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[Dostoevsky]

Star Ocean 2 was very good and one of my top RPGs on a system that had several good contenders. I never played the first one, and the third literally ruined the entire series both going backwards and forwards with the stupidest plot twist possible. I'd recommend only playing the second one and leaving it at that.

Spoiler: For the curious (click to show/hide)

In Star Ocean 3 it turns out the entire universe is just an MMORPG that's nearing the end of its' profit cycle and all the protagonists are NPCs; everything they do is just some background event to the actual game people are playing. The last boss is the CEO of the company. It's beyond idiotic.

Star Ocean series has a lot of interesting things going for it, particularly the combat system (for the time) and crafting system (again, for the time). But boy those plots were often pretty out there - 4 had its own weirdness, though 3 probably does take the cake.

Spoiler: Spoilers for 4 (click to show/hide)

There's a somewhat unnecessary portion of the game where you're sucked into an alternative dimension's 1957 Earth, and proceed to make some semi-poor decisions that culminate in destroying the planet utterly. It's kind of used for character development? The main plot itself is fairly pedestrian for a JRPG, typical extradimensional evil god-like entity showing up in the 4th act.

First one is a solid SNES RPG that I remember having a fair number of similarities to 2 mechanically. If you liked the second game I'd suggest giving it a whirl.


As to my own tale, taking down the King of the North (well, the self-styled king of barbarians). Was woefully underprepared for the fight, though the payout of the contract should have told me something dire.

I outnumbered them more than 2 to 1, but each and every one of them was a hulking titan clad head to toe in plate, wielding massive two-handed weapons. Crossbow bolts barely phased them. My champion and beggar, Hugo the Meek, who had previously killed a similar Chosen in single combat, lasted perhaps longer than expected before falling to the king and led to a near-rout. Gottfried the Quiet, the faithful monk and dutiful sergeant, barely kept the line together long enough for the pikemen to wear down their Chosen and the massive champion. The champion felled a new recruit in the process; he was a drunkard anyways.

The King himself was the last left, yet still cut down another 4 men (and one brave warhound) before going down. 2 of the least capable survived with broken legs. Time to rebuild the front line, but could have been far worse.

The payout of 4,500 coins is small compensation for the veteran lives lost - some of the first members to join the company. But the king and his champion did yield a full set of exceptional armor and a two handed mace powerful enough to potentially kill an armored man in a single blow.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Battle Brothers. Seriously, the gear the champion dropped is pretty ridiculous. 333 armor for -28 fatigue on the body, 276 armor for -14 fatigue on the helm. And the mace ignores 74% of armor while doing up to 107 damage in a single blow.

[Akura]

Finished off the Queen of Night with a blast of light magic, which is entirely fitting.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Child of Light. Damn good game, my main complaint is how abrupt the ending is. After defeating the second main villain it immediately throws you into the final boss without any prep time or anything(you cannot spend your level-up points from the penultimate boss, for example).

[Yoink]

Just bagged a whole squad of hunters myself.   
I mean, my team helped - we slid into the building they were in with the utmost stealthiness, like some kind of well-oiled, three headed ganking machine - but it was my trusty shotgun that did for most of them, with my (also trusty!) Caldwell pistol finishing off the last guy after a brief-but-intense shootout in the belly of this disgusting, gloomy building filled with corpse chunks.   
We winged each other, then I ducked around a corner to whip out my six-shooter before ducking back out, fanning the hammer and riddling the water trough he was cowering behind - and him - with bullets.   
I'm no mathematician, but I'm pretty sure we found at least one extra body in that building, too, which suggests there had already been a lot of action going down before we showed up to crash the party. After all that, the monster we'd all actually been sent there to hunt down was dispatched almost as an afterthought. I'm not sure if the poison bombs I dexterously lobbed through holes in the roof when we initially came into the building had any effect, but I'd like to think so.       

Earlier on I managed to take out another enemy hunter with the same pistol, frantically shooting him through a fence, whilst one of my teammates mercilessly hunted down his partner who had sniped the third member of our team from a distance. When we showed up to loot their corpse (I unfortunately burnt the other one with a firebomb, expecting his buddies to show up at any moment to try and revive him) they turned out to be wearing what appeared to be a hoop dress. Seems like an odd choice for traipsing around the swamplands after undead monstrosities, but who am I to judge?
Didn't seem to work out for them too well, though.   

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Hunt: Showdown.   
This game was a real unexpected treat. I've been playing it a lot. I'd like to say I'm finally getting the hang of it, but for every match like this that goes well I have about three more that are a total comedy of errors - or ones where I just get plain stomped by experts, haha.   
I'm getting better, though.   

   

[Akura]

Did the mission I had difficulty on. Using the jackhammer on the end of the long-armed excavator, I chipped away at the top, sweeping away some debris with sharp swings of the arm to keep it from falling on(and damaging) the bottom half of the tower. Once I had most of the tower roof gone and an opening to the inside, I poked inside and started pushing out the walls on the inside, again to keep as much from falling into the bottom half. With both the success and failure meters almost full, I turned off the jackhammer and just slapped out whatever wall sections I could. Finished under time, and with the failure meter(filled by damaging the bottom half) at around 90%-95%.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Demolition Company.

