Community Backlog Blitz Season 19 - Runs April 1 through June 30 with a cash prize raffle at the end

[Wibblewozzer]

We just finished a successful eighteenth season of the Backlog Blitz. We're a quarter into the year and the big games have been dropping. If you've been here from the start and completed all your games each time then you're up to 90 completed backlog games! I usually compare our seasonal run to TV shows but it turns out we're high enough that we don't have that many milestones to pass and we won't see another until season twenty. Take that TV!

We had 20 participants (+2 from the previous two Blitz) with 97 game goals set (+9 change) and 61 of them were completed (+2 change). Congrats on clearing out those backlogs! The rate of completion took a dip and I expect that's due to all the big releases this first quarter. Hopefully you got through some of them so those didn't get added to your backlog! Congrats to Derrick01 for winning the raffle. Make sure to give them congrats for clearing that backlog and winning. Derrick got the win for completing Final Fantasy VII Rebirth. Saved it from entering the backlog and also probably the perfect game for Derrick to win with.

The second quarter doesn't have too many of the big hitters announced so far, right? At least not a ton of big stuff comes to my mind and I simply can't be bothered to look at the moment. So let's pretend it's a light quarter which means the best time to clear the backlogs to prepare for big games later in the year. Silksong is coming out, right? Right?!

The spreadsheet has been updated, the prize pool has been reset. We'll start with $20.00 but chipping in is always welcome. The details to do so will be posted separately within the thread soon after we get started.

Pick your games accordingly!

What it is:

It's a simple way to clear out some backlog games. You select a number of specific games you want to complete and if you complete them in a set time frame you have a chance to pick a game of your choice within the prize limits.

Rules:

First off, there is no time limit on when you can join. If you come in late and only have a month left please feel free to join. Even one completed game will get you entered into the raffle detailed below.

Everyone shares the same rules so an agreed amount of time would be set (three months this time) and then a set amount of games you want to complete in that time (been using five games). You then pick your specific five games with the intention that you don't go changing it all the time. The idea isn't that once you beat some game you go and list it and mark it complete. Instead, you pick five games to complete at the start of the Blitz and ideally you complete them as well as anything else you want to finish in that time.

Prize:

In the end, I suggest a prize pool and a simple raffle done. I always chip in $20 to start it and accept any other additions. Raffle winners must use at least half but can go up to the full price of a game (capped at $60 if the prize pool gets large enough). Leftover goes to the next drawn winner until it gets down to $0 (or close enough at which point I'll just add it to the next Blitz).

Thoughts?

There's no entry fee or anything so there's really no loss for taking part or starting it and then ignoring it. It's just a fun way to clear out backlog games and have discussion about what you're completing. And commiserate if you pick a game you don't enjoy and sour one of your spots on your list.

I created the Google Sheet so feel free to add yourself and games:

You need to reply to this thread in order to see this content.

I changed to a hide until replied as I think some people had issues with the hide until reacted. Ask any questions and sorry for those that already posted their new lists in the previous thread. Feel free to just post it again here as we continue for the next three months here.

Good luck, everyone!

 

[gabbo]

Onward! Having completed 3 last time I feel I can do at least that going forward

• Doom Eternal
• Rage
• Psychonauts 2
• Lust From Beyond
• Perilous Warp

edit: realized I should swap out Psychonauts2 as I'm already playing it

 

[Cacher]

Last time I failed the blitz completely, so relatively conservative choices are picked for this quarter.

1. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
Already cleared the first case. I should be able to blow through this game soon.

2. Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice
Sequel is releasing in May. May not be able to play it on day 1 but I aim at finishing this prequel before its release.

3. Squad 51 vs. the Flying Saucers
Have been sitting in the backlog since day 1. Looks like a lot of work was put into this rather short title. Excited to finally start playing it.

4. Reverse Collapse: Code Name Bakery
Main dish of the quarter because judging by some reviews this is going to be a looooooong game. Already started playing and the opening stages are very good.

Haven't yet decided on the fifth game. Maybe a romance VN, depending on my mood during the next three months.

 

[Parsnip]

Moving Vampyr over from previous blitz, haven't given any thought to my other picks just yet.

 

[Jav]

1. Resident Evil 3 (Remake)
Last blitz I played the second one, seems only fair to keep going with this one.

2. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
Last game in the series, let's go.

3. The Forgotten City
Bought it at launch after all the fuzz around it and didn't touch it for 3 years, yay.

4. The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles
Never played these ones and it has been sitting in my backlog for nearly 3 years so let's give it a try.

