Trophy Bragging Rights

[Claytone]

Platinum is Home Run Derby Champ from MLB Home Run Derby VR!

This is a pretty mindless little arcade batting simulator. It uses the PS Move controller and greatly exaggerates my ability to smash absolute monster home runs. The last trophy for this one is pretty grindy, requiring you to hit 100 of the score multipliers in the outfield, which is pretty tough (not uncommon to go an entire round without doing it once). Ultimately, though, I was able to enjoy it as a countdown to a milestone home run like the all-time greats do in real life.

I'll do a song this time like Share.

[Kong Wen]

Platinum trophy #71: Howl (PS5)

Excellent little turn-based puzzle game. Picked it up on sale for $7.50 CAD and finished it in 7.5 hours, for a cool $1/hr of entertainment value.

Every time you act, the enemies act. You have to use your skills and enemy positioning to clear levels and accomplish feats (defeat all enemies, reach the goal within a certain number of turns, etc.). It has a nice aesthetic, but the plot is ultimately secondary to the puzzles.

Platinum trophy #70: Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster (PS4 via PS5)

Completed my Red Mage Rampage all-RDM autobattle-only (except Chaos) challenge run. Fun little remaster, but astonishingly easier and quicker/shorter than the original. That's fine. The music was the highlight!

[Claytone]

Platinum is Hall of Fame from Bat Boy!

This was a solid trophy set. You gotta 100% the game and do a couple other odds and ends, and the plat is yours. Bat Boy is a platformer of a dozenish levels, so it's a pretty quick plat too.

Kinda funny that I only got a single platinum in 2023 and have notched eleven this year. I just seem to keep picking them up on smaller titles like this (although Infinite Wealth was certainly not a short one). Maybe I'll try to collect one more before the end of the year to average one a month? We'll see.

[Sharecrow]

Got number 70 in Hyper-5 - one of the many games on my Shmup list at BL. Was awesome if a bit on the easier side for the genre. Enjoyed it very much. Wasn't expecting to beat it when I did as I had tried the last level many times previously.

[Claytone]

Platinum is Platinum from She Sees Red!

Very easy trophy set for this very small interactive movie game. You gotta see every ending, but that only takes 1.5-2 hours since you can skip scenes you've previously watched, and a single playthrough only takes about 30ish minutes. This game isn't much to write home about, but it subverted my expectations in some ways, and it's impressive enough as a debut effort from Kazakh studio Rhinotales. Will be interesting to what they've been working on in the intervening couple of years since they released it.

[Claytone]

Platinum is "Old Man Stauf Built a House..." from The 7th Guest VR!

Nice little trophy set for this one. More or less just requires you to 100% the game and do so without using the auto-solve function on any of the puzzles while also doing a couple odd, missable actions in a couple of those puzzles. Toughest thing was finding all the hidden coins in the game, and I'll admit to having used a guide for the last few particularly well-hidden ones. Really good game that I'll be writing more about shortly.

Last one for 2024 probably. Looking forward to more happy trophy hunting in 2025!

[Claytone]

Platinum is Virtuoso from Rocket League!

This one was a long time coming. I started my Rocket League career nearly ten years ago on PC, but I did poke around on PlayStation with a couple friends in the early days. My PC friends were the ones that stuck with it, though, so I mostly played there. However, in the past few years, my computer has been getting pretty long in the tooth, so it occasionally got a little choppy running RL. Fortunately, after the Epic Games acquisition, all game stats/progress/unlocks were managed through their account system and thus persisted across platforms. I decided to switch to Xbox, which got Discord integration before PlayStation and which used the same controller I'd been using on PC. However, Epic/Psyonix haven't seemed to have supported Rocket League as well on Xbox as other platforms, so I finally switched again to PlayStation. After I merged in all my PC/Xbox progress, most of the lingering trophies auto-popped, but I still had the mind-numbing task remaining to complete the offline season mode against bots. These guys are dreadfully easy to beat once you've put hundreds of hours into the game against online, human opponents, so that was a real snoozefest, but at least I got my platinum! Credits rolled too, so I guess I may as well count it as a Game Clear as well. (Maybe even a :C:)?

Glad to already be on the board in January. Looking forward to seeing what the rest of y'all plat this year!

[Sharecrow]

Platinum 71 was an easy one from a short game called Trails and Traces: The Tomb of Thomas Tew. Too short for a theme song…second game I’ve beaten this year!

[Kong Wen]

Platinum trophy #72: Wilmot's Warehouse (PS4)

This is a fun little relaxing puzzler that I picked up on sale over Xmas, and the timing was right because it was exactly the kind of game I was in the mood to play on the PSP on the couch. I thought it was going to be about organizing a warehouse, but it's really about organizing your mind. You basically have to decide, on the fly, how you're going to sort and categorize various abstract items, and then recall them later. It sounds hectic (especially since there are delivery time limits involved), but it's somehow relaxing in spite of all that.

Platinum trophy #71: Howl (PS5)

Excellent little turn-based puzzle game. Picked it up on sale for $7.50 CAD and finished it in 7.5 hours, for a cool $1/hr of entertainment value.

Every time you act, the enemies act. You have to use your skills and enemy positioning to clear levels and accomplish feats (defeat all enemies, reach the goal within a certain number of turns, etc.). It has a nice aesthetic, but the plot is ultimately secondary to the puzzles.

[Kong Wen]

Platinum trophy #73: A Little to the Left (PS5)

This was a cozy tidying-up game that I played through to completion late last year after picking it up during the Xmas sales. It had a couple trophies related to daily puzzles, which is why it took so much longer to get the platinum after completing it... but here we are, 100 days later.

Platinum trophy #72: Wilmot's Warehouse (PS4)

This is a fun little relaxing puzzler that I picked up on sale over Xmas, and the timing was right because it was exactly the kind of game I was in the mood to play on the PSP on the couch. I thought it was going to be about organizing a warehouse, but it's really about organizing your mind. You basically have to decide, on the fly, how you're going to sort and categorize various abstract items, and then recall them later. It sounds hectic (especially since there are delivery time limits involved), but it's somehow relaxing in spite of all that.