Lurker > KamikazePotato

39. Until Dawn

Not to simplify a game down to one core concept, but...seriously, Until Dawn is just B Horror Movie: The Game. And it's awesome. It mashes together several horror movie genres, sticks a bunch of overly emotional teens in a 'trapped with no way out' environment, and then hands you the reins. It turns out that characters making bad horror movie decisions feels very different when you're the one making those decisions for them and only have yourself to blame! Until Dawn is hardly a game I would call complex, and I wouldn't at all recommend it to people who don't like horror movies or games that boil down to a bunch of glorified QTEs, but man is it fun to experience. I recommend playing once on your own, then playing with others in the room and having them make all the decisions for you. Watching them panic is hilarious.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

40. Bastion

Bastion is Narrator: The Game. The art style is charming, the combat is pretty fun, the characters are memorable despite limited screentime, and the music is very good, but the narrator is what everyone remembers about it. The voice and the way the lines are delivered is hypnotic, and the way the narrator reacts to how you play the game makes it feel like a very personal experience. The only other game that feels quite like Bastion would be its spiritual successor Transistor, and I'm okay with that. The concept would grow stale if other games copied it, but it being relegated to one or two games makes it a very unique experience.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

41. A Plague Tale: Innocence

A Plague Tale has many good qualities to it, but really it's all about those rat physics. The rat swarms that carpet many of the environments in A Plague Tale is horrifying and gives the game an atmosphere that is unlike any game I've ever played. Their presence is so well-done that even despite frequent exposure to them, it takes a while before the creepiness factor starts to lose its edge.

The game also has solidly written characters, good cutscenes, decent puzzle-solving and stealth mechanics that amount to 'pretty fun', but it's the atmosphere that carries the game. I'm not sure how I feel about the last 1/5 of the game, where the atmosphere pivots into something different, but it was probably necessary as by then the players (and characters) had grown more accustomed to the rampant death and misery plaguing the world. It definitely stuck its weirdo ending a lot better than other games have, though, so I give it a pass. Definitely a consistently enjoyable game that I recommend to those that like stealth or survival horror (even if it's light on those survival elements).

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

42. 999 / Zero Time Dilemma

Hah, I'm already grouping games together! Look at this cheater over here.

I like Visual Novels. The Zero Escape series helped scratch that itch in a time period when there weren't many to play, and I appreciate that. All the games have strong elements - I group mentally group 999 and Zero Time Dilemma because I like them about the same and think they share similar strengths and weaknesses. Both games have a dark tone, are set in a very hostile 'trapped with no way out' environment that I love to see stories in, and are consistently good experiences...until the endings. I know that 999's ending is popular but I thought it was really silly when I first went through it and it somewhat took away from the harsh tone the game had built up. Zero Time Dilemma goes all-in on its time travel weirdness and plays around with the concept in a much more organic way, and the highs are higher than 999, but the ending is really freaking stupid and hurts not only the game but the series as a whole. Both are good games that fit my interests, but ultimately didn't reach their full potential.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Oh, and for reference, here's a list of games I'm pretty sure would make the list but haven't gotten around to playing:

Breath of the Wild
Control
AI: The Somnium Files
Disco Elysium
Devil May Cry 5

So don't expect them to be here. I considered waiting until I'd cleared out the backlog a bit before posting this list, but by then Game of the Decade lists wouldn't be the 'hip' and 'now' thing and I'd get less of those precious topic posts.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

All the cool kids are doing it! It's made up of 42 games because I didn't want to pad out the last with games I don't care about that much to reach a nice round number.

I'll be keeping the writeups brief for the sake of time, but will try to hit all the highlights of why I like the game. Also I group some games together that I don't mentally separate in my head, so it's actually more than 42 games total but my list my rules.

Oh yeah, and obviously there will be SPOILERS FOR EVERY GAME ON THIS LIST.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I have a lot of stuff in the Top 20. Works for me!

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Proud of Berseria for getting so high, surprised Arkham City is as fondly remembered as it is.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

up

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I still got a lot left, neat

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

mnkboy907 posted...

It sounds like HOES MAD is some meme from the FE:3H voice actors or something.

Started with Hero, continued with Terry, and will now probably be co-opted by every subsequent DLC reveal character.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

TheCodeisBosco posted...

