shadaik Posted February 4 Author Share Posted February 4 Didn't play much this week. Or rather, I did, but not many different games. I'll explain when we get to the 100% of the week. Backlog-wise, Sea of Stars got added thanks to the Playstation Stars program. It's a game I do want to play at some point, but not before I finished The Messenger, the developer's previous game that allegedly has connections with this one. I also grabbed one f2p title each on PS5 and PS4: Silent Hill: The Short Message and Roblox, respectively. I ignored Roblox previously sticking to the Windows version, but now that it has trophies, I'll just quickly grab those at soem point next week. That makes +2 PS4 and +1 PS5, with no game leaving because Minecraft (Vita) was not on it. Which brings us to... Plat #135 - 100% 213 Minecraft: Playstation Vita Edition Let it Go! Walk across the surface of a deep ocean by freezing the water with Frost Walker boots. Vita Here it is, the very edition of the game I did not expect to 100% at all in the version I least expected to. And yet, here we are. 100% on a Minecraft stack. This completion is mostly due to a boosting group here on PSNP, finally netting me the two trophies I needed more than two players for, completing the multiplayer modes exclusive to the Minecraft Console Editions. From then on, only one trophy was left in my singleplayer world. The one that made me go "Wait, Frozen is that old already?" But there are worse earworms to be had than anything sung by Idina Menzel, so alright. The issue with this one was that I couldn't for the life of me get the ecnhantment to the point I started to believe maybe it hadn't been implemented on Vita. But that was impossible, was it? Others had the trophy. And so I continued. All in all, I'd been fishing for 7 hours, branching out into other opportunities to get the book every now and then - I cleared a Woodland Mansion, two shipwrecks and the treasure chests they pointed me to (the same one, mind you), I even spontaneously converted a nearby village's farming plot into a villager breeder to maybe get a librarian villager that sold the enchantment. No, really, here it is! Turns out, I should have just stuck to fishing because after days of putting in some time each evening, it finally happened. The ocean now empty of fish, but also all those rods and bows people seem to be throwing away, a whole library of enchanted books (Bane of Arthropods III holds the record as I fished that one three times), and the Endermen alone know how much other stuff, but suddenly, with a jank on the fishing rod, yet another book flew toward me and there it was, Frost Walker I! And I knew, Let it go, let it go, can't hold it back anymore. Let it go, let it go, turn away and slam the door. I don't care what they're going to say let the storm rage on the cold never bothered me anyway. Also: Most unneccessary Totem of Undying ever Meanwhile, the other editions give me trouble. PS3 didn't even unlock trophies when playing with four controllers. Might have been because two of these were PS4 controllers, but it's still annoying. And yes, it was a public game, as proven by randoms dropping into the game en masse. This is a major issue: Randoms can join a running game on PS3! Round one I had four accounts in, round two of the same game, two other guys joined. Not that it mattered, because like I said, trophies just didn't pop at all. MIght have been splitscreen with four players was too much to handle for the console. PS3 has a lot of lag for trophy popping, so apparently that is quite a daunting task to the old system? I dunno. PS4 is suffering from me only having two controllers, but also from one singleplayer trophy still missing. The grindiest one of all: Master Trader for selling stuff to villagers for a total of 1,000 emeralds. I was also missing Me Gold!, but that one I finally got using a Youtube video guide. At first I used an outdated video that gave the seed "55" to spawn right next to a beach with a chest to open for the trophy. Turnsed out that no longer works, the seed now spawns the player in the middle of a desert (right next to a Desert Temple and with several more temples and villages closeby). However, that seed was useful. I could have gotten Master Trader already had I not liked the 55 world so much. It ended up reinvigorating my fun with the game and I decided to do this trophy during a challenge: Play in this desert world with desert and mesa spanning for miles, finally doing something I've been wanting to do in Minecraft for some time now (upgrade a desert temple) and do it on Peaceful (no hunger and no enemies, but that also means, a lot of materials are inaccessible or hard to get). And so, most of my gaming time goes into building a desert village around a desert temple used as the entrance to an artificial oasis. It might take me longer to go for the final singleplayer trophy on PS4 that way, but it's also much more fun. Up next I'll still be gunning for the PS3 edition. Let's see what comes of it. Meanwhile, my current Bingo Bonanza card has a field on it for the oldest entry in my backlog and it turns out that is... drumroll... Hydrophobia! Alright then. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted February 11 Author Share Posted February 11 Well, that was an odd week. It's PS Plus week and so some of the games on offer get added: Steelrising (PS5) and Foamstars (PS4+PS5). Foamstars (PS4) should not stay on there for long. I also did a sweep of remaining cross-platform lists to move from PS4 to Vita and came up with these: Color Guardians, 2064, We are Doomed, Grim Fandango, and Woah Dave! Of these, only Grim Fandango had already been on my Vita list, the others get added on there but removed form PS4 because I enjoy the little handheld. That makes +2 for PS5, +4 for Vita and -1 for PS4, with another -1 for PS4 being Roblox. The second game I finished on PS4 both got added and removed this week, though I didn't buy it. More on that in its review. Which brings me to... Non-Plat 100% #86 - 100% #214 Roblox PS4 Roblox had been on PS4 for about a month already when it finally got trophies added, presumably becaus enobody was playing on the system. I had played a little on Windows before where it came pre-installed, and it was a decent enough creativity enabling app. Much like Dreams, this is a system to create and distribute games, though with a far younger target audience. Now that the game got trophies, I decided to check out the PS4 version, after all. And boy, was I right about staying with the Windows version. Average facial expression when playing From what I can tell, this edition lacks the creation tools, which is kind of understandable given the vast differences between pc and console. This reduces it to a pure distribution extension of the platform. Naturally, game quality depends on the individual fledgling developers and the amount of experience and talent they bring. Yes, Roblox is filled with a lot of crud, but that is to be expected and getting into a platform like this means one should always be prepared to take a while to find something worthwhile. Eventually, even here, the cream rises to the top, though a majority of games is dull and basic, such as the caveman game above which had me running around as a caveman clubbing dinosaurs to death and collecting their bones as well as meat, which I can then exchange for more bones. No, they do not fight back, they just walk around slowly for you to kill. Riveting. Also, there's quite a few games that can't be played on PS4 at all. Then there's the games that are fun for a few minutes, like a Spider-Man game I found that has me swing on webs and find the one enemy of note on the map, a giant Sandman to punch to death. And finally, there's the proper games, such as a full-on clone of multiplayer Minecraft or a game that has us play as humans that turn into mermaids when getting into water. You never know what you get. What you doget either way, is terrible controls. Honestly, they're absolutely horrid! I can't remember having seen controls this bad in anything ever. The pc controls are haphazardly converted to the Dualshock which clearly lacks enough buttons to enable a complete input scheme for most games, especially stuff like the aforementioned Minecraft clone. The best games are borderline unplayable, most of the others are awkwardly playable at best with a click of the touchpad giving a second layer of controls that barely covers the remaining bases. Overall, this is an absolute mess of a conversion. Not a surprise when seeing what is being ported here and how much freedom the platform gives developers, making converting it to console, of all things, sheer madness. My advice: Grab the trophies, if you want, and then hop over to the Windows edition. This is a really fun platform, but you wouldn't know that from playing the PS4 edition. Appropriate screenshot for the last trophy to never go back ever again Game: 2/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 3 hours Plat #139 - 100% #215 Bigfoot's Journey Never ending journey Get all other trophies PS4 Here's a game I never bought. And frankly, never would have. But now I can say I played every trophy-enabled game on Playstation that has the word "bigfoot" in the title, the other one being Jacob Jones and the Bigfoot Mistery. And that is very important! Spoiler (No, it's not) I ended up winning a code for this game in a raffle, something I found out this morning in a surprising email sending me the code. Lucky me! And look at that plat! It's like a cross between Homer Simpson, some Mayan gylph, and a dick pic with a photoshopped face of a knock-off Knuckles in there. Ohboyohboyohboy! The games today really