Integrity

congratulations on having a fart's worth of fun

lol hell yeah shovelware ftw

yeah Q's one of the nasty ones. the only candidates off the top of my head are the quakes (which, to be fair, quake 2 is very not-long and could probably be done in six or so hours co-op on easy) and queen's wish, a game i haven't played but parrhesia loves him some spiderweb software crpgs. i don't even own a non-quake game that starts with Q on steam, and there isn't a single one in my huge spreadsheet of unclaimed games. the quake 2 one, yeah. quake 64, to my knowledge, was largely just a shittier linearized version of quake's campaign rather than its own thing like doom 64 and quake 2 64 were. it's apparently included in the quake remaster but i didn't bother playing it, lmao

ok editing works again i fixed it. fixed the image links too

QUAKE 2 (ID, 1997) Finished: 15/9/23. Playtime: 11.7 hours. Quake 2, on release, was lauded as not only the best first-person shooters had ever been, but possibly as good as they could ever be. It looked and played unbelievably well - so good, in fact, that id had to adjust design philosophies towards map design focused around fewer enemies because your brand spanking new Voodoo graphics card couldn't handle the fidelity of Quake numbers of enemies on screen at a time. It had interconnecting levels, split into 'units'. where travel back and forth from maps was possible and all actions you took were persistent until you moved to the next unit. It had this, regrettably. Bless you, the 90s. Quake, interestingly, held up like a damn wine. It was not only playable largely blind in 2022, I'd say directly it was good and full-up still just as recommendable as when it was new. Quake 2 did not. Quake 2 is a fine enough shooter for if you're very hungry for more shooters from the 90s, but its reputation as one of the best of all time is entirely unearned, I think. I'd put forth that not only is it the worst Quake, not only was it not the best shooter of its time, it wasn't even the best shooter of 1997. It's not a bad game, it's just ...well, it's something. I'll try to peel apart why Quake 2 is so completely whelming. The very most basic thing to judge a game by is how it looks, and Quake 2 looks like shit. Part of it, certainly, is that mid-90s 3D has aged badly, but I'm not going to pick on model quality or anything - we use the tools we got. A lot of it is down to the fact that everything in Quake 2 is fucking brown. Everything. There's a bit in Quake 2 64 where you have to stare into the darkness from your brown platform to see a different brown platform ascending up a brown column. I'm not even exaggerating. Parrhesia could not see it before I pointed it out. That was the worst instance in the game, but everything is just browns on browns. Every joke about X360 shooters sparked by Call of Duty and Gears of War was a joke that was almost ten years too late, because holy shit. Quake's aesthetic, weapons and enemies and environments, coasted by smoothly on how alien and gothic everything was. Quake 2's weapons and enemies are just kinda standard cybernetic body horror (I implore you to click the earlier link, or to do it again) and, while the designs are mostly interesting enough, it just doesn't hold up like Quake's unique weirdness did. Quake 2's environments are awful, shitty future-industrial mazes. Quake 2's gameplay loop is also just inherently unsatisfying compared to its predecessor. The weapons are more standard faux-militaristic shit, rather than the wack junk of Quake - and they feel like shit to use. Quake operated with an almost unfathomable simplicity of design: you had the Axe, the Shotgun, the Shotgun++, the Nailgun, the Nailgun++, the Exploder, the Exploder++, and the Ultimate Weapon. Four ammo types and, except for the ultimate, a low-grade and a high-grade way to expend each. There's some argument, to be sure, that having a weapon basically obsolete a previous one isn't great design, but I think in Quake's case it worked gangbusters. Quake 2 has a shitload of weapons (and far more added in expansion packs) and many of them have overlapping roles to the point where you're never using a weapon for a situation, you're using which of the fairly-equivalent-power weapons has ammo right now. It also clogs the hell out of the weapon lineup, because (for instance) while you will use the machine gun after you get the chain gun (unlike Quake's equivalent nailguns), the shotgun is absolutely pathetic and has no place post-super shotgun, and you can throw grenades before you get the grenade launcher and you keep this ability on your weapon lineup forever for some reason. Combine this with the lower-number high-health enemies, and you never build any momentum going through a level. Fighting always feels like stopping to burn a bar down, but the game wasn't designed as an arena shooter like a predecessor to neo-Doom