I guess what's frustrating is, it feels like the defenders are so torqued up about people like those Twitter goons that they're spewing HOES MAD and countless insults everywhere... even places where people aren't actually acting out-of-pocket. So as someone who just wants to reasonably discuss the damn game and its announcement, it feels like it's harder to avoid the vitriol/general negativity from the defenders than the "hoes".

Honestly speaking, and this is from someone who would have preferred many characters over Byleth, I don't think this is at all true outside of the actual Fire Emblem subreddit. People shot off HOES MAD pretty quickly but that's because the complaints were already starting like 30 seconds into the Direct.

Doesn't matter much in the grand scheme of things though, I just have a morbid fascination with the Smash fanbase and they'll get over it once Shiny DLC Character #6 gets released.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Ngamer64 posted...

The board's a little slower it's true, but we'll still get a huge wave of noms to rounds things out once the form locks. I bet our final numbers end up looking respectable.

Speaking of which- any chance we could we do stats tracking this year? As in total B8ers submitted, total nominations, number of different games selected. I love to include those on the wiki page for comparison's sake.

I should be able to get all of those without too much trouble, yeah.

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TheCodeisBosco posted...

If you go to the Smash Ultimate board here, there's a fuckin' Gregorian Chant of "Hoes mad" in seemingly every Byleth thread.

That is because some hoes are, in fact, very mad.

https://imgur.com/kfGZH8S

(Zack Aguilar is Byleth's voice actor)

That's not a super isolated incident either! Enough to the point where other FE voice actors are aware of it.

https://twitter.com/SimplyAllegra/status/1217913291982303232

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

1 Nomination
100% Orange Juice
2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa
A Hat in Time
Ar nosurge: Ode to an Unborn Star
BanG Dream! Girls Band Party
Batman: Arkham City
Battle Chasers: Nightwar
Bloodstained Ritual of the Night
Bloody Trapland
Caravan Stories
Chaos;Child
Crash Team Racing: Nitro-Fueled
CrossCode
Crypt of the NecroDancer
DUSK
Dandara
Death Stranding
Diablo III
Digital: A Love Story
Disco Elysium
Dota 2
Dragon Age: Inquisition
Dynamix (2015)
Euro Truck Simulator 2
FTL
Fallout: New Vegas
Fantasy Life
Final Fantasy Record Keeper
Final Fantasy XIV Online: A Realm Reborn
Fire Emblem Awakening
Fire Emblem Heroes
Fire Emblem Warriors
Fire Emblem: Awakening
Five Nights at Freddy's
Forza Horizon 3
Gone Home
Heavy Rain
Hello Neighbor
INSIDE
Judgment
Kid Icarus: Uprising
Kingdom Hearts III
Kirby Planet Robobot
Kirby's Epic Yarn
Kirbys Return to Dream Land
L.A. Noire
Last Window: The Secret of Cape West
Magic: The Gathering Arena
Mario Kart 8
Mass Effect 3
Max Payne 3
Mega Man 10
Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance
Metroid: Other M
Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom
Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate
Murasaki Tsurugi
NIER
New Super Mario Bros. U
Ori and the Blind Forest
Outer Wilds
Outlast 2
Overcooked! + Overcooked! 2
Pikmin 3
Pillars of Eternity
PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds
Pocket Card Jockey
Pokemon Conquest
Pokemon GO
Pokemon Sun / Moon
Pokemon Sword / Shield
Rabi-Ribi
Radiant Historia
Resident Evil: Revelations 2
Return of the Obra Dinn
Rewrite
Rhythm Heaven Fever
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Rune Factory 4
Saints Row IV
Saints Row: The Third
SeaBed
Shadows of the Damned
Shin Megami Tensei IV: Apocalypse
Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor 2 - Record Breaker
Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable
Sid Meier's Civilization VI
Silent Hills
Solatorobo: Red the Hunter
Starcraft II: Battle Chest
Stella Glow
Super Mario 3D World
Super Mario Party
Tales from the Borderlands
Tales of Xillia
Tales of Zestiria
The Jackbox Party Pack 3
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II
The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening
The Sexy Brutale
The Talos Principle
The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings
Transistor
Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3
Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
Umineko When They Cry: Answer Arcs
Umineko When They Cry: Question Arc
VVVVVV
Valkyria Chronicles 4
XCOM: Enemy Unknown
Xenoblade Chronicles 2
Yoku's Island Express
Yoshi's Woolly World
beatmania IIDX 24 SINOBUZ

