Darling Baphomet's Altar

[Darling Baphomet]

Aloha! I'm Darling Baphomet, otherwise known as Bappho, and this is a thread where I'll be trying to keep track of my platinum trophies in the most aesthetically pleasing manner possible. I've had a PS4 since 2016, and when I first started playing Infamous: Second Son and realized I was almost able to platinum it, my interest was hooked. Since then, I've approached platinuming games with a very on and off fashion - I'll often have bursts of major trophy gains, then lose interest for months at a time. Sporadic, yes, but ever forwards!

I generally play quite a few games, and if getting the platinum trophy is too inconvenient, I don't bother with it, although I have known to force myself through repetition from time to time (looking at you, Driveclub!). I have a varied taste and I enjoy a lot of games that are widely disliked - Agents of Mayhem, Battleborn, and Fallout 76 are all games I've genuinely enjoyed, the hatred for them be damned.

 

216 PLATINUMS

2016

  

2017

2018

 

2019

2020

 

2021

2022

2023

 

Edited March 29, 2023 by Darling Baphomet

[Darling Baphomet]

Guess I'll start doing reports every week or so.

 

Completed:

Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments

Now playing:

Psychonauts

 

I was hoping to finish another game before I started playing something more, but given that all my current platinums will take ages to achieve, it's probably a good idea to have at least one game that I can finish quickly at a time.

Garden Warfare 2 and Driveclub are my games closest to completion, but the former requires me to wait at least three weeks for the six or seven remaining epic quests I need, and I still need to play the same drift event two hundred times more in Driveclub. 

 

Edit: Did a massive overhaul on the OP post. Now listing Mass Effect Andromeda, Magicka 2, and Tomb Raider under 'passively platting'. This distinction is both for games wherein I am primarily working on the story / campaign, and games that I am very irregularly grinding, with no end in immediate sight.

Edited February 2, 2018 by regularegg

[kraven_15]

Good luck with your list!

The major grind for tomb raider's online can be done in about 12-14 hours and also solo. An hour here and there and you'll be done in no time!

[Darling Baphomet]

12 minutes ago, kraven_15 said:

Good luck with your list!

The major grind for tomb raider's online can be done in about 12-14 hours and also solo. An hour here and there and you'll be done in no time!

Thanks!

The main problem is some times at night I'll barely find two or three people to play with. And when I do, it's often me on a team of level <10s against all 60s, lol. Really irritating.

[CJ_Mystery]

On 1/30/2018 at 0:41 AM, regularegg said:

Yooka-Laylee - Started my collectible run, only to find out that I'd glitched the pagie count and need to start a new playthrough. On hold indefinitely.

 

OUCH. Sorry to hear that. Hearing that you can glitch the pagie count has discouraged my own attempt to start playing this game.

 

I hear you are playing Birthdays the Beginning. I was interested in that game since it's distributed by the same people who did Disgaea 5, but I'm on the fence. What are your experiences with that game exactly? I heard it was some sort of "world evolution simulator."

[Darling Baphomet]

Just now, CJ_Mystery said:

 

OUCH. Sorry to hear that. Hearing that you can glitch the pagie count has discouraged my own attempt to start playing this game.

 

I hear you are playing Birthdays the Beginning. I was interested in that game since it's distributed by the same people who did Disgaea 5, but I'm on the fence. What are your experiences with that game exactly? I heard it was some sort of "world evolution simulator."

 

If you do want to play Yooka Laylee, it's not *that* big an issue if you're careful. Make sure you save and quit (through the menu) before you close the game, shut down your ps4, or start a different game. I accidentally started a game while in it *one time* and that messed up my pagie count. From what I've read, that's a known bug that happens when you improperly close the game.

 

Birthdays the Beginning is a fun little world sim. It's nothing too complicated or advanced. A lot of the gameplay is based on shaping the terrain of your world, which raises / lowers the temperature, and you need to get to certain temperatures to get certain species to thrive / spawn. I'd say you should wait until it's on sale.

