Trophy Hunter’s Club: 2019 in Review
Last time on THC I wrote about the system I’ve implemented to “improve” my video gaming. I thought it would be a good idea to go back through the list of games I completed last year and touch on how difficult the trophy sets were and whether the games were actually any good! Don’t judge me.
Call of Cthulu
I’m part of a Dungeons and Dragons group amongst some close friends and I thought it would be cool to run a game of Call of Cthulu based on some hilarious videos the Yogscast put out several years back. As a result I’ve acquired a taste for Cthulu-flavoured media despite not having ever picked up a H.P. Lovecraft book (I did get obsessed with the Re-Animator films a few years back though).
The official video game of the RPG gives you a nice flavourful taste of the green-tinged world of CoC (yes it has an unfortunate acronym) but I found the story slightly lacking in how it jumped around all over the damn place or had you “possess” other NPCs for chunks of storyline. It the video game was supposed to be a taste of playing the RPG, then the Keeper clearly kept losing track of the plot and had to keep railroading the player despite only having a handful of players to keep track of.
The trophies were fairly straightforward and I got most of them on the first playthrough. There was a frustrating second playthrough where you have to put points into certain stats and if the random number generator decides you fail on some of the challenges but you don’t hit reload quick enough, the game autosaves and you have to restart the chapter.
Personal difficulty rating: 3/10.
Hitman 2
I love Hitman as you can probably tell from the fact that I can’t stop writing about it.
Half of Hitman 2’s trophy set was duplicated from Hitman 2016 a.k.a. the “season one” of modern Hitman. I didn’t really mind retreading the old levels to grind out the trophies but please, for the love of gods IO Interactive, don’t do the same with Hitman 3, I’m not sure I can be bothered to redo the trophies from season one and two.
(Spoilers: I totally will.)
IO was also really annoying in how they did a great job in releasing new mission packs for the game which meant that Hitman 2 technically kept jumping off the “completed” list all year. The sniper challenge packs I particularly enjoyed because I did them with my significant other. I still go back for the elusive targets despite them not contributing to trophies, too (that’s right, I do them for the sheer giddy thrill of fun!).
Personal difficulty rating: 4/10 (1 point was awarded for the sheer amount of trophies and levels to grind out).
South Park: The Fractured But Whole
Very funny and fun game, the first time through. The second time through I saw all the jokes coming so it was pretty much one of the dullest games to grind through, even on the hardest mode.
If you’re struggling concentrate on giving your character powers and abilities that afflict status effects (particularly frozen and shocked, which one of the limit break abilities does at the same time) and the game becomes laughably easy even on the hardest mode.
Personal difficulty rating: 3/10.
Quiplash
It’s a party game and yet I completed it by opening seven private browser windows on my laptop and pretending to be seven different people.
I was so ashamed that I didn’t even count it towards the system.
The sad thing is, I’m probably going to end up doing the same for the three or four other Jackbox games I’ve downloaded since at some point. Apparently I don’t count party games towards the system now, I guess?
Personal difficulty rating: 1/10.
Personal shame rating: 9/10.
2064: Read Only Memories
I absolutely loved this game. It’s a throwback to old-school graphic adventure games, in this case specifically Snatcher which it pays heaps of homage to. You basically help a cute little talking robot solve the murder of their creator and uncover a massive conspiracy.
The trophies basically boil down to playing once through as a really nice guy (which just came naturally on my first playthrough) and then playing through again as a complete bastard.
The flies in the ointment were two shooting gallery style minigames that require you to not be hit by enemies and get a high score respectively. Both were not optimised for the PlayStation from their PC origin at all and, as such, they basically come down to patience and luck, neither of which I have. Some posts online recommend using the janky PS4 touchpad but I’m pretty sure I managed to get there in the end using the dpad and buttons, despite the horrendous amounts of input lag (oh fuck me there was terrible input lag).
The last challenge is completing the game in one playthrough without dying which only takes about three hours if you skip all the dialogue. The most difficult part comes in a boss encounter near the end where the random number generator might decide to screw you and just straight up kill you. Luckily I was used to this boss’s bullshit by this point and managed to survive with minimal fuss.
Personal difficulty rating: 2/10 for the main game and 9/10 for the shooting minigames, which can feck right off.
Carnivores HD
Christ, I bought this bloody years ago out of nostalgia for the original Carnivores PC games, not realising that this was basically a port of a handheld version. I pretty much bought it to let the mate who had the original carnivores play it and then immediately forgot about it.