know how to represent my facial expressions playing them What this is, is a short graphic novel by Askold Akishin, a prolific Russian comic book artist. No, not a visual novel, a full-on graphic novel that is being presented to us panel by panel. What we get there is seven short chapters of an apeman wandering post-apocalyptic Russia. Foraging food, being hunted, meeting friendly humans, flashign back to a confusing Origin story, meeting other apemen riding mammoths -it's all very confusing and somewhat incoherent, not at all helped by including not a single spoken word aside from signage and labels on cans of yummy treats like Squid Goulash with Sea Cucumber (that might or might not have been the reason for the nuclear war that happened). I think the main issue is that we're not getting the full picture here. Are we in the future? The Ice Age? Are we a bigfoot, an escaped gorilla, or a mutated human? What is going on? Aside from the comic, we get a game that hands us 60 seconds (plus extensions, making about 2 minutes total) to make it through 15 "mazes". Said mazes are about appropriate for the level of confusion the comic leaves us in, meaning: There is no maze here, just a corridor with a few corners in. The best thing to say here is that it's short. Touted as a four-minute plat by people who don't like to ever engage with their media at all, even doing so extends those minutes to a mere nine. I take the free plat, but from googling I get the impression this experience hurt my view of Akishin more than he deserved. Too bad. If you're looking for a wordless story of apemen by a prolific Russian artist, I highly recommend Genndy Tartakovsky's Primal. The comic feels incomplete, the game sections are barely existing, one wonders why this was published as a game at all. Also, between Shiro, Big Dipper, and now Bigfoot's Journey, what's with all the bad Russian games coming up recently? Thank you, and now please leave my console Game: 1/10 List: 2/10 Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 9 minutes Up next Hydrophobia is still coming along, and compared to these two, even mediocre is a massive step up. Adding to that, Foamstars looks fun and I should try and get that one quickly because I don't know how long this multiplayer-only title will last. Lots of folks completed this one in no time, so should be doable in a week. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted February 25 Author Share Posted February 25 A quiet two weeks, but I added three free titles to eventually play: Ping Redux (2x PS4, 1x PS5), Hawked (PS4+PS5), and Danmachi Battle Report (PS4). Ping Redux recently went free because, to paraphrase the developer, it made them one Happy Meal a month and seeign people just play it was worth more to them. I love that sentiment. Hawked is a title I thought looked interesting form the trailers. Danmachi is a series I previously only played the Shmup spinoff on Switch from, but as another freebie, I'll check it out. The bizarre western title of Is it Okay to Date Girls in a Dungeon? did absolutely help, this is just the right kind of quirky. Meanwhile, a different free title is not quite leaving the backlog, as a few dlc trophies are still left, but the plat is already here, warranting a review for: Plat #140 Rocket League Virtuoso Unlock All Trophies PS4 What do you get when you take a sport I hate, replace the players with a machine I dislike, and make the result a damn multiplayer match with despicably random teams? The answer is: An absolute blast. For those who have not yet tried the sixth-most popular game on this here site, Rocket League is soccer played with physics-defying remote-controlled cars in teams of up to four players, usually randomly grouped in matches. Except in some special modes,where the game turns into ice hockey. Or basketball. Or just low-gravity. Or where shattering tiles on the floor become the goal. Variety is a big thing here, thanks to years of expansions and added variations to keep the player base engaged. Not only the modes. The cars are fully customizable with a plethora of decorative items and paintjobs. The physics is fine-tuned enough that the shape of the car makes a huge difference in how the ball behaves when hit, not to mention cars behaving somewhat differently such as the van named Merc that can turn on a dime. Add to all that lots andlots of lights and special fx and you get a visual spectacle of a sport that also happens to produce excellent screenshots. Like this one It's all great fun, and as you play the game, you will learn more an more about vehicle behaviour. In the beginning, players stay firmyl on the ground, hopping on occassion to get a ball passing over them. Then you'll start scaling the walls to get to the ball. And ultimately, the car's rocket boost can be pointed down to get it airborne, striking the ball (or, more often, missing it) up far in the air. Other cars can be rammed and even destroyed, given enough speed. I've had a long journey when it comes to multiplayer. I still don't like tacked-on multiplayer, but I began that journey way back with Defiance which had multiplayer mostly consisting of players just running around the same map, occassionally tackling events by just being in the same place at the same time. Rocket League marks the first time I sought out a multiplayer team match game and had fun with that, paving the way for trying a lot more games like this in the future. The only negative thing here is how some dlc trophies are tied to getting a certain item as a drop in order to do something with it. Even having almost all trophies done, I'm still missing the items necessary for two more trophies and I can do nothing but hope they will eventually drop - and then each on is done within a few seconds, a minute at most. But this is still an excellent game with an excellent list. Not hard, but it taks a while. Okay, not all that spectacular of a plat shot. But it's nicely purple! Game: 9/10 List: 9/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time: 50 hours Up next I set myself a goal of getting Lollipop Chainsaw done by the 29th for a challenge on this here forum, a disc I had lying around for forever. I might have underestimated this game's toughness (and overestimated my available time), but we'll see. Next Sunday seems to be in the cards, though. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted March 3 Author Share Posted March 3 As usual, I did not finish the games I planned to but finished some, either way. Alongside that, the PS5 stack of Omega Strikers leaves the backlog because that game is basically already announced to end and likely not to be running anymore by the time I finally get a PS5. Plus, (spoilers!) I didn't like the game all that much. Meanwhile, I'll add Trailmakers to the pile on PS4 and PS5. One of only a few legally-distinct-from-Lego games that made it to console and it looks very intriguing, so I got it on a deep discount. With the three games finished this week, that makes -1 for Vita, -1 for PS4, and no change for PS5. So, let's see what games I beat this week: Plat #141 & 142 - 100% #216 & #217 Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet Ultimate Sweet You've seen everything in the game! Thanks for playing! Vita & PS4 When I was but a wee lad, I did not yet know what on Earth a wee lad is on account of not being Scottish, but I did know something else: Saturday Morning Cartoons. An incredible mix of animated shows would fill the saturday and sunday mornings of several stations. And in Germany, where private television (that is, ad-funded instead of publicly funded) was in its infancy, we got the best of all worlds, cartoons from all around the globe coming together to fill up the stations. Anyway, now many people have nostalgia for those shows. You know the ones - Transformers, G.I. Joe (well,. Action Man in Europe), Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (no ninjas allowed!), Dino-Riders, He-Man, and so on. Except nostalgia is an odd thing when it comes to those shows. While we do remember those shows of heroes shooting completely harmless laser guns at each other for suspense, there was another kind of shows prevalent at the time. Muppet Babies, Strawberry Shortcake, My Little Pony (G1), Care Bears, Teddy Ruxpin, shows directed at either younger audiences or girls that were less focused on fighting. Though She-Ra kinda filled the gap between those. Those shows are usually less well-remembered, at most the associated toys tend to be far more popular than the shows. Which is a shame, these shows definitely were a significant part of 80's culture. Well, 80's kids room culture, which is enough for me. Why this tangent? Because if there is anything Syrup and the Ultimate Sweet feels like, it's an episode of those shows. Befitting its saccharine title, it comes closest to Strawberry Shortcake - or My Little Pony to the point it could fit in with both old and current iterations were the characters just a bit more quadrupedal. It's just 100% one of those stories. This VN accompanies Syrup, a candy maker who one day finds a candy golem in her lab. Said candy golem comes in the shape of a pink girl with swirly gumdrops for buns and has but one goal: To get along with Syrup. Despite her pleas, Syrup decides not to eat her (well, in any but the shortest of the ten story paths) and instead investigate the apparent prank that is being played on her while also going on a journey for the titular Ultimate Sweet, a feat which requires the help of her main competitor, a witch of undetermined wickedness. As visual novels go, this is a very short and straightforward one. Reading all paths takes about two hours, skipping everything for the trophies (which I did on the cross-buy PS4 stack because I had read it all just days before) takes less than ten minutes. It's cute, it's short, it's well-written. The saccharine theme and tale are not for everybody's taste and as far as visual novels are concerned, this is just a very basic one. I liked it well enough, but I can see this not being everybody's cup of bubble gum flavoured soda. Whta kind of bubble gum is bubble gum flavoured soda supposed to taste like, anyway? Game: 6/10 List: 7/10 Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 2 hours Non-Plat 100% #87 - Overall 100% #218 Omega Strikers PS4 Soemtimes, it's hard to gauge the potential of a new idea while you are in the phase of hype almost any new idea brings with it. On an unrelated note, I was completely blown away when, upon first starting up Omega Strikers, it hit me with one of the best video game openings I have ever seen. It's incredibly cinematic, energetic and well-animated, and it should never not be mentioned or, better yet, embedded in any review of the game. Holy...! Now, back to that maybe not that unrelated point from before. Omega Strikers is a game by a team of developers that left a small company you might have heard of, Riot Games, of League of Legends fame. The premise is simple: What if you take air hockey, but instead of a mallet (I totally didn't have to look up what that round puck-hitting thing from air hockey is called) you have fun characters with different shot abilities? The answer is: A game that is fun for about ten minutes. In fairness, it's free, but the developers obviously overestimated the potential their game had. An item shop? All the money that probably went into that intro? Branding your studio website with assets from this one game? Honestly, that seems like a bit of a miscalculation. Weirdly, the tiny trophy list of just four basic trophies reflects that issue aptly. That is not to say the game is bad, it's just that the idea had never that much potential to begin with, not in 2d, anyway. Add to that some considerable input lag during hectic games that seems to be by design, and it also doesn't play all that well. Button choices on the Dualshock feel awkward, though that may just be that the control scheme is optimized for pc. This might have been sensational had it come out 35 years before, when sports games on NES looked like this but with pixels instead of polygons, yet today, this just misses the goal. I could see this as a freeby to draw attention to something else the studio is working on. But on its own, it's not substantial enough to gain the momentum it clearly was supposed to have. Also, how is a game looking this simple a 4.84 GB file? Game: 4/10 List: 3/10 Difficulty: 2/10 Time: 1 hour Btw, I'm scrapping the "Up Next" section. At this point, it feels like a bad omen for completion to have a game show up in a preview. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted March 10 Author Share Posted March 10 It's PS Plus week! Hello Neighbor gets added just due to being an easy plat, so I'll take it. Sifu gets added because I hear it's areally good game. Simple as that. I also got two games from a sale ending last Wednesday, but these are also the games I finished this week, so they add or subtract nothing. Meanwhile, I'm going for 100% on a couple of games that'll take some time, so view these as filler if you want. Minecraft Dungeons, Fall Guys, Tera, and Foamstars are all coming. But for now, the "filler": Plat #143 - 100% #219 Headbängers in Holiday Hell Platinum Headbanger Get all other trophies PS4 Let's start with an entry in the Bingo Bonanza happening in this very forum. You know, I could have used any game with a christmas or halloween or easter or maybeeven valentines level for the entry "Contains Holiday Themes". But then I stumbled upon this thing and immediately knew, I would do it the most straightforward way I could. Most christmas themed games are terrible enough you know without even looking at it, but this just looks fun. At the very least, somebody had a blast developing this. This the so far only game by Vikerlane, which I believe to be one person. One Christmas Eve, Santa shows up, declares how he hates metal and abducts a bunch of metalheads, leaving our player character to free them. And so, we slaughter our way through elves, with the occassional reindeer boss thrown in, pursuing Santa to the North Pole. It's technically a 16 bit style roguelike in that levels are semi-randomly generated and each game over gives us opportunity to upgrade our power and weapons. You know how this stuff works! And now you also know what it looks like Yes, it looks a lot like a Christmas-themed clone of Hotline Miami, but thankfully skips the whole rhythm/flow based gimmick in grading from that game, something I was really not fond of. Admittedly, that is likely more down to lack of skill on the developer's side than to a conscious design decision, but I can still appreciate this absence. The games knows what it can do, though, and it leans into its humor hard. That makes it all just a good time - elves can be entranced by nearby tvs with their fat elf leader's mug on it, their death cries condemn me to the naughty list, the first reindeer boss greeted me with the words "The power of Santa compells you!" - this is just great! A pure bundle of fun. The trophy list does not require a full playthrough (a shame, really), but does successfully showcase the diversity of the game experience and the many ways to kill Santa's little helpers. I'll still mark it down for technically only ever requiring me to play the first level over and over. The game is the definition of dumb fun and there is something to be celebrated about that. Did I mention your sprite kinda looks like Lemmy? Perfection! Game: 7/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 2/10 Time: 1 hour Plat #144 & 145 - 100% #220 & #221 Attack of the Toy Tanks Platinum Tank Get all other trophies. Vita & PS4 Oh, look, it's Ratalaika again! And yes, this one, too, has a trophy list that doesn't even ask to play through the whole game. In this case, you need to finish 30 out of 60 levels. Full disclosure: I did not yet plat the PS4 version as I'm writing this, but am confident enough I'll have that done by midnight tonight I'll still count it. I had my eyes on this one for a long time, even had it on my wishlist before the Playstation Store changed and removed PS3 and Vita from the browser store. And now it was at .49 Cents! Why did I have my eyes on it? Just because it was easy? Well, there's that, but even more importantly, it reminds me of one of the most wonderful oddities of the classic Game Boy library: Battle City. In Battle City, you played a tiny tank on a top-down battlefield that needed to shoot all other tanks in the level, using obstacles for protection in a labyrinthine cityscape. The odd thing about it is that it was a very popular game that, in the West, you could only get on pirated compilation cartridge with imaginative titles like 101-in-1, about 10 of which were Battle City with different title screens. Like this, but black-on-pea-soup Attack of the Toy Tanks takes this and adds modern graphics. The levels take advantage of the higher resolution of 1080p by fitting one screen each. The tank can now rotate its turret to shoot any direction and in some levels, we get special ammo that moves in waves, ricochets, or leaves a mine for a few seconds before poofing into thin air. The mission is still straightforward as ever: Destroy the other tanks, don't get blown up - which does include not to get blown up in between shooting the last enemy tank and seeing the victory screen. A quirk that can get really annoying some times. Keeping track of several enemy tanks while navigating obstacles and, later on, dangerous lasers and spikes, is a decent challange. Though I managed to finish despite making it hard on me. See, the tanks can go forward or backward, as well as turn, as any tank should. But I didn't know that. I grew frustrated by not being able to go backward on numerous occassions, cussing at the game for not including one of the most essential movement mechanics of a tank. It was only after getting the plat that I looked at the controls and realized there was indeed a reverse, mapped to the button on Vita. With forward mapped to L1, I did not even think to try that one. I'llmark that down as "Yeah, I can now finish hard mode even on games that don't even have hard mode!" Now that is hardcore gaming! Awesomeness is me. Game: 5/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 2/10 Time: 1 hour 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted March 17 Author Share Posted March 17 (edited) A week with no growth to the backlog? How odd! Judging from how many games I bookmarked in current sales, that is likely to change. But for now, I can pat myself on the back for managing a week with it actually shrinking again. As for the games off the list, we have an unexpected return and another entry in the ongoing series "Why do I keep ending up with live service titles all the time?" One plat, one non-plat 100%. In perfect balance, as all things should be. Oh yeah, on emore thing: I added a list of titles reviewed to the original post. The list was getting long! Plat #146 - 100% #222 Tera Arborean Hero Unlocking all trophies of TERA PS4 How about a game I had given up on years ago? Tera is a free 2012 MMORPG that made its way to PS4 in 2018. Among the few products of South Korean publisher Bluehole, it is kind of the step child next to its younger brother, PUBG Battlegrounds. And the two couldn't be more different. Tera is very much a typical action rpg, but with other players joining in and