 

There's also some issues with the platinum trophy. One of the trophies is *absurd* - originally, it required you to spend 100 billion years in game, which would be something like 6k hours. They apparently lowered it to be more reasonable, but there's controversy about whether or not the trophy unlocks at 3 billion years or 10 billion years. The former would take you 200 hours.

[CJ_Mystery]

12 hours ago, regularegg said:

Make sure you save and quit (through the menu) before you close the game, shut down your ps4, or start a different game

Okay, thanks for the advice. I'll remember to do that. And thanks for your review of Birthdays the Beginnings. I'll definitely agree to wait for a sale. In the meantime, I'm going to download Knack and Rime from my other account which has a year of PS Plus - those games just got on the free market for this month and I have been making excuses to play Rime forever.

[kraven_15]

18 hours ago, regularegg said:

Thanks!

The main problem is some times at night I'll barely find two or three people to play with. And when I do, it's often me on a team of level <10s against all 60s, lol. Really irritating.

Yea, very annoying. 

I suppose it depends on if you're trying to do it legit or not. If you're looking to boost, the only trophies you need to do ranked are the win a game on each gametype.

Everything else can be done in private matches

[Darling Baphomet]

Weekly progress report!

 

Platinumed:

Driveclub

Added to backlog:

Rime

Grand Kingdom

 

Finally got Driveclub after a hellish ~4 or 5 hours of grinding the same tracks. (Nevermind the 5 hours before that.) Might do some more DLC trophies when I'm not sick of it.

Garden Warfare 2 is coming along, but it's a massive grind. Need ~6 or 7 more epic quests, and two of the ones I have right now require me to have characters I don't have. And unlocking characters is 100% RNG, so... hopefully platinumed this month, though.

 

Edit: Resuming Disgaea 5. Need another game I can play while watching shit when my internet is being godawful.

Edited February 9, 2018 by regularegg

[Darling Baphomet]

Platinum #34: Plants versus Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

Glad to finally get one of the 'grindy multiplayer game' trinity off my list. Now I just have to spend forever in Mass Effect Andromeda and Tomb Raider...

Not altogether too difficult. Played a ton of the game just grinding for new characters, while doing some trophy clean up here and there.

[Darling Baphomet]

Weekly overview.

 

Completed:

PvZ: Garden Warfare 2

Added to backlog:

Severed

 

Progress reports:

Birthdays: The Beginning  - Finished most of the trophies, currently idling out my 600 hours. About 9.3 billion years left out of ten. Need to finish challenges and get 5 stars on a story mode episode.

Code: Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~ - Following a trophy guide while Birthdays idles. Should probably be done in the next few days.

Disgaea 5 - Minor story progress, spent a lot of time grinding my characters in the Item World.

 

Not honestly a lot going on this week. I've been hooked on Marvel TV shows (Punisher, Daredevil, Luke Cage, now Jessica Jones), so I've only been playing my low-attention games - ie the ones which I can focus on while watching. Hopefully I burn out on my Netflix addiction and can go back to Dragon Age / No Man's Sky / Psychonauts soon.

Edited February 15, 2018 by regularegg

[Darling Baphomet]

Thread revamped again! Now it's 100% more aesthetic.

 

Birthdays is progressing steadily, 1.5 billion years out of 10. Presumably I'll finish this trophy up in March or April, depending on how much I use my Vita.

 

Also, got my 3000th trophy from No Man's Sky, which is pretty cool.

 

Got Beyond: Two Souls from my girlfriend so I'm adding it to my platlog.

[Darling Baphomet]

Completed

Code:Realize ~Guardian of Rebirth~

Added to actively playing

God of War (PS Vita)

 

Progress Report:

Birthdays: The Beginnings - Up to 2.6 billion years of the 10 billion I need. Have half of the challenges finished.

No Man's Sky - Wrapped up a few trophies while I played. Will probably delay the Naturalist trophy until I revert the game to pre-patch.