or Boltgun. It wants you to freeroam and explore the (large!) levels, but you can't do that easily when enemies have a significant barrier to kill and pose a distinct threat to you. It's a game waiting to be Boltgun, but Boltgun hasn't been invented yet. Enemy and map design? Dross, generally. I didn't mention it before, but the 2023 remaster that I played incorporated a bunch of later AI and moveset improvements to the base game which generally made the game more dangerous but in good and interesting ways. In the original, enemies had crippling weaknesses like "slow and melee-locked", "reloads before he shoots for some reason", and the godly "cannot attack and move at the same time". Skyrim bears had an ancestor, I guess. This does distinctly improve the game, but it also means that a good number of enemies can flip between original behavior (which is harmless) and expansion pack behavior (which is lethal) on a dime. Your government-issue elite gunners can either shoot you (for fairly piddly damage) or launch a volley of three to seven grenades in rapid succession. The melee guys from earlier who could not move and attack at the same time now can, for ignorable damage, or they can leap at you for some damage and massive displacement. The maps are winding and poorly-laid out (but do attempt to have signage!) and, honestly, this would have taken twice as long if the remaster had not introduced my best friend, Compass-kun. Compass-kun, when activated, lays out the path to your next objective. It's obscenely good games design: always there if you need or even just want it, never present in your interface if you don't press the button to bring it up. Compass-kun fucking rules. I'll put a note in about the music since I tend to when I do these fuller breakdowns: Quake's score was legendarily written by Ohio's own Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, and he created one of the greatest soundtracks to a game ever made, which has stood the test of nearly thirty years now. Quake 2 was scored by some young composer in one of the first jobs of what would become a very respectable career, and the result is very much Nine Inch Nails At Home. It's not very good. I'm glad he went on to create good things later, but this is absolutely early career growing pains, and I'd wager the poor guy was asked to follow up on Reznor's obscene effort directly. I do not blame the composer for Quake 2's music. One of his very next jobs was Unreal Tournament, a game with a good enough soundtrack that Parrhesia and I literally played it over the musicless Quake 2 64. At the end of all this, did I like Quake 2? Not really, honestly. It was okay. It was not the worst shooter I've ever played, but it really did nothing to elevate itself from the myriad gunk of games like Duke Nukem 3D. It doesn't even have enough character, like Duke3D, for me to see why it would be somebody's weird stan game. It's just kind of an evolutionary nothing that would eventually inspire Quake 4, a game I have a lot of absolutely unearned love for, and really not much else. Sayonara, weird and kinda-sub-mediocre game. The 2023 remaster contained five campaigns, and 100% achievements means nothing more or less than beating all five on any difficulty. This does not disclude co-op multiplayer, so Parrhesia (my man, my boy, my platonic love) ran the entire gamut with me. Take a moment to stop reading, cover your heart, and say a prayer for some unbelievably homie behavior here. Quake 2's original 1997 release was the first and the longest, of course. The following year, 1998, would give us The Reckoning and Ground Zero, the original expansion packs to Quake 2. The Reckoning was developed by Xatrix Entertainment, who you may better know these days as Treyarch, the architects of all the Call of Duty games that people play when there's nothing else to do between Infinity Ward releases. It's insanely fucking bad. The Reckoning is, genuinely, among the worst FPS experiences of my entire gaming life. The Reckoning is fucking terrible. It's full of poorly-signposted backtracking, there's no ammo anywhere, it adds more weapons that add nothing to the experience, and it really loves to use a particular enemy. I didn't harp on this in the enemies section so that I could harp on it specifically with regards to The Reckoning, but there's an uncommon enemy type who has a claw and a railgun. The railgun is hitscan, but takes a moment to acquire you and you can strafe-dodge it. It does fifty damage of your hundred-or-so health. The Reckoning adores to have them in trios or more, or to put them in such places where the railgun side sees you first and it gets a first strike, and it does this a lot. It's unfathomably tedious. At no point during The Reckoning was I having an ounce of fucking fun. Parrhesia and I had a rhythm where we would play a game or two of Starcraft 2 co-op together, shoot the