realm722 Posted August 7, 2021 Share Posted August 7, 2021 On 8/3/2021 at 10:01 PM, Briste said: The way I tackled the game was to do Valhalla mode first once I unlocked it and before cleaning up the regular game trophies. I wanted to get both of the conditions met in Valhalla and then go back to the main game and finish up that boss’s trophies so that I could effectively be done with that boss and focus on the next boss’s mechanics without getting rusty. I’ll tell you one thing, after beating a boss in Valhalla, the trophy cleanup against the normal bosses was a breeze. It was funny because I though the bosses were pretty challenging the first time I faced them during the story, but after practicing in Valhalla, they were pushovers. I’d recommend this approach for anyone that wants to play it since it really gets rid of the potential frustration for those timed trophies. Hah... I never even thought about tackling the game this way. I know on my 1st run I went out of my way to beat them all without god powers, but when re-fighting the bosses for the time rials and no damage and such I did them as soon as I finished the game since I wanted experience going into Valhalla Mode. The game must have been comically simple in comparison going back to the "easier" mode since Hagalaz's lightning spires dropped from 8 to 4, Odin's spheres going from 3 to 1, and so forth. Congrats on the plat and I'd say it's VERY worthy of being your 150th. I'm quite jealous of your latest milestones. I wish I could have made FF7 Remake's plat icon an image, and Iver from TBS somehow looks even better. 15 hours ago, Briste said: All in all this was a very average game. It ran smooth and there were no disconnects or crashes so at least that part of the game was good....but overall it felt pretty uninspired and was just pretty boring. If you like Diablo clones, it's not terrible, but there are lot better ones out there to choose from. Thank you for the heads up! Don't really play Diablo clones but I had seen Torchlight on sale multiple times for very cheap and always wondered if it was worth a buy. While I can tell from your review that you didn't dislike it, doesn't really feel like an experience I want to pour 40+ hours into. I don't mind games that have a bit of a grind to wrap things up since they can be good background games if I'm watching other stuff but if the game is just way too easy it can get a bit droning. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted August 12, 2021 Author Share Posted August 12, 2021 (edited) On 8/7/2021 at 4:14 PM, realm722 said: Hah... I never even thought about tackling the game this way. I know on my 1st run I went out of my way to beat them all without god powers, but when re-fighting the bosses for the time rials and no damage and such I did them as soon as I finished the game since I wanted experience going into Valhalla Mode. The game must have been comically simple in comparison going back to the "easier" mode since Hagalaz's lightning spires dropped from 8 to 4, Odin's spheres going from 3 to 1, and so forth. Congrats on the plat and I'd say it's VERY worthy of being your 150th. I'm quite jealous of your latest milestones. I wish I could have made FF7 Remake's plat icon an image, and Iver from TBS somehow looks even better. I usually will do games this way that have a difficulty trophy involved. I figure if I can beat the game on the hardest setting, the rest will be easy. If I start easy and go hard, then I might have several frustrating runs through a game...if I start with the harder stuff first, then I often remove a lot of the frustration. If you look at my time between trophies, a lot of my clean up trophies only had minutes or seconds between popping. It really was effective lol Actually, I tend to do the something similar with books that become movies. If I haven't read the book yet, I'll usually watch the movie first because 99/100 the book is far better than the movie. If I read the book first, I won't enjoy the movie experience since I know what is missing. If I start with the movie, there's a chance I might like the movie since I don't know what is missing and then go read the book. Then I'll have enjoyed the movie and book experience. Doesn't always work, but most of the time it works. On 8/7/2021 at 4:14 PM, realm722 said: Thank you for the heads up! Don't really play Diablo clones but I had seen Torchlight on sale multiple times for very cheap and always wondered if it was worth a buy. While I can tell from your review that you didn't dislike it, doesn't really feel like an experience I want to pour 40+ hours into. I don't mind games that have a bit of a grind to wrap things up since they can be good background games if I'm watching other stuff but if the game is just way too easy it can get a bit droning. Yeah, I wouldn't go out of your way to play it....but if it's a PS+ game or you can get it for $5 or so it's not terrible. It's a great game to catch up on movies or TV shows since you can mindlessly go through it. I have a milestone coming up in about ten trophies. I had picked out a trophy from Mount & Blade: Warband to be my milestone...the good news is there are several good contestants to choose from....the bad news is I popped my first choice by accident. In honor of turning 40 this year, I was hoping to pop Old Dirty Scoundrel which you pop for getting a faction (kingdom) to -50. I thought it would be a little harder to pop than it was and it popped completely by accident. I'll give more of a synopsis of the game when I beat it and do my review...but basically you are a prospective knight/lord in a feudal era style war game with aspirations of becoming the ruler of all the land. There are five 'kingdoms' that each have a king that battle each other for supremacy in the land and each king has a 'claimant' or someone who feels they have the right to the throne for that kingdom (bastard son, widowed queen, etc). There is a trophy for getting a 'claimant' to a throne so I figured I'd pick one and start working towards it. I had a 0 or better rating with all of the kingdoms when I figured I'd start working on that trophy and the moment I declared my support for the 'pretender', I lost 50 rating points in the kingdom the 'pretender' has a claim to. With that popped the trophy. From reading the guide, it looked like doing this would give me a -40 and I'd need -10 more to pop this trophy....but nope. I'm a little bummed that I popped the trophy early, but this game has a lot of funny trophy names and I like the images a lot so I have a few to choose from. Not sure if I'm going to go with one of the Monty Python inspired ones or the Star Trek inspired Khaaaaan!....I kind of like the image of the Star Trek one the best....but having The Holy Hand Grenade or Bring Out Your Dead on my wall wouldn't be terrible either....I also haven't ruled out Holy Diver with a nod to Ronnie James Dio. The Knight with the 'rock on' hands is pretty sweet...decisions decisions. After this milestone, I won't have one for a little while so it should be good! Edited August 12, 2021 by Briste 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted August 18, 2021 Author Share Posted August 18, 2021 So The Holy Hand Grenade ended up being the winner for my milestones. I really screwed the pooch with this one lol I really wanted to have Old Dirty Scoundrel and was pretty disappointed when that popped unexpectedly (well it popped when it should have....I just wasn't expecting to meet the criteria at the time it popped). I then went to my kids to see which one they liked best. They are huge into 'rock out' songs (rock out songs include, but are not limited to, ACDC, Metallica, Billy Joel, Lady Gaga...you get the idea) so I was going to go with Holy Diver. That one was supposed to pop at 500 kills/injured enemies....popped for me at about 390. I guess the tracker tracks kills even if you don't save. There were times I saved before going into a tournament or siege the first few times I tried them and I guess those kills carried over....so after I popped that one, I was going to go with Khaaaaan!i since I liked that image better than the other ones and I tend to like Star Trek better than Monty Python....that one popped while doing a tournament....which I really wasn't expecting since you don't kill anyone in a tournament. I thought I would have to grind that one out in regular battles....so strike 3.... While I like the Bring Out Your Dead scene better in Monty Python than I do the killer rabbit and The Holy Hand Grenade scene....I didn't really like the image for Bring Out Your Dead. I had actually decided to go with None Shall Pass for defending a castle during a siege. I liked that trophy image the best of what was left and the Black Knight was one of the funnier parts of Monty Python...the problem became getting someone to actually try to siege one of my castles....I had really painted myself into a corner with this endeavor... I had 6999 trophies and my faction just wouldn't go to war. I couldn't leave and make my own faction since there's a trophy for that and I really don't care much for that trophy. The couple of times my faction did go to war, nobody would siege my castle and the one time someone actually did....my king made peace with the other faction and the siege ended before the battle ? I tried for a day and a half to try and get a siege going and came up empty. I now was coming up upon a second wall....a 273 day trophy streak AND my 7000 trophy. I was running out of time to keep the streak alive and the only one I knew I could pop was The Holy Hand Grenade....so due to a lack of time and options...that one ended up being my 7000. I'm pretty lukewarm about it, but it's not terrible. In hindsight, I think Kingmaker would have been a pretty good one too since I have two boys....but that one seemed much more challenging than it ended up being. At the end of the day, I should have either done more research on the pop conditions...or just played and see what happened. I know the more logical choice is option B, but this is my party and I'll cry if I want to... I'm really into this game FYI....it's so close to being amazing but is just clunky enough where I could see where people would hate it. I've stayed up way later on several nights than I usually do because I get lost in time. Hoping to be able to finish this up in the next week or so...we'll see since this game is pretty huge. 4 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassylvania Posted August 18, 2021 Share Posted August 18, 2021 I think you put more planning into your milestones than I ever did. ? I was mostly just happy to get a trophy in a game I liked. I guess the two exceptions for me were 9k and 10k (especially 10k, since I had been planning that for 3-4 years). But enjoy it while you can! Once you reach 10k, it's all over until 15k... I'm interested to see how M&B handles on console. I played the original on PC when it first released. I remember liking it, but it was very unpolished. You really should give KCD a try when you have ~200 hours of free time. They're not exactly the same genre, but they do a similar thing with combat. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grotz99 Posted August 19, 2021 Share Posted August 19, 2021 That would drive me crazy trying to pop a specific trophy for a total trophy milestone, you have some serious patience. I haven't paid much attention to those and it's funny when I look at my profile and see what actually counted for them. I at least started to plan platinums after 50...which is only 2 so far. For my 9000th though, I'm actually considering playing Fallen Legion: Flame of Rebellion, which I got through PS+ for the over 9000 trophy.... