Board 8 > SHINE and Arti rank their 22 Platinum Trophies in 2017

(+) Yeah! (+)

I was playing Xenoblade 2

RAW is on now though so probably can do more of these
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13. Platinum #148 GET! - South Park: The Stick of Truth



The first good south park game in like 20 years it's a miracle! I didn't get around to playing this game until 2017 on PS3. I technically own the PS4 version too for preordering Fractured But Whole, but I havne't played that version yet. Maybe one day because it's a quick 10-12 hour platinum. For this one you have to complete The Game, collect all Chinpokomon, Costumes, Weapons and Making Friends With Everybody. Then there's a bunch of one off trophies for doing various sidequests or performing certain actions in battle you know the drill. Although I liked this game more than Fractured But Whole, this platinum is lower because the Chinpokmon are missable. I realized this while playing the game and had to roll back to save 2 hours earlier because I missed the Chinpokomon in the alien spaceship :(
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12. Platinum # 142 GET - The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel II



If any of you played the first Cold Steel this platinum is almost exactly the same. Play through the game once on normal or hard doing 100% of the sidequests, reaching the max student rank, fill out all the various books (recipes, enemies, fish, characters, etc), open every chest in the game, bone all your party members, get all the master quartz and a bunch of battle related trophies. Then you play through the story again on Nightmare because Falcom does that with all their games. Only ranks so high because Cold Steel II is an awesome video game and I look forward to Cold Steel III.
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11. Platinum #148 GET! - South Park: The Fractured But Whole



Fairly similar to Stick of Truth except no missables and can be done in a single playthrough if you play the game on mastermind difficulty as a black kid. Also Morgan Freeman is rad.
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11. Hyperdimension Neptunia Re;Birth1 (Vita)

I don't remember all of the story from the first Neptunia and I have no desire to ever go back to that experience ever again, but the remake fixes pretty much all the problems of the original game. A few details of the story were changed, but I think most of the changes are for the better. Also, since this came out after the sequels had been released, they backported a bunch of characters from the sequels to add more characters into the game, like the CPU candidates. The only two things I didn't like that there are very ridiculous difficulty spikes out of nowhere, especially in the midpoint of Chapter 2. Plus, the trophy for reaching 100,000,000 credits take forever and a lot of kills of the monster Clione, who only drops around 150k. There's no real faster way to do it in this game, unfortunately. If you do want to start this series, this is where to begin.
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I currently have a platinum in every day of 2018!!!!

4 plats last year.

Horizon
Persona 5
Nier
The Deadly Tower of Monsters

No real rating, P5 was probably the most fun to do.
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3DSRage posted...

I currently have a platinum in every day of 2018!!!!

dude same
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10. Grim Fandango Remastered (Vita)

This was a great point and click adventure game with a clever trophy list consisting of various ways to get alternate dialogue. Since all dialogues are voiced, it's definitely worth the time to get all the dialogue from as many characters as possible. The puzzles, while there are no hints that could make it easier, have some easy ones to figure out but some I had to consult a guide for. Still, I feel I could have ranked this higher if the port was as solid as the trophy list - the game crashed in Year 4 and I lost about 4-5 hours of progress in the game. The annoying need to use tank controls for one trophy also contributes to this - apparently Tim Schafer is still stuck in the 90s, which is disappointing. I did manage to do it and was relieved when it popped at the beginning of the final cutscene.
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@Arti

Life is strange spoilers

why do you say chloe will probably die anyway?
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Cavedweller2000 posted...

From favourite to least favourite (based on how enjoyable it was to plat)

Final Fantasy XII
Resident Evil 7
Final Fantasy XV
Uncharted 4
Shadow of the Beast
Uncharted 3
Uncharted: Golden Abyss
Heavy Rain
Undertale

This almost seems backwards to me... Why was Undertale so unenjoyable to play? It was my only plat this year and I got it just playing through the game normally. And I've heard FFXII is a pain in the ass to plat.
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10. Platinum #140 GET! - Atari Flashback Classics Vol. 1



At some point I decided I wanted to increase my background of Atari games I had played. The two collections on PS4 provided the perfect opportunity for this. What I wasn't banking on this collection having fairly challenging trophies for most of the games in it and an overall very rare platinum (it was on my top 10 rarest list until dropping off to 11th recently). I won't go through every trophy but I will list the golds which were the hardest ones. I still have nightmares of playing Tempest

