2022 Recap
Figured I should try and get one post in for the year. I will briefly cover the main plays from 2022, which won’t take too long considering I didn’t play all that much this year. That plus the handy new “Steam Replay” feature will make this a breeze.

• FIFA 22
  

  202 hours playtime

  19 of 37 achievements

• XCOM: Enemy Unknown
  

  174 hours playtime

  84 of 85 achievements

• Blood Bowl 2
  

  25 hours playtime

  17 of 31 achievements

FIFA 22
Bought it on sale in January - very rarely do I actually buy a game from the store, even on discount. My backlog grows nearly exclusively from bundles and trading (as I’m sure many of you would be familiar with). However, I had a strong urge to build an Ultimate Team again (something I haven’t done since FIFA 14 on the PS3) and figured I could justify the price with the amount of hours that I would put in. Finished up with just over 200 hours, although a good chunk of that would’ve been AFK grinding squad battles. Achievements are a bore, especially considering most of them are for the modes I wasn’t interested in. Overall, enjoyed my time with it, but definitely won’t be buying the next one. However, I have (embarrassingly) been seriously addicted to FIFA Mobile over the last couple of months.

XCOM: EU
My favourite game of all time. I was a couple runs away from getting 100% achievements, so I picked it back up again to try and complete them. It doesn’t feel like a grind though, I seriously love the game. Currently hunting the last achievement by save-scumming my way through an Impossible difficulty run. Once I finish it I will probably move on as I have loads of similar games to try (like the sequels!)

Blood Bowl 2
My brother was way into the game back in the day, so I figured I would give it a shot. It’s turn-based, but doesn’t feel super tactical (too much luck involved). The gameplay is quite slow with no option to speed up the AI turns. I found the only way to tolerate it was to be doing something else in the background - like watching YouTube on the second monitor or playing FIFA on my phone (sometimes both).

August 2021

It’s been a year since my last post! While I’ve beaten a bunch of games since then, I’d like to focus on a few that I finished more recently. I wanted to get a post done before uni really ramps up this semester, because once it does I will have very little time for gaming or BLAEO posting. Week 2 has just finished and things are already starting to get hectic.

• Bounty Train
  

  25 hours playtime

  18 of 30 achievements

• Faerie Solitaire
  

  15 hours playtime

  30 of 30 achievements

• Fae Tactics
  

  60 hours playtime

  9 of 10 achievements

Lately I have been prioritising SteamGifts wins as I would like to be a part of the group Playing Matters someday soon (hello future PM recruiter, if you’re reading this). Sometime between my last post and now I actually did manage to get half of my SG wins to >25% achievements, which was a pretty longstanding goal of mine (and one of the minimum requirements for the PM group). That milestone has since been steadily creeping towards 60% of games with 25% or more achievements.

Bounty Train
Despite this, the first game that I have properly enjoyed in a while wasn’t actually an SG win. I don’t remember when I bought this one - probably from a bundle or through trading, but I found it in my library and decided to give it a go. Took an hour or so to get settled with the mechanics and the tutorial, but after that I was off. I really liked the trading mechanic - it reminded me of Caravan. I wasn’t too keen on the combat, but thankfully there were sliders to adjust both the difficulty and frequency of these encounters. Worked my way through the main campaign, followed by the DLC campaign, picking up as many achievements as I could along the way. Decided not to stick around to grind the rest of the achievements, as the ones I had left were rather luck-based and I was getting a bit sick of the mild tediousness by this point. Overall fun game - hope to find more like this one in the backlog.

Faerie Solitare
Nice little game to grind to 100%. Pretty boring, but not bad while watching YouTube or something. Was nice to complete another SG win.

Fae Tactics
This was a big one - another SG win as well. The last achievement got away from me as it required an NG+ run, which I don’t think I could handle. I even borrowed a friend’s save file (same may consider this cheating, but I just wanted to see if it was possible) and I couldn’t beat the final boss, so there you go. Aside from that, it was an awesome game and massively underrated. A couple minor complaints (unskippable cutscenes!), but the game itself was very polished and the gameplay was fun.

There have been a number of great bundles & sales this year, so it’s quite likely my backlog has grown and not shrunk over the past year.

Welp, it’s back to the uni grind for me. I recently changed my major, so at least I’m enjoying what I’m doing a bit more now. Looking forward to beating some more games, but realistically I won’t have much time until the next holidays. Also I got a kitten.

Cya then!

August 2020
Gotta keep up my trend of posting once every ~8 months. I do still visit the site regularly to check out the stats n things, but it just takes a lot of effort to post. I have also gotten a good amount of the backlog completed in that time, so I’ll just post about a couple big ones.