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted August 20, 2021 Author Share Posted August 20, 2021 On 8/17/2021 at 11:23 PM, Cassylvania said: I think you put more planning into your milestones than I ever did. I was mostly just happy to get a trophy in a game I liked. I guess the two exceptions for me were 9k and 10k (especially 10k, since I had been planning that for 3-4 years). But enjoy it while you can! Once you reach 10k, it's all over until 15k... lol but less planning into the trophy image screenshot that goes with it I figure since I know when the milestones are coming up, I have plenty of time to plan for them so I might as well try for something that I find funny or amusing. I'm just lucky this game had many trophies I like as opposed to some of the games I've targeted where there was only one. I still have slim amounts of hope that they'll adjust that at some point, or allow some more customization with what milestones you show. I'm going to pop my 11,000th, 12,000th, etc trophies as if they are going to be milestones still just in case. On 8/17/2021 at 11:23 PM, Cassylvania said: I'm interested to see how M&B handles on console. I played the original on PC when it first released. I remember liking it, but it was very unpolished. You really should give KCD a try when you have ~200 hours of free time. They're not exactly the same genre, but they do a similar thing with combat. It seems to handle pretty well to be honest....it is clearly made for use with a mouse, but it's not that bad. The combat isn't terribly smooth though and the AI is kind of weird at times...like during a siege when reinforcements appear, it's like they are on a train track to go a certain way and you can just stand to the side of them while they walk by and mow them down like grass. I did buy KCD a few months ago so it is something I plan on playing for sure. 10 hours ago, Grotz99 said: That would drive me crazy trying to pop a specific trophy for a total trophy milestone, you have some serious patience. I haven't paid much attention to those and it's funny when I look at my profile and see what actually counted for them. I at least started to plan platinums after 50...which is only 2 so far. Usually it isn't so bad since the other milestones I've picked were easy to setup. As it turns out, this game was far easier to setup than I anticipated. I started playing the game with like 30 trophies to go since I wasn't sure what 'get -50 from a faction' meant and I expected it to take some grinding. I had no idea that backing a 'pretender' for the crown would drop me -50 immediately....Old Dirty Scoundrel in theory could have been my second or third trophy....I just didn't research it enough. Once I painted myself into a corner though, it got a little harder to tackle. I generally get the one I want ready to pop with 10 or 12 trophies to go and then get those other trophies in a different game until I'm ready to pop it. I would agree with you though, that I do have some serious patience lol It's why I've been able to complete some of the games I have....there's moments of frustration for sure, but at the end I've been able to persevere. Actually, I was going to talk about how I feel about UR trophies. I saw that big thread going on and it seems people have some pretty strong opinions on them. They are somewhat important to me personally. Not because it shows that a game is hard or that I have skill or anything...but because I like knowing that I've achieved something that not a lot of people took the time to do....for whatever reason. Some of them I have no idea why people haven't taken the time to achieve....for example, in Mount & Blade: Warband there are three trophies for getting a specific skills to level 5 or higher. All of them can literally be achieved in the starting menu by picking specific traits for your character. It takes two minutes yet all three of them are under 10% achieved. I have no idea why more people who have played this game, haven't taken the time to get them....but they haven't. These aren't good examples of UR trophies that are important to me....but I like that I took the time to do it when 9/10 don't. I think it is usually pretty easy to tell which UR trophies are due to difficulty, which are due to grindy requirements and which are due to a game being terrible. I appreciate all three types and have all of them on my profile. I actually just got my overall % under 40% for the first time in the past week. It's important to no one but myself, as is my profile in general, which is why I take the time to get the trophies I want for milestones, try to keep series in order and other little quirks. My profile is to amuse myself and maybe some others. It has helped me meet some great people and I really like the PSNP community that I've interacted with...I think a big part of that is because I don't take myself too seriously here. I play for fun and my own personal goals and enjoy reading and talking with others in the same mold. Because of that, I really haven't had a bad experience here at all. I know I've read several times about the toxicity of this website...but for me that just hasn't been true. I'm kind of going off the rails a bit here so I'm just going to get back to some M&B 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arcesius Posted August 20, 2021 Share Posted August 20, 2021 3 hours ago, Briste said: Actually, I was going to talk about how I feel about UR trophies. I saw that big thread going on and it seems people have some pretty strong opinions on them. They are somewhat important to me personally. Not because it shows that a game is hard or that I have skill or anything...but because I like knowing that I've achieved something that not a lot of people took the time to do....for whatever reason. Some of them I have no idea why people haven't taken the time to achieve....for example, in Mount & Blade: Warband there are three trophies for getting a specific skills to level 5 or higher. All of them can literally be achieved in the starting menu by picking specific traits for your character. It takes two minutes yet all three of them are under 10% achieved. I have no idea why more people who have played this game, haven't taken the time to get them....but they haven't. These aren't good examples of UR trophies that are important to me....but I like that I took the time to do it when 9/10 don't. I think it is usually pretty easy to tell which UR trophies are due to difficulty, which are due to grindy requirements and which are due to a game being terrible. I appreciate all three types and have all of them on my profile. Which thread do you mean? ? But yeah, I share your opinion I think. There are some UR trophies that are UR for... reasons...? And those trophies being UR doesn't mean anything to me. For example, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a UR platinum, but it's a 2-3/10 game in terms of difficulty.. The game could sit at 30%+ rarity for all I care. But then there are games that have UR trophies for the - to me - right reasons. Difficult, skill-dependent trophies. Those are the UR trophies that matter to me, the ones that actually represent what you described: I was able to do something many were not. However, this is not always reflected in the rarity. Sure, I would say that the really, really tough games, your 10/10s, are all UR. But there are many 7-8/10 games that are not very rare. My favorite example is The End is Nigh. The game is not much easier than SMB (the gameplay is actually harder, the platinum is a bit easier.. both games made by the same guy), yet the difference in rarity is enormous. SMB is still 0.24% or so, while The End is Nigh, which has only been completed by 30 people, is at almost 7%. But, with profiles not being updated regularly on this site since... 2017 or so, those rarities are also starting to feel very wrong and more and more insignificant. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassylvania Posted August 20, 2021 Share Posted August 20, 2021 13 hours ago, Arcesius said: But yeah, I share your opinion I think. There are some UR trophies that are UR for... reasons...? And those trophies being UR doesn't mean anything to me. For example, Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime is a UR platinum, but it's a 2-3/10 game in terms of difficulty.. The game could sit at 30%+ rarity for all I care. I'll never understand the rarity of LiaDS...or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Phil's Epic Adventure, which sits at a ridiculous 61%. It's not difficult at all, but I have a hard time believing that many people stared at a white screen for such a long period of time. Ever since I lost my ability to have a 100% profile...and since it'll be years before my next PSNP-approved milestone...I'm starting to focus more on URs now. I'm excited that I hit my 300th UR today. Even moreso since I haven't popped a trophy since Wednesday. Wish there was some way to see what trophy was responsible. I guess I could sort all my trophies by rarity and see which one is closest to the cut-off? But like you guys are saying, not URs are created equal. You generally take on games that have UR trophies because of difficulty. I play obscure games. Briste does a little of both. I'm not sure how you could factor that in, unless you're also taking into account the number of game owners. 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Copanele Posted August 21, 2021 Share Posted August 21, 2021 Wow can't believe someone else is playing Mount & Blade Warband here I can tell why this game is UR though...it's hella obscure (if you never owned a PC) and most who start it are "ugh what's this wonky medieval thing". Not to mention that the multiplayer based kills are abit of a headache to get unless you boost and the entire process of conquering the map can be a headache if you don't plan it beforehand. But damn this game was fun. Way better to play on mouse and keyboard as it was mentioned, but it worked kinda fine on console also. Sieges were the thing that gave me the most headaches though because the dumbasses would just sit on the siege ladders without doing much while being pelted with arrows. Holy Hand Grenade is still a good milestone, if anything you can say you are a Monty Python fan ? Good luck and keep stealing the butter from the Swadians! 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted August 21, 2021 Author Share Posted August 21, 2021 (edited) On 8/20/2021 at 2:52 AM, Arcesius said: But, with profiles not being updated regularly on this site since... 2017 or so, those rarities are also starting to feel very wrong and more and more insignificant. Yeah this is probably one of my biggest pet peeves with the site in general. How can the leaderboard be 'as accurate as possible' if the site isn't updating the profiles that are on it regularly? I really don't care too much about the leaderboard in general...I just like to see my number green as opposed to red...but I have no delusions of grandeur when it comes to my ranking on there. But with how motivated PSNP is to keep cheaters off the leaderboard (which I agree with), one would assume they'd also want to keep the accounts that are contained on it as up to date as possible. I'm not sure what's wrong with the website updating once a month for each account....but I'm not a programmer so I am speaking out of turn a bit there. 21 hours ago, Cassylvania said: But like you guys are saying, not URs are created equal. You generally take on games that have UR trophies because of difficulty. I play obscure games. Briste does a little of both. I'm not sure how you could factor that in, unless you're also taking into account the number of game owners. I actually bought a few games on this most recent sale that seem both obscure and hard....we'll find out why when I play them, but from the little research I did, they seem grind-y. I bought Fantasy General II: Invasion, Pathfinder: Kingmaker - Definitive Edition, Griftlands, Banner of the Maid and The Lord of the Rings: Adventure Card Game Definitive Edition. BotM was not on sale, but it wasn't that expensive and I was in a buying mood last night. Almost all of those games have less than 1,000 owners and FG II has a 0.00% completion rate...it doesn't appear to be a broken game so I'll be curious to see if I can plat that game. I can't tell if it's just because it's obscure AND grind-y or if it's because the gameplay is bad or what. If it's like an Ash of Gods kind of broken, I can manage (AoG is on sale very cheap right now ftw). Every once in a while I get a funny feeling to start something random and I now have a few choices again. I have no idea when I'll play any of these....but they looked about right for me. 10 hours ago, Copanele said: I can tell why this game is UR though...it's hella obscure (if you never owned a PC) and most who start it are "ugh what's this wonky medieval thing". Not to mention that the multiplayer based kills are abit of a headache to get unless you boost and the entire process of conquering the map can be a headache if you don't plan it beforehand. But damn this game was fun. Way better to play on mouse and keyboard as it was mentioned, but it worked kinda fine on console also. Sieges were the thing that gave me the most headaches though because the dumbasses would just sit on the siege ladders without doing much while being pelted with arrows. I can see why it is UR too lol it is really gind-y to conquer the whole map as you said...and I totally agree with those sieges being weird like that. I tend to stand at the base off the ladders/siege tower and pick off the archers with my bow. You never really run out of arrows since the ground is littered with them from the enemy. I let my soldiers clear a path off the ladder and then I go join them. I basically sneak around back and just beat the shit out of their archers/crossbowmen. When the 'more enemies arrived' message pops up....the will spawn on me while I'm shucking archers, but the run towards my main group, leaving me alone to massacre. I've been blitzkrieging through the map the past couple of days and it's been a lot of fun. It took a while to get the feel of the different strengths and weaknesses of the soldiers and what works best...but I agree that this game is a blast if you have the patience for it. Since I still have my PS4, the MP trophies were a breeze since most of the rooms are empty and I was able to log in with the account I let my son play and just wail on him. I'm telling you, this PS5 backwards compatibility thing has been great for some of these games with grind-y MP stuff. I'm hoping to be able to finish this game up in the next week or so, but this was an unexpected gem for me. Edited August 21, 2021 by Briste 2 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