shit, warm up, and then play Quake 2 for a unit or so, each night we had nothing else going on. The Reckoning was so bad that we swapped this routine, weeks in, because if we played Starcraft 2 first we'd just decide to play more Starcraft instead of swapping games. We had to change our behavior to force ourselves through this fucking thing. Ground Zero was honestly fairly good, which is interesting because it comes from the minds at Rogue, who I introduced in the Quake writeup as having made Dissolution of Eternity, a campaign where their reach distinctly exceeded their grasp. While The Reckoning introduces weapons that do absolutely nothing for the gameplay loop (like fucking traps. TRAPS! in Quake!), Ground Zero adds things that actually fill niches that Quake 2's design philosophy needed, like a Machinegun+ with its own ammo so you're not splitting bullets between the machine gun and the chain gun. This is also the expansion that invented most of the behavior changes that the remaster backported into the main game, correctly, like the gunners not reloading before they shoot and enemies making token attempts to dodge projectiles. It's just, on aggregate, better than the original game, and its tepid contemporary reception both confuses me and further convinces me that gamers are inhuman. This will get worse later in this post. 1999 would produce a Nintendo 64 port of Quake 2. Doom had been "ported" to the N64 before and had gotten an entirely unique game out of it, which is also in this thread and which I thought was kinda bad (but better than Quake 2 vanilla, honestly). Quake had also been ported to the N64, and it caused some discontent on account of being a shit demaster of the original game instead of an experience designed for the N64. id, seeing patterns, decided to go the Doom route for Quake 2 64, rather than the Quake route. Quake 2 64, by Midway (as was Doom 64 and Quake 64), is unfathomably okay. Except for the aforementioned platforming brown bit, in the penultimate level, it's fine. It's okay. There isn't enough ammo, but it's never hard. It was designed to be played on the fucking N64 controller, that aberration, and took Parrhesia and I literally an hour to beat on Hard in a single take. If you're extremely hungry for just a crumb more 90s shooter, it's there. There's nothing (else) offensively bad about it. It's just there. It's in the remaster, for the first time outside of the N64, because Bethesda has a bizarrely healthy relationship with its retro shooter franchises. Finally, there's Call of the Machine. As with Quake's Dimension of the Machine, Bethesda commissioned Machine Games of neo-Wolfenstein fame to make their own expansion map pack for the game as an event for the game's 25th anniversary last month, launching with the remaster. Call of the Machine, as with Dimension of the Machine, is very obviously made by multiple disparate directors of distinctly differing aptitude. Of the six units, one is really bad, most are fine, and Corpse Run. Corpse Run is perhaps the single finest FPS experience I have ever had in my entire life. I am absolutely fucking floored by how good Corpse Run is, and I have no idea why. There's an enduring capital-G Gamer thought that I try to push back against at every possible opportunity, that the value of a game is measured in hours per dollar spent. I'm sure you've seen it, that a dollar per hour is the expected minimum for a game. It's really stupid, but things like Corpse Run really put the lie to it, in my opinion. The entirety of Corpse Run, co-op with Parrhesia, took about 50 minutes (lol, about the same as Quake 2 64). I bought Quake 2 off-sale for $10. If the game had been only Corpse Run, I would be singing its praises. This unit, genuinely, was worth ten dollars on its own. Quake 2 technically beat out the $1/hr metric that Gamers hold games to, and the 10.5 hours of it that weren't Corpse Run were fine. Adequate. Bad, sometimes - hell, often. Was Quake 2 improved because I put more than one hour per dollar into it, beyond the absolute joy I got out of Corpse Run? No, it wasn't. It's a terrible metric for evaluating entertainment. Buy Quake 2, play Corpse Run, and refund it if you must. This is my plea. e: lol i forgot there were two followups on the 'gamers are inhuman' bit - the first is above, the second is that people are unironically mad that machine games didn't include the linked Naked Titty Bitch enemy, who is a shit enemy even ignoring the optics, in Call of the Machine, and tried to use it as a rallying cry for how games is woke now. like fucking lmao. i saw some idiot mad because machine games included "every enemy" from return to castle wolfenstein (what, all the different flavors of nazi) except for the she-wolf of the SS leather dominatrix women because they're woke now. the actual takeaway is that i hate everyone who posts about videogames online in any capacity.