 

Pretty lazy week. I've been sleeping for 10-12 hours a day and not getting much of anything done lately. Luckily that's giving me time to let Birthdays idle, at least...

[CJ_Mystery]

On 1/30/2018 at 0:41 AM, regularegg said:

PS4:

Psychonauts - Currently on main story, collecting everything I can - cleanup run immediately after.

Dragon Age: Inquisition - Running the story mode, taking care of collectibles and missables all the while. Need to do a nightmare playthrough afterwards.

No Man's Sky - Playing the game normally, while keeping track of trophies. One of the games I play while on Netflix.

Disgaea 5: Alliance of Vengeance - Grinding and going through the main story. Good game to play while watching TV.

Birthdays: The Beginning - 2.5 of 10 billion years idled. Almost have all the other trophies done.

 

Psychonauts: Good luck on that. Do remember you have to reset your console date to 12/25 for that one trophy which requires you to buy something from the camp shop on Christmas Day. And I bet you're struggling on the punching mini-game too. That game is the bane of my life, even worse than Ice Cream Beat(from Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep).

 

Disgaea 5: Good luck on the plat! I've gotten through the main story and all I have left are a bunch of extremely tough trophies. Hope you like farming shards because that's what you'll be doing post-game to get those 20 million in stats to clear the brutal Carnage Dimension quests and defeat Carnage Dark!

 

Birthdays the Beginning: I have heard mixed reviews for this game on how tough the trophies are. Since you are nearly at the plat, could you tell me how tedious or tough it was, as whether I buy and play this game on my account depends on what the answer is.

 

Good luck on all of your trophy hunting!

[Darling Baphomet]

14 hours ago, CJ_Mystery said:

 

Psychonauts: Good luck on that. Do remember you have to reset your console date to 12/25 for that one trophy which requires you to buy something from the camp shop on Christmas Day. And I bet you're struggling on the punching mini-game too. That game is the bane of my life, even worse than Ice Cream Beat(from Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep).

 

Disgaea 5: Good luck on the plat! I've gotten through the main story and all I have left are a bunch of extremely tough trophies. Hope you like farming shards because that's what you'll be doing post-game to get those 20 million in stats to clear the brutal Carnage Dimension quests and defeat Carnage Dark!

 

Birthdays the Beginning: I have heard mixed reviews for this game on how tough the trophies are. Since you are nearly at the plat, could you tell me how tedious or tough it was, as whether I buy and play this game on my account depends on what the answer is.

 

Good luck on all of your trophy hunting!

 

Psychonauts:

Still working on the main story. I've barely been playing games when I'm not watching things so I haven't had much time for it.  And yeah, I know there's a Christmas trophy. Sounds annoying but... whatever. I've heard that there's a trick for the punching minigame where, if you pause right after one of the dummies drops, you can see where the next will pop up.

 

Disgaea 5: 

Yeah, I'm aware that it's a massive grind. Luckily I'm usually playing it while distracted, so it's not nearly as big a deal.

 

Birthdays: The Beginning: 

Most of the trophies aren't hard at all. I'd recommend you look up how to clear the Nessie challenge, but otherwise the game is pretty easy. You can easily collect all of the different species through planning.

What I did was play through the story mode, collect a TON of evolution / mutation seeds, then to wrap up species I would evolve them, slow progress time until the evolved species popped, then *immediately* switch to creator mode and evolve the newly evolved species (because a lot of them have drastic environmental conditions and would go extinct if you wait too long).

 

You DO have to idle for 600 hours, though, which is an immense time investment. Would take several months if you just let it run while sleeping.

 

Edited February 24, 2018 by regularegg

[Darling Baphomet]

Platinum #36: No Man's Sky

Finally got this one done. Binged it for the last ~4 days or so while watching shit. It was actually much easier than I'd expected! Once I got the hang of searching out creatures (and giving up when they were not spawning) Galapagos was a piece of cake. Beyond that it was just grinding out the languages, and finally, the ship kills and warps.