EDIT:

Last (vanilla; the game does support mods) mission of the game, I need to "carefully" demolish a burned-out penthouse on the top floor of a hotel using a long-armed excavator. According to the pre-mission tips, I don't have to destroy the walls facing the street as getting debris on the street below is a fail condition. ...Except highlighting the building parts I need to demolish does mark those walls as an objective.

Regardless, I use the excavator as a ramp to climb to the roof, and plant several Level 3 explosive charges(the biggest) on the corners. This is enough to vaporize the entire penthouse at the touch of a button. Instantly fills the progress bar for mission success. Hilariously, in between the game showing the mission is a success and the mission actually ending, all the debris rains down across the district, instantly filling up the failure bar... but the mission was still considered a full success with no penalty.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Demolition Company. Despite supporting mods and custom maps, I can't seem to find any. Especially odd because it's by the same developers as Farming Simulator(and on a similar engine it looks like) which generally does have a fair number of mods and maps.

[Iduno]

I've been playing Hitman 2, with all of the levels from Hitman 1 added (not the original Hitman, the recent one).

The final level of Hitman 1 takes place is a Japanese hospital, and also you don't get to start with your full gear loadout as an extra challenge. It's great. And I just learned that destroying the replacement heart one of the 2 targets is getting installed counts as killing him without all of the hassle of leaving a body to be found. I just wrapped up a bunch of the high-end challenges because sniping a heart through 3 glass doors is way stealthier than trying to distract and move past guards.

[hector13]

That’s the way you do the suit only silent assassin one.

Well, it’s the way I did it. With my silverballers.

[Akura]

I could have sworn I once got Silent Assassin rating in the original PS2 Hitman 2: Silent Assassin on that mission where you infiltrate a Yakuza-owned castle. Supposedly it was impossible without glitching, but I remember I just hid in the truck and the ninjas didn't spot me.


Did a stupid game setup, with all tech levels set to 40... which in this game means that right off the bat your starting world produces tens of millions of stuff every second. Managed to grab every planet except the enemy's starting system. Put a lot of ringworlds down, and built a scale-1.2 billion ship armed with a plasma beam capable of one-shotting a star... and an over 7000 second reload time. That's a couple minutes shy of 2 hours. I had to scrap an rebuild because they kept trying to target the enemy scout ships, which are scale 0.6(and they missed) because rebuilding a galaxy-sized ship is faster than reloading the guns. Had to reset their AI to not be normally able to target anything, and could only shoot by giving a force-attack order. Which I did, at the enemy's star.

Surprisingly, their star being shot with an entire galaxy's worth of stars didn't do anything to the enemy planets or ships. Tried several things to break through their mass of ships, but they were building them far faster than should have been possible. They were building scale-2.5 to 4 million on planets with 15-20 slots, and were able to keep pace with me building scale-12 million ships at multiple ringworlds which have 100 slots and a bonus makes every one of those slots actually 10 times bigger(that is, one factory is effectively 10). I could not actually target their worlds, since ships block mouse zooming.

Or so I thought. Found I could rotated the map view level with a star system's plane, and zoom in on planets this way. Over a dozen of those scale-12 million ships, armed with TL40 plasma throwers that fire a friggin' star every 30 seconds turned their guns on these puny planets. That took way longer than it should have.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Star Ruler.

[Iduno]

That’s the way you do the suit only silent assassin one.

Well, it’s the way I did it. With my silverballers.

Got silent assassin, the ninja one (with the sauna), and sniper assassin. Took like 10 minutes.

[Robsoie]

using Flashpoint Infinity, i was replaying "Spectromancer : Gathering of Power" that i remembered being really good for a flash card game .

After coming to the end of the campaign i got puzzled in how to beat the last opponent (the council of liches) with its huge amount of health. Previous strategies for past opponents didn't made it there, even if i managed to destroy a lot of the AI health i still was defeated countless times.

Until i won

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Wondering if i was just playing the wrong cards in my deck i checked youtube to see if someone has a better strategy than i had and found one that despite i was using a different character class would work wonderfully as it wasn't linked to the element (and so pack of cards) that is specific/unique to each class but it was all about a specific card from earth and water, in fact it was quite simple.

You do everything you can to increase your earth mana so you can bring a couple more master healer , the goal is to make sure your already provided earth elemental do not die. And you play most of the time the lowly mediation card so it increase all your element mana by 1, increasing then by the same time your couple of earth elemental attack power.
Support that by some good "damage all opponent summon" card and you're set.
It isn't a fast strategy but it is a 100% sure kill one, and with 3 master healers at once it's +9 health for you and +9 health for all your creatures by rounds, only if the AI use a highly damaging anti-creature spell they can be in trouble, most normal creature will never hurt them enough to kill them (only the highest end creatures that attack level is their amount of elemental mana can get very high)

And so the deck did the deed (the fire dragon was there so my direct damage the opponent spell would be more powerfull, as the AI started the duel with 500 health)

For the anecdote, apparently one of the 3 people that developped Spectromancer system was Richard Garriot (the guy behind Magic the Gathering)

[Mathel]

The Chasers were forced down in the Antarctic. But they though they knew what to expect of the X-Com. Humans in heavy armor with turbolasers, right? Wrong.

