back in da shovel again.... i fell off this for a couple months, i think mainly because i was playing other games and also there was some controller annoyances whenever i wanted to play it. after a while it was just kinda hanging over my head and i felt that when i go back to it i'll probably just try to get it done with. recently i got access to my old Steam account again and found out about "family sharing" to access my old library (i pirated it before), so i started playing again and now i'm back to wanting to 100% it again.. i like the shovel game

i've now played through Shovel of Hope four times. the past few days i very slowly worked my way through a new game+ playthrough. very slowly, this is not a long game at all, but the game was now much harder and the decreased checkpoints had me checking out pretty quickly. only two checkpoints per level, double the damage and all healchickens are now funny prank bombs! really had me realizing how forgiving this game usually is with the amount of health and healing items i get. i rarely felt the need to be careful before

i have developed a hot new complaint and it's that there are a few too many screens where the gimmick is "now you can't see anything hehe". i hit a bonus stage with that theme and immediately quit out of it because it's just not fun. aside from that it's such a neat lil package of a game that in wanting to squeeze as much out of it as possible i'm thinking about going all the way with the 4-5 playthroughs necessary to unlock all the feats. could probably consolidate it a bit if i were good enough but playing through new game+ squashed any impression i had that that could be true. guides say "do new game+ and the no-death run together two birds one stone" my shovel hath not been steeled that much!!!

weeoww completed the speedrun playthrough!! the time limit was 1h30m and it started looking like it was gonna be a lil tight towards the end. i took up that whole row of save files with copies after every level, there was a whole lotta quitting outta levels after dying/falling back a couple screens then using a copy to save the three seconds spent on the map screen. if exiting levels didn't erase absolutely all progress within them including time spent and deaths i would not even think about attempting a deathless run after this. i've trained my copying finger and i'm ready to go to town with it

man i would but. seconds

that's a regular playthrough, new game+, and a speedrun done, so now i gotta do no purchases/relics then no checkpoints/deaths. i'm being very safe by not attempting several at once since i figured i'd waste more time having to reset more often on account of i'm not very good at video games. looking forward to moving onto the other campaigns and quickly hitting a wall in my completionist journey. anyway i'm glad my new rarest achievement on Steam has a typo in the name

back again almost a year later, And boy is my shovel tired! i didn't feel all that compelled to come back to this for a while since i wasn't in the middle of a playthrough. i was sure i had at least started Spectre of Torment but i couldn't see a save for it, nor for Plague, then i remembered i did all that on my pirated copy.. i can knock out another quick Plague run at some point for a completed save. lord knows i had no problem playing through Shovel of Hope five times

oh yeah and Shovel of Hope DX was announced since then which is exactly what i wanted and more more more but i wish it was DLC and not separate!! maybe it will be but i want da custom knight most of all. someone will mod it into the original, for me personally. or does that count as piracy. because i would never do such a thing if so

that's right i was in the middle of doing challenge runs. that's short for "frugalicious" i'm pretty sure. going to not bother continuing with this and just move onto Spectre for now. not going back into this with the completionist mindset i had before but that is exactly what i said last time i came back to this isn't it. well we'll see how it goes, hopefully the game doesn't continue being good and fun

yeah i'm thinking this is probably the best campaign

never mind hopefully King of Cards is good at least

i have bad news regarding my hopes for the game not being good and fun (it is). i remember not being too hot on Plague because it was largely the same game with new abilities, but stages are much more remixed this time around and the level design is so good constantly forever. it also addresses another issue i had with Plague and makes sure i know how to use and can see how useful new abilities are before i unlock them

spectre man rules!!! almost every screen had me goin Well would you look at this. Isn't this a cool video game. just about everything about it is better than the previous campaigns in my opinion except maybe Plague had a better story. i always thought of Shovel Knight as being a real good albeit safe game but i think Spectre pushes it further than that for me. i've never seen a platformer with an NPC who tries to kill me by passionately kissing me but ends up killing himself instead. proof there's still some innovation left to be had in the genre

this is the paragraph where i force myself to complain about the game. they still do the annoying "now you can't see" segments but now have introduced the even more annoying "Just Kidding Walls". i'll be walkin and then suddenly invisible wall, go another way, haha gotcha another invisible wall. also the ending was weird how it played out, it culminates in spectie suddenly going to great lengths to protect a kinda-nothing joke side character, but it's not revealed until after the credits that that was who he had to protect all along? i specifically checked if i was just stupid and put things together way late but no that was the reveal

it was a noticeably easier game probably thanks to the crazy increased mobility and being able to tackle levels in any order. three quarters of my deaths were from clumsily attempting to retrieve gold i had dropped in precarious spots. but that's Spectre of Torment!! i don't know if i'm quite back in the wanting-to-100%-it camp just yet.... i did play some new game+ just to see. health and magic are combined into one meter now and it's constantly draining whuh!! even in the hub world!!! i mean it stops at 1% and there's nothing in the hub world to damage me. But still it's messed up

aside from having to replay each campaign several times my biggest hesitancy regarding going for completion comes from the challenge mode. "It's challenging". but the moveset for Spectre makes it equally fun as it is difficult so i hacked away at it for a while... i spent so so long juggling a beetle. there's one where i gotta juggle a beetle and i juggled a beetle for so long