Definitely planning on playing this game more in the future. Probably after the next update hits. I'm excited to see what kind of content they roll out.

[Toogie53]

Excellent reference in your title. I'm working on No Man's Sky myself right now. I'm prettyy early on and have warped just once. Any tips for farming enough warp cells/materials to craft them?

[Darling Baphomet]

1 minute ago, Toogie53 said:

Excellent reference in your title. I'm working on No Man's Sky myself right now. I'm prettyy early on and have warped just once. Any tips for farming enough warp cells/materials to craft them?

 

It'll come as you go through the story. You gradually get the crafting schematics for all of the different materials needed for Warp Cells. Once you have an Atlas Pass, you'll be able to unlock level 1 locked containers (which are pretty common) which will give you either of the three crafting stages for Warp Cells (ie, Suspension Fluid, Electron Vapor, Antimatter). If you're crafting from scratch, you'll need Carbon, Plutonium, Heridium, Zinc, and Thamium 9.

 

All of those are pretty easy to get, with the exception of Thamium 9, in my experience. First you have to find a planet with good Thamium 9 deposits, then you want to slowly walk across it (to not have to waste Thamium on refilling life support) and collect Thamium. 

 

Also, if you get the Fauna / Flora analyzer sigma upgrades, you'll get 15-33k for every animal and 5k for every plant, and 56-111k / 20k respectively if you can get the level 2 upgrades, which make getting money a breeze. (Which you can in turn use to buy copious amounts of the materials you need for warp cells.)

[Darling Baphomet]

So, I suppose it's time to wrap up last month and set some goals for this one!

 

Overall, I'd say February was a success. Five games, two of which were fairly significant time sinks (Driveclub and PvZ Garden Warfare 2). Unlike January, the only quick & easy trophy I got was Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, as I'd gotten through most of it during January, whereas in January I was able to quickly wrap up Tabletop Racing, Life is Strange, and Bastion. The latter of which I only needed a single trophy for.

 

I'm hoping to finally get rid of some of the heftier titles on my current list. I'm currently focusing my efforts on getting through Disgaea 5, which I'm hoping to finish before the end of the month. And Birthdays, though I'm likely to only get the 10 billion years over with somewhere in early to mid March. I'd also like to get through Dragon Age Inquisition, though depending on how long it takes to finish, I may temporarily put it on hold before I go through Nightmare mode. I already have a good ~40 hours in it, and from the sounds of it I'll need to put in a good 100 or so on my current completionist run. 

 

My main problem is that I'm growing increasingly bored with playing games on their own. During February I started watching TV while playing games, hence me platinuming No Man's Sky, Driveclub, and PvZ GW2, while neglecting story based games like DA:I and Psychonauts. I'm hoping to put some good few hours in and platinum Psychonauts and God of War. Immediately after that I intend to go to Bioshock 2, and possibly Infinite depending on how feasible it is.

[Darling Baphomet]

Platinum #37: God of War

A short, and easy (albeit very frustrating) platinum. God of War is a perfect example of my issues with many older games. It gets absurdly frustrating at times, with the final challenge being one of the most frustrating experiences in gaming I've had in the last year. 

That being said, it was, overall, a pretty fun game, with an interesting story and decent core mechanics. Near the end it begins to get irritating with the introduction of more enemies capable of blocking, but for the most part the combat is pretty fun.

[Darling Baphomet]

Platinum #38: God of War 2

A short, but enjoyable trophy. After being disappointed by the first God of War, I was definitely not expecting the sequel to be as good as it was. Most of the nuisances from the first game are gone, the levels are much more interesting and detailed, and the story is a hell of a lot more engaging. As opposed to the first, which left me dreading the prospect of playing through the second, God of War 2 actually made me very excited to play God of War 3 and the other games in the series.

The challenge levels were also much better than the first. While they were still very difficult, I actually felt like I was being challenged this time around, as opposed to thrown around at the whims of bad game design.