- Win with no wall left in arcade Warlords
- Earn 800 points in Lunar Landers COMMAND MISSION
- Score a kill in Combat's Tank-Pong using a shot that has bounced at least 7 times (this one was actually easy)
- Eliminate all the mushrooms in a level of arcade Centipede
- Clear a level in Canyon Bomber with limited bombs (Games 1-4)
- Finish Level 81 or above in arcade Tempest without losing a life in the level

Apparently the Vol. 2 platinum is even harder so I'll have to get to that one day too.
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9. Platinum # 130 GET! - WWE 2K16



Somehow missing my platinum screenshot for this game, oh well! The WWE 2K games aren't really that great of games, even as wrestling games. I far prefer the AKI style that has gone out of favor. There's too many systems in an attempt to make it a real simulation when professional wrestling isn't a real sport to begin with. These platinum is also super grindy having to go through career mode and just win hundreds of maps to earn enough VC and SP to buy all the skills and abilities

But I don't know....I just really like playing these games. As much as I enjoy other fighting games if there was an EVO for WWE 2K games it's probably the closest I'd come to being able to qualify. I've never struggled in any of these games online modes and maintain like an 80% win rate in ranked matches. For such a bad platinum, my bias in how much I enjoy playing these games overrides it thus getting it a top 10 spot.
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Waluigi1 posted...

Cavedweller2000 posted...

From favourite to least favourite (based on how enjoyable it was to plat)

Final Fantasy XII
Resident Evil 7
Final Fantasy XV
Uncharted 4
Shadow of the Beast
Uncharted 3
Uncharted: Golden Abyss
Heavy Rain
Undertale

This almost seems backwards to me... Why was Undertale so unenjoyable to play? It was my only plat this year and I got it just playing through the game normally. And I've heard FFXII is a pain in the ass to plat.

This list signifies how fun they were to plat (platinum). Not necessarily to play. Whilst undertale was quite fun to play, the trophies had no thought to them (intentionally). 12 or so of them involved pressing X for 10 minutes straight.

FF12 on the other hand had fun and challenging trophies imo and you had a sense of achievement when getting the platinum.
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I guess we just differ in that sense. I find trophies basically meaningless so the easier and more mindless to get, the better. Requires less effort. Lile if I was going to try and go for platinums just to boost my score, I'd go for shit like that mayo game or games that just require beating the game.
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For me trophies are basically an extension of what I've been doing in games since I was 5 years old which is do everything the game has to offer. I am not satisfied until I see every meter filled.
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ninkendo posted...

For me trophies are basically an extension of what I've been doing in games since I was 5 years old which is do everything the game has to offer. I am not satisfied until I see every meter filled.

I'd be more inclined or tempted to do them if most of them weren't so dumb or just time consuming for the sake of being time consuming. I think they should be fun to work toward, not frustrating.
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one man's frustration is another man's fun
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pxlated posted...

@Arti

Life is strange spoilers

why do you say chloe will probably die anyway?

it's another Steins;Gate reference since I mentioned it in the writeup
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9. Stories: A Path of Destinies (PS4)

One of the biggest surprises that I've gotten on PS+, a short action RPG with choices that do matter and a mystery to solve through multiple play throughs. The narrator in this also reminds me of the one in Bastion, with him commenting on some of the random stuff the main character does, like smashing pots or dashing for no reason. It gets lowered because the platinum requires every ending to be reached, and with all the endings this game has, it becomes a tedious exercise when some of the results of each ending can already be predicted based on earlier choices you've made. Also, there's a few more runs tacked on to that to max out the skill tree. It was an enjoyable game other than the platinum run.
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8. Puyo Puyo Tetris (PS4)

Puyo Puyo Tetris is one of the best puzzle games to come out in 2017. I especially enjoyed the nonsense of Adventure Mode, and going online and beating people with Puyo matches. The platinum, however, is another exercise in frustration because of the grind to pop 100,000 puyos. By the end of everything else in the game you've probably only popped 25,000 so that's a long grind to finish it off. At least the game gives you a counter to show how many you've done.
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8. Platinum #139 GET! - Star Ocean: Till the End of Time



The Summer of Star Ocean never truly ends. For the PS2 Classics version of this game we got some hot trophy action! It was largely similar to the 600+ hour Star Ocean 4, but much easier because they only required you to get 80% of the battle trophies (240/300) as opposed to all of them like SO4 did (which also had 900 of them, not 300)

SO3's Universe difficulty and 4D difficulty were far more difficulty than any of SO4's difficulty modes, especially in the beginning although once you reach town that opens up crafting and you make orichalcum/boots of prowess 9999 atk weapons it becomes much more manageable.

