YaManSmevz Posted September 8, 2023 Share Posted September 8, 2023 5 hours ago, Briste said: Platinum #193 The Godfather II Nice! 5 hours ago, Briste said: I ended up having Covid when I started this game. Okay, maybe not so nice. Great write-up, dude! I thought this game had a very unfinished feel, so many great functions like having a crew, or features like multiple maps, yet they just didn't feel quite as explored as they could have been. I still enjoyed it quite a bit, possibly because I loved the first Godfather game when it came out (warts and all, much like this one). But yeah, agreed with pretty much everything you said - reminded me that my lazy ass needs to get to writing about this one of these days😄 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted September 22, 2023 Author Share Posted September 22, 2023 Sorry this reply is coming so late...I've decided I need to stop saying I'm going to post more lol It never seems to happen despite my best intentions. My boss was recently let go and I've been doing the job of two people and my kids are starting to go to bed later now and I'm just beat almost every night. I'm kind of just going through the motions with my games right now to just blow off some steam...but I don't have the energy for it as much right now....and even less to properly maintain this thread. I'd really like to, but I just have so many other things going on so I'll just say that I'll post when I can. On 9/8/2023 at 3:15 AM, YaManSmevz said: Great write-up, dude! I thought this game had a very unfinished feel, so many great functions like having a crew, or features like multiple maps, yet they just didn't feel quite as explored as they could have been. I still enjoyed it quite a bit, possibly because I loved the first Godfather game when it came out (warts and all, much like this one). I never new there was a Godfather game lol I didn't know this one existed either until I was looking up the first games with trophies. Was that game also a GTA clone? Unfinished is a good word for this one. A lot of potential and some good ideas, just didn't quite do everything it could have. I am definitely glad I played it though. Platinum #194 Call of Duty: World at War So this series has been a true surprise for me. As I mentioned in previous posts, I first playe CoD on my friends Xbox way back during the MW2 days I think. We played online for like 20 minutes, I got slaughtered and had absolutely no fun with it and thought never again. I had bought Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 when I bought my PS3, just so I'd have an MP game to play in case someone came over. It remained unopened until last year and I only played it since I paid full price for it way back when. I was shocked at how much I actually enjoyed it. I solo'd most of the online stuff and DLC's and thought the campaign was a really good challenge. After that experience, I bought most of the other ones that I plan on playing over time. I was pleased to see that this game was so low on the game page count and that I'd get to play a game I really wanted for my project. I had done a little research going into this one. I know these games can be full of hackers and I really don't want to have to hide any games on my profile for some online shenanigans. I saw that this game was not really safe to play in public lobbies online and I had also read that the main campaign on Veteran difficulty was one of the hardest in the series. I wasn't so worried about the campaign, but the online portion made me nervous. What made the campaign so hard was the absolutely ridiculous grenade spam. There were certain sections of the game (looking at you 'Heart of the Reich' mission). That particular mission requires you to take out four stationary guns. I found the first two guns to be fairly easy to do, and thank goodness there's a checkpoint right after that second gun is taken out because the next section taking out the last two was brutal for me. You need to use cover when you move virtually all the time if you want to survive in Veteran, but you also have to keep moving because if you stay still for more than a few seconds, odds are there's three grenades being lobbed at you. Even when you're not close, they are tossing them at you. It's bananas the amount of grenades get thrown at you. It's not unique to that level, but that particular checkpoint was really hard for me due to that. The next hardest level for me was the 'Burn'em Out' mission. You get a flamethrower and spend most of the level in trenches, where you get shot at from people in trees and people running on the top of the trenches and people in the trenches. You get some smoke grenades, that I found extremely useful in a few tricky spots, but it just took a lot of trial an error to get through it. I tend to play these games through on Veteran my first go through to save time. I figure I have to beat them on that difficulty anyway, so I might as well just do it to start and then use the regular playthrough for clean up if needed. I like these campaigns and I appreciate that they bounce you around a few different characters to play. It allows them to expand the story a bit and gives you some different perspectives to play from. The graphics were good for the time and the controls are good. The trophies for the game are pretty consistent as well. You pretty much get some trophies for beating missions in Veteran difficulty, there's always a collectible to find and then there's some unique things to do in a mission for a trophy. I found the hardest random trophy to be the 'Sum of all Zeros' trophy for shooting down 45 Japanese planes. There's not too many more planes than 45 it seems so you need to shoot down most of them. It takes a little while to learn the level well enough to know where they are coming from. Thankfully it can be done in Regular difficulty...but that one took me a good 45 minutes to an hour to get. I found the hardest trophies in the game to be for the DLC's. Both involve the Zombies mode of the game, which has historically been my least favorite part of the games. The trophies are not easy for either of them and require quite a bit of luck to do solo. In the Map Pack 2 DLC, there's no place safe where you do not have to worry about zombies coming from a blind spot. There's a very specific strat for doing it solo, but it requires a lot of luck with regards to the random gun you get from the mystery box and the random perk you get from the vending machine. You need the Wunderwaffe, which is like an electric shock gun, and a high capacity, fast shooting gun like the PPSh-41. You need specific perks. You really need to end each round with a crawler, which is a zombie whose legs have been blown off, so it moves really slowly. This allows you to catch your breath, replace boards on windows for some cheap points and get ready for the next round. As the rounds get higher, the zombies move much, much faster and if you get stuck, you're pretty much dead. The strategy involves getting those key guns/perks, unlocking specific areas, and then running a loop to get a huge zombie train behind you before running back into the hut, creating a long line of sight where you can just mow the zombies down. It took me several days of trying to get the right setup and used to the strategy, until I was able to beat it. You feel like a major badass when you get it working, but it was very hard to do. I didn't think DLC Map Pack 3 could possibly be as hard as Map Pack 2, but I was wrong. In theory, it is easier. The level has warps, you can boost up your weapon, and there is an area where you can camp where you won't be attacked from the back or sides...but the trophies make this one harder. The trophy 'Perkaholics Anonymous!' requires you to get to the 20th round without buying a perk. That is super hard to do. I tried for several days to do this solo and just wasn't even getting close. I did what I could and then decided to do something risky...I joined a public lobby to see if I could do it with others. I got reeeeeaaaaaaally lucky. I got into a room with two dudes who were vastly better than me at the game. I pretty much just had to not screw them up, and we were going to make it. It's hard not to screw things up in the later rounds. There's just so many zombies, they move so fast, and they don't go down as easy...plus there's Hell Dogs to contend with. The first 18 rounds or so, you can hang out in the camping spot up the stairs and survive...but after that round, it gets impossible. You have to use the teleporter and start to kite a bit to survive. I was not prepared for this the first time through and we died in round 19. Thankfully, the same two dudes played again and we got to like round 22 and I got the trophy. I was able to do all of the other trophies alone, but I rolled the dice with that one that I wouldn't get screwed by hackers and really lucked out. While Zombies is my least favorite part of the game, I found the DLC's to be very satisfying to beat since they were so hard and it's typically not something I'm good at. The game has been out for 15 years, so odds are if you wanted to play this game, you would have by now. If you haven't, it is a fun game to play and I would recommend it. I'm not terribly good at FPS games and I was able to solo everything but one trophy, so I think it's achievable by most with a little patience. I'm currently playing the Vita CoD game, Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified. That game is mostly hard because the Vita screen is so damn small, but I will definitely play more games from this series going forward. I think I have less interest in the newest ones, but these classic ones have been a lot of fun. The rest of the games in my project will be beaten eventually, but I'm going to turn those into series runs now. I really enjoyed Bioshock and am looking forward to the other games in that series. I also need to finish Mirror's Edge...and the Soulsborne series...my ambitions are high and my time is low 😭 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted September 30, 2023 Share Posted September 30, 2023 On 9/21/2023 at 7:30 PM, Briste said: I never new there was a Godfather game lol I didn't know this one existed either until I was looking up the first games with trophies. Was that game also a GTA clone? Unfinished is a good word for this one. A lot of potential and some good ideas, just didn't quite do everything it could have. I am definitely glad I played it though. Oh yeah, total GTA clone. I thought it was a lot of fun though! Definitely more fully realized than the sequel, even if it didn't always work as well as it should have. Definitely worth a play, especially if you had fun with the sequel! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted December 18, 2023 Author Popular Post Share Posted December 18, 2023 Despite my best intentions of trying to keep this thread updated as I finish games, I've just really felt a true lack of motivation to do so. I really thought that I would spend my Thursday nights watching the football game and writing a review (if needed) to keep up with all the work I've put into the thread and my profile so far. But, I've instead chosen to just kind of zone out on those nights and go through the motions of playing a game on my PS while listening to the football game on my PC. I used to be excited to make my updates here and log my thoughts on my games as I finish, but lately, I just haven't. I really can't tell what it is either to be honest. I can't tell if I'm just getting older so my interest is waning, or if it's because I'm hitting some sort of midlife gaming crisis, or what exactly. I have lacked the enthusiasm for gaming that I used to have. I'm sure part of it has to do with the fact work has been so stressful for the past few months, and the company/job I truly thought I'd be working for the rest of my life has had some major changes recently that have me wondering how long I'll last. I truly love my work, however there's been some changes in management that have changed the overall feel and my company recently announced that they are building a new Operations center that will add 45 minutes to my already 30 minute commute. I don't make enough money to justify spending two and a half hours a day in a car. I've been working remotely for three and a half years, so I'm hesitant to bitch too much...but they've had us start coming into the office one day a week and once the construction is completed, it'll most likely be three or four days a week. I'm a huge work/life balance person. I'm not that passionate about my career and I view it as more of a means to an end. I firmly believe that there will be no evidence I was ever even alive in a hundred years, so I have no delusions of grandeur and the only thing that matters to me, is that my family is happy and provided for. If I can do that, then I will have viewed my time on this Earth as a success. I work, because I have to...not because I have a passion for my industry. I happen to be good at what I do, so I enjoy it, but I couldn't care less about my title or role or whatever. So long as my job gives me puzzles to solve and pays me enough money to give my family a good life, I could work in any field/industry. For a long time, gaming has been my mental escape from any of the day to day stresses that I may have been feeling, but somehow, I've turned my leisure activity and thing that was supposed to help me relax, into a job. I create self imposed deadlines and feel bad if I don't meet them. I don't think I want to do that anymore. I don't want this thread to die, but I don't want it to feel like a chore to do either. I've been mostly lurking on the forums for a few months now...reading the checklists and event updates from my phone. What I think I'm going to do is kind of take 2024 off from some things. While I've loved the events as they've helped me expand my tastes in games and I've met some wonderful people, I don't think I'm going to do any in 2024. I think I'm going to not do anything that has a deadline and just play some games again for a while, focus on finishing my incomplete games, and play some games I truly want to play with no deadline for when it needs to be finished. I want to try and re-center where I'm at. If I don't feel like playing some nights, I won't. I try to be accommodating in real life and I don't really speak up for what I want to do, because at the end of the day, it really doesn't matter all that much to me what I do. So long as it makes someone else happy, I'll go a long with it. It's just been a tiring several months. I really don't want to bitch though, because by and large, things are going pretty well overall for me....but this is my Diary of a Madman and I've felt like venting for a bit now, so here I am, gently whining . I