Insomniac Nightmares

Made a bit of progress this week, but still running behind due to the grinding in Fist of the North Star. It’s gonna take a while to recover from that I think.

This week, I’ve been playing Night Trap. Yes, that Night Trap. You know, the one that, alongside Mortal Kombat, is pretty much responsible for the ESRB. It’s fun, and I’m about halfway through the list, but the thing that strikes me the most about it is how honestly tame it really is.

That scene is sparked a lot of controversy. A very PG scene of a stereotypical horror girl being surprised by the killer in a bathroom. There’s no nudity. Her nightie would probably pass muster on anything Fox airs. There’s no blood. But that was going to warp the minds of all us impressionable children and create a legion of serial killers.

What’s really funny to me is the 25th Anniversary Edition for PS4 and Vita is actually rated “T.” Apparently, even the ESRB – spawned from this scene – agrees that maybe it wasn’t actually that bad. Hilarious.

Right now all that’s left is to trap a boatload of Augers (1987, to be specific, though I’ve got at least 700 right now, having done two perfect runs after popping the “Catch 500” trophy), watch everyone die at least once (three times for dear old Dana Plato), and fill in the movie and production still collection categories (which mostly involves seeing all those deaths and seeing every story scene in the game at least once. So a lot of sitting around, catching just enough of the vampires to make sure the game doesn’t end early. Yay.)

Also started Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice. It’s interesting, though not as Dark Souls as some folks would like to claim. It feels kind of like a middle ground between Nioh (which was Dark Souls, Onimusha and Diablo in a blender) and a “real” Dark Souls game, then put on fast forward and with Spider-Man movement options. I like it, but I haven’t even gotten to the first boss as of yet (mostly poking around the first area, seeing what I can and can’t get away with, grinding skill points.) I expect it to be enjoyable.

Also started getting into Path of Exile. It’s good stuff, at least if you’ve already pillaged Diablo II and III for everything they’re worth. I don’t care for the loot system, though; too much crap drops, too much of it is useless, and the vendor system kinda sucks in my opinion. Still playable, certainly, but doesn’t grab me the way it’s spiritual forebears did.

Last bit; if anyone is actually playing Borderlands 2 VR – the PSN stats say not many area, but I’m sure at least one of you out there may be – they finally gave it a patch to include most of the DLC. So far as I can tell it doesn’t have the latest patch – the one that added the “prelude to Borderlands 3” content – but it does have all 4 of the major DLC packs, adds Gaige and Krieg to the roster, and all the holiday-themed one-shot adventures plus the level cap raises. All for free. With all the trophies from the regular or Handsome editions. So that’s fun.

Spirit Hunter: NG (and why, for the life of me, they didn’t call it Death Mark 2 so it would at least have some brand recognition in this country) is supposed to arrive today or tomorrow through the wonders of GameFly. I think it will serve as a nice palate cleanser.

What about you? What games are you playing? What games do you think I should be playing? Let me know down below, or you can stalk me on PSN at Ashande, XBox Live as Typo Monster, or right here on Twitch.

It’s very slow going, with one game to blame.

There was some small progress on God of War II, but given that I have been mostly without my Vita charger and for some reason it’s never worked to charge it off the PS4 no matter what the “USB charge settings” say, there’s not enough battery to get far in that, especially given how it inexplicably drains while playing that game.

There was some picking at Friday the 13th, finally earning two of the unique kill trophies. I wasn’t aware they’d finally implemented the single player challenges; to be honest, I thought the game was dead after the lawsuits. Unfortunately, with few exceptions, you can’t earn trophies in the single player modes, and multiplayer might as well be dead; waiting 20+ minutes for a match, sitting in the lobby for enough players for another 10 minutes, then the host leaves and you get to start all over again. I was hoping the release of the Switch version would have reinvigorated the game somewhat (it’s what made me pick it back up, learning it hadn’t been killed yet), and that they would have finally added Jason X, but sadly both were hollow hopes.