The dumbest trophy is obtaining the bunny race trophy in the casino type area near the end of the game. You need to bet on bunny races which nets you very few points and you need 1000 of them to buy the trophy. The races themselves also take like 2-3 minutes to watch. I ended up turbo controlling this and coming back about 80 hours later while I played other games.
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7. Platinum #147 GET! - NieR: Automata



Typical open world platinum boosted by being god damn NieR: Automata. You only need 80% of most categories (quests, archives, unit data, plug-in chips) but you also need to find all the weapons in the game and max them all out to level 4.

The game is smart though and provides most of the materials you need via sidequests so there's very little actual grinding for materials (I'm looking at you Pure Water).

Lots of combat related trophies, some of which can't be done until the B route

Also trophies for fishing I loooooove fishing (for real)

Ranks lower because it features the trophy shop so that any Non-Ace of Games could get this platinum with very little effort.
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7. Everybody's Golf (2017) (PS4)

I feel like the amount of playing needed to unlock everything in this game is unnecessary, but it's much easier to play than earlier games in the series. As such, I really enjoyed playing through the five courses and the one DLC course that I got from pre-ordering the game. The only annoyance with the game is the fact that it takes 18 days (real time) to unlock all the revenge VS characters to complete the game. There's several more time consuming trophies like the condor, catching all fish, and the spiral shot but I had no problems with most of them, and they can all be done while you wait for the VS characters to show up. This game stays up here since you can play other games while you wait to get the platinum.
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6. Atelier Ayesha Plus: The Alchemist of Dusk (Vita)

The Dusk series is still the best Atelier trilogy and probably will be for a long time since the Mysterious trilogy isn't really that good. Ayesha has the best soundtrack and still was a blast to play through even though I wasn't too fond of it in the first place. In this game, they added some new tasks to do along with the main quest, which was nice because normally there's almost an in-game year to waste once you've wrapped up all the events. Also, they added a hard mode, which I went for first and still managed all the character events within the time limit. The last part of the platinum required beating four superbosses, but with ultimate equipment and consumables they can be beaten pretty easily. One of the bosses does ban a consumable by countering its use, so he's a little bit more difficult than the others.
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6. Platinum #143 GET! - Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age



Was very excited to finally play the IZJS verison of this game in glorious HD and with trophies. Every trophy in this game I already did back in the PS2 version in service of reading the Order of Ambrosia rank in the hunting guild. Thanks to the 4x speed boost though it took nowhere near as long, even Yaizmat himself took under an hour (I think he took me 5 1/2 hours the first time I faced him)

They also added a trial mode where you could bring in your story mode characters into a monster arena with the final fight being fighting all 6 judges at once. That fight is the new hardest fight in the game and I greatly enjoyed overcoming it.

FF12 is still a great game with a ton of content that everyone should check out.
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ninkendo posted...

one man's frustration is another man's fun

I 100% agree
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I also agree that Level 100 of trial mode posed the greatest difficulty.

The trial mode was a fantastic addition. Designed in a way that it would be impossible to blitz through it with the same set of gambits, to the point where I didn't even use gambit in the final battle.
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5. Platinum #136 GET! - Persona 5



All screenshots were banned in this game thanks Atlus. This platinum 99% of it can be done in a single playthrough. Finishing the story, complete all requests, maxing all social links, maxing all social stats, completing your Persona compendium etc. It's fairly similar to the Persona 4 Golden platinum including hearing 250 lines from your navigator. Hearing 250 Futaba lines is so much easier than 250 Rise lines though because Futaba had multiple lines for the same situation. I ended up having that one early in the Casino area which is way before the game ends while the Rise one it's not uncommon to not get it until the final boss even if you're going hardcore into getting every line possible.

The only ones I recall that had to be done in NG+ were creating Sataneal which was the cool ass Persona you summoned during the final boss fight and then taking on the NG+ optional super boss which is available to you as soon as you unlock Mementos.

