madbuk

#346 - Batman: Arkham Origins This game is pretty underrated. I'd say it's on par with City, honestly. The side quests are about as generic and the main plot if anything is even better. It also only has 200 or so tedious collectibles instead of over 400. The performance of it wasn't great, but it's a PS3 game and for years I've only played Arkham on PS4 so I think giving it some leeway in terms of how it performs is reasonable. It took quite a while for me to readjust to PS3 Arkham, but once I did I began to really enjoy this a lot. The game introduces some fun new tools for predator encounters like the rope launcher, and the predator challenges themselves weren't anywhere near as obscure or specific as the ones in City which I appreciated a lot. The combat was mostly the same but with the addition of shock gloves, which were fun. They're a bit overpowered but they're also on a cooldown timer so it balances out imo. The open world wasn't anywhere near as tedious to travel through either because this game actually features fast travel, and isn't shaped like one big U like City was. I wish I had the advanced grappel from Knight though lol. The MP was fine in concept, not so much in execution. I can see what they were trying to do - turn regular predator encounters from the main game into multiplayer by having most of the players be the goons and two people be the predators (Batman/Robin) but that wouldn't be very interesting for the goons so they had to introduce another goon faction, and you're too busy capturing bases and fighting off the opposing faction to effectively keep an eye out for Batman/Robin. I'm definitely interested in what the next Arkham game from this team will be like, hopefully a lot more polished.

Progress Update: #346 - Batman: Arkham Origins This game is pretty underrated. I'd say it's on par with City, honestly. The side quests are about as generic and the main plot if anything is even better. It also only has 200 or so tedious collectibles instead of over 400. The performance of it wasn't great, but it's a PS3 game and for years I've only played Arkham on PS4 so I think giving it some leeway in terms of how it performs is reasonable. It took quite a while for me to readjust to PS3 Arkham, but once I did I began to really enjoy this a lot. The game introduces some fun new tools for predator encounters like the rope launcher, and the predator challenges themselves weren't anywhere near as obscure or specific as the ones in City which I appreciated a lot. The combat was mostly the same but with the addition of shock gloves, which were fun. They're a bit overpowered but they're also on a cooldown timer so it balances out imo. The open world wasn't anywhere near as tedious to travel through either because this game actually features fast travel, and isn't shaped like one big U like City was. I wish I had the advanced grappel from Knight though lol. The MP was fine in concept, not so much in execution. I can see what they were trying to do - turn regular predator encounters from the main game into multiplayer by having most of the players be the goons and two people be the predators (Batman/Robin) but that wouldn't be very interesting for the goons so they had to introduce another goon faction, and you're too busy capturing bases and fighting off the opposing faction to effectively keep an eye out for Batman/Robin. I'm definitely interested in what the next Arkham game from this team will be like, hopefully a lot more polished.

