lenticular

This sort of approach is typically powerful in FE, yes (although probably less so in Engage than most other games in the series since fewer units means fewer Emblems). I'm not clear on why you think that adds value to Mauvier, though. Typically, if someone is looking to build a juggernaut then it's best to do so with early-game units. This gives them plenty of time to really snowball, and also just means that you have your overpowered units for as great a percentage of the game as possible. For that sort of play through, isn't Mauvier just going to be even more outclassed than usual by the time he's recruited?

Meanwhile, Ticket to Ride has announced that they're doing basically the same thing which has earned them at least three angry reviews on Steam. The same shit happens regardless of what scale you're looking at. (Though Ticket to Ride is Asmodee which is part of the Embracer Group now, so they probably deserve whatever shit they're getting.)

The game really wants you to use Mauvier and Veyle. The deployment limit has been capped at 12 for a while, and then it gets bumped up to 13 when Mauvier comes along and then 14 when you get Veyle too. And unless you've been deliberately training more characters than you have unit slots, they're pretty much going to outclass any other benchwarmers who might potentially take their slots. This means that they are both likely to see deployment. Personally, though, I find that about 10 characters is the sweet spot for deployment in Fire Emblem, with up to 12 being OK and then more than that starting to feel like a drag. I don't find myself thinking "ooh, yay, now I get to deploy 13 units"; rather I think "ugh, now I need to deploy 13 units". My 13th (or later 14th) best unit just isn't going to contribute very much when I've already built a well-rounded team of 12 who are plenty capable of filling all niches that I feel I need or want. And when I got him, Mauvier was absolutely my 13th best unit. He was better than my bench warmers, but considerably behind the units I'd been using. I don't know if this is a playstyle thing but for me, by that point, I was overleveled considerably past both the enemy units and past Mauvier. The end game level curve was just completely broken for me. (This is on Hard, after doing all paralogues, not doing skirmish battles, and generally having a "kill every last one of them" approach to most maps.) So Mauvier's role was, essentially "the least worst filler available for a deployment slot I didn't actually want". And he was OK in that role, I guess? Staff utility never hurts, and he has sufficient bulk to not feel like a liability. But he also didn't actually really do anything. He was more useful than keeping an empty deployment slot, but not by much. I give him 3/10.