It’s a game when you shoot dinosaurs for sport. It’s like Jurassic Park gone wrong…er…gone right? The dinosaurs are only killing rich businessmen who are paying to hunt them so that’s good, right?
I only had two trophies left: shoot a bunch of t-rexes and get more than 500 points for a kill. The former was easy peasy once I realised that one of the desert levels has a rock bridge the t-rexes can’t climb up on and the latter basically meant turning off all the items that help you hunt dinos and then nailing a herbivore in the back of a skull with a crossbow.
Felt good to get this one crossed off!
Personal difficulty rating: 4.5/10.
Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse
You can’t buy this anymore! SEGA released this HD remake of the Mega Drive classic several years back and I picked it up on the PlayStation store the day before SEGA’s license with Disney expired. I never finished the original because I found it too hard so I don’t know what I was expecting.
I didn’t expect the game to be narrated by Sully from the Uncharted games, so that was awesome.
It turned out that I’d done two-thirds of the game before I’d given up so most of the leftover trophies were collecting all the level collectibles, most of which I’d also collected. I’m not the best at platforming and I don’t have a lot of patience, however I remember only getting frustrated a few times. There’s a handful of collectibles on the library level that were particularly nasty to get.
It took me 12 attempts to beat the final boss, a cheap facsimile of Maleficent who I hated by the end because she repeats the same ten lines of dialogue every time you fight her.
Personal difficulty rating: 5/10 (I suck at platforming).
Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge
I didn’t play the Monkey Island games when they originally came out but I did play them when a mate leant me them years later, still before the HD remakes. The first game wasn’t too bad but I remembered getting frustrated with the second game for just being completely obtuse with its puzzle logic.
The baffling part was, going back to finish off the meagre few trophies left, discovering that I’d quit a no-hints speed run about 30 minutes before the end. I have no idea why, maybe I just thought I wasn’t going to finish the game in 3 hours despite having over an hour left on the clock?
I followed a guide and finished the game, 4 trophies in the bag.
Personal difficulty rating: 1/10 (yeah, yeah I cheated by using a guide).
The Sinking City
2019 was the year of Cthulu video games, apparently. I really dug the Sinking City over the official game though because of its free-form investigation mechanics and unusual Cthulu theme park atmosphere. I actually went and did side investigations and quests that didn’t earn trophies just for kicks because the game was so fun. I do acknowledge that the enemies and environments were very repetitive and some of the controls were pretty jank, however.
Managed to do all the trophies pretty much in one sitting, there’s a few side investigations you have to reload and make a different decision on.
Personal difficulty rating: 3/10.
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Genuinely one of the most tedious trophy sets completed last year, you basically have to sit and watch some guy play the game while you play because there are missable collectibles and seriously fuck that as a game mechanic. I know Japanese RPGs have been doing it for years but it’s 2020 now, maybe give your players the opportunity to go back and collect things they miss the first time around?
I realise that they did correct this for the sequel but it was still a slog. The gameplay is pretty repetitive compared to the sequel too.
Personal difficulty rating: 2/10.
Personal boredom rating: 10/10.
Dragonball Z: Budokai HD Collection
I believe this was a Christmas gift I requested out of nostalgia several years back and seeing it uncompleted on the list I thought why not?
Turns out you can put the difficulty right down and then grind through the levels no problem. I took turns with the missus because she played the originals back in the day and it was a blast reliving the PS2 DBZ games.
I think I managed to grind out the characters to unlock in the space of a week, where I swear it took me and the missus a few months back on the PS2. There’s a handful of trophies that rely on random encounters and a few that require cheesing the world tournaments but I don’t remember anything too frustrating, it was just a bit of a blast really!
Personal difficulty rating: 2/10.
Tekken Hybrid
Tekken Hybrid actually consists of two games but since one of them is basically a glorified demo I classed them as one game.
I don’t think Tekken Tag Tournament HD was particularly difficult, the hardest parts being beating Time Attack in under 6 minutes and clearing 10 wins in survival. I would like to think I did this with my faves Jack and Bryan but I suspect I ended up cheesing it with Wang and Paul and their 1-hit kill moves (I’m too lazy to turn on the game and check the leaderboards to see who I used).
Tekken Tag Tournament 2 Prologue was an absolute grind. You have four characters to pick from and a series of four stages to fight through. You have to do this about 20 times. If you like reliving the old PSOne demo discs of old, then this is the game for you!
