strawdonkey

Had a quick look for previous posts on this subject but trying to search anything for "app" is just a nightmare. Just switched from Android to iOS and used the BG Stats app to track plays previously. The app is also available on iOS, but was wondering if there's generally considered to be a better option available on iOS before I drop a few quid on it. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/board-game-stats/id892542000

32 - Narcissu 2nd More Narcissu, another story of someone who is going to die. Weirdly also focuses a lot on car ownership and usage like the first game. Slightly wonky with a few extremely effective moments.

Do you have any other things in the house that could be interfering? We had some video baby monitors that worked over 2.4GHz but despite being from a big brand they were also complete shit and would just block out the entire 2.4GHz spectrum when in use.

I wasn't using the dash at all 👀

This one is fun - only tried the regular difficulty so far. Top score on the leaderboards is about 240 million so there's a little room for improvement...

32 - Pineapple on Pizza ????????????? ? ???? ?? ????????????

Got the following in the trade folder: Ascension: Immortal Heroes: £15 Code of Nine: £12 Risk: the Two Player One: £3 Magic the Gathering: Arena of the Planeswalkers: £6 Will probably be at UKGE on the Saturday and would be happy to drop off there, or we can work out postage/collection/whatever. Not really looking for trades, I have too much to play as it is!

30 - Narcissu 31 - Endless Monday: Dreams and Deadlines Narcissu is a visual novel about coping with terminal illness as a member of a palliative care unit at a hospital, and coming to terms with the location of your death. It sadly suffers from a pretty rough presentation of the translation that can make it difficult to follow, but does follow two people's journey through acceptance and/or not acceptance of their situation in a pretty captivating way. I won't go into more detail because you could summarise the entire plot of the game in a couple of sentences, but that isn't what makes it interesting. -- I've been following the developer of Dreams and Deadlines (@hcnone) on Instagram for years now, from when they did 256x256 pixel arts of people eating burgers and stuff. About a year ago they quit their role in a coporation to try and make a go of it as an artist/developer/etc, and they've put out a bunch of stuff - most notably some fanzines and now a fully-realised videogame, set in the "Endless Monday" universe, which frequently revolves around how working for a corporation is shit. I'm biased as an existing fan of their work, but I adored this - a short adventure where you help Penny, a member of a creative team stuck in the office over the weekend, inspire themselves to do the work they've been putting off for a whole month by getting up to all sorts of daft shit while the office is empty. It's the right level of stupid without being obnoxious, and deftly touches on some real issues affecting people in creative industries whilst telling its story. Buy the thing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262610/Endless_Monday_Dreams_and_Deadlines/ - it's about £7.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/danmaku-unlimited-2-bullet-hell-shmup/id580663396 - Danmaku Unlimited 2 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/danmaku-unlimited-3/id1230598125 - Danmaku Unlimited 3 I like both of these a lot. Used to enjoy Mushihimesama too but it didn't ever get updated for 64-bit compatibility so died with the old versions of iOS sadly. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dodonpachi-resurrection-hd/id1573571545 - Dodonpachi Resurrection is available in Apple Arcade too.

Team Wisdom here too - spent a bit of time playing Hero Shot Replica before going back to the old faithful (Aerospray with Reefslider). I'm so bad at this game these days

Would very much like the code cards please, if they're still available.

I have a kind of weird problem - I'm rapidly running out of shmups. Out of my list on Steam, I've played everything except Space Moth and Mushihimesama (which to be fair is a pretty good one to save until last) but it's kind of wild that I've got through nearly 25 shmups alone since endeavouring to actually play some of the shit I've bought. Faced with the horrifying prospect of having to get the wallet out soon. Anyway - some good news, finally Killed The Fucking Chaos God on Monolith after 72 hours. Spoken about it tons in here so will save you another writeup, but it's an absolute banger and would absolutely recommend it. I've gone back to Space Moth since then; I bounced off it pretty hard originally since it's really difficult, but the tutorial kind of does you a disservice as it tells you how to play "properly" - i.e. raise your multipler and score - but doesn't really go into the fact that the game is a lot easier if you just laser everything, which is a viable strategy in the later levels when you just want to try and survive. 1CC really know how to make an excellent risk/reward system too. It was really good in Star Hunter DX and it's really good here. In short, using your main weapon will build a meter that after a certain point can be fired off to transform all bullets in your vicinity into multiplier-boosting skulls. However, using your main weapon will also cause large enemies to transform, at which point they fire a lot more bullets - great if you are in a position to absorb them, and just an added level of difficulty if you aren't. Switching from main weapon to laser after the enemies have transformed nets you bonus points, which means there's a "proper" way to play and the backup of "oh fuck there are so many bullets". Got the clear just now by using the available continues, but the 1CC feels a long way off. [edit] current best is 7.85mil at the end of stage 3, though pretty aggressively playing for score. Stage 5 and especially the boss are a bloody nightmare.