My first reaction to you saying this was "nah, most of them were fine". But then I thought. And I remembered. Most of the ones that I did were fine. Many of the ones that I refused to touch with a bargepole were utterly deranged. I did pretty much all the ones that were "complete all of these different things": Cartographer, Sklill Hunter, Guardian, Vanquisher. Those ones. They were fine. But then there were the ones that were "do this one same task a ridiculous number of times" which I didn't touch with a bargepole. Stuff like "have your character spend 10,000 minutes drunk". But the absolute most ridiculous one of the whole lot was "Legendary Defender of Ascalon". Since you played, you might remember this one, but if not, and for anyone else playing along at home, settle down because this one is a wild ride. The tutorial area in Guild Wars was also, essentially, the prologue to the story. There was this lovely idyllic bucolic setting with mostly easy and low-stakes quests. "Oh no, the bull got loose!" That sort of thing. You play through that, learn the game, and then at the end of the prologue enemies invade, rocks fall from the sky, lots of people die, the land is scarred and blighted. You then cut forward in time a few years and the game proper begins. And since the tutorial area was a different time rather than a different place, once you leave you can never go back. Every player character in the tutorial area has never been outside of it. One of the consequences of this is that there was an absolute hard limit on how much xp you could earn while you were there, and so what level you could potentially reach. These numbers are all pulled out of my arse because I can't actually remember them, but they're illustrative. See, the amount of xp you get for killing an enemy scales based on your relative levels. Once you get to be 4 levels higher than the enemy, it stops giving you any xp at all. Now, most of the enemies in the tutorial area are no higher than about level 3, so you aren't leveling too high from them. But there's a small group of enemies in one specific place that you aren't really meant to fight, and they go up to level 8. So if you grind out killing them over and over you could potentially get up to level 12 and then there was nothing else that you could kill for more xp. But if you save all quests until after you've done this, then you could turn in all the quests for the quest reward xp to reach a theoretical maximum hard limit of level 13. But that was it. Going higher wasn't possible. The Legendary Defender of Ascalon title required you to reach level 20 (max level) without leaving the tutorial area. Which I just told you was impossible. Well, I lied to you. It's only impossible if you are a sane and rational human being. But. Well. Gamers. See, when your whole party died in Guild Wars, you would respawn at the nearest resurection shrine. So some bright spark figured out that if you carefully kited enemies over to a resurection shrine and let them kill you, then you could get into an endless loop where they kill you, you respawn, they kill you again, and so on. And due to a weird quirk in the way the game was coded, when enemies kill you, they gain xp. Not very much xp, but if you leave them endlessly killing you at a resurection shrine then eventually they would get enough xp to level up. At which point, you could then kill them and be able to gain a few xp from them again. You can see where this is going. If you wanted the title, you would lead a handful enemies to the resurection shrine last thing at night before you go to bed, leave your computer on over night hoping that your internet connection didn't crap itself, wake up in the morning and kill them for a paltry sum of xp. Then you'd do the set up again and leave the game idling for hours again while you went off to work or college or whatever else you were doing. And if you were diligent about always doing this twice a day, this tiny trickle of xp would eventually be enough for you to hit max level after... I don't know? About a year? Maybe more than that? The first person to do this did so before the title existed. Just because they could. Then the devs added in the title as a way of marking this achievement. And then the existence of the title just made other people want to try to do it as well. Eventually, the devs just caved and added a separate way of getting to max level that was within the scope of intended mechanics and which could conceivably be actually fun to do. Yeah, THK was an absolute killer. Since it needed you to split the party and be at least slightly coordinated. And since the computer controlled henchmen were pretty terrible. It ended up being pretty simple to solo once they'd added in Heros with custom builds and the ability to flag the computer controlled characters to tell them where to go. But at launch, it was somewhere between nightmarish and impossible to solo it. Aurora Glade was the other big one that sucked to solo, but that one wasn't so much of a big deal because you could just run around it and skip to the next mission if you wanted to. But completing THK was the only way you could possibly get to the Fire Islands, so you had to do it if you wanted to go further. Yeah. This is why I love stuff like Radiant Dawn part 2 and XCOM Chimera Squad. Actually showing what happens next and the struggles of trying to win the peace after you've won the war. I find that stuff so much more compelling than yet another war of resistance against the evil empire.

Yeah. I have a lot of sympathy for the people who write TRPGs. How the hell do you actually make a compelling plot when you're forced to fit it around the basic skeleton of "army has a couple dozen pitched battles and wins all of them"? A shit narrative is pretty much to be expected here, and games that manage to attain the heights of "vaguely competent" should be celebrated. So I'm willing to cut the writers a whole lot of slack. ...but not that much slack. Yikes. Great. I'd somehow managed to have never heard of Maddox until now, and my curiosity made me just have to go and look him up, didn't it? Thanks a lot for that one. That aside, I have nothing to say about Counter Strike, so I will instead meander super off-topic and share my own story of weird online gaming from the noughts. My game of choice back then was Guild Wars. I have a frankly embarrassing number of hours in that, which I am mercifully spared from being reminded of due to it being a standalone client and not through Steam. It was also the cause of the single naffest interpersonal drama that I have ever been a part of. There was an achievement (or technically a "title") in the game called Survivor. To get this to its max level you had to created a new character, and then play without ever dying until you got 1,337,500xp (for comparison, getting a character to max level required 140,600xp). This had all the usual challenges of requiring you be both good and consistent at the game, but also the expected stuff like "what if my internet drops?", "what if my teammates are idiots?" and "what if I die during a cutscene but it still counts?" I honestly didn't find it that difficult to do, but I had a decent net connection and the experience of multiple thousands of hours in the game. I dunno how hard it was without those things, but it had a Reputation. Someone in my alliance (read: a group of guilds that form together to form a super-guild) had been going for it for ages, and then finally picked it up after multiple failed attempts. My response was something along the lines of "Congrats. Dying is for nubs." (And yes, I definitely said "nubs" and not "newbs" or "noobs". It was, as you say, a strange time.) This made several people go absolutely ballistic. Just full on frothing rage. And on the one hand, sure, I will readily admit that mid-twenties lenticular was not as diplomatic as early-forties lenticular and that I would have been well served by being more careful with my wording. But on the other hand, I am still absolutely baffled that I managed to attract such vitriol for it. Apparently they thought that I was mocking them for finding the achievement difficult or something? I don't know. Next thing we know, my guild leader is getting PMs demanding that she kick me from the guild over this most heinous crime. Which, if memory serves, she didn't even know what they were talking about and was just trying to pootle about in game doing her own thing at the time. Poor sod. Long story short: lots of people got very angry, lots of words were said, lots of tears were shed, and in the end, my guild just ended up leaving the alliance, because wtf? I'm actually still friends with a bunch of the people from the guild. We have our own little Discord server these days, where we chill and talk shit. Today's topics of conversation have included Astarion from BG3 and how weird it is that Fran Drescher is a union leader these days. Shitty internet drama forms lasting bonds, you know?