to memory the two quicktime events at the end are mashing and the timed press where you have to hit the button when the white circle overlaps the red one (same thing as fishing)

SONIC FRONTIERS (TEAM SONIC, 2022) Finished: 7/9/23. Playtime: 21.1 hours. Sonic Frontiers is a game that coasts almost exclusively on vibes. The good news is that the vibes are really good, but any attempt to take the game apart from an objective standpoint is, ultimately, going to be fairly unkind to it, I think. The game's kind of a mess, suffering from bloated and opaque systems and a world map that's got one of the worst cases of Ubisoft Syndrome I've ever seen. The game constantly struggles to find a difficulty curve that's between frictionless schmoovin' and blank staring with no idea how to proceed. There's at least two upgrades that are actually kind of downgrades. There's quite a lot to dislike about Frontiers. The most indicative element of all of it is, I think, the combat system. Sonic's got a small pile of combos and unlockable abilities to help you to optimize DPS at different ranges and from different angles, with a parry and a dodge mechanic strapped on top... and total mastery of it basically boils down to whether you two-cycle or three-cycle a given boss fight. Most enemies are dispatched in a hit, and most minibosses require you to do some mechanic (be it platforming, parrying, etc.) to put them into a vulnerable state whereupon you can apply your damage. Since these windows are timed, 'just mashing the hit button' will not do enough damage to kill the guy in two phase cycles, but instead three; while perfect combat mastery will do enough damage to kill the guy in two phase cycles, but not one. Depending on how diligent you are at upgrading your attack stat, it's entirely possible to be in a space where mastery of the combat isn't enough for a one cycle, but brute punching still gets you a two cycle - or, hell, if you upgrade enough, where brute punching is just a one cycle victory, and total mastery only lets you win the fight slightly faster. What does this add to the game? I genuinely don't know, but I do know one thing: I had fun playing with it for some reason. That's the crux of Frontiers, to me. There's some of it that's genuinely indefensible and dragged the game down, like the wild interconnecting pathways of rails that you create to make island traversal easier not having quite enough draw distance to be as useful as they ought to be. For most of the game, though, I can type a big takedown of why the system is pointless or even in some cases counterproductive, and then end it off with "but I had fun with it anyway." The cyberspace levels, little bite-sized throwback stages that just crib themes from past games like everything I disliked about Generations, are generally really easy and fairly samey and most of them are under two minutes long on a first clear. I still had a bunch of fun with them, even though none will stick with me in the long run. The cyberspace stage music fuckin' rocks, though. That's just objective fact. Hell, the plot of the game even follows up on this. It kept my attention and I ended up not skipping anything, unlike the three Sonic games before this, where I made it between a third of the cutscenes in (Generations) and the intro cutscene (Forces) before I started skipping everything like it's Final Fantasy XIV. But why didn't I skip? The first entire two islands were the low point in the story. I didn't particularly care for Amy and I found Knuckles to be boring as sin, but I kept watching anyway. I did get invested in the Eggman half of the plot, and genuinely liked whatever the hell was going on with Sage, but I really ought to have tapped out hours before the things I liked were getting center stage. I guess the vibes were there. I had fun with them anyway, for some reason. The open world's incredibly cluttered and only gets more cluttered as you complete objectives in the map. The map has no fewer than I think fourteen filter modes, one for each kind of icon, and there's whole parts of island you just straight up can't see on the map through all the icons. It looks like shit, and the information the map screen gives you is extraneous, redundant, overwhelming, and often opaque. The world itself suffers from this too, a bit. Completing challenges eventually makes every island a horrible spaghetti bowl of platforms and rails to help you get around, industrializing the beautiful islands into Californian nightmares. One of the islands is a bit of a pain in the ass to get around, and one is horribly designed, which doesn't sound bad until it's pointed out that there are only four islands. That's half the game indicted in one fell swoop. On the other hand, just going fast is really enjoyable and I had a lot of fun gathering collectibles, for some reason. All of these complaints and more just kind of washed over me while playing the game. Beneath some spectacular attempts to self-sabotage, and a game absolutely creaking under its own weight, Frontiers carries a kind of simple joy of speed with it that I was completely able to deactivate my rationality cortex and vibe into, unlike the previous Sonic games I've played. I don't know, and I don't think I could ever justify, why I enjoyed Frontiers as much as I did. The simple fact remains, though, that I had a lot of fun playing this kind-of bad game. For some reason. Sonic Frontiers would be one of the worst chores imaginable to 100% if you hate fishing, but good news: I love fishing. Most of the game is really trivial to finish from an achievements standpoint. You don't need to get anywhere close to 100%ing the game to get all the achievements, and I didn't force myself to. Beat the game, kill everything one time, and see all the side cutscenes, and you're basically done. You don't even need to complete all the missions (S-rank time, red star rings, finish with X rings) for every cyberspace level, and in fact you don't even need to play every cyberspace level. At the end of all of that is maxing out your stats and skill tree, which takes hundreds of various stat-up doodads which are generally rewarded to you in singlets for doing platforming challenges. This would take eons of samey overworld jumping and running to complete, except that catching a single fish on the fourth island can be worth up to 24 of the stat-up doodads. It took 76 fishes to max all my stats, max the skill tree, and get a few dozen affection tokens to unlock the last of the side content. Thanks, Big.

stop posting good things you're becoming the best incumbent user of these forums after lenticular

it sounds hokey ("yeah no shit ike") but the core question, first, has to be what should knife sages accomplish? i bring this up because (for instance) the 'have a knife like the flame shuriken' angle is just, like, you've given them Tomes With An Extra Step, right? don't consider the stats of the units in question first or the way the game is already put together, you gotta be able to say what the point of Sage Knives is besides 'it is funny'. imo, the best angle one could take if we really want to bring it back is to design the game around magic damage being really polarizing - generally low res, but low tome might, but high wizard res. fighting wizards with wizardry would be kind of a standstill, then, and sages would be far better used to support their allies by taking out enemy melee troops or, with staves, by healing. giving sages knives, then, could be a statement of specializing this wizard as a wizard-killer (a King Wizard of sorts) because, while his strength might be low, enemy defense is cratered and he's going to get much more damage out of slinging that knife out than by using magic to fight magic that's not the only way to take it and i'm positive armchair general (who has replied (show reply)) has a different take, but i think any interesting approach to it needs to answer that simple question - why take a sage knives - before any numerical or specific talk can occur. i think it would be a neat way to differentiate wizard-duelist-wizards (e.g. dread fighter lite) from other, supporting wizards, but that's just one way to go about it e: i was baited. his post sucked

