoy it. It peaked, roughly, at 'okay, if you're very hungry'. The iconic get boss weapons to counter other bosses setup of the franchise felt far more like guessing at the proper weapon in order to have a decent time against any given boss, rather than smugly pulling out a counter. Hell, the weapons themselves felt like shit with a single exception, Thunder Beam, which felt like the fist of an angry god. The Magnet Beam was janky utility that I never got my head around using particularly efficiently. There's something to be said for this, you know, 36 year old game being a bit unintuitive, frustrating, and unsatisfying, but I'm not giving it any leeway. Sorry, Mega Man. We'll see if the series improves from here. Outside of 'anytime there was precise platforming' and 'ice physics' being awful, the only really notable bits of the game were two boss fights. Guts Man fucking sucked, and there's a real chance he's still the Worst Man by the end of this six-game rampage. The Yellow Devil, on the other hand, is one of the worst bosses in a video game I've ever fought. I gave him old college tries for about twenty minutes, almost got to where I could jump the yellow blocks without taking damage once every other time of asking, and consulted ancient AGDQ knowledge from decades past to do pause buffer damage strats to one cycle him. Fuck that noise. I'm not above exploiting. MEGA MAN 2 (1988) Mega Man 2 built up a lot of goodwill from the word go. The game controls just a little better, the drop rates are just a bit more forgiving, the stages are just a bit better designed. The weapons were far more satisfying, outside of two, than the original, and I found myself swapping a lot more than I ever did in the first. The bosses swung a little too hard in the opposite direction of 'completely hardcountered by the right weapon', but I prefer that to 1's 'fair fight with, slog without' approach. Air Man would not be defeated. I can genuinely say that I pivoted completely from the original - I had an actual good time going through the eight robots of Mega Man 2. Then the game threw every bit of that goodwill away. Wily's Castle was bad in 1 and fucking awful in 2. The individual fights are shit, to some degree - the dragon was just no fun at all to platform up to and fight, The Room was either zero difficulty or instant damage for each wave, the tank, and then it got worse. The Wall of Turrets that can only be destroyed by Crash Bomb, which is one of the two weapons I alluded to not enjoying earlier, was awful and I thought it was going to be a one-off miss, not a portent of things to come. From here, we hit a long sequence of having nowhere to recharge the guns and having entire bosses who aren't damaged by half, or even all but one in two occasions, of your arsenal. The Wily Robot was a shit fight, in both phases, but at least the default buster could do the job. For the Wall and the Alien? With no way to recharge your guns except a game over + continue? To have only their Weakness Weapon be capable of doing damage? Sure, if you wipe in the Wall, you can farm the annoying shield dudes on your way back to recharge the Crash Bomb, but once you're through there you have the stocks you have. The fact that everything except the bubbles heals the Alien is just a footnote here, that's how badly I felt about everything after entering Wily's Castle. Here's hoping that when people say this is the best of the original games there's always an unspoken 'except for the parts that are really bad' afterwards. To be fair to Mega Man 2's back third, I did enjoy the boss rush of the regular bots, but that's not really the fault or credit of Wily's Castle. MEGA MAN 3 (1990) I think I liked Mega Man 3 less even than the original. To give it the most basic justice, the very core hop-n-bust loop has the quality of 2's, which is an improvement on 1. This is where my praise for Mega Man 3 ends. The robosses have an absurd theming, and the fights are almost bad to a man. Proto Man's invasions wreck the pace of the stages, and his fight is both tedious and high-risk somehow. Hell, between those two, I felt like almost every high-stakes fight was entirely against collision, and the projectiles were just there to distract me from the fact that the enemy was going to jump relentlessly at me and do insane damage if he connected. The stages were poor, and Wily's Castle did not redeem them. Remixed versions of earlier stages, all eight 2 bosses, a do-over for the Yellow Fucking Devil, and a Wily robot fight that I straight up had to look up a strat for because I could not discern the part of his body that was taking damage. I genuinely do not have a single word of praise for any of the combat encounters in Mega Man 3. One way to compensate for poor encounter design is with a solid gameplay loop, though, and fortunately, Mega Man 3 also completely fucking flubs this one. The weapons are, to a unit, more gimmicky, flaccid, harder to use, and without any of the punch of 2's generally great suite, or even 1's weird loadout. The armory of Mega Man 3 is among the worst I've experienced. The standout weapons were, honestly, the two that were basically 'it's the buster but it does more damage to some enemies'. The worst part about the weapons was that they were more gimmicky and less generally applicable, but also had disgustingly low ammo counts to discourage experimentation. Combined with enemies getting increased i-frames, there were entire bosses who were weak to the Magnet Missile who I failed to kill with my entire stock of the Magnet Missile thanks to shooting too early, having it blocked by Air Man's tornados, or just hitting i-frames without realizing it. It took me most of the game to figure out what was going on with that. I said I wasn't going to give Mega Man much of a pass on account of it being 36, but I've learned that I subconsciously did. I did not extend nearly the same indulgence to Mega Man 3 on account of I've seen them do better. 