As regards Cavaliers in Three Houses: while Intermediate classes are typically the ones with good masteries, it's still absolutely viable to use a class for it's power level in the moment rather than for what it can do for you long-term. One of the things that really helps out here is the existence of adjutants, which opens up two possible plays. One is to have a throwaway unit be your Cavalier and use an adjutant slot to make sure that none of your main units are falling behind. Then once you get up to Advanced tier, you can easily drop your Cavalier in favour of all the fully trained units you have with all their completed class masteries. Or, my personal preference, is to have your Cavalier backfill their Intermediate masteries later on by adjutanting. It doesn't matter if you're still in Brigand at level 20 if all you're doing is adjutanting, and you can pick up class masteries extremely fast if you have the statue bonus and a knowledge gem and then adjutant your unit onto an enemy phase unit. Going from 0 to mastery in a single map is eminently attainable. Which overall means that the cost of having one or two units spend time in Cavalier is very low.

For me, that's what I want. It's a feature, not a bug. Having all the Lords failing is what feels (for me) like the correct outcome of Three Houses. Possibly I just have a bleaker outlook on the Three Houses storyline than most people, but I do very much see a lot of it as a tragedy. The happily ever after style endings felt very out of place for me. From what discussion I've read, I think that I also see Edelgard as a reflection of Rhea to a greater extent than most people do. All the usual stuff about there not being a single correct way to interpret art certainly apply, but that was something that came across to me very strongly and obviously. Rhea had this horrific childhood trauma, went to war over it, won power, had good intentions, but then ultimately was corrupted by the power. So then we see Edelgard have this horrific childhood trauma, go to war over it, win power, and have good intentions... so my assumption is that she's going to be corrupted by the power and ultimately fail to achieve her goals. But my basic idea is that history has repeated itself, and a core theme of my hypothetical sequel would be about trying to break out of that cycle. Let's have another sympathetic character who has this trauma and is going to war to prevent it from ever happening again, except that we can't let them. If that would be unsatisfying for a lot of people and feel as if it invalidates the ending of Three Houses, then another possibility would be to put it in a future of a timeline different from any of the Three Houses routes. For instance, it could be a timeline in which Edelgard was pushed back and nearly defeated, undertook the Hegemon Husk transformation in desperation, and that was enough to see her victorious, but with her humanity shattered. Or maybe a timeline in which Byleth was lost after the Battle of Garreg Mach and never returned, meaning that nobody ever got a decisive advantage in the war which then lasted for decades, descending into a worse and worse quagmire where there were no winners. But with all that said, I do think it's an interesting thought exercise to imagine what a Fire Emblem game would look like if it did have a setting with a tech level based anywhere after the 14th century (or thereabouts; FE tech isn't supposed to mirror real world tech very well, but rather have a general medieval vibe, sometimes brushing into early modern). I do agree with you that it's unlikely that they ever will do this, but it is interesting to think about what it would look like. Personally, I don't think I'd want to see firearms (or at least not many of them) because I don't think that they could really be implemented in a way that feels satisfying but doesn't alter core FE mechanics too much. What I think could be an interesting direction, though, would be to really push into the direction of magitech. There's already a decent amount of this in Three Houses, with stuff like the Titanus, so I think the setting is ripe for completing a full on magepunk future with automata, ornithopters, magic laser swords, and so on. I'd be down for that sequel as well, even if it would be very different from my original idea.

