Friday 23 October 2015

Perfect Games

Not perfect in the sense of the games being well made, but perfect in the sense that I have all of the achievements on Steam.

I posted a bit about my road to completing the Binding of Isaac. That was my second perfect game. I couldn't think of what my first was and did some searching. It turned out I didn't have another game with all the achievements. What I did have was Rogue Legacy, a game for which I completed all the achievements before they added some more. Apparently the "perfect" status remains under these conditions. So I guess that means I'll have a perfect record with Afterbirth the moment it launches.

Since the announcement of the release date for Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth, I've been looking for games to kill time with until it comes out. I thought I might try to pick up a few more perfects on the way. Unfortunately - from my perspective - a lot games require you to do a huge amount of grinding to get achievements, particularly where games offer online play. I had some fun playing Magic Duels, but I'm not going for 500 player vs. player wins for an achievement.

The game I zeroed in on as my best chance was Skyrim. It turned out that Skyrim doesn't have any extremely grindy or hard achievements, it just has a lot of achievements that cover parts of the game I hadn't really experienced. In order to get one of the achievements I needed to start a new game and level up to 30, and others involved doing very large questlines, but I think I probably rounded out all of the achievements I didn't have in about 50-60 hours of play.

Next I looked at finishing off King's Bounty: Dark Side, but even though there is nothing terribly difficult to do there, it takes about 100 hours to just play the game through, so winning with an orc would be a big pain.

I finally settled on Desktop Dungeons. I wrote about this game when it was in beta, and mentioned the alpha as well. The full release has been on Steam for a while now, and it is a really good game. The achievements looked a little daunting at first, but most of them just require some clever strategies, not huge numbers of attempts. I've only got three achievements to go now, one of which is within reach and the other two of which are doozies. It should keep me busy until Afterbirth anyway.

Wednesday 14 October 2015

Crime Simulator: Rebirth

I've done a full rewrite of Crime Simulator including many new features for those who like to simulate the commission of crimes. The game, at it's heart, is still a game about soliciting men with the offer of sexual favours, killing them, and using their money to go to New York to kill Andy Warhol, but there is so much more you can do now. In particular, there are 13 achievements for you to obtain, ranging from nearly impossible to avoid to being so specific in their requirements that its very unlikely anyone will ever come across them without looking at the code.

The basic engine driving the thing is a lot less slapdash now, so it's much easier for me to add things to the game. Will I continue development? Who knows. But if you would like to see features, or if you encounter bugs, feel free to report them here or on the official Crime Simulator thread on Boing Boing's BBS. Enjoy your crime spree.