for anyone else reading the thread, you will be judged for that and should feel bad. have a great day 🙂 op's on a two-week suspension and last strike because it's a holiday weekend and i'm feeling generous so don't expect him to respond to any of your posts, but i'll leave the thread open i guess e: for the record the suspension ought to have been on sight, but on account of it's a holiday weekend i spent yesterday drinking beer and playing total warhammer and only checked the site once in the morning and figured everything would be nice and calm. guy lucked out and posted like an hour after i checked in

now THIS is quality offseason posting

hell yes i have. my mom is the hugest titan quest fan so she's over the moon right now

inject these takes into my veins. this gives me life.

RISK OF RAIN (HOPOO, 2013) Finished: 26/4/15. Playtime: 19 hours. RISK OF RAIN 2 (HOPOO, 2020) Finished: 26/8/23. Playtime: 133.4 hours. Finally. I've 100%ed Risk of Rain 2 several times, and they keep putting new shit in. Bastards. Risk of Rain and its sequel are odd games. Risk of Rain, the first, was a pretty solid 2D action-platformy-roguelike kinda deal. You pick a character, get dropped into a random first stage, and have to find the exit while cleaning enemies up for money and looking for places to spend that money on items. Once you find the exit teleporter, you interact with it to start a defense event, and on completion of that you're able to move to the next stage. Rinse and repeat. Once you get to Stage 6, the stage instead ends with a boss fight, and you win. Various smaller meta-challenges in the game unlock more items to be seeded into the item pool, or unlock more characters you can pick from to start a round. It's a pretty simple game, but it comes together well to create a fun, bite-sized frenetic action game. Risk of Rain 2 makes the absolutely preposterous move of successfully transferring every bit of Risk of Rain's DNA to a third-person shooter in full 3D. It's the precise recipe for disaster in every conceivable way, and Hopoo somehow stuck the landing immaculately. I never think of Risk of Rain 2 when I think of my favorite games ever, but it's pretty undoubtedly one of the finest examples of its genre ever put together. The only downside to it is that I find it gently exhausting to play. I've only summarized the games at a very high level because so much of Risk of Rain 2 comes about in how its achievements are structured. Risk of Rain, while a hard game, is relatively smooth to 100%. If you're capable of crushing through the game on the middle difficulty of three, you're well past good enough to get everything done with a guide and a little luck. Notably, Steam 100% is not Risk of Rain 100%, which is a far bigger undertaking. I'm... not actually sure that Steam 100% even necessarily requires beating the game a single time, now that I think about it, which is pretty funny. 100% Risk of Rain 2 is an absolute goddamn monster. The overall game flow of the sequel is slightly different to the first. You go through five random stages and, at the fifth's teleporter event, you have the option to configure the teleporter to the moon (go to the final boss stage, analogous to Risk of Rain's Stage 6) or to the planet (loop back to Stage 1). Since difficulty is a factor of how many stages you've completed and how much time you've taken, each loop represents a fairly hefty difficulty spike. Every fifth stage is always the same map, and you get to make the same choice as many times as you can stay alive for. First up, you basically have to interact with every single facet of the game. Raise every stat, one at a time, to large levels. See all of the bonus stages and, of course, beat them all. Beat the final boss. Beat the game the non-boss way, which involves getting to at least midway through your second loop and taking the alternate exit to obliterate yourself from existence. Kill a boss fast. Kill an elite boss. Kill a lot of other things. Kill a lot of things at once. There's a fucking load of these, and they don't represent anything near the hard shit. Next up, let's introduce Artifacts. Both games had them, but 2 has an achievement for getting each. These are items you can find during runs that can be toggled on or off from the run setup screen to provide a permanent modifier to the game, such as all enemies in a stage will be the same type, or your doppelgänger will try to kill you every few minutes. There's twelve of these in total, and they can make getting a lot of other achievements a hell of a lot easier, either through making the game less random (Command lets you choose items instead of getting them at random) or through more direct methods (elite bosses only spawn after your third loop; Honor makes all enemies including bosses elite from the first level). They don't impact any achievements, so go wild. Command is widely considered to make the game significantly easier by removing one of the biggest sources of RNG, and I abused it flagrantly for the below. You'll see why. Third are the victory achievements. There are, as of this writing, thirteen characters to choose from in Risk of Rain 2, and I don't suspect that number is going to go up. Everything I've said up to now is, thankfully, difficulty-agnostic; let's change that. You have to beat the game, through your choice of either method outlined earlier, on the highest difficulty with each character. Just getting good enough to beat Monsoon is already a task itself. Getting flexible and comfortable enough with the game to beat Monsoon with everyone is a hell of a task, even if you're using Artifacts to make the load a little lighter. Doing it au naturale? Christ, forget it. I got good enough to beat Monsoon one time with random drops just to prove I could, and then everything I did after that was with Swarms (double enemies but half health each), Command (choose items), and Sacrifice (no chests, but enemies drop items randomly) enabled. Fourth and finally are the skill unlock achievements. Every character (but one) has alternative skills they can equip before a run, and your build is locked when you hit go. These skills get unlocked via achievements, and these achievements are often completely fucked-up to imagine doing without Command. Some of them are batshit no matter how you slice it, even. Going through the character list, and ignoring the ones that are pretty banal (like "beat the