Integrity

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

it's a trick game - there's only one cat, but locutus of morb is worth 100 other, better cats

CATS HIDDEN IN PARIS + CATS HIDDEN IN ITALY (TRAVELLIN CATS, 2023) Finished: 17/8/23. Playtime: 41 minutes. It's easy to forget, for us hardcore giganerds who need our heads flushed in toilets, that gaming takes a lot of forms to a lot of people. Yeah, there's Paradox games and Fromsoft games and all sorts of ways to get one's teeth kicked in, but that's not always the point to many people. And if I love anything, I love silly little passion projects like this. Our lovely own @CrimeanRoyalKnightbought me Cats Hidden in Italy as a silly little pre-birthday gift. It was, roughly, a dollar. You click play, you are treated to a cheery little looping song, and you are shown a cute hand-drawn block evocative of a certain city. There are one hundred cats. Find them and click them. That's it. Paris has an achievement for speedrun clicking all the cats in 3 minutes. It took me three tries. My favorite cat was Isidoro. Was this less gaming than trying to figure out a hard fight in Baldur's Gate 3? Was it, somehow, more pure? I don't know. I don't think that's answerable. I mostly just think it's worthwhile to remember how easy it is to get caught in our little bubbles of what things are or ought to be, and to poke around outside sometimes. Go click on some cats. I'm gonna go hug mine. e: cat hidden in ohio

considering our posting interactions, this doesn't surprise me in the least to learn but you do a very good job of avoiding being the stereotype, don't you worry about that. you're fun to talk videogames with

he regrettably posts these to the discord sometimes, including a guy who thinks throne of bhaal was better than bg3, or better than shitting oneself to death

guild wars 1 is a fantastic game for pure combat but that's basically all the game is, is finding inventive new ways to do combat. it's still pretty much unparalleled at that, but it's also a pretty limited niche imo

bg3 is the greatest crpg ever made, i am confident in this ruling i'm playing a half-elf fighter because that's what i always did as a child, and if i'm gonna be playing a new baldur's-fucking-gate in tyool 2023 i am absolutely reverting to the Old Ways

DUNGEONS OF DREDMOR (GASLAMP, 2011) Finished: 13/8/23. Playtime: 189.1 hours. This is something of a melancholic post for me. Dungeons of Dredmor, warts and all, has been a constant companion for twelve years now, even as it grew more unstable as Windows moved on and I grew dissatisfied with big swathes of it as my tastes grew and changed. There was always something about it, though. Something irreplaceable, to a big degree something magical, about Dungeons of Dredmor. This is kind of an elegy for Gaslamp Games, who gambled it all and lost. A studio of three, they dropped an experimental game in 2011 to relative success, went for broke on a big simulator that flopped, and folded. It's the story of the harsh reality of the society in which we live. Yet, somehow, long past the disbandment of the studio and the complete cessation of support for their games, Dredmor lives on past their legacy. Roguelikes didn't always have the accepted reputation that they do now. Time once was they were the realm of grognards, the kind of guys you'd run into on IRC who would talk about how it wasn't like back in the good old days of Usenet. The crack in the facade was, honestly, Spelunky. Losing was always fun, of course, but Spelunky brought the right amount of spectacle to the presentation, the right amount of spunk and chutzpah. That opened the floodgates for the first wave of properly-accepted, accessible roguelikes. Ed McMillen, much as I might think he's a total dipshit, threw himself into the ring quickly and productively, as did the folks behind Subset developing a little game called FTL: Faster Than Light. But just a little before them, while the edge was still bleeding a little harsher, was Gaslamp Games. Dungeons of Dredmor was a real attempt to bring the sheer merciless punishment of classic Rogue-alikes to the masses. In 2008, the International Roguelike Development Conference was held in Berlin. The result of a big keynote panel in this conference was the now-heralded Berlin Interpretation, which laid down the classic foundations of what mechanics comprised a game like Rogue. There needed to be some way to separate games with superficial similarity, like Diablo, from the original, you know? The interpretation of this, uh, Interpretation to Spelunky is, as far as I'm aware, what led to the invention of the term roguelite, for games that appropriated a certain amount of the Berlin characteristics but didn't really go all-in. Roguelites would spin off to become a hell of a genre and create many incredible games, but that Interpretation would hang heavy. Dredmor, in the very early days of this chaos, wanted to be like Rogue, calories and sugar and all. Dungeons of Dredmor would release on my mother's 43rd birthday to muted fanfare. It got generally solid review, but little raving, and many decried its seeming- and actual- randomness, as well as how utterly unforgiving the game was. I was a deeply different guy back then, and thought I'd just crunch through this goofy-looking game, and picked it up. It was pretty cheap - $20 if I recall - and my sister and I played it for hours back in my freshman year of college, as she finished high school. We'd swap builds, die all the time, try to figure out how Necronomiconomics worked, the whole nine yards. We never killed Dredmor - hell, we never got close. That wasn't ever the point. It was always about getting a little deeper, getting some weird new kit, trying a new skill line. When you roll a new guy in Dredmor, you pick seven skills from a pool of, initially, I think twenty-three, and eventually forty-odd. Your character is entirely defined by those skill tracks and the gear they get. You might get completely hosed by drops, a thousand swords when all you need is an axe, and the game has no mechanic nor interest in adjusting for it. The skills run the gamut from the obvious, like weapon specializations, dual wielding, various magickries, and crafting specializations; to the exotic, like burglary, ley line senses, mushroomancy, or literally just being a vampire; to the weird, like being such a dedicated communist you become some kind of socialized wizard. The wackier ones tended to come from the later expansions, but the thread was there from the beginning. Dredmor was a silly game with serious variables. Dredmor was Plants vs. Zombies' skin stretched over the fabric of competitive Starcraft. Dredmor wanted you dead, with a smile. This goofy veneer worked, though. Eating mushrooms to heal, getting silly reference swords, dying to whatever the fuck diggles are - it all worked. It hit the right balance of goofy and threatening. It landed. For nine floors of dungeon, increasing heavily in difficulty, Dungeons of Dredmor was a fantastic dungeon delver with a superb sense of humor. It all falls apart at the end, of course. Much like its later cousin FTL, Dredmor's titular Dredmor is a horrible fight and is terribly designed. I, a much more mature person, put together the work to actually kill the bastard, and found it not at all satisfying. The game was far better when I didn't have a chance to win, oddly. I don't know what to make of that, but there it is. Even so, after all the runs I've done, playing the game every year for the last twelve, I have nothing but love for Dredmor. I started playing it before I met the woman I'd go on to marry years later. I'd get married the same year Gaslamp folded, and celebrate my sixth anniversary a few weeks ago. In a weird way, I feel like I'm one of the last few carrying the torch of Dredmor, and I think that's kind of a tragedy. It was so great, and it could have been so much better, but the harsh realities of life took that potential from us. Nobody has really landed that level of accessible, turn-based, kinda-goofy dungeon delving that Dredmor did, and I'd even hold most of the game up against the original Rogue and Nethack in the glorious halls of RPG history. For all its warts, for all its faults, for all the bits about it that just fucking suck, I love Dredmor deeply, and a lot of me is kinda sad to finally pack it away. Do not try to 100% Dungeons of Dredmor. The achievement set is awful. It used to be basically-impossible - when the studio was solvent, one of the achievements was to have a beer with the devs in real life and give them your Steam profile so they could award it to you. They took that one out, making this post possible. Do not do what I have done.

PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY TRILOGY (CAPCOM, VARIOUS) Finished: 12/8/23. Playtime: 44.4 hours. Cribbing the format from my Mega Man post, it's time for another anthology! My experience with the Ace Attorney games is pretty minimal. My sister got Trials and Tribulations, the third game, for our DS back when it was fresh in 2007, and I thought it was pretty alright. Never played the first two, and managed to somehow not learn a single thing about them except for 'the miracle never happen' until I started the trilogy earlier this year. Don't know how I dodged that one. I'd eventually progress on through the series, to play Apollo Justice (which I thought kicked ass) and then never play another game in the series, leaving me having played only the middle pair out of six. The games have a nice easy breakdown thanks to the case structure, so let's get into it. PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY (2001) 1.1: The First Turnabout It's a tutorial. For what it is, it's fine. Parrhesia made a comment that it's essentially a perfect case for its scope, but its scope is limited to "here's what the buttons do, also please begin to care about Mia." That pretty much sums it up. 1.2: Turnabout Sisters Good job I began to care about Mia, eh! With the tutorial out of the way, Ace Attorney honestly hits the ground running. The core cast is all here, they coalesce together well instantly, and the series' first take at investigations lands well. For your First Real Case, 1.2 was pretty much beyond reproach. 1.3: Turnabout Samurai Well, damn. Every sin 1.2 deftly avoided, 1.3 dives deeply into. The cast of side characters in 1.2 were fun to talk to and accuse of committing perjury; the side-cast of 1.3, particularly Sal and Cody, and to a lesser extent Oldbag, were the pits. The investigation phase started to show a trend that future cases would slip into at their worst points, where your way forward is to go to an empty spot to get a dialogue about how someone isn't there, then go back to where you were to find out something unrelated had happened. Day 2 of 1.3's investigation had that and also a trade quest between two NPCs who were a staggering five zone transitions apart. It was a mess, but if there's any upside to it, it's where Edgeworth starts to get rolling. 1.4: Turnabout Goodbyes I've been oversaturated on Miles Edgeworth for more than a decade at this point. The last contact I actually had with the guy was 2008ish, and through a number of longstanding friends who enjoy the Ace Attorney games and the fact that I've been on Tumblr ever, I've heard no end of the bastard. It's testament to his writing, then, that despite all that, I still really like the guy. Edgeworth is the glue that holds Ace Attorney 1 together. What about the case, though? It's fine. It dragged a little bit, particularly any time you had to interact with the boatkeeper and watch his entire snot bubble popping animation every single time he does anything, but it was still compelling enough to keep me driving towards a superb conclusion. Overall, despite a slump, I can see why Ace Attorney captured hearts on that tiny screen in 2001. 1.5: Rise from the Ashes So I didn't actually know that Ace Attorney was a GBA franchise. I learned this during 1.5, when I DMed Parrhesia to say that 1.5 feels weirdly tacked-on, like a DLC case or something, but the DS didn't have DLC, did it? That's when I learned for the first time that Ace Attorney wasn't a DS original, twenty-two years later. 1.5's a weird case. It's entirely too long by several degrees, and it bears the black mark of having inflicted Mike Meekins on me, with his terrible megaphone feedback sounds playing constantly. Loved seeing pre-jaded Ema, didn't care for Lana; Gant's an alltimer. The DS gimmicks (especially fucking video evidence) did not help matters at all. It wasn't without redeeming qualities, but it really did not land very well overall, and left Ace Attorney maybe feeling a little worse off than it really deserves to. PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY: JUSTICE FOR ALL (2002) 2.1: The Lost Turnabout It's a worse tutorial than 1.1, tutorializing the same mechanics, and it's completely disconnected to anything else that's happened before or since, except for introducing Byrde so she can be used later. Nothing about it is particularly bad on its own merit, it's just a complete sleeper. 2.2: Reunion Comma and Turnabout I'm of two minds on 2.2. Psyche-Locks were absolutely necessary to spruce up the investigations phase, and I applaud the invention. Franziska wasn't nearly as obnoxious as my vague memories indicated she might be, but Ini Miney's gimmick ran thin almost instantly and was played for the entire case. Despite that, I still liked 2.2 overall, and it bears the twin glories of introducing Pearl, who I genuinely like, and being the only time that all the Mia channeling is warranted, given as the crime is happening in her own house. We'll get to that in a minute, though. On the other hand, 2.2 introduces Hotti, and for that it should be destroyed. 2.3: Turnabout Big Top I liked the damn circus, with a big star on liked. Max and Moe are both great, and almost nobody else really slumped, except for that Ben had possibly the single most obnoxious gimmick in a witness so far, and was a terrible character. The trial segments were fun, but that thing I grumbled about in 1.3 came back with a vengeance - go to the cafeteria to notice that nobody's there, go to Moe's room to notice that Moe's not there, and then go to the cafeteria to find Moe, but if you don't go to the cafeteria first, you don't get the middle event, so nothing else happens. A huge chunk of the investigation time in 2.3 was wasted just going back and forth between places looking for something new to happen, and I'm fine admitting I just used a guide past the halfway point of the case for the non-court bits. Due to that, I can't really give the circus the credit I want to, but it wasn't the worst at least. 