Week of 25 May 2025
“Take that, you mother-flippin’ turd pile!”
Achievements Earned In:
- Cassette Beasts
- Firework
- Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer
- NeverDead
I didn’t play a whole lot of Cassette Beasts on Sunday to wrap this up. I finally picked up Viola and did all of her quests, grabbed a couple other miscellaneous achievements, then got bored and finally used the console commands on PC to unlock the rest of the achievements. It was a very cool game at first, but it got more than a little repetitive and just wore out its welcome.
Achievements unlocked: 100 (+17) | Completed
Viola, you’re not helping.
Back to mopping up games leaving the Xbox Game Pass library! I’ve actually had Firework installed for a long, long time now, almost since it joined Game Pass. I figured it’d be a good idea to have a quick/easy game to play on my laptop in case I was on vacation and my connection wasn’t strong enough to handle some cloud gaming. But that never came to be, so now I have to quickly knock it out before it’s gone. This is a simple adventure title, not even of the “point and click” variety. It feels a lot like the Japanese import titles I’ve played, like Death Mark, and plays like Whispering Willows. There’s zero skill involved, so just follow a guide while following along with Lin Lixun as you discover the secrets of the Tian family. I found the story fairly engaging! The hardest part of the completion was getting the achievements to actually pop when they’re supposed to. I played dual-screen, so every time I knew an achievement should unlock I’d click over to the other screen, and this seemed to work fine.
Achievements unlocked: 10 (+10) | Completed
Hey, protip, Lixun: don’t go in there.
The next game was another easy/short one, and it’s called *deep breath* Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer! Like Cassette Beasts, you could complete this extremely quickly with console commands, but it’s completion time is not very long and it seemed easy enough so I went the traditional route. This game has you playing as Zane, a “Slayer” on a quest to save his fellow Slayer, Stephanie, in an homage to “boomer shooters” from the 90s. It’s a lot of frantic fun as you blast through weirdos and so so much poop, but I chuckled a good bit at all the nonsense and corny one-liners. I started my first and only playthrough on “Inzane” difficulty, and even then the game never came off as too hard. There are collectibles to find (namely, toilets to destroy) but a guide makes that easy and there are very few. If things do get too out of control, you can easily save scum. All-in-all, a fun time of blasting baddies. Nice to play a simple game once in a while.
Also the game’s title is misspelled. lulz
Achievements unlocked: 19 (+19) | Completed
Sometimes you just have to poo that badly.
I felt guilty I hadn’t been playing any of my older games lately. Like, NeverDead, which I’ve owned for a fairly long time and was too put-off to play it. It received pretty bad reviews, and the “fall apart when you take damage” mechanic is supposed to be a nightmare on the hardest difficulty. Well… here I am, and so far I can see the issue. The dismemberment mechanic exists, and that’s about the best thing to say about it. It serves no purpose really to enhance the gameplay and is solely frustrating. I also am not a fan of the characters in the game. Not even the gruff protagonist Bryce; the issue is how mean the female side-characters are to him. Maybe he’s a misogynist or something, but they haven’t displayed that in the game so it just comes off as a young girl and a woman bullying an immortal guy. Weird choice. I made it about halfway through the campaign, and I’m on the clock as I needed to have the entire thing played through before Monday, when I’m taking part in a gaming session for this. Getting those multiplayer achievements out of the way in this old, unpopular, non-Backwards Compatible always makes me feel better.
Achievements unlocked: 11 (+11) | Completion: 26%
Rarest Achievement:
That's No Moon in Cassette Beasts [3.75]
Most Common Achievements:
Devil within in Firework [1.00]
Psyko Onslot in Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengance of the Slayer [1.00]
De-Cyphered in NeverDead [1.00]
