Caturday + Things That I Have Been Playing

When in doubt, just post pictures of the cat I guess. He’s getting so much bigger!

I finally finished the MGSV campaign earlier this week. I kind of want to play Metal Gear Online and play through some of the extra/side missions that I missed but I don’t think I will. Good game, had a lot of fun. As a final thought, the weakest part of Phantom Pain in my opinion is the narrative by virtue of the Metal Gear series as a whole, failing to integrate the storytelling aspect of the game into the gameplay aspect of the game. There is too much exposition. I am torn between feeling glad that the developers shoved most of the dialogue into the cassette tapes and recognizing that sort of thing is lame.

I purchased Hearts of Stone, the Witcher 3 expansion the other day, which I was playing on and off in-between attempting to clean the house. The somewhat awkward thing is that you can only play the expansion content once you have beaten the game; Which would normally be okay except for the fact that I was already about 5 to 10 hours deep into a New Game + replay. So, I had to back up a copy of my NG+ save (as a precaution), load an older pre-NG+/post game completion save, then trigger the expansion quest line. I would like to complete NG+, but I don’t think I will be able to do so before Fallout 4’s release date.

Odds and Ends: October 2015

It was nice, chilly, rainy, and fall-like last weekend and now it is about 100 degrees outside. It’s at the very least a “normal” Southern California dry 100 degrees and not an abnormal El Nino super humid 100 degrees outside, a la most of the summer. Still playing Metal Gear Solid V though at more of a, “do a mission here and there in-between being busy with other stuff” pace. I do believe that I am either at or towards the very end of the game.

The problem that I have with the second part of the game is that it seems to be for the most part, comprised of filler missions. By filler missions I am referring to the missions that are just rehashes of previous missions with harder win conditions (such as stealth only, no starting gear, “extreme”, and so forth). Unfortunately, I am pretty sure that I have to play through all or at least some of these in order to unlock the next story progression missions. So that is kind of where I am at in the game right now: Putzing around while waiting for the game to trigger the next piece of new content.

Hearthstone
I’ve dabbled in Hearthstone on and off since beta, but haven’t played it seriously or all that competitively. I have been the mood to play Hearthstone so I have been trying to get more into it beyond building decks and playing a game or two during lunch at work. Really, the only classes that I have even somewhat extensively played are: Paladin, Mage, and Hunter. Next week’s “project” will be to build a warlock deck and play at least until all of the base cards are unlocks.

Rick and Morty
Marathoned season 1 and caught up with season 2, which I finally finished watching last night. Great show, new personal favorite, and easily the best show that i have watched lately. I had assumed that Rick and Morty was just a standard goofy Adult Swim show, wasn’t expecting feels. I am now really super ultra said that I will probably have to wait at least a year and a half for Rick and Morty Season 3.

Other TV Things
We dropped Netflix and Crunchyroll and picked up Hulu Plus, now that there is a reasonably advertisement free plan + a shit ton of anime. The only two things that irritate me about Hulu are: No options for separate profiles on a single subscription and only being able to stream it on one device at a time. Really, the only thing that I greatly miss (in light of football season starting) about not having a cable subscription is easy access to sporting events.

Pathfinder
Monthly pen-and-paper Pathfinder (D&D 3.75) group starting up soon. I am rolling a human sorcerer and am currently torn between whether or not it is worth losing a spell per day to go crossblooded with Arcane/Draconic. I guess one of the human racial benefits makes up for that, but still. I would be lying if I were to say that I wasn’t tempted to fully minmax my character into fireball blasty goodness.

Odds and Ends: August 2015

Aka, reasons why I have not been posting lately:

  1. We have a kitten: Kittens are far more fascinating than anything computer related at the moment.
  2. It’s f-ing hot: Well technically it’s not the fact that it is hot but rather unseasonably humid. I live in a part of the US that you could normally bet a million bucks on never raining from May through October. It not