Integrity

i think it's kind of a question without an answer, innit? gameplay systems, like it or not, are informed by presentation - and presentation is, itself, in a huge part informed by graphics. we got into endless fights in enemy territory about whether the mp40 or the thompson was better, even though they were statistically identical, almost entirely because of the smooth ratta-tat of the mp40's bolt. and that was a relatively-arcadey shooter. something explicitly adventurey like metroid prime absolutely benefits from better graphics, possibly even more than it does better gameplay, but the two always intertwine. battlefield bad company 2 looks fantastic to this day and plays fantastic to this day don't go blaming frostbite for frostbite's problems. battlefield 3 does too so don't go gotchaing me that bad company 2 was frostbite 1 or something E: to be a little more serious not picking on you specifically, op, but i really hate this notion of 're-adding cut content' to remasters/remakes. it does a lot to reinforce the idea of a platonic ideal of a game, the thing the auteur director came up with in his infinite brainspace, which was only denied entrance to this world because of <corporate meddling> <deadlines> <tech limitations> [pick one]. ignoring the fact that a lot of the time content was cut because it sucked ass, not necessarily because time ran out - video games aren't films. a remaster isn't a director's cut, where the guy takes the stuff that he likes and puts it onto a disc and says voila. the underwater hylia in wind waker might have been trialed in wind waker's original design, found to be too much work to ship, then been trialed again for the predevelopment for wwhd and found that the idea was actually just bad. there's a sort of agnosticism to the quality of idea that people have with regards to remakes and remasters that's a bit fascinating and weird to me. i got into a big fight with a dude on some discord server about a rumor with no source that the islamic state of crapcom was gonna remove the mine sections from the resident evil 4 remake, and my point the whole time was that the mine sections of resident evil 4 were the absolute nadir of the game. his only counterpoint was that they deserved to be in because they were in the first game. i never got a solid answer to why? if they genuinely fucking sucked - i have never heard anyone praise a second of them except for some halfhearted 'the minecart section was campy' bullshit - why shouldn't a remake kick them out? this isn't to say re-adding cut content or even adding all new content (e.g. beamdog's additions to baldur's gate) is a bad thing at all! i just dislike the idea that it should be expected.

seadra but this was a spam topic lmao yall E: sorry, lmao yall except lenticular and eltosian, you saw through the ruse E2: i'm leaving it up because it's a fun question