5. River City Girls
I want to play this co-op but if it ends up not being possible, maybe I'll swap it for another one.

 

[KainXVIII]

I've still figured out what will be the rest of the blitz

1. Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb
2. Outcast - Second Contact
3. Far Cry 2

 

[Knurek]

I'm going to polish a bunch of games I should have played way earlier

• Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster
• Doom (1993)
• A Short Hike
• Florence
• Sayonara Wild Hearts

 

[Futaleufu]

Sniper Ghost Warrior Contracts
The Walking Dead Michonne
Hollow Knight
Anno 1404 History Edition
Need for Speed Heat

SGWC ditches the connected open world from 3 replacing it with smaller open world maps with several objectives (main, secondary and optional) per mission, also taking some game design and mechanics "inspiration" from Hitman and Sniper Elite, including customizable loadouts. Now it requires more effort from the player because automatic aim correction is gone, you need to set distance to the target in the rifle's scope manually and adjust the theorical bullet trajectory using an augmented reality indicator. So far its OK, the autosave system its kind of a wildcard though.

 

[kio]

I think I've got a good mix of genres and styles.

• Floppy Knights
• Afterimage
• West of Loathing
• Eternal Threads
• Frogun

 

[Wibblewozzer]

Picked my five games finally and went with some of the shortest from my goals list since the first quarter of the year has had some really long games (Stardew over 80 hours, Rebirth and Infinite Wealth at 100 hours). I just want some short games to play again!

• Little Bug
• FreshWomen - Season 1
• Seabed
• Transiruby
• A Short Hike

 

[xinek]

Baldur's Gate 3 put a big damper on the last Blitz for me -- not a great decision, but I'm glad I played it. Anyway, I'm going to try these for this Blitz:

1. Ixion: It's like a city builder, I think, so I'm not sure how to define completion. But my understanding is there's a definite story, so it should be clear when it's done.
2. Card Survival: Tropical Island: This is a survival game, so hopefully I'll be able to actually beat it lol
3. Cruelty Squad: Been meaning to play this one FOREVER
4. Metal: Hellsinger: Should be a good palate cleanser of blasting away at stuff
5. Railway Empire 2: An open ended builder, which I may swap out after I boot it up and see what it has for a story mode. But I think it has a story as a set of scenarios to beat.

These are a few potentially really time intensive games, but I'll give it a shot. I'm also in the mood for some builders, so it should be a cozy time.

 

[Futaleufu]

Just completed Sniper Ghost Warrior: Contracts. Not too long, not too short, got stuck twice in terrain, never used drone gadgets despite using them a lot in SGW3, I'd recommend it if you like slow paced FPS/stealth games. First game of the season done.

 

[MegaApple]

Mustered courage to go back to half finished games, this time with Until Dawn.
Will do that to few more games this 3 month period.

 

[Cacher]

My last game of the blitz is Future Cop: LAPD on PS1. One of my favorite games during my childhood. I sank countless hours into the battle mode but I never beat the main campaign. The level designs are simply too complex to a child. Time to finally beat this game after 20 years.

 

[Deku]

1. Hitman World of Assassination
2. The Falconeer
3.
4.
5.

Haven't decided the remaining three yet. Going to play through the entire Hitman trilogy. I haven't played the third game yet, so it's going to be fun when I am there

 

[Parsnip]

Alright, gave it some thought and here are my games.

Vampyr
The Forgotten City
Heavenly Bodies
The Gunk
Peregrin


These are mostly stuff I finally grabbed on sale somewhat recently that I've been wanting to play for a while but was waiting for a sale.

 

[Parsnip]

Finished Vampyr.
Definitely a flawed game but overall I liked it.

 

[Jav]

Finished River City Girls, I might do some cleanup since I went for the secret boss and I'm only a couple of achievements short of 100%.

It was fun.

 

[Wibblewozzer]

Finished my first game, A Short Hike. While the story is short I got all achievements so it turned into a somewhat less short hike. Really enjoyable, even wasting an hour or two just jumping and gliding around trying to find stuff for achievements and finding mostly nothing.

Been working on Transiruby and FreshWomen Season 1 at the same time. Should finish Transiruby the next time I start it as I have like 1-2 hours left but I got distracted by trying out Minishoot' Adventures and got a bit hooked to that instead.

Also have Little Bug and Seabed left. Seabed I'll play outside of streaming time so probably will end up slowly played over evenings unless I binge it over a weekend or something.

Finished Vampyr.
Definitely a flawed game but overall I liked it.

I really like Vampyr but I seem to be in the minority. I even liked the combat which most people who liked it still complained about.

 

[Cacher]

I got Helldivers 2, so good luck to my blitz

At least I should be able to finish Ace Attorney. Two cases left.

 

[Parsnip]

Finished Heavenly Bodies. Very good, but the movement controls take a little bit of time to get used to.

I really like Vampyr but I seem to be in the minority. I even liked the combat which most people who liked it still complained about.