det_gittes Posted August 21, 2021 Share Posted August 21, 2021 5 minutes ago, Briste said: I actually bought a few games on this most recent sale that seem both obscure and rare.... Speaking of obscure and rare games, earlier today I saw someone made a comment on SPELLSWORD CARDS: DUNGEONTOP, which has - strangely enough - almost the same underwhelming number of owners in EU and US regions (~60). The game is said to be a mix of a turn-based RPG deck-builder and a board game and the Steam reviews are very positive; it is also very cheap I haven't gotten it yet but put in on my wishlist just in case I am also very tempted to get Griftlands, I remember @Rally-Vincent--- mentioning it a few months ago. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rally-Vincent--- Posted August 21, 2021 Share Posted August 21, 2021 47 minutes ago, det_gittes said: I am also very tempted to get Griftlands, I remember @Rally-Vincent--- mentioning it a few months ago. Yes, he did mention it, and he is playing it atm - technically, since all the XCOm 2 talk in @Arcesius's thread and Christopher Odd starting a new season resulted in him downloading a plethora of mods and cursing five missed 80%+ shots in a row. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Cassylvania Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 Well, congratulations. You found a game I've never heard of (Fantasy General II). I have Pathfinder and Griftlands on my wish list. Banner of the Maid was fun. LotR...well, I don't know how the card game is, but there's a serious lack of good Middle-earth games out there. What do we have -- a couple spin-offs from the movies, a few LEGO games, an MMO nobody plays, and one awesome hack-and-slash that came out on the PS2? EA needs to do for LotR what Jedi: Fallen Order did for Star Wars. Maybe that Gollum game will be good... And yeah, DungeonTop is supposed to be a lot like StS. I haven't looked much into it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJ_Radio Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 On 8/20/2021 at 1:34 PM, Cassylvania said: I'll never understand the rarity of LiaDS...or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, Phil's Epic Adventure, which sits at a ridiculous 61%. It's not difficult at all, but I have a hard time believing that many people stared at a white screen for such a long period of time. Ever since I lost my ability to have a 100% profile...and since it'll be years before my next PSNP-approved milestone...I'm starting to focus more on URs now. I'm excited that I hit my 300th UR today. Even moreso since I haven't popped a trophy since Wednesday. Wish there was some way to see what trophy was responsible. I guess I could sort all my trophies by rarity and see which one is closest to the cut-off? But like you guys are saying, not URs are created equal. You generally take on games that have UR trophies because of difficulty. I play obscure games. Briste does a little of both. I'm not sure how you could factor that in, unless you're also taking into account the number of game owners. I stopped caring about URs for the most part because it's honestly no different than stacking easy games. Sure there are some truly hard games with a bunch of URs worth playing, but I'm not going to go out of my way to play some obscure indie PS4 game I couldn't give a damn about just because it has a bunch of URs. Some of those I actually played were offered on PS Plus, so that skews the statistics. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arcesius Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 (edited) On 8/20/2021 at 10:34 PM, Cassylvania said: But like you guys are saying, not URs are created equal. You generally take on games that have UR trophies because of difficulty. I play obscure games. Briste does a little of both. I'm not sure how you could factor that in, unless you're also taking into account the number of game owners. I don't think there is any need to take that into consideration though... I wasn't implying that one reason for smth being UR is superior, either, sorry if it came across that way ? I was only stating that, to me personally, only the rarity of trophies that are UR due to the skill required to unlock them is meaningful. Others might care about something else. But in the end, I think there is no need to globally explain the rarity of a trophy. 4 hours ago, AJ_Radio said: I stopped caring about URs for the most part because it's honestly no different than stacking easy games. Sure there are some truly hard games with a bunch of URs worth playing, but I'm not going to go out of my way to play some obscure indie PS4 game I couldn't give a damn about just because it has a bunch of URs. Some of those I actually played were offered on PS Plus, so that skews the statistics. It is only similar if you play UR games just for the sake of earning more UR trophies. Witch no one here is doing ?. We all have different reasons for caring or not caring about rarity. That statement doesn't apply to the majority of players I'd say.? Edited August 22, 2021 by Arcesius 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJ_Radio Posted August 22, 2021 Share Posted August 22, 2021 13 hours ago, Arcesius said: It is only similar if you play UR games just for the sake of earning more UR trophies. Witch no one here is doing . We all have different reasons for caring or not caring about rarity. That statement doesn't apply to the majority of players I'd say. Pretty much. If it’s not something that interests you, don’t bother playing it. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted August 24, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 24, 2021 (edited) On 8/21/2021 at 2:13 PM, det_gittes said: Speaking of obscure and rare games, earlier today I saw someone made a comment on SPELLSWORD CARDS: DUNGEONTOP, which has - strangely enough - almost the same underwhelming number of owners in EU and US regions (~60). The game is said to be a mix of a turn-based RPG deck-builder and a board game and the Steam reviews are very positive; it is also very cheap I haven't gotten it yet but put in on my wishlist just in case Well now you've gone and done it....add it to the backlog! For $3.49, even if it sucks, I won't lose any sleep over it On 8/21/2021 at 8:19 PM, Cassylvania said: Well, congratulations. You found a game I've never heard of (Fantasy General II). I have Pathfinder and Griftlands on my wish list. Banner of the Maid was fun. LotR...well, I don't know how the card game is, but there's a serious lack of good Middle-earth games out there. What do we have -- a couple spin-offs from the movies, a few LEGO games, an MMO nobody plays, and one awesome hack-and-slash that came out on the PS2? EA needs to do for LotR what Jedi: Fallen Order did for Star Wars. Maybe that Gollum game will be good... Finally!! I actually enjoyed the Mordor games quite a bit, but overall I agree that there is not a ton of good LotR games out there. This one looks like it could be a bit of a slog so it's not something I'm going to jump right into. I'll let you know if it's any good. On 8/22/2021 at 1:13 AM, AJ_Radio said: I stopped caring about URs for the most part because it's honestly no different than stacking easy games. Sure there are some truly hard games with a bunch of URs worth playing, but I'm not going to go out of my way to play some obscure indie PS4 game I couldn't give a damn about just because it has a bunch of URs. Some of those I actually played were offered on PS Plus, so that skews the statistics. Since I don't look at URs in terms of difficulty all the time, I don't exactly see them that way. I look at them for exactly what they are...trophies that most people haven't got for one reason or another. I won't lie, when these huge sales come up, I look at the difficulty rating that gets included before I look at the title of the game. If I see it's an 8/10 or 9/10, I'll check it out to see if the genre is something I might like. If less than 1000 people have played it, I get even more interested. I get a kick out of playing really obscure stuff every once in a while. I enjoy the AAA games too, but I like finishing something that not a lot of people have attempted. On 8/22/2021 at 5:27 AM, Arcesius said: I was only stating that, to me personally, only the rarity of trophies that are UR due to the skill required to unlock them is meaningful. Others might care about something else. But in the end, I think there is no need to globally explain the rarity of a trophy. This is why I like the trophy hunting a lot. We might target the same types of games for very different reasons. You enjoy the challenge where as I enjoy venturing into the unknown. Those paths cross enough where we'll dabble in the same stuff. That's also why I like the term 'trophy hunting' since it covers a wide array of styles. Some hunters go for quantity over quality and some go for the big game trophy's. Some take their time to enjoy the hunt and some like to bag something every day. It's a hobby that can cater to whatever you want to take from it. That's the biggest reason why I wish there was a bit more variety with the leaderboard. This one is all about quantity, which is a huge turnoff to a significant number of hunter's. I don't check it out nearly as often, but I like the different boards over on PSNTL. The more broad ways of slicing and dicing up the profiles is much more interesting to me. I also feel like adding some more leaderboards would perhaps get rid of some of the toxicity surrounding the games people choose to play. Right now people bitch at each other over the influx of easy plat stacks that have heavily inflated the current leaderboard. Right now, that's the only leaderboard there is so people are consuming, what seems like, garbage games hand over fist to try and scale the mountaintop. If there were more leaderboards to choose from, those of us that don't care about that particular way of ranking, could find some other way to compare. I mean, I really don't care one way or the other, I just play games and looking at the rarity is one of the factors I use when deciding sometimes. On 8/22/2021 at 5:27 AM, Arcesius said: We all have different reasons for caring or not caring about rarity. That statement doesn't apply to the majority of players I'd say.? Preach! Platinum #152 Mount & Blade: Warband I bought this game a while back because it was hovering around 1% completion....? and it also sounded like the kind of game I would enjoy. I had sat on it for a while and when I began to look over my backlog for a good milestone trophy, this game was littered with them. I've already said several times about what I was targeting and how I failed miserably to achieve my first several choices so I'll skip that here. I LOVED this game. It is absolutely full of flaws, but I don't care. This game kicked me right in the nostalgia nuts and I was going to like this no matter what. This review is going to be pretty longwinded, so be warned! Back when I was a kid, there was this place where masses of people used to congregate to go shopping that had tons of different types of stores called a 'mall'. It was always a big deal and it usually coincided with some sort of giant pretzel or a stop at Boardwalk Fries and it was amazing. My 'mall' had this awesome video game store that I always had to stop in when we went. It was called Electronics Boutique and it was every video game nerd's wet dream. By 1995, I was 14 and had been working for a couple years at my family's restaurant, so had some disposable income to throw at video games. I played a lot of PC games at the time in addition to my SNES, and one day when I was in Electronics Boutique, I looked up on the top shelf and saw a game with a Knight on the cover. I couldn't read the name and wasn't sure what it was, but because I was 14 and wanted to be a dick, I asked the clerk to come and get it down for me. He begrudgingly came over to get it muttering about how there was a reason it was on the top shelf since nobody buys this game. Well just to spite him, I decided to buy it (I sure showed him!) The game was called Conqueror A.D. 1086. In Conqueror, the game started with you as a young boy with aspirations of becoming a Knight and perhaps the King of all England one day. You would cross the map of England and do tasks for people and compete in tournaments (jousting was impossible in this game). I want to say you would try to wooo a bonnie lass to be your bride. You could beat the game one of three ways I think...you