Personal difficulty rating: 5/10.
Tekken Tag Tournament 2
Capping off the run of Tekken games, this one gave me thumb blisters. Christ, I thought the demo was grindy, I forgot that the main game is exactly the same.
Challenges were threefold:
- Beating someone online; I am crap at fighting games. It turns out there’s someone out there who’s worse. It helps that losses apparently don’t penalise you online.
- Get the top title in arcade mode; this was exacerbated by the fact that I didn’t realise that you had to fight characters of the same level otherwise it doesn’t count, which means I did probably hundreds of fights for no reason.
- Beat the Combot training mode; I got stuck on level 3 with the blocking boss fight, I just couldn’t do it for toffee! I think I just lucked out in the end.
I was glad when the grinding was all done.
Personal difficulty rating: 7/10.
Trivial Pursuit Live!
Thanks for getting me to login and start this bloody trophy set on my account, Ross.
In all honesty this was quite fun to do as it meant I could play a bunch of rounds with the missus, but then she started beating me and that didn’t help with the trophy where you have to win a bunch of times so I sacked her in favour of AI players.
I did this in parallel with Tekken Tag 2. When the physical grinding on that got tiring, I’d switch to this and do mental grinding instead.
Personal difficulty rating: 3/10 (I used a guide for the one where you have to get every question right, alright?).
Return of the Obra Dinn
Ohh, just superb! What a great game. If you love puzzles, it doesn’t get more engaging that trying to work out who the crew are on a ship from a sketch and working out how they all died using a magic watch. I spent a week with my other half and we were riveted from beginning to end in trying to work out who each crewman was.
There’s a trophy for getting everything completely wrong too, which is surprisingly difficult especially if you don’t have a save game without any correct deductions.
I can’t recommend this game enough. I just wish there was more!
Personal difficulty rating: 6/10 (it would be lower if we’d cheated and just looked everything up!).
Marvel’s Spider-man
It’s a great game but I struggled to engage with it because the combat just isn’t as tight as in the Batman games. The other thing that got my goat was, like the South Park games, this one wants you to redo everything on a second playthrough on max difficulty and that’s where you realise the game is a bit of a one-trick pony. There weren’t any new enemy placements, all the collectibles were reset and the missions were identical.
By the time I’d done that the DLC just became a tedious milestone, particularly around the second DLC pack where enemies start getting equipment with no easy exploits. I resorted to lowering the difficulty right down and powering on through the surprisingly unevenly paced extra story).
It’s a really good game, play it once and ignore the DLC (and their trophies).
Personal difficulty rating: 5/10.
Tropico 5
I got this one as a freebie from the PS Plus subscription service. It’s a great city builder game with some interesting mechanics but it’s an absolute pig to collect all the trophies on!
Even lowering the difficulty, a lot of the missions can be pretty brutal if you haven’t set up your city correctly. I think I must have restarted the main campaign about three times!
I found going all farms in the colonial era would rake in the cash and then supplement them with creameries, rum factories and cigar factories during the world wars. When the Cold War rolls around you can improve your farm production with one edict and then bump up the amount earned from farming from another edict! Plunge loads of cash into building hotels before the modern era and hopefully tourism will keep your city afloat while mining and farming profits drop.
It’s really important to keep game saves in-between levels because, even at the end, I found myself having to backtrack a few missions to prep my city more carefully for one of the later missions.
The DLC missions can be just as annoying, although I remember one mission (“Pay-to-win”) being particularly memorable as the game suddenly turns into a mobile game.
One warning for prospective trophy hunters is that there are multiplayer trophies; you’ll want a mate to give you a hand with all of these (in this case I got my wife involved again!).
Personal difficulty rating: 8/10.
That’s All for 2019, Folks!
I managed to earn 620 trophies in 2019. That’s quite a big number, isn’t it? There’s also 17 games completed (18 if you split Tekken Hybrid) which is quite a satisfying number of 100% completions!
Let’s see if we can beat that number in 2020…
Post by Sean Patrick Payne+ | February 2, 2020 at 12:00 pm | Trophy Hunter's Club, Video Games | No comment
Tags: 2064: Read Only Memories, Agent 47, Call of Cthulu, Dragonball Z, H.P. Lovecraft, Hitman, Jackbox, Monkey Island, PS3, PS4, South Park, Tekken, trophies