2.4: Farewell Comma My Turnabout This was, handily, the best of the cases I hadn't played before. Everything comes together well, with a few moments of unsure progress (I kept trying to make Nick figure out the knife was missing from the fucking plate, it's so obvious!!!) to make sure things weren't perfect. Still, my entire complaints about 2.4 can be summed up simply: please do not have brought Hotti back, and the final testimony stalling should have been about two rounds shorter - it made its point by the, what, fifth round of poking holes to buy time. My last, and meatiest, complaint about 2.4 is something that has echoed since the first game but is really appropriate here: I don't like Mia as she's used by the games. Don't get me wrong, 1.1 Mia Fey is a good character, and we'll get to my thoughts (positive) on playing as her in Trials and Tribulations later. What I don't like is the Maya/Pearl As Mia defense counsel. I give it a pass gladly for 1.2 and 2.2, since those are dealing with Mia's own death (and is kind of a tutorial) and a murder in the Fey estate, but particularly in 2.4 it's just obnoxious and it both cheapens Mia's death and stifles Maya/Pearl's characters. With the amount of Pearl Mia in 2.4, there's a fair argument that the case would play out identically if Mia never died to begin with, which is just bonkers. The case would have been fine if Pearl herself just delivered the end-of-testimony you-got-this-Nick lines and the Judge had some jokes about a child in the courtroom. Still, this is a complaint I've had for most of the cases so far. It's just the most pressing here. Even with that, 2.4's the highlight of the first two games, and now it's time to reexperience the one game I've played. PHOENIX WRIGHT: ACE ATTORNEY: TRIALS & TRIBULATIONS (2004) 3.1: Turnabout Memories This is great! This is a better tutorial than the original, even! It walks a very fine line, where I remember playing as Mia and meeting Young Nick fifteen years ago, before I even got to see Phoenix Wright, and thinking it was a cool prologue to the game. Now I'm playing it with context, and it's still a cool prologue to the game and excuse for a new tutorial, but from a completely different angle. I think the framing decision for 3.1 was absolutely bang-on, and it's the best of the tutorial cases by an insane margin. There's one major note, though. Through his previous appearances, I found I really liked Grossberg and I was absolutely baffled why people had told me that he was an awful one-note character. I found him to be batting well above average for Ace Attorney side characters. Anyway, every single line 3.1 Grossberg has is about his asshole, and zero of his lines in any previous appearance were. What the fuck happened?? 3.2: The Stolen Turnabout Weirdly less than the sum of its parts. There was nothing dropped in the side characters - Andrews is good, I'm never sad to see the Butz, and as a fellow wife guy myself I identify deeply with Dessie DeLite - but something fell apart in the main thrust of the case. Luke isn't nearly compelling enough a character for the sheer amount of time he spends on the stand, but I did like Ron and did a little chuckle at the way his whole thing wrapped up as Mask Star The Mask. The testimonies had a few of those needly bits where I've figured out what's going on but can't figure out which piece of kit to show at which statement to show that Nick's figured out what's going on, but not especially more or fewer than previous cases. I think what really broke 3.2 down was Godot, honestly. I remember him being vaguely tryhard but not a particular negative when I played the game as a kid, but he's just genuinely the fucking worst. One of the two or three things I remember about Trials and Tributlations is Godot's big secret background, so I'm seeing the foreshadowing of that, it's just not helping. The coffee gimmick is lame and the animations play far too frequently for their runtime. His fake pontifications run tiresome by the end of the first day of the trial, and he doesn't shake it up at all. He's just this unearnedly smug motherfucker who shows up with all the worst traits of all three previous prosecutors and none of the good ones, and he doesn't get any of the things that make the others satisfying to beat. The worst part is that I'm very sure the game thinks he's cool as hell, and when you get that wedge between player and intended experience, it's just a recipe for disaster. Christ. Maybe he can pull it back, though. 3.3: Recipe for Turnabout Eh, he kinda did. 3.3 just wasn't very good overall, but it wasn't Godot's fault. The framing from the jump was dumb even by the standards of Ace Attorney set out so far, with the "fake Nick" doing a trial a month prior and having to investigate a cold-ish case contributing absolutely nothing at all to the structure of the case. Armstrong, Tigre, Viola, and the old guy were probably the single worst crew of side characters so far, but none of them hit that Ben level of stank on their own. All-in-all, the flavor side of the case was just kinda neh. Hell, Godot was one of the better parts of the case, but that's meant more as an insult to the case rather than a compliment to Godot. That brings me to the mechanical side of the case! I haven't harped on this much before, except briefly in 1.3, but the travel mechanic in the investigation phase is something that ought to be virtually invisible, and when it isn't, there's a problem. In 3.3, it isn't. The map of zone transitions is a line from Nick's office to the cafe, through the jail of all things, and then it sort-of fans out to most of the other places, except some only come off of the park which you can only get to from the cafe. It's, except for maybe 1.5, the best argument that the zone list should simply have been a menu in the remakes, though I assume it was this way because the GBA couldn't list more than four options at a time, considering how conversation topics overwrite each other. The other, quicker, thing to bitch about is how the final witness is handled. Being penalized for pressing on statements sucks, it adds nothing but tedium to the game, and the healthbar is the quietly-worst part of these whole games, so dragging it to the forefront is just asinine. I don't necessarily mind the dramatic you-have-one-chance that crops up rarely in trials, but this was absolutely an unwelcome shakeup to the gameplay loop. Trials and Tribulations has just been a downhill slope since minute 1. 3.4: Turnabout Beginnings This is a weird one to try to rank. It's obviously a prelude to the titanic 3.5, but it requires a level of buy-in that I think far outstrips its value as an actual case. Outside of seeing Godot: Unmasked! for the first time, we really don't get anything outside of facts that I presume will pertain to 3.5 that we didn't already get out of 3.1. Armando, Co-Counsel is much better than Godot, Prosecutor, but Terry and Dahlia, Again kind of let this one down badly. Better than the previous, but ultimately a nothing burger and kind of a pace breaker. At least the downhill momentum has been arrested. Heh. Arrested. 