I am primarily a PC gamer, with PC having been my main system going back to the '90s when I switched over from older proprietary 8-bit home computers (the Amstrad CPC in my case). I've always had consoles too, but they've always been suplemental for me. So that does definitely shape my perspective. I've been playing indie games pretty consistently since the 1980s. But with that said, even if you're only looking at consoles, I still don't think that indie games are particularly a new thing. Direct digital distribution on consoles is around 15-20 years old now. XBLA launched in 2004, WiiWare in 2008. Thinking back to some of the successful indies of that era, there's the likes of Braid, Castle Crashers, and World of Goo, which all released in 2008. And do remember as well that the concept of the "AAA" game is not all that much older than that, only dating back to the late 90s. Prior to that, relatively small budgets and small dev teams were the norm. While the stuff that got published on consoles in the 8- and 16-bit eras typically wasn't what we'd recognise as indie by today's standards, it also wasn't anything close to a modern AAA game. The industry was sufficiently different then -- in both creative and business aspects -- that modern terms just don't fit all that well. So even on consoles there was only a period of maybe a decade or so after AAA games appeared and before direct digital distribution allowed indies to proliferate. And even then, it's not like indies didn't exist at all; Shantae may have been held down by the cost of publishing, but it was still there. Oh, and since I'm talking up the history of indie games, I will just point out that two of the most successful and influential video games in history are indies: Tetris (1985) and Minecraft (2009). Anyway, this is getting increasingly off topic and I've said my piece, so I will bow out now.

If you move onto Let's Go with the fairy type, you can then have: Which has absolutely no overlap with the obligatory Gen 1 team.

I wouldn't really say that we've reached that point, more that it has always been the case. Through the entire history of video games to date, there has always been a continuum of game creators from hobbyists through indies to mid sized and then to the biggest companies. The big corporations with their enormous marketing budgets want us to believe otherwise, but they have never had the monopoly on games that they want. It's good that there's a growing awareness of indie games, but they aren't anything new.

Dammit. Thinking about this further:

They're not really games that are designed around 8 players, though. (At least, Smash Bros isn't; I'm not super familiar with Mario Strikers, but I assume it isn't either.) Rather, they're games where more players can be accomodated without sacrificing how well the game plays with fewer players. Yes, you can play Smash Bros with 8 people, but you can also play it with 4 (or any other number up to 8 ) and you never feel as if the experience is watered down at all. With Mario Party many mini games are designed around having a specific number of people and don't really work properly (or at all) with fewer.

I have to imagine that at some point over the history of the development of Mario Party, someone in the development team has come up with the idea of "what if we allow for more players?" Conceptually, it's not a particularly big creative leap to make. So the fact that they've never done it probably means that they decided it wouldn't work very well for whatever reason. And I think that First Mate has hit on the two biggest reasons why it wouldn't work well so I'll largely just echo him, but I will add another couple of potential concerns: 8 players would mean you'd need 8 controllers, which a lot of people don't have. I sure don't. And also, there's the issues of how many people you can happily fit around a Switch. My living room certainly can't fit 8 people and have most of them be anything close to comfortable, and I imagine that's true for a lot of people as well.

I came up with these lists before looking at yours: Gen I: Gen II: Gen III: Gen IV: Now comparing those lists with yours, we have literally identical (except for order) lists for gen I, but substantially different lists for subsequent generations. Which isn't entirely surprising. Gen I did tend to reuse a lot of its type combinations (grass/poison and ground/rock especially), so it's not surprising that there just weren't as many possibilities to choose from.