1 was an experiment, floundering around in the dark to try to invent a new style of video game. 3 is a failure. MEGA MAN 4 (1991) What the fuck happened? Mega Man 3 was so bad. It was a remarkably terrible game. Why is Mega Man 4 good? It certainly wasn't my favorite game ever, but I'd say it was the most fun I've had with the Mega Men so far as a whole package, and not by a small margin, either. The robosses still had a stupid theming, but it was more memorable than 3's at the very least, and the weapons actually had use cases in stages outside of 'apply to the correct boss so you don't have a terrible time.' The stages themselves were a little repetitive - I did start to notice repeating rooms - but there wasn't terribly much Bad about them outside of Cossack's opener, which masterfully combined ice and snow physics to be shockingly terrible. Drop rates and ammo counts hit a nice midpoint between the generosity of 2 and the bleak scarcity of 3. Hell, the part of the game that's been universally the worst - everything after the robosses - wasn't, somehow. The Mike Cossack stages, outside of the first minute and a half, were pretty good. The bosses were fun fights. The Wily stages got a little rude with placing enemies under blind drops and shit, but the fights weren't anything too bad. I'd say the final Wily fight was the worst of the bunch, but even he wouldn't crack the bottom rungs of the post-roboss ladders from any of the previous games. I don't even need to pin a caveat on it like I did for 2, I just liked Mega Man 4 and thought it was a good game. Wild. MEGA MAN 5 (1992) I'm building a theory that Mega Men are like Star Trek films - the even ones are worth seeing, skip the odd ones. It doesn't really scan to my experiences with the films but hey, it's a fun axiom. Mega Man 5 wasn't as bad as 3, and it was more polished than 1. It was just kind of regular-bad. Kind of unremarkably. The weapons weren't very good, but only a few were notably terrible. The stages weren't very good, the bosses weren't very good, it was just an exceptionally 4/10 experience. I really don't have much to say about Mega Man 5 besides "i didn't like it very much". I appreciate the invention of M-tanks to refill all your guns after the roboss rush, at least. That's a solid check for 5. Annoyingly, I missed exactly one letter going through the eight stages, so I didn't get the bird. They did make Mega Man's eyes not track the roboss you have highlighted in the stage select though. What the hell! That was the only cool thing 3 did. MEGA MAN 6 (1993) I liked Mega Man 6. If 5 was just a kind of neutral bad, this was just a kind of neutral good. There's a lot of stuff in here, individually, that I'd like to see in a better game. The transformation suits took a bit of warming up to. I complained earlier about how weapons felt like counters you swap in for bosses rather than alternate weapons for different situations in the bad games, and they felt like that here. It took a good bit of playing (until X's castle, really) to realize that the weapons did have decent use cases in-stage, I was just using the jet as a platforming/mobility crutch. Looking back on it, I think that's actually pretty good design. I sacrificed combat utility for platforming, not because the combat utility was worth less than the platforming, but because I was covering for my own weaknesses. I think with a quick change mechanic, even caching two forms for fast swap rather than something like a modern weapon wheel, would have gone a long way towards realizing the design Mega Man 6 was going for - but I do recognize that the game was made for a NES controller's utter paucity of buttons. Besides that, though, I had a fine enough time. The weapons were a little hit and miss, the theming was silly (Tomahawk Man!) but stronger than the last few games, nothing hit either the heady heights or turpid lows of Mega Man 2. The X/Wily stages were a bit of a drag, but nothing in them was notably bad. I think that one was more down to burnout on me than any fault of Mega Man 6, honestly. Now, however, I can say confidently: Mega Man 4 > 6 > 2 > quite a gap > 5 > 1 > 3. CHALLENGES This kind of small-bite optimization is honestly the shit I breathe. Taking a small scenario and practicing it until I have it reasonably-perfect speaks to me on an irrational level. This is a lot of why, like, the Yakuza minigame completions appeal to me so much, or even to a lesser degree the Just Cause wingsuiting and suchlike. It's weird, because one could completely encapsulate the Sonic games I don't like in that statement, and yet they don't appeal to me for some reason. Still, the conceit of these challenges is that they take a series of screens from one or multiple games and send you through them on a time attack. It's a good conceit. The execution is kind of terrible. The first problem comes up really rapidly - the grab-bags favor a few screens