fighting monsters around you. For a 2012 onlien title, fights are surprisingly deep, with several attacks of different effect and cooldown times providing enough variety keeping the dullness of many other attempts at the genre at bay. Still, the pc servers have long since closed, making this somewhat of a Playstation 4 exclusive. Odd, since its mains elling point should still work, especially for a free game. No, not the stunning vistas, though the game has plenty of those. Not the battle system and deep lore. Not the imaginative monsters and biomes. It has all these things, butno, it's absolutely, and positively, beefcake. And a leveling system that involves clothes that grow more and more appropriate as you level up, until you reach something like my character here at the level cap: "Appropriate" does mean she can prune her pubes without taking it off, right? So, why did I give up on this game? Well, I played this back when it came out. Leveling up and reaching the endgame was quick for an MMO, but hunting and killing the final few monsters for the trophies for killing the overworld bosses proved an issue. Even if I managed to find one of the remaining ones, other players would join in during the fight and with the kill going to the mvp, as calculated by damage done, I was never credited the kill. I eventually left. About a year later I returned to find out the developers had comitted a cardinal sin of MMO management: They had deleted old inactive accounts. My gear, my mounts (including a ridiculous Hyundai car), my progress, all gone. Miffed, I deleted the game to never look at it again. Al that was left was screenshots of my dearest Naldrielle. Farewell, my fair lady! Fast forward by about five more years and I hear there now is an item that instantly levels a character to the cap of 65 and that this was given away as a login bonus after six days. So I thought: "Okay, that should get me back to where I was, so I could go for the two missing trophies". And so I did. I recreated my old character from memory, somehow ending up with a hybrid of her and my Neverwinter character. Given that one is a Tiefling - and male - the two ended up resembling each other in nothing but hair color. They're not even the same species! Either way, the servers are far less populated now and within a few days, I managed to find all boss monsters and kill them without any other players even showing up in the boss fight areas. Solo, each of the three strongest ones took about 40 minutes to down and that was that - finally, the last two trophies popped and once more, I deleted the game. This time, for good. Unless I get the idea of going forthe Asian stack. After all, for an MMO, this is relatively short, it's free, and it's actually good. Usually, I would now get to the platinum screenshot, but I just can't without showing you guys the most ridculous fantasy armor I have ever seen outside of an outright parody: Tbf, her head might just be shaped like that... Nothing can withstand my battle dreidel! Game: 7/10 List: 6/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time: 50 hours Non-Plat 100% #88 - Overall 100% #223 Foamstars PS4 Yup, we got two online titles this week. But let's shift gears from an MMORPG to a MOBA. Foamstars is Square Enix' attempt to cash in on the popular genre. It's clearly inspired by Nintendo's entry Splatoon (that Nintendo multiplayer battle game that is not Smash Bros), and was readily derided as a copy of said title. But is that really fair? After all, being merely inspired by something is not a bad thing, that is how most videogame genres came to be. I mean, FPS used to be called Doom clones, named after the famous Wolfenstein clone that popularized the genre. Modes are played in teams of four, either against another team (Versus) or co-op against enemy waves (Squad Missions). There's also a small single player mode to get comfortable with each character's playstyle and deliver some back story. More on that later. Where Splatoon uses ink, Foamstars uses foam. And that is where the games diverge a lot - the foam can and will pile up, forming barriers or vantage points, shifting the terrain itself all the time during each battle. I say battle, but the game insists on "party", unless playing PvE against monsters. Because this is not a battle, this is people having fun in a friendly sports competition. Aside from Rave Breaker whose deal is that he hates parties (yeah, Rave Breaker is me if I was a supervillain). Idling characters will vibe to the beat, and it is a vibaceous beat indeed. Still looks like a battle, though People were quick to dimiss it. I, too, saw the superficial similarities to Splatoon, but thought, if that game can have three titles to its name, why should another game like it suddenly be bad? After all, that series will not make it to Playstation anyway. And Squenix is a decent publisher. So, how is it, then? Foamstars has a steep learning curve due to the sheer chaos present in matches, and this is something that can put people off already. It tries to mitigate this with its tiny singleplayer campaign. But it is absolutely fun and once you get used to the characters, which all play fairly differently, the chaotic nature of the battlef dancefloor recedes somewhat, though it never disappears. We have several modes including the usual 4v4 game, a 2v2 game with the other two of each party working as support from a platform above the arena, a king-of-the-hill game with the hill actively driving toward either team's base, and aforementioned PvE modes. More modes, characters, story missions etc. are inbound with the game having a full plan of more than six seasons. A month after release, we already got three additional characters (a barista, the icecream-themed Mel T, and a 70's disco guy with a majestic star-studded afro) with the fourth one, a French lady with a battle umbrella, already announced. But it's not all perfume and roses and bubbly characters. I can ignore the ridiculously expensive cosmetics. Or the fact this game is 29.99 for anybody who did not get it in Ps Plus last month, in a genre that is known for its free-to-play leanings. I really thought that kind of stuff had been buried during the PS3 era. The story is off, it's here where the game shows massive pacing issues. How is it a fast-paced moba that considers itself a party starts new players by showing us a dead-boring intro of a news reporter on tv with the pace of an actual news report? The same thing crops up durign the character missions with battles interspersed by overly long dialog sequences. While over-the-top and funny, they just suddenly slow the game to a crawl. This is likely intended as a breather in between challenges, but it just turns parts of the game into a constant stop-and-go. One mroe issue is porbably not the game's fault: Matchmaking tends to take several minutes. Luckily, the main hub features a large area for players to try out the characters' abilities. But doing this for up to five minutes, which often enough will then result in it not even finding a match until the second time you try is tedious. This game relies on populated servers and with it getting some negative hype (what's the opposite of hype? Lope?), that is a challenge even after being free on launch with Plus Essential. Some declared it dead on arrival and that might have been a self-fulfilling prophecy. We'll see in the coming months. This has the potential of turning into a long-running staple of PS online fun. But it's having a hard time convincing people of that and I've seen better games than this fail horribly. For now, it's fine. I listed quite a few flaws, but ultimately they're minor gripes, except for the apparent low server population. Indeed it is. For now. Game: 6/10 List: 5/10 Difficulty: 5/10 Time: 16 hours Edited March 17 by shadaik 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted March 24 Author Share Posted March 24 My fascination with odd peripherals is getting the better of me and so, while I'm gearing up to finally play the epic uDraw trilogy, the backlog also grows by the PS4 and PS5 stacks of Hot Wheels Rift Rally. Also new is the Asian stack for Tera, which I immediately started playing. Btw, I'm getting close to plat #150 now and have designated the candidate for that milestone: Ark! I'm so anxious to find out how I'll screw that one up! Another online title gets to leave the list in return. Let's all welcome to the stage... Plat #147 - 100% #224 Fall Guys Ultimate Fall Guy Acquire all other trophies PS4 I've been ignoring Fall Guys for quite some time. Much like Among Us, this is a game that got its hype during the Covid pandemic, and it was one I didn't even glance at due to it being an online multiplayer title. But cultural osmosis and the allure of being free can hollow out the toughest boulder until the boulder is no longer conflicted. And then is promised an ass-whooping, because this game is rated a 10/10 in difficulty. That whooping never came. See, the difficulty of this is mostly held aloft by people who are in denial about the game having become so much easier and who want to protect their precious plat they got when it was still hellishly hard to get. Yet, the previous plat-stopper, Infallibe, for winning five times consecutively, isn't even the toughest trophy anymore. The game has casual rounds now where winning five times in a row is easy, because everybody who survives the last round in those modes wins. Instead, the plat-stopper is now Low Baller, an extremely luck-based and maybe even bugged trophy for winning a team game with exactly one goal. That one is either bugged or poorly phrased. Many people have reported they got the trophy in games that resulted with anything