Neigh, lad. You can shout until you're hoarse, but you need to realise that we're all just horsing around here and get down off your high horse. Ahem. Sorry, don't know what came over me there. Anyway. Not oging to try to rank these in order or anything, but some general thoughts: Three Houses Paladins are actually pretty good. They have high movement, canto, dismount, and hardly any effective weaponry among enemy ranks. Their only real problem is that Wyverns exist and do basically everything that paladins do except better and flying. But as someone who typically plays highlander style (only one of each end-game) class, I do appreciate what paladins have to offer. Engage Paladins are incredibly underwhelming, but its cavalry options are pretty cool. Wolf Knights and Royal Knights offer cavalry options that haven't really existed before, and Great Knight is also a viable option. It's just a shame that Paladin doesn't really bring anything notable to the party and very much feels like the poor relation here. In Shadows of Valentia, when I'm deciding what classes to choose for my villagers, cavalier is one of the two options (alongside soldier) that I don't think I've ever chosen and doubt that I ever will. That pretty much says everything about how I feel about the class here. Radiant Dawn is especially weird when it comes to how its Paladins are distributed. The Greil Mercenaries get 2, the Dawn Brigade gets only 1 (and a pretty terrible one at that), but then the Crimean Royal Knights get 4. 2-3 and 3-9 are both Paladin central, with paladins constituting 4/6 and 4/7 of your units there. So we have several that are all bunched up together (Geoffrey, Astrid, Makalov, Kieran), one who's very underpowered (Fiona), one who's late-game filler (Renning), and two that are in the overpowereed group where pretty much everyone is great (Oscar and Titania). I'm really not sure how to judge the class line as a whole. Awakening Cavaliers and Paladins aren't very impressive. It comes in somewhere around about "oh right, that exists". It's been a while since I last played Awakening, but I had to go and look up what skills the class line gets, and having done so, I'm not surprised. Nothing there is especially inspiring. Sully and Stahl are both perfectly servicable units, but neither are setting the world alight. If you want to count Great Knights, then Frederick is good, though.

Nintendo have put out a few clunkers. Remarkably few, given how many games they put out and how long they've been in the business, but they definitely are out there. The two that come to mind for me are Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival and the 3DS remake of Urban Champion. I'm sure that there are people out there who liked both of them, but they're pretty lonely voices. And there are a lot more games that have mixed or checquered receptions or have been somehow controversial. Paper Mario: Sticker Star, Metroid: Other M, Tokyo Mirage Sessions ♯FE, Wii Music, pretty much their entire mobile library. I mostly agree with your broader point, though. Mostly I think that we just need to collectively move away from discourse of "this is good" and "this is bad" and towards "I like this" and "I don't like this". There are games that I didn't enjoy that are wildly popular and games I love that are pretty unpopular. (Example: I had more fun with TMS♯FE than with Breath of the Wild.) Which doesn't mean that anyone is over- or under-rating anything. It just means that different people have different tastes. Such a shocker.

I'm really interested to hear what you make of it, even if you don't end up 100%ing it. It's really not like anything else I've ever played, and I'm really curious if other folks' experience of it lines up with mine.

I look forward to seeing maxed stats Martial Master Lindon show up in your signature.

