Sekiro, and nothing else has ever come close. It’s so smooth and so fast that I drop into the flow state with no trouble at all.

Hey, I’ve actually done that! It was almost a year ago now, so I can’t remember my exact strats for those missions, but I might be able to help.

First of all, those two missions are brutal–I had to retry them a lot before I got the S. It seems like you’ve got the right basic idea for both: move fast and play the objective above all else.

For builds, I had the most success running Zimmerman in the right hand and laser lance + pile bunker on the left hand/shoulder. You can swap lance/bunker to basically always have a melee available to one shot any MTs that are in your optimal path. For the real fights, building up poise damage with Zimmerman and then staggering with lance before finishing with charged bunker is an insanely fast kill that only costs Zimmerman ammo. It takes some skill and a little luck to land it on Iguazu (he’s one slippery bastard) but if you can lance him into a corner then he’s toast. The same basic principle applies to the refueling base fight, but you have to do it twice. The biggest thing to know is how much poise damage you need to build up before lance will stagger --it’s crucial that the lance induces stagger to set up the bunker.

Good luck!

Edit: I see you got it–congrats! That’s a tough achievement.

It’s been steadily overrun by bots, and I guess the community hit a breaking point

Fair enough–there is one specific boss that comes to mind where a specific prosthetic is supremely useful, as well as some mini bosses. All the “enemy with sword” bosses like Genichiro are pretty straight up, though.

Juzou the Drunkard is a brutal fight! I rushed Hirata Estate my first playthrough and got stuck there for a long time.

IMO spirit emblems are cool but ultimately a waste of time–they’re a lot of fun to play with in the open areas, but for ~a boss~ most bosses, it’s faster to just learn the fight than spend time farming tokens to try to grind it out with prosthetics.

You may know this already, but a slightly hidden mechanic is that the parry window is a while .5 seconds if you hold the parry button down–if you just tap it you only get a couple frames, but if you hold it, you will find the window far more forgiving.

Timberborn! It’s a city builder about beavers, the primary conceit is that there are periodic droughts that can and will kill all your beavers if you haven’t saved enough water.

Armored Core 6. Missions are pretty short, attempts on them can be abandoned without losing anything but your progress in that attempt, and there is absolutely no slack time–start to end it’s densely packed with new content.

I’ll save you the watch, it’s a 20 minute Balatro ad with some pedestrian commentary on what makes games fun sprinkled in.

I really appreciate how FromSoft does achievements–theirs are the only games I ever really go for the 100%, since that usually entails simply playing and mastering all the content that they have prepared. Achievements like “beat the whole game under x arbitrary condition” or “get this super specific scenario to happen” just aren’t that interesting to me, but “beat every boss, collect every important item, visit every area” I find very satisfying.

Finally got around to starting Sekiro a month ago and 100+ hours and five runs later I’m wondering why I waited so long

There are a few factors that I think make this year a standout for quantity of great games released:

1. Tons of games that were delayed due to the pandemic released this year, giving us several years’ worth of ideas and work all at once.
2. The games industry saw massive layoffs this year–that’s a ton of talent cut loose that now isn’t going towards future games, and another step towards the inevitable reckoning over the abusive labor environment that games are made in. Whether that’s a collapse or labor organization and the establishment of a long-overdue union, it’s going to create a churn period that isn’t going to produce a lot of games.
3. The glut of great games has saturated the market, meaning that games are returning less per investment dollar. This makes investors less eager to put their money towards new games, which leads to fewer games being made.

Came back to Dark Souls 1 after finishing up armored core. I’m always fascinated by how little time it takes for those crunchy old graphics look normal.

The game just has two too many buttons. I played it on both, and it feels much better on controller. Holding down both triggers to unload twin Gatling guns right into the spider’s pinecone ass is just satisfying in a way that mouse and keyboard isn’t. That being said, the fact that you need six easy-access buttons and constant camera control makes it really awkward/borderline unplayable unless you have a controller with back paddles.

Pile bunker is genuinely my favorite weapon in the game. That charge shot is a pain to land but there’s nothing better than staggering a chunky enemy and just gut punching them into oblivion.

Have you tried dual Gatling guns? They stagger very reliably and the damage output is nuts

I’m curious what uses you have in mind–anything that’s an online competitive (i.e., you compete against other players–doesn’t need to be esports sweaty) game I don’t think there’s a strong case for allowing injected code, since that’s an avenue for gaining an unfair advantage and thereby worsening other players’ enjoyment, and anything offline I can’t see it being worth a company’s time and money to prosecute.

Even if they didn’t steal assets, a copyright suit is a massive pita to defend against

I’d add the caveat “badly designed for solo matchmaking.” Dota with friends–especially a five stack you get along with and play well with–is sublime. Dota with four randos is a complete and total crapshoot, though if your behavior score is good and you’re not in the total shit tier ranks it’s usually pretty fun.

Hell yeah. Never played AC before as well–picked this one up on launch day and have been having an absolute blast. It’s FromSoft, so it kicks your teeth in a little bit, but once you get the hang of the combat system and make sense of the info on your screen it’s a ton of fun. If you like the dark souls style of combat (heavy emphasis on dodge-and-punish, demands near-perfect execution), you’ll like AC.