Then there’s Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise. At last update, I had finished the main game and was picking off the grindy and post-game trophies before heading into Extra Hard mode for the finale. Having finally finished that grinding, I say this:

Fuck this game’s grind. I have earned most of the battle trophies in several Star Ocean games (sometimes more than once, as I’ve lost save files or rebought them for other platforms.) I’ve hunted flags galore in Assassin’s Creed games. I have literally spent a thousand hours in both Diablo III and The Binding of Isaac. I’m not a stranger to grinds, and frequently enjoy them.

But this. Ugh. Part of it is the monotony; there’s no change, no feeling of progress, not even little magic numbers going up because you don’t earn XP for any of the minigames you have to engage in. Second is that you have to play those minigames. The colosseum isn’t terrible, just repetitive, but it’s pretty much the shortest part. You’ll need about 1.5 million casino chips, earned (at best) at an average of 2k per hand of blackjack. You’ll need to knock out $100 million in debt (for a broken vase) in 3 minute bursts of running a hostess club where you earn between $3k and $1 million per round… and you’ll be investing a crapton of time and money you obtain through other means to find and train hostesses and keep them in shape to earn that money. You’ll have to earn roughly 180k of racing points, that you’ll earn, under optimum conditions, about 1,800 a go. That’s not counting the grinding you’ll have to do to get your car to a point where you can actually win those races.

Aside from that, there’s a boatload of playing minigames to get the shopkeepers to like you enough to sell the other components you need, grinding to level up your secret techniques so you stand a chance against the top-tier colosseum matches, and grinding for the cash to do your upgrades and buy the materials (you’ll need around $200 million.) It’s miserable.

On the bright side, as of this morning, it’s done. There’s 3 trophies left; one for maxing out all skills (which doesn’t require much grinding, but there are roadblocks in the skill trees that can only be undone by orbs you only get for finishing a chapter.) The trick? There’s 11 chapters, and 15 or so of the roadblocks. So 2 playthroughs to deal with that. There’s one for using a specific attack against a specific boss (you might be able to do it on your first playthrough, but it would require you doing all the grinding at the midpoint of your first playthrough,) and the last is for finishing it on Extra Hard (which, after that grinding, is pathetically easy.)

It’ll be done today or tomorrow, and then I can go play something else, but goddamn. Fuck that grind.

What about you? What do you feel about grinds? Let me know down below!

Rise of Insanity has finally been completed. It’s not 100% yet – have to go back through and find all the collectibles – but at least the main game is out of the way.

I don’t know how to feel about it. I know what they were trying to do, but I feel like they missed a lot of the boats that would have given it more punch. There’s a lot of imagery that seems there because “ooooooh, spoopy!” but doesn’t actually relate to the murder and madness that form the bulk of the plot. Perhaps I missed a collectible that explained it, but all the crow imagery – while very pretty and suitably atmospheric – seems tacked on with no reason. On top of that, the “twist” of who you’re playing and what’s going on was telegraphed five minutes in… but half the game’s notes and the way things are presented don’t seem compatible with it.

I’m not going to spoil it – if you want spoilers, you can see me playing it over on Twitch – because it’s still worth a playthrough if you enjoy games like Slender or Layers of Fear, and it’s pretty inexpensive… but if you like horror walking sims and haven’t yet played Layers of Fear or Layers of Fear 2, I recommend those first.

Beyond that, primarily been working on Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise. It’s Sega doing what Koei has been doing with Dynasty Warriors: Take your well-known franchise, slap a popular skin on it, call it new. This time, instead of covering generic hack and slash with a coat of Zelda paint, it’s Yakuza with FotNS on top. It’s very well done, and for the most part feels like a decent Yakuza game, but it’s not taking any spots in the series’ hall of fame.