per game immensely. The long Quick Man instant-death screen shows up in almost every single mixup that includes Mega Man 2 in any form, showing up I think seven times out of 46 total non-bossrush challenges, of which about nine include Mega Man 2. Various Men show up bizarrely often, as well - Pharaoh Man shows up in nearly every relevant mix, despite his strategy being 'hold triangle until he dies'. Metal Man is in most of his possible mixes, despite being twoshot by his own weapon and being trivial to clear without damage. Some of the preferred screens are just long and uninteractive, like the Mega Man 2 postgame one where you're shooting bird eggs and then have to sit on Item-2 for like nine seconds. It's not like they're choosing the hardest screens, even, because a few of them include screens that are just 'Eddie gives you an item' as part of them. It's too consistent to be random, but too weird and bad to be curated. I'm unsure if it was just incompetence or what. The second problem follows - the times are often utterly draconic considering how many screens involve instant-death platforming. The timer runs irregardless of what you do, so swapping weapons is a few-second tax, dying is a ten-second tax give or take, watching a boss's spawn animation is a five-to-eight second tax, etc. Dying to a late instant-death platform, particularly in Mega Man 5-inclusive mixes, can cost 30 seconds or more, where many mixes have a 10-30 second margin for Good Execution to get gold. The later ones are a bit more lenient, and some are insanely so (I watched a guy die twice and fuck up weapon choices repeatedly and still beat a stage by 2 minutes and change), but it absolutely is a recurring issue. It creates a strange difficulty curve where you unlock challenges sequentially by pair of game, but the hardest challenges are at the end of each pair of game, rather than being clustered; and they ease off as you go, and the All Game megamixes are more forgiving than their paired counterparts. It's odd. It's even kind of random within that ruleset - with two extra deaths in the 6 All Robosses compared to the 5 All Robosses, I got gold in 5 by a solid 45 seconds, and I missed gold in 6 by two and a half minutes. Then you get to the final set of challenges. The Challenge Challenges are simple - complete any four of the following with golds, and most of them with any medal, for completion: beat all robosses of Mega Man <X> with only the Buster, beat all 46 robosses with only the Buster, and beat all the appearing-block screens without items. This is, I think, the ultimate challenge of the Mega Man Legacy Collection. I didn't do Mega Man 2's challenge because I didn't have to and, frankly, because fuck that. There was enough to deal with learning the perfect-timing Electricity Man stunlock, cursing God while Dust Man or one of the legion of Men who can turn invincible spammed the invincibility move and burning clock like hell, or wearing my thumbs down charging shots forever in the 4+ games. The final challenge was all robosses, all games, Buster only, and this was torturous primarily for the Mega Man 3 bosses. It all comes back to that shithole of a game, to the point where I even ended up grinding out the Buster-only 3 robosses challenge (not needing the medal) just to be able to practice them for the All Robosses Buster Only. Mega Man 3 will haunt me until I die, I swear. The final hurdle came with the fiftieth gold. The first 46 came without too much difficulty each, just a lot of grinding. The Mega Man 1, 4, and 5 robosses (no items) fell without too much difficulty, surprisingly in the case of 5. My time for All Robosses Buster Only came in 15 minutes over estimate, and fucked if I was gonna do that again to try to make that the one. That left 2 and 6 Buster Only, or All Appearing Blocks Buster Only. I drilled all of these a bit and came to a realization. When I watched Austin Powers for the first time, and for the second time, I laughed at this ridiculous parody of the Bond films. When I finally knuckled down and watched some of the classic Connery and the ilk Bonds, I realized that Austin Powers was hardly a parody. I had the same realization here, but for I Wanna Be the Guy and the appearing blocks stages. I thought that was a psychotic overtuned take on a silly platformer game, but no, actually, the Mega Man appearing blocks are actually almost that shitty and stupid. Gold on the stage requires basically doing every single screen perfectly, so I ditched it and drilled hard on the 6 Buster Only rush. I was not going to yoke myself to killing Crash and Quick Man with any semblance of speed or reliability, respectively. Doing these All Buster challenges deeply raised my level of contempt for these games' fight designs, and this was no different. About half of the Mega Man 6 robosses share the simple attack of rushing at you a short distance with no tell at high speed, and for all of them it's the most dangerous thing they can do. It's deeply irritating to lose a run because Blizzard Man decided to, instead of using his attacks, simply keep using the Walk Towards Mega Man attack, his highest damaging and least-punishable one. It really stresses how fundamentally shaky these games are, that if any boss's entire loadout were replaced by hopping at you (as Shadow Man's is) they would become infinitely more threatening. I ground it out and, frankly? I'm pretty fucking proud of myself for it.