could defeat the dragon (which involved jousting), you could win over the country by winning all the tournaments (which involved jousting) or you could just be a warlord and take England by force (the only way I could ever play the game). So, I'd take over fiefs and amass an army that was large enough to overthrow the king and try to win that way. The annoying thing about the game was the time limit. I think you had until you were like 30 years old to beat the game or it was game over. Time moved pretty quickly too iirc but the game was fun and challenging. I used to play it on and off for years until PC's got too good and too fast, that it couldn't play games like this anymore. I haven't played a game like this in close to 20 years probably. Why did I just waste your time talking about this relic that nobody in the world played? Because Mount & Blade: Warband was awesomely similar to my lost relic. In M&B you choose a backstory by answering a few questions before you start, then you get to customize what your hero looks like and his/her name. Since you have to beat the game as a female for a trophy, I played as Bristina of the Kingdom of Vaegirs, daughter of a Merchant who spent my early life as a street urchin, fending for myself and learning the ways of the world. As a young adult, I became a troubadour to try and escape the streets due to my excellent singing voice and love of poetry. I decided to become an adventurer for reasons of revenge after the love of my life was killed! How you choose your upbringing and early life dictates your starting stats. You pick a starting faction (kingdom...there are 6 overall and 7 when you make your own) that dictates where in the world you start. You are thrust into it pretty quickly. This game has a very steep learning curve simply because there is just a lot to learn and remember. Each kingdom has a king and each king has several Vassals (knights who fight for them) who have their own personality and land. Each kingdom also has their own type of troops with different strengths and weaknesses that you need to learn if you want to build an effective army. You need to earn money to pay for troops so you need to figure out a source of income; you need to make relationships with the different lords so that they may join you when you decide to make your own faction; you need to generate renown by winning battles and tournaments to people have heard of you and the max size of your army is directly tied to your renown; you need to keep the morale of your troops high so they do not desert you by winning battles, having a variety of foods, not raiding and pillaging towns (troops you have from a faction you are at war with take a morality hit and could more easily desert you); you have to wooo a spouse (for a trophy, you don't have to in the game if you don't want). In addition to all these things, you have to learn how to level up your character properly. There are general stats, personal skills, party skills, leadership skills and weapon skills. General stats are STR, AGI, INT, CHA. Every three points you have in one of those will raise the cap on the personal skills, party skills or leadership skills by one. Those different skills are tied to one of the general stats. For example, if you raise your STR, you'll be able to raise the cap of your personal skill damage (among others)...if you raise your AGI, you can raise your Athletics (among others) which allow you to move faster in battle, if you raise your INT you can raise your Surgery skill, which makes it more likely your troops are knocked unconscious instead of killed. The personal skills tie to the individual unit, party skills affect the entire party and leadership skills only affect you (since you're the leader). I say individual unit because you can recruit 16 different unique characters that level up like the main character and not like the normal grunts. You can only ever have 8 at a time in your party however, since different subsets of them have personality conflicts with others and will leave your party. The trick is to find 8 that are compatible with each other and hold onto them and use them to boost party stats. You can use the others for short periods to your benefit like spread the word of your candidacy for ruler , but you can't keep them long without strife. In general, it makes the most sense to raise the personal skills of your character, since you will only be using yourself to attack and your named companions can't die, and to raise the party skills of your comrades to improve the overall group's abilities. I didn't do much with Leadership personally. Weapon skills level by use and you get 10 points per level to add as well. The overall gist of the game is to have one faction rule over the entire country. You can either join a faction and help them take over everything or create your own to become ruler of the land. For trophies, you need to do both but it's super easy to do them in one playthrough. You can create your own faction, destroy 5 of the other 6 and then become a Vassal for the last king and you'll make that kingdom the ruler of the land. You can then quit without saving and take over that ruler yourself. There are really only three types of battles in this game...tournament, field and siege. All three are pretty similar. In tournaments, nobody dies, only gets knocked out. In the field, you can ride on your horse and charge into battle. You can use a lance or bow or sword...there are tons of options and this game looks really cool riding on horseback into battle and are really a lot of fun. I found sieges to be pretty stupid for the most part. You get funneled into an area where only a couple guys can get through at a time...you can't break down the gate or anything and can just climb a narrow siege tower or one or two ladders. There's not even several ladders....just one or two. And when you have 100+ soldiers climbing at once with 100+ soldiers blocking the entrance....it's just very clusterfucky. Unfortunately, you do a TON of sieging. The good news, is that it's really pretty painless since the AI is dumb as all hell and a siege only takes 5-10 minutes. If you are part of a faction, you are at the whim of the king whether or not you can fight other factions. If you want to keep him happy, you can't start wars without the king first declaring war...and if a fief, castle or town is taken, you have to hope the king awards it to you. You can politic to get it given to you, but you have a lot of competition from the other Vassals. Owning a fief, castle or town is the best way to make money in the long run. Early in the game you have to win tournaments for any decent income and then turn that into 'an enterprising business' such as a brewery or dyeworks in one of the towns to get steady income weekly. You lose that income if you are at war with the faction the town is in, but I found it pretty easy to make money for the most part. At first, I was trying to level up all my troops to the highest form they can be...all soldiers start as recruits and then go up a tier 1, tier 2, tier 3 kind of leveling system. You can choose whether to make them infantry, knights or archers and the higher the tier they are, the more expensive they are per week. I was taking the time to level my guys and then put max level troops in the garrisons of my castles and towns....but it takes a good amount of time to level them up. I found it was much easier in the long run to keep a couple of towns for myself as income, and then give the rest away to my Vassals/lords for them to man with troops. I kept my garrisons full of chumps (lots of chumps though to dissuade other factions from sieging them) and I kept my roving army full of max tier troops more or less and just mowed through the countryside taking castle after castle once I changed to that strategy. I mostly used Swadian Knights, Nord Huscarl infantry and Rhodok Sharpshooters or Vaegir Marksman for archers. I hated Khergit troops and the Sarranid troops were decent at all three if they fell into my lap. There's really so much to talk about in this game that I could go on forever, but I'll switch over to the annoying things about the game that didn't stop me from loving it. The biggest and most consistent nuisance for me was swinging a sword. You can select in the options to either choose the direction you are swinging the sword yourself or have the character do it on its own, relative to the enemy you are fighting. I wanted to be able to select it myself, but the problem is, the button to choose the direction you swing is also the button for controlling the camera, so you switch from slashing to piercing to overhead all the time just trying to situate the camera and it's not always how you want to swing. The problem with having the computer do it, is since there can be tons of enemies around at once, it is a crapshoot half the time how you swing the sword but in the end I found that less annoying. It also takes a lot of practice figuring out how to hit ground troops while you are on a horse. I found the most success when I would swing the sword as I basically ran into the enemy...but while figuring it out, you swing and miss a lot from horseback. Once you level up Archery, I found that to be the most consistent form of attacking, but you can only carry 34 arrows if you decide to have a sword and shield as well. If you went strictly bow, you could carry over 100....but that's not good for close combat. Another fairly large nuisance was leveling troops. After battles or after midnight of the day, your troops would earn experience. Most times, some of them would level up. You would then go into the party screen and arrow down the right side of the screen to the troops you wanted to level. After selecting the troop to level, the cursor would switch over to the middle of the screen where you would select how many of that troop to level (it costs money to level) and/or select a specialization (archer, knight, etc). That worked just fine....the nuisance would be that when you arrowed back over to the right side of the screen to select the next set of troops to level, the cursor would bounce all the way to the top of the list and you'd have to arrow back down to the next troop in line. It doesn't sound like a big deal, but when you've got 6 different factions of troops types, with several different tiers within that troop along with mercenary's, bandits and farmers who could also be in your army, it gets really old really fast....especially later in the game when you can have well over 100 troops in your army. If it just went back to where you left off instead of all the way to the top, it'd have been sooooooooooo much better. The last complaint is the online portion. It takes the weakest part of the game, the siege's, and makes that the focus for battling. It's got things like capture the flag and deathmatch and stuff...but the servers were mostly dead and it was just really useless. The good part of the servers being mostly dead is it made it really easy to self boost the MP trophies with my PS4 and my sons profile, so it made that part mostly harmless....but it would have been way cooler if they made like a 2 on 2 mini campaign mode or something where each person starts with a town or castle and the object is to overthrow the others. It would have taken a lot longer than the 10 minute sessions it's set up for now....but would have made for a way more interesting MP experience that I would have actually had some interest in playing. There are a couple of other ticky tack kind of things that are annoying about the game, but I loved it too much to really remember them now. This game had it all for me...a great format during a cool era in time along with funny/clever trophy names with pretty good artwork to boot. I can fully acknowledge that this type of game is not for everyone, but I loved it and cannot recommend it enough. I can't really say how long it took to plat since I let it idle while I was working quite a bit...I'd try to play here and there during downtime, but because of that my time played is exceptionally inflated. I'd say it was a good 60-80 hours though. Conquering the whole map is quite time consuming. I could have probably done it faster if I wasn't trying to pop specific trophies at specific times, but make no mistake that there is some grinding to do in this one....but in the end it's all worth it for the 1% platinum, because let's be honest....aren't we all here for UR? ? Edited August 24, 2021 by Briste 6 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJ_Radio Posted August 24, 2021 Share Posted August 24, 2021 9 minutes ago, Briste said: Back when I was a kid, there was this place where masses of people used to congregate to go shopping that had tons of different types of stores called a 'mall'. It was always a big deal and it usually coincided with some sort of giant pretzel or a stop at Boardwalk Fries and it was amazing. My 'mall' had this awesome video game store that I always had to stop in when we