3.5: Bridge to the Turnabout Shit rules. Simple as. Best case in the trilogy. BONUS: ACE ATTORNEY (2016) I watched the anime! I needed something to kill time during work and decided I'd give it a whirl. It compresses the games into two 24-episode seasons, with the first covering Ace Attorney except for 1.5 and Justice for All except for 2.1, and the second covering 2.1 and then Trials & Tribulations. Season 1 It was refreshing! To nitpick up front, compressing the cases did introduce a bit of incredibly wack logical leaps that Nick and co. make that you were forced to take many small steps towards in the games, but I don't think that dragged the season down overmuch. Franziska is, God help me, actually a really likable villain in the show compared to the games, and almost stands up to 1.X Edgeworth. The one anime-specific episode, centered on Nick, Edgey, and the Butz as kids and nestled between the games, does a good job of shining a light on a relationship the games really only hint at, and I think it does good things for the story of Justice for All. One thing I found interesting about it is that it deeply leveled the playing field between cases. The ones I particularly liked, like 2.4 and 1.2, lost a bit of their charm in the adaptation - though 2.4 was a mixed bag, they really tackled it from a rather different angle and did some things I liked a lot more than the game equivalents. On the other hand, and why I think I might even have liked the show more than the games, the cases that dragged or full-on sucked in the games got a damn spit-shine put on them. 1.3 was fairly faithful to the game, but just a bit of rewrite to Oldbag and a change to her motivations and she became a surprising highlight of the case rather than a particularly-shitty roadblock. The circus benefited from this the most by far. They had a bit of fun and expanded things, retooling the other circus workers' roles in the case slightly, and that combined with me not having to figure out the investigation logic meant it was the standout of the show by far. Especially big shoutout to the guy who voiced Moe the clown for knocking it out of the fuckin' park. In an unfathomably based move, though, the show surgically excises Hotti from the entire plot. Eat shit, fucker. Season 2 I'm still amid it as of this writing, about halfway through, but it's showing the same signs as the first. 3.3, which was really quite a bad case in the game, is very good in the show. With a tune-up to his script (particularly varying his nicknames for Nick) and a solid vocal performance, Godot flips from being the thing tanking 3.2 to a very enjoyable part of the case, and of the case after. There's still a good bit of compression, like in the first season, but Trials and Tribulations had a lot of cruft to it that needed compressed, so it ends up being rather appreciated overall. I'm excited to see how 3.5 shakes out tomorrow, honestly. Season 2 does have a bit more anime-specific content compared to the first. There's another episode that focuses on Nick, Edgey, and the Butz as kids that offers some oddly humanizing moments for Manfred, of all the guys. There's an episode I haven't gotten to that seems to exist as more context for 3.5. Most of all, there's an entire three-episode case that the show invents outside of the games - and it's, shockingly, okay. It bats about average for Ace Attorney [Game] cases, which means it bats a bit below average for Ace Attorney [Show] cases. I don't think experiencing Northward Comma Turnabout Express is particularly necessary, but it doesn't outstay its welcome and it doesn't drag the experience down. All-in-all, I think the show is a perfectly good surrogate for the games. I wouldn't consider it as a substitute, mind; while it does a very good job capturing the silly energy of the games, the arcs of the cases end up quite different, and if anyone had interest in the games I'd recommend playing them before watching the show. That said, I'd absolutely recommend the show to anyone who liked the games, and if someone had zero interest in a detective visual novel I'd still recommend it as a fun as hell little show instead of trying to push the games hard. BACK TO THE GAME: THE ACHIEVEMENTS (2023) Ace Attorney Trilogy's achievements split into two big categories: progression and 'do this shit'. The progression ones are as simple as you get: there's one per case and one for beating all three games. The 'do this shit' ones are largely having you get to funny lines, at a rate of about one per case. These, further, split into ones that are fine and ones that suck. The ones that are fine are pretty straightforward, and most of them are pretty unremarkable. Generally, you get these for pressing a certain statement in court, as in 1.3 and 2.2; or showing someone an evidence, like showing Maya Max's profile in 2.3 to get her spiel about how Nick needs a cooler stage name. There's a genuinely great one for inspecting every ladder across the entire trilogy - none of them are particularly out of the way, and there's only about eight or nine in total, so it's just kind of a funny through line. The bad ones aren't the worst, but they're bad because it's shit you really wouldn't - or shouldn't - do without a guide. Getting the bad end in Justice for All (the miracle never happen...) is okay, if a bit odd. The real bad ones come about from doing specific or obviously-bad things, like presenting yourself as Mia in 1.1, or getting Viola's first Psyche-Lock wrong in 3.3. The worst pair of these have to belong to 1.5 and 3.3. In 1.5, already a bloated case with too much going on, occasional statements and lines of questioning with a particular character (Angel) will cause her to offer you a lunchbox. You have to find every lunchbox, which includes making a few false statements and some evidence presentation to Angel across both investigation days and her trial day, but the final lunchbox isn't given until she's well out of the picture by almost an entire day. Really sucks to miss one, there. 3.3 holds the worst, though: hear every French word that Armstrong has to say. Probably. I'm not even sure that the unlock description is quite accurate. Anyway, to get it, you have to talk to him about everything, present your magatama to give you the option of Psyche-Locks, do the completely-unprecedented talk to him about the locked option (NOT break it, talk normally about it to be stonewalled), then get every single option in his Psyche-Lock interrogation wrong once before getting it right. After that, present every single profile and piece of evidence that he has unique commentary on, across two days, which I'm pretty sure includes Maya once on each day. Then he'll come in on trial, and you have to press every single statement he makes across three testimonies - EXCEPT! There's one which leads you to a choice, and if you choose correctly, he amends the testimony and you have to press on that line again. This is crucial, because one of the words is in the fork you get for choosing wrong first, and after the testimony is amended the line no longer exists to choose the wrong option. It's a clusterfuck. It's an awful achievement. So where do I stand at the end, here? I'm glad I gave the series a real run. It's not the greatest thing ever - hell, it's not even the greatest Ace Attorney can be (that's 4) - and bits of it dragged badly, but it had a lot of heart in it and I had a good time throughout. See you next year, Nick.