WARHAMMER: VERMINTIDE 2 (FATSHARK, 2018) Finished: 29/5/23. Playtime: 94.3 hours. Let's talk about Left Four Dead. Left 4 Dead was, honestly, a proof of concept game. It was so impossibly novel when it was fresh - nothing outside of some really raw Source mods even compared - that we papered over all of the cracks and just cranked hour after hour into it. Most of it was due to the sheer brilliance of the Versus mode, to be sure, but the core game had so many great nuggets of ideas that it didn't quite recognize that, with literally no other options, we simply took it as it was. Left 4 Dead 2 is among the finest games ever made. Left 4 Dead 2 is nearly immaculate. It's unapproachable on its throne, but in so being, has spawned a suite of successors, spiritual sequels, and genre fodder all its own. There's far too many to enumerate, though I would love to spend a paragraph or so picking on Back 4 Blood (I'm not just piggybacking Crowbcat's perfect video, I've played it myself), so today we're narrowing down on what is to my knowledge the only company to dedicate themselves to the Left 4 Dead Alike Game: Fatshark. Fatshark is a Swedish company that flailed about putting out the B-versions of other games for a while. Probably their biggest splash was War of the Roses, which was Chivalry-at-home before Mordhau became the go-to for the PvP FPS melee game. At some point, they got the license for a Warhammer: End Times project, tying into the much-maligned new era of Warhammer Fantasy at the time which is being quietly rescinded as we speak. The resultant Warhammer: End Times: Vermintide: Colon Overload followed in the footsteps of Left 4 Dead solidly. It was a melee-focused FPS, where you roam through stages to accomplish objectives and extract at the end. The pattern follows Left 4 Dead closely, but they decided to strap some light progression elements in. There's five characters, of which four can be brought to any given mission, and each one has different gear choices which are locked in at the start of the stage. Those gear choices are not only different melee and ranged weapons and passive-buff trinkets, but also increasing strengths and rarities of these. You might want to bring a greatsword, or a sword and shield, or even the sword without the shield for a mix of mobility and damage, etc. Warhammer: End Times: Vermintide was a solid effort that earned its keep, but something was missing. It cleaved so closely to Left 4 Dead that it even remembered to be a proof of concept game priming for a sequel. Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is a janky masterpiece. The core chopping-up of rats is completely intact, but there's just a bit more of everything. Instead of just rats, it's rats and northmen for variety. Beastmen were introduced in a later DLC for even more, if you're so inclined. Each of the five characters now each have three classes that change how they play distinctly. Initially you had five guys - Markus, the guardsman, your balanced type of fellow; Bardin, the dwarf ranger, defensive with a slight focus on ranged combat; Viktor, the witch hunter, doing high DPS and marking targets for allies; Kerillian, the elf, your mobile ranged character; and Sienna, the pyromancer, your wizard. Now each of those guys have three representations of what they could have been with a different career path in life, to focus on my boy Bardin for instance: Bardin (Ranger Veteran) - killing special enemies drops ammo for anyone to pick up, can go into stealth briefly for flanking, Classic Bardin from Vermintide 1. Bardin (Ironbreaker) - loses crossbows, but gains the ability to equip Drakefire weapons, essentially small handheld flamethrowers. Can shrug off attacks and taunt enemies, trading Ranger's flanker focus to make Bardin the center of attention and very much at home in a crowd. Bardin (Slayer) - loses ranged weapons entirely, instead equipping two different melee weapons for flexibility. He moves faster and can leap into combat, and gains the ability to dual-wield axes for obscene DPS at the cost of anything else. I won't go into all five characters, but suffice it to say that each has a similarly Interesting spread of choices of how to play them. The gear is also hugely expanded from the first game, and talent trees give you a choice of benefits to put onto your guy in the between-map hub. Patches and DLC expanded all this tremendously. All of the characters but Sienna as of this writing have an extra career (in Bardin's case, combat engineer) that can be picked up for $4 apiece, and other paid and free expansions have added multiple additional campaigns and game modes in. The game, as it stands, is enormous for a 4-person coop slasher game. I cannot recommend it highly enough if that's even adjacent to your jam. Vermintide 2 breaks from Vermintide 1 for achievements, much for the better. Vermintide 1's achievement set is absolutely deranged, requiring beating every map as every character on the highest difficulty and a series of challenges on every map besides. Vermintide 2 reserves these to Okri's Book of Grudges, giving ingame rewards, usually cosmetics, for all of these esoteric and often insanely hard challenges. The Steam achievements, meanwhile, have been stripped down. Beat the campaign, do every kind of crafting, equip every rarity of item, and you have the lion's share. Leveling each character to 30 is a grind, and thank God for the double XP weekend that just dropped for me to finish off my last three, The challenge achievements have been condensed to their most simple - beat the final map of the original campaign on each difficulty level. None of the patches or DLC contributed any achievements, though they contributed many challenges. One could make the easy case that I haven't finished Vermintide 2 by any stretch, but at a hundred hours + the time I put into its predecessor, I'm pleased for now and can turn my attention more to Darktide. E: a fun final fact - the Vermintide games take place in the city of Ubersreik, and Total Warhammer 3 included a special building you can make in Ubersreik that adds five heroes (a captain, a witch hunter, a bright wizard, a dwarf engineer, and an elf handmaiden) to the town's garrison. I think that's really cute, personally.