The main story’s fine, the combat works – even if it does become trivially easy once you get good at doing Perfect Channel attacks and unlock the Ki Field ability – and there’s certainly a boatload of content to explore. The problem is in the minigames. Most Yakuza games have a metric shitton of random minigames to play, and Lost Paradise is no different but unlike most Yakuza games, the amount of time you’ll have to spend playing them if you want to finish everything is ridiculously high… and there’s less variation.

For example, the club management minigame, which was most prominent in Yakuza 0 but also had variations in 3, 4 and 6 (probably 5 too, but I didn’t get to play much of that one since my PS3 cooked itself right after it came out here.) In those other games, if you want the trophies related to it (or the tickmarks for your Completion list, or the related substories) you’ll get through it in about 3-4 hours once you get the hang of it. There’s also some variety in the missions, the characters are actually developed, and you feel like you’re getting something out of it (be it money or items) that are actually worth your time investment.

In Lost Paradise, you’re pretty much forced into the game after you break a priceless vase and have to work off a 100,000,000 debt. The missions are 2-3 minutes long, usually stressful to start with, and until you unlock the last couple of them (and have a stable of S-Rank, max level hostesses), you’re going to get between 20k and 200k towards that debt. And no money or items to use in the meantime. When you finally get to the last mission, you’ll get around 1 million per go, but you’re going to need to repeat it around 85-90 times to pay off that debt (which is the roadblock to 3 substories, two hidden bosses, and the last match in the Colesseum minigame, all of which have associated trophies.)

The racing minigame is also a giant pain in the ass, tedious as hell, only has five tracks, and if you want to Platinum it, you’re going to be repeating one of them at least 20 times to rack up the BP (the racing currency) required to buy one piece of the top tier armor.

Right now I’m at 80% on the trophy list, with the primary hangup being the hostess minigame. Still owe 69 million. When that’s done, I can blitz the last few substories (and pop three trophies, one for each hidden boss and one for all substories done), finish the last two Colesseum fights (rematches against the hidden bosses, which pops two more), grind the Colesseum for crafting mats to finish upgrading junk, and then blitz Legend difficulty in about 3 hours, which means I’ll be done.

It will be the first Yakuza game I’ve actually platinumed. The mahjong stuff screws me over in most of the others, Dead Souls suffered from exploding PS3 syndrome, and Judgment is on hold because it’s been packed in prep for the move. Part of me is sad about that.

Beyond that, I’ve been picking at Caravan Story, which is a free-to-play “action” RPG that mostly plays itself. Going to be a nasty grind (you need to kill 10,000 monsters and enslave 1,000 more) but nothing exciting. Mainly something to stare at while holding X when I can’t take looking at the hostesses anymore.

Moving this week, so hopefully, things will be set back up and I can do a proper stream at some point next week; thinking either Alien: Isolation or maybe Yakuza: Dead Souls, if my PS3 wants to cooperate with me (I got a new one more than a year ago, but ran out of ports on the TV and couldn’t get behind it to rewire things. That will be fixed in the move.) If any of you out there have suggestions, I’m open to other ideas, too.

As always, shameless shill time: If you like my stuff and want to help me keep doing it, you can drop a dime in the bucket over on Patreon; everything helps and is always appreciated, but never required. If you want to help me get breathing again, I’ve got a GoFundMe for my surgery set up, too.

Until next time, folks!

Things are slowing down a bit, as many of my physical games have been boxed up for the move, many of my digitally owned games have either already been stripmined of their trophies or are just completely unappealing at the moment, and GameFly is temporarily on hold so I don’t end up with a Vita cartridge or PS4 disc lost in the mail somewhere, but progress has still been made.

The Sinking City and Yomawari: Night Alone have both given up their Platinums. So far as TSC goes, I think it gets kind of a bum rap; sure, it’s got some issues, but overall I thought it was one of the best Mythos-related games I’ve played. It’s the game that last year’s Call of Cthulhu wanted to be, and despite the Mass Effect 3 “dial-an-ending,” I still found it enjoyable, engrossing, visually stimulating and suitably creepy. The trophy list was kind of small for a game of its length, and there weren’t a lot of clever or “outside the box” trophies, but it wasn’t full of “why the hell would I want to even try to do that?” trophies, either.