congrats op!

i agree with this wholeheartedly. wotc has some immense highs when everything comes together (hell, this goes for all the five games before it too), but chimsqd is such a tight, reliable package, almost exclusively for the better i've been meaning to give this a crack someday! i've never actually played a katamari game, but i've been peripherally aware of them for forever at this point. maybe this'll spur me into grabbing it on the xmas sale cycle... interesting writeup! i'd heard peripherally about this one (from a slay the spire stan who said it's all luck-based, unlike slay the spire, which of course has no luck involved) and discarded it since i had other games (slay the spire itself, finishing up ftl, and had just picked up monster train) of that ilk at the time, but i think i'll wishlist this one for the next cycle. well done!! i don't know super hexagon but vvvvvv is a superb game, so that's a big point in this one's favor. looks like you can get a bundle with dicey + hexagon for like $3 more than just buying dicey, so i'll probably get that. i'm in a similar boat to you with beyond earth - i've been tempted to 100% beyond earth before, but keep getting held back by the fact that the game is just weirdly... bad. i hadn't thought about it as such, but i think your suspicion that it was rushed out with intended post-launch support is pretty close to the truth, and really helps solidify why i never got into it. i kept trying to like it and just... never could. god, i love these. i'm going to keep a hold of this one for when i'm talking about Weird Achievement Differences with people in the future, thank you very much hell yeah!