that's a totally different kind of game - the dark alliance games were top-down hack-n-slashers with stripped down rpg components meant to make a more Arcadey combat game in the forgotten realms universe. the classic baldur's gates play completely differently, and far worse. E: ftr i meant none of that as an insult. the dark alliance games knew what they were and they owned it, and i have nothing but love and respect for em

i'm not really predisposed to either. both can be done really well or really terribly. turnbased is a bit harder to make terrible since you inherently give people infinite time to think about their moves but you still get to games like e.g. space hulk where the animation locks are disgustingly long and, since it's turnbased, the player can do absolutely nothing for seconds at a time while a canned animation plays. realtime doesn't get that issue, but it can get into the problem of things happening faster than the player can process or insufficient information being provided - the command and conquer games are absolutely nasty for newcomers for this reason, well-designed as they are, but there's tons of examples of bad realtime games. my only pure bigotry is fuck realtime with pause. fuck you, baldur's gate. this is a pretty huge misconception for whatever it's worth. even using the absolute most orthodox terms for wrpgs and jrpgs, plenty of wrpgs (pretty much any of the ones that didn't take their dna from baldur's gate) have been turnbased, and even baldur's gate (and RTWP in general) was conceived as a way to present turnbased combat in real time, which is a big reason why it's so bad. i'm less versed in jrpgs, but final fantasy xii is right there as basically just arriving at RTWP from a different direction, and if you're using 'jrpg' in any way that's more modern than what we used it as kids in 2005 then the genre will include a shitload of realtime and even pure action games. it's not completely out there to call dark souls a jrpg.