read something from @YaManSmevz's thread about how a lie can become the truth in your mind if you tell it enough, and it got me thinking. There have been times in my life where I've told a lie, whether it was an embellishment of some feat or I went here when I really went there. Since I'm the only one that knows the truth in those scenarios, the truth can be whatever I make of it. There were times when I would do that to avoid confrontation or just make my life easier, however I started to feel some overwhelming guilt about it and came clean to those I had been lying to....mind you none of the lies were big...just convenient. It was shit like my wife (girlfriend at the time) thought I was going to the gym when I was staying home and playing video games. Or I'd create some scenario where I'd give up shifts at my job so I could just not work. It's never been anything bigger than that, but it bothered me a lot that I was creating this image of myself that wasn't true and I ended up being honest with my wife about these things and I try now to just be honest. The truth is, she didn't really care one way or the other...she just wanted me to be honest and I've tried to respect that ever since.....except..... The fact is, I'm the only one that truly knows my mind...and despite the fact that I present happiness to my friends and family, because that's how I want them to feel, I'm not sure that is how I truly feel. I should feel that way....but something just seems off. I feel fatigued and I'm just running the rat race, treading water. I'll keep that lie going with my wife and kids, because I don't want them to worry (and truly there isn't anything to worry about), but I just need to do some soul searching and find what makes me happy. In the pursuit of doing, what I think is the right thing for my family, I've forgotten about myself a bit....I'll make no promises about this thread...I won't abandon it, but I also don't know how often this will be updated either.....stream of consciousness over. Battlefield 1943 I have honestly never felt less qualified to review a game I've played than this one. With my personal event of preparing for a potential Gaming By Numbers event for 2023, I started to play Battlefield: Bad Company. Once I realized that the event probably wasn't going to happen, I decided to revert to my usual 'play all the games of a series in order' when possible for this series. I was going to do Battlefield 1942, Battlefield: Bad Company, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, and so on with the whole series consecutively, so I started up this game to get prepared. The reason I feel hardly qualified to review this game is because I barely played this game. One of the trophies is for playing in 100 online matches. I started the game and played a couple of rounds and realized that I really didn't want to invest that much time into this game. I have a turbo controller for my PS3 and just rubber banded it with a LEGO piece holding the X button down and left the PS3 on over night for a couple days. In doing so, I got several of the trophies just for jumping in place. The other trophies I got in maybe five actual matches? There were a lot of people boosting this game, so finding jumpers was pretty easy so I was able to get pretty much all of the other trophies by just wandering around and picking off jumpers. I played this game at a time when a lot of people were trying to get it done before the server closure. Boosting groups were all over and jumpers were all over and the game was just a mess of people trying to get the trophies. I don't know if I really got to experience this game the way it was meant to be played. There's no campaign and no one was really playing it. Since the servers are dead and you can't play this anymore anyway, it's not like I can recommend it or anything anyway lol. I can say that I didn't like the MP nearly as much as I enjoyed Battlefield: Bad Company. The planes in this game were a bitch to fly and I found the graphics to be more grainy and I didn't find the combat to be as satisfying. What I can say this game did, is help me decide NOT to play the entire series in order. I treated this game and the two Bad Company's as one series and at some point (probably when those servers are going to be closed) I'll do the non-Bad Company entries as a separate series. Out of all the FPS games I've played, this one was the one I liked least and fortunately, the one I invested the least into. Until next time folks, I hope you all have a great holiday season. 10 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted December 18, 2023 Popular Post Share Posted December 18, 2023 I'll be here to read whatever you put out... whenever that is... if there is something else again. From one internet stranger to another, I wholeheartedly agree that you should strive to maintain integrity/honesty/authenticity in your life, and to do whatever it takes to get your bearings again. Finding your North in this hobby is much more important that trophies... anyone worth their salt will agree to that. Best of luck Briste. 👊 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post YaManSmevz Posted December 18, 2023 Popular Post Share Posted December 18, 2023 Hey Briste! That's rough that things haven't felt quite right as of late, but for what it's worth your awareness and attitude are very healthy and wise. Taking care of yourself and seeing what can regain the proverbial spark could be the best thing for you - hell, I may take that advice my damn self! Along with Vice, I'll still be here to happily read anything you may post, whenever that may be. All love, homie👊 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rally-Vincent--- Posted December 18, 2023 Share Posted December 18, 2023 13 hours ago, Briste said: The fact is, I'm the only one that truly knows my mind...and despite the fact that I present happiness to my friends and family, because that's how I want them to feel, I'm not sure that is how I truly feel. I should feel that way....but something just seems off. I feel fatigued and I'm just running the rat race, treading water. I'll keep that lie going with my wife and kids, because I don't want them to worry (and truly there isn't anything to worry about), but I just need to do some soul searching and find what makes me happy. In the pursuit of doing, what I think is the right thing for my family, I've forgotten about myself a bit....I'll make no promises about this thread...I won't abandon it, but I also don't know how often this will be updated either.....stream of consciousness over. Not that I would be qualified to give advice, but - have you thought that it might be something bordering burn out if reallife is afflicted? Please take good care of your health, it's usually the only one you got. There is nothing wrong with doing something for yourself now and again. Hope you feel better soon. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted February 28 Author Popular Post Share Posted February 28 So it's been a little over two months since I posted last and I haven't opened this thread in that time. I really appreciate the supportive comments and it just reinforces how amazing the checklist community is on this website. I appreciate you all and thank you I have been spending those couple of months trying to recapture the joy I used to have for this hobby and I'm glad to say, I think it's working. I haven't completely sheltered myself from the forums, but I've been casually lurking on my phone and have kind of avoided the event threads....because let's be honest...if I look, I'm going to want to join since we have so many dedicated people that are creating fun and interesting events. As much as I'd like to join one this year, I think it would kind of put me back in the cycle of playing stuff I have to play instead of playing some things I want to play. I think some deadline free gaming has been a good medicine for the last couple of months. I've finished two games so far this year and they are games I have truly enjoyed. I've casually been playing Diablo II on the side and am currently re-playing Final Fantasy 7 Remake to get ready for the big release on Thursday. I just want to say....the cosmos have been conspiring against me with these last few Final Fantasy releases. Last year, the Pixel Remasters were supposed to be released on/around my birthday and I had taken a few days off from work to be able to enjoy them as a gift to me. Square did something, that would normally be awesome, and moved the release date up several weeks into April. That was great for 99.999% of the world out there, but for me, I couldn't switch my vacation time because someone else already had that week off from work. I do work remotely (for now) and was able to play a little during my downtime...but it wasn't what I had hoped. Final Fantasy XVI didn't have any real hiccups around release, but Rebirth is being released under similar circumstances as the Pixel Remasters for me. I had hoped to take a few days off to binge on release, however the release date is February 29th, and with my job, the last day of the month and the first couple days of the new month are more intensive and I don't want to make my life harder at work by taking those days off to play a video game. Well, if we're being honest...I totally do....but I have to be a responsible adult so I'm going to work instead. Normally, no big deal, I'd work my normal day and play after work....HOWEVER!!!...my job has scheduled a mandatory 'All-Staff' meeting for February 29th, in-person, over an hour away from where I live, from 5:30pm-8:30pm at night....meaning! I won't be able to play during the day since I have to be at the office and I won't be able to play after work until probably 10:00pm since I have to drive over an hour home once the meeting is over. Listen all y'all, it's a sabotage! Anyways, since I'm trying to re-center my gaming habits....I'm going to just take it as it comes and go with the flow. I'll still get to play for an hour or so, and I'm really excited to be doing so. As I mentioned, I've been re-playing FF7R on the PS5 and I can't stress to you enough how much I love Aerith's theme song and how much I love these characters. I cannot wait for next weekend when the story continues. With that in mind, I've been looking at my gaming track and I am about 13 reviews behind. I want to make some sort of outlandish claim that I will do 13 reviews in 13 days or something....but I'm not going to be setting any deadlines. A few of these are shorter titles and I may be able to bang a few out quickly...but Final Fantasy XVI is in there as well as the whole Bioshock series and those will take some time to do. The good news is that I've enjoyed all my games recently so the reviews will be mostly positive and mostly enjoyable to write....so without further ado... Platinum #195 Battlefield: Bad Company So as I have mentioned, several times at this point, I had decided to prep myself for the annual Gaming By Numbers event for 2023 by getting the platinum for the ten lowest number platinums possible. I wasn't going to play non-platinum games and nothing that was unobtainable (obviously). This game and Farcry 2 were the two games that were making me hesitant. The reason I decided to try this in the first place was because I had just played Bioshock (#3 trophy list ever) and had really enjoyed it. I thought I would enjoy playing a lot of these old PS3 games and it would be a cool thing to do to sync it up with an event. I was hesitant, because these games had some pretty involved multiplayer trophies and I figured trying to play naturally would be impossible 15 years after release and boosting wouldn't be much easier. As luck would have it, a friend of mine let me have his PS3 for $20 since he had just gotten a PS5 and I thought that with self-boosting....I just might be able to do it. This was a situation where the cosmos were actually on my side. I decided to pursue this challenge on January 17th of 2023. How could I possibly remember the exact date you wonder? I know because I had ordered two used copies of both Farcry 2 and Battlefield: Bad Company at the same time and was going to start with whichever game showed up at my house first. I ended up starting with Farcry 2 because one of the copies of Battlefield that I received was actually Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (their mistake, not mine) and I needed to re-order Bad Company to be able to self boost. I ended up keeping Bad Company 2 since I figured I'd want to play that anyways....because of my obsession with doing entire series. Anyways, I had popped Farcry 2 into the old PS3 and was having issues connecting to the server. I closed the game and decided I'd fool around with my alt before doing anything on my main and popped a couple of the random trophies for creating maps and stuff and decided to stop since I was nervous that I couldn't connect to the servers. Turns out, the servers went down on January 16th (unannounced) and I had juuuuuuuust missed having a game with unobtainable trophies on my profile. If I had started this even one day earlier...I would have popped a couple of Farcry 2 trophies and it would have been the first time I had a game on my profile that I couldn't beat due to server issues. I did some interwebs searching and at the time, it was thought that the servers would just be down for a few days...after all, Ubisoft made no announcements and the game was still working on XBox 360. I figured I would just start with Battlefield: Bad Company when it arrived and do Farcry 2 when the servers came back up. For those wondering....the servers are still down over a year later and Ubisoft has still made no official announcement (that I've seen anyways). So....the cosmos have evened out gaming-wise for me in the last year. Back to this game....looking at the trophy list...there were two trophies that were going to make this game very hard. The first being Beans Bullets Bandages for getting 10,002 kills online. The second being I am Bad Company! for achieving all of the awards. However, I had a second PS3 now and an alt so I figured I'd be able to self boost the whole thing. It may take a while, but with some perseverance, I'd get it done. Holy shit guys....no I wouldn't have lol I was not prepared for how many people still played this game. Turns out, they are called 'lifers' in the Battlefield community. There were about a dozen people that were still leaderboard climbing in the game and they were either ridiculously good and/or were using cheats to play. If I had a nickel for the number of times I got headshot sniped by a jumping dude through a fence, I wouldn't have to worry about my All-Staff meeting this week. Anyways, I was playing a bit every day and a match would last around a half an hour. I