went. It was called Electronics Boutique and it was every video game nerd's wet dream. By 1995, I was 14 and had been working for a couple years at my family's restaurant, so had some disposable income to throw at video games. I played a lot of PC games at the time in addition to my SNES, and one day when I was in Electronics Boutique, I looked up on the top shelf and saw a game with a Knight on the cover. I couldn't read the name and wasn't sure what it was, but because I was 14 and wanted to be a dick, I asked the clerk to come and get it down for me. He begrudgingly came over to get it muttering about how there was a reason it was on the top shelf since nobody buys this game. Well just to spite him, I decided to buy it (I sure showed him!) The game was called Conqueror A.D. 1086. In Conqueror, the game started with you as a young boy with aspirations of becoming a Knight and perhaps the King of all England one day. You would cross the map of England and do tasks for people and compete in tournaments (jousting was impossible in this game). I want to say you would try to wooo a bonnie lass to be your bride. You could beat the game one of three ways I think...you could defeat the dragon (which involved jousting), you could win over the country by winning all the tournaments (which involved jousting) or you could just be a warlord and take England by force (the only way I could every play the game). So, I'd take over fiefs and amass an army that was large enough to overthrow the king and try to win that way. The annoying thing about the game was the time limit. I think you had until you were like 30 years old to beat the game or it was game over. Time moved pretty quickly too iirc and the game was fun and challenging. I used to play it on and off for years until PC's got too good and too fast, that it couldn't play games like this anymore. I haven't played a game like this in close to 20 years probably. Why did I just waste your time talking about this relic that nobody in the world played? Because Mount & Blade: Warband was awesomely similar to my lost relic. In M&B you choose a backstory by answering a few questions before you start, then you get to customize what your hero looks like and his/her name. Since you have to beat the game as a female for a trophy, I played as Bristina of the Kingdom of Vaegirs, daughter of a Merchant and spent my early life as a street urchin, fending for myself and learning the ways of the world. As a young adult, I became a troubadour to try and escape the streets due to my excellent singing voice and love of poetry. I decided to become an adventurer for reasons of revenge after the love of my life was killed! Nah dude, you have to admit talking about nostalgia and your childhood a little was well worth writing about. I almost sort of envy you in a way and I'm a bit jealous of older Millennials like yourself because you guys really got to experience the old days when we practically had to physically haul ourselves to an electronics store to pick up. There was no fast internet back then either, so picking up a game was like feeling this sense of wonder, especially for something obscure like Conqueror A.D. 1086 because nobody had heard about it. We had an old computer store in my local area that my dad used to take me to, when Windows 95 and later Windows 98 were on the shelves. Seems like such a distant memory now, but I always like when people here talk about what they experienced growing up. I heard a LOT about Mount & Blade: Warband, but never quite got around to it. I won't bother playing it for trophies, I'll just pick it up on Steam when it's on sale and try it out for myself. 14 minutes ago, Briste said: Finally!! I actually enjoyed the Mordor games quite a bit, but overall I agree that there is not a ton of good LotR games out there. This one looks like it could be a bit of a slog so it's not something I'm going to jump right into. I'll let you know if it's any good. People like to keep harping that the two Middle Earth games are a bit overrated. I can agree, the best thing they going is the Nemesis System, which I felt was well designed. In Shadow of War they basically padded the Nemesis System so it's rather convoluted, especially if you didn't play the first game. Wasn't that bad though, I was fairly surprised that the platinum was a lot shorter than I expected. 16 minutes ago, Briste said: Since I don't look at URs in terms of difficulty all the time, I don't exactly see them that way. I look at them for exactly what they are...trophies that most people haven't got for one reason or another. I won't lie, when these huge sales come up, I look at the difficulty rating that gets included before I look at the title of the game. If I see it's an 8/10 or 9/10, I'll check it out to see if the genre is something I might like. If less than 1000 people have played it, I get even more interested. I get a kick out of playing really obscure stuff every once in a while. I enjoy the AAA games too, but I like finishing something that not a lot of people have attempted. Some of the stuff I played had URs simply for being incredibly niche. Pumped BMX+, a game that was initially on the internet, has a bunch of piss easy URs and one actual challenging one. Not that great of a game in all honesty, but all but one trophy can be easily obtained in just 20 - 30 minutes of playing. Other stuff I played I felt should of had lower rarities. Dead Space 2 on Hardcore was difficult for me, and it's only a VR as opposed to a UR platinum. So it'll be real interesting to see how NYMHC will turn out for me in Max Payne 3, since it's a sub 1 percent platinum. 19 minutes ago, Briste said: This is why I like the trophy hunting a lot. We might target the same types of games for very different reasons. You enjoy the challenge where as I enjoy venturing into the unknown. Those paths cross enough where we'll dabble in the same stuff. That's also why I like the term 'trophy hunting' since it covers a wide array of styles. Some hunters go for quantity over quality and some go for the big game trophy's. Some take their time to enjoy the hunt and some like to bag something every day. It's a hobby that can cater to whatever you want to take from it. That's the biggest reason why I wish there was a bit more variety with the leaderboard. This one is all about quantity, which is a huge turnoff to a significant number of hunter's. I don't check it out nearly as often, but I like the different boards over on PSNTL. The more broad ways of slicing and dicing up the profiles is much more interesting to me. I also feel like adding some more leaderboards would perhaps get rid of some of the toxicity surrounding the games people choose to play. Right now people bitch at each other over the influx of easy plat stacks that have heavily inflated the current leaderboard. Right now, that's the only leaderboard there is so people are consuming, what seems like, garbage games hand over fist to try and scale the mountaintop. If there were more leaderboards to choose from, those of us that don't care about that particular way of ranking, could find some other way to compare. I mean, I really don't care one way or the other, I just play games and looking at the rarity is one of the factors I use when deciding sometimes. I honestly wish Sony would stop allowing these stacks from entering the store but as we both know by now, that probably isn't going to happen. I literally discovered two indie games I might be interested in buying in the near future, that I basically missed because of all the crap coming in. It wasn't until I looked at other peoples reviews that I finally discovered them. I will never be anywhere close to the top, so there's no point in me even trying. So I much prefer to play stuff I want to play. The diversity is probably the main reason why I enjoy trophy hunting. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rally-Vincent--- Posted August 24, 2021 Share Posted August 24, 2021 16 hours ago, Briste said: I also feel like adding some more leaderboards would perhaps get rid of some of the toxicity surrounding the games people choose to play. It'll just shift to "Your UR is worse than mine because...". 16 hours ago, Briste said: In Conqueror, the game started with you as a young boy with aspirations of becoming a Knight and perhaps the King of all England one day. You would cross the map of England and do tasks for people and compete in tournaments (jousting was impossible in this game). I want to say you would try to wooo a bonnie lass to be your bride. You could beat the game one of three ways I think...you could defeat the dragon (which involved jousting), you could win over the country by winning all the tournaments (which involved jousting) or you could just be a warlord and take England by force (the only way I could ever play the game). So, I'd take over fiefs and amass an army that was large enough to overthrow the king and try to win that way. The annoying thing about the game was the time limit. I think you had until you were like 30 years old to beat the game or it was game over. Time moved pretty quickly too iirc but the game was fun and challenging. I used to play it on and off for years until PC's got too good and too fast, that it couldn't play games like this anymore. I haven't played a game like this in close to 20 years probably. You know where jousting was possible? In Defender of the Crown. 1986 was the future. Well, somewhat. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Copanele Posted August 27, 2021 Share Posted August 27, 2021 On 8/24/2021 at 6:18 AM, Briste said: The game was called Conqueror A.D. 1086. --- On 8/24/2021 at 6:18 AM, Briste said: Why did I just waste your time talking about this relic that nobody in the world played? Because Mount & Blade: Warband was awesomely similar to my lost relic. In M&B you choose a backstory by answering a few questions before you start, then you get to customize what your hero looks like and his/her name. Since you have to beat the game as a female for a trophy, I played as Bristina of the Kingdom of Vaegirs, daughter of a Merchant who spent my early life as a street urchin, fending for myself and learning the ways of the world. As a young adult, I became a troubadour to try and escape the streets due to my excellent singing voice and love of poetry. I decided to become an adventurer for reasons of revenge after the love of my life was killed! I BEG YOUR PARDON SIR! I shall never forget the Elite Knights/King's Guard/whatever they were called going ARRRR every time they were chasing you down the corridor Given, I had no idea what I was doing in that game but damn it was fun. Hard to pick a damsel too! Big congrats for the platinum! So glad there's at least another person who loved this game. Mount & Blade Warband is pure love and atmosphere and if I remember correctly, the original game (that had no story) was developed by a Turkish couple. So many lost hours in this game, it's one of the games I am afraid of because it's way too addictive! Also Vaegirs are the best choice hands down. Slav squatting your way to victory ? 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted August 29, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted August 29, 2021 On 8/23/2021 at 11:40 PM, AJ_Radio said: I heard a LOT about Mount & Blade: Warband, but never quite got around to it. I won't bother playing it for trophies, I'll just pick it up on Steam when it's on sale and try it out for myself. The trophies honestly aren't that bad outside the MP ones if you don't boost. It does also play well enough on the PS where it is a fun experience, but you can definitely tell this game was meant to be played with a mouse. But so long as you experience, it's cool wherever you play it On 8/23/2021 at 11:40 PM, AJ_Radio said: People like to keep harping that the two Middle Earth games are a bit overrated. I can agree, the best thing they going is the Nemesis System, which I felt was well designed. In Shadow of War they basically padded the Nemesis System so it's rather convoluted, especially if you didn't play the first game. Wasn't that bad though, I was fairly surprised that the platinum was a lot shorter than I expected. I also liked that the combat in was similar to the Arkham games. It made it pretty seamless for me to pick it up quickly. It felt like a cross between Assassin's Creed and the Arkham games, and I also thought the nemesis system was pretty cool. I enjoyed the first one a bit more than the second....but they were both good in my opinion. On 8/24/2021 at 3:44 PM, Rally-Vincent--- said: It'll just shift to "Your UR is worse than mine because...". lol I suppose that is probably true.... On 8/24/2021 at 3:44 PM, Rally-Vincent--- said: You know where jousting was possible? In Defender of the Crown. 