Greatly enjoyed my time playing P5 and the platinum helped enhance my enjoyment of the game because it points you to seeing all the content that game has to offer.
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My final 4 are the ones I feel much stronger for than the rest and I had the most fun trying to earn
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5. Eiyuu Senki: The World Conquest (PS3)

The only PS3 game on this list, which shows how much I played my PS3 last year (I plan to fix that this year). Actually, I had this beaten in a previous year and gave up because I could not get past a battle in the bonus dungeon. I enjoyed all the parts up to that except for the part where you can completely miss one of the endings and had to make a new file to get it (which I did). Someone eventually posted a guide to the bonus dungeon with item setups that actually worked, just had to grind out the troop amounts for some of the characters by beating a certain level of the dungeon a good number of times. There's a lot of strategy required in some of the missions, so it was a good run through. Hopefully we get a port of Eiyuu Senki GOLD at some point.
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4. Hitman GO (Vita)

The Lara Croft GO writeup talked about this game a bit, so I won't repeat myself too much. I enjoyed this game a lot more as I was able to correctly finish all the puzzles and objectives in the game without referring to any guides or hints, which is good since using a hint makes you lose one trophy. There's just one dumb trophy that requires you to play for 100 turns on a single level, which tacks a few minutes on. Not a big deal.
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4. Platinum #145 GET! - Ys Origin



Although I had beaten the game once on PC, this is the first time I did the full Ys Origin experience. This platinum requires 7 full playthroughs (all 3 characters the first time, then all 3 again on Nightmare, then again on Very Easy because it didn't count that one if you beat it on higher difficulties and also difficulty scales based on difficulty and it's almost impossible to reach the max level of 60 except on Very Easy.). On top of that there's also a battle arena with 6 stages that needed to also be completed on Nightmare difficulty.

Getting through all this on Nightmare required a level of boss memorization I haven't had to do in a long time and it really just took me to back to the NES days when you had to do that for every game. Also it's a great Ys game! So great I bought the PS4 version twice! The original PSN release, then I got the Collector's Edition from Limited Run games when they did that a few months back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUBgNT2r7lE
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3. Platinum #146 GET! - Sonic Forces



Say what you will about Sonic Forces, the act of memorizing 3D sonic stages and running through them perfectly for the fastest times is amazingly fun and still is. Nothing too special about this platinum, it's a simple 100% of getting all the collectibles and S-ranking every stage (not so much for an actual trophy, but because it unlocks customization parts for your Fursona which is a trophy). I stopped my NieR: Automata playthrough halfway through Route A to play this game and nothing else. Never going to get tired of gotta go fast.
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Here's a video of me playing stage 24 because it's the stage that plays the main theme

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=im3PBOU6Zwg
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2. Platinum #133 GET! - Resident Evil VII: biohazard



RE7 is a great game! One of the best games of 2017 in fact! It's even better in VR!

I get too sick in VR though so I had to limit my exposure to that, but the times I did it I loved it.

A fairly straight forward platinum, but it took me back to when I platinumed REmake HD a few years ago which might be my single favorite platinum over all. For RE7 you need to play it on easy or normal and get all the collectibles, misc combat trophies and one of the two endings.

Then before attempting Madhouse difficulty I went ahead and combined the 4 hour speedrun trophy with the trophies of never using the item box (except when you have to) and using 3 or less med kids over the course of the whole game. It made sense to combine them all since you're kinda doing the same thing in all of them because if you're speedrunning the game you're going through as fast as possible not going into the item box and playing well enough to not use med kits. This is the part that reminded of me REmake when I did stuff like the 3 hour speed run with invisible enemies turned on. It's just nuts and not a way I would normally play the game, but it's so much fun doing it like this

Then from doing one of those (I think it's the speed run) you get a power saw as a weapon which instantly kills most things making Madhouse difficulty trivial.

I'm still hoping to build up enough VR Tolerance to be able to play the full game that way one day without getting motion sick. I've been practicing with my Gear VR about once a week so hopefully I continue to get more and more used to it.
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3. NieR: Automata (PS4)

SHINE already talked about this so I won't go over too much, though I don't think the trophy shop being in the game should affect the ranking. I pretty much played it from the end of Route B to the platinum exclusively, and enjoyed almost every moment of it. I'm glad Board 8 chose NieR to be my 50th platinum or I would have never played this in the first place, so thanks all :)
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Before I hit #1 I wanted to acknowledge other games with trophies with categories I'm coming up with on the fly

The best non-Platinum of 2017 - Parappa the Rapper 2



First time I ever played this game. It didn't have a platinum, but some super rare trophies in the form of unlocking all 10 records in the record shop. 1 is unlocked by beating the CPU on the hardest difficulty on all 9 stages. The other 9 are unlocked via finishing each stage in Cool Mode. For anyone who's played a Parappa game you know how difficult this can be because it was an early rhythm game so the beats don't always match what you're supposed to hit and there's the whole freestyle mechanic to your rapping which never really makes itself clear on what you're supposed to do. I feel I finally got a handle on it all at some point though and felt proud of what I had accomplished

The Platinum that Got Away - Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite



Still haven't been able to get to rank 10 online in this game. There's no real way to boost it on PS4 (there is on Xbox because you can freely change your online account's region there). Closest I've gotten is rank 12 before hitting people who are clearly much better at Marvel games than I'll ever be.