I once nearly got One Faith by accident. I was playing as Poland and doing the achievement to reach max level in all techs, so was basically just playing a full campaign from 1444 to 1821 with a very strong country, and I just kept growing and growing and growing. I think I ended up with only something like 50-100 non-Catholic provinces left at the end, and I probably could have got the achievement if I'd really wanted to, but late-game conquest in EU4 is soul-crushingly boring and repetitive once your past the point when there's anyone left on the map who can even vaguely threaten you, so I just couldn't muster up the will to push on and finish it. I've definitely had a few achievement runs end in frustration as well, though. The worst ones for me were always the ones with time limits. I had multiple attempts at some of them, and it's very disheartening to be just barely behind schedule and then have to restart when you don't quite finish on time. Anyway, I'm on a roll, because I just finished getting another 100%: NEVER ALONE (KISIMA INGITCHUNA) (UPPER ONE GAMES, 2015) (Finished: 21 September 2023. Play time: 11.8 hours) This is a bit of an odd one. Ostensibly, it's a puzzle platformer with optional co-op. Think of something like Trine or Lego Star Wars. There are different characters with different abilities and you need to use both sets of abilities to solve the game's puzzles, which you do either by playing co-op or by playing single player and switching back and forth between which character you're controlling. In this case, the two characters are an arctic fox (who is good at climbing and has the ability to control spirits) and a girl called Nuna (who is good at having hands). Except that that's not really the main point of the game. The main point is that the game is actually about Iñupiat (native Alaskan) people, their culture, and their stories. The story is based on an Iñupiat story and has an Iñupiaq language narrator (with English subtitles), some of the art is based on Iñupiat art, and as you play through the game, you unlock "cultural insights" which are basically just short videos of interviews with Iñupiat people, talking about their lives, culture, etc. I'm not sure if I'd go so far as to call it edutainment, but it is definitely leaning in that direction. The basic gameplay is mostly fine if unremarkable. There are definitely moments of indie jank that can be frustrating to deal with. For instance, in single player, the computer will control the character you aren't using at any given moment, and typically just follow along behind you. Except that sometimes they will miss the most basic jump and instead plummet to their death. Fortunately, checkpoints are pretty damn regular, which kept the frustration to a fairly low level. But in purely mechanical terms, I couldn't really recommend the game. It's not bad, but it isn't particularly good either. But, ultimately, if you're buying this game because you're excited about tight platforming and intricate puzzles then you are absolutely doing it wrong. This is not a mechanics game. This is a vibes game. If you're playing this, you're doing it because you're interested in Iñupiat people and culture, or because you really dig the Arctic setting, or because you love the art style (which I saw someone compare to Studio Ghibli, which I think is overselling things but not absurd), or because you think that Nuna and fox are really cute. And if you go into it with that mindset and are willing to put up with a bit of jank and frustration, then it's a charming and really quite good game. Achievements are pretty straightforward. They're a combination of progress achievements that are impossible to miss as you play the game, and achievements which you get for finding and unlocking the cultural insights throughout the game. These vary from "pretty much impossible to miss" to "kind of out of the way, but not too hard to find if you look for them". My overall play time includes one full play through in 2015 and then another full play through in 2023 to get 100% achievements, so the "real" completion time is probably about half of what it took me overall. And that's N completed. Now I'm down to just E, J and Y.

The character who I mostly had in mind when I said that was Oliver, but there's really no shortage of villainous staff users across the series, I don't think.

It's an interesting question, I think. I know that there's a bit in Three Houses where Manuela talks about the difference between magical and medical healing, but I can't remember when it is, nor exactly what it is that she says. I think that the basic gist of it is that magical healing is more of a stop-gap temporary measure, good for closing up wounds on the battlefield so the person doesn't immediately die, but not for longterm health. There's also the consideration that hit points are an abstraction. If a unit is reduced to only 1hp, that doesn't necessarily mean that they have two broken arms, a ruptured spleen and a severed femoral artery. It can just mean that they're exhausted from fighting, aren't able to defend themself properly any more, and the next enemy that attacks them has a high chance of landing a fatal blow. So in that case, healing magic isn't necessarily closing up any wounds at all, but rather restoring their vigor, concentration or even luck. It's also worth remembering that healing magic in FE is usually associated with faith, deities, and religion. There is an implication, I think, that the cleric is channeling the power of their world's god(dess) rather than just doing all the healing personally. It is quite possible that a healing staff typically would cause cancer, but the deity in question is the one who stops that from happening. And actually, that makes some other stuff fit better. I can't remember when exactly, but I know there are points in the series where someone says that only people dedicated to serving good are able to use healing staves... which is then directly contradicted by seeing someone comically evil using them a couple of chapters later. So what if only people who are dedicated to serving good can use healing staves without causing cancer, because they have divine supervision. People who are evil and impious, can still do healing magic, but will give everyone cancer in the process. Except that they don't care if all their underlings will die because they're evil.