I liked the combat more after I respecced and got all the stamina I could get. Lots of stamina also definitely helped with the district maintenance tedium, I was able to just dash dash through and ignore most of the street fights in order to quickly treat everyone and continue the story,

 

[xinek]

Just completed Ixion today. It's a very strange story-driven city builder/management game. Overall, it was a good and unique experience marred by some real stupidity. The game doesn't always tell you what the objective will be until it's far too late for you actually achieve the objective. Once, I lost the game without ever understanding why -- it just gives you basically a "you died" screen with no way to review anything or figure out what happened. But, the fantastic aesthetic and soundtrack make up for a lot, and many of the story elements are very well done, making it really feel like your ship is encountering truly unknown and weird space phenomena.
I think a game like this isn't great for a Blitz, because it's fun to reload a chapter and see how things can play out differently. I can see myself replaying this at some point in the future for sure, especially now that i know how to avoid pitfalls. Recommended.
On to Card Survivor: Tropical Island, another weird one for a Backlog Blitz.

 

[Knurek]

And that's Blitz done.
Other than Sayonara Wild Hearts I enjoyed every game I played. It's good to finally have finished Final Fantasy and Doom.

 

[Wibblewozzer]

Third Blitz game completed last night - Little Bug. Started this up on a stream after finishing Minishoot' Adventures just as something to fill an hour or so and instead I ended up completing it in a little over 1.5 hours. There's more content if you want to do more but I'm fairly well satisfied. It's a fun mechanic (grapple beam where you control both the character and the point you grapple to) but also can be pretty frustrating as there's like three checkpoints that are far harder than any other spot so you get these weird difficulty spikes out of nowhere. But plays pretty well and death is a minor punishment in most cases so multiple attempts to fling a jump just right is a good enough time.

 

[kio]

Finished the first couple of games from my list.

Eternal Threads (7h, PC) - I enjoyed my time with it even though you can feel the limitations the devs where under. It feels much more like a proof of concept or prototype than a complete product.
You're tasked with going back in time and fix the timeline in order to save 6 people from dying in a house fire, so you influence the events of their lives in the week leading to the fire to avoid their death. You can see events and conversations between characters and every now and then you can choose option A or B which will lead to C or D happening, which can affect events E and F and events from other characters. It's a spiderweb of choices and consequences although not that complex (sadly) that plays around the butterfly effect concept.
It's good for what it is but, like I said, it's clearly limited. Had the devs been more experienced and/or had more money I can see the web being more complex, the play area being larger and there being more characters to follow. The game ends with a sequel bait so we'll see if that ever happens.

Afterimage (~28h, played perfectly on the Deck) - If I could describe this game with one adjective it would be frustrating. The game does so many things well and at the same time fails miserably on all those things it's infuriating, otherwise it would be a standout metroidvania.
First things first, the game is gorgeous and I didn't find any technical issues with the presentation, everything was coherent and fitted nicely together. They clearly showed attention to detail until they stopped caring or were forced to rush things... It's the little details, in the first half every piece of scenery flowed perfectly to the next and if it didn't it would be because you found a secret and it would be possible to jump/slide in there, but in the latter half that careful attention to detail was completely gone and it almost felt like everything was cobbled together at the last minute.
The music and sounds are nice and the voice acting is competent enough but... it's not infrequent that two pieces of music start playing at the same time, for instance the boss and stage music, and on top of that you might also have characters talking... In a few words, a mess.
Level and map design are also superficially well done up until the point the cracks start showing. Your first big mission is to reach a zone in the far right of the map (you start on the far left), which feels weird that they didn't add multiple objectives for each of the multiples zones you pass through on your way there, that gradually guide you and introduce the story and the stakes. After that it's a complete mess, you never know where to go or what's your objectives. Some NPC might say that you need to go to zone ABCD but you can't find it because none of the zones have that name... It's a complete trial and error affair and progression is basically teleporting somewhere and running until you can't move forward anymore and teleport across the map to another zone and try your luck there.
Story is basically non existent which is frustrating because they clearly spent time creating lore and a world to support that story. You fight bosses you have no idea who they are or how they are tied to anything. The big villain was introduced seconds before fighting her and she was talking like I should've known who she was when I'm fairly certain she was never shown to the player... There's also some text and lore that wasn't completely translated from chinese (i believe).
And on top of that you have a miserable combat that revolves around spamming attacks and tanking damage. Why isn't there a way to block or parry? Why is the ability to dodge through enemies the second to last skill you get? And why does it have a cooldown?
Like I said, frustrating... Had I known then what I know now I wouldn't have bothered as there are much better metroidvanias out there that are much more worthy of my time.

