Formidolosus

December Roundup

Going out with a bang

Games I beat this month:

Beaten in December 21 games

100% completed
  • Sniper Ghost Warrior 2

    34 hours playtime

    38 of 38 achievements

  • Hitman GO: Definitive Edition

    21 hours playtime

    26 of 26 achievements

  • Burgers

    5 hours playtime

    5 of 5 achievements

  • Teslagrad

    14 hours playtime

    36 of 36 achievements

  • Space Pilgrim Episode III: Delta Pavonis

    7 hours playtime

    7 of 7 achievements

  • Home is Where One Starts...

    7 hours playtime

    8 of 8 achievements

  • Wave Mechanics

    5 hours playtime

    7 of 7 achievements

  • Draw a Stickman: EPIC 2

    59 hours playtime

    20 of 20 achievements

  • Far from Noise

    4 hours playtime

    9 of 9 achievements

  • Anarcute

    15 hours playtime

    25 of 25 achievements

  • Broforce

    32 hours playtime

    17 of 17 achievements

  • Hook

    4 hours playtime

    1 of 1 achievements

  • Crazy Machines 3

    19 hours playtime

    41 of 41 achievements

  • Antisquad

    85 hours playtime

    178 of 178 achievements

  • Electronic Super Joy

    25 hours playtime

    37 of 37 achievements

  • Depth Hunter 2: Deep Dive

    24 hours playtime

    17 of 17 achievements

  • Curvatron

    12 hours playtime

    8 of 8 achievements

  • Snail Bob 2

    7 hours playtime

    27 of 27 achievements

  • Snail Trek - Chapter 1: Intershellar

    15 minutes playtime

    6 of 6 achievements

  • Super Life of Pixel

    37 hours playtime

    72 of 72 achievements

  • hocus

    5 hours playtime

    4 of 4 achievements

Last month I surpassed my goal for the year of 100 games beaten, so I figured I'd end 2018 on a bang, and try and beat as many games as I could. I did cheat a bit, as one does, by mostly playing games I'd already started before and shorter ones, but I still think 21 games was a good tally for the final month. Overall 2018 was the best year yet in terms of beating games. I'll make a separate post summarising the year sometime, but even though I only earned a few more achievements, I managed to beat 24 more games total, mostly because I spent a lot of time revisiting old games and finishing them up in this year

So part of the reason this was a bumper month was because it is the first time I've scaled down my work over the holidays. In previous years I've only worked for myself, and under contracts, so didn't get any official leave, and no work meant no pay. But this year I finally consented to becoming a full time employee for the one company I've worked for and one advantage of that is that when they go quiet at the end of the year, I also don't have to work as much and I spent a lot more time with my kids, and working in the garden, and of course gaming. Child number 3 is due any day now, so it was also nice to be able to help more around the house.

Christmas was the usual subdued affair. My family wisely decided years ago that we would permanently shift to a 'secret santa' type arrangement, so the adults only buy one gift for one person. And we all get gifts for the kids. But not having to find gifts for everyone makes it a lot less stressful, and it's nice to be able to seek out a gift that is super special for that one person. The kids loved it of course, and lots of lego means lots of fun for daddy too. At least the next one is a girl, so maybe my wife will finally be co-opted into playing with new toys.

And then New year was also super relaxed. My wife and I walked around our garden admiring the fireworks and then came back inside to continue watching netflix. Perfect.

Steam winter sale managed to hook me. Mostly because I had money from the in laws to spend. So I bought Assassin's creed origins, and have been loving it. I also bought some DLC for games I have been wanting to finish for ages, and also red strings club, Lego DC villains and a few other small games. What can I say? I'm a sucker for a bargain, but I've installed a lot of them already, so they won't languish in the backlog too long.

So anyway, on to my opinions of the games I beat this month.

Other stats

Achievements Gained 369
Most difficult (according to TSA) 'Elegant rescue' in Antisquad
Games added 19
Number of different games played 42
Achievement streak 981 days
Average Game completion 73%
Total number of completed games 362
Games completed in 2018 124




JaffaCaffa

Pre-congratulations on your new baby girl!! Hope it’s a smooth delivery and she’s happy & healthy. :) That’s awesome that the job worked out for the holidays, getting some time off to spend with family and refresh for the new year is such a nice feeling.

And of course kudos on your backlog progress, enjoy your new games (and legos :P)! Wishing you a fantastic 2019.

Formidolosus

Thanks so much for the well wishes. Exciting and potentially exhausting times ahead.

malabagaa

wow congratz! those are a lot of games! :D

..are you going to call her Number 3? =P

ah, hitman go.. I have the same problem with lara croft go.. none of the achievements triggers for me :\

Formidolosus

Yeah I’ll suggest that to the wife and see how it goes. We laugh but we actually knew a family who had called their son the equivalent of ‘another boy’ in Zulu. So I guess number 3 would be fine.

And sorry that you had the issue with Lara croft go. Funnily enough that worked fine for me straight through. It amazes me that they managed to make something that works so intermittently. I am a programmer by profession, and all my bugs are usually something I can trace back and replicate in order to fix. What they created doesn’t seem to have any common factor to what causes it or what fixes it, and it seems so random. Weird.

malabagaa

Well, here it was common* to call their children by their order/ordinality of birth (first, fifth, tenth..). Perhaps a practice handed down by ancient romans/greeks. Nowadays isn’t common anymore as children are usually fewer…

Maybe they just don’t care ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
They make money anyway.. why spend time trying to fix bugs?
If I’d have to throw a shot in the dark I say a bunch of un-initialized variables =P

* not always.. it was more common (and still used) to give newborns their grandparents’ names.. but when one was out of “creativity” this was a safe road =P

Formidolosus

That is genuinely interesting. I think the only way I could get away with it is if I tried something clever like ‘trinity’ or something else with a 3 in the base. Then people would assume it was religious or matrix related, but I’d know it was for the number 3.

In my attempts to find the problem with hitman go, I actually opened open the source code in dotpeek, and honestly, I could not see anything obviously wrong. It had all the expected conditional tests and the step counter was supposed to update the steam stats, but just somewhere along the way it gets broken, and randomly. The best guess I came up with was that the actual steam object they were using had some bugs, just because it works 100% for some people, intermittently for others, and not at all for some. If the game had persisted to not work, I would have maybe dug into that, but honestly that should not be my job.

malabagaa

With the number 3? Easy, Half-Life! :v
I know, I know.. sowwy ^^; Jokes aside, the only name I can link with the number 3 is Zelda.. because I don’t think Trifortia is a viable option =P

After a quick search, I’ve found the following names that may or may not have an assonance/connection with the number 3 :
Trientje
Treena
Triana
Trinn
Trista
but I mostly depend on your surname and your local habits.. don’t mind me, I was just curious if a feminine version of Trent exists (that’s the only name with a 3 I could think of)


Oh, it could also be Valve’s fault.. didn’t think of that! but it wouldn’t surprise me that much =P

Pietruszek

If you still want to try getting the Lara Croft GO achievements I recommend trying out this. I’m not sure why it happens (not getting any achievements in games which do not have broken achievements since they unlock normally for others) but I already had this issue twice during my 7 years on Steam and on both occasions doing the thing I described in that post did the job for me. It takes some time to find the right installers for the newest versions of all of this stuff, but maybe it’s worth testing out in your case too?

malabagaa

Oh, thanks!
To be honest, I didn’t check if they unlocked in game.. gotta check that!

This could be a valid solution though, as I had just re-installed windows when I started playing.