1986 was the future. I need to find that soundtrack for my iPod. It was hilarious how much the lance bounced up in down in that video ? On 8/27/2021 at 2:49 AM, Copanele said: I BEG YOUR PARDON SIR! I shall never forget the Elite Knights/King's Guard/whatever they were called going ARRRR every time they were chasing you down the corridor Given, I had no idea what I was doing in that game but damn it was fun. Hard to pick a damsel too! That is so awesome that you know what I'm talking about. I had forgotten about the ARRRRR until you just mentioned it, but you are 100% right lol I remember once you got the Armor Piercing or Man-Eater Sword or something like that, combat became wicked easy, but it was still a ton of fun. Did you ever get any good at the jousting? I think I knocked one guy off his horse out of all the times I tried and I had no idea how it happened. There was no YouTube back in the day to learn how to do it and the game was obscure enough where I couldn't ask anyone. It was absolutely maddening lol On 8/27/2021 at 2:49 AM, Copanele said: Big congrats for the platinum! So glad there's at least another person who loved this game. Mount & Blade Warband is pure love and atmosphere and if I remember correctly, the original game (that had no story) was developed by a Turkish couple. So many lost hours in this game, it's one of the games I am afraid of because it's way too addictive! Thanks! I definitely stayed up way too late on many nights because the fights were just short enough where you felt like you could do just one more. I was also afraid of losing my train of thought with what I was working on and wanted to finish up whatever that task might have been. It was well worth it though. On 8/27/2021 at 2:49 AM, Copanele said: Also Vaegirs are the best choice hands down. Slav squatting your way to victory I started out that way, but by the end I liked the Nords the best. I loved the Huscarls and I thought the tournaments in the Nord towns were the fastest to get through since you didn't have to worry about getting stuck with lances. Some of those tournaments where it was you vs someone else and you both had a lance took a pretty long time to finish lol I took over the Swadians first and ended up being pretty partial to Swadian Knights as well...I flat out hated the Khergit....I thought they had the worst troops when they were on my side and they were annoying to fight against since everyone was on a horse. Do you know of any other games that are like M&B? I don't want to go 20 years in between this style of play. Platinum #153 2064: Read Only Memories I think I got this game for 'free' a couple years ago with my PS+ subscription. It wasn't anything that was really on my radar until this past week when I was going through my backlog to see what I had that might be a shorter game, with a number I need for the GBN event. When I checked the 100% tab on this games page, I saw it could be done in just over 5 hours (if you skip all the text) and figured I could easily get it done in a week. It's the second game I've finished this month with really retro graphics (NeverEnd being the other) and the first point and click game I've played in a bit. I ended up enjoying it. It had a bit of a Steins; Gate crossed with a Detroit: Become Human kind of feel to it. The game takes place in 2064 and you are a struggling investigative journalist, who is surprised one morning in your house, by a ROM who is seeking your help to find his missing creator. This ROM is the first ever sentient ROM and it feels like its existence may have something to do with the disappearance of his creator. Your sidekick being a sentient ROM is what gives it that Detroit: Become Human feeling and all the hacker talk and character personalities give it that Steins; Gate feel. The game is littered with interesting characters. Starfucker and Oliver were my personal favorites follow closely by Majid and Gus. I haven't played a ton of games like this, but it was pretty progressive with its use of language and sexuality. It uses a lot of 'they/their' pronouns when referring to people and also lets you choose your own when you name your character. The sexuality of the characters is very fluid and I think the game does a really good job of making it natural. I know a lot of times when these subjects are broached in games, it can feel either patronizing or preachy depending on what side of the fence you fall on. This game never actually makes a big deal out of it and just treats it as something that is a part of every day life. Since the game treats the language and sexuality of its characters organically, it doesn't come across as being 'in your face', preachy or patronizing. It just is. One of the big reasons that pronouns outside of 'he/she' is used is because in the future there are 'hybrids' who are people that have genetically modified themselves with animal DNA for one reason or another or with cybernetic implants. The reasons could be personal or to combat disease or enhance certain senses. Some characters will share with you why they became a hybrid and some do not. The civil rights struggle of the time is for Hybrids to be treated as human and there is an anti-hybrids organization that opposes them. Needless to say, you get thrust into a few emotionally charged scenarios where tension is high and have to figure out the best way to talk to the characters to get what you need. This is another game that has several endings....fortunately you can get through all of them in just two playthroughs (the guide on here is really good to minimize playthroughs and does a good job as well minimizing any potential spoilers). I used the guide since I was trying to get this done in time for the end of the event. This is not how I usually play these games. Most point and click games I've played aren't terribly long and I like to try and do a blind playthrough the first time if I can unless I get completely stuck. This game has 65 trophies and I'd bet that 50 of them are missable and even with the guide I messed up on two of the trophies (I forgot to talk to my plant in one of the chapters so it died). A couple of the trophies were pretty hard/annoying and they both involved the only places where combat is involved. There are two parts of the game that involve shooting minigames and in both, it seems impossible to meet the requirements due to how sluggish the controls feel in those parts...however, both of them only took me about 20 minutes to get so even the hard trophies weren't that bad. Considering the recent discussion going on in this thread....this game is super easy and has a 7.35% platinum rarity. This is a very rare game that probably has more to do with the missable trophies and being on PS+ than anything else. You are able to skip the text by holding down and can get through a playthrough in about an hour and a half if you do the bare minimum. I did the first playthrough reading/listening to all of the dialogue (the voice acting is surprisingly good in this game) and then 'd through the second playthrough. The dialogue choices didn't change enough to make it worth re-reading everything all over again. BUT this is a game that you can't look at the rarity...at all... and say this is hard....Including the platinum, there are 13 trophies that are 10% rarity or less and 56 that are 20% rarity or less. If there were a rarity board, this would be one of those games that I feel would go up quite a bit for those chasing the leaderboard...which would then bring the rarity up to something more that makes sense. Even though I didn't pay for this game, it was good enough to throw $5 at if you didn't get it for 'free' when it was available. The story is decent and there is enough comedy to make this an entertaining game (there's some great bear puns in one of the areas). Plus it is a game that starts with a number if you happen to be chasing a platinum alphabet. I'm going to try and squeeze one more potentially short game in before Tuesday night though I'm not sure I can beat Downwell in 3 days, but I'll give it the old college try! 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Copanele Posted August 29, 2021 Share Posted August 29, 2021 8 hours ago, Briste said: That is so awesome that you know what I'm talking about. I had forgotten about the ARRRRR until you just mentioned it, but you are 100% right lol I remember once you got the Armor Piercing or Man-Eater Sword or something like that, combat became wicked easy, but it was still a ton of fun. Did you ever get any good at the jousting? I think I knocked one guy off his horse out of all the times I tried and I had no idea how it happened. There was no YouTube back in the day to learn how to do it and the game was obscure enough where I couldn't ask anyone. It was absolutely maddening lol Nope, I had NO idea how jousting worked, I barely knew proper english back then all I know is that I was flicking the mouse towards the knave that was trying to steal my damsel and he fell...most of the time. Not always though so I might have been lucky lol. Damsels were pretty content with my Tournament strats though ? I should really re-pick that game on an emulator... 8 hours ago, Briste said: I started out that way, but by the end I liked the Nords the best. I loved the Huscarls and I thought the tournaments in the Nord towns were the fastest to get through since you didn't have to worry about getting stuck with lances. Some of those tournaments where it was you vs someone else and you both had a lance took a pretty long time to finish lol I took over the Swadians first and ended up being pretty partial to Swadian Knights as well...I flat out hated the Khergit....I thought they had the worst troops when they were on my side and they were annoying to fight against since everyone was on a horse. Do you know of any other games that are like M&B? I don't want to go 20 years in between this style of play. Lol everyone agrees that Khergits sucked ass goddamn spear tossers and bow users. However on high difficulties Khergits were the worst to defeat, since their aim was 360 noscope every time. Nords were badass in sieges but on battlefield I had a bunch of angry dwarves chasing down Swadian cavalry, battles took way more time. As for the same style...sadly I don't know anything on Playstation other than Kingdom Come Deliverance (and it doesn't even come close, I know). On PC you either have the upcoming Mount&Blade II Bannerlord (can't wait) or medieval simulators like Mordhau. Unfortunately M&B is one of its kind... 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted September 4, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted September 4, 2021 (edited) It's been some radio silence from me this week, a lot of it due to being busy at work and the rest for me not having much time to try and finish up the GBN event. It took me 16 games to get all 10 numbers done...mostly because I wanted to play some games that weren't going to count, but a couple were because I looked at the wrong version of the game to get the number lol In the week leading up to the end of GBN, I finished 7 games....which is a real lot for me since I don't generally play a bunch of short games. However, with only a week left after finishing Mount & Blade: Warband and five numbers needed, I had to scrap whatever I could together to finish (technically 4 since Dragon Age is a '7' and had been ready to pop since May). I had actually thought M&B was a number I needed while I was playing it so thought I'd have a week to go and only 3, but I was wrong lol At first, when I saw I still needed 4 games, I was going to just give up on it....but I just don't like giving up on things if I think I can do it....so I looked over my backlog and saw that 2064: Read Only Memories seemed possible to do in a few days and also was a number I needed. Most of the other games in my backlog were too long, so I got to work on 2064: ROM. It took a bit longer than I anticipated (I had been hoping to play a little during work hours, but I was super busy at work and really didn't get to). It took me just over 4 days to beat and now I needed 3 games in 3 days. Definitely doable, but I'd need to make a couple of purchases to make it so. Since I didn't have any in my backlog that I felt I could get done in time, I scoured the list of completed games during the event over the last 3 years (@eigen-space has an awesome tableau setup that you can use for research) and found more than a few candidates. The only thing I didn't want to do was any of those Breakthrough games or 2 minute Rata plats. I didn't want to 'buy' my finish. I tried to pick games that would at least take 4 hours or more and if they were going to be that short, I wanted non-plat games so I didn't artificially boost my plat numbers. The first game I selected was: Monopoly Plus It seemed quick, was less than $5 and I thought it was a game I'd be able to play again later at any time if we wanted to play as a family one day. It was under that 4 hour threshold I had wanted to stay above, but I also thought it'd be a good opportunity to introduce the game to my son. Being only 7, he didn't really understand the idea of buying property and paying rent, etc, however he did like the game pieces. His favorite was the dog so I let him play as that one while I was the shoe. I'm always the shoe....I don't know why anyone would choose anything other than the shoe...One of the trophies requires playing with 6 people, but you can do it using one controller, so I just started the game with 6 and immediately declared bankruptcy with 4 of them so just the two of us could play. The game is actually pretty good. The graphics aren't bad for a board game, it's got several different types of house rules...growing up we always played where fines went into the middle of the board and anyone who landed on 'Free Parking' would get it...and that mode was available! They had several other 'house rules' setups, but I had never played any of them before. The trophy list was super easy and I got most of them without even trying. There are two that are RNG related. One for getting the highest roll of the dice at the beginning of the game to go first and one for getting a Chance/Community Chest card that gives you over $100. Neither are hard or take long...but you are a bit at the mercy of the RNGods. The card one took a little while since only the main profile gets trophies, and the shoe just wasn't landing on card spots on the board. If I did get a card, I had to pay money or go to jail or something. The game ended up lasting just long enough. My son was starting to get a little board...