Week of 19 Feb 2023
“Assistants don’t ask questions.”
Achievements Earned In:
- Jump Force
- Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion
- Hitchhiker
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection
- El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron
The rest of Jump Force was essentially like the previous week, except far more grinding as I needed to reach a total of one million gold earned. And spent, but obviously that’s pretty easy once you have the funds. The quickest way to grind that money is to reach level 100, then using the “Defying Limits 14” Expert Free Mission. Of course, consistently completing this mission was easy enough with the combat strategy I outlined previously. Mostly, I wanted to touch on my thoughts on this game’s story mode, which is all just…so disappointing. The storyline is you are a Normal Person in the real world caught up in the blending of the Shonen Jump worlds with yours, given superhuman powers, and helping fight the antagonists alongside three teams led by Son Goku, Monkey D. Luffy, and Uzumaki Naruto. But, all of the character animations just look stiff in most instances, with the bulky characters (like from Dragon Ball or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) looking awkward and ‘roided out. Your created character doesn’t even emote, which is super weird. The environments are so bland, and everything just lacks any excitement or personality. There’s also a huge, missed opportunity to have all these iconic characters have fun/interesting interactions with each other whenever they interact! Compare all this to the infinitely cooler Jump Ultimate Stars on the Nintendo DS and it just feels like such a wet fart of a celebration for this legendary line of manga.
But, hey, easy completion!
Achievements unlocked: 50 (+7) | Completed
Wow, of all the people, I didn’t expect the Jump Force to include Willem Dafoe in kink gear!
After a week of evaluations for the one-year anniversary of her double lung transplant, and her being home for almost two months now, it seemed I wouldn’t have to be relying on Xbox Game Pass Cloud games to continue my streak anymore. That meant it was time to go ahead and knock out Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion. This is a very simple (and very silly) action game that plays as a Zelda clone mixed with white collar crime. Lots of stabbing and ripping in this game! Following a guide makes this a pretty short game, but it’s fun to read things and talk to the veggie people for the writing and silliness. I chuckled plenty, and I definitely recommend this one for a good, relaxing time.
Achievements unlocked: 37 (+36) | Completed
Hehe, I’m in danger.
I was on a roll cleaning up my gamertag finally, so I decided to move to Hitchhiker, which I’d started on a whim way back in June 2022. I felt I needed to start getting some of my touchscreen-reliant Windows games completed before my old tablet-laptop combo finally went kaput, so I started this towards that goal. Then more chaos happened and I fell off it. It’s a very simple game, where you have to use solely hitchhiking to get from your starting position to the end goal, with each subsequent end getting further and further away. You can control the maneuvers each ride can make, but you only have so many of each command in each mission. But it all takes place in the same small city area, and that’s really all there is to the gameplay, so it’s not exactly exciting stuff. A very easy completion, if not a little boring.
Achievements unlocked: 50 (+33) | Completed
I’m so glad everyone picks up hitchhikers in the middle of the night here and do everything they command of them.
And with Hitchhiker knocked out, I was officially caught up to my satisfaction! That means I could start something new. My bestie TommyToday was kind enough to have bought me Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection a bit ago, but between not being in a place to start something new and/or being out of town I just never had a chance to get around to it. That changed this week, and honestly it was wild going back to these games from my childhood. Well, some of them; I never really played the Genesis-exclusive Hyperstone Heist, the third Gameboy game, or the NES version of Tournament Fighters. But getting to go back to The Manhattan Project and Fall of the Foot Clan after all this time really brought me back to my childhood of playing them for hours. Sadly, like most old games, I just did not enjoy playing them beyond a few minutes each, so I quickly took advantage of the compilation’s watch-and-play feature to fast-forward to the final hit of each title’s end boss, take control, and earn the achievement for beating the game. There are only two titles this doesn’t work with: the versions of Tournament Fighters for Genesis and SNES. You actually have to play their story modes fully to “beat” the game, and the watch mode doesn’t play through the correct mode so that’s a no-go. They weren’t too bad, what with the save state and rewind features, but you still had to beat the Genesis version on the hardest difficulty, so your mileage may vary. It wasn’t bad! What a fun little run down memory lane.
Achievements unlocked: 13 (+13) | Completed
Word of advice, Leo: Get outta Florida ASAP.
It was time to try out a game that I’d been contemplating for a few years now! The mysterious El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron went down to only $2 back before it was delisted, so I grabbed it and always wanted to get around to it, but the achievements kinda intimidated me. But, I figured in my goal to get a good bit of my remaining non-backwards compatible games done I should finally take the dive. I’m not sure how the scoring will be, since I haven’t unlocked that part yet, but the combat is painfully dull and the story is just weird. It’s all based off Abrahamic mythology (a lore not often directly mined for adaptation) and the art style is very cool, but that’s really where my praise ends. You have to do at minimum two playthroughs: one on Easy to unlock Extreme, then another on that higher difficulty. You could theoretically get your G-ranks on Extreme, but since the hardest you have to play on for the achievement is Hard, why do that to yourself? Also, if you get all of one of the collectibles you unlock an armor that negates all damage, making Extreme a piece of cake. But using that armor caps your rank at S, so you can’t use it and get your rankings, so better to do three playthroughs, which is what I’m going to do. I’m nearing the end of my first one, and can’t wait to be done with this bonkers game ASAP.
Achievements unlocked: 16 (+16) | Completion: 32%
Hey, remember when the prophet Ezekiel sent his two giant blood-crying pigs to fight Enoch? That Old Testament nugget not ringing a bell?
Highest ratio: 13.41
Jump Force (Jump Force)
Lowest ratio: 1.00
The Journey Begins (El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron)