TOTAL WARHAMMER 2 (THE CREATIVE ASSEMBLY, 2017) Finished: 23/2/23. Playtime: 407.6 hours. This is, by a distance, the longest it's taken me to 100% a game where I set out from the outset to do it. The only two games with hour totals over that are Rocket League, where I actually finished the achievements somewhere in the middle of the near-on 700 hours I have logged; and Monster Hunter World, where I didn't even start the final thunder run until I was ~500 of my 800 hours in. Four hundred hours, starting from a base of about twenty. The fact that I had the jujubes to slug this out is a little bit baffling to me. I started this back in November. Total Warhammer 2 takes almost everything that I could complain about from its predecessor and squashes it mercilessly. There's a funny sum-up I like to tell about the old gods, Westwood, that Dune II was where they figured out what to do, Tiberian Dawn is where they learned what not to do, and Red Alert was where they finally got the entire act together - a pretty impressive turnaround for basically inventing RTS. Total War kind of sits in the same boat for me. Pretty much everything before Total Warhammer was the developers figuring the formula out - with Shogun 2 being, notably, when things finally began to click. Not having played Rome 2 myself, we'll call that the Dune II equivalent. Tiberian Dawn, then, was Total Warhammer; they finally nailed it all but for the details, little niggles here and there. Total Warhammer 2 takes all the right lessons from Total Warhammer. It's a fantastic game. Outside of units behaving better and balance (generally) being more sound and all the boring things a sequel really ought to improve, the biggest quality 2 brings to the table is a change of scenery. The Warhammer Fantasy world is fairly analogous to ours, and 1 focused entirely on It's Just Europe. Consequently, it had pretty safe factions - all the big boys: Men, Wood Elves, Chaos, Orcs, Dwarves*, Beast Men, North Men, Dead Men, and The French. 2 sets the entire campaign around fantasy-Americas and Africa. Instead of the safe titans, we've got lizardmen and weird elves and vampire pirates and da rats. The variety in army composition and playstyle compared to 1 is baffling, and that's just counting the new races. Through DLC, a Mega Map condensing both 1 and 2's campaign worlds a little bit for playability can be accessed with all of the first game's factions playable or fightable. It's a superb mode. This is where the problem creeps in. Much like its predecessor, platinum Total Warhammer 2 involves winning a campaign on the high difficulty as all of the game's factions - six in total. It also requires winning a campaign on the high difficulty as all of the original factions as well. If you're not counting, that's fifteen completed campaigns. It's such a staggering amount of labor that it almost feels pointless to talk about all the other, smaller achievements - for each of the major skeleton factions, you have to do at least a mini-campaign to grow to a certain size or conquer a certain amount of land, et cetera. The research achievements that took so long from 1 resurge, but they're not as bad, given as you only have to do them for the core game's four factions - elves, other elves, lizards, and da rats - and da rats can stack enough research speed modifiers to make it trivial to crunch out before you even win, no lingering. There's also two multiplayer-exclusive ones - to play a campaign with another player (just start one session, you get it during the first load screen), courtesy old mate Parrhesia, and a viral one that the same top bloke who got me the one for 1 helped with. Big ups to Felzear on Steam. As God is great, 3 does not have a viral achievement, spoiler alert. With a single exception (the Northmen campaign was fucking balls ass hard and no fucking fun at all), Total Warhammer 2 was a joy to go through. It absolutely got a little tiring by the end, but the fact that I was still able to get hyped for my fifteenth campaign because I'd finally be playing da rats after nearly-400 hours at that point really puts the point on just how great this game was. It blows 1 out of the water by nearly the same insane margin that 1 blew the entire previous Total War library out of the water, and that's a fucking feat. The sick thing is 3 is even better. We'll get there. (* yes i know they're dwarfs in the warhammer universe; no i do not care)

got distracted watching rocky 5 with some mates (don't watch rocky 5, it's shit) but got the pages changed. keep using this page to let me know if i've missed any

2/4 supergiant rep now, i'm assuming you'll do transistor at some point and i'll eventually get hades?

cheers, i'll go fix those after work today

i genuinely can't see the difference on my monitor unless i really get at an angle, so good to know i think i fixed it, give it a look and, if so, i'd appreciate you lot using this thread to tell me where there's other spoilers like that and i can put the fires out as i go EDIT: yeesh they're all over the engage section eh i'll look through it and change more during the super bowl tomorrow

short of it is, the way sf is at present, only verified users with full site access can contribute at all to the main site. vince handles most of that end, so that much is on him, and you can contact him if you really want to try to bend his ear. the wiki was kind of a failed concept we haven't really maintained, unfortunately. there's a percolating idea to get a better system together that jyosua is working on but there's no ETA or details on that, so don't hold your breath. fun fact, it's actually more locked down than you think - i had to ask to have an account manually created completely irrespective of my sf admin account to help make edits from the admin account on the forums. it's a bit of a pain point but we're working on it

that's what happens when a new forum system can't read history, sorry op

have you picked up openxcom? it smooths the curve a LOT from experience nothing to add or counter, i feel largely the same about them. thanks for the post op

i'm not really i'm excited to move onto TPP from my experience with G0. look forward to the TPP post in several weeks because it's a difficult plat and my will is indomitable. i'm glad to see someone else who loved the firaxis games and still saw the glory in chimera squad as a completely different thing, honestly. i'd love to hear your takes on the other games since you seemed to be biting your tongue about them here

METAL GEAR?!