third stage as Huntress"): Commando: Kill an Overloading Worm, which involves getting an Overloading Worm to spawn, which can only happen on the second loop and beyond after about 40 minutes of gameplay. Nothing guarantees it, just pray. This would be the worst, except the Commando's other one is to complete twenty consecutive stages in a single run. Recall that beating the game, nominally, is either six or eight. Huntress: Hold twelve crowbars at once. This is pretty tame overall, but I want to bring it up to prime later ones. Crowbars are a common item, which means that without Command you're relying on a 1/40ish chance per common drop to get a crowbar, and for that to happen twelve times in a run. There's very rare spawns that can help out but the short of it is that this is just completely random unless you have Command on, and then it's completely trivial. We're going to talk a lot about item stacking later. MUL-T: Much like the Huntress, the worst he's got is one random one: kill an Imp Overlord with a Preon Accumulator. The Imp Overlord has a chance to be the boss of Stage 3 or 4, and the Preon Accumulator is a rare equipment spawn with a single fixed instance on one of the three possible Stage 3s (you have to get there fast to get it though) so it's just a matter of rerunning a 10-minute game over and over until the stars align. Engineer: Finish a teleporter defense with no enemies left alive. This is one that just sucks for dumb reasons - enemies do not have to be killed to finish the defense, and it's very frequent that one just gets stuck trying to path to you or one spawns a second before the event ends. You can brute force it eventually, it's just - again - random. The first set of characters (up to here) are pretty tame, overall, except the Commando. Artificer: So let's go apeshit. Kill a teleporter boss in a one-second window. The Artificer is naturally fragile and bursty, but does considerable AoE. It's very easy to poke the boss with the tiniest amount of splash damage while clearing guys who will kill you fast, and then you're just hosed. I genuinely have no idea how you're supposed to do this outside of turning on the Artifacts of Glass (500% damage, 10% health) and Command, and even then you need a hefty portion of luck to pull it off. Mercenary: Here we go. Every day, a Prismatic Trial is generated. This has you complete two stages with certain parameters on the run, and is meant as a daily challenge kind of deal. As the Mercenary, complete a Prismatic Trial without falling below 100% health. I don't need to explain to you how completely horseshit this is, do I? I will also add the information that Risk of Rain 2 has falling damage. Captain: It's a fair question whether it's less onerous for an achievement to be one difficult action, but you only get to make the roll after 40 minutes; or to be a ballbuster, but you pass or fail within 10. The Mercenary's one was the latter, and here's the former. The Captain can call down two Supply Beacons per stage. They're solid buffs that you can configure in the pre-game screen and reinforce the Captain's identity as a positionally-defensive character. They take a few seconds to deploy and do a modest chunk of damage to anything under them as a joke. Kill the final boss with a Supply Drop. This sounds really funny, but I have to stress - they do modest damage and take a while to deploy. You get two shots per stage. You get to the final boss after 40 minutes to an hour of gameplay, at least at my pace. If you miscalculate the damage you do - which you can't easily see, because you'd have to use it to check - and leave the boss alive? Eat shit. If you miss? Eat shit. If you fuck up and kill the boss by mistake? You guessed it! Eat shit. It's a remarkably terrible achievement. Bandit: Here's the punchline. Kill the final boss with Lights Out. You know what Lights Out is? Reusable. This isn't even a bad one, it's just astonishing in contrast with the Captain one which was added in the same update. Railgunner: Do a million damage in a single shot. This is what the Huntress was setting up for. To get this million damage, I had to stack twenty-six crowbars and five glass shards (a rare item you will typically see 0 to 1 of per run) to get to that million. Much like the Artificer, I have no earthly idea how this is possible to get to organically outside of just being good enough to loop 20 stages. It took me almost a full run with Command to get the items together for it and those shards tanked my prospects of actually winning. REX, Loader, Acrid, and Bandit (so 4/12) I have nothing to complain about. REX and Acrid's achievement sets actually just reward you for properly using their kit, and Loader's are all about going fast but not so insanely fast that you need Command to stack speed. The thirteenth survivor (Void Fiend) has no alternative skills. My complaint with these is that they're extremely specific (and often exceptionally difficult) challenges that unlock options for you that can dramatically change how the survivor plays. These should be locked behind things like REX and Acrid have, where you're rewarded for using your skillset well with changes to your skillset, as opposed to having to prove either utter mastery of the game or wildly cheese a build in order to replace a skill you don't like. If Risk of Rain 2 has a glaring and unignorable flaw, I think, it's the skill unlock achievements. They suck. The good news is that that's it, though. If this were a narrative, at this point, you'd be done or all but done. The process of getting all these alternative skills and skins (skins being the rewards for beating Monsoon) will almost certainly get you everything else. While I have massive issues with the structure and format of unlocks in Risk of Rain 2, it clearly hasn't stopped or slowed me from coming back to the game over and over again to crunch through a new set of achievements or to buy a new DLC. Risk of Rain itself is getting a full remake, including content from Risk of Rain 2, sometime this year, and you bet your ass I'm going to throw another set of dollars and hours at Hopoo. The thing is, whatever negatives I can point to, the simple fact of the matter is that they get it, on a fundamental level. They make fantastically playable games that feel incredibly good to master, and I've really mostly just wasted your time in a huge series of nitpicks about optional content.

