A Strategy Guide for your Strategy Guides
It has been a while since I had a collector’s edition of a strategy guide! But now I sit with two, and here is an unboxing of one of them, the Wolfenstein II collector’s edition strategy guide. It’s a thing of beauty, and I look forward to using it when I play. Check out what’s inside below!
Be on the lookout for unboxing the Assassin’s Creed Origins strategy guide soon!
I wasn’t able to get my Assassin’s Creed Origins Collector’s Edition on release day, but it still arrived and holy cow is it amazing. Technically, it’s called the Gods’ Edition, but potayto potahto. It includes a new statue for my statue garden, an art book, the game soundtrack, and of course, the game. It’s all of my favorite things in one giant box!
But is it worth the hefty price? See for yourself in our video below.
Stay tuned for the corresponding Assassin’s Creed Origins Collector’s Edition strategy guide unboxing video. It should be here soon!
I returned home late last night from an amazing Extra Life weekend with the best gaming friends I could ever have. The four of us gathered at Chris’s house, ate all his food, moved his furniture, and used up his datacap all in the name of playing video games and raising money for children’s hospitals. We laughed, we made fun of one another, and we caught up as if we just saw one other last month instead of two years ago. It made leaving yesterday very hard.
Of course I missed my house and my family, but I was sad to leave my friends. We really have to do better about getting together, even if it’s just to play a game together. Something where we can all talk instead of type.
I brought a number of games with me to keep me occupied across the 24 hours, but I was not prepared to only touch two of them. I thought I was nearly done with Ys VIII when I started the event, but I was over 14 hours away from finishing. Thanks to the abysmal boss rush of an ending, I think I’m done with JRPGs outside of the Square Enix realm. I’m good with Final Fantasy and Star Ocean, but I’m tired of this pattern of a game being way too easy until the very end, where even after doing all the side quests, you’re still way too underpowered to fight the final bosses. Sorry you have nothing left to do, but you’re going to have to grind up at least 10 more levels before you can even think of tackling these bosses. Oh and I hope you have enough potions with you, because there’s no time to get more in between. Ugh it was frustrating beyond belief. Finally said fuck all and lowered the difficulty because I was completely out of potions. The only way I could get more was to reload a save point at the start of the final boss rush. I had zero interest in doing that.
But hey, it’s done, and I’m not sure I want to do many more.
I also finished The Division with Blake, and that was absolutely thanks to Chris. He was so overpowered, he carried us the entire rest of the way. While Blake and I huddled together (so we could heal one another) and took cover to pick off enemies one by one, Chris would just run straight up to them, no matter their strength, and kill them with his pistol. Yes, his pistol. It was both amazing and humbling.
As much as I would like to tackle another game on my backlog, quite a few with guides are releasing this week, and I need to keep focused on those before I head back into the stack of the shame.
The “real” Extra Life weekend is set for November 4-5, but Team SGR is doing it this weekend. We couldn’t get together for the actual date, and this was the only weekend before Thanksgiving where we weren’t totally booked. That real life thing, y’all. It’s often a pain in the ass.
Last night we totally destroyed Chris’s office area in the name of setting up three additional gaming stations. I have my PS4 and Switch, Ross has his PS4 and massive desktop PC, Chris has his entire collection, and Blake brought the following:
I suppose that’s the difference between driving somewhere for an event and flying. TSA tried to make me check my GAEMS case containing my PS4. They were baffled when I said absolutely not.
We’re all going to be streaming throughout the day, and no, I’m not hosting all of the streams on the SGR Twitch channel. I don’t have the know-how to do it at all, much less do it right so it doesn’t look like a foursquare of streams. So for your convenience, here are everyone’s streams:
Watch live video from grundytheman on www.twitch.tv
Watch live video from StarvenMarven on www.twitch.tv
Watch live video from crunchychocobo on www.twitch.tv
Watch live video from GreedyRaven on www.twitch.tv
As you can see from our sidebar to the right, we’ve blown our goal out of the water. However, Blake still hasn’t met his personal goal, and Ross upped his goal to $1k. If you’re still considering donating, please donate to one of them.
This weekend somehow turned into one of finishing things. I platinumed in two Vita games and finished a book. Now I’m wondering what I’ll do next, handheld-wise, as I have plenty to do console-wise.
I honestly wasn’t expecting to finish either Vita game so quickly. Last week I reviewed a visual novel, Bad Apple Wars, for PlayStation LifeStyle. I know if I actually take the time, I can easily Platinum a visual novel, even though I’ve never done it before. Usually racking up the trophies in a visual novel requires multiple, multiple playthroughs. For the review, I played through it a few times, which was incredibly easy since there’s so little gameplay. It also helps that the game has an auto-play feature, allowing you to skip through dialogue you’ve already read and auto-scrolling through dialogue you haven’t read. Anything I could do one-handed, I did while holding my Vita and watching the movies play out. You make 1-2 decisions in the beginning, and then simply watch how it all unfolds. There’s some touch screen gameplay mixed in, but that can be done while doing something else one-handed.
After playing through each character’s ending once, I spent the next two days with the game on almost literal auto-pilot while I worked. When I realized on Friday night that I only had the bad endings to sort through, which I could start at each character’s chapter 6 (out of 9 chapters), it was game on from there. I have to say that the bad endings were some of the most depressing things I have ever seen in a visual novel, which is saying a lot. It probably wasn’t the best thing to end my night with, but the Platinum Trophy pop made it worth it.
Before I had to focus on Bad Apple Wars, I was trying to console myself over missing out on the Platinum trophy for The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game with LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens on Vita. LEGO games on the Vita are often a bigger pain-in-the-ass than on console, but this one takes the cake. It’s not LEGO Marvel Superheroes on Vita bad, but it’s in that direction. Thankfully, the strategy guide included the handheld strategies (they often don’t lately, only online), which was an immense help in trying to figure out some of the minikit locations in the levels. You’d think that with the Red Brick turned on to point you toward collectibles would be enough, but it certainly was not. I almost did better ignoring the markers completely than trying to figure out what in the world they were pointing to. When you have to destroy X number of things, don’t mark where the kit appears; mark the things you’re suppose to destroy. It was absolutely ridiculous.
The one trophy that might have prevented my Platinum glory, however—the one that requires killing 10 enemies by deflecting blaster shots at them. If you hold down the square button, the lightsaber wielder stands in a defensive position, almost like a batter trying to bunt. It was fairly easy to do this to kill the enemies, but it never counted. If I had the Red Brick turned on to allow perfect deflects, the trophy wouldn’t pop. So, okay, I turn that Red Brick off and all the other Red Bricks, just to be safe. Then I replay one level over and over to bat back blaster shots at stormtroopers. That still didn’t work. Out of extreme frustration, I read the trophy description one more time. It says to deflect as a Jedi. A Jedi. I’ve been using Kylo Ren, so could that be what’s preventing the trophy pop?
Once I switched to Luke, the trophy popped very quickly. It helped that by this point, I was a goddamn pro at deflecting blaster shots. Trophy popped, Platinum trophy popped, victory dance was had, and then it was time for bed.
Not sure if I’ll have any other productive weekends like that one, but it was nice to clear games off my plate when it feels like all I do is pile them on.