Yomawari was enjoyable as well, and in many ways better than it’s predecessor, Night Alone, though there was some very tedious pattern learning with the boss monsters, overall I didn’t regret my time with the game. The trophy list itself was fairly even with a mixture of game progress, collectibles, and “do X this many times.” No funky ones, and thank God it doesn’t have another one like “Long Night” from the original (play a 3 hour game for 50 hours. Who thought of that one?), though the “Die 80 times,” depending on how well you do during the main game, may be a bit of a grind… and the game tends to crash, so be wary. If you’re curious, I do recommend checking out NitroRad’s review of the games, which is pretty close to my own opinion; you can find the YouTube video right here.

Also almost completed Rise of Insanity, though I will have to go through it a second time to pick up a couple of collectibles and a pair of “do this at X time” trophies I missed. Fairly enjoyable game, and worth grabbing on a sale, with a list that isn’t too traumatic to complete. No Platinum, though.

Progress being made on Devil May Cry, though new trophies earned; picking at earning S-Ranks and beating Very Hard and Dante Must Die mode on DMC3, though stuck doing it as Vergil since I inadvertently saved over my Dante file, and don’t feel like going back and grabbing all the blue orbs, abilities, upgrades and piles of Vital Stars/Devil Stars before I can try to tackle the higher difficulties. At least Vergil was mostly upgraded after his initial run. Devil May Cry 1 is about halfway through Hard and doing the Secret Missions. 2 continues to rot, even though it really isn’t much more work for Platinum. Just need like 3 Blue Shards for Lucia and it’ll be done. It’s just painful to contemplate playing through it to get them.

Started Yakuza 3 in earnest (I had completed the first chapter, then put it aside because I still have to finish 6, Kiwami 2 and Judgement, picked it back up because I have it digitally but the other three are physical and boxed up.) Busy knocking out the miscellaneous trophies (break 30 weapons, find junk on the beach, catch a tuna, train a hostess, etc) while grinding XP before moving on to the game proper, but have reached Chapter 4. It may actually be the first Yakuza I can actually platinum, since they don’t have the damn “Complete the List 100%” thing, so the fact I can’t get my head around Shogi and Mahjong and only vaguely understand Oichi-Kaibu won’t punish me.

Lastly, I went back to The Evil Within, which I swear I really will 100% one day. Finished The Assignment, with the exception of Kurayami mode (which I’ll go back for and do in tandem with The Consequence‘s Kurayami mode). Will probably be tackling The Consequence this evening or tomorrow morning, if the Gods don’t bless me and magically make Ghostbusters Remastered appear on my hard drive.

Maybe there was more progress made than I thought; this is a pretty long post. Oh well. We’ll see where it goes from here. What about the rest of you? What games are you working on, and is there something you think I should tackle? Let me know down below!

Okami has fallen. The platinum now resides in my trophy shelf, immortalized as my 125th Platinum. Hooray?

By the time I finished the game, I was honestly starting to hate it; it was severely overstaying its welcome, and the boss rush and 6-stage final boss, especially after the pain that was the Wakwu Temple, was just dragging its feet in an apparent attempt to pad the runtime. When I started, I was skeptical… not really understanding why everyone seems to think it’s one of the best games ever. By the midpoint, I was warming to it, somewhat; still not one of the best games, but definitely a decent game. By the end, I hated it again.

Oh well.

I also finally kicked Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords to the curb. It’s been literal years since I grabbed the PS2 Classics version, and began inching my way through it. Honestly, having finished it again (because I had it for PSP and PS2 back in the day, and bought it again for XB360), I don’t know why I was so bloody enamored of it. It’s slow, clunky, ugly, and frequently blatantly unfair. (To this day, I swear the CPU opponents “know” what’s going to fall when they make a move. The number of times some random green in the corner starts an 8+ move cascade with multiple +5 Skulls involved seems a little too frequent for mere chance.) But at least it’s done.