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

21 Nominations
Super Meat Boy

10 Nominations
Mass Effect 2

9 Nominations
Life is Strange

8 Nominations
Bloodborne
Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker
Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age
NieR: Automata
Persona 5

7 Nominations
Cuphead
Sonic Mania
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate

6 Nominations
Celeste
Dark Souls
Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Pokemon HeartGold / SoulSilver Version
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

5 Nominations
DOOM
Dragon Ball FighterZ
Ghost Trick: Phantom Detective
Hollow Knight
Night in the Woods
Sid Meier's Civilization V
Super Mario Galaxy 2
Undertale
Yakuza 0

4 Nominations
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag
Marvel's Spider-Man
No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice
Rayman Legends
Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
Rocket League
Spec Ops: The Line
Splatoon 2
Stardew Valley
Super Mario Odyssey
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Xenoblade Chronicles

3 Nominations
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
Devil May Cry 5
Doki Doki Literature Club!
Donkey Kong Country: Tropical Freeze
FTL: Faster Than Light
God of War
Grand Theft Auto V
Hitman 2
Horizon Zero Dawn
Kirby's Return to Dream Land
Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors
Pokemon Black/White Version
Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon
Slay the Spire
Terraria
The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth
The Last of Us
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC
The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
The Stanley Parable
Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of DANA
Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward

2 Nominations
Animal Crossing: New Leaf
Apex Legends
Assassin's Creed Odyssey
Atelier Ayesha: The Alchemist of Dusk
Bayonetta 2
Borderlands 2
Bravely Default: Flying Fairy
CONTROL
Control
Crusader Kings II
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Digimon Story Cyber Sleuth
Fate / Grand Order
Fortnite
Gravity Rush
Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft
HuniePop
Hyrule Warriors
Katawa Shoujo
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Overwatch
Persona 4 Golden
Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Dual Destinies
Pokemon Black/White Version 2
Portal 2
Red Dead Redemption 2
Resident Evil 2
Resident Evil 7: biohazard
Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey
Shovel Knight
Sonic 3 & Knuckles
South Park: The Stick of Truth
Splatoon
Tales of Berseria
The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky
The Witness
Theatrhythm Final Fantasy: Curtain Call
Tomb Raider
Untitled Goose Game
VA-11 Hall-A: Cyberpunk Bartender Action

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Yeah this might actually be the most negative reaction a Smash reveal has gotten in the entire series. Corrin got off better than this!

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

HaRRicH posted...

I trust KP is busy but I'm excited to see some tallies when they arrive.

Was planning for there to be more posted, but I suppose I'm still used to the faster pace of the B8 of old. This topic would have already had 250 posts five years ago.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

TheCodeisBosco posted...

Instead, the dissenters have mostly been relatively calm (from what I've seen anyway)

You mean the same dissenters that are complaining on the voice actors' twitter accounts?

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

It's a shame that Dishonored 2 never caught on compared to the first game. I thought it was way better.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

MichelBollinger posted...

That's a great show, but uhhhh...maybe tell your friend that spoiling the major twist premise of a series isn't the way to get you into it.

I mean, it's an Episode 1 spoiler.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Did Dimitri not even get into the contest?

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Geno - like many long-running Smash fan picks - feels like a product of inertia more than anything else. People wanted him once upon a time and never let go of the idea.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Remember: as disappointed as you may be over Byleth, at least you aren't as disappointed as this guy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA-vmIecDDE&feature=emb_title

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I don't trust Mass Effect at all after what Andromeda did to the series, and I don't trust Smash 4 at all after Ultimate has come out.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Quick note: Smash continues the trend of characters looking better in Smash than their own games.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Grimlyn posted...

lunatics, Edelgard best lord

She's been pretty consistently ranking below the other two in popularity polls since release. Apparently, starting a war over somewhat questionable logic will do that!

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

The funny thing is that if they HAD picked Edelgard ahead of time, people would still be upset, because her popularity plummeted once people actually played Three Houses

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Pikachu was considered the mascot by the time Smash 64 rolled around, and the Pokemon series has always been about the Pokemon and not the humans. He's not the main character of RBY, but Pikachu is definitely the main character of Pokemon as a whole.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Mewtwo59 posted...

To be fair, Dragon Quest is basically a non-entity outside of Japan.

