Insomniac Nightmares

Another slow week, and one of surrender.

HTOL#NIQ got shipped back to GameFly, unbeaten. I am broken. I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t care about the game, I didn’t care for the game, I felt the mechanics were awful, and what the trophies wanted from me was liable to cause a stroke. Overall, just not worth it.

I always feel bad when I give up on a game – unless the trophies I’ve given up on are specifically glitched/unachievable, or tied to multiplayer that is underplayed or unavailable, or they are just far beyond my skillset (the gambling-related stats in most Yakuza games, f’rex) – but even though I frequently play terrible games, and will do so to completion, even I have limits. Gaming is supposed to be fun, not abject misery, and HTOL#NIQ was quickly heading in that direction.

I did some digging in the backlog, and knocked out a couple of troublesome flies left over from my last visit to Devil May Cry 2. The only thing left to do in that one is fully upgrade the life bar. Amusingly, it’s also one of the few I need for Devil May Cry 5. I just seem to have problems hunting down the one blue orb I missed somewhere in this series. (I think it’s also one of the last trophies I got in Devil May Cry 4 and DmC, and it’s liable to be one of the last in Devil May Cry as well.) Also ripped through the rest of normal difficulty in the original Devil May Cry, and am picking my way through Hard (with a guide, hopefully finding all the little blue rocks this time.) Once I kick those two out, it’s probably time to try to finish VMD difficulty in Devil May Cry 3 and go find that last orb in 5, before I beat the hell out of myself trying to platinum 4. Then I can have the whole series all on one platform and all with Platinums. It’ll be shiny and happy.

Speaking of Capcom games (and their subsidiaries and former employees,) I also made a little more headway in The Evil Within. Doing a slow run to find all the collectibles, before I learn to hate myself in Akumu. And finally, have gotten around to really playing Okami. I’ve tried before – I owned it for PS2 and never left the village, owned it for Wii and don’t think I even ever booted it up – but this time I’m actually playing the damned thing.

Okami is odd to me. Part of me hates it just because I heard too many people fapping to it and telling me how it’s the best game ever. Frequently those people didn’t bother buying it, judging from the sales stats (around 270,000 copies sold in NA for PS2, about 130,000 for Wii.) There are more games I hate for the fanbase than I hate for the game itself, and Okami is very close to the top of that list. Part of me thinks it shows its age poorly, and has a certain clunkiness that makes it hard to like. But it’s still somewhat enjoyable, and it is without a doubt pretty. It’s a basic Zelda knockoff, but it does what it does well and doesn’t resort to Monkey Island logic to solve some of the puzzles and collectibles, so that’s not bad. Still not something I would pay $40 a third time, but amusing enough. I’m about to go kick Orochi’s face in (which I believe puts me around the halfway mark) so it won’t be abandonded this time… but I still don’t think I’d be putting it on any of my “top games of all time” lists. Of course, most people will tell me that if I make such a list that it’s wrong. The first four entries of Metal Gear Solid 3, Silent Hill 2, The Binding of Isaac and Yakuza marks me as a nerd, a weeb, and not “artsy” enough, and my dislike of Braid or Fez leaves me outcast amongst my people.

Anyway. There may be a week taken off from Trophy hunting, as Gears 5 may soon be accessible to me, and there will have to be some time Achievement hunting in that, instead, and then there may be some time spent with the PS3 and PS2 classics section (I have to finish Siren, and I have the first three Fatal Frame games installed that still need love) for Halloween. But we’ll see.

What about you out there? What games are you working on? What games should I torture myself with? You can sometimes catch me playing them live over on Twitch, and if you want to stalk me, it’s Ashande on PSN and Typo Monster on XBL.

As always, if you like my stuff and want to help me keep doing it, you can drop a dime over at Patreon, or help support my surgery GoFundMe. Contributions are always appreciated, but never required. Until next time, folks!