• Rebel Galaxy
  

  50 hours playtime

  37 of 37 achievements

• Insurgency
  

  30 hours playtime

  54 of 100 achievements

• ORION: Prelude
  

  20 hours playtime

  94 of 251 achievements

• Town of Salem
  

  70 hours playtime

  96 of 361 achievements

Rebel Galaxy
I had gotten really close to beating this before abandoning it for a while. When I decided to revisit it, I got hooked all over again! Completing the achievements wasn’t too hard - only required a moderate amount of grinding after finishing the main story. You do, however, have to enjoy the grind - I can imagine this game might get a bit repetitive and boring for some. The progression system is great and feels rewarding. Controls can be a bit annoying at times, but you do get used to them. Overall really solid game, and I’m happy to be ticking off such a big one! 9/10

Insurgency
Not a fan of FPS games, but I wanted to give it another go because I’m not big on abandoning Steamgifts wins. I discovered the co-op mode required very little skill and was a great way to earn a large chunk of the achievements, so I stuck with that. I ended up enjoying the game a lot more than I thought I would, but I’m happy to cross it off and put it aside for now (or for good).

Orion: Prelude
The classic $1 dino shooter. Bought it a few years ago and played it with my friends a little bit, but had barely touched it since then. It was yet another game that hadn’t reached my self-imposed rule of earning minimum 25% achievements. (I’ll explain later). For a while I was put off by the sheer amount of achievements the game had (251!) and thought that getting even just a quarter of them would be impossible. However, with a little work, it wasn’t too hard to hit just over a third of them, which I’m happy with. With no real reason to keep playing, I’m glad to be throwing this one on the “beaten” pile.

Town of Salem
Another game where I was put off by the number of achievements, but was still able to hit 25%. I do really enjoy this game and I’m still actively playing it - which is why it’s labelled as “unfinished” for now. The majority of the achievements for this game are simply “win X games” with each role. So as long as you keep playing (and winning!) the achievements come naturally. ToS is vaguely similar to the party game “Mafia” or board game The Resistance/Avalon. I would often play these in-person with friends or people from church, however, due to the lockdown we haven’t been able to do this. ToS really scratched the itch for playing those sorts of games though!

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My “rule” for having to earn 25% achievements comes from this Steamgifts tool that quickly shows how much someone has played their SG wins. Handy for assessing your own wins (or judging other people, up to you). Recommend getting it if you don’t have it already. Anyway, one of the more important stats shows the % of games that you have earned >25% achievements in. For me, it’s currently 45.1% (32/71). I feel like this is a good benchmark to show that you have properly attempted a game. Obviously, this will differ depending on the game, but overall I think it’s a good estimation. This is why I aim to earn 25% on not just my SG wins, but all my games. I’m not going to beat myself up on games that have awfully difficult/grindy achievements, ones that require DLC, or if I just really don’t like the game - but it’s a solid goal that I keep in mind.
Until next time!

December
I wanted to make one more post before 2019 came to an end. Well, I failed. Procrastination got the better of me, and I’m currently typing this at 1am, January 1st, 2020. Happy new year! However, because of timezones n stuff, I guess this still counts as 2019… right?
Anyway, despite having not posted on here since March, I still actively frequent the site. I find the monthly themes pretty cool, so I always check those out - despite never having the time to actually participate. I also really like the sites organisational features, so I’m always coming back to check & update my lists, etc.
I’m not gonna sum up my year of gaming since March, but I will include a few recently finished titles.

• Poker Night at the Inventory
  

  6 hours playtime

  19 of 20 achievements

• Hexa Turn
  

  3 hours playtime

  20 of 20 achievements

• Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf
  

  50 hours playtime

  25 of 79 achievements

Poker Night
Solid poker game. As far as the poker went, it wasn’t bad. There were some other features that I wasn’t too interested in - for me they just slowed the gameplay down.
Being a Steamgifts win with relatively easy achievements, I was glad to tick it off. Unfortunately though, as you can expect for poker, achievements are mostly luck based. There is one achievement that is notoriously hard to get - winning a hand with a straight flush. Anyone who’s played a bit of poker knows how rare these are. One guide walks through installing an autoclicker running a simple script that plays the game for you. Running this script for 10s to 100s of hours usually earns the achievement. Despite this being a relatively simple method, I decided it wasn’t worth the effort and left the game one achievement short of completion. Overall rating: 6/10