 

[xinek]

Well, that's Metal Hellsinger done. It was outstanding up until the horrible final boss, for which I used the easiest difficulty. It wouldn't have been quite so bad except there are no checkpoints, and you have to repeat the ENTIRE level before trying the boss again.

On to Cruelty Squad, which looks like a trip.

 

[Parsnip]

Finished Forgotten City.

It's pretty good! Obviously the budget and such is more than apparent, but it didn't take me long to get used to the level of production, so to speak.
The voice acting is surprisingly competent too.

2 games left, I think I'm going to play The Gunk next.

 

[MegaApple]

Uncharted 3 done
Will post review sometime

 

[Wibblewozzer]

Finished my fourth game: FreshWomen - Season 1. Been having some decent fun with these popular pervy visual novel style games that have begun to floor Steam in recent years. Is the writing good? Nah, not really. Do the characters actually look like humans? Maybe at times. But it's ridiculous in a fun way, the expressions were over the top and amusing, and it's just a fun, dumb time.

 

[kio]

Finished game #3

Frogun (~7h, PC) - It's a 3D platformer with a grappling gun gimmick, the titular frogun, that you can use to grapple enemies or parts of the environment to move around. It was ok...
I can appreciate the attempt and it was fun for the first half or so but there's something to be said about how the jankiness of the movement and and hit detection of your gun affects the platforming challenges and instakill pits of the latter half.
The grappling movement is completely done on a 2D plane at the same level your character is so if you are a little bit above or a little bit bellow the thing you're trying to hit it won't latch and, to add salt to injury, in those situations the reticle will still point towards the thing so you can't really use to assess if you're at the correct height or not. There should be some leeway to help to player and make the precision platforming in the last quarter a bit less frustrating and trial and error..
There are also bosses at the end of every 5 or so stages but I honestly don't think they add anything to the game and would be better if these stages were normal like the rest.

 

[Parsnip]

Finished The Gunk!

It's a solid 7-8 game. Story is a bit too saccharine and self serious and the voice acting doesn't always quite deliver, music's nice and the art style is alright.
Some of the environmental puzzles remind me of 3D Zelda, some similar mechanics such as bomb flowers, and not terribly complicated overall.
Also cleaning up gunk is satisfying.

Peregrin is the last game for my blitz. Not sure if I start it right away as it's another short one. Expecting it to be another solid 7-8 game, didn't get enough reviews for a opencritic score and only 200+ reviews on steam.

 

[Deku]

Finished all parts of Hitman Trilogy. To be honest, I felt that the third part was a bit more cinematic than the previous parts and also less open world

 

[Wibblewozzer]

Finished all parts of Hitman Trilogy. To be honest, I felt that the third part was a bit more cinematic than the previous parts and also less open world

They tried something a bit different with Hitman 3 to try to keep things mixed up and it definitely meant a wider variety for the levels but they didn't really all work for me. I think overall it probably is my least favorite of the three games due to only really liking two of the maps. Three were decent. And one was trash.

 

[Cacher]

I did it again, going astray from my blitz games. Just changed Squad 51 vs. the Flying Saucers to Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story. It is very enjoyable.

 

[Deku]

They tried something a bit different with Hitman 3 to try to keep things mixed up and it definitely meant a wider variety for the levels but they didn't really all work for me. I think overall it probably is my least favorite of the three games due to only really liking two of the maps. Three were decent. And one was trash.

Problem for me is how linear the locations are. Last one is way too linear. It feels like they wanted to create the locations just to finish the story and nothing else. The game felt like how Absolution was, which I don't think is bad. It just didn't felt anything like the previous parts of the trilogy

 

[xinek]

Well, that's Cruelty Squad off the list. I didn't actually beat the final level -- the difficulty ramps up to insane levels, and the actual level design is fucking bullshit. I had to literally watch videos on slow mo to figure out how to traverse it. Hordes of enemies, new super dangerous enemies you inexplicably can't kill, ugly ass level, horrible platforming, and just a complete and utter misery. After dying about 50 times, I'm done. Uninstalled. I'll never have to look at that piece of shit again. It was pretty good up until the final level, but my time with it is thankfully over now, and I can't recommend it. Why do devs do this? Another game I really enjoyed up until it spoiled itself with a bad ending (see BG3).

Started playing Railway Empire 2, and what a relief to play an actually good game. Sorry, I'm just bitter and really annoyed. Ugh.

 

[MegaApple]

Dragon Quest 1 - done!
Another off the list!

 

[Futaleufu]

Finished the story mode in Need for Speed Heat, which by itself is kind of short but in a game full of activities like this you feel no hurry to rush to the "ending". Game has a lot of content compared to previous games, competition with other racing open world games is good. Recommended. Thats the second game of this season.

 

[KainXVIII]

3 out of 5 games done (Outcast was more enjoyable than the rest, even if it was seriously flawed)