it's pretty uncommon, poor sap

skill issue tbh

registration is reopened for now while i can monitor it

aow4 really feels like a game that's gonna be great in a year or two of patch/expansion cycles, and just doesn't quite hit the mark immediately

three things about that 1) that's a really toxic idea for the community, people spuriously report posts that are just like 'i don't like that this guy is being mean to me' when the post in question is like 'hey actually this is wrong because x xx xxx'. having a public 'this post has been reported' counter is like a reddit -1 voted comment, it just drives people to disregard the post in question 2) multiple reports on a single thread go into the same 'report' on the mod side of things and are handled with the same action automatically. if a hundred people report the same post it's 1 'report' with 100 'comments'. there's not enough solid citizens who report the spam that even if every one of them accidentally reported different threads in an attack it would become an issue 3) ip.board literally doesn't support it lmao E: ftr i don't mind the speculation! i don't mean to be mean debunking, wild suggestion from laymen is responsible for some great policies. it's just shotgunning for good and ill

my god

you're essentially right with that - the nasty ones are the edited posts and the ones that get tucked into innocuous threads, and those ought to just be reported every time since it's pretty unlikely we'll stumble on them. it does happen, though! in general, any Batch of spam is worth reporting an example thread from, particularly if it's tucked away in one of the less-used forums (one of the places these guys hit was spriting). having a report trail is sometimes a little useful since it lets me know when one of my minions cleaned things up for me so i can praise them appropriately, and Flagging One Report is a minimal taskload on top of the cleanup. the problem only shows up when it's, like, closing 30 threads and banning 14 users, and then there's 30 reports to also flag as complete. the mod control panel only displays 20 or 25 reports at a time (i forget) so that's when you start to get into an interface hangover. generally, though, if someone's Reporting A Spam, i consider that to be good community service and appreciate it. this only comes up in the thread now because one dude filed two hundred reports overnight for individual threads - that doesn't help anybody and only wastes your and our time. a handful of reports would have done it. otherwise, the only thing to point out is that we'll always be more responsive on discord than here. i try to poke my head in here a few times a day to keep the habit going, but a discord DM will go right to my phone and could mean the difference between me cleaning up a spam before i head into work and not finding it until 3 or 4 EST. that's not to compel anyone to use discord, of course, but if someone's already on both and could make a report or drop a ping/dm, the latter will always get a faster response.

boltgun is exactly as good as it was promising to be

yo, i nipped out of work to handle this so this will be very brief and informal 1. all registration is temporarily disabled for a day or so while this passes. if you're reading this as a guest, my apologies, i'll temporarily waive the need to have an sf account to get into the discord if you point this post out to me instead. 2. i brute-force deleted every account registered so far on the 23rd of may by american standards, so if you're the one legitimate user who happened to register among all that spam (i scanned and didn't see any but i'm not perfect), again, apologies and you'll be able to re-register with the same account soon. 3. for you, the user, if you see a massive spam attack, please do not go through and bespoke-report every single thread. a report calls our attention to something and, once we're there, we can start bulk-deleting threads and (i, at least) can bulk-delete people. the only thing bulk reporting accomplishes is that i have to then also go bulk-close reports after handling everything else. i absolutely appreciate the community's involvement in tamping down on this, generally, but some of you went way too far last night. think that's it. cheers. i'll update this thread when i unlock registrations.

i told the guy this was fine to post btw