Some were shot by lasers, but most died from getting bitten in the butt by robodogs. They could not see that coming. They did not even get to fire a shot, they died so quickly.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The X-Com Files mod for OpenXCom

[Akura]

Took my army of about 225 men against the royal castle of... the green faction, I didn't bother to learn one from the other and it hardly matters, they're all assholes anyway. They had 120 defenders. So far, I've actually been surprised by the low number of troops defending their towns; most had at most a few dozen, and I've only seen one wandering army during my invasion with more than the 120 defending here, and I've taken much of their territory with minimal difficulty.

As for the attack, my named companions manned the battering ram, a few men manned the catapult, and the rest followed me up the ladder onto the wall. Clearing the wall was easy, except for nearly getting shanked from behind by a knight I thought I killed and also my shield breaking. Pulling out a second sword to replace the shield, I rejoined my companions at the bottom of the wall(they broke through at the same time) and charged the next wave of defenders. Unfortunately, during that charge, my troops were either wiped out or scattered, leaving my to finish the rest of them.

The next wave took the form of a line of archers locked right onto me. I ducked behind a wall, and jumped out, flailing my swords. To my complete surprise, I wasn't (noticeably) shot repeatedly in the face, and all the archers were dead. I charged right into the next wave. Despite taking a javelin to the forehead, I was able to push on by myself to the second wall.

Eventually got ganged up on by too many enemies to fight myself, so I stabbed a catapult operator(shutting it down) and ran back to the first wall. There, my army had finally gotten itself back together, and were able to assist me in tearing through my pursuers. That blob must have been the last of their spawns since I didn't meet much resistance until I reached the great hall were a guy with dual swords and some sleek-looking armor was glitched out and unable to fight back while I cut them apart(not the first time I saw that).

I didn't look at my total kills, but I'm fairly certain I killed at least half the defenders by myself. In contrast, my army only lost 47 men, far less than I expected.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Tales of Glory.

[nenjin]

Finished an Ascended playthrough doing the Bleeding Heart Penance in about...oh, 20 hours. That's about 1/3rd faster than my first playthrough. Having all the Relics and upgrades and not wandering around what to do half the time really sped things up. There were some scrapes and some rage along the way, getting used to the way the penance changes your health pool and how fast you can heal and recover from damage. But when things clicked, oh man, did they really click. Some of the hardest fights, after bashing my face against them and mapping out the moves and timing.....I cleaned house. Several fights went from dead in under 45 seconds to "didn't even have to chug for that fight." There's more of the DLC yet to play as far as other penances go, but I think I'm satisfied with this win for now.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Blasphemous

[Rolan7]

I feel pretty good about yesterday's Heat Signature win.  Given only a lethal shotgun, too weak to use melee, and too frail to ever take a hit, the goal was to to assassinate three targets while harming as few others as possible.

A rough combo, what tools did we roll?  A crash trap, useful, and... another crash trap.
okay
The best part is that the crews were mostly equipped with auto-teleporters.  Any time they heard a noise (like say, my only weapon, notably lacking the Silent or Quiet qualities for once) they would instantly teleport next to me from a long range.  Likely getting murderized by said shotgun blast.  This game really makes you *baby* the enemy sometimes.

I decided "screw it for once" and murdered my way through the first couple ships instead, taking massive score penalties.  There were several *very* close calls, even getting wounded by a sentry turret.  A guard almost picked me up to space me, which would have been RIP, but I juuuust managed to recover in time.

Third ship's crew had a combination of shields and armor, of course, so my shotgun wasn't going to be harming anyone.  Oh I forgot, the guards with keys tended to have proximity sensors, so sneaking up behind them was literally impossible. 

Long story short:  I went loud, but I had looted a 3-use sidewinder-teleporter.  So each time I fired, all the nearby guards came to me but I was able to grab a key off one then leave them confounded.  This got me to the emergency escape room.  The room next to it had a window.  I shot the window as my target passed by.

Top 6% - ranked 8 in the world, shortly before the cutoff.  I usually get in the top 20% at least.  Am I... actually good at a video game?

Anyway, new day, what's the first loot we get...  An armour-piercing shotgun against Offworld Security who never wear armor, of course.  And an equally useless acid trap.  And *Defenders* with their BS uncrashable shield-auras, despite this being an Easy Sunday daily. 
Fine, fine.  Only top 34% because I cautiously took my time.

Heat Signature (is still good actually) (despite Defenders)

[Egan_BW]

Surprised that you didn't end up shooting your shotgun, having a shield guy teleport into the blast, and dying to the reflection.

[Rolan7]

The gods favor fools, they say.

The gods also favor those who teleport behind a guard, nothing personnel, and sprint around a corner before they can react~