this is the first i'd heard of thronefall but yeah, i'm definitely interested in what i see

huh! mystery solved

you recommended it to me in another thread, i want to say late last year? e: unless this is a very funny and embarrassing case of misremembered identity

BIOSHOCK 2 (2K, 2010) Finished: 27/7/23. Playtime: 18.2 hours. @Florete, this one's out to you. As I said in my brief Bioshock recap, I never played 2. Liked 1 when it was new, then liked 1 again if a little less when I came back around to it. Hated Infinite. Still have no desire to go finish it. Still, I was told that Bioshock 2 was good and that I should give it a try irregardless of my feelings on the other two, and it was a fiver this past Steam Summer Sale. What's the harm? Why the fuck don't people talk about Bioshock 2 more? This game whipped ass. Both of the big pacing issues with the first - the tepid, long intro and the absolute pacebreaker that was Point Prometheus at the eleventh hour - have been fixed, and fixed with aplomb. Bioshock 2 starts good, never really slumps, and ends strongly. All of the complaints that I have about it are generally things it imported from Bioshock, like the weapons being overall kinda flaccid (especially the machine gun) and the great variety of plasmids being superseded by how good electro-bolt is. They're lessened here, at least. The rivet gun and drill feel far better than their original counterparts, and nothing in 1 comes close to the joy of the harpoon gun coming fully online three Powers to the People later. I did, occasionally, swap plasmids around. It's an overall tighter gameplay loop compared to the first, which is what one would hope to get from a sequel. Complementing this is the story and setting. For however iconic would you kindly ended up being, I never particularly cared about, well, anyone or anything in Bioshock. Crucially, I'm not entirely convinced that Bioshock was entirely convinced that Bioshock was a takedown of libertarian individualism. Bioshock was a fun time, but stripped entirely of the context of the plot, it was kind of the same fun time. Lamb, on the other hand, plus the cadre of smaller support characters, I felt added to my enjoyment of 2 fairly substantially. Eleanor's gambit at the end was pretty pumpin', and I liked Sinclair all the way to the end. Was it a story of the year candidate? Nah. But I do think that it was distinctly better than what the first served up. The other half of this was the setting. Bioshock, being System Shock 3, genuinely could have simply been in a space station rather than Rapture and almost literally nothing would have changed about it. Bioshock 2 is far fishier than its father. It's damper. There's way more barnacles and shit. You have a few walking on the ocean floor segments, on account of you're in a diving suit. There's a really fucking big squid at one point in the background. Bioshock 2 couldn't have just been set on a space station instead, and does a far better job owning the fact that you're on the ocean floor. I liked that a lot more. Everything I said about Bioshock's achievements applies to 2's. One top-difficulty campaign run, with respawns off, being meticulous about getting audiologs and stuff, and you get all the non-DLC achievements. I feel like 2 was a fair bit easier and shorter than 1 overall, hence the reduced time taken. There are two DLCs to follow it up. I did Minerva's Den first, which is just a short side-story with its own collectibles, nothing super heady. Took about three or four hours, including getting a high score at Asteroids (Yakuza trained me for this...). Second was Protector Trials, which sets you to defend a Little Sister harvesting session over six arenas, with three scenarios each. Every scenario has a different kit limitation imposed on you, which was nice for me to get to use the shit I didn't in the main game. After doing all eighteen of them with at least an A (90ish% success) and at least one with an A+ (100%), you unlock a bonus round through each map with your entire endgame kit unlocked to sandbox with. These were a trivial victory lap, but the whole DLC didn't take particularly long and had the decency to have some off-the-wall combinations to make you try to keep it fresh. I would say, overall, that I enjoyed my time with Bioshock. On the other hand, I would say that I liked my time with Bioshock 2. Bioshock is a pretty big game, historically speaking, and I've absolutely recommended it to people on that basis before - I generally think it's both important and cool to see what inspired the stuff we get now. I would recommend Bioshock 2 to someone entirely on its own merit. It's just a very solid game. e: i can't not mention possibly the single greatest porting fuckup in gaming history

this isn't enough to state, because the entire fucking question is 'are they doing this because of inertia or because of merit' lmao man. you're bringing up a shitload of utterly unrelated things as cover for it. permadeath's only real relation to fire emblem, outside of the reputation of fire emblem, is nothing. it has nothing to do with nintendo's bedrock branding, and you're bringing it up completely as a smokescreen, frankly. you're making the assumption that permadeath is an Intrinsic Value of fire emblem to justify that it should be an Intrinsic Value of fire emblem going forward with nintendo's horribly backwards policies. it's shit. did you not read my post? i wrote a lot of words about how fire emblem's mathematics forbid permadeath because of the combat systems, so why did you jump straight to casual, and turnwheel, and other death-mitigation techniques? almost everything i wrote two posts ago was about how fire emblem sucks ass at letting you build replacements, not about how losing units forever is somehow anathema to being a good game, so i have to assume you're just ignoring my points here. genuinely lmao, dude. resetting the game is not a balancing tactic for the game. wasting the player's time is just poor game design and basically everybody would agree with that, and your entire point here is that if a Sufficiently Nonvaluable Guy is going to die you won't reset. that is not a win for permadeath. you'd play the game exactly the same if the shitty guys didn't die forever and just came back to die again, then, eh? e: genuinely: how the fuck do you spend lives in fire emblem in a way that isn't you losing a guy because you fucked up. how do you get a guy killed in a way that isn't 'the rng didn't favor me so i offered a sacrifice'. you didn't answer my question, though. you kept saying 'this much, but not enough'. what's this much but not enough? i said what the ultimate form of it is, valkyria chronicles' class-based progression. how much progression, between 0 and valkchron, is the right amount?