Capcom designed the game to be able to get there though because rank 10 honestly isn't too crazy, but so few people bought this game that you only run into the serious players online and very few casuals. So few in fact that no one on the leaderboard had even reached past Rank 6 last I played.

Since then the game has been completely rebalanced with the characters I was using getting significant nerfs at this point I'm not sure if I'll ever bother going back to it. Maybe if it becomes free on PS+ one day that'll be my opportunity or if the online dies so much that boosting becomes possible. Till then it's the one that got away.
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2. Final Fantasy XV (PS4)

I did enjoy playing through the open world of FFXV, it might be because I don't play through many open world games overall (there's a lot from 2017 I have yet to play, though!). Besides the story trophies you get all the trophies simply by exploring the open world and doing sidequests, hunts, and dungeon runs. The tower that needed to be finished for one of the royal arms was the only difficult portion of the platinum - I had to do it twice because I encountered the glitch that doesn't open the bottom floors of the dungeon. I just needed to have Noctis run in circles for four hours to max out Gladio's survival rank, but that's not a big deal. As for the DLC, I have only done Gladio's episode and will probably tackle the rest at some point.
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FFXV is my 2016 GotY I support this decision
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oh hey I Platinumed FFXV too
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1. Atelier Escha & Logy Plus: Alchemists of the Dusk Sky (Vita)

I've said many times this is the best Atelier game released here, and it's the best version of the game as well. The trophy list is the same as the PS3 version, but like every Plus game the game is enhanced. There are a lot of new events between Escha and Logy having them develop a more serious relationship, which continues into the sequel's Plus version. As with all plus version this game adds in all the DLC from the PS3 versions. This adds in more events with the DLC characters and makes it so you can do some crazy amounts of damage with their skills - up to a million damage, more than enough to kill any boss in the game. I enjoy just playing these games for a long time and just losing myself in them, and getting all the trophies is always a great experience, which is why it's my favorite platinum of 2017.
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1. Platinum #144 GET - Windjammers!



The Original Flying Disc Game! I had been wanting to get into Windjammers ever since Giant Bomb starting playing the game on their weekly streams years ago. I finally got a chance to play it for the first time at PAX South last year when they had the actual arcade cabinet there. For my first time I did surprisingly well, hanging with people who were clearly longtime fans of the game and I looked forward to the PSN release the coming summer.

When the game came out and I was able to actually sit down with it I found the simple controls actually had a ton of depth to them and that it wasn't all that different the thrills you get from playing a fighting game. You're trying to predict what your opponent will do and bait them into a situation and attack with the correct combination of offensive and defensive moves to win the match. During the time I was playing I found myself consistently in the Top 50 of the leaderboard and I even got to take out WWE's Austin Creed (Xavier Woods) in an online match.

The real reason this is #1 for me though is the trophy for beating Arcade Mode on Hard. This one was single most satisfying trophy to earn for me of all 2017. It was honestly a shock at first because easy and normal in arcade were simple, but then suddenly Hard turns the AI well past the limits of any human player you'll find online and for the longest time I couldn't even win the 1st match (of 6). It also reduces your continues to only 1 so you're only allowed to screw up a match once. Also unlike the Neo-Geo version you can't adjust your time for arcade mode. I tried to watch videos online for any hints on what to do and it was all people setting the timer to 30 seconds and trying to score once then hold out until time ran out to win. For this I would have to beat the AI at their own game fair and square.

I ended up practicing that mode for like 2 months straight until I was finally able to do it, learning all the of the AI's tendencies and what worked better on them and what didn't. I had to switch my main character because the one I was using was just too slow for the style I wanted to play against the AI. Eventually it just came down to execution and I had to play essentially 6 perfect matches in a row to win. When I finally pulled it off my whole body was tense, I was breaking out in a cold sweat and I fist pumped like there was no tomorrow.

tl;dr Windjammers is rad here's a video on I put up right when the game came out so I was still learning the game. I look back at it now and think man all I did was bounce shots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=logwnzeLWOw
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Good reads guys
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A real ace of games would have beaten madhouse mode without the saw or other boosters t b q h
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that's a misunderstanding of what the ace of games is

it's always been the guy who will play every video game ever
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that sounds more like the Jack of Games

Jack of All Games, Ace of None
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I inherited it from my master I'm not sure where the name came from
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Cool list, you people are crazy lol.
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