Edited March 7, 2018 by regularegg

[Darling Baphomet]

Week 1 overview for March

 

Completed:

God of War

God of War 2

Added to actively playing:

God of War 3

Added to passively playing:

Borderlands 2

 

Busy week for me! I started the week out by storming through God of War, then (reluctantly) tried the sequel and was smitten with it, which inspired me to pick up God of War 3 again to finally platinum it, almost two years after having finished it. I have to say, playing God of War on a TV seems a hell of a lot more impressive after you've been stuck with two fairly shoddy vita ports in a row.

In the meantime, I've also started playing Borderlands 2 again with my one of my girlfriends. While I'm not actively searching for trophies in it, I'm hoping that with her helping out I'll be able to finally plat the thing. Definitely going to start actively hunting in it if we end up putting enough effort into it.

Once I finish God of War 3, I intend to focus on a few games on my vita backlog (Claire: Extended Cut and Severed, for starters), partly to help get Birthdays' idling over with. I'm also close to being able to redeem 20$, and I'm planning to spend it on the Ratchet & Clank trilogy on Vita, which should give the system a good bit more use.

 

Progress Reports:

Psychonauts - Completed a few more story stages, almost 100%ed one of them. Slowly making progress on this game, which is fun, albeit somewhat clunky and prone to stuttering. 

God of War 3 - All trophies achieved, save for clearing the game in Titan mode. While it's possible to use an exploit to finish the game in 1-2 hours, I care enough about God of War at this point in time that I'd rather not cheat myself out of the accomplishment.

Birthdays: The Beginning - 4.7 billion years out of 10 billion. Finally close to halfway done with this absurd time sink. Luckily, playing a lot of Vita games this week has allowed me to put a bit more time than usual into Birthdays.

 

[Darling Baphomet]

Platinum #39: God of War 3

Finally got around to platinuming God of War 3! As the final game in the series, it wraps up everything from the last two games in a pretty well executed way. That being said, I feel like God of War 2's setting and story were superior to 3's - climbing up the same chain several times is pretty bland compared to that first moment when you're running the chains to the Steeds of Fate in 2. Overall, though, God of War 3 is undeniably the superior entry, with gameplay and graphics both leagues beyond the first two games in the trilogy.

 

Weekly summary:

This week was pretty slow. Most of my gaming time got put into playing through Borderlands 2 / The Pre-Sequel with my girlfriend, which I eventually intend to platinum, though god knows when that'll actually get around to making itself happen. I've also started working through my PS Vita backlog while I let Birthdays idle, which is now around 6 billion years, finally sort of close to being finished. I'm almost done with my collectionist Claire playthrough, to be followed up with a Nightmare run, and I've started Severed, which shouldn't take long.

I'm also running out of games to play while watching TV, which is somewhat unfortunate, considering I've still got five and a half seasons of Deep Space 9 to plow through. Grinding in Disgaea 5 is absolutely mind numbing, so I may put it back on hold and start grinding Tomb Raider or Mass Effect MP instead.

I've also decided to consolidate my weekly summary and platinum posts to avoid spamming. It made sense when I was playing lengthy games, like PvZ GW2, but with short plats like God of War and Claire, things would get more than a bit spammy.

 

Edit: I just realized I posted this a day early. Whoops. 

Edited March 14, 2018 by regularegg

[kraven_15]

Nice work. 

The GoW games are great fun. Kratos is a douche, but the games are excellent! Have you played ascension or the two handheld ones?

[Darling Baphomet]

4 minutes ago, kraven_15 said:

Nice work. 

The GoW games are great fun. Kratos is a douche, but the games are excellent! Have you played ascension or the two handheld ones?

 

Yeah, most of Kratos' violence is at least sorta justified, but I wasn't too much of a fan of him killing civilians. 

 

And not yet! I own the PSP GoW games on Vita (probably PS+?) but they don't have trophies, so I'm waiting until I get a PS3 to play them. Really looking forward to getting a complete set of GoW plats, though.