was getting like 3-5 kills per match and the math of how many hours it would take for me to get to 10,002 was starting to stress me out. The good news was that, besides the lifers being exponentially better than me and making the game significantly harder than needed, the gameplay was actually really awesome. I had only ever played Call of Duty before and there aren't any vehicles in those games to use (at least in the few I've played). In Battlefield, you can drive tanks, helicopters, boats and other assorted vehicles INCLUDING a golf cart. Outside of flying the helicopter (which I actually got decent at doing by the end) all of the controls were pretty intuitive and smooth and was a hell of a lot of fun. The helicopter was a bit unwieldy to fly and was extremely easy to crash. I found it was quite hard in the third-person view however in first-person view...it was far easier to control. Of course, I didn't figure out you could change the camera view until several weeks of playing. I had decided that trying to go for kills outside of a boosting group would be a pretty futile exercise. I ended up using my alt to focus on the trophy for getting all of the awards. This trophy is also quite a grind. There are 120 different awards to get. They are broken down into three categories...Wildcards, Trophies, and Patches. Wildcards are a mix of cumulative achievements and a set of things done in one round. For example, one of the Wildcard awards is called 'Gunslinger' and requires you to get 80 kills with a handgun throughout all of your rounds. That one is easy, you just get kills with a handgun and over time you will get it. Another one, 'Cab Driver' involves driving any vehicle for 5 minutes while you have a passenger in a round. Easy enough, throw my alt in a tank and just drive around away from the fighting for 5 minutes and achieved. Some Wildcards are a bit harder...for example the 'Chopper Chopper' one requires you to kill 25 helicopters over all your rounds and then after you do that (or as your last 5) you have to kill 5 helicopters in one round. This wouldn't have been quite as hard, except the Russian Choppers were glitched and didn't count as kills. This meant you could only kill US choppers or MEC choppers. This made all of the Chopper related awards be harder than needed. Trophies were all things you had to do in a round and you were able to do multiple times. Most of these involve getting X amount of kills in a round with a specific weapon or getting the best score in a round or doing some specific action in a round. These are repeatable and are often required to get multiple times in order to get the next set of awards, the Patches. The Patches had multiple tiers; bronze, silver, and gold. Generally the bronze is to get a set of trophies three times, silver five times and gold seven times. There's some variation, but that's the general idea. Some patches weren't so bad, like the 'Defend Patch'. This patch set required you to get object defender trophies. You get one of those for getting 18 defender points in a round. You can only get those in the Gold Rush mode where you are defending your bases gold bars....but that'll mostly come naturally if you're playing in that mode since every other round you play on defense. Some patches were a bitch, like the 'Savior Patch' and 'Avenger Patch'. To get a 'Savior Trophy' trophy, you need to get 30 Savior points in a round...which means you have to kill an enemy that was about to kill a member of your team three times in one round. If you kill the enemy too early, you aren't a savior so no dice and if it's too late, well they died...but the good news is you'd get the 'Avenger' points in that scenario. For the Avenger, you kill someone that just killed a member of your team. It has to be within like two seconds or it doesn't count. These are really hard to get naturally. You might get one or two Savior/Avenger kills in a round by accident....but you can't really try for these and they're mostly luck based. So there are 120 of these that I had to get and the good news was I could get something like 100 or so of them by myself with just my alt...but to get them all I was definitely going to need help. Getting them by myself wasn't going to be easy either as a lot of the lifers didn't like boosters and would target them. The good news about boosting was it was pretty easy to do. If you have a turbo controller, just set the to turbo and your alt will jump in place and when he dies, he will automatically respawn. Fortunately, the spawn locations in most of the areas are fairly close to each other, however, if someone sees a jumper, it's open season on them. For a lot of rounds I wasn't jumping. I would actually mostly play as my alt. I would hide my main in an area that was away from action and I would play as my alt and run to where my main was. I got a lot of the gun and vehicle related awards done this way. While I was doing that above, I was looking for a decent boosting group. Boosting in Battlefield: Bad Company was easy and very not easy at the same time. With the game being as old as it was, the servers were pretty unstable. There are two different modes of multiplayer...a capture the flag mode and a gold rush mode. With capture the flag, it was exactly that. There are two teams and several flags located around the map. Each side has 200 lives and if any team has more flags claimed than the other, the life bar will slowly drain away. The more flags between the two teams, the faster the life bar drains. If the flags are equal, the life bar doesn't drain. In gold rush mode, there is an attacking side and a defending side. The defending side has two crates of gold and the attacking side tries to blow those crates while the defending side tries to stave off the attack. The attackers have about 100 lives and if the defenders get 100 kills before the bars are destroyed they win. If the attackers blow up the two crates, they get some extra lives and the map expands. Generally, there's three or four potential expansions per map. Both modes are actually quite fun to play. With regards to boosting, there is generally only one each mode running at once. It took twenty-four players to fill up a lobby and lock it up just for boosting. This is really, really hard to do unless you have a plan and an event. I had found a discord server for boosting that I joined to be able to finish this game. I cannot begin to tell you how organized these sessions were. The hosts of the event were incredibly knowledgeable and ran a pretty tight ship. They typically allowed up to 16 people to sign up and used 8 alt accounts as dedicated jumpers to lock a lobby. Each person would get roughly three minutes to work on whatever they needed, whether it was a specific award or just kills. Some maps were more conducive to boosting than others and we would skip the really bad ones. But the hosts knew all the spawn points, how to block spawn points to funnel spawns into the best areas and they were incredibly efficient. When I first started boosting, it was before they announced the closure of the servers and we had a real hard time getting enough people to lock a lobby. Most of the sessions were a free-or-all when you would hunt out the jumpers and try to avoid the lifers. While not nearly as efficient as a locked session, it was still lightyears better than a normal session. Once the closure was announced, there were a lot of people that joined the discord server to try and finish the game. Once that happened, they could sometimes get two locked sessions going and there were some sessions that would last a few days because there were enough people on standby to jump in if someone had to go and keep the lobby locked. It was actually a really good experience, which is not always the case with these MP games. I kind of wish that I had played this game 12-15 years ago when the servers were more active, because it really was a great MP experience....but I feel like I did get to play the game enough outside of boosts where I got to enjoy the complete experience, unlike in Battlefield: 1943 where I didn't really play that one at all. There is a TON more nuance and information that went into these sessions, but the servers are now closed and writing it down here wouldn't really help anyone. I'll just mention that the servers were finicky and it was often that they would be unstable and crash. The hosts of the boosts knew how to create a stable lobby that would crash and made it possible for probably over 100 people to get the MP done before server closures. The main host (I'd love to give him a real shoutout, but he's very private and would probably not appreciate it so I won't) was truly dedicated. He was very rough around the edges and didn't put up with any BS, but he had finished the game months before I started and stuck around hosting boosting sessions all the way until the server closed on December 8th. He had something like six PS3's he would use to help lock sessions or to keep them locked. He would be up extremely late making sure everyone got their turn and made sure the sessions ran efficiently, and he did it all without any real incentive to do so outside he probably enjoyed being the expert in the game. He knew that I couldn't make all of the sessions due to having a wife and small children and he volunteered to boost with me several times outside of those main sessions to help me get some of the harder awards done. So even though I won't say their name here, I do want to thank him in this small way for his help. Everything I had read about the single player campaign showed that most people seemed to really enjoy it. I thought the gameplay was pretty good, but I didn't really like the story much. The guys in the squad were kind of goofballs and it didn't really make sense to me in the context of what they were doing. I mean, they're in a warzone with enemies everywhere, and in one of the chapters, one of your squad mates just runs into a village because he thinks there's gold in it? And he didn't just run....he Captain Jack Sparrow ran into it. The main character that you play was ok and the platoon leader was great. The other two were a little odd though. I mean, I get it....they were called Bad Company for a reason....they were misfits...but at the same time, it was hard to believe they were an elite squad with how goofy some of it was. That is my only real complaint with this game though. The controls were responsive, the graphics were good, and the variety of weapons and vehicles made the game quite enjoyable. It probably took me about 150-200 hours to get this platinum and none of it felt like a chore. I legit enjoyed it the whole time. While I played this game from January 22nd through March 27th, I was saving the plat or the event. I was actually kind of relieved when the event didn't ever happen since it then allowed be to platinum the two Bad Company games consecutively, which is how I like to roll. I've written a lot of words here and I think this is a good place to stop. As I mentioned, I will try to get to Bad Company 2 on the sooner side of things, but with FF7R2 coming out in a couple of days...I make no promises....but I am in a better headspace with my gaming and I am starting to enjoy this hobby again.... 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Super_Mep Posted February 28 Share Posted February 28 @Briste I remember seeing you around in Bad Company. I decided to just get all the multiplayer trophies I could before the closure and I never successfully joined a boosting group. I did fairly well all things considered and actually got pretty good at the game even against the lifers haha. But I definitely didn't attempt the 10000 kills or all the awards. I did get half of them(and the trophy for it) so I felt pretty accomplished over that since I did them legit. I'm sad the game is over it actually replaced R6 Siege for me for awhile. Now I'm back on Siege for my multiplayer shooter fix haha. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted February 29 Author Share Posted February 29 15 hours ago, Super_Mep said: I remember seeing you around in Bad Company. I decided to just get all the multiplayer trophies I could before the closure and I never successfully joined a boosting group. I did fairly well all things considered and actually got pretty good at the game even against the lifers haha. But I definitely didn't attempt the 10000 kills or all the awards. I did get half of them(and the trophy for it) so I felt pretty accomplished over that since I did them legit. I'm sad the game is over it actually replaced R6 Siege for me for awhile. Now I'm back on Siege for my multiplayer shooter fix haha. I remember seeing your name too! I'm impressed you were able to do that much without a boosting group. It was painfully slow on my own with an alt...can't imagine without it. Not all of the lifers were bad, but some of them were pretty unfun to play with. I'll be cycling through the old COD games if I need a fix any time soon. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted May 6 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 6 So, after writing that big, long review and declaring myself back....I up and disappeared like a fart in the wind. Of course I did...that's pretty par for the course for me lately. The good news this time around though, was my absence wasn't due to a mid-life gaming crisis....it was because I had started playing Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth and I was just so engrossed in the game that I chose to spend my free time playing that and completely ignored this thread while doing so. The bummer with that is I have 11 reviews to do before I get to it....the good news is that now that I'm out of that grind, I do feel like taking it a bit slower gaming and doing some upkeep here. I need to clean up the OP with my progress and add my badges to that section and I need to do these reviews before I completely forget how I felt about the games. So with that in mind.... Platinum #196 Battlefield: Bad Company 2 This was not originally a game that I had intended to play. I played the first one due to my goal of getting the lowest numbered Platinum page games for the Gaming By Numbers Event and that was the only one I had planned on playing. As I mentioned in my last review, I had bought my friends PS3 for $20 and when I originally purchased my second copy of the first Bad Company, the seller made a mistake and sent me Bad Company 2 in error. It was only like $3 and I figured I could just play this one too, so it was added to my backlog. The servers closing for this game were announced at the same time as the first ones announcement, so I knew that I only had until December of 2023 to get it done if that's what I wanted. I ended up being very lucky with regards to the DLC for this one. Apparently, they had discontinued the sale of the DLC's at or shortly after announcing the server closing, but I had purchased them right after I decided to keep this game, so was safe from being unable to get the DLC trophies. I don't have quite as much to say about this one as I did for the first one. It was more of the same. I did like the main campaign in this one a bit better. In this story, they seemed more like competent misfits than the goofballs they were in the first one. It was much more believable in this campaign that the squad could actually do what they set out to do. I also liked that the story was not about them chasing the gold, but them actually trying to do something heroic. I feel like the hard playthrough on this one was a bit easier than the first. I don't recall any particular area in the game giving me any fits, but the overall gameplay was pretty much the same. It had the same easy transfer to vehicles and the same smooth controls. The graphics were still great for the time and the voice acting was also quite good. The only real bitchy trophy was the MP one for getting 20 demolish kills. They weren't hard to do, it just wasn't something that was going to really happen with natural gameplay and was a bit tedious to setup flying solo with my alt. Despite that trophy, the requirements for this MP were exponentially easier than in the original Bad Company. I was able to solo virtually all of them with my alt. Doing so was also far easier as you did not need a minimum of 4 people to start a round in this one. Only one mode required that many and only for one trophy. The Onslaught DLC was much, much, MUCH easier to do with other people, but the rest could be soloed. I started with the Vietnam DLC and it's really hard to give an accurate review on the game. Every single time I logged into play the Vietnam DLC except for two times, I was there alone with my alt. I would do the 'Capture the Flag' game type, which would give me about 200 kills per level, so long as I kept the flags event. I would usually capture one spot and let my alt capture another, and then just camp the zone my alt spawned at to get the kills. I figured out pretty quickly that the character won't spawn on a spawn point you are standing right next to, so I would usually chose to stand on one spawn point that allowed me to see the others and then just camp there and shoot my alt over and over until I hit the different requirements. It was not the fastest way to get it done, but I made steady progress every day with absolutely no interference at all. It wasn't just the Vietnam DLC that was dead, it was pretty much all of the MP types. I was able to find a group of people to do the 'Squad Deathmatch' game type (that's the only one that needed more than me and my alt). I was able to do the Onslaught DLC with that same group. The Onslaught DLC required you to beat each of the levels on the Hardcore difficulty, which I did not have enough skill to do by myself. I was able to do it alone in the normal difficulty, but I just couldn't do hardcore alone. Even with three other people, that mode was really challenging, and was quite fun. It was the only mode where I was able to truly experience the MP in a way that the game was intended to be played. There were only four levels, but each one (except the first) had some tricky spots that were hard to get through. The gimmick in that mode is that if the whole squad is dead at the same time, you have to start over. The trick was to generally have one person stay behind while the other three would move up to take the target. If they died, they would respawn on the person hanging back and we could keep going. We tried all going together, but there are unlimited respawns in this mode and you could just get overwhelmed very quickly. It took a bit longer, but we were able to get them all done in one afternoon, so it wasn't too bad. I'm glad I had decided to do my mini project because I ended up playing several games that I really enjoyed. I would have never played these games if it wasn't for that and I'm glad I was able to experience them before the shutdowns occurred. I wish I had played them when they were new, because I think the MP would have actually been pretty fun to do, but at the end of the day, both boosting groups I worked with over the two games ended up being really good experiences. While this entry in the series will be less memorable to me since the grind was way less, it was still fun overall. However, based on how sparce the activity was on the servers when I was playing, it was definitely time for these servers to say good bye. My goal over the next couple of weeks is to do my review first, and then play for a bit before bed. Hopefully, I'll be back to current within a couple of weeks. I can't wait to do my FF7R2 review. I have a lot of thoughts and am looking forward to writing that one. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted May 6 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 6 (edited) Platinum #197 Madden NFL 23 Growing up, Madden was one of the games that I used to get every year. I always found the Sega Genesis version to be the superior version over the SNES one. I'm not sure why, but Sega Genesis just did sports games better for some reason. It was the same with NBA, NHL, and FIFA games. I think SNES held its own with baseball games, but always trailed in the other sports. The last year I bought Madden religiously was 2002 when Faulk was on the cover and Clinton Portis was a rookie. I was a junior in college and me and my friends did a franchise draft and kept the teams over the last two years of school. I remember taking all 90+ rated offensive lineman in the first 5 rounds and then Portis in the 6th and just running the shit out of the ball. It was a lot of fun to play the game with friends. Once I graduated, I stopped buying the game since I really didn't have anyone to play with and playing online wasn't something that appealed to me. I hadn't played a Madden game since college until I bought Madden NFL 18 because my boy Brady was on the cover (btw, the Brady roast on Netflix is pretty good....they roasted the shit out of him lol). Madden NFL 18 was decent enough....the plat wasn't terribly hard and the graphics were insane over what I remembered....but again it wasn't as fun without my friends playing next to me, so I figured that'd be the last one I did. I changed my mind over the summer when Madden NFL 23 was on sale. With John Madden having passed away recently and with this iteration of the game being dedicated to him, I wanted to pay homage to one of my favorites as a kid and play the game one more time. I can tell you, without a doubt, this will be the LAST time I play one of these games.... Holy shit folks was this a terrible experience. The game itself isn't that much different from the 2018 version. Graphics are still insane and the gameplay is your typical gameplay for a Madden game....but this was probably the worst trophy experience I've ever had. Even worse than the dreaded Space Hulk 40k kills trophy that I messed up on twice. There were six trophies that made getting this platinum a brutal time. They were: Now none of these trophies were particularly hard....but my god were they tedious and/or frustrating. The first five on that list were so exceptionally tedious. Getting to max level required about 3.5 seasons to achieve. That's a 3 game preseason, a 17 game regular season, and then 3 more playoff games (assuming you get a bye and get to the Super Bowl) 3.5 times....for 5 different positions....the good news is, they aren't full games since you make a player at one of those positions and then only play as that player. So if you are doing one of the defensive positions, the offensive part of the game is simulated and vice versa. I believe you could watch it if you wanted, but who in the hell would choose to do that? Also, the good news on the defensive side, is that you could just press to have the ball snapped and let the PC play for you. The PC moves your guy until it feels an input on the controller. So you could just let the game play itself for defense, but it could take longer since you aren't doing the pressing or pass rush moves. The bad news is that there is absolutely nothing different (other than position) to doing this. It's the same cut scenes, the same handful of challenges, the same virtually everything. So you have to play 15-18 full seasons, of the same bull shit, in order to get all 5 trophies. It is beyond boring and tedious. I tended to play this while I was watching an actual football game to help pass the time. It would have been better to have ONE trophy that asked you to reach max level at ONE position. It probably wouldn't have soured the experience so much. I mean, I got 5 UR trophies out of it....but it was some boring, repetitive gameplay.... While those trophies were boring and tedious...the Clean The Pile trophy is one of the worst I have ever had to get. I'm convinced it is 99% luck based. The 'Hit Stick' is when you press up on the button and you launch yourself at the ball carrier. In order to get this trophy, you have to wait for a scenario where the ball carrier is in a 'Standup Tackle' animation and then use the 'Hit Stick' to force a fumble. It's easy to tell when they are in a 'Standup Tackle' animation because the defensive and offensive player will lock up and a power bar goes over their head. You have to tap a button and whoever fills up the bar wins. The reward is either a tackle for the defense or a broken tackle for the offense and an opportunity to gain more yards. The problem with this trophy is that the trophy is either glitchy, or the requirements are extremely asinine and hard to do. You can help yourself out by working with the sliders, by making it more likely that the ball carrier fumbles and leaky offensive lineman. It sounds like it should be easy to do....but it isn't. I created this exact scenario over a hundred times, and forced over a hundred fumbles, and the trophy never popped. It was so freaking frustrating because you just couldn't tell what you were doing wrong. I was reading online, and a lot of people seemed to think that you couldn't just hit the pile and force the fumble. You had to somehow hit the ball and knock it out of the ball carrier's hands in order for the trophy to pop. I have no idea what it is, but I played 4 full games, with 15 minute quarters, using two controllers, running the same play, over and over and over again, over the course of a week, before this one trophy popped. Here is the video that finally popped the trophy.....notice the score.... It appears like I basically missed the pile too and that was the one that popped the trophy. I repeated what you see there well over a hundred times with nothing. I've never experienced anything like that in a game before and it's not something I want to do again. It completely soured me on the series and the only way I'd buy another Madden game, is if my kids end up wanting to play with me when they're older. It was the third to last trophy I had to get and I could not have been more happy once this trophy popped. It meant all I had left was two more boring run throughs to max out WR and QB...two of the 'more fun' positions to play. If you are looking for a football game and do not care about the platinum, you already know this exists and probably will enjoy it just fine. If you are a trophy hunter and completionist....stay far, far away from this steaming turd. The game was 95% headache and 5% fun...you can do much better than this. Well, I'm going to pat myself on the back for a moment....I got two reviews done in two days. It's still early-ish here so maybe I get one more in tonight while I'm watching the Bruins game. They are going head to head with @realm722's Florida Panthers, who knocked out the record setting Bruins last year in the first round after the Bruins were up 3-1. We're looking for payback this year, however the Bruins are coming off an exciting game 7 while the Panthers are well rested. Hopefully the Panthers have a little rust tonight and the Bruins can get out to an early lead. Edited May 6 by Briste 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
realm722 Posted May 7 Share Posted May 7 20 hours ago, Briste said: It was the third to last trophy I had to get and I could not have been more happy once this trophy popped. It meant all I had left was two more boring run throughs to max out WR and QB...two of the 'more fun' positions to play. If you are looking for a football game and do not care about the platinum, you already know this exists and probably will enjoy it just fine. If you are a trophy hunter and completionist....stay far, far away from this steaming turd. The game was 95% headache and 5% fun...you can do much better than this. Yea... I looked at those Madden trophies when the game became available for all users on EA Play and nope'd the hell outta there when I saw the grind that was involved. Last Madden I touched was Madden 22 which I was able to get done in a handful of days. Now they've made the plat unfathomably grindy in the laziest ways possible. It feels like they've given up on all things creatively given they did the exact same trophy list for Madden 24, will 100% do the same thing for Madden 25, and are even repeating the same boring ass white/black font for the trophy icons. On the other hand, MLB The Show platinums have become cupcakes in a role reversal so if you ever wanna get a sports fix, I plan on scooping up 24 later in the year. OR maybe I won't. Marlins damn sure haven't given me anything this season. 20 hours ago, Briste said: Well, I'm going to pat myself on the back for a moment....I got two reviews done in two days. It's still early-ish here so maybe I get one more in tonight while I'm watching the Bruins game. They are going head to head with @realm722's Florida Panthers, who knocked out the record setting Bruins last year in the first round after the Bruins were up 3-1. We're looking for payback this year, however the Bruins are coming off an exciting game 7 while the Panthers are well rested. Hopefully the Panthers have a little rust tonight and the Bruins can get out to an early lead. Hah... 'grats on the Game 1 victory. I had the game on and watched the whole 1st period. Then from then onwards I was on some ZOOM calls with some friends from Colombia and Venezuela and the game on in the corner. I saw us go ahead 1-0 and then get spanked the rest of the way lmao. Panthers need to be better in every facet in order to get a chance because we were outplayed in every category. Still expect it to be a long series regardless. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted May 9 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 9 On 5/7/2024 at 1:57 PM, realm722 said: On the other hand, MLB The Show platinums have become cupcakes in a role reversal so if you ever wanna get a sports fix, I plan on scooping up 24 later in the year. OR maybe I won't. Marlins damn sure haven't given me anything this season. It's funny you mention this because I had just added MLB 21, 22, and 23 to my wish list a couple of months ago and am waiting to see if they go on sale and was going to scoop them up. I did enjoy those games quite a bit and would definitely pick them up at a discounted price. On 5/7/2024 at 1:57 PM, realm722 said: Hah... 'grats on the Game 1 victory. I had the game on and watched the whole 1st period. Then from then onwards I was on some ZOOM calls with some friends from Colombia and Venezuela and the game on in the corner. I saw us go ahead 1-0 and then get spanked the rest of the way lmao. Panthers need to be better in every facet in order to get a chance because we were outplayed in every category. Still expect it to be a long series regardless. I was really surprised with how that game finished. I felt like the Panthers were dominating the offensive zone early in the game and thought the Bruins were in trouble. Sloppiness with the puck in their defensive end is what ended up costing the Panthers in the end. It's the second intermission tonight and your guys ran roughshod all over the Bruins in that second period. Swayman hadn't allowed more than 2 goals in an entire game yet in the playoffs and the Panthers put up 3 in that period. I'm not feeling great about the third period...Bruins spent half of that period on the PK. Nothing beats playoff hockey though. (/edit....this game is off the rails now lol. Bruin's are getting their shit beat up, both on the scoreboard and in the fights.) FYI, I have so much I want to say to you about your awesome review on Rebirth....but it'd end up making my review moot lol I'll probably reference your review several times in mine, but you went the extra mile with yours. I won't go into the Chapter detail that you did, but I'll have a lot to say as well. I missed my review yesterday because I fell asleep on the couch during the Celtics game and couldn't be assed to sit at my PC when I finally woke up to write something so I'll probably get two in here since my next two games were relatively short. The first one is.... Platinum #198 Unpacking This was not a game I was aware of before I played it. It was getting towards the end of the year and I needed a 'brown' game for the Kaleidoscope event. I didn't have any games in my backlog that I felt like doing and I had seen this game pop up quite a bit on other people's cards. I took a quick look and felt like I could use something relaxing after the cluster that was Madden NFL 23. I also had Final Fantasy XVI ready to pop for my 200th milestone and this game was just what the doctor ordered. At its core, it's a pretty basic puzzle game. Despite its simplicity, there is a story here. The goal of the game is to successfully unpack the items of a young girl throughout several moves in her life. It starts off with her as a younger child/teen. She has just her bedroom and that's all that she is responsible for. On the floor in the room are several boxes, and each time you click on the box, a new belonging comes out. Your goal is to find a place for the item that makes sense and to make sure you unpack everything. There's a place for every thing, and you put every thing in its place. There's posters and books, stuffed animals and instruments, clothes and school supplies, toys and artwork....once you unpack everything and it looks satisfactory to you, you can end the level and you move onto the next move in her life. You follow the same young woman throughout her early to mid-life. She'll move to an apartment, her own house, back in with her parents, another home. The story is in the new items she possesses, which show how she is evolving as she gets older, as well as in which items follow her throughout her life. She has fewer toys and all of a sudden she has bathroom, kitchen, and living room furniture. Eventually there's male clothing, which lets you know she now is living with a boyfriend/husband. When she moves back home with her parents, it makes you wonder if there was a divorce or break up. Through all the changes in her life, there are some items that stay with her, some that are less expensive when she's younger and improves in quality as she gets older and theoretically has more she is able to afford. Like I said, the story isn't something that's told and is quite basic, but it's there and it's subtle. The game is defaulted to the setting where you can't just put anything anywhere and have it count. The game will not let you place an item some place that doesn't make sense. Like you can't keep your pots and pans in the bathtub or your clothes in the kitchen cupboard. Clothes go in the bedroom dresser or closet, pots in the kitchen cabinets, etc. There is an option to turn that off so that you can just put anything anywhere, which makes it so you could get this platinum really quickly by just emptying the boxes....but if you did that you'd miss the charm that is here. I used it one time in one of the rooms (can't remember which) because I was trying to pin a postcard or photograph on the corkboard or wall, but it just wouldn't let me do it. Nothing else made sense and I didn't feel like doing the old 'point and click mix and match everything' move. I turned that on so I could put the photo on the wall, finished the level, and then turned it back off. The puzzles are relatively basic and most of the items in the boxes are present in the room they belong, but as you get older, there'll be the random shirt in the kitchen boxes or plate in the bathroom boxes....as it happens in real life when you move lol Most of the trophies will come naturally, but there are a handful that require you to unpack things in a specific way or area. The good news is that once you finish a 'level', it makes an entry in your journal and you can go back to your journal to meet the needs of the trophy, so nothing is missable. The game is quite fun and relaxing. It's cute and has a ton of charm and is definitely an excellent palate cleanser between tougher games. It's also a great option if you need something shorter for an event that requires many games in a short period of time. There's nothing groundbreaking here, just a good solid game. The second game of the evening is... Platinum #199 Pumpkin Jack I'm not always good about playing themed games for a particular season, however in this case, I was looking for an 'orange' game for the Kaleidoscope event and it also happened to be close to Halloween. I saw this game and also saw that it was another shorter game that I would be able to get done in time for both the holiday and the event. It also would let me pop my 200th platinum game a bit quicker too 😉I picked it up and gave it a go. The best way I can explain this game is that it's a poor man's A Hat in Time. You play the role of Pumpkin Jack, who is damned due to his mischievous ways. Jack makes a deal with the Devil to destroy a Wizard, who has decided to help a village end the Devil's curse. In exchange, Jack's past misdeeds will be forgiven. It's a pretty basic story and the gameplay is a simple platforming game where the outfit you're wearing gives you different abilities. There are small puzzles and some battle sequences, but the bread and butter is the platforming bits. The graphics are very colorful and well done and the controls are quite smooth. Each level ends with a boss battle before continuing the search for the wizard. Each boss has a gimmick, and once you figure out what you need to do, none are terribly hard. This is another game where the trophies are pretty straightforward. Pretty much beat the levels and find a few different collectibles and you've got the Platinum. I think it took me about 8 hours or so to do. The levels aren't terribly long, but probably took me an hour, hour and a half each. The knock I'd have on the game is that there's nothing here that hasn't already been done by someone else better. Having said that, the most incredible thing about this game, is that it was developed by basically one person. Nicolas Meyssonnier was the brainchild behind the game and basically did this as a solo project. it is really well done when you take that into consideration. I was quite surprised when I saw that this was done by one person. Despite that, the fact remains that if you're looking for a good platforming game that is similar, A Hat in Time blows this one out of the water. That game is much longer and harder to complete though, so if you're looking for something shorter that is pretty good, then you could do worse than Pumpkin Jack. This isn't a game that I'll be remembering much about a couple of years from now. To be honest, I had to look at the trophy list to remember what little I wrote above. That could be good as nothing stood out as being terrible, but conversely, nothing stood out as being amazing either. If you find this on sale and are looking or something to do over a weekend, this is something you could have some fun with. If platforming isn't your bag baby, then you could probably forget about this one. It might take a couple of days for me to get my next one done. It was my 200th platinum and was Final Fantasy XVI. I have a lot of thoughts on that one and it will take me a lot longer than these past two did. It's been pretty slow at work though lately, so maybe I'll be able to spend a bit of time on it during the day tomorrow. 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
realm722 Posted May 10 Share Posted May 10 On 5/8/2024 at 10:28 PM, Briste said: FYI, I have so much I want to say to you about your awesome review on Rebirth....but it'd end up making my review moot lol I'll probably reference your review several times in mine, but you went the extra mile with yours. I won't go into the Chapter detail that you did, but I'll have a lot to say as well. Looking forward to it! I've been waiting for somebody to bounce my opinions off of from that wall of text and see if my sentiments were generally in line with others or if I'm just too hooked on that narcotic to talk about it rationally. On 5/8/2024 at 10:28 PM, Briste said: I used it one time in one of the rooms (can't remember which) because I was trying to pin a postcard or photograph on the corkboard or wall, but it just wouldn't let me do it. Nothing else made sense and I didn't feel like doing the old 'point and click mix and match everything' move. I turned that on so I could put the photo on the wall, finished the level, and then turned it back off. Happy to see you played Unpacking. It's a lovely little title to break up the rhythm between bigger, more expensive games. I did wanna make mention of one thing. I think it's possible the postcard you're referring to is the one with the ex-boyfriend/husband and THAT'S the reason the game didn't allow you to hang it up out in the open. If you attempted to put it away in a drawer rather than have it on display, the game would have allowed it. If it's not that, forgive me. But I'm decently certain it was given the fact I've seen this mentioned by a number of trophy cabinet threads here for being a wonderful example of subtle narrative storytelling. Rather than say: "GIRL SAD. GIRL BROKE UP WITH BOY. PLEASE HIDE PHOTO." You're subtly nudged in that direction. if I'm totally off base, forgive me. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted May 11 Share Posted May 11 On 5/6/2024 at 2:43 PM, Briste said: Platinum #197 Madden NFL 23 Great review, man! For a split second gave me FOMO with football games... til I remembered that I hate football😂 On 5/6/2024 at 2:43 PM, Briste said: Growing up, Madden was one of the games that I used to get every year. I always found the Sega Genesis version to be the superior version over the SNES one. I'm not sure why, but Sega Genesis just did sports games better for some reason. It was the same with NBA, NHL, and FIFA games. I think SNES held its own with baseball games, but always trailed in the other sports. As an SNES kid with Genesis-toting friends (or some who had both because they were rich asses), I'd like to go on record saying that all of this is 100% factual😂 On 5/8/2024 at 7:28 PM, Briste said: Platinum #198 Unpacking I'm so glad you played and liked this one! As Realm said, the subtle storytelling adds a lot, I really dug this one a lot. Great write-up as always, sir! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted May 12 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 12 On 5/10/2024 at 7:45 AM, realm722 said: Happy to see you played Unpacking. It's a lovely little title to break up the rhythm between bigger, more expensive games. I did wanna make mention of one thing. I think it's possible the postcard you're referring to is the one with the ex-boyfriend/husband and THAT'S the reason the game didn't allow you to hang it up out in the open. If you attempted to put it away in a drawer rather than have it on display, the game would have allowed it. If it's not that, forgive me. But I'm decently certain it was given the fact I've seen this mentioned by a number of trophy cabinet threads here for being a wonderful example of subtle narrative storytelling. Rather than say: "GIRL SAD. GIRL BROKE UP WITH BOY. PLEASE HIDE PHOTO." You're subtly nudged in that direction. if I'm totally off base, forgive me. I'll bet that's exactly what it was. It never even occurred to me that the picture could be one that would make her sad so wouldn't be on display. I think I tried hanging it on almost every wall, in almost every room with no luck....just another example of the subtle, but good story that was being told here. I'm glad you said that lol It adds a whole other layer to the story! 2 hours ago, YaManSmevz said: As an SNES kid with Genesis-toting friends (or some who had both because they were rich asses), I'd like to go on record saying that all of this is 100% factual😂 lol I had both 🤣but it wasn't because we were rich lol it was because my parents were divorced and they used to try to 'one up' the other quite a bit around the holidays. My mother had gotten me an SNES for Christmas, so my dad got the the Genesis for my birthday. Another year, my dad got me a cool road bike so I could ride over to my friends houses, then my mom got me a sweet mountain bike to one up that. While the divorce sucked because my parents hated each other so much and shit talked each other all the time, the divorce was great for presents around birthdays and the holidays when I was younger. When I was at my mom's house, I was an SNES kid, but at my dad's I was a Genesis kid. While Genesis tended to have the better sports games (none better than NHL 94 with Jeremy Roenick as a God in that game), SNES tended to have better every other genre. The arcade style games were pretty good on Sega (Golden Axe) and some of the RPG style (Shining Force, Phantasy Star), but I think the three button Genesis controller held back some of what it could do. They did come out with a six button controller at some point, but the Fighting games were better on the SNES (except Mortal Kombat since Nintendo didn't allow the blood/gore that Sega did) so I had more SNES games than Genesis. It's milestone review time good people.... Platinum #200 Final Fantasy XVI Sometimes the timing of the release of a game works out well for these milestone, i.e. this game....and sometimes it doesn't, i.e. Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth. Despite my disappointment with Final Fantasy XV, I will always look forward to a new Final Fantasy game. My biggest disappointment with FFXV was that it was released before it was ready. If they had waited and released it as the Royal Edition, with all of the DLC available, and the story more complete, it would have been a very enjoyable experience. The fact they released the game with HUGE gaps in the story, that weren't explained until months/years later with the DLCs....made it a disjointed, disappointing experience. Once I had played all of the DLC and all of the end game dungeons, FFXV ended up being pretty good. It was just released incomplete. That seems to be a pretty common trend these days and it's a rush to get it out and then a scramble to clean them up with fixes and/or DLC later. Given that trend....I was a bit nervous about this one. I will have a portion of this review that will contain heavy spoilers, which I will hide. I'll talk about the generic stuff outside the spoiler tag below though, including the basic story premise. If the story premise is something you do not want to read about, I'd suggest ending your reading here lol. Since the game is less than a year old, I do not wish to ruin anyone's experience. The timing of this review is actually quite good as I just finished The Rising Tide DLC the other day. I had gotten the platinum for this game on Halloween, so it was good to get a quick refresher before writing this. I had pre-ordered this game as soon as it was possible and was really looking forward to it. I didn't really watch any of the previews or reviews and I didn't play the demo or anything ahead of time. I wanted to go into it without any prenotion of what I was getting into. I also didn't use any guide or anything either as I planned on doing everything as I went. The game isn't shy about markers on the map and where you are supposed to go, so it's really hard to miss quests, etc. The only bit that could be challenging were some of the monster hunts, as those are unmarked and you are only given clues as to their whereabouts. Let me start with the good in this game. The graphics and cutscenes in this game are amazing. The very first cutscene in the game blew me away and they continued to do so throughout the entire thing. I played in graphics mode and didn't notice any issues. The combat was incredibly smooth, if not completely chaotic at some points, however the game has an easy button. You are able to equip rings that turn the game into a button mashing event if that is what you wish. One relic will somewhat automate combat. All you have to do is hit the button and the game will cycle through your different attacks or spells, however there's no real rhyme or reason to what it chooses. I tried it out just to see what it did and hated it. It took all the fun out of combat AND made it harder to dodge. There was another relic that would slow down time dramatically when you were about to get hit so that you could press the dodge button and avoid the damage. That one proved helpful when going after a few of the random combat related trophies, but I felt otherwise interrupted the flow of battle too much. There was another relic that would automate your dog companion Torgal's attacks. He is an NPC that you can issue commands to during combat by using the D-Pad. This relic automated that so your hound would act autonomously. I tried that one out too, but it's a waste of a relic slot in all honesty. The game isn't hard enough and the combat isn't so complicated that you can't just issue commands on your own. The one that I did use, which made the game much easier, was the auto-dodge relic. Wearing this relic would automatically dodge an attack during combat if it was able to be dodged. I found dodging to be quite clunky and there are often a lot of animations and distractions on screen that could make dodging quite challenging. I didn't want the clunkiness of the dodging to sour my opinion of the game, so I wore that one relic of the 'easy' buttons and then used the last two slots for boosts to other areas, whether it be combat, XP, or AP. With regards to the combat, I found it to be pretty ok. I could definitely understand the criticism that it was a bit too formulaic and could get boring....but I found it was pretty easy to master and was pretty fluid to perform, so I didn't have any real major issues. You have your normal attack, a magic attack (a severely underwhelming option in this game) and then Eikon (summon) attacks. Throughout the game, you get access to different Eikon's that have unique attacks and abilities. You can equip up to three different Eikons at a time and each Eikon has four different abilities you can use, however only two can be equipped at once, unless you have mastered that ability. If you have mastered an ability, you can assign it to a slot under a different Eikon. It's kind of confusing to explain here how it works, but is not that hard to figure out when you're actually doing it. To use the ability in battle, you hold the R2 button to bring up the Eikon abilities you have chosen, and then use the or to use the attack. Each of those attacks has a cool down timer and cannot be used again until the timer has run out. Generally, the stronger the attack, the longer the cool down. You can lessen the cool downs or strengthen the attacks through the use of relics equipped. The strategy is in picking a mixture of abilities that you can use often along with some more powerful ones that you can sprinkle in throughout a fight. Combat follows the recent trend of Final Fantasy games where you attack an enemy to build up its stagger gauge, and then go to town on it for the short window the enemy is staggered. I tended to have one high stagger ability and one high attack ability for each Eikon group. During battle, you could switch between the equipped Eikons by pressing the L2 button. It was pretty seamless to do, however there are clear abilities that are better than others, and once you have access to all of the Eikons, it is fairly obvious which ones you're going to use and each battle does become formulaic. My only other real issue with the battles is how flipping long some of them can be. Some of the bosses have HP in the billions. They are HP sponges and sometimes it felt like the battles would drag on just so they could do more CGI scenes. With regard to the characters, I found the main characters to be extremely likeable and the voice acting was outstanding. Ralph Ineson (who I know best from the movie The First Knight but most would probably know as Amycus from Harry Potter or as Dagmer from Game of Thrones), who voiced Cidolfus, stealing every scene he was in. It might be one of my favorite castings of a voice actor in a game ever. His raspy voice is just perfect. Everyone did a good job though. This game was much more adult themed than any other Final Fantasy I have ever played. I was actually caught off guard when I heard the phrase 'You cock' in the early dialogue. There were a lot of F bombs and a lot more swearing than you've ever seen in a Final Fantasy and a lot more sexual content then you're probably used to from a Final Fantasy title. The only reason I was a little bummed is I wanted to show my kids the cool graphics that included some of the cutscenes involving a few of the usual summons that would appear in a Final Fantasy title, but the language just wasn't appropriate. As much as I liked the characters, I wish they had cooler names (except for Cidolfus....that name is awesome). Clive wouldn't have been bad, except I have two small children who have seen Despicable Me 3 more times than I can count, and every time I heard them say Clive, I could hear Trey Parker in the back of my head talking to his robot Clive in the movie. I'm sure that was a very unique issue isolated to me, but it did kill the immersion at times lol I also didn't love the name Jill....I have an aunt named Jill and it was just a meh name to have for one of the main characters. Almost all of the other characters had cool enough names, but following the adventures of Clive and Jill and friends wasn't as badass sounding as following the adventures of Locke and Celes or Cloud and Tifa or Aerith. Beyond having meh names, Clive and Jill are two of my favorite main characters though in a Final Fantasy title. I felt they did a good job with character building in this game. The next bit of story review will have some spoilers so... Spoiler This game seemed to be HEAVILY influenced by Game of Thrones. There was a Jon Snow character (Clive), a Cersei (Annabella Rosfield), a Hodor (Goetz), an Eddard Stark (Elwin Rosfield), a Loras Tyrell (Dion Lesage), and on and on. I had mentioned there was quite a bit of sexual content and swearing and it truly did feel like it was straight from GoT. I loved GoT as a series so didn't mind the setting....but it wasn't subtle at all and I could see why that would bother people as well. Cid was far and away the best character in the game, and I wish there was more of him. While there was a lot of influence from GoT, there was also some familiar themes from previous titles with the presence of the Crystals, except in a twist of stories...you're trying to destroy these ones instead of preserving them as is done historically. The Crystals are the source of all aether, which allow people to use magic. Some are born with the ability and are known as 'Bearers' and those that don't have the ability innately, get the benefit of magic through the use of Crystals. However, similarly to Mako in Final Fantasy 7, drawing upon the Aether seems to be sapping the planet of its energy as a world wide blight has appeared that is shrinking the livable land and causing wars over the resources. Clive and his band of rebels are trying to destroy the Crystals with the hopes of stopping the spread of the blight. Each of the major nations has access/owns one of the major mother crystals and the people that live there are reliant upon the magic that it grants and do not wish to see it go away....this of course is a familiar theme as well.... One of the oddities I found in the story is the role of the Bearers....They are treated as less than human and in essence used as slaves by normal people to do work. That seems counterintuitive to me.....it would seem like the Bearers would be the ones with the power and not the regular folk....but those born with the ability to use magic are marked with a facial tattoo so people can clearly see they have a master. There is a great cost of using magic however, as when it is used too much, the Bearers turn into stone eventually, once their energy is sapped, and the process is exceptionally painful. I get the plot device here....but I just felt it was weird that the Bearers (seems like there's a lot of them) would be marked as slaves instead of looked upon as gifted saviors.....but I guess people who are different are often subject to this type of setting. The thing I liked the most about the story was what they did with the Eikons. I thought it was super cool that each nation had their own Eikon and that they were channeled through the individuals called 'Dominants'. The Eikon would lend its power to the Dominant and they could change the tide in a battler. However, due to their massive ability to do damage, they were used sparingly. They were the medieval time version of using a nuclear weapon. In most nations, the Dominant is revered, however in some they are feared and put into servitude. That was where I thought the cutscene battles were amazing. When I saw Titan battling it out with Shiva, I thought it was one of the coolest things I'd ever watched in a game before. I thought the role of the Dominant in the story was pretty well done and all of the scenes with them were very cool. It was also quite fun to battle as an Eikon....at first...but Jeebus Christmas were those Eikon battles loooooong as hell. Call me a sap, but I like my good guys to be good guys and make the right choices and do the righteous things. Clive embodied this perfectly. He understood the assignment and was good and fair to his people, and is quite honestly the kind of leader that I would get behind as well. Jill is also a great character. Despite all the horror she endured after the tragedy at Phoenix Cave, she was still a good person and was a strong heroine to admire throughout. I really got behind Clive and her love story. I thought they did a great job showing how much they cared for each other and why. I felt like this was one of the better fleshed out love stories they've done in recent memory of the Final Fantasy titles. My biggest issue with the story was that it started off incredibly. I thought it was a neat idea that you got to follow Clive over 18 years or so and I thought the drama at the beginning was really well done. I was super interested in this world and super invested in the characters and was hooked. I thought it was really well done up until the time Cid departed from the story....then it felt like they just had no idea what they wanted to do. The beginning was really filled with drama and then the whole middle become this massive fetch quest that felt like a waste of time....and then the drama picked up a bit at the end....but the story just got completely lost in the middle and then all of a sudden it was the end. I have read that a lot of people felt like Ultima was a boring antagonist...but I thought it was fine in the context of the story they were trying to tell. It was a shame, but by the end of the game I was kind of getting bored. I still liked the game, but I think they just blew their load too early and then couldn't keep up with the good story telling....another thing this borrowed from GoT...... One of the biggest sins in the game was how useless magic was. I don't think I used magic more than a dozen times in the game....it just wasn't needed or worth it...which is weird in a Final Fantasy title. I went into more depth in the spoilers above, but I'll just say generally here that I felt the pace of the game really lagged in the middle. It got off to an amazing start and then just sort of fizzled. The biggest sin to me, was the stupid side quests. This game did something that is a cardinal sin for me (and seems to be getting more prevalent in games). It made many of the side quests have NOTHING to do with the story. I don't mind a fetch quest or two, or some side quests here or there....but please make them relevant to the plot. There were several side quests that just made no sense at all. In these games where the world is coming to an end or something is happening where there is a dire emergency and time is a major factor, there is bound to be quests where a random townsperson will stop you and say 'I just found this awesome recipe in this old cook book, would you mind running to the four corners of the world and getting me the ingredients so I can try it out?'