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After some longer break from the game due to my busy work schedule, I have finally acquired Platinum Trophy in Tales of Arise on my PS4 today. This game has one of the most balanced roads to Platinum Trophy, I have ever achieved. I had no need for any kind of excessive grinding. Just now and there going back to some easy to get material for weapon crafting or few minutes of fishing. Even the post game was one straightforward way to level 100 while clearing all new content. Both post game quests have been fun and challenging, and I had not feel burned out from for a single minute during whole 111 hours of gameplay. That's what I call quality game design!

Quote for the Day: "Junior programmer demanded we unblock ChatGPT. Told him CPU time was 100% allocated to finding John and Sarah Connor. He completely missed the joke."

After I thought I have lost a video of my Druidstone gameplay during my PC upgrade, after almost two years I have finally found it It is a guide and walkthrough of Speedrunner achievement on Hard Difficulty. This is the only video of this achievement on Hard on YT, so it might be possible, that no one else so far, has bothered to get it this way The preparation of tactics for this took me more than two hours and then another half hour to have a luck with RNG on book spawn to be able to perform it correctly

Elden Ring. Reached the late-game dragon area. Ironically, the only boss who didn't have long delayed and extendable combo chains, abilities to cross the arena in an instant or attacks faster than I could see them coming, was the Fire Giant. Granted, he also had an enormous health bar and the attacks were hitting hard if they landed, so even my upgraded tower shield could only take one. Also, visually, the boss strongly reminded of Daimon from Dragon's Dogma. Defeated Alecto the Ringleader. Took quite some time, as Alecto could cross the arena quickly and one-hit the PC at any point with little time to react (the AoE blood jump attack and the grab) and could extend the normal combo seemingly indefinitely unless interrupted, which could result in trading hits which is not a good idea with any boss. Fortunately, I was able to corner her between the mist wall and a rock and her health ran out before my stamina did. Edit. Also defeated a Godskin Noble (?) mini-boss. The boss jumped off the bridge where the battle was taking place, which was rather amusing and certainly preferable to fighting it head-on.

So I've tried using a machinegun, and I think now I get why some folks have issues with ammo. That thing is blasting inside the view cone like there is no tomorrow. It's pretty easy to use up 100 rounds of 7.62 in a single battle. But on the other hand, I'm cutting down enemies so fast... it's highly effective.

'cause am old james jamerson bass and wilton felder, one o' the greatest motown sax players, on bass. HA! Good Fun!

gonna observe blaster always seemed like a good option from our pov and there has been improvements with patches. example: irresistible divine damage took some time to implement correct. the hd increases is underappreciated. is doubtful kp reads, but is also worth noting a merged spellbook angel or lich keeps the merged spellbook when going the gold dragon route, albeit w/o the inflated caster level, which as already noted in the linked post is not that big o' a sacrifice for a blaster. 'course the downside, much like with legend, is the lateness the gold dragon is available plus our only dedicated blaster character thus far were an azata and it felt wrong to kick aivu and the rest o' the lollipop guild to the curb for a little more power which 'course is kinda unnecessary late game. the difficult content in the game is early, so being a smidge more powerful for the last 10% is kinda underwhelming. still haven't done our anticipated lich-> gold dragon even though it is one o' the few remaining builds am curious 'bout. @Sarex the water elemental is beatable even on unfair w/o numerous reloads, but doing so requires exploitive gameplay HA! Good Fun!

The Camellia reveal is even worse than I expected Gonna be using Sosiel for a while

Starting island is maybe 4 hours. Probably a bit less for most. Only significant 'complaint' I have so far is performance, the game doesn't look good enough to be quite as slow as it is even on an old card. Niggles are there being no buying/ selling, or at least so far as I have got. Plus the voice acting is far too good for a Jagged Alliance game. Where is the iconic "she. is. evil. . a. driven. bitch" type stuff where it sounds like they grabbed someone off the street and held them at gunpoint to deliver their lines?

I just finished Return of Obra Dinn, and while a great game, it has some annoying achievements that require you to re-play the game in a stupid way. So yeah, great achievement design is fun.

Are you people playing in a higher difficulty setting? I've read of you guys money troubles and how hard it was to capture certain sectors. So the thing is ... Finally yesterday I had time to actually dig into the game and by the end of the middle of the night, I had both mines, the one in the top, and the one at the bottom of the coast. I have 6 mercs now - me, Ice, Hitman, MD, Igor, and lately I've hired Livewire, because I thought it useful to have an actual mechanic and hacker. I have something around 40k in money. I'm playing on the difficulty setting that is not the super hard one (forgot what it was called). I had been in the one or the other pickle, but all in all I've managed fairly well so far. The game has some really cool moment, and I love it when the music sets in every once in a while. That whole african flair is just great. As I had expected before the release, the maps are all pretty small and often feel like just a set combat arena. Still, the maps look great. Just wish there would be a few more opportunities. Oh, and man, I quickly found out how useful sniper rifles are. Since the very first time I found a fat rifle, I'm kicking ass. And since I have found an M14 with mods from a weapon smuggler, Hitman hits 90% of his shots.. to the head. He is cleaning up the field almost on his own. I gave Igor the golden rifle that was mentioned further above and jeez, that thing hits like an elephant. Oh² one more thing... In the starting area I got a Famas with mods... but I have never used it so far, since I actually don't have *any* 5.56mm ammunition. And I have absolutely no idea where I can find some. Is there a weapons shop again like in Ja2? The interface is kinda annoying to use, and I couldn't find anything via the web browser. What's the point of giving me a cool rifle if I don't have any ammo for it. It's crazy how good this game feels. After so many failed attempts to make a new JA game, it feels extremely weird to suddenly have one that ... doesn't suck. It's almost like you expect a new JA game to suck, because "that's just how it is." And when you play this game, it's like it was actually really easy to make a good sequel. Like.. what's the big deal? Here you see exactly how to do it ... why have all those other studios not been able to do this? Is it really actually Ian Currie who is the only one who understood the game and was now able to make another good one? I just don't understand. Granted, the game also has its fair share of issues, but it's nothing I can't look past for the moment.

Sometimes you just find a game, that somehow comes to personify an age or a genre for you. For me, there are a handful of games that despite being 30 years old are my "go to" games for different reasons. To this day, I still use a C64 as well as an Amiga emulator to play games that never made it to PC in a for me playable form (Lords of Midnight by MIke Singleton, Ultima IV by "Lord British", Elite by Bell/Braben, Carriers at War by SSI, Mech Warrior, Defender of the Crown etc.) as well as old PC games that runs on dos emulator like Gygax' War in Russia and Master of Orion 2 by Microprose and yes, also some "newer" games that runs on Windows like the original X-Com trilogy and Jagged Alliance 1+2. To be fair, if I wanted the original Elite experience, I should find an Acorn BBC-B emulator and the original BBC version But like the above history, sometimes, just sometimes you run into something that feels like a worthy successor. I had a similar feeling with Xenonauts after lamenting the inability of games developers to make proper X-Com type games (as in, I felt like celebrating and played it to death for a while, satisfying this deep seated need for something that felt like X-Com and I hope JA3 will be a similar experience) Edit: Forgot to mention a game like HoMM3, which to some degree got a similar game in Disciples II

Everything can be music.

the one genuine surprise for owlcat's camellia arc is it manages to be considerable worse in act 5. HA! Good Fun!