Yeah. I do have a few of the gnarlier ones. World Conqueror, The Third Way, An Unlikely Candidate, Academical, African Power, etc. But there are certainly a lot of them left. And basically nothing left on the scale of "have a royal marriage". Probably a handful of pretty easy ones that have been added since I last played, but not many. I did not know that, and damn, that's wild. Is it a reference to something, or did Johan just have a stroke in the middle of designing achievements? It doesn't sound too difficult, though. The hardest part would probably be breaking out of HRE purgatory quickly enough to get to Jerusalem before that formation stops being available. Once you do that, forming the Inca shouldn't be too bad, just super fiddly, obnoxious and annoying. I'm pretty confident that I could do it if I really wanted to, but even more confident that I don't want to. I do kinda want to play EU4 again now after thinking about it, though. Just when you think you're finally out, they pull you right back in.

Hahahaha. My 1754 hours in EU4 were only good enough for 51% of achievements. Which is steadily falling as they release new ones with every expansion, while I haven't actually played in 2 years. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest there may be easier choices for me here.

Oh, that's good to know. I've seen that the grand prix exists, but the timing hasn't actually worked out for me to be able to try one yet. I'm glad it exists, at least. In the version of F-Zero 99 that I'd imagined in my head before it was actually announced, I'd imagined the game getting progressively faster and faster as it progressed, getting more and more difficult to control. Combine that with more hazards, removing the heal area, aggressive limits for being placed out, and so on, and I'm sure you could winnow the field down in a reasonable amount of time.

QUEEN OF SEAS (KOMBITS, 2017) Finished: 19 September, 2013. Play time: 100 minutes. Oh boy. This game. This game is not good. But then, I knew that before I started playing it. You knew that before you started reading this. The question was never going to be whether or not it was good. The question was always going to be just how bad is it? To that, I will say that it's pretty bad, but probably not quite as bad as I was expecting. Let's step back a moment. This game typically costs £0.89, but as I write this, it is on sale with a 51% discount (for some reason) bringing it down to £0.44. Before I bought it, I had exactly £0.43 sitting in my Steam wallet from selling trading cards. This means that I spent exactly one penny on it. (For those of you reading from other countries with other currencies, that's approximately equal to €0.01, US$0.01, CA$0.01, CHF0.01 or AU$0.02. Sorry Australia, you always get screwed on game prices.) This equates to 167 hours of game play for every pound that I spent on this, which -- if The Gamers are to be believed -- might make this the best value for money game ever made. The game describes itself as a platform game but this seems to be something of a misnomer since there are no platforms in sight. You play the role of a diver who walks across the sea bottom. Sharks and jellyfish will spawn in randomly and you can jump or duck to try to avoid them. You can also jump to collect coins, which you use to buy upgrades between runs, which will let you walk faster, jump higher, and take extra hits before dying. The ultimate goal is to walk 200 steps without dying. And that's it. So, a full 100% run looks something like this: you start off by collecting coins to buy upgrades, starting with the higher jump upgrade since that one lets you grab more coins. Once you have all the upgrades, you then actually bother trying to beat he game, which I managed in my first fully-upgraded run. You then spend a while longer at the end farming deaths to get the achievements for being killed by sharks 100 times and by jellyfish 50 times, because of course they exist and of course you complete the game far before you get them. Causes of death, ordered from most to least common: Death farming for achievements Tried to rush due to impatience and boredom Something spawned in right on top of me and there was no reasonable way to avoid it The awkward controls and really floaty jump made dodging too difficult I misjudged the hitbox of the shark ("Fun and engaging difficulty" would go here, but I don't think that actually happened) So, of those 100 minutes that I played, how much of the time was actually spent having fun? Well, there was one time when I did a pretty sick dodge that was pretty fun. So let's say... 3.5 seconds of actual fun? Which, as it happens, is about how long it takes to earn £0.01 at current UK adult minimum wage. Honestly, though, I don't want to rip on this game too hard. It does have the feeling as if someone was actually at least trying to make a competent video game here. They just didn't actually succeed. Which does at least place it above the scores of cynical asset flips that infect the bowels of Steam. But I've played a bunch of games that were made by a single person inside of a weekend for game jams that were much more fun than this, so I'm not going to give it too much credit. And that's Q knocked out for me. Only EJNY remain.