. Or, 'Would you bring tables 5, 9, and 10 their soup? it's getting cold.' Some dumbass 'quest' where you are doing the most mundane thing that is so unimportant in the context of the story. Like I get that your character is a 'good guy' and beloved by his people, but seriously....who the eff goes to the hero and asks for shit like this? 'I know the world is coming to an end, but I really liked these flowers when I was a kid and it'd make me super happy to have one again.....what do you say?'. To all you game developers out there...please, PLEASE stop adding quests like this into your story. No one likes them and they detract from your story. This was a big sin for me in the Horizon games and is a big sin for me here. The final sin to me, which isn't that big of a deal, but was stupid, is how little gear or leveling seemed to matter. I mean, it did a little, but there's almost no treasure boxes in the game....everything is crafted. You only have a sword, bracer, belt, and relic to use and there's not much creativity with what to wear. There's nothing that really grants boosts to anything like immunity to an element or enhances anything (outside of the relics). It just makes sense to use the highest damage weapon and the highest defense bracer and belt. The other thing was how much XP was granted. By the end of the DLC's, you'd get like 2 million XP in a fight. Why? What's wrong with keeping it in the thousands and just knocking some zeroes off at the end. It didn't mean anything, but was just weird to see....just some weird choices made here. All in all, this is a very flawed game. It has moments of sheer genius and amazing story telling, followed by some really boring sections and questionable story choices. The lack of magic in battle is a bummer, the somewhat formulaic battles can also be a grind, the mostly terrible side quests were a nuisance, but the characters were great and the graphics and cutscenes were all good. There were some great ideas here, but just enough bad ones to make you raise your eyebrow at what they were thinking. While I mostly enjoyed this game, it didn't really feel like a Final Fantasy to me. The DLC's were fine, but were generally more of the same. I don't think they needed to be added as i don't think they really enhanced the story that much. I'm glad I played it and do not regret buying it day one....but they did leave a lot on the table here. I'll buy Final Fantasy XVII when it comes out since I know SE still has it in them (the FF7 Remake games have been amazing) so I have faith that they'll be able to make something original again that grabs my spirit the way the old games in the series did. If you're not a fanboy like me, you could probably wait until a good sale to play....but be prepared for some very high highs, but some pretty low lows as well. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
YaManSmevz Posted May 14 Share Posted May 14 On 5/11/2024 at 9:56 PM, Briste said: lol I had both 🤣but it wasn't because we were rich lol it was because my parents were divorced and they used to try to 'one up' the other quite a bit around the holidays. My mother had gotten me an SNES for Christmas, so my dad got the the Genesis for my birthday. Another year, my dad got me a cool road bike so I could ride over to my friends houses, then my mom got me a sweet mountain bike to one up that. While the divorce sucked because my parents hated each other so much and shit talked each other all the time, the divorce was great for presents around birthdays and the holidays when I was younger. Damn man, that's wack.. though I suppose at least you got something out of the deal? My sister's dad wasn't married to our mom, but after they split there was an awful lot of mud-slinging my she had to endure going from house to house. It really took a toll on her, so I have a very vague idea of how much that must've sucked, I'm really sorry to hear that. On 5/11/2024 at 9:56 PM, Briste said: When I was at my mom's house, I was an SNES kid, but at my dad's I was a Genesis kid. While Genesis tended to have the better sports games (none better than NHL 94 with Jeremy Roenick as a God in that game), SNES tended to have better every other genre. The arcade style games were pretty good on Sega (Golden Axe) and some of the RPG style (Shining Force, Phantasy Star), but I think the three button Genesis controller held back some of what it could do. They did come out with a six button controller at some point, but the Fighting games were better on the SNES (except Mortal Kombat since Nintendo didn't allow the blood/gore that Sega did) so I had more SNES games than Genesis. Yeah dude, NHL and NBA on Genesis were the business! And back in the day the whole Mortal Kombat blood thing was a huuge blow to us SNES kids... although the three button thing is true, I could never get the hang of that, and can only imagine how that must've been when playing MK! On 5/11/2024 at 9:56 PM, Briste said: Platinum #200 Final Fantasy XVI Yo that's a dope platinum image! Magic and equipment being useless? A story that goes from amazing to dumb with ease? Sounds like XVI has a case of FF8itis! It is kinda funny to picture excessive cursing in a Final Fantasy game, particularly in that type of setting. "Here son, I've loved these games my whole life, why don't you play for a while an-" "COCK!! FUCK!!!" "Uhhhh yeah, nevermind, go to your room!" You also hit the nail on the head with how those quests go. I always would laugh at how someone's towns would be in ruins, with a very clear desperation in the air, and there's always some dumb motherfucker who's like "Hey, would you find these trading cards for me?" Coping mechanisms are strange, I guess! As always, great write-up! I'm still debating if I'll get past XIII with my FFing (and the 7 remakes, of course), but we shall see. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted May 17 Author Share Posted May 17 On 5/13/2024 at 10:06 PM, YaManSmevz said: Damn man, that's wack.. though I suppose at least you got something out of the deal? My sister's dad wasn't married to our mom, but after they split there was an awful lot of mud-slinging my she had to endure going from house to house. It really took a toll on her, so I have a very vague idea of how much that must've sucked, I'm really sorry to hear that. No worries my dude....it was almost 40 years ago so I've had time to cope lol It was a weird dynamic where I think I ended up liking and not liking my parents more from it. I'd get upset at the mudslinging, but it made me look for the good things I liked in them when I had to defend one to the other. I guess it helped me appreciate and find the good stuff so that I could properly defend. It wasn't fun to have to do it, but it was a long time ago now. On 5/13/2024 at 10:06 PM, YaManSmevz said: Yo that's a dope platinum image! I thought so too! That's part of why it made it's way as a milestone On 5/13/2024 at 10:06 PM, YaManSmevz said: As always, great write-up! I'm still debating if I'll get past XIII with my FFing (and the 7 remakes, of course), but we shall see. Thank you sir! It's a pretty large undertaking to tackle the whole series, but I've truly enjoyed almost all of my time with the series. Even the less popular games I enjoyed at least a little. They are long, grindy and not for everyone, but I think they are worth playing. Platinum #201 LEGO DC Super-Villains Well guys, it happened again. My son saw a LEGO game he wanted to play with me, so I downloaded it, started playing it with him, and after a few hours, he lost interest and I'm stuck finishing up the 40 hour grind solo lol. While I find these LEGO games to be mostly fine....they are all pretty much the same and I really didn't need to play five of them. Having said that, if he came up to me tomorrow and said 'Dad, can we play a LEGO Star Wars game?' I'd 100% buy it and play it with him. He just turned 10 and I'm sure he'll not want to be playing games with me at some point, so I'll take all I can get! I did wait almost a year before finishing this one with the hopes he'd ask about it again....but he's now into Roblox quite a bit. He's also playing Mario 64 with me on my N64 (he has gotten about half the stars), and he's lightly playing Diablo 2 as a Druid. I don't have much to say about this one. I'm pretty sure it's based on a LEGO movie that I've seen with my kids, but it's the same recipe as all the others. There's a story mode where you do the story with locked characters, then a free play mode where you can play as any hero/villain to clean up on the collectibles....you collect LEGO studs to unlock new characters.... you collect gold bricks as you go that are rewards for minigames and puzzles...red bricks you find give you special additions like a stud collecting multiplier. All very familiar for LEGO games. The games seem to get bigger and bigger, with more and more to collect. There were like 100 characters to collect in this one. Nothing terribly hard though and I was able to complete everything, including the DLC, in about 40 hours. The games are fun enough, but I don't think I am the target audience for these titles lol It wasn't a terrible game to finish up, but nothing something I will actively choose on my own. If you have kids or are a LEGO nut, then this game would be fun for you....if not, then you definitely do not need to play this. If you want to play a LEGO game, there are dozens to choose from and just pick one in a setting you like. Once you finish that one, you've pretty much played them all. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted May 26 Author Popular Post Share Posted May 26 (edited) Platinum #202 Risk of Rain 2 I broke my mold with this series. When I choose to play a series, I generally enjoy to play them consecutively and in order so that they appear on my profile as such and I did not do it with this one. Of course, it can't always happen that way. Some series I've played are still releasing new games, so those will always be out of order. Sometimes, a DLC will be released that will throw off the order. Some series it doesn't really matter the order as they have nothing to do with one another....but when possible, I will try hard to do it that way. I have three big series that I am going to be tackling in the near future that will prove just how much I do not like myself lol but I'll talk more about that after the review. I'm going to try something a little new and add some of my trophy videos so that you can see the gameplay a bit, instead of my usual walls of text lol For the past few years, a few people in my discord chat group and I will try and play some sort of co-op game together. None of them all out co-op since gaming schedules an be challenging to sync up. So far, Torchlight 2, Team Sonic Racing, Path of Exile, Diablo 2, DOOM Eternal, Demon's Souls, Genshin Impact, and Risk of Rain 2 are games I've played due to attempts to play something co-op. Torchlight 2 was probably the game we had the most success playing together. Risk of Rain was a game recommended in the chat and we all enjoyed that enough to give Risk of Rain 2 a try. This game was primarily attempted with @Cassylvania. The premise of Risk of Rain 2 was very similar to the first; you've crash-landed on a planet and must escape. It's a rogue-lite game where a game loop gimmick, just as the first, but this game played quite differently from the first Risk of Rain. The first game was a 2D side-scroller, whereas this game is in a 3D environment. This change made the game also feel very different from the first, and I didn't quite like the change much at first. I found it very easy to get lost in the levels. Just like in the first game, you're looking for a Teleport Gate to move you to the next zone. The different levels seem much larger than they actually are and it took me several times going through them to get my bearings. The game has three difficulty levels: Drizzle, Rainstorm, and Monsoon. The main difference between them being how quickly you regenerate health and how quickly the difficulty ramps up. No matter which difficulty setting you choose, the game starts out as EASY. In normal, after about 10 minutes it changes to MEDIUM, where in Monsoon difficulty I think it's about 5 minutes before it ramps up. The default is Rainstorm setting, which is a pretty good challenge. The game only has one trophy that relies on the difficulty setting, and that is to beat an upgraded boss on Monsoon difficulty. This sounds like it'd be very hard, however it's really not since this game has an easy button. The general flow of the game is you pick a character (I only played as the Commando except for the DLC) and difficulty and then spawn into the game. You run around the map, looking for the gate to the next level while killing enemy spawns and earning money. Littered throughout each level are treasure boxes and shrines that cost money to open/unlock. Inside the boxes are different artifacts that boost your abilities or give you new ones (for example a boost to running speed or shooting rate vs. the ability to double/triple/quadruple/etc jump). The game was very challenging for me to start. As I mentioned, there is an easy mode in the form of 'relics' that allow you to play the game under certain conditions. For example, one relic gives you the ability to choose the artifact you get from a box, allowing you to stack certain bonuses early. This is the biggest one that helps you get most of the trophies. Another one turns you into a glass cannon by making your attacks do something like 500% damage, but you only have 10% of your max HP. This one was helpful for a few of the trophies. While those easy buttons exist, you have to unlock them in the game to be able to turn them on. You can only unlock them in one zone and it's usually about the 5th level you get to in a run. Once you get to that level, you have to input a code into a portal, and it will bring you to an area where you get the benefit of the artifact but you have to clear the