but games won with a score of 1-0. I myself got the trophy after winning 2-1 in the first round and then loosing something like 4-9 in the second. Which works out to "winning with one only point" in no system of maths I've ever seen. Note that it's not "winning by one point", because then I'd have gotten that trophy weeks earlier. Though it might actually mean "win a game with you making one, and only one, point". Anyway, I finally jumped in when, in November 23, Infallible became laughably easy for a few weeks. There was a mode back then with only one player, guaranteeing a victory for anybody able to make it to the end. I was able to quickly customize my fall guy. I hope the idea gets across, he's supposed to look like a freshly cooked ear of corn. With something in his left eye Easy to do early on, but I kept him. It was a fun idea that just feels very much like my exact brand of using creative tools like these. Just very me. And everything else in here is just the purity of a grind that knows what it is. Race across colorful obstacle courses, getting the odd first place. Everything will just unlock by playing this game long enough, except maybe for the squad-based trophies. Low Baller I talked about, Squad Goals I got playing with a boosting group for Low Baller that didn't work out for me. Oh, and getting some items from the Premium Season Pass, which can be unlocked for free after three goes of the Standard Premium Pass earn enough currency to do so. Some points subtracted from the list for not making me engage with the new creative mode. Other than that, it's a perfect showcase of what's on offer. There was only one last thing to be done before I'd delete this off my drive. I created a short 3-minute course of my own for anybody who'd like to try. So, here's Zoo Zoom: Have fun, and don't feed the hippos! Oh, and the plat, of course. There are more stacks here, but I won't be going for those. While I really liked Fall Guys in the end, playing one stack blocks the others. This can be remedied by disconnecting my Epic account and connecting to a new one, but that is too much of a hassle for me. Maybe if they ever fix that, which seems unlikely. Game: 9/10 List: 8/10 Difficulty: 4/10 Time: 50 hours 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted March 31 Author Share Posted March 31 As expected, we have quite the growth this week, though some entries are a bit odd: Haven (PS4&5) enters the backlog because I failed to finish before it left Plus Extra. Hello Neighbor 2 (PS4&5) is the odd one this week. Originally, I added Hello Neighbor to my library thinking it was this month's Plus Essential entry. As a friend pointed out, it was not and so I now have both mainline Hello Neighbor games. Bot the bad one and the worse one. Or so I hear. Of the last sale, I add my long-wishlisted Tyd wag vir Niemand, earning its spot on linguistics alone, Lego Marvel's Avengers as another Lego entry on my quest to eventually get all Lego plats, and Pocket Academy Zero for the uniqueness of the premise. With Tera leaving, that makes an overall growth of 2 PS5 and 4 PS4 games with nothing leaving. Plat #148 - 100% #225 Tera (AS) Arborean Hero Unlocking all trophies of TERA PS4 On 3/17/2024 at 9:31 PM, shadaik said: I deleted the game. This time, for good. Unless I get the idea of going forthe Asian stack. After all, for an MMO, this is relatively short, it's free, and it's actually good. Well, that didn't take long. Yeah, this is the Asian stack for Tera, which I by now know stands for The Exiled Realms of Arborea. And now the name of the plat suddenly makes sense, as does the missing R in the Italian/Latin name of our planet. I decided to try out how short this MMORPG really is by trying to go for the plat quickly. 25 hours over two weeks with one final sprint today bringing it up to just under 30. For an MMO, that's tiny. Using the 500% XP bonus for 3 hours each the game generously supplies as well as one level skip potion fromlogin bonuses, this was not all that grindy. It helps that I found out side quests give scarcely any XP, while just sticking to the main questline while having those potions active would almost exactly level the character up along with the main quest progress, no grinding necessary. The Asian servers have a few more instances for most areas, allowing for easier search of the world bosses needed for the two last trophies and I was easily able to find all of them this here Sunday along with finishing the dungeons that are not part of the main quest line. Not going to do another review two weeks later, but there are a few interesting details and things I learned this time around, some from the camera clipping through my character during conversations. Oh, so that's a boob window! The reason the Asia plat is far more common than the global one? The monsters are far easier to find because there are more instances and scarcely anybody hunting them. Why is the game logo for the Asian stack slightly darker than the global one? I have no idea, but it's odd, isn't it? What's the best way through a hedge maze? Cut the hedges down by summoning meteorites, of course! All in all, there is a lot more stuff here if you do the sidequests and there is still a lot of main quest left after the last trophy, but the trophy list ends here. Which is less down to the list being incomplete and more to the game having been updated and expanded heavily over the years, beyond the scope of the long-since deceased pc original. And here we go, the plat: Don't ask about the alpaca, it's just happy to be here Game: 7/10 List: 6/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time: 30 hours 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted April 7 Author Share Posted April 7 It's PS Plus Essential week! This month was a weird one. I would probably have bought none of the titles (except Minecraft Legends when cheap just to complete my Minecraft trophy collection), but all three are interesting enough to warrant adding to the library for not-quite-free-but-close-enough. That makes +2 for PS4 and +2 for PS5. I also got two PS3 titles for cheap at gamestop of all places: Tomb Raider Trilogy (which I'll count as one entry) and Arcania. Though I might have to add to the price how hard the guy in the store tried to sell me on the extended warranty. I don't think I ever had need of one of those since games transitioned from cartridge to disc. Well, that's what you get when you buy a game at a Funko Pop store. Meanwhile, one PS4 game is done, so here goes: Non-Plat 100% #89 - Overall 100% #226 Celebrities Hacked PS4 Huh, that was not the plan. Oh well, done is done! Let's head to one of the fundamentals of PC gaming: Xonix. Back in 1984, a little game appeared in which the player was tasked to section of parts of the screen while avoiding balls bouncing around. Filling enough of the screen netted a win. It was simple, but challenging enough to be fun. Qix did it first, but Xonix refined the formula to perfection. By the time Windows came around, the background was revealing an image. Those went on to become a staple of the era of gaming magazines with CD-ROMs with freeware and shareware games on them, a tradition sadly dead by now. But some of it live son and so we get the Hacked series of two games so far, both free games with some DLC that is ntot needed for the 100%, though it does make reaching it easier just because more levels mean there are more stars to be gotten. You can either get every star in the base game or make your life easier by adding one or two DLCs and get some stars there (there are three perlevel with three levels per girl). In each level, you'll unlock an image of a woman with achest that would give Lara Croft a terrible backache just from looking at them. Not much to them, though the artwork is nice enough to look at. Not exactly a new idea in itself. The only new thing about this variation of Xonix having girls is that they are fuly clothed this time around, which is rare for these games. Though this might just be down to this being the PS4/PS5 ports. And no, none of them are parodies of some celebrities or something, that would have been far too clever. A full set of clothes? How scandalous! I found Celebrities Hacked to be a little bit harder than the first game, Cuties Hacked, and put it aside quickly, missing two final stars. So, this week, I decided to load it back up and get it finished. Xonix is always fun, even though there is really no lack of clones anywhere and the pictures are very much in the "whatever" area. The first game had some funny ones like the image of the character finding the hidden photographer and punching them as they make their photo. Either way, a free and mostly easy pack of trophies in the rough shape of a game. And if I ever want to do one of those again, there is yet another free Xonix clone on PS4, Xposed Reloaded. That makes three of those, all by the same developer, not counting the original Xposed, which is a paid title. You can say developer Somequest definitely has a recognizable style. If you call developing the same game multiple times a style. Game: 6/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time: 3 hours Getting Closer The ends of those posts felt like something was missing without the previews, so I try something new - an overview of games I made trophy progress on this week without finishing them. This week in general had a theme of digging up unfinished games from long ago. None hard, but all somewhat grindy: Frozen Free Fall, Giana Sisters Dream Runners, Minecraft Dungeons, and Lego Worlds. I did want to finish Giana Sisters Dream Runners this week, but that game's just a very confusing mess. More on that once I'm done. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted April 14 Author Share Posted April 14 No change for the backlog with the one titleleaving it having never been on it, I just got it recently. I have, however, re-assigned the role of designated 150th platinum. In light of Ark being basically a 1/10 due to console commands, I'll opt for a more respectable #150, the spot is now reserved for Lego Worlds. This might be quite the grind for my next plat, but I have enough non-plat titles to bridge the gap. But before that, let's quickly take a look at a short and easy one that nevertheless came highly recommended: Plat #149 - 100% #227 AER: Memories of Old Pilgrim Explore the Land of Gods. PS4 Why is the plat a cupcake with a cherry on top? I have no idea, though maybe the game was inspired by the lead designer looking at one? Now that I think about it, that does make sense with all those floating islands surrounded by clouds. Yep, we are visiting sky islands again. I would make a joke by shortening that to skylands, but Toys for Bob already made that joke two console generations ago. Odd how common those are in games though, isn't it? This thread alone features Invizimals, Omno, and Fall Guys. Not to mention I recently played, but did not finish, Haven. Plenty more all over the place in my backlog, including the first two Skylanders games. But let's stick with AER for now. Generations ago, the world was to be devoured by The Void. In a last-ditch effort to save the world, the gods tore it apart to convert it into floating islands in a neverending sky. We play as the newest in a long line of pilgrims tasked with visiting each of the three shrines across the world. But then the prelude cave crumbles and things get a bit more perilous than anticipated. No, AER is not really going for an award in originality as far as storytelling goes. Though while it does sound like the exact same plotline as Omno, this one is older than that game. Though betwen the two, Omno is by far the more fleshed-out experience. What AER does well, though, is efficiency. It tellsits story in as little time as it can. The one tiny side-story takes up almost no time at all. The main story is playing through three extremely short dungeons (a few minutes each), paced by transforming into a bird and flying to the next objective. If you want, you can find a lot of additional lore strewn throughout the world. The map is just large enough to get across the land is large enough for several factions of people to live there and have their own stories, even though we meet none of them apart from four people. And a crab rave, never forget a crab rave! Gameplay-wise, AER plays like the exact middle ground between Omno and Journey. Developer Forgotten Key shut down in 2019, after expanding its team from four to fourteen people in order to create this very game. And playing it, I feel like I understand what happened. The studio just wasn't ready for doing something thisambitious. It's clear to me that a lot of this game has been left on the cutting room floor due to time and budget constraints. AER is a beautiful little title that fills what little time it demands well. But it also finds itself in direct competition with giants like the Zelda games. This in itself makes for ridiculous odds, but add to that the utter hopelessness of this game becoming even as big as it seems to have been envisioned, and it is, sadly, clear why this did not make a big splash. Unlike the platinum, which I got by jumping into a well Game: 6/10 List: 8/10 Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 2.5 hours Getting Closer Lego Worlds and Minecraft Dungeons have been generous in terms of ultra rares this week. I plan on getting both done soon. The big grind of MD is almost behind me (getting the first season pass done), while that of LW is incoming. Speaking of grind: Despite handing no new trophies this last week, I'm positive I will finish the base game trophies of Frozen Free Fall next week, being a mere seven Stars away from the trophy for getting 500 stars in levels. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted April 21 Author Share Posted April 21 Fair warning, there is some mood whiplash inbound, concerning death and grief. But before that: The First Tree leaves the PS4 backlog this week but gets replaced by The Lego Movie 2 Videogame. The PS3 backlog grows by one game I'd been looking for for a long time: Minecraft Story Mode! I expect both newcomers to not stay on there for long, both being short and easy games from beloved franchises. Non-Plat 100% #90 - Overall 100% #228 The First Tree PS4 If you ever get reincarnated, better make sure you don't become a vixen in your next life. Between this and Endling, they seem to be on the receiving end of mortal peril a lot. I mean, fair enough, being a wild animal is tough, but foxes in videogames, especially female ones, have it rough enough, they might be the Spider-Men of gaming. In all seriousness, this is another game that is unexpectedly about death, loss, and how to cope with that. I had a few of those these last months and everytime I did not expect it. Which is not a bad thing, as it makes the story more impactful. Last time we've been here, Lost Words gave insight into the mind of a child loosing her grandmother and how she struggled through her inability to grasp what was happening. This time, we follow through the dream of an adult man preparing to face the demise of his late father. He dreams of a fox in search of her missing cubs, the first of which she soon finds dead close to her den. She wanders a forest littered with fragments of memories of the dreamer's father. Every now and then, Joseph, the dreamer, talks about the dream as it unfolds, in dialogue with his partner, Rachel. He remninisces on his childhood, the things his father did with him, how he himself was as a child and teenager, but also his regrets about distancing himself from his father and leaving the family home in Alaska. Yet, there is one thing different from most eulogies in media - Joseph is not alone in his memories or his grief. Rachel is no mere listener, she helps Joseph sort his feelings and gain a new outlook on life. The giant bunny is a tad less helpful, though. But, having fluffy things does help in my experience. Maybe it's just my choice of games, but I noticed reflections upon death becoming a more common topic in games these last few years, though it has been popping up every now and then for some time now. Proteus was an early title doign so, sharing with this one the progression through the seasons. But this makes sense to me. As gaming becomes a mainstream activity and the average age of gamers increases, it becomes more of an important part of our lives. Now said age is in its fourties, and as we notice our parents become actually old people and some even die, it's a good time to reflect upon it and its impact on us. Or maybe that's just me. While I'm writing this as part of normalcy carrying on, my mother is facing her last days. My father, my brother, and I make sure one of us is always with her. It's been a taxing few months since I found her on the floor and the doctors then found a bunch of inoperable tumors in her brain. Work and escapist hobbies are most of what is tethering me to sanity. I've had this game in my backlog for quite some time. Turns out, I could not have picked a better time to get through this one. The serenity it connects with death and the maturity with which the narrating dialogue handles grief are downright therapeutic. It gives a positive outlook for those "left behind". It might just be me, but this is exactly what I need to experience right now. And I'm glad I paused the collectible guide that was running on a second screen to listen to this game's narration instead of rushing through another quick platinum. A collectible guide is essential for this one, though, which I do have to count as a negative in detracting from the game. Game: 8/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 2/10 Time: 3 hours Getting Closer I finally finished the base game trophies on Frozen Free Fall, a big (and actually very good) free match-3. Now, that does not result in a review because, not bearing a platinum, the dlc is part of the 100%, and while this game's dlc is a free update, each of the four trophies in there is as big as the whole base game. So, that'll still be some time. Lego Worlds is only missing the last few miscellaneous and collection trophies and on its way to fulfill its destiny as my 150th platinum. Meanwhile, Minecraft Dungeons creeps closer to completion and is likely to give me my 100th ultra rare trophy. Not much left now on this game that currently serves to keep my goal of getting at least one trophy per day up through the work days. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonesey46 Posted April 23 Share Posted April 23 Your writing is fantastic mate, I find I can read anything you post and still be entertained, even if it's about a game I have no interest in. I'm sorry to hear about your mother, and you're right, these things pop up more as you get older and you can't really run away from it anymore. I wish you and your family all the best. Keep it up. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted April 28 Author Share Posted April 28 I have been holdign back this last week a lot. There was a long list of games saved in my bookmarks from the latest sale and in the end, I boiled all of them down to only one: Torn is joining the list by virtue of being an interesting and cheap VR title. Reviewers are split on this one, and I think that is something that often implies we have an interesting title on our hands. Even cheaper is the rest of the week: Metaball (PS4 & PS5) is a title I had avoided due to its trophy ist asking for even more consecutive wins than Fall Guys while being a far more competitive game, but apparently these can be done against bots, making it doable. Eternal Kingdom Battle Peak (PS5) is an odd one in that there is a PS4 app, but only the PS5 one has trophies. That does make the PS4 stack basically a demo and if I find it's too hard (very unlikely given the trophy list is only level-ups and reaching certain armor scores), I can just forget about it without leaving an unfinished husk of a trophy list. And then there's the PS5 stack of Fallout 4 which was free acting as an upgrade for my physical PS4 copy. Meanwhile, I did NOT buy Road Bustle Online despite being only $0.01, but I did think about it as a joke, just putting it directly behind this week's UR plat. Subtract the three stacks I finished this week and we have -1 games on PS4, and +2 on PS5. On to the leavers: Non-Plat 100% #91 & 92 - Overall 100% #229 & 230 Minefield (NA & EU) PS4 War. War never changes. And neither does the job of those clearing its remains, literally plowing mine-infested plains with sturdy machines sent to either remove or purposefully explode those remains with little to no harm to themselves so those less sturdy humans waiting to exploit this wrecked soil anew in an everlasting search for food and materials stand a chance of succeeding. Aware of the toil, as well as the importance of their duties... Yeah, okay, it's a Minesweeper clone. One of the more barebone ones at that, but in exchange, it's free. There's some sloppy design going on here, e.g. the very first tile clicked can be a mine and immediately end any attempt out of pure bad luck, which is really annoying. The main attempt at doing something different here is highlighting the selected tile with a warping effect, but that only serves to distort the playing field and being an nuisance. So it's a Minesweeper clone, and not even a good one. And that is all there is to say. It is still as pleasantly stress-inducing as any iteration when it gets going, though Game: 4/10 List: 5/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time: 1 hour each Plat #150 Lego Worlds Master of Master Builders! Collect all the trophies PS4 We have a hattrick! And I don't even play football/soccer, unless there's rc cars involved! Platinum #150, ultra rare trophy #100 (right now, rarities shift and change all the time, but I take it), and UR platinum #3 (which was an annual goal of mine). Say, do you have those two friends that, when they finally meet each other, are clearly destined for each other? Like a perfect match that everybody can see. And they are both looking for someone. Yet, they keep flying past each other for years to the point it becomes a running gag. That is what watching Lego and Minecraft had been like for some time. I mean, what's a more perfect match than building bricks, being the most successful toy in the world, and building blocks, being the most succesful video game in the world? Shut up and take my money! And Lego clearly saw that. In a rare deviation from the Lego game formula that had begun to get stale by 2017, they made the closest thing to a Minecraft clone you could get with bricks. It's all here: Procedurally generated worlds, free building with the blocks that make up everything, purely decorative and functional blocks. There's no survival aspect in it, but in its place, we have NPCs giving short missions that range from standard fetch quests to requests of building stuff for them or painting objects nearby with a painting tool. The imagination in tools is excellent, the developers clearly had some ideas. It has some quirky ideas and characters, fun biomes like a candyland, droves of neat builds for buildings and vehicles. And yet, it does not quite work. The building is boring and sluggish, it feels empty. It's more fun creating Lego models in a non-game pc app like stud.io or Ldraw than it is here. And while I can tell you that they eventually got the building right in 2023 with Lego 2K Drive, Lego Worlds is a rocky start. It's not really a bad game, it's just not good, either. Though the rarest base game trophy had me exploiting a duplication glitch for hours by placing the same item in the same place over and over again while standing in a hole beneath collecting the drops from every new copy destroying the old one. Which sounds worse than it was, I just played some podcast in the background and, in all honesty, I don't think I have listened that intensely to a podcast in a long time, if ever. So, if you have any questions about the theory of German Expressionist Cinema, be my guest! As a minor annoyance, the US copy I bought digitally did not accept the German dlc so in order to finish the dlc, I have to do a big piece of grinding again. Because the save file from the US copy also does not get loaded by the German copy. Oh, well. The Space DLC is fine and I already finished that (a fine dose of nostalgia), but the Monster DLC requires a few items from the base game that have to be unlocked beforehand, some of which are completely RNG drops. Thankfully, the base game has gone on Plus Extra in the meantime. Had that not been the case, I would have gone ahead to ignore the DLC. Platinum, here I come! Game: 6/10 List: 7/10 Difficulty: 3/10 Time: 40 hours Getting Closer I haven't touched the two stacks of Horror Stories in a while, but booted them up as a stopgap by grabbing an easy trophy in both stacks. I should just get around to finishing this game, it's not that hard, and not bad, either. Just a bit forgettable. Minecraft Dungeons continues to get mined bit by bit. Still almost 20 trophies left there, a list smaller games would have as their entire trophy assortment. This week, I used it to fill up the UR trophies to make the Lego Worlds platinum UR #100. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted Sunday at 09:22 PM Author Share Posted Sunday at 09:22 PM (edited) Here I thought I would not add anything and then this week actually happened. First addition was a letter from Japan that arrived way sooner than expected. It held a copy of Tekken Hybrid. With that, I have all PS3 and PS4 Tekken games ready to do. And because I did the only Tekken game that is currently undoable, Tekken Revolution, years ago, this means I can complete that series, except for Tekken 8 right now. As usual with such collections, I'll count the two game son here as one entry. And then the local library had a sale of discarded media. Aside from some books, I also got a few games at € 2.50 each. First up a physical-only PS3 title for a great movie: Megamind! Can't wait to kick Tighten's ass. Then there's Lego Jurassic World. I played this one years ago on Vita, but that version felt like diet gaming and I expect the bigger edition to be much better. I know it's up on Plus Extra, but I'm not saying no to another stack of a good game at just 2.50. Staying with dinosaurs, but switching to PS4, I also got Pixark there. Minecraft and Ark sounds like a winning combination of my interestes. Speaking of games that are trying to be Minecraft but aren't, let's head into... 100% # 231 Lego Worlds (DLCs) PS4 Last week, we had the base game, this week, here's the rest of the trophies via two DLC lists. I'll just do a short look at the DLCs, as I spoke about the base game last week. The first DLC is a theme sorely missed in the base game: Classic Space. The ultimate in nostalgia tripping for Lego fans gives us a bunch of new builds (almost all actual sets from the old space themes), and the old astronauts for new characters. None of the more modern space themes like Ice Planet, but it's a nice bone to throw us. There are space spider enemies that are much mroe modern in style than everything else here, but all in all this is just a short nostalgia trip. Them bringing back the old space baseplates with the crater-riddled rim is appreciated a lot. The old tv filter is also kinda cool The other DLC is a bit more odd. Lego rarely has horror themes and so, instead of referencing an existing theme, we just get a pack of monsters and a monster town biome alongside new horror- and monster-themed builds to be found in those towns. A few of the monsters here are annoying to get - the bat monster comes with the monster cemetary showcase build instead of this dlc, and the vampire is locked behind a base game questline one has to find in the first place. The monster world is fun, and the characters here are quirky as ever. All in all, a welcome addition, but both DLCs are a bit short. I vant to suck your stud, a-ha-ha! Trophy-wise, Classic Space offers no challange at all, while Monster Town adds a few tedious ones by way of needing to have the vampire unlocked as a playable character. Plat #151 - 100% 232 Last Stop All Done Unlock all trophies PS4 On to a new title, then! Last Stop is one of the games leaving Plus Extra on the 21st, so I went and played it before that. Spoiler warning: I shouldn't have done that. But one thing after the other. London, 1982: A pair of kids run from the police after having stolen a police helmet. The chase leads through subway tunnels, sewers, and a couple of tunnels that are there for no apparent reason at all other than to end in a mysterious green portal that occassionally turns up in a deadend. The two friends get separated, one entering such a portal with the other backing off. Cut to "current day", probably March 2020, following some dates given as being in the past. The first day is probably March 5th, 2020, with the other episodes playing out over the course of one week, one timeline hiccup aside. We follow three storylines, intertwined by almost