that's a simple fix but that isn't an easy fix. the obvious endpoint of that is valkyria chronicles' replaceable dudes, but how high do you dial the replacement factor up? and even if you do, if you have instantly replaceable guys but the pool of guys winds down, how fire emblem are you? i'm ignoring balance here since that's a whole different conversation and a way bigger one, but if guys just autolevel what if i bench a big guy to get bonus exp? how do you do this in a way that preserves fire emblem's identity without taking it to a different game's territory - like valkyria chronicles? e: take a look at mobile game bad north! your lords are replaceable and only really differentiated by class, the bench leveling problem is utterly solved, but losing one is a huge to crippling loss to the game anyway because of your replacement pool. it's like fire emblem in all the important ways, but the game is nothing like fire emblem.

sure, that's why i listed 3 more games where that isn't the case

sure, fire emblem could lean into permadeath harder, but it would need a mechanical overhaul from the ground up to do so and it would adopt a new identity that isn't the fire emblem we've had except for fe5 if it went through that. lent's right, permadeath is no longer core to the identity of the franchise, if it ever was, and the things you're describing, while possibly cool, would be a significant swerve for the arc the games have been undergoing for longer than the lives of many of this site's users. e: my problem with this angle of thinking has always been that you don't spend human life as a resource in fire emblem. there is no situation, in any map, in any fire emblem, where you can gain a notable tactical advantage with a strategic sacrifice like you could in a game like battle brothers. every fire emblem is made to be crunched through without a loss of life, and every system in the game supports that read on it. human life in fire emblem isn't a resource, it's only a measure of how many times you fucked up and decided that the fuckup was not worth rewriting. e: deranged to come up with an edit an hour later but to put it another way, calling human life in fire emblem a resource is the same as calling your survival rank a resource - you're never incentivized for spending it, you never gain for spending it. you're free to ironman, lose guys, and tank the survival score, but you're not gaining anything except for intangibles of your Experience by doing so. parr's post in the other thread put it a good way - there is no equivalent situation to sending a dozen zerglings to kill three marines knowing one or two will die but you'll come out ahead, or trading pieces in chess. you always come out behind when a unit dies. a resource implies either a trade value or a necessary expenditure, and lives are neither necessary nor valued in the marketplace of fire emblem systems, if you want to get philosophical about it.

exactly how you'd think - if your guy died, he died, and you had to start a whole new game file sword of aragon, a pc strategy game from the late 80s sometime, had permadeath on named units, to at least name one, if rogue being a one character game isn't quite what you meant e: in addition to other SSI games, i'm faintly sure the original might and magic had permadeath, or at least certain deaths were permanent, and that came out in 1986. e2: actually fuck how did i forget wizardry (1981), the game that spawned the entire jrpg industry

i said there wasn't a 'more logical time' to introduce casual mode but you've changed my mind. i think that's three very solid points. xcom gets compared to fire emblem fairly frequently but i think it's a bit of a false similarity. xcom is a tactics game where you manage little (in the new games) or big (in the old games) squads of action figures and have them kill aliens and sometimes die and make you cry. the similarities end there - xcom has an extra layer of strategy where you have to manage your global response and technological research to fight an accelerating alien force, the games have no similarity whatsoever on the tactical level besides being grid-based and 'having an enemy phase', and your guys in xcom are recruited from the void with no personality besides whatever you assign them (and, especially in xcom2, whatever hella fashion you give them). if you like tactics games in general, the original x-com (with the openxcom wrapper) is absolutely seminal and you owe it to yourself to at least try it, whether you end up liking or finishing it or not, kind of like how it's worth it for any sci-fi fan to watch some of the original star trek even if much of it isn't very good. the more recent games (xcom + enemy within and xcom 2 + war of the chosen) are, in my opinion, better games, but they're very different and focus on commando squads of personalized, rad dudes rather than the hordes of earthmen at your command like the old ones do. some prefer the old way, which is understandable. e: actually that's a pretty pithy way to put it - in old x-com, you control army men. in new xcom, you control action figures. both are fun, but they're quite different. if you like fire emblem, specifically, that's not much of an indicator for how you'll feel about the xcom games. play xcom: chimera squad tho it's fuckin fantastic