Piece of Cake Steins;Gate 0 I did a number of VNs this year, but I'll go with Steins;Gate 0 as it felt the shortest and I had already played it before too, there aren't many important choices either. Great game though and I enjoyed replaying it after playing Elite earlier in the year, I do think the original game is better though. It's Like Dark Souls Gran Turismo 5 There's really no contest for this one, even if we were to allow platinums from any year. Easily my proudest, hardest and longest platinum I have ever obtained and the journey was hell. Thankfully I had a few friends on Discord to help encourage me during the many many periods where I had lost all hope. I'm still kinda in disbelief that it's done after being on my list unfinished for over 8 years. Bad Ass Award Gran Turismo 5 Same as the above really, but I'll narrow it down further and specifically say the AMG trials. Don't get me wrong, most of the non-afk playtime was brutal, but AMG broke my spirit time and time again. You have to do a time trial on a course that lasts 7-10 minutes depending on the car. You have to do each sector 4 times - once with 4 different cars - and then do a full lap with each of the four cars, and some of the full lap requirements felt like they had 0 room for error. When I was finally done with the AMG Academy I was so elated. Grind Of The Year Gran Turismo 5 Starting to see a bit of a trend here but GT5 is the grindiest plat I have ever done, one of the trophies is for reaching level 40 in A-Spec for example and this required playing the hardest map in the game over and over again in 4 hour intervals for 60-80 hours... And then you have the B-Spec grind which takes over twice as long, but thankfully the game plays itself for that so I sat there playing Ys on Vita, playing Arkham City on PS4, or watching Black Mirror while GT5 did its thing. There are also two 24 hour events that need to be done, a 16 hour one, and several other multi-hour ones. Oh and then you have to go grind to get 256 unique paints (RNG), get 1,000 cars... Uncharted 3's MP grind was nothing compared to this. King of the Internet This is going to have to be a N/A for me, the most online I did this year was boost Burnout Paradise remastered and help out a group of people boost Arkham Origins. Worst Online Experience Likewise, N/A. Both of the boosts I did this year went smoothly and everyone co-operated well so there's really nothing to be angry about here. Sleeper Hit of the Year Steins;Gate: Linear Bounded Phenogram Going to cheat a little here and go with Steins;Gate Elite, but not because of Elite (Elite was actually a bit disappointing imo) but because it came with Linear Bounded Phenogram, a non-canon spin-off that contains 11 short stories in the world of Science Adventure (the series S;G is a part of.) I had low expectations for it based on what people had said online before it was localized, but I absolutely loved it. Mr Braun's story was a tad tedious but the rest was incredibly engaging, easily my GOTY this year and I'd bet most people will skip it because (for some reason) it was released without any trophies at all. Biggest Bomb of the Year Steins;Gate Elite I would've gone with Insomniac's Spider-Man, but to be honest that kinda met my expectations of being pretty generic, it's really no better or worse than the Amazing Spider-Man games imo, but Elite I was actually quite excited for to see how an animated VN was going to work, how they're going to make everything smooth, what all the scenes that weren't in the anime were going to look like... But a fair amount of it wasn't even animated and it cut content and while overall it's a fine experience, it really just doesn't hold up compared to the original version for me. But hey at least it came with Linear Bounded Phenogram so I felt my money was worth it for that alone even if Elite itself was disappointing. Best Trophy Image Dragon's Dogma Decided to restrict myself to plats for this one because otherwise it would've been way too hard to choose. As it is it came down to a choice between several games even just using plats, but ultimately I went with Dragon's Dogma. No special reason really, it just looks nifty. Worst Trophy Image Burnout Paradise Remastered If it were any more generic it'd just be an image of a platinum trophy. The whole list looks like this, just with different tints applied and it's not particularly relevant to Burnout outside of being a wheel that could easily be associated with most other racing games on the market. Very bland. Best Female Character Makise Kurisu (Steins;Gate Elite) Going to go with Kurisu because she's a wonderfully written character who grows as the game progresses and has great chemistry with the rest of the cast. She's strong, she's capable, and outside of being a bit of a tsundere (especially early in the game), she doesn't tick any of the obnoxious anime trope boxes. She's not used for fanservice, she's not a loli. She's just a genuinely strong character. Best Male Character Okabe Rintaro (Steins;Gate Elite) There are so many male characters out there that it was kind of hard to pick, so I'll go with Okabe. He's a deep character who has wonderful growth over the course of the game, stacking it you can really see just how far he comes and how much depth is hidden behind his admittedly rather obnoxious Hououin Kyouma personality. He's not flawless, but no great character is because his flaws are what make him so interesting and allow such growth. Best Plat of the Year Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled Wasn't quite sure what to expect going into this but I absolutely loved it, the handling is great, there's decent challenge without it feeling unfair at all, and it doesn't outstay its welcome either. If anything I'd say it was a bit short, shame there weren't any DLC trophies for the new stuff they've been adding every month. Even if it was just one bronze a month for beating the new Oxide trial, I'd take it. Wurst Plat of the Year LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars Was going to post GT5 again but I felt it won enough awards and the elation that earning it provided was worth something I suppose. This game is just bad, and it's not hard so you feel accomplished when it's done like GT5, you're just glad the tedium is over. It's buggy, the levels aren't interesting, and it has an awful tower defense game that feels like it takes up half the playtime. It's not my least favourite LEGO game, that title is taken by LEGO Hobbit on the Vita, but it's definitely towards the bottom. Outside of GT5 this was a relatively strong year for me in terms of how much I enjoyed my games - I did even get some enjoyment out of this. It was just the worst of a pretty fun selection. Most Anticipated Platinum of 2020 Robotics;Notes Elite Next year seems relatively dry for me in terms of new games. There's Yakuza 3, 4 and 5 remasters coming that I'm excited for, if I can ever get myself through the poorly aged PS3 version of 3, there's Tales of Arise, but I still have Vesperia, Zestiria, a Graces f stack and both Symphonia games on my list so I'm not exactly aching for more Tales content, and other than that... I can't really think of anything to be excited for next year? The new Batman game maybe if it ends up being a 2020 game. But Robotics;Notes finally being localized after all these years is very exciting to me (and DaSH and maybe even the Steins;Gate romance spin-off too!) because now all of the mainline Science Adventure games are available in English apart from Chaos;Head (and you could try and make a case for Occultic;Nine which really wants to be a part of the franchise but afaik isn't officially.) Hopefully C;H is also coming sooner rather than later.

I haven't done Trackmania, but WipEout is a complete and utter joke in terms of difficulty compared to Gran Turismo 5, the only really tough thing in WipEout imo is Beat Zico, which took me about 500 laps the first time I did it, but compared to many of the time trials in GT5 that's nothing. There's one event in GT5, for example, that lasts 7 minutes long and it felt like you have less than a second of leeway to make mistakes in. GT5's platinum isn't overrated at all imo, it's easily the hardest (and longest, what an awful grind) I've ever done.