(see what I did there )...so I ended up stopping that game right after getting the last trophy. The game is actually a really good realization of Monopoly and if you like board games and/or are looking for some family stuff to play, this isn't a bad choice at all. You can play classic board or a fancy 3D city board and for under $5, you really can't complain. For trophies, it only took a little over an hour to get the 100% which was very good for my chances to finish up the event. Now I still had 3 days and only needed 2 games to finish. After scouring the Tableau again, I found: Platinum #154 Minesweeper Genius It was a '6' game and that was one of the numbers I needed. When I looked it up on the PS Store, it was going for the massive price of $0.59. I have played hundreds of hours of Minesweeper over the years. I'm not sure if this is something kids still play these days, however it was one of the two games that came with Windows when I was a kid. It was either Minesweeper or Solitaire, and Minesweeper was much less conspicuous in the computer lab at school to hide when the teacher was walking by. I got pretty good at it too. Before cell phone games, there was minesweeper. Considering my extensive experience with the game and the fact I just played a Minesweeper style mini-game in Shiren The Wanderer, I felt like this could be a good choice for me. In addition to those other reasons, I also had my first fantasy football draft of the season coming up later in the day and Minesweeper seemed like the perfect game to be able to play on and off while doing my draft...and if the game sucked, it cost nothing to buy. This game took a little getting used to because it's not set up like your normal Minesweeper game. In this game you play as Aristotle, and you have to navigate him through the Minefield to his destination. He sweeps the floor as he walks and if you walk into a bomb spot, you die and if not, you can continue. You cannot walk over already discovered spots so it's just a matter of finding the safe path through. The board is setup kind of like Sudoku where you can see along the X and Y axis how many bombs are in that row/column. You then have to figure out which direction is the safe way to go. In addition to normal walking, there are also special floor boards with different types of arrows on them that will manipulate the board in some way. One type of arrow will jump you over the next square, one type will shift the entire row you are on the direction the arrow is pointing and one type will shift just that square. It adds a tiny wrinkle to the puzzle, however there is only ever one path through a board. What makes this game a little challenging is that the boards are all randomized. To get the platinum, you need to get 3 stars on every level. Each time you die, you lose a star, so you need to be perfect on the run. If you restart the board or die 3 times, the level resets and it is a new board. I like this because it makes it not an easy peasy game where you can look up all the solutions. I'm actually kind of shocked the completion % is over 60% because there is no cheating or looking up solutions in this game. While the game isn't easy peasy, the only downside I found is that it actually got a lot easier the further I got because you get used to seeing patterns in the way the boards are setup. Even though the boards get a little bigger, there's not a ton of variety that they can do. The boards also don't get that big (I think 8x12 is the biggest board you play one) so it ends up being pretty easy by the end. It turned out to be a really fun game though. As far as cost per hour of enjoyment...this game might be the best I've ever played lol. It took me about 6 or 7 hours to do the whole thing so the game cost me less than a dime per hour. I seriously considered making this game be a milestone for fastest platinum. I enjoyed it quite a bit, Aristotle is a boss and the platinum title of 'True Genius' is just the kind of humble title I like to choose for myself and immortalize in my milestones. In the end I decided against it though since The Wolf Among Us is still one of my favorite games and I also like that trophy image quite a bit. It's not nearly as funny and I kind of wish I did pull the trigger on the change since I like humor more than art...but at least I still like what's there. If you like puzzle games, this is a nice little game to pick up. It was good that I enjoyed it as much as I did and that it was so cheap, because this game didn't end up counting lol The version of the game that was a '6' was the EU version...and I am in NA....so I proudly got to add another '5' to my list of GBN games The good news was I still had 2 days to finish 2 games...but now I needed another 6! This is going to be a 'to be continued' post since this seems long enough already. Part 2 of my cramming to finish the GBN event comes tomorrow! Edited September 4, 2021 by Briste 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Popular Post Briste Posted September 5, 2021 Author Popular Post Share Posted September 5, 2021 (edited) Ok, so I had two days to go and two numbers left. The challenge was going to be that these were work days and I wouldn't have a ton of time to play anything that needed full attention. I needed to find some shorter point and click style game or something that I could stop playing and leave idle for long stretches. Looking over the Tableau, I saw two potential games....one of which was a VR game. Those tend to be on the shorter side of things. It was $15, but I know VR games are a bit inflated in price because they are OMGVR games. Since that game had a platinum and I didn't want to risk it becoming my new fastest platinum, I started Déraciné first to pop an early trophy or two to start the timer and then I started Sacra Terra: Kiss of Death. The latter of the two was the first I did end up popping. Sacra Terra: Kiss of Death I had never heard of this game before. It ended up being on the tableau from two or three years ago and I checked the game page and it looked to be something that would take around 4 hours or so to finish and was a non-plat game. I also saw that it was a puzzle/adventure style game and thought this would be a perfect kind of game that I could start and then put down for a bit if I got busy at work. The other bonus was that I could also use it for the PS3 event, but that wasn't the impetus behind this purchase. The only real bummer about this game being a PS3 title was there was no chance for a sale. The game was $11.99 and was almost above what I was willing to spend on a last second game for an event. But, I figured beggars can't be choosers and just pulled the trigger. I was actually pleasantly surprised by this game. This was another entry that unexpectedly hit a nostalgia note for me. It reminded me of a few older PC games that I had loved playing as a kid in Return to Zork, Death Gate, Myst, and Shannara. All of these were point and click style puzzle, adventure games and this was made in the same mold. I'll come out and say off the bat that this game had perhaps the worst voice acting I've ever heard in anything....ever (skip to 1:25 in). The Succubus wasn't so bad....but everything else, especially the boyfriend, was just terrible. The game starts with a couple about to sit down to dinner at the lady's house. The phone rings and the woman gets up to answer the phone. While she is on the phone, the man has a wedding ring box in his hand and is intending to propose to his girlfriend. At this moment....for reasons....the man picks up a book he sees lying on the ground. This book is some sort of magical book with satanic spells inside. He reads one of the passages while his girlfriend is on the phone and inadvertently summons a succubus who comes to steal his soul. In this game, you play the girlfriend who goes to a mysterious island to try and save the soul of your captured boyfriend before it is too late. After the introductory chapter, some weird fisherman dude takes you to the island and warns you that the succubus is very powerful while she has control of all the souls. Your job is to free some of these souls to weaken her enough to free your soon-to-be fiancé from her clutches. There are four different soul stories that you are tasked with freeing. You need to figure out what the souls need to be freed from their hell. It follows the usual point and click, find the relevant item to use on a different screen to progress through the story/puzzle, as most of these games do. This game was actually really easy though. When you pull up the map, there are several hearts like the one in the trophy image above. If the heart is devoid of color, you either haven't been there yet or there is nothing new you can do in there. If it is green, it means there is a clue in that room that you need to find. The room you are in is colored yellow and if it is half yellow and half green, you know there is something to do in the current room you are in. Having the map like this made it really easy to solve the puzzles. You never have a ton of inventory, so there's not too much trial and error and it makes it very easy to see where you need to go next. Littered throughout the game are 'HOS' (Hidden Object Searches?) parts where you are given an area with a mess of stuff in it and you have to find each object that is located on the list below. Kind of like a word search, but with objects. After you find all of the objects, you are given some item that will be needed to progress the story, so there's no option to skip these. They aren't that hard, but some of the stuff was not obvious at all to find. It was alright to do, but really didn't seem to have anything to do with anything in the story and was just something else to give you as a puzzle. You have to do two playthroughs for the 100%, and one of them has to be on hard without using clues. Honestly, since the map is one giant clue, there's never really a need to use the clue button anyways. It probably took me about 3.5 - 4 hours to beat it the first time and then an hour and a half or so the second time when I skipped through all the dialogue and knew what the solutions were to the puzzles. I'd have a hard time recommending this game to someone. It's really not worth $11.99 and while I enjoyed it for the nostalgia ding, the story isn't very good, the voice acting is garbage and the puzzles aren't very inspired either. The best thing about this game, was the fact that it ended with a '4' and meant I only had one game left to finish the event. The last game to finish was: Platinum #155 Déraciné It was 8:50pm EST when I finished Sacra Terra: Kiss of Death and I was really hoping to be to bed by 1:00am at the latest. The first couple of trophies in this game popped after only ten minutes or so of playing the night before, so I had to try and finish this whole game in 3 hours...which turned into 2 hours since my wife wanted to watch a little TV with me from like 9-10:30pm. We have a deal that I won't neglect to spend time with her to play video games if she is awake. This deal allows me to play quite a bit still. I usually play a bit after my kids go to bed around 8:00pm. I often get about an hour to play then since my wife likes to do bedtime songs, take a shower and then call her mother most nights. Once she is off the phone, we'll hang out until she gets tired and goes to bed. If I'm also tired, I'll go to bed too, but most nights I'll come down and play for another hour or two before I call it a night. This arrangement works out pretty well for us and the only challenge I was going to have was to get to bed at a reasonable hour