Insomniac Nightmares

It’s been slow going on the trophy front for the last week; between spending a lot of time dealing with medical problems and working on Black Yard and the games I had on hand either being time sinks or being annoying and unfun to start with, progress was stalled.

I did, however, kick out three Platinums since we last spoke; Yomawari: Night Alone finally gave up the ghost, so to speak, after wrapping a rubber band around the thumbstick and glaring at the Vita for a couple of days. “Long Night” is potentially the trophy I am most angry at for existing. I don’t mind “play for this long” trophies in some games, so long as they make for at least a semi-logical timeframe. But if your game takes around 5 hours to 100%, including multiple RNG factors and a metric crapton of pattern memorization and dying until you get it just right, you don’t need a damned trophy to play it for 50 hours. No one is wandering around that map for ten times longer than they need to just for funsies. But at least it finally popped.

Steins;Gate 0 was also encountered and defeated. This was also a bit of a sour one. I’ve heard, repeatedly, that the Steins;Gate games are amazing visual novels. I haven’t tried the first one as of yet (though it is installed on my PS3), but 0 was possibly the most boring one I’ve played other than Nekopara. I worked my way through the first four chapters, discovering that the only real choices you were making were whether to answer your phone or not – you get text messages sometimes, and can respond to them in a variety of ways, but they don’t actually change anything – and even then that happens maybe once a chapter… well. I was less than impressed. The fact I didn’t care about any of the characters, actively hated at least two of them and was bored to tears with what story I’d been presented with didn’t help. I’m not ashamed to admit I put the little bugger in fast forward and blitzed out the trophies before dropping it back in the mailbox.

On the other hand, for an actually entertaining visual novel-style game, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is finally complete. It took longer than expected – as with a lot of VNs or adventure games, sometimes you will bash your head against the wall repeatedly even when you know the answer, because the game wants you to present it their way, which is sometimes a little obtuse – but it was still fun, funny, and appropriately emotional at times. There weren’t enough “do random stuff” trophies for my taste, and the “collectible” trophies varied between “why is this even an achievement?” to “how much of this do I have to endure?”, so could have used a little evening out, but I don’t regret my time with Nick and his friends. Well worth it.

So far as what’s next, I still have to deal with HTOL#NIQ, which shares a cartridge with Yomawari. I don’t know if it’s a game I can actually platinum or not, but I’ll try. Also, inspired by YouTuber NitroRad’s Halloween Specials, I came back to Siren and NightCry, making a little progress in each. Siren is occasionally frustrating, but still a decent enough game (and hey, Sony, if you’re reading this? Can we get Forbidden Siren 2 or Siren: Blood Curse ported over to PS4? Thanks). NightCry is active torture. Whoever let that thing get released with those frame rate issues should be shot. (Ever play a Clock Tower, Haunting Ground, or Outlast? Picture trying to run from the enemies in those games with a stamina bar that makes Sebastian in The Evil Within look like a Kenyan long-distance runner, incredibly twisty paths, and running at 5 FPS or less. Yeah. It’s that bad.) Which, since I’m begging Sony for stuff anyway, hey, can we get Clock Tower 3 and Haunting Ground as PS4 ports? Or even PS2 classics on PS3? Pretty please?

Anyway. That’s it for now. I have to go make another room in Black Yard.