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Finished Spear of Destiny with 100% on each level for the first time (as opposed to getting bored of indescrimninately humping thousands of wall tiles, and mindlessly blasting my way to the exits ASAP instead), thanks to ECWolf and a functional kills/treasures/secret counter along with that holiest of holy grails in FPS games, an automap feature. I loving hate the zombies (or 'mutants', as they're officially known as, for whatever reason) in this series and I'm glad I killed every loving last one of them this time around. Yeah my final time absolutely sucks mountains of balls. Some of these maps are just complete and utter slogs to contend with on a 100% run, and I'm one of those weirdos who refuses to make mid-level saves.  Unfittingly, the final boss is by far and away the easiest enemy in the game to deal with, aside from the meatshield dogs. Slow moving projectiles vs turbocharged player movement, go figure. Score here is wrong, by the way. It's missing a digit.  I still find it odd how the HUD was spaced out in such a way that it's incapable of displaying the score properly beyond six digits. Surely even during development the guys at id Software were actually playing these games all the way through and should/would have realised such a thing? Ahhhh, whatever.
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Dec 5, 2023 17:46
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Unreal Tournament [GOTY] (1999) I'd left it on the backburner since July last year, but I remembered to get back into things and finish up the SP Tournament mode for the first time since... aw Christ, 2001? 2002?    Surprisingly easy to get to the end of this one, even on Masterful difficulty. The Deathmatch Ladder is just stupidly easy to win, all the way through, so I don't have much to say about that other than "gun go bang". The three Teamgame Ladders aren't so straightforward, but are still simple enough if you tell your team of bots to be aggressive and go for the objectives as soon as the match starts; they'll either succeed whilst you lay waste to the enemy bots, or provide enough of a distraction for you to do things yourself -- just don't have them following you around, because they're pretty poo poo at engaging/disengaging in any way that would make sense. Especially on Assault. Can't say for sure that it's really a thing, but the matches here involving the Skaarj teams certainly seemed more difficult (the Skaarj bots consistently felt like they were more accurate and reacting faster to whatever the hell I was doing compared to the standard assortment of guys and gals) but I could have just been having a few off moments along the way. The 'Challenge' Ladder, featuring all these shiny cyborg-types, was a bit of a wake-up call. Not because of the faster gamespeed, but the much shorter fraglimit (15). You have to be constantly hunting or one of the bots will invariably start dominating with grenade spam or some other poo poo (lmao when it backfires and they eat their own grenades). Other than that, pretty straightforward and the increased speed soon feels normal. Cyborg or not, these bots are just as susceptible to being shredded by flak shells and minigun fire as everything else has been. And then there's the final match, a 1-on-1 against Xan. Hoooooo boy, this garbage again. Xan, as usual, was a horrible, needlessly facehugging, insultingly-accurate piece of poo poo with a fetish for insta-dodging projectiles that aren't flak-based. I think I got pretty loving lucky to one-shot the finale so quickly, I'll admit that much, and I'm just going to say it; Hyperblast is an absolutely awful choice for a 1-on-1 battle. You spend more time racing around looking for the robot bastard than you do actually fighting him, though chances are he's going to head straight for the Shield Belt the moment it respawns. Combine this with the constant risk of  Motherfucker was just delaying the inevitable, and things would have been closer if he wasn't such a relentlessly greedy dickhead. I  In any case, it's amazing not just how well the game holds up almost 25 years after release, but how surprisingly good and enjoyable the single-player portion actually is. Sure it's ultimately a load of glorified fake-multiplayer stuff at its core, but it's presented in such a way that actually feels like a reasonably coherent campaign with some meat to it, mixing up the difficulties, bot teams and behaviours with a pretty drat good assortment of modes to fight through, rather than just being a series of random matches against random assholes, slapped in as some afterthought for Billy-no-Mates or the few 28k modem users left in the world. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Quake III. What a ride though. God I loving love Assault mode.
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Jan 26, 2024 16:02
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30XX  Always feels good to win at this, especially so convincingly, because when it goes wrong it goes really wrong. Was playing co-op with a mate, and for the second time in a row the RNG was well in our favour; by the end of the game we were just brokenly OP with the most ridiculous Aug & Core combinations (lmao I was completely no-effort just Juggernaut-dashing around while also equipped with passive shields, leaving me safe enough to just ignore hazards and smash enemies to bits on contact). Final boss didn't know what loving hit him! He'd do his usual 'move fast across the screen throwing poo poo around' stuff when the fight started, but that's no good when there's a nigh-invulnerable player also rushing around and tearing his hp to loving shreds on contact -- never mind the other dude blasting him into mulch for 400dmg a hit. Ten seconds! It was over before the music even had a chance to get going!
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Jan 27, 2024 22:53
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Just beat the remastered release of Tomb Raider. Holds up remarkably well for the most part, though not without some unnecessarily frustrating moments (mostly combat-related, due to how anything and everything nudges Lara around effortlessly on contact). I made it more awkward for myself than I really needed to by chasing a couple of "no fun allowed" achievements: In any case, thoroughly enjoyed revisiting this one, despite the above pair of achievements meaning that by about halfway through I had to savescum like an incompetent baby every time I made even the most trivial of progress. Christ I loving hate the Mutants. Oh well, on to the Unfinished Business expansion
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Feb 19, 2024 14:07
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30XX (again) Except now co-op actually displays an ending!  
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Apr 5, 2024 22:27
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