considering I had to get up for my kids first day of school in the am lol Anyways, this game is also a puzzle game in the ilk of Sacra Terra except much more interactive since it is a VR game. You are a good fairy who lives at some sort of small, mystical boarding school in the woods. The game starts with you learning the controls and ending up in the girls dormitory, where you come into possession of two rings. One ring allows you to steal the life essence from something and the other allows you to move time. You can take the life essence of anything living whether it be plant, animal or person and your ring holds onto that essence until you pass it on to someone else. I say anything, but you really only use the ring a handful of times. The time ring is basically a device the game uses to move from one chapter to the next. Once you have solved the puzzle for a particular chapter, the time ring pulses, letting you know it is ok to move on. Other than moving to the next chapter, that ring doesn't do anything. The first couple of chapters involve learning the layout of the school and how to use your new toys. The first 'mission' is to help one of the girls play a prank on her classmates. The puzzles are extremely short, but not necessarily obvious. I mean, one of the chapters involved picking out a chair I'd like to be my own. Once you select your chair (that you never actually use) the chapter is over...A few chapters took 15-20 minutes, but most could be done in just a few. This game was really, pretty weird. I've always thought of fairies as being pixies...however in this game, it seems that a fairy is more of a human phantom than your stereotypical pixie. Movement in this game follows the all-too-common in VR games of 'phasing' from predesignated spot to predesignated spot. I really don't like this about a lot of VR games. I get that graphically it is probably pretty hard to have flowing movement...but I've play quite a few games that allow normal walking. Many of the VR games I've played involve being stationary or only traveling to specific spots in a room and it feels lazy. DOOM VFR has been far and away the best VR experience I've had and that had free flowing movement AND guns AND enemies...so it can definitely be done. DriveClub VR has been decent too, but I'm not a huge racing game fan. The story of this game is never truly apparent. It takes several chapters before a story even begins to take form. Half the game is just doing things that 'a good fairy' might do like helping the kids find lost items, play a prank or bring back to life a dead pet. I assume this is to help you get to know the different kids at the school....but the chapters are so flipping short that you don't even really learn their names. Towards the end of the game, you finally learn what your purpose is. I will say spoiler warning, but the story is so thin in this game that it's not much of a spoiler. Spoiler Apparently there is an evil fairy that has drained the life of the students, and you have to go back in time to try and prevent this from happening. There are major gaps in the story, the timeline gets very muddled and there just isn't enough time in the game to actually care about any of the characters. After the initial 'this looks cool' that I get from most VR games, Déraciné just really had nothing else to offer. The biggest bummer was it took me until 1:30am to finish up so I didn't get a ton of sleep, however having worked third shift for ten years, I'm used to functioning on little to no sleep for short bursts. It is definitely not worth the $14.99 I spent on it and I'm going to be a bit more discerning in the future about which VR games I invest time into. While this was a last second choice to finish the event, I had really hoped for something a little better. Every other game I played felt like there was something redeeming about it....but this one just wasn't very good. So, I had finished all my games and could finally go to sleep right? To be continued.... Edited September 5, 2021 by Briste 5 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Briste Posted September 6, 2021 Author Share Posted September 6, 2021 And tonight, the final episode of the saga of my rush to finish GBN. We left off at 1:30am on the night the event was over with a shiny new platinum trophy for the mediocre Déraciné and I was finally able to go to sleep having achieved my goal in the nick of time. Shut off my PS4, brushed my teeth and slipped into bed, hoping my wife wouldn't notice the time....anybody feel like I forgot something? I feel like I forgot something....I definitely forgot something....oh wait..........oh shit.....god dammit!!! Slip back out of bed, tip toe back downstairs and boot up the PS3. I had forgotten to pop the last trophy for Dragon Age: Origins!!! How funny would it have been if I did all that work at the deadline to finish all my numbers but failed because I forgot to pop the last trophy on a game that's been ready since the end of May? Well I turned on the PS3, loaded DA: Origins...started a new game in the Golem DLC, picked the warrior class, leveled up and ping! Platinum #156 Dragon Age: Origins I had bought this whole series several years ago on sale, simply because it had the name Dragon in the title and it sounded cool. As I've made clear before, I do top notch research on all titles before purchasing. Well, I never really felt the itch to play them, what with all the other amazing games in my backlog, and it kept getting pushed back. After playing the ME series during the winter, I felt like I had waited long enough on this other Bioware series. I'd heard pretty good things about it and I loved the ME series so much I figured I should play this sooner rather than later. It also helped that I joined the PS3 event and the RPG event. Starting this series was killing many birds with one stone. The original plan was to play these back to back to back and have them ready to pop on my birthday platinum rain back in May, however that was scrapped once I started to get sidetracked on several other games. Then I was coming up on my platinum milestone and I had to decide if I wanted to squeeze these games in before 150 or after. I decided on after since there were a few other games that I had gotten into right around the time of my birthday and while this entry was ready to be popped on my birthday, I held off on it. While I did have a good time with this game, it didn't have quite the same impact that Mass Effect did. It's not fair to compare this one game to the whole series yet since I haven't finished this series yet, but I felt like ME broke a whole lot more ground than this game did. Don't get me wrong, it is still quite good, but there were some things that felt pretty dated with this game. Mainly the combat. I decided to play as a Dwarven Noble Rogue (I almost always choose the rogue class when available). I usually play as a human character, but decided to mix it up a bit this time. The Dwarven Noble is betrayed by his brother and exiled from the city, only to be scooped up by the Wardens, who are the worlds best warriors against the upcoming blight. The blight being the invasion of the Dark Spawn and their Dragon leader. Through many betrayals and many quests and journeys, you become part of the last hope to save the Fereldan land from the Dark Spawn. The story is pretty good and if you take the time to read all of the codex's, there is actually quite a bit of lore that goes with it. For a game over a decade old, the graphics were still pretty decent too. My favorite part of the game was the witty banter and voice acting. The voice acting was quite good, even if I heard 'A cunning trap!!' several hundred times. There was quite a bit of comedy and I really like how Bioware lets you choose the way that you want to reply to dialogue. You could be virtuous, funny or a complete dick. I usually choose the virtuous or funny ways, but in order to manipulate some relationships in this game, you are forced to be a dick from time to time. My goal was to limit my number of playthroughs to one if possible. These longer games can get brutal sometimes when you have to do full playthroughs for one or two trophies. That was actually the biggest downside to ME for me, the quest trophies that required 3 playthroughs...In this game, the thing that looked like it would cause a couple playthroughs was the romance trophies and the leveling trophies. Supposedly, it's really hard to romance both Leliana and Morrigan in the same playthrough. I actually did it by accident. I didn't read up on how to do the romances until after I had already romanced two people. What I did was romance Morrigan as soon as I could by focusing on all of her stuff right away. I had barely even spoken to Leliana by the time I had finished the Morrigan romance. I broke off the romance with Morrigan pretty amicably and then had a quick rebound fling with Zevran, who didn't seem to mind the fling part of it. I then did Leliana's romance just fine and she ended up being my one and special someone throughout the remainder of the game. That meant I only had to do a very brief playthrough with a female character to romance Alistair. I still think it's weird to watch a sex scene in these games and for some reason it seems like it's a prerequisite to releasing a Bioware game....but I was happy that the number of playthroughs wasn't going to be the thing that soured my experience with the game. So, I had mentioned that I felt the combat wasn't terribly good. That's not exactly true. The reason I felt it wasn't good is due to the fact it is an auto attack setup. Engage the enemy, and then just sit there. I mean I guess it can be better than mashing buttons, but it was just kind of boring. I was dual wielding for a while and then made the change to a bow about a third of the way into the game. The damage on the bow was pretty sick once you upgraded the abilities and it kept me pretty safe throughout. While the actual combat itself was pretty boring, I did like how they handled abilities in this game. I thought it was cool how they had 3 different types of abilities. Passive abilities, which are always active; active abilities, which are ones that occur right after you use them; and sustained abilities, which are ones that eat up a certain percentage of your stamina, but are always active until you turn them off. For example, the 'Aim' archery ability eats up 5% of your stamina permanently while active, however while active, that ability decreases your rate of fire while raising a bunch of other stats like accuracy and damage. You can flip it on or off whenever you want, which I thought was a cool wrinkle. I can't recall playing another game like that and it was a pretty innovative way to make combat have a lot more dimensions to it. There was a ton of DLC for this game and they were mostly fine....it added a little depth to the characters and lore, but I don't think they really needed to be made. They were definitely worth paying for since they did eliminate two near full playthroughs from the base game. There is a trophy for getting each job class to level 20. I beat the entire game, doing everything and my rogue was only level 24....so to get the other two jobs to level 20 would have basically been full playthroughs. The good news is with two of the DLC's, your character starts at level 20 so you just have to start the DLC with the other job types, press the 'level up' button and the trophies will pop. It saved a good 40-50 hours of replaying the same game. Not that the game isn't good enough to play through 3 times....but I have so many games I want to play that unless additional playthroughs really add something to the experience, I'd rather move onto something else. I'll do it if I have to, but things that cut out several hours of repetitiveness are a win in my book. The grindiest trophy was for killing 1000 darkspawn. For a game about eliminating the dark spawn....you don't really fight a lot of them throughout the game. You fight a ton in the beginning and a ton at the end and not much in between. Fortunately, the counter for the game seems to count all playthroughs and times you reload a prior save. I ended up just replaying one of the last zones over and over until it popped. It was really the only grind-y trophy though. So....now that I popped this trophy I had truly and officially finished my GBN event and could go to sleep. It was 2:00am by the time I went to bed, but looking at this awesome badge by @Spacey Dweeb I think the effort was worth it. It's also fitting that Dragon Age: Origins is the game to get me my dragon badge I'm going to take a break from some events for a bit so I can clean up some of the stuff in my backlog. Most events don't allow DLC only playthroughs to count, so I'll never be able to finish TLOU2 or KH3 or AHIT if I keep signing up for stuff. Once those beasts are slain, I'll be back in the saddle! 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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