Dragon Quest hasn't lit up the place outside of Japan, but non-entity is going a bit far. DQ9 and DQ8 sold pretty well and there's been tons of DQ games on Nintendo systems. And it doesn't take much more than a cursory knowledge of video games in general to know about Dragon Quest's existence. Considering the random obscure characters that people (including me) hype up, the reaction to Hero was embarassing.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Hero's reaction was easily the worst and showed that a lot of Nintendo fans don't know anything about non-Nintendo games. Apparently, a character from the most influential JRPG series of all time is too obscure.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Byleth is different! Literally directly addresses the 'generic swordsman' complaint and uses multiple weapons.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Anyway, my more serious non-schadenfreude take is: totally reasonable to be disappointed in Byleth (I'm not really jumping up and down for joy myself) but considering we're getting 6 more characters, some of the reactions I've seen are super over the top

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

They're never not going to pick the main character of a game/series they represent. Not sure why people ever bother talking about it otherwise. The one time they slightly deviated from this by picking Robin instead of Chrom (and Robin is as much of a main character as he is), people complained so much Chrom got in anyway.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOaIPk4U4AANzxs?format=jpg&name=large

What the fuck kind of pose is Female Byleth trying to pull off here?

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Grimlyn posted...

Sakurai favouratism knows no bounds lmao I can't help love it

He didn't even want Corrin, so I doubt Byleth was his first choice for a DLC character.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

My biggest complaint by far with 3H is that replaying is a chore, but you can get a full game's worth of experience with one route anyway, especially if you go Black Eagles and make a strategic save file halfway through.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Dmitri was the least-popular choice when 3H came out, but once people played the game and saw his character he slowly overtook the other house leaders as the fan favorite.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

By the way, Nintendo took down and reuploaded the youtube video of the Direct because it was getting a fair amount of dislikes (65k likes to 25k dislikes). The new version has a way worse ratio at 10k likes to 7k dislikes, lmao good job NIntendo

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I think Sakurai doesn't give a fuck by this point. In one interview related to Smash 4 a while back, when asked about how the fanbase reacts to things, he said something like "it's to be expected, a lot of them are children".

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Punnyz posted...

i was LITERALLY just about to ask

Did any leakers get this right?

Vergeben was given a huge list of characters that it WASN'T, but not which one it was, and said yesterday that it still hadn't fully leaked and he couldn't commit to anyone.

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TheCodeisBosco posted...

And it's a "shill pick" scent. It feels like a classroom where all of the students are punished for the actions of the troublemakers, y'know?

Three Houses was extremely successful, so I wouldn't call it a shill pick. Just very weird after four 3rd party characters and how secretive they were about this character not being leaked.

I said it before and I'll say it again, I'd never buy something like the Fighters Pass. The risk of monkey business like this is just too high.

He literally told people not to buy it!

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Honestly, Byleth doesn't look very fun to play, but the Smash fanbase getting salty over Fire Emblem is the one piece of petty internet schadenfreude that I absolutely love to take part in so this works for me.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

I'm going to enjoy this salt and I didn't even want Byleth.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/poll/6139-best-game-ever-day-23-round-2-grand-theft-auto-v-vs-super

By GotD 2 standards, that's a very good result. I have no idea if GTAV retains that strength whatsoever.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

TsunamiXXVIII posted...

Yeah, I was wondering about the methodology for these adjustments.

The fact that even after adjusting, ME3 > ME2 seems odd. I've never played any of them but I heard the general consensus was 2 > 1 > 3

It's been too long since I did the adjustments to remember exactly how I did it, but it usually involves a lot of cross-referencing (and at times, a bit of guesswork) to get stats that eliminate the effects of SFFs, rallies, bandwagons ect. It's as good as you're going to get considering 1/4 of the bracket was trashed by rally spillover.

ME3's stat specifically is worthless because it faced Undertale in Round 1, and ME2 just didn't do well. ME1 ranked above it as well.

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Anyway, Dark Souls 3 will be weak, FF8 is already struggling and what is essentially a port wont be respected, which leaves a modern-enough rerelease of a strong Zelda game to be enough to win this

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

NowItsAngeTime posted...

Id choose Links Awakening > Fire Emblem Awakening if I could

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

LordoftheMorons posted...

I dont see why society should be fully bailing out somebody who knowingly took on 200k in debt to get a degree in philosophy or whatever (or physics, for that matter).

Late to the party, but this is probably the worst thing a left-leaning person has posted in this topic in a while, and I say that as someone with no personal stake in the student loan situation

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.

Claude

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Black Turtle did a pretty good job.