cats hidden in italy achieved steam verification so it counts for metrics now so the thread gets to go up by 1 number with no extra work fuck yeah

no worries, glad we help 👍

my guess is it looks more "streamlined" to have fewer buttons or some other corporate nonsense, but i can't weigh in concretely any given way

that was a change enforced by ip.board, regrettably. i can muck about a bit in the admin tools and see if it's possible to restore if that's something people want, but i'm not particularly hopeful about it e: haha the preview on the front page says "Any reason for the Edit butt..."

as far as news goes, there's just been no real news to talk about. that will inevitably spin back up when there's a new game in the works, but for now there's nothing going on except feh additions which (iirc) we have one guy doing in his spare time and we've never really tried to be comprehensive about e: also i'm doing pretty well thanks for asking 🙂

the new map sucks shit fair enough!

question for the chat when a game gets an update / dlc that comes with a few more hours of gameplay and a new set of achievements, should i: go about my work in dutiful silence post about the new achievements / content only if they're notable or somehow at odds with the original verdict (e.g. if i'd played fell seal's dlc after the fact) Just Post e: this is sparked by the amid evil dlc, which was really good e2: this doesn't include stuff like killing floor 2 or golf with your friends, which update to include A New Map and Two New Achievements, ofc

POWERWASH SIMULATOR (FUTURLAB, 2022) Finished: 19/8/23. Playtime: 72.8 hours. I don't lie. Powerwash Simulator, to put it bluntly, rules. You have a pressure washer. You wash. That's the entire game. You unlock stronger washers to combat stronger mucks. There's coop, and I've beaten the entire game twice, once as Parrhesia's guest and once in my solo campaign. Either this sounds like a good time or it doesn't. Instead of going through the game's silly houses and goofy cars you have to wash, I'm going to talk about my second monitor, which I stole from my university when my advisor's lab closed. I watched two shows, two Youtube channels, and a sport while pressure washing, and I think all five worked just about perfectly. I already talked about my time with the Ace Attorney anime, and watching it was, in large part, the sideshow to pressure washing things. 3.5 followed the trend of 2.4, where it wasn't as good as the game case on aggregate but had some spins it took that I think benefited the case a lot as a whole, and particularly in the medium. The other show I watched while washing was Quarterback on Netflix. It's not award-winning, as documentaries go, but it's good and if your primary goal is to think Kirk Cousins is a bizarrely likeable dude, or to feel bad for Marcus Mariota, man you're in luck. I've found it to be very compelling and a fascinating look into the lives of a bunch of guys who are entirely unlike anything I could imagine being. Easy recommendation. One of the biggest helps during the late stage solo washing goes to the Youtube channel Stu. Stu's gimmick is simple - uncommentated speedruns of Starcraft's campaigns, 1 and 2, with cutscenes and dialogue left unskipped. They're absolutely fantastic sidebar material, without peer. Similarly, in the strategy space, Jethild produces pseudo-documentary videos about various topics in the Command and Conquer universe, sort of in the conceit that it's historical or real, and is an easy rec if you enjoy either those games or just generally a good-hearted dork talking about something he really likes. This has finally been the season I managed to get myself into baseball. I played a lot as a kid - I was the star pitcher in my Little League for a year, then played shortshop (which I liked a lot more) - but stopped when I was about eleven. Problem was, baseball just kind of sucked to watch. When I'd start caring about sports, Three True Outcomes baseball was at its worst height. On top of that, I grew up first in Hawaii, then in Germany, then in Vegas, and really had nothing like a home team considering my local (Cincinnati) team was chronically mismanaged and shit. The changes made this year as a result of the World Baseball Classic to MLB made the games weirdly... watchable. finally. I was in a bar earlier this year, in Pittsburgh, watching a game, and I fell in love with Ji-hwan Bae. I'm a Pirates man, I