An artist I've been following for a few years has taken a break from work and developed their first game during that time. It released today! Haven't been able to play it yet but am expecting good things: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2262610/Endless_Monday_Dreams_and_Deadlines/

Those seem to be two of the best and most popular decks right now (along with Lugia/Archeops). Are you teching a Drapion V in the Lost Box deck for the one-shot on Mew VMAX? I'm playing TCG Live also - having a lot of fun with just rattling off a couple of games in the morning. The game almost feels too generous, with the caveat that after about a month of playing casually I have enough credits for one proper deck and the earn rate is pretty slow, which explains why you see the same precon/modified precon decks most of the time. Having said that I've also not spent any of the gems the game gives you on packs of cards either. I think I'm "strawdonkey" on there too, have just sent a request!

Hell yeah. Played and finished this back in 2020, big "just one more go" energy. Couple of horrible fucker levels but largely really well put together.

26a - Monolith: Relics of the Past Was going to just put this in with whatever got completed next, but am so far away from whatever that might be that I figured it would be worth a dedicated post regarding the fact that I Finally Killed The Fucking Chaos God. There is one more boss in the game I haven't tackled; you have to beat Chaos God and then fight him immediately after. Current thoughts on this: no

Be sure to let us know when you start tackling it again!

It's DLC-only and has some pretty strict requirements to be able to reach. After that there's the small matter of actually being able to kill the damn thing

For anyone who doesn't follow the Games What You Done Completed thread, I've been playing Monolith again! It is still absolutely brilliant and while the base game is very good, the DLC is probably an essential purchase. Anyway there's an optional boss. I rarely bother with optional bosses but Monolith has its claws in, just like Refrain did. I achieved all the regular clears and then following a singular Discord message (simply reading "KILL THE FUCKING CHAOS GOD") I've been on a Quest To Kill The Fucking Chaos God. Anyway this just happened, we've all been there and today it's my turn:

29 - Deepest Sword "That looks fun" I thought to myself, and then got stuck on one obstacle for 25 minutes. The rest of it was fun and straightforward but there was just one bit where I very much felt like I could have been doing anything else with my life that was more productive. Which I assume is the point of games like this and Getting Over It, etc. Unrelated: still haven't killed Chaos God

28 - Murder at the Cat Show Kill The Fucking Chaos God update: Murder at the Cat Show is a very traditional menu-driven crime adventure about cats and someone who drowned. It wasn't a cat who did it. Pretty short and sweet, and while it feels like it needs a bit more polish it did make me smile.

27 - Splatoon 3 Quick Monolith update: cleared my plate entirely. Cleared with no weapons, cleared with no upgrades, cleared with all the additional ships, cleared fast, cleared taking under 10 hits. Great stuff, very happy with myself. I let my friend know and receive the following: So uh. Chaos God is an optional hidden boss with a very specific set of steps required to reach. You can reach Chaos God by fulfilling the following criteria: I think this might take a while so look forward to updates I guess. Current status: Attempts: 2 Times reached The Temple: 1 Times reached Chaos God: 0 -- So uh Splatoon 3 then? I've been a big champion of Splatoon since I fell hard for the Wii U original, to the extent that I borderline panic-bought a Wii U so I could participate in the final Splatfest. Splatoon 2 consumed over 300 hours and I invested a ton of time into every single Splatfest, and still feel like I only scratched the surface with the ranked modes. Splatoon 3 is still really good but the criticisms about it being somewhat incremental are sadly pretty fair. There's still a bunch of fun new stuff in the game, with the lockers and gacha machine and the card game but you knew it was going to not be super different when the first trailer for the game showcased the fact you could now throw eggs in Salmon Run. It does change the way you play to an extent but there isn't a huge amount that's truly revolutionary in Splatoon 3. Singleplayer is pretty good, like all the Splatoon games. Lots of imaginative challenges, many with multiple loadouts you can attempt them with which definitely change the way you have to tackle them to some extent, and the ending is suitably absurd God In Space nonsense. I dunno - it feels almost disingenuous to refer to something so polished and well thought-out and feature-packed as "just" an incremental update, but I've definitely not had the same attachment and desire to spend every evening on Splatoon 3 that I did with 2; partly due to the amount of time I spent in Splatoon 2, and partly down to the fact that it does feel very familiar, both in good ways and bad. But it is super good, all the same. Looks absolutely stunning on the OLED too.

