Integrity
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Posts posted by Integrity
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got it on the bookmarks lol
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Finished: 12/2/24. Playtime: 15.5 hours.
The entire project that is this thread is inherently sisyphean in nature. Half the fun of it is spinning up sub-projects that sound absolutely obscene from the outset, like "a game for each letter" or "all of the Yakuzas", and then grinding through hundreds or thousands of hours of that over real-life years for a series of 128x128 pixel badges on a social media platform and the right to feel extra moral when talking smack about something online. Spite is a hell of a motivator, and I'm good at convincing myself I'm doing something to spite a straw nobody, if nothing else. Let's start a new, horrible chapter. We're not stopping with the first one, oh no. I've purchased, organized, and lined up main numbered games 1 through 13 (skipping 11 of course) for gradual submission here. We're gonna see if I can rekindle that JRPG fire that I haven't had in my heart since sophomore year of college, over a decade ago, and we're gonna start where it all began.
I've had a long relationship with the Final Fantasy series, one of the longest consistent involvements of my entire gaming life. I got my start with the Pizza Hut demo disc that had the first bit of Final Fantasy 8 on it, and I thought it was fine, but nothing like the true PSX JRPG, which was obviously Legend of Dragoon. A neighbor kid would lend me disk 1 of Final Fantasy 7 at some point, and I'd slug most of the way through it, but it was no Legend of Dragoon, so I never asked for the second disk. My next involvement would be Final Fantasy 10, and that game completely blew my prepubescent mind. Out of all the Ultimas, all the Wizardries, all the Mights and the Magics, all the Fallouts and Icewinds Dale, and yes, even Legend of Dragoon, that was the first RPG I gutted all the way through, and I loved it. It remains, to this day, the only soundtrack for a game I've ever bought. I know all the words to Otherworld, and if you get me drunk enough, I will karaoke it and I will sound horrible doing it.
The PS2 was the era of Final Fantasy that hit at the age where I was perfectly poised to think Final Fantasy is the coolest thing ever. I'd get 10-2 and later 12, and beat both, and those three would remain the core of my Final Fantasy favorites until the present day. Part of this project is actually seeing how they've held up, honestly, but we'll get to that in a long-ass while. The PS2 would also give us Dirge of Cerberus, a game so crappy and edgy that I thought it was lame at like fifteen and quit it forever around the 70% mark, which is a hell of a feat. Still, 3/4 topping the overall list ain't bad at all.
My later teens would come with more of an emphasis on handheld gaming for various reasons up to and including college. My venerable GBA SP and then DS would hold many Final Fantasies across the entire quality spectrum. I'd play the 5 and 6 ports on the GBA - I loved 5, and liked 6 but found it gently overrated by the internet of the day - and eventually fail to get far into either of the 1+2 package and get through about half of Tactics Advance before deciding it sucked. The DS carried horror in its bosom, frontloading the 3 and 4 DS ports, both of which I found to be awful games, though I'd actually slug my way through 4 eventually just to say I did it, in probably the first glimmer of what would become the me who would make this thread. I'd eventually play about 35 minutes of Tactics A2, a game I really never gave a fair shot to, and play all the way through the dark horse Revenant Wings, a game I'm positive is nowhere near as good as I remember it being and I'm uninterested in disabusing myself of those delusions. Around this time, my cousin would give me his PSP, and I'd play Dissidia very briefly for the novelty and then 85% of Tactics before deciding it sucked. I've got a contentious relationship with the Final Fantasy Tactics games, to put it gently. Y'all saw the Fell Seal post.
Then I'd kind of just... stop. Finishing Final Fantasy 5 in my freshman year of college would be followed by, of all things, my first run of Pokemon SoulSilver to make me realize that I just wasn't feeling JRPGs anymore as a concept. To top that off, I never bought a PS3, and didn't buy a PS4 until Kingdom Hearts 3 came out, so if I had wanted to move on from there my options were crappy PC ports of the day. I'd go into hibernation, having beaten all the SNES and all the PS2 Final Fantasies and no other, and I was content. I got into the alpha and beta tests for Final Fantasy 14's original release, and it was so awful that I literally didn't believe people when they said "the game is good now" until my wife picked it up in Shadowbringers and I joined her just to see. I pretty much just didn't sink my teeth into any Final Fantasy, besides a little romp through 12 where I tried to Vaan solo the game and got bored about halfway through, from about 2011 until I picked up a 14 sub in 2020 after my time with World of Warcraft was finally at its true end. Even then, I played 14 exclusively as an MMORPG and skipped all the cutscenes after level about 15. Love the game; the only cutscene set I've watched in full is the saga of T'laqa Tia, my homie.