Hexa Turn
Nice little puzzle game. I don’t usually enjoy nor have the patience for puzzle games, but this one seemed interesting enough so I grabbed it. Decently entertaining, not too hard (with a complete video guide available in case you get stuck), and easy 100% achievements. Definitely pull this one out if it’s in your backlog. Rating: 8/10

Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf
This one is a big one for me. Not every day I’m ticking of games with 50 hours logged. In fact, that’s quite near the top in terms of hours played. Anyway, I completed the campaign as well as a decent amount of extras & other content. Achievements are incredibly grindy and not really worth the hassle. You need to buy about 3-4 DLCs to earn all achievements as well. There was still plenty more to do in the game; daily missions, ranking up in PvP, and grinding out the achievements - but it’s certainly beaten. I have a whole stack of other tactical turn-based/deckbuilding games in the backlog. No point lingering on one game just for the sake of it! Despite the grindy-ness and some frustration here and there, it was a fun game. 8/10

March!
Been a while! I can’t exactly remember what my gaming patterns have been over the past 4 months since my last post, so I’ll just throw in a couple of updates. The holidays consisted of me not playing as many games as I would’ve hoped - mostly due to a decreased urge to actually play them! Also, uni is already back in full swing so I’ll currently be squeezing in whatever small amount of playing I can here and there.
Having said all that, I’ve actually checked off quite a few games over this period, so I’ll list the highlights.

• Distrust
  

  6 hours playtime

  34 of 56 achievements

• Domina
  

  10 hours playtime

  30 of 34 achievements

• Caravan
  

  16 hours playtime

  14 of 14 achievements

Distrust
Good little survival/strategy game. Would definitely recommend if you are into those genres. Can be hard at times, and there are some mechanics I just couldn’t figure out. Getting 100% achievements would take far longer than I cared to spend on this game. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it and am happy I beat it. Rating: 7/10

Domina
Really loved this one. It’s a management style of game where you build up your army and take them into battle. Good emphasis on individual unit customisation. Not a whole lot else to say as I don’t want to turn this into a long game review, but I really did enjoy playing it and comfortably beating it. Unfortunately though, I couldn’t quite grab 100% achievements. Only had 4 left to earn, but 3 of them are heavily RNG-based and one of them requires a big grind. Wasn’t really worth it as I realised that: in the time I would spend earning the last few achievements, I could start and finish and entirely new game - which I would much rather do. I will say this about the game though: if I had a much smaller library, I would keep it around and still probably still play it from time to time, as it is a lot of fun. However, as we all experience, our backlogs are much too long to allow this! Rating: 8/10

Caravan
This gaming is basically a trading simulator with an interesting story. I absolutely loved the trading mechanic! I felt we got along really well. The other features, such as combat and progression, are pretty polished too. However, seeing the same unskippable cutscenes over and over got kinda irritating, but it keeps with the slow and relaxed feel of the game. Another big plus: very manageable 100% achievements. Most come with the story progression/regular playing - you’ll only have to go out of your way to get a few of them, and even then they aren’t that difficult. My playtime for the game is a bit of a lie - it really only took about 8 hours to beat the game normally, plus another couple for the achievements. [Tangent Warning] I don’t think I’ve mentioned this before, but in my steam games list, I like the playtimes to be very organised. When I finish a game, it must have the playtime on a whole hour (e.g. 8.0, 10.0, 15.0). For games that take longer than 20 hours (and the decimal place is not shown), it must still be on a nice number (25, 30, 40, 550, etc.). And for shorter games, I separate the trash from the good ones by leaving the trash games on a final playtime of X.1 hours (e.g. 3.1, 5.1). [End Tangent] I was hoping to leave Caravan on 10.0 hours, but by the time I finished off the achievements it was already like 10.3. So naturally, I was going to idle it up to 12.0 hours (11 is a yucky number) but I idled it for too long and missed it. I aimed for 15.0 next, but missed that too! (Really have to set a timer for these things.) So now, it rests on 16.0. Rating: 9/10

Thanks for reading if you got this far! I’m aware that probably no one reads my rants, but I mostly write it for my own records anyway :P

Happy playing!