guess. If you've bounced off baseball before this year, but wanted to like watching it, it's finally become a fantastic thing to watch while you do something not especially engaging, like the step up from a podcast. Anyway, 100% Powerwash Simulator involves a simple set of achievements. Pressure wash your way through the campaign and one DLC, and for about 2/3 of levels do some optional objective. For almost all of these it's simply "do <this part> <first or last>". If you check them, there's not much to say about them. They don't tend to make the levels particularly harder or easier, but they do add a bit of gameplay flavor, and I wish they were presented as secondary objectives when you loaded into a map instead. The one DLC is the Spongebob Squarepants tie-in, and as someone who did not grow up on the show nor knows, uh, anything about it besides listening to LS Mark talk about it, it was actually really fun for the most part. Goofy texts, and the levels varied from "just a solid Powerwash level" to "a funny gimmick they couldn't do in the main game." The final level was fucking trash on ice, but I won't drag it too hard for that. There's also a challenge mode which grades you on either the time or water you take to finish a job, and you need any five gold medals from that complete (20+) set, and I found it trivial to finish at the end. All in all, very satisfying, incredible game, easy recommendation to anyone. Don't let my paucity of words about the game fool you - I had so few words, and yet sunk three entire days into the game and think it was great. wosh u soul

that all does scan to my memories of the time, actually. that's a pretty sensible breakdown, thanks op

i'm running oc fighter, with default class wyll, karlach, and gale, to see if the game survives me running without a cleric or a rogue

YEAH! YOU WANT "THOSE GAMES," RIGHT? SO HERE YOU GO! NOW, LET'S SEE YOU CLEAR THEM! (MONKEYCRAFT, 2023) Finished: 18/8/23. Playtime: It's gonna be 44 hours but that's off for a few reasons. Yeah, you want "those games", don't you? 98% of people fail this - can you succeed??? Those Games (henceforth) is a collection of minigames that are meant to represent the kinds of games you see in mobile game ads that just don't exist. Cash Run asks you to spend cash to walk to choose to Casino or Study, or to Vaccine or Virus, on your way through the path of life. Pin Pull has you pour lava on your stick man because you didn't pay attention. You've seen Number Tower before, as the advert attacks a guy with 18 power to increase his own power to 38 power, and then hurls himself into a guy with 41 power and dies - FAIL. Download now! The joke largely lands. Parking Lot is genuinely fun, and Color Lab and Pin Pull have fun in them. Cash Run sucks, and Number Tower is either dull or frustrating at best, but for a tenner there's absolutely ten bucks of fun in it. You're graded entirely on the time you take to clear things, which is usually to the detriment of the standard game, but is used to make a half-baked monthly challenge system. Those Games has eleven achievements. Five of them are for beating all levels, between 25 and 100 depending on the game, of each game. Five of them are for getting three stars, again based on time, on every level of each game. The eleventh is for getting one million coins. Beating one level gets you between 100 and 500 coins. The math does itself. There are missions to beat certain stages in certain ways, which can add up to two or five thousand coins to your total. Out of a million. Beating every single stage, competing in several leaderboard challenges, and going out of my way to accomplish missions got me somewhere north of 200,000 coins. At this point ,you can do dailies (worth about 10k coins/day), or you can cheat. I cheated. If you set up a macro to spam controller-A, or keyboard-Enter, about every six frames, you can just crank through Pin Pull level 6 every about six seconds for a hundred coins. Then, you go to bed. The first night I did this, I forgot to turn on the macro. Tonight, the macro will actually happen and the game will finish. It's a bullshit achievement in the most bullshit way, but the joke of the game is good enough that I feel like stressing about 100%ing this game is owning yourself automatically, so I'm going to give it a pass. e: i was right for date - the achievement popped at 4am today. i was wrong for time - the final playtime was 43 hours. damn