Stared The Sinking City, which is much more entertaining… to me, at least. The combat is a little janky and unnecessary, and sometimes navigation is cumbersome (walk down this street, hop on a boat, take the boat to that street, get off the boat, sneak through a combat zone, get on a boat, get off the boat, and now you might be where you were headed), but overall I think it’s a solid game. The fact it doesn’t hold your hand, making you actually do some detective work to sort out where you’re headed and why, is certainly different and (in my opinion) enjoyable. In a lot of ways, it feels like the game Call of Cthulhu wanted – and failed – to be. CoC still has a couple of things going for it over TSC – the graphical style (though not the fidelity, I fear), better load times, and more detailed environments – but if I have to pick one for my Mythos gaming, Sinking City wins. (But can we maybe get the two developers to work together, plastering over each other’s weaknesses, and make a Mythos game that shakes the walls of R’lehya? It’d be AWESOME.)

About halfway through the game, about 35% through the trophy list. It’s pretty enjoyable so far, though I would likely be somewhat irate if I was playing without a “warning list” of “no return” trophy points and choice-based ones. Almost every case has two (or more) resolutions, and there’s generally a trophy attached to each. Given that, while I enjoy the game, it’s not really one I see myself wanting to complete in full more than once, save-scumming is a must.

Still picking at the Devil May Cry trilogy, Labyrinth Life and the Vita God of War collection, as well as Siren. Will probably be taking on Yomawari: Midnight Shadows this week as well, if GameFly and the postal service cooperate with me. Just hoping that one doesn’t have another “play for 50 hours” trophy like the first one.

That wraps up the trophy round up on this end; what about you folks out there? What are you playing? What should I be playing? What trophies have you earned that you’re stupidly proud of… or do you wish you could hide on your profile? Let us know down below! Until next time.

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!

It’s been a slow week in trophy-land, but not entirely unproductive. Horizon Chase Turbo and The Wolf Among Us have been added to the Platinum cabinet. I honestly was doubting whether or not HCT was going to be in there, and suspected it might rot at around 80% complete, but my stubbornness finally pushed me through the Endurance mode and to finish off the Master Tournament to get that oh so shiny 100% in there.

Yomawari: Night Alone and it’s pal HTOL#NIQ or whatever you want to call it aren’t done, yet. Night Alone just needs some collectible hunting and then leaving the Vita on forever and a day for the stupid “Long Night” trophy. HTOL needs actual effort; I haven’t played it much since the first day. Once they’re done, I think I’m going to loop around and try to knock out the rest of Corpse Party: Blood Drive; sick of looking at the icon on my home screen, and might as well knock out another “cutesy horror game” since I’m on the train already.

The Phoenix Wright trilogy is nearly complete; as of this morning, Justice For All is done, and the first case of Trials and Tribulations. All that’s left are two case-specific collectible trophies, one game-wide collectible trophy, and finishing off the game itself. Hopefully by next week Phoenix, Miles, Maya, Ema and the rest will have said their peace, with no additional “Objection!”s. (And, hey, Capcom, if you’re listening… there’s 5 other games that came out here you could bundle up. Plus another three you can toss in if you want to do some translating. Get on that.)

After all that, I suspect it’s going to be all Yakuza, all the time. Judgement, Yakuza 3, Yakuza Kiwami 2, and Yakuza 6 all need some love, and by the time I get through those, I’m sure Yakuza 4 will be available. Plus Shenmue 1 & 2 are still waiting in line, and 3 will be dropping shortly, so… yeah. Drowning in weird Japanese culture/time-wasting/ass-kicking games for the foreseeable future.

What about you folks? What games are eating up your time? Let us know down below, and if there’s something you’d like to see me tackle, you can drop that down there, too.

If you want to stalk my progress, you can find me on Twitter, over on Twitch, or on PSN as Ashande, or Xbox Live as Typo Monster.