October Update

Ugh… so during the uni semester, I didn’t really have any time to actually play any games, but I couldn’t resist doing things like buying bundles, sussing out sales, and trading. So basically my backlog has been continuing to grow without me having the chance to do anything about it! However, it’s holidays now! So I should have time to actually start playing some games :D

• Door Kickers
  

  40 hours playtime

  40 of 43 achievements

• Medieval Kingdom Wars
  

  6 hours playtime

  6 of 20 achievements

• XCOM 2
  

  2 hours playtime

  2 of 88 achievements

Door Kickers
I have finally gotten this game to a level of completion that I can classify as “Beaten.” It has taken me a long time, and I really really enjoyed my time spent playing it. However, I started to hate the game towards the end when I was just trying to earn the last few achievements - unfortunately, I feel this is the case for most games - so much so to the point where I had to quit just 3 achievements short of being 100% Completed. These last few achievements require earning 1, 2 and 3 stars respectively in every mission. The fact that I didn’t even earn 1 star (the minimum) in every mission begs the question, “how can I even mark this game as Beaten?” I don’t doubt that earning a star (or 2 or 3) in every mission is a great indicator of having beaten the game, but there are other indicators as well. For example, I completed every Campaign, including those that do not give you an achievement for doing so. I also levelled up every trooper in the squad to the maximum level (this also awards an achievement). And apart from earning “X” stars in every mission, I have earned every other achievement for this game. Besides, more missions are/were added after the achievements were created (hence why some campaigns don’t award an achievement), so I’m not entirely sure up to which mission I’d have to complete to earn the achievement.
In short: Game is fun, would recommend. Grindy in some parts, and you will begin to hate life if you aim for completion.

Medieval Kingdom Wars - Steamgifts win
I would have to say this is the first game I’ve seen that (either intentionally or unintentionally) has the ability to FAIL the tutorial. It was quite strange. I’m not a fan at all of the RTS genre, but this one seemed interesting and chill enough that I gave it a go. After completing the short introductory campaign and earning 30% achievements, I figured I had had enough of the game.

XCOM 2
I have been so keen to play this game for a loooong time. EU is my favourite game, so I think I’ll really enjoy this one. While I did have other games that were higher priority on my to-do list, there’s a sale on for the DLCs that ends in a couple days, so I should figure out whether or not I like the game enough to buy them. (I’m pretty certain I will want to buy the DLCs, but it makes sense to have at least played the game a bit first.)
If you don’t hear from me for a while, it’s probably because I got hooked on this game :D

~

I have played a few other bits & pieces this month, but nothing as noteworthy as the above 3.

This is an update, but it’s more of a reverse-update. I got Humble Monthly for the first time ever, and despite not actually liking any of the games in the bundle, I have been doing a bit of trading recently. In the past couple days alone, I’ve added about 12+ games to my library (and consequently, my backlog!). When I trade I generally only look for games that I actually want to play… thus adding to the backlog.

Guess I’ve got a lot to look forward to!

Edit: It’s looking more like 20 games added to my library…

Another update + monologue!

• Creeper World Anniversary Edition
  

  14 hours playtime

  39 of 39 achievements

• GALAK-Z
  

  15 hours playtime

  20 of 35 achievements

• Door Kickers
  

  35 hours playtime

  37 of 43 achievements

Creeper World - Had this game for a while and have long thought about finishing it. My first attempt at playing it again turned into a 4.5 hour grind sesh. I was really enjoying it and making good progress. I like that this game has evenly-spaced achievements; 1 more-or-less after every level. However, the initial excitement wore off after a while. I was very close to finishing - only about 2-3 hours of playtime left, but I just couldn’t bring myself to play it that easily. But being so close to completion - combined with my natural inclination to not start a new game for fear of having too many active uncompleted games - the phrase “playing a game” was temporarily synonymous with “finishing Creeper World.” Any time I had a chance to actually play a game, I would end up just watching YouTube or browsing Reddit instead .-. Eventually, I was able to get over the inertia and finish the game. It only took me an hour or two, and I actually really enjoyed it.

Monologue - This is one of my concerns with the whole backlog thing and completing games in general. Sometimes (often) you’ll get a bit bored with a game before you finish it, and there’ll likely be a decent amount of play left in it as well. For some people, this isn’t much of an issue as they just bin it and move on - I do that sometimes as well. But when the end is in sight; 100% achievements is quite easily reachable; or you just owe it to the game for coming this far as it is, it’s pretty rough to just say, “that’s enough” and walk away. Sure, you could take a break until you feel like playing it again, if you don’t mind having +1 to your “started, but not completed” or “I’LL COME BACK AND FINISH THIS SOMEDAY I PROMISE” piles. Another problem for some games is that by the time you feel like playing it again, you’ll have forgotten how to play but the difficulty is pretty high because of how far you’ve progressed. A minor issue, I suppose.

Galak-Z - Finally beaten. Been a long time coming. Got a decent amount of achievements along the way, so I’m happy. Not much else to say, as I mentioned that I was going to start working on this game 2 posts ago. I’m just glad it’s done. I really enjoyed playing it as well!