#345 - LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues Having already played this before, I went into it knowing what to expect and I think overall I enjoyed it more now that I already knew each hub was an entirely separate thing and progress isn't shared between them at all (outside of red/green/blue bricks.) Unlike last time where I did all 30 story levels and then went back and did all of the clean-up afterwards, I tackled each hub area one at a time before moving on and enjoyed it a lot more than leaving everything until after the story is done. I actually quite like the concept of each hub being comprised of several puzzles, where you can only solve one or two at the start, but those unlock more characters/vehicles so you can start doing the other puzzles scattered around too. It's a gameplay loop that the other games don't really attempt, as they just have one large overworld where once you've unlocked the necessary characters (usually accomplished just by finishing the story) you can just do anything anywhere which trivializes a lot of the puzzles in those games. From the very little I've seen, LEGO Movie 2 actually kind of reminds me of this but for the entire game. Maybe I should try it at some point.

Progress Update: #345 - LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues Having already played this before, I went into it knowing what to expect and I think overall I enjoyed it more now that I already knew each hub was an entirely separate thing and progress isn't shared between them at all (outside of red/green/blue bricks.) Unlike last time where I did all 30 story levels and then went back and did all of the clean-up afterwards, I tackled each hub area one at a time before moving on and enjoyed it a lot more than leaving everything until after the story is done. I actually quite like the concept of each hub being comprised of several puzzles, where you can only solve one or two at the start, but those unlock more characters/vehicles so you can start doing the other puzzles scattered around too. It's a gameplay loop that the other games don't really attempt, as they just have one large overworld where once you've unlocked the necessary characters (usually accomplished just by finishing the story) you can just do anything anywhere which trivializes a lot of the puzzles in those games. From the very little I've seen, LEGO Movie 2 actually kind of reminds me of this but for the entire game. Maybe I should try it at some point.

#344 - Hakuoki: Edo Blossoms I appreciate that the routes in this game do actually significantly diverge from each other (they share similar key events, but that makes sense since the MC shouldn't have any control over them), but... 13 routes was a bit much. They all began to blur together for me, and if you ask me in a year or two I doubt I'd be able to remember any routes in particular, as none really stood out to me apart from maybe Harada's. This is likely the longest VN I've done and I don't feel like it really justified that length at all. The main character definitely seemed more competent in this compared to Kyoto Winds, it feels like she has actually grown as a character throughout the story. I wish Sen and her bodyguard were more prominent instead of being relegated to side characters, as they were my favourites, but I guess that just made all of their appearances more meaningful. Some characters have their personalities shift dramatically between routes, but I don't really understand how the main character's decisions impact them at all as she's very rarely even in contact with them. Also the decisions that lead to the bad ends/game overs don't make much sense either to me because the choices and the endings seem completely unrelated to each other. Overall these two games were good, but apparently this is a remake with added routes and I feel like all the added routes have diluted the overall quality a bit.

Progress Update: #344 - Hakuoki: Edo Blossoms I appreciate that the routes in this game do actually significantly diverge from each other (they share similar key events, but that makes sense since the MC shouldn't have any control over them), but... 13 routes was a bit much. They all began to blur together for me, and if you ask me in a year or two I doubt I'd be able to remember any routes in particular, as none really stood out to me apart from maybe Harada's. This is likely the longest VN I've done and I don't feel like it really justified that length at all. The main character definitely seemed more competent in this compared to Kyoto Winds, it feels like she has actually grown as a character throughout the story. I wish Sen and her bodyguard were more prominent instead of being relegated to side characters, as they were my favourites, but I guess that just made all of their appearances more meaningful. Some characters have their personalities shift dramatically between routes, but I don't really understand how the main character's decisions impact them at all as she's very rarely even in contact with them. Also the decisions that lead to the bad ends/game overs don't make much sense either to me because the choices and the endings seem completely unrelated to each other. Overall these two games were good, but apparently this is a remake with added routes and I feel like all the added routes have diluted the overall quality a bit.

27/129 in common 1. Assassin's Creed II 2. Batman 3. Beyond: Two Souls 4. Bully 5. Code: Realize - Bouquet of Rainbows 6. Deponia 7. Detroit: Become Human 8. Everybody's Gone To The Rapture 9. Heavy Rain 10. inFamous 11. inFamous 2 13. inFamous First Light 14. Lara Croft GO 15. LEGO The Incredibles 16. LEGO The Lord of the Rings 17. Life is Strange 18. Life is Strange: Before the Storm 19. Marvel's Spider-Man 20. Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch 21. Okami HD 22. Rime 23. The Walking Dead 24. The Walking Dead Collection 25. Transistor 26. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy 27. Until Dawn

Dragon Age: Origins