Reminder

26 - Monolith: Relics of the Past I wrote about the base game here, back in 2022: Was bought the DLC for Christmas and fancied a bit of a palate cleanser, few runs through the new stuff, all good. 30 further hours of in-game time later and I've had some kind of epiphany, the game has clicked in a way it didn't the first time around (even though I still adored it originally!) and the practice has really paid off, as I'm now routinely getting through parts of the game that felt like they were borderline impossible to begin with. Like Refrain -Prism Memories- did, this has properly got its hooks in to me in ways I didn't expect it to. I'm not really one for achievements in general, but the ones included with Monolith are mainly skill-based and enjoyable challenges that make the most of this game's roguelite background. There is a huge variety in the ways that the game can be played - there's four different ways to win depending on the route you take through the game, the layout and resources are different every time and there are five ships with wildly differing playstyles to run through with. Bafflingly, most of these are locked behind extremely difficult unlock conditions so most players will never know of their existence let alone get to play as them. Skully is my favourite - instead of you wholesale switching weapons each time you collect a new one, Skully slowly builds their weapon up from the standard peashooter, which can either leave you with a horrible nightmare if you're not careful, or extremely destructive if you make the right choices during the game. There's still a couple of things that I consider on my plate - a Peashooter run, where you don't pick up any new weapons at all; a run with one of the last ships that is unlocked; and maybe a no-upgrades run too, not to mention some of the hidden bosses I've so far avoided. There is also the option of exploring loops, where you make the game slightly more difficult each time around but I nearly had a nervous breakdown when there was no added difficulty so I think I'm going to pass on that one thanks. I think this one is another absolutely incredible hidden gem and for a fiver on Steam (or a tenner with the DLC) it's very easy to recommend, even if it is ultimately quite a difficult game.

25 - Lucy -The Eternity She Wished For- 15c - Refrain -Prism Memories- (Re:Advanced 1CC and I am definitely done now OK) Might need to stage a self-intervention as I'm playing too many games with hyphens in their title in daft places. Lucy is a game I very gratefully received as part of the RLLMUK Secret Santa! In, er, 2017. It's a visual novel that explores a father and son's relationship via the conduit of an extremely advanced android. It falls a bit into the trap of making most of the characters enormous shitheads so that when they take on a reasonable standpoint at the end of the game it represents clear and obvious personal growth, which is a shame; I kind of hope for something more subtle but the first hour of the game is just sledgehammer-level bad takes all around, not helped by what is probably an awkward translation that drops a kind-of transphobic line early on (though it's the only line in the game that stuck out for this reason which makes me feel like it's an awkward translation or idiom, rather than being a hallmark of a Problematic Game). Some mad shit that happened in the story: The game tries to weave in aspects of the three laws of robotics, human consciousness and the danger of an android being "too real" and the potential consequences of it. Sadly it fell a little flat just due to the absolute clanger behaviour from the humans in the game, though there is a good payoff right at the end which helped claw it back. Not a classic for me. -- OK I know everyone's bored of hearing about Refrain -Prism Memories- but I took on one last battle and about 25 attempts later finally put together The Run and am both feeling proud of the accomplishment, and also entirely comfortable that I'm Actually Done with the game now. It's an all-timer for me and when I first started playing it I didn't think I'd ever get good enough at it to complete the regular difficulty, let alone the hardest difficulty with just one continue, or the turbo-charged hard difficulty, or that I'd go through the game with all the characters and learn the nuances of how they all differ and make well over a hundred attempts or- Look it's really fucking excellent ok? if you like shmups I would really recommend giving it a try.