But, you know, it would always rankle a bit. 13's been sitting in my Steam library for longer than I can remember, to the point where I have no recollection of ever buying it. I'd look at it, occasionally, with this feeling of a love lost. Time once was I could sit down with a GBA Player on a Gamecube and grind shit out in Final Fantasy 6 for hours. That little completionist part of my brain that was starting to take root in my later 20s before going apeshit as I crossed 30 would always grumble about how I'd beaten 4-6 and 10-12, not even a contiguous swathe of games like I have Resident Evil. And Revenant Wings, of course. I accumulated copies of 8, 9, and the 10/10-2 package over time and always intended to get into them and never did. The JRPG ennui extended, too - I own two Tales games for some reason, never touched either, as well as The Last Remnant, which is the most PS3-ass game ever concocted. Etrian Odyssey finally reunlocked that part of my brain, and then the pixel remaster package finally went on sale. It's time.
Final Fantasy has aged with absolutely startling grace. With what amounts to quality of life improvements and not terribly much more, it's nowhere near the best RPG I've ever played, but considering all the nothing it had to pull on for reference back in 1987, it's a genuine landmark. There's just something kind of timeless about all of it - the little sprite men walking around, the batshit attempts to translate Amano's concept art onto the Famicom, the bonkers gameworld that is very transparent about being a series of vehicle gates, the unmitigated pettiness of dungeon design, all of it is just so cowboy game design. It rules, even if there are a lot of objective and subjective flaws to it. The game's intended progression is even fairly concisely communicated, intuitive, and easy to follow, without anything like a quest log - until you get to the step where you invent the airship, and then the game flies instantly into fucking Sierra moon logic. I managed to slug my way to promotion after looking up how to get the airship, and from there I just had to guide out the rest of the game. I would never have figured any of it out. By the standards of today, it's actually even a fairly breezy game if you don't mind following a little bit of a guide, with ingame maps and the bestiary able to take a bit of the sting out of the asshole design of the times. The only party wipe SLEEN the Red Mage, GORGE the White Mage, SKORT the Warrior, and REGGIE the Black Mage ever suffered was, when I was filling out the bestiary, a Warmech used Nuke on two turns back to back and killed 3/4 of my party, and then the last one died moments later. It's uncompromising, and the difficulty is all over the fucking place, but it's not a hard game to get into if you've got a certain tolerance for older stuff.
It's not hard to 100%, either. You essentially just need to beat the game, get all the treasure, and fill out the bestiary. The pixel remaster includes a chest count for every location in the world, so finding any missing treasure is simple as anything; I missed a single chest in the Cavern of Earth playing organically. Filling out the bestiary is only more involved because there are three rare encounters that only happen in specific places: the Tyrannosaur in the overworld's big desert, the Warmech in B4F of the penultimate dungeon, and the Iron Golem in B4F of the ultimate dungeon. These aren't even obscenely rare by modern RPG sensibilities, just 1/64 encounter chances. Besides those three, I only missed a single monster (the Soldier on B3F of the penultimate dungeon isn't even a rare spawn, I just never saw one) in my entire romp through the game without a mind to fill it out as I went. A single clear, nothing missable, and a short loop around the world to clean up before you go kill Chaos. I'm glad I gave Final Fantasy the time of day. The rest of the project won't necessarily be twelve more Final Fantasies in twelve more posts, but they'll be trickling in as I do them for a long while now, so I hope you'll join me for this long ass project.