Door Kickers - Played this game ages ago and completed most of it. Decided to revisit it, and am glad I did as I’ve been really enjoying it. Also realised I’m actually quite close to 100%ing the game. Some achievements will take a bit of work, but I think it will be worth it. Hopefully I don’t get too bored as some of the achieves will be pretty grindy.

Hello! Here’s an update (that sorta turns into a monologue) of a few games I’ve been playing.

UFO: Aftershock - Was really looking forward to playing this. Looked like an XCOM clone, then I realised it was real-time-with-pause rather turn-based. So a real-time XCOM clone that’s also a little bit like Door Kickers! Unfortunately, I could not get the game to work! A more or less well-known glitch prevents the game from running. So instead…
UFO: Aftermath - I bought this one! AFAIK the gameplay is the same, which is good as I’m not really missing out on anything. Only played a little bit so far, but really enjoying it. Figured I might as well give it a shot as it was only $1 in the steam sale - and if I really didn’t like it, I could always refund it!
Sidenote: this was the only thing I bought in the sale (aside from cards n badges n things :3) much restraint :3

Perfect Universe - Steamgifts win. Hate it. It’s everything I don’t like about platformers in one neat package. Forced myself to earn 25% achievements to count towards the ratio on that steamgifts extension. This required completing 2 of the main game modes - there are 3 total.
• Finishing each one gives you an achievement.
• Completing each one with 3 stars (highest score) gives you an additional achievement.
• Completing all of them to 100% gives you an extra achievement, for a total of 7.
However, this is where the grey zone in terms of organising games on this site comes in. Obviously, to mark as “completed,” all 7 achievements should be earned.
Objectively “beaten” would likely be finishing each of the 3 main game modes. I finished 2/3, and considering how much I hate/how bad I am at platformers, I was pretty proud of this. I could never hope to finish the other game mode though, because it’s incredibly difficult without a controller. I guess this means I could mark it as beaten OR “won’t play?” Although, I’m trying to minimise my abandon rate.
I poked around a on a few other people’s profiles and discovered that there is a bit of freedom in how each user chooses to define each category and arrange their games. In that case, I think I will put this one as beaten - because, to the best of MY ability (without driving myself insane), I think I’ve beaten it. And as I said in a previous post: this is BLAEO after all, not 100% achievements group, right? I need to move on to more games!

Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf - Only played a few hours so far, but again it’s really fun and I’m enjoying it. Unfortunately though, I can foresee it getting boring quite quickly as the gameplay is rather repetitive. Hopefully they introduce new things that keep it interesting as you progress!

• UFO: Aftershock
  

  1 minute playtime

  no achievements

• UFO: Aftermath
  

  61 minutes playtime

  no achievements

• Perfect Universe
  

  2 hours playtime

  2 of 7 achievements

• Warhammer 40,000: Space Wolf
  

  3 hours playtime

  4 of 74 achievements

Heya, just a quick update.

Thought I should let ya’s know that I did get 100% on achievements for The Silent Age like I said I would :P Didn’t take me very long and it was satisfying to have a game ticked off as 100%!

Another game that I just beat was Battle for Enlor. I had won it from steamgifts. While the game itself felt unpolished and unfinished, overall it wasn’t too bad. There were a total of 9 bosses, and by defeating each one I classify the game as being ‘beaten.’ You get an achievement for each boss you beat (plus a couple of extras). The achievements that I haven’t earned are for achieving a “rank S” against each individual boss - basically a perfect score. I have no idea how it’s even calculated or how you would go about doing this - it feels unbalanced and arbitrary. Frankly, I don’t even know if it’s possible. I feel like I found the optimal strategy for most of the fights, even earning a few rank As. It’s not worth trying to earn these last achievements - this is BLAEO after all, not 100% achievements group, right? I need to move on to more games! :D

One more game that I’ll be working on - and have been working on for a while now - is Galak-Z. There are 4 “seasons” of missions, and I’m currently up to the last one. The game is quite challenging, but I really enjoy it. Some of the achievements would be really, really difficult to earn, and a lot of users have reported issues with them not triggering - so I’m not going to bother with 100%-ing this one. Beating the main story (the 4 seasons) and picking up as many achievements as I can along the way will be enough for me!

• The Silent Age
  

  4 hours playtime

  24 of 24 achievements

• Battle for Enlor
  

  3 hours playtime

  11 of 21 achievements

• GALAK-Z
  

  13 hours playtime

  16 of 35 achievements

More to come…