nothing. They play out in parallel, but aren't really connected by anything. A few minor characters appear in several stories, but that's it, really. Aside from the final chapter, but we'll get to that. This game is an unusual episodic game. I'm trying to avoid it as a choice-driven narrative game, because pretending the choices in here are actual choices would be hyperbole. We only get to make choices in situations where our choices don't matter. Whenever a choice actually matters, you'll be thrown into its consequences after the actual choice was made for you in a cutscene. Oh, well, maybe this is alleviated by the stories being good, then? Well, no. Before I get into that, a bit more on structure. The episodes play out a bit different form what we're used to. Each of the storylines has six chapters and in order to play any story's second chapter, all of the first chapters have to be done, and so on. This does mean we cannot play through one character's story in one go, we always have to switch characters to continue. Almost an exciting shot. Almost. Paper Dolls revolves around two men. John, a balding pushover loser, and Jack, a prick. John also has a daughter, Molly, who is essentially Clementine from The Walking Dead if Telltale had terrible writers. The focus here is John, who leads the dullest life this side of the Vogon homeworld, until during an encounter caused by Jack being the worst prick one could imagine, complaining at a man he ran into by not watching where he's going. The man curses Jack and, for some reason, John. Now they have switched bodies. Sounds interesting? Trust me, it isn't. It's all just very dull. Internal Affairs follows Meena, a worker at some military company building robots. The problem with here is that the player keeps getting thrown into situations where Meena knows exactly what's up, but the player doesn't, making it next to impossible to play as them and select appropriate dialogue choices. I mean, the very first scene finds us in some kind of interview. Is it a job interview, an interrogation, a psych exam? When we don't know, how are we expected to know what answers to pick for their questions. Immediately after that, we show up at someones's doorstep and once more, we don't know why she's there and which are the appropriate options in this situations. This happens a lot in this storyline. And then we have the one that has stuff actually happen, Stranger Danger, featuring a girl named Donna. In this one, we get it all right from the beginning: Aliens, strange portals, our "heroes" kidnapping someone, people disappearing... Alright! That finally sounds interesting. But don't you worry, the developers manage to make even this impressively dull. Only in the last chapter do they all meet. Their stories up to that point are mostly unimportant, but at least the pace finally picks up. Still not enough to keep a caffeinated squirrel awake, but it's getting close. In the end, I do think the story has a point. What that is, is harder to determine. I'd say it's something about dealing with the past, but if it is, this game sends confusing and contradicting messages. I though, maybe it's something about letting go of the past, but that clashes with what the villain of Donna's story is doing. The concept does show up a few times too often to be ignored, but ultimately, nothing coherent comes from it. In other words: This game is just bad. At least it was short and easy. Honestly, compared to this, Telltale games are a challenge. But I could have done without ever playing this. At least it can't hurt me anymore Game: 3/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 7 hours Getting Closer Just some more trophies in Minecraft Dungeons Edited Sunday at 09:23 PM by shadaik 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonesey46 Posted Monday at 08:59 AM Share Posted Monday at 08:59 AM 11 hours ago, shadaik said: Plat #151 - 100% 232 Last Stop All Done Unlock all trophies PS4 On to a new title, then! Last Stop is one of the games leaving Plus Extra on the 21st, so I went and played it before that. Spoiler warning: I shouldn't have done that. But one thing after the other. London, 1982: A pair of kids run from the police after having stolen a police helmet. The chase leads through subway tunnels, sewers, and a couple of tunnels that are there for no apparent reason at all other than to end in a mysterious green portal that occassionally turns up in a deadend. The two friends get separated, one entering such a portal with the other backing off. Cut to "current day", probably March 2020, following some dates given as being in the past. The first day is probably March 5th, 2020, with the other episodes playing out over the course of one week, one timeline hiccup aside. We follow three storylines, intertwined by almost nothing. They play out in parallel, but aren't really connected by anything. A few minor characters appear in several stories, but that's it, really. Aside from the final chapter, but we'll get to that. This game is an unusual episodic game. I'm trying to avoid it as a choice-driven narrative game, because pretending the choices in here are actual choices would be hyperbole. We only get to make choices in situations where our choices don't matter. Whenever a choice actually matters, you'll be thrown into its consequences after the actual choice was made for you in a cutscene. Oh, well, maybe this is alleviated by the stories being good, then? Well, no. Before I get into that, a bit more on structure. The episodes play out a bit different form what we're used to. Each of the storylines has six chapters and in order to play any story's second chapter, all of the first chapters have to be done, and so on. This does mean we cannot play through one character's story in one go, we always have to switch characters to continue. Almost an exciting shot. Almost. Paper Dolls revolves around two men. John, a balding pushover loser, and Jack, a prick. John also has a daughter, Molly, who is essentially Clementine from The Walking Dead if Telltale had terrible writers. The focus here is John, who leads the dullest life this side of the Vogon homeworld, until during an encounter caused by Jack being the worst prick one could imagine, complaining at a man he ran into by not watching where he's going. The man curses Jack and, for some reason, John. Now they have switched bodies. Sounds interesting? Trust me, it isn't. It's all just very dull. Internal Affairs follows Meena, a worker at some military company building robots. The problem with here is that the player keeps getting thrown into situations where Meena knows exactly what's up, but the player doesn't, making it next to impossible to play as them and select appropriate dialogue choices. I mean, the very first scene finds us in some kind of interview. Is it a job interview, an interrogation, a psych exam? When we don't know, how are we expected to know what answers to pick for their questions. Immediately after that, we show up at someones's doorstep and once more, we don't know why she's there and which are the appropriate options in this situations. This happens a lot in this storyline. And then we have the one that has stuff actually happen, Stranger Danger, featuring a girl named Donna. In this one, we get it all right from the beginning: Aliens, strange portals, our "heroes" kidnapping someone, people disappearing... Alright! That finally sounds interesting. But don't you worry, the developers manage to make even this impressively dull. Only in the last chapter do they all meet. Their stories up to that point are mostly unimportant, but at least the pace finally picks up. Still not enough to keep a caffeinated squirrel awake, but it's getting close. In the end, I do think the story has a point. What that is, is harder to determine. I'd say it's something about dealing with the past, but if it is, this game sends confusing and contradicting messages. I though, maybe it's something about letting go of the past, but that clashes with what the villain of Donna's story is doing. The concept does show up a few times too often to be ignored, but ultimately, nothing coherent comes from it. In other words: This game is just bad. At least it was short and easy. Honestly, compared to this, Telltale games are a challenge. But I could have done without ever playing this. At least it can't hurt me anymore Game: 3/10 List: 4/10 Difficulty: 1/10 Time: 7 hours Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with Last Stop. I played it because I'm trying to play all games published by Annapurna, and despite being terrible, it actually isn't the worst game I've played published by them, that crown goes to Wattam. Anyway, it's a shame Last Stop was so bad, because the developer's previous game, Virginia, was really good. Great post as always mate! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadaik Posted Tuesday at 07:53 AM Author Share Posted Tuesday at 07:53 AM 22 hours ago, jonesey46 said: Anyway, it's a shame Last Stop was so bad, because the developer's previous game, Virginia, was really good. A good example of how limitations can improve quality, I think. Virginia concentrated on telling one story well, much to its benefit. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jonesey46 Posted Tuesday at 09:34 AM Share Posted Tuesday at 09:34 AM 1 hour ago, shadaik said: A good example of how limitations can improve quality, I think. Virginia concentrated on telling one story well, much to its benefit. Without any dialogue too! From these two games alone, it's clear to see this studios strengths and weaknesses. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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