METAL GEAR SOLID 5: GROUND ZEROES (KOJIMA, 2014) Finished: 30/1/23. Playtime: 22.1 hours. Technically, I still have to finish Jamais Vu on Hard one more time to 100% it, but I have downtime during a Total Warhammer 3 session with some mates and completion is literally inevitable tonight, I've already beaten Jamais Vu once on hard. The only way it gets to be a tomorrow game is if I get unfathomably drunk watching the Bengals tonight and fuck up every input. e: this is precisely what happened lol I always have a bit of apprehension towards games that have such an insane universal acclaim as does Metal Gear Solid 5. I've been burned more than once - Final Fantasy Tactics being a very high-profile, if not the only, example - and I've just learned to accept I have that nagging worm in my skull that judges Acclaimed Things more than other things. My takeaway from Ground Zeroes is that MGS5 is actually as good as everyone has been saying for like ten years now. It took about a run and a half of Camp Omega for it to click, it wasn't a trivial investment. Once it did, I binged the rest of the game in what was basically a feverish two-and-a-half-day session, interrupted only by this ongoing TWW3 session. I'm still itching here to get out and kick out the last run of Jamais Vu and to start The Phantom Pain. I had a fantastic time with Ground Zeroes. It's the only of those stealth-action games (Dishonored, Hitman, etc.) that has actually seen me being perfectly happy when I go loud, murdering a few guys and vanishing and continuing the mission instead of just checkpointing. This was my second Metal Gear Solid experience after Revengeance, for the record. I played the demo of 1 on a Pizza Hut disc in the 90s and thought it sucked, partially because i was like 7 and partially because it did. The path to platinum was not terribly straightforward and I'm glad I had a Steam guide to follow. You essentially have to run the main, and each of the five side, ops four times each, with different requirements. The usual run was beat on normal -> beat on normal and mark all enemy targets -> beat on hard twice. I found it pretty satisfying, except for the 'mark all targets' - that was just a pain in the ass half the time and I didn't really enjoy it. Still, it's not much of a detriment, just an extra hour or two here and there. There's a few extra things as well - an extra objective per mission, plus collectibles - that are pretty well-placed and don't go too far, but if you don't know about them you probably won't get them. My final statement is that the Steam guide for 100% achievements has a far worse strategy for S-ranking the destroy the anti-aircraft guns mission. Mine rules. The recoilless strat is probably easier, but mine is doable with no kit or a B-rank instead of an A, so I'll claim the victory here.

it looks like the functionality to "show on member's profile" is actually what makes it show on other peoples' posts, which is extremely counter-intuitive you guys should be able to see each other's titles now? E: it always showed for admins despite that setting being set to "don't show to anyone" ("show to staff only" is an option) so i'm REALLY puzzled if this works but we'll take it

neat cheers

they should be back right now, jyosua crowbarred them back in yesterday. if you can't see yours, or see it but can't edit it, let me know so i can do some troubleshooting

hi guys this is a quick one blue skies and sakura forest are back and seem to be working fine, tell me if they aren't i don't have an ETA on the return of night forest because the color scheme has to be completely overhauled from how it used to be, thanks new forums.

it is, but it doesn't mean that lmao

pretty good timeline to not commit to, if i do say so myself

christ, the option was tucked away in the bowels of the backend. i set it to display inline after the first post of threads 3+ pages long rather than as a sidebar, since it's neat information but squishes stuff down e: themes are a low priority but will come back eventually

the particular reason is that ip.board themselves removed them on the back end, annoyingly. we can crowbar them back in with some effort, but i won't commit to any timeline on that unfortunately

FASHION POLICE SQUAD (MOPEFUL, 2022) Finished: 12/1/23. Playtime: 11.3 hours. I always appreciate when a game tries to take the essence of its genre and distill it. Get in deep, work with the why of game systems. I've talked about it in a few earlier recaps, but Fashion Police Squad is a superb example of it. Why do you switch weapons in a boomer shooter? What encourages a player to use a varied weapon loadout rather than falling back to a favorite with common ammo, like how every WW2 FPS ends with the player using the MP-40 for over half its runtime? Doom (2016) kinda cut through the meat of it - by having common ammo pickups, but low ammo capacities, you can force the player to flex through their weapon wheel in any given encounter, trying to map weapons to scenarios based on remaining ammo. Fashion Police Squad cuts straight through the whole flesh and bone of it: every enemy can only take damage from one or two of your four weapons. Late-midgame encounters see you use your entire weapon wheel, because you have to use your entire weapon wheel. It creates unique encounters that I can say I had fun with quite honestly all of - even the gimmick sequences, sniping and turreting (obligatory) were significantly more enjoyable than their traditional FPS equivalents thanks to the damage system. The turret section was the big shocker because it was, unlike every vehicular turret section in every other game ever, fun. On top of that, the game goes for thirteen maps and introduces its final new weapon in map 11 and its final new enemy in map 12. It doesn't give itself time to run out of ideas. It presents every novel idea it has, gives them some time to breathe, then you crush the final boss (with its own fun gimmicks) and the game's over. No back half with nothing new except locale to show off. It ends when it ought to, and that's deeply admirable. High. high recommendation. Achievements were largely straightforward, with one caveat. There weren't many and, clearly, they didn't take long, but they hit the usual notes. Beat the game, beat the challenges, collect the secrets, top-rank the sniping sections, and fuck around a little on the golf course in map 11 (I actually got both of these by accident just playing normally). There's one for stunning 250 enemies with your whip but, presuming you're playing relatively-normally, that's two playthroughs of the game tops. The weird one was actually the '100% all maps' one - as one might expect, killing all enemies and finding all secrets on every map is required for this, but that's only 2/3 of the requirement. The third third is picking up all armor, of all things. The armor isn't, like, psychotically hidden, but with no in-mission checkbox to see how many you've grabbed, or if you've grabbed it all, manually sleuthing it became really tedious really quickly, particularly when I left a map thinking I'd scoured everything to end up with 12/13. Thankfully, some dude has completely no-frills runs of every map grabbing all the armor and secrets. Thanks, that guy.

we did meet through sf, but had no reason to talk until i was bitching on irc about mh tri one day

LOST JUDGMENT (RYU GA GOTOKU, 2021) Finished: 6/1/23. Playtime: 99 hours, sort of. There's a big old asterisk on the playtime here because the area under my TV is a wifi deadzone for some reason, and leaving the Deck plugged in there for several days caused some desync of playtime on the Steam servers. One time I closed the game and the playtime flashed up by 14 hours and then back down, so we'll say that's the disconnect. The listed playtime on Steam is 85 hours, but for a good chunk of the last parts of completion my save file time was larger than my Steam playtime, which is, you know, impossible. Lost Judgment was not the masterpiece that Judgment was. It had a lot going on - and a lot of it was genuinely great - but I think it tried to be too many things and, similar to Yakuza 5, fell into the trap of being the Most Game. Everything was a mixed bag of some variety compared to the first. The gameplay feels very solid and a step up from Judgment, and Snake style makes a fun addition, but your options all end up wildly outclassed by performing the same Tiger charged finisher combo forever. The story makes some pretty great shakeups to the core cast for the exclusively-positive, but is undermined by a few decisions, including a main villain I never bought into, despite how much the game very obviously wanted me to. The side content is all over the place, quality-wise, but that's any RGG game for you. Climax battles are back, though, and that's just great. I liked those even in the shit games like 3 and having them in a game where I actually want to engage with the combat is aces. Despite the mixed feelings, I did really like Lost Judgment overall, though. It was never likely to surpass Judgment, and I can enjoy it for what it was instead of calling it a disappointing sequel or something like that. Completion for it was more miserable than the time suggests. Despite clocking in ~20 hours shorter than Judgment, there was a lot more miserable meniality to 100% Lost Judgment. The high school is the perfect example of this - you have to cozy up to ten clubs and complete requests for them for a side story that, honestly, has a pretty great payoff to it. The completion metrics for the clubs are all over the place, though. The Photography Club can be completed 100% just by doing its little side story. The eSports Club's story requires you to win 5 bouts of Virtua Fighter 5; but the completion metric requires you to win 16. No extra content, just fight 11 more battles of Virtua Fighter 5. The Robotics Club is the absolute worst for this; while the story is already very meaty and requires you to win a dozen or maybe twenty bouts of its little minigame, the completion metric is to invent everything your robots can use, which involves grinding approximately a hundred minigame rounds. This was absolute torture. The same 'get 50 pickups in the lightgun shooter' achievement from Judgment came back for some reason, and pickups were just as sparse. That's an hour or two of just grinding a single stage of Hama of the Dead up to the pickups and quitting out, over and over. You have to play with cats 100 times, despite playing with cats not even being a minigame - just a menu selection - and being able to befriend every single cat in the game fully in about 30 play sessions. There's just shit like that all over Lost Judgment that made it irritating and helps explain how slowly I went through it compared to its predecessor. However, Lost Judgment gives you a dog. Greg Chun incessantly praises him and showers him with loving words whenever he's around. Perfect game, 10/10.