zone or it to be able to be used permanently. I did not realize that second part the first time I got to the level. I got there and was jumping around and fell off the edge during the battle and ended up dying....only to discover I had to get back there and redo the whole thing. I had made this game harder on myself than I had to. When I first played the game, I had set it to the Drizzle difficulty and so long as you stay in the game, that setting will stay until you change it...however if you exit the game, it goes back to the Rainstorm setting. I did not realize this and for the first 20 hours or so was playing on Normal difficulty. I thought the 3/10 rating was bullshit...or I just really started to suck at video games. Once I realized my issue and adjusted the difficulty, the 3/10 made much more sense lol At first, I didn't really like this game a ton. I found it very frustrating and highly reliant on RNG, which is never fun when it comes to trophies. Once I got the relic for being able to choose the artifacts I got, I ended up having a lot more fun and ended up enjoying this game quite a bit. As I mentioned, I only played as the Commando for most of my playthroughs so I can't really give too much on the difference between the characters. The Commando most mirrored what I used in the first game, and I enjoyed his skill layout enough that I never really deviated. I did use the Engineer for the DLC and the Monsoon difficulty boss trophy. The Engineer's skill is to set out two drones that get the benefit of all the artifacts you have gotten so far. In the DLC, you have to stay pretty stationary for most of the levels and these drones will do most of the work for you. It was pretty fun also, but the Engineer moves slowly and is very reliant on the drones so I found it not as fun to play during the regular game. While I did end up getting onboard with this game by the end, I still feel like the concept worked better in a 2D setting. I didn't find it as user friendly to learn and the graphics were very polygonal, which made it seem less polished. I could see how this game might disorient some people or give them motion sickness. I didn't have any of those problems, but I could see where someone could. I mean the 2D game didn't have amazing graphics either and this game is less about the graphics and more about the gameplay, but I do think it's worth mentioning them. The music was good and overall this game did prove to be a fun experience. If you enjoy the rogue-like/rogue-lite style of game, this is worth a look. The DLC is pretty expensive for what it is, but I had fun with it so it's worth getting if there's a sale. I'm doing better catching up on these than I thought I would I did mention above, I'd give an update on what I'm doing....So what am I currently working on? Well, a lot of different things actually. My long-term project is in Diablo 2 where I'm currently trying to get my Paladin through Hell difficulty by the end of June so that I can do some co op with a friend. I haven't joined any events this year as I have been focusing on just playing what I want, except for one mini, non-PSNP event that I'm doing. I'm in a small discord group of similarly aged and like minded individuals and we decided on a mini friend event for 2024. There are five of us in the chat, and each of us picked one game from our backlog that we recommended to each of the others to play before the end of the year. The games that were selected for me were Cuphead, Disco Elysium, Atelier Rorona, and Elden Ring. I'm a bit behind since we're almost halfway through the year and I only have finished Cuphead. My challenge here lies with the fact that Elden Ring and Atelier Rorona are parts of series, with Elden Ring being the last game in its series. In order to be true to my gaming ethos, I now am obligated to play all the games in those series. I already had planned that with the Soulsborne series, so no worries there....but Atelier is a horse of a different color....there are SIXTEEN games in that series. While I know I don't have to do it....and it's probably stupid to do it....but I'm going to do it since I think it'll be funny. My plan for the rest of 2024's games to play will be: South Park: Snow Day! Metal Hellsinger Disco Elysium PAIN! (for milestone) Demon's Souls (PS5) Dark Souls Remastered Dark Souls 2 Dark Souls 3 Bloodborne Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Elden Ring Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland DX any other Atelier games I can before the end of the year. I have 7 months to finish most of those games. Pain! for PS3 I do not need to finish, just get the trophy I want for 10,000 to be ready to go when I get there, but I can finish that one at any time. I might split up South Park: Snow Day! and Metal Hellsinger and do one or both of them in between Souls and Atelier as a break. That's 11 games in about 7 months....which may be too aggressive...but that list is a bit misleading as I am 10 seconds away from finishing Demon's Souls. I played that game a couple of years ago when I had originally planned on doing my Soulsborne run, but delayed it when I decided to play the oldest trophy list games I could. Behind the scenes of all of these games will be me doing Genshin Impact daily quests to keep my game up to date for the updates, plus I'll be chipping away at Diablo 2 when I need a break. That game will be done in 2025 at the earliest...which of course then means Diablo III and Diablo IV will be played right after Wish me luck! It should be a lot of fun as those games are considered some of the best ever made. Hopefully, I don't burn myself out, but I don't think I will since I really enjoy that genre. Edited May 26 by Briste 7 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rally-Vincent--- Posted May 26 Share Posted May 26 Disco Elysium definitely is worth playing. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassylvania Posted May 27 Share Posted May 27 8 hours ago, Briste said: For the past few years, a few people in my discord chat group and I will try and play some sort of co-op game together. None of them all out co-op since gaming schedules an be challenging to sync up. So far, Torchlight 2, Team Sonic Racing, Path of Exile, Diablo 2, DOOM Eternal, Demon's Souls, Genshin Impact, and Risk of Rain 2 are games I've played due to attempts to play something co-op. You forgot FIREBALL! FIREBALL! FIREBALL! 8 hours ago, Briste said: My plan for the rest of 2024's games to play will be: South Park: Snow Day! Metal Hellsinger Disco Elysium PAIN! (for milestone) Demon's Souls (PS5) Dark Souls Remastered Dark Souls 2 Dark Souls 3 Bloodborne Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice Elden Ring Atelier Rorona: The Alchemist of Arland DX any other Atelier games I can before the end of the year. As much as I love the Souls series, I cannot recommend this. You're asking for burnout. I was burned out midway through Elden Ring and that was with a year's long break. If you really want to do a whole series, just do DS1, DS2, and DS3. They're a complete set. Wait a bit before getting into Bloodborne. It plays very differently. Same with Sekiro. Elden Ring... honestly, I'd wait for that as long as possible. Play that when you're in a gaming lull. You're going to be doing yourself and that game a disservice if you try to rush it. I know you're Mr. Series Completionist and you're probably thinking I'm just saying this to get you to play Rorona sooner, but I think future Briste will thank me if he chooses to heed my warning. You walk a dangerous path here. 8 hours ago, Briste said: I already had planned that with the Soulsborne series, so no worries there....but Atelier is a horse of a different color....there are SIXTEEN games in that series. While I know I don't have to do it....and it's probably stupid to do it....but I'm going to do it since I think it'll be funny. I know I already told you this, but for the sake of posterity, this is my recommendation for how to deal with the Atelier series: Play Rorona or Ryza first. If you play Rorona first and like it, play Totori and then Meruru. You're then free to play any other trilogy within the series. If you play Rorona first and don't like it, play Ryza. If you don't like that either, you're done with the series. If you play Ryza first and like it, play Ryza 2 and Ryza 3. You're then free to play any other trilogy within the series. If you play Ryza first and don't like it... what's wrong with you? The only oddball games are Lulua, Sophie 2, Marie, and Nelke. Recommendation is to play Lulua after the Arland trilogy, Sophie 2 after Sophie 1 OR the Mysterious trilogy, and Marie whenever you want. Save Nelke for last. And only for the lulz. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted Tuesday at 01:14 AM Author Share Posted Tuesday at 01:14 AM On 5/26/2024 at 2:24 PM, Rally-Vincent--- said: Disco Elysium definitely is worth playing. I'm looking forward to it. I hadn't ever heard of it before, but from what I've seen, I think it's something I'll enjoy. 22 hours ago, Cassylvania said: As much as I love the Souls series, I cannot recommend this. You're asking for burnout. I was burned out midway through Elden Ring and that was with a year's long break. If you really want to do a whole series, just do DS1, DS2, and DS3. They're a complete set. Wait a bit before getting into Bloodborne. It plays very differently. Same with Sekiro. Elden Ring... honestly, I'd wait for that as long as possible. Play that when you're in a gaming lull. You're going to be doing yourself and that game a disservice if you try to rush it. I know you're Mr. Series Completionist and you're probably thinking I'm just saying this to get you to play Rorona sooner, but I think future Briste will thank me if he chooses to heed my warning. You walk a dangerous path here. While I would like to do it as I wrote above, what you're mentioning here isn't unprecedented for me. I was originally going to to the entire Battlefield series after finishing Bad Company 1 + 2, but really wasn't in the mood to do the other games so decided I'd treat the Bad Company games as a series and then decide if I wanted to do the other ones at a later date. If I'm feeling burned out after doing the three Dark Souls games, I'll probably pivot to what you mentioned....but if I could do the entire KH series in order, I'm feeling pretty confident I could do this. Atelier on the other hand might need to be split....16 in a row is a tall order.....BUT I think it'd be cool if I could do it so we'll play it by ear. 22 hours ago, Cassylvania said: I know I already told you this, but for the sake of posterity, this is my recommendation for how to deal with the Atelier series: Play Rorona or Ryza first. If you play Rorona first and like it, play Totori and then Meruru. You're then free to play any other trilogy within the series. If you play Rorona first and don't like it, play Ryza. If you don't like that either, you're done with the series. If you play Ryza first and like it, play Ryza 2 and Ryza 3. You're then free to play any other trilogy within the series. If you play Ryza first and don't like it... what's wrong with you? The only oddball games are Lulua, Sophie 2, Marie, and Nelke. Recommendation is to play Lulua after the Arland trilogy, Sophie 2 after Sophie 1 OR the Mysterious trilogy, and Marie whenever you want. Save Nelke for last. And only for the lulz. My current plan was to follow the series order that is on PSNP and do them in that order since I feel like this is a series where the order is less important...similar to most of the Final Fantasy games since the majority of them have nothing to do with one another. The currently planned order is: Rorona -> Totori -> Meruru -> Ayesha -> Escha & Logy -> Shallie -> Sophie -> Firis -> Lydie & Suelle -> Lulua -> Ryza -> Ryza 2 -> Sophie 2 -> Ryza 3 -> Marie -> Nelke If that order makes no sense, feel free to re-arrange. My instinct would be to move Sophie 2 to right after Sophie and Ryza 3 to right after Ryza 2....but I have no idea lol 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Platinum_Vice Posted Tuesday at 08:07 AM Popular Post Share Posted Tuesday at 08:07 AM 6 hours ago, Briste said: I'm looking forward to it. I hadn't ever heard of it before, but from what I've seen, I think it's something I'll enjoy. I've reviewed Disco Elysium on my checklist. Might be worth a quick look to pique your interest. 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassylvania Posted Tuesday at 09:12 PM Share Posted Tuesday at 09:12 PM (edited) 20 hours ago, Briste said: My current plan was to follow the series order that is on PSNP and do them in that order since I feel like this is a series where the order is less important...similar to most of the Final Fantasy games since the majority of them have nothing to do with one another. The currently planned order is: Rorona -> Totori -> Meruru -> Ayesha -> Escha & Logy -> Shallie -> Sophie -> Firis -> Lydie & Suelle -> Lulua -> Ryza -> Ryza 2 -> Sophie 2 -> Ryza 3 -> Marie -> Nelke If that order makes no sense, feel free to re-arrange. My instinct would be to move Sophie 2 to right after Sophie and Ryza 3 to right after Ryza 2....but I have no idea lol So, I don't want to spoil any of the amazing plots of these games, but the games within each trilogy are connected story-wise (e.g. most of the cast in Rorona is also in Totori, and most of the cast in Totori is in Meruru.) Usually, the alchemist you play as in the first game becomes the mentor for the next alchemist. The reason that Lulua is an oddball is that it takes place after the events in Meruru and continues/concludes the Arland series, even though it was released much later. Same for Sophie 2. Those are the only two games I'd suggest doing earlier than you have planned. That said, if you don't care about the story, you can play the games in any order. The reason I suggested starting with Rorona or Ryza is because they're on opposite ends of the spectrum. Rorona is the hardest/most unforgiving game in the series. (It was made easier in the DX version, but now Meruru DX is the hardest.) I don't know if Ryza is the easiest, but it's the most fun. You'll get a good understanding of what a series completion will look like from just those two games. Most of the games play the same. The main challenge in the earlier games is the time limit per assignment, which can potentially softlock you into starting over. Make extra saves when you do those ones. Every game has a slightly different combat and alchemy system, but it tends to get less complicated in newer games. If you can get through the Arland games, you can get through anything. Edited Tuesday at 09:17 PM by Cassylvania 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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