i've posted a few screeds about this across my years on this forum but you pretty much his the nail on the head here fire emblem doesn't interact with permadeath in any meaningful way. it's just an alternative failure condition that varies on the player (from 'i reset for deaths' to 'i have run out of guys who can challenge the content') and doesn't contribute anything more to the games. this has a few ranging consequences on the rest of the game design, the biggest being that the game cannot, necessarily involve 'side' characters heavily in the plot, because they could be dead. a unit can, at best, have commentary-level oneliners and occasional optional (missable) conversations, but it's essentially infeasible to have The Colm Sideplot in the teens of fe8. dark deity, while the story was embarrassingly bad, had a huge improvement on permadeath. it had permanent stat penalties knock onto units if they 'died' but a unit wouldn't ever leave the roster, just become unusably bad if you kept losing them, and this let the mc and his tobin-character have a growing, plot-centric relationship through the entire game without having to have a big asterisk on the * (if garrick is alive) on about half the chapters in the game or having a flag that garrick retreats instead of dying but, i dunno, alden's fucked and just eats it if you lose him. i think fire emblem would do far better to crib this and trim the casts a bit rather than trucking on with permadeath because that's how it's always been. this is another great point i harp on a lot, because fire emblem is actively unfriendly to you losing units, and has been for quite a long time. if kaga ever had the dream of ironmanning, the games have no feasible catchup mechanics and an incredibly hostile fundamental mathematic system for low-leveled units. strict linear combat math has a huge benefit in that it's really easy for the user to comprehend - think about the ease of calculating a turn ahead of time in fire emblem versus just about every other srpg ever made - and i think it's one of fire emblem's most fundamental strengths in the srpg market, but it comes at a cost. in a lot of other tactical games, a low-level guy can be far worse, but it's rare in the ones with permanent unit loss that a unit can become completely ineffectual, while this is expected in fire emblem. if you lose sain in ch26 and pull up a base-level lowen to replace him, he won't only be bad, he'll be completely unusable, doing 0 damage to enemies and dying in return to everything. not only that, but he doesn't have the weapon ranks to use the advanced kit that you've been getting since you recruited him to try to shore up his offenses. to take a short sample of some other permadeathy tactical games i've played recently: battle brothers has a significant amount of your brothers' ability come from the kit itself. even with a full squad of level 11 bros, if you get a level 1 daytaler and give him an arming sword, a kite shield, and a mail hauberk, he's still going to be doing credible damage at poor hit rates (like 40%s, not fire emblem bad) and can poach occasional kills, while the experience for simply participating in combat helps him catch up much faster. in addition, battle brothers has positional effects that fire emblem largely lacks: a level 1 guy is still contributing flanking bonuses to other bros, and can tie up enemy archers just as well as your goliath with his coat of plates and warhammer. x-com, mit dash partly has that and largely has a lot of emphasis on controlling the clown fiesta through numbers and low accuracy but high lethality. a rookie with a laser rifle in a squad of colonels can still roll that 11% snap shot and dome a sectoid commander. xcom, ohne dash follows a little similarly in the high lethality band, but proximity and flanking will generally contribute a lot more to hit rates than just getting the aim number bigger (though that helps a lot). the power gap between squaddies and colonels in xcom is still large, but it's far less large than the power gap between a level 5 and a level 20/1 unit in fire emblem, and crucially that squaddie with a shotgun can still bean a guy or even use explosives (which improve as your campaign goes on) to secure rng-free kills for experience. valkyria chronicles is a weird one because you can easily make it through the game without losing anyone, but the way upgrades work (being per-class rather than individual levels) means that you can absolutely use one of the other scouts if you get ted ustinov, bisexual king, killed with little impact other than you don't have ted's superior perks. this fulfills something i think fire emblem wanted to do, that your units are actually a resource pool that can be depleted but can be swapped out for one another without a complete gutting to the squad overall. two things most of these games share that help you revel in the permadeath experience is the ability to replace guys and a progression of basic recruits. battle bros and the xcoms punish you harshly for losing a high-level guy, but there are hypothetically infinite more guys to replace them and you're given a failure condition that's more advanced than a simple 'you don't have enough / the right guys to progress anymore'. fire emblem, if you think about it, doesn't have a campaign-failure condition - you either lose the lord and reset a chapter, or the sword of damocles falls on your head and you softlock yourself, which is far rarer. i think the way more important and, to a degree, interesting thing that other tactical games do that fire emblem doesn't is the concept of more advanced basic guys. in x-com, a rookie with an autocannon and demolition charges is still effective later in the game, but if you're bringing a rookie to a later level that's not what you're getting. you're getting a rookie with your B-kit, probably personal armor and a laser rifle, if not one of your castoff plasma rifles since most of your big guys are using plasma cannons by now. in battle brothers, a guy in leathers with a falchion is great early and falls off harshly, but you're not deploying a guy in leathers with a falchion later. the guy you brought off your bench has a castoff mail or light plate kit, a helmet, and a shield to go with his morningstar or flanged mace. if you bring sain off the bench in chapter 25, he's sain exactly as you left him. chances are quite good you don't even have a better sword he could use, because he's capped out by weapon ranks. it should be said that some fire emblems do interact with this to varying degrees starting with the ike games! por/rd have bonus experience, most games since por have forging to make an iron/steel weapon way sharper, and one could make an argument that statboosters can fill the niche in a pinch even though i don't think they have the oomph to pull it off. the problem with all these solutions besides, well, the games that let you grind, is that advantages in fire emblem compound tremendously. you can drop five levels of bexp on kieran to get him ready to cover for the dearly departed oscar, but if you'd turned that into three levels on oscar earlier then he simply wouldn't have died in the first place. a dracoshield can make est not get onerounded so you can actually level her up, but if you'd used that dracoshield on palla when you got it she would have become invincible and stayed rudely ahead of the damage curve. you're not incentivized, outside of a scant few games and difficulties, to not put all your eggs in very few baskets, which further exacerbates permadeath's lack of actual meaning compared to a game over if you lose any unit at all. funny enough, while i don't like the game itself much, the only fire emblem that does a great job making permadeath work (more or less) is thracia 776. it's got a relatively crunched stat spread (everything capping at 20), solid mid- and lategame recruits, and as you go you get more scrolls which means a level earned later is worth more than a level earned earlier, which does facilitate catching units up to some degree. i could not feasibly take a fresh neimi off the bench for the desert and get her a kill, let alone shape her into a real unit, but i'm pretty sure i could take a fresh ronan off the bench at the routesplit and shape him into as real a unit as ronan can be, which is not very much. e: heck, on top of that, fe5 also has fatigue, which is the only system in any fire emblem that actually encourages or enforces any kind of squad rotation, which means you're more likely to have a semi-effective C-lister to cover if you take a casualty later in the game