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man and i thought i had scorn for fe7 lol jesus
e: we should renormalize bullying imo
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On 2/9/2024 at 11:57 AM, Fabulously Olivier said:
So, I don't know how or why number progression came to be the defining factor in people's minds for whether a game is an RPG. Because it absolutely isn't. Levels and gear are tangential.
The one and only thing that makes a game an RPG is choice. Narrative/personality choice, character build customization, or party customization. Without at least one of these things, a game is not an RPG, period.
Unpopular video game fact.
this isn't even an unpopular video game opinion, it's been bothering me for a whole day now
you're just mad that the definition of a word has escaped what you think is the "proper" definition
'rpg elements' mean 'number progression' to most of everyone, and you think that's wrong, and the opinion is that you think everyone else is using the term incorrectly, but the problem of language is that they aren't, because that's what it means to most of everyone else. if you're in the deep minority, as you clearly are, you're wrong here. it's not an 'unpopular opinion', it's just raging against the dying of the light. feel free to think that 'rpg elements' shouldn't mean 'numeric skill-buying progression', sure, but 'rpg elements' have literally never been majorly equated with narrative choice in games in the whole time i've been around.
condolences.
e: i'm not even disagreeing with you here as to what 'rpg elements' Should mean, i'm just saying this isn't an 'unpopular opinion' nearly as much as it's a 'i don't like how the kids use words now'
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15 hours ago, AnonymousSpeed said:
I seem to remember, years ago, being able to click on the post/view count by a thread's name and see how many posts different users had in that thread, ranked from most to least.
you're correct in remembering that this used to be a feature about... i dunno, two major iterations of ip.board ago, maybe three. they stripped it out in favor of the info panel the guy above me posted about a long time ago and to my knowledge a full set of posts-by-user for a thread is no longer accessible including to we staffers. i'll take a look into it this weekend and see if there's a disabled option somewhere but i'm fairly sure the option is just gone and has been replaced by various options for that info panel
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im not gonna go back through the whole backlog and do it but i have no idea how it took me nearly a year and a half to figure out the idea to link the game's steam page in the post, like especially for something like shotgun king where i'm asking people to check out the devs, why don't i make it easy lmao
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SHOTGUN KING: THE FINAL CHECKMATE (PUNKCAKE DELICIEUX, 2022)
Finished: 6/2/24. Playtime: 82 hours.
PUNKCAKE Delicieux is a weird little studio. Two French guys, with a Spaniard making music for them, who just make little novel games that they want to make for a small audience, cranking several out every year. They're kind of the platonic ideal of "indie" gaming - just two guys making games they want to make because they have ideas nobody else has really explored. One thing I want to impose on you, the reader, is to go check them out on Steam even if Shotgun King doesn't sound like your speed, because I really think they ought to get more exposure beyond this, their one relative hit. Their most recent game (Super Algebrawl) just came out last month! I bought it, but haven't started playing it yet in part to get myself to slug through the last of this one.
Shotgun King has an incredibly direct premise. You, the Black King, are alone on a chessboard. Opposite you is the White King, and he has four pawns, a knight, and a bishop in support. You have no allies, but you have a double-barreled break-action twelve-gauge shotgun. You win a round by killing the opposing number, and you lose if any piece captures you according to the rules of actual chess. Killing non-pawn pieces reaps their souls into your inventory, allowing you to move as that piece for a single action rather than as a king. That's just floor 1, though. After each floor you're given a choice of two pairs, one boon and one bane each, to lock in for the rest of the run. Black cards might tighten your firing cone, give you more damage, give you more mobility, add grenades or a sword to your arsenal, or outlandish shit like letting you overload the shotgun with extra shells or putting a mission marker that lets you sabotage the white army. White cards might add health or speed to enemy pieces, add pieces to the enemy laydown, or even add new methods of enemy mobility such as letting knights carry pieces alongside them or letting pawns capture two squares in front of them. Cards can become far nastier in combination, like making the king unkillable while any knights are alive combined with a card that adds a knight to the enemy side every ten moves. Clearing the final boss (a huge king) gives you a pretty standard difficulty scaling system. Thrones 2-15 add enemy pieces to the starting laydown, add health to types of pieces, and debuff you variously as you go up, all stacking. By the time you've made it to Throne 15, White's starting with something to the tune of 4x as many hit points of pieces on the board as when you began, not to mention the actual danger of just having more pieces on the board.
The sheer variety in what the game can throw at you is genuinely baffling, with around 54 of each color of card in a deck that the game pulls from, to the point where I was still having weird builds pop off fifty, even seventy hours in. A whole clear, for the record, takes around 5-10 minutes. We're talking hundreds of games later. That's not even touching on the five different shotguns you can take into a run or the entire two other modes that come with the game. Endless is just a run that doesn't go to the final boss in wave 11, but the enemy continues to scale forever until you die. Chase is a fun one where enemies spawn from all sides and your goal is simply to continue killing as long as you're able, gaining and losing powers in a continuous dance with no resets. They're fun, but mostly as extras to the meat of the game.
Now let's dig into the specifics of 100%ing this motherfucker. Straightforwardly, there's a whole pile of achievements for beating the game at each Throne difficulty up to 15, and one for beating the game at any difficulty with each shotgun. Throne 15, I cannot stress enough, is an absolute bastard to gut through on its own, let alone the grind of getting good enough to unlock it. I started this game back in September and have been working on it on and off since. There was a complete month in which I was continuing to grind attempts at Throne 15, only, having completed Throne 14, where I just never kept it together quite long enough. I actually got it right before going to bed on Christmas Eve, in fact. It's a festive miracle.
The second category of achievement is weird interactions or stacking you make happen any way you can. Some of these are trivial to get, like beating any floor while killing only the enemy king, being in check from four different pieces at once, or beating a floor while only moving on squares of the color you spawned on. Some basically just require having a few of a given set of cards to stack a modifier really high, like getting your fire arc huge, holding an obscene amount of shells, having more shells loaded than you can actually carry, or burning 9 get out of jail free cards in a single run. Pieces fall into this too, with one each requiring you to have 5 queens or 6 rooks on the board at once - a death sentence to stack up, and some of the last ones I got overall. Some require you to do trivial things but with a specific combination of cards, largely involving King's Shoulders. King's Shoulders is a black card that lets you, once per floor, pick up an adjacent white piece and put it onto your kingly shoulders. Your next shot will, instead of firing the shotgun, lob the piece at an enemy for damage to both or lob the piece off the board for an instant kill. Carry the enemy queen to your starting space, kill the enemy king with his heir (from another card), or throw the otherwise-unkillable Iron Queen (from another card) off of the board and into space. These are all kind of just waiting for the right cards to show up and then remembering the thing you have to do with them. Keep that phrasing in mind for a moment, will you.
Third up are challenge runs. There's two degrees of speedrun (5 minute and 2 minute clear, where the timer only runs while you can take action) which were pretty easy but very enjoyable for my massive brain to conquer. Complete Throne Mode without ever letting a pawn promote. Complete Throne Mode without ever killing a queen; this one is both pretty difficult and, last I knew, bugged such that if you've killed a queen since booting up the game this session, it invalidates the achievement until you restart the game. One nicety the game provides you is Folly Shields, which prevent you from moving into checkmate twice per turn; beat the game without ever burning one of them. These were, generally, the most fun I had out of the achievement set.
Let's go back to that phrasing now. "Waiting for the right cards to show up." Thirty-one of the game's achievements require you to beat Throne Mode with a specific set of three cards in your set of twenty. This is, unfortunately, the meat of getting platinum for Shotgun King. You will go through dozens or hundreds of aborted runs and, worse, runs where you got two of the three you needed in your first two floors and the third didn't show up across the entire rest of the run. On top of that, when you're just getting started, you just have to keep track of what cards count for your remaining achievements yourself, particularly onerous when about 70% of the game's cards end up counting for one or another. On top of that, a good number of cards have mutual exclusivities, or require certain quantities of enemy piece types on the board to even have a chance to spawn. On top of that, a fair number of cards have prerequisite cards, so a handful of these are actually four-card achievements, narrowing the margins for error even more. That's not even getting into the fact that some of the combinations of cards, if you have to take them all, are hard as hell to actually clear - Harem, not counting what your other white cards contribute, at a minimum gives you three invulnerable white queens, with the slight assistance that they're slower than usual and can only move 3 squares per action. Security Service makes the enemy king offload all damage onto any living rooks when shot, be impossible to kill if any knights are alive, and makes knights shrug off all of the first instance of damage they take any floor. Swarm's three cards add a whopping 11 pawns to the field, doubles all of their health, and adds another per 10 turns constantly. Inquisition makes bishops float over all pieces, have bonus health, be faster, and move (but not attack, at least) orthogonally. Even if you get these, you're not at all guaranteed to have a good enough build or large enough brain to overcome them, which makes the hell all the worse - the achievements are to win with the cards, not simply build the set.
This all culminates in Builder. Builder, nominally, requires you to clear the game with Cathedral, Highest Dungeon, and Trowel. Cathedral, however, will not be seeded into the deck unless you've already taken Cardinal in a previous floor, and Highest Dungeon similarly unless you've already taken Ramparts. Your third white card will always be the one that adds the queen, so that means that to get Builder you have to have 5/9 white cards be exactly these five, from a pool of 53 possible, and there can never be more than three that you need in the pool. Hell, just to fuck with you, Cardinal and Ramparts can appear multiple times, so selecting them doesn't even dilute the pool! Your reward for getting this is that rook health is doubled, but that bonus health goes away if you kill all enemy pawns, but all enemy pieces have bonus health as long as any rooks are alive, and all enemy pieces adjacent to a rook can only take 1 damage max per turn. Even if you manage to get those five cards out of your first six, setting you up for an ideal run, you might just flop against the resulting horrible brick wall of enemy meat and ivory that you've made for yourself. Shotgun King is a game that deeply, deeply does not want you to fill out its achievement list, but it's a game that I adored enough to shove through and do it anyway. You can't tell me what to do, French dads.
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ORCS MUST DIE! 3 (ROBOT ENTERTAINMENT, 2020)
Finished: 23/1/24. Playtime: 35.8 hours.
On 10/21/2022 at 1:40 PM, Integrity said:Orcs Must Die! 3 will appear in this thread too, but they added a new DLC with new achievements that I haven't gotten yet. Bastards.
Hell, it's about time.
After Orcs Must Die! 2, Robot would make the frankly baffling decision to create an Orcs Must Die! MOBA. I played it very, very briefly. It did not translate well to competitive multiplayer. I got the spirit behind the idea, but it just didn't do it for me. Years after that, they'd return to their roots and make Orcs Must Die! 3, which is just the best the franchise has been. It's got all the warts of the previous games, to be sure, and even more interactions to ensure that there are even more janky interactions. It slots firmly into the third-person shooter / tower defense hybrid style, even more so than the previous two games, and there won't be terribly many times that you can actually create a bespoke defense and just watch it work. Besides that, there's not much more to add. It's Orcs Must Die!, but More. There's a set of characters to choose from (eight or so, not the two from 2) with very slight differences in mobility options. Pick your favorite voice lines and aesthetic.
Orcs Must Die! 3's main contribution to the formula is Scramble mode, and it's a good addition. You're, simply, put through five increasingly-difficult maps, where you can choose global debuffs and buffs at each stage. It's nothing super fancy, it's nothing that hasn't been done before, but it does the one thing that Orcs Must Die! has consistently failed to do up to and including this game: encourage a little variety in your loadouts. That's all one can ask for, really. The game also adds War Scenarios, which are massively scaled up stages that give you super traps to compensate. They're a mixed bag, but I appreciate them trying something new.
As far as achievements go, this one is by far the most straightforward. Gone are the weird challenges of 1 and the bullshit of 2. The game ships with a main campaign and a minicampaign, and there are two additional DLC minicampaigns. Get a perfect clear on each level of all four of these on the top difficulty, get to wave 25 on Endless mode for a vanilla map and one from each DLC, and gather a 5,000,000 point Scramble clear, which basically means the same thing. Going through all this gets you all-but-cleanup all around - you might not have bought every trap, but respeccing is free; I only got about two-thirds of the kills needed in the ice DLC and had to grind a few more stages. Completely straightforward and completely doable (and recommended) in co-op - @Dr. Tarrasquecame back for this one right on the heels of 30XX, after we cleared vanilla together when it was new and cleared the first DLC together when it was new and then didn't do the second DLC for a year and a half for no real reason. So it goes!
We'll see where Robot posting goes from here, though. They nearly died between the tepid reception of Unchained and, immediately after shuttering that game, the pandemic sweeping us all. The only thing that saved them was some Google money, discussing contracts with them, learning they were the Orcs Must Die! guys and partially funding 3 as a year-long timed exclusive for the fucking Stadia before it came out on other platforms. They've been radio silent since last July, which was a surprise update to 3 after a year of silence before that, so who knows what's up. I got a bad feeling they might just quietly close and get subsumed into other studios, but who knows.
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On 1/21/2024 at 12:01 AM, Fabulously Olivier said:
13. Halo: Combat Evolved
i also never played the halos as a kid (ps2 gang) and over the course of 2023 i started and stopped halo 1 like three times. the final try made it through the library and somewhere into the chapter after that before i ran out of steam again. it's got good ideas, and it's impressive for literally birthing console FPS as a thing to take seriously, but my god it's just so repetitive, blandly laid out, and generally tedious to play
i need to finish gutting through it so i can play the "better" halos
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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
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oh i'm excited as hell to read this post tomorrow
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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
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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.
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this does mean that i have a game for every letter AND one with a number now 😎
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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.
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11 hours ago, Shadow Mir said:
I'm going to stay respectful
popping in post-suspension to peanut gallery a tremendous fucking lol
for the information of those following: forums rules on not being a dickhead don't extend to childish "i'm not on your side of the room" shit. you don't have to pull out actual slurs to be acting like a shithead for no reason
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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
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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.
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58 minutes ago, Fabulously Olivier said:
No one sees something, and says "that looks like shit, I'mma try it."
fuckin watch me mate
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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.
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i was being deeply facetious my friend
except about warframe
e: to be a little less flippant about it: the thing is, even with games like nier automata (i genuinely do think the intro sequence pre-first save is a pretty trash opener but have enjoyed the game more since, i'm not talking the difference between routes here), one's experience of a game is going to change pretty hugely with experience even if nothing else about the game is actually being introduced.
it's obvious that if mechanics are being added (e.g. pick your third-person action poison) there's gonna be a sweet spot of complexity when the game hits a perfect balance, and that's typically not going to be how the combat kicks off. pretty much any yakuza game is like this, and i don't think it's that outlandish to say that not enjoying the xxxy combat in the tutorial fights is not necessarily a predictor of how you'll feel about the combat in an hour or three.
even if mechanics aren't being added though, like a monster hunter game (for the most part, natch) and you're mostly just mastering the systems that are there, distaste can easily turn to taste once you figure shit out. i brought up "20 hours" because it's a really stupid number to use, but i wouldn't base my enjoyment of lies of p off the first ~hour, even though the game hasn't gotten much more complex since then. i've enjoyed it a lot more, though, because i primarily didn't vibe with the first two or three weapons, and i adjusted my thought patterns from a most darksoulsian scheme of combat.
even "20 hours" is, itself, silly, because what about a paradox game? that's just a measure of complexity, and has nothing to do with how good or bad it is or isn't, eh? it's something that one cannot make a rule out of one way or the other.
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it's weird to me that every time i see someone express that exact sentiment, always really smugly for some reason, they always pick some silly figure like 20 hours. actually, they seem to usually pick precisely 20 hours. peculiar.
i prefer to take the hardline stance of if a game isn't immediately good as soon as i gain control, it is actually just bad. nier automata's shit, and everyone who likes it is undergoing some mass hysteria. no i haven't played past the tutorial, why
e: i do agree with the guy but only precisely in the case of warframe, and for no other game
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play drums of war
ike's steam platinums blog (latest one: 162. never alone)
in General Gaming
Posted · Edited by Integrity
i like blitzball, you fool
get in
e: a fun fact: per steam global achievement metrics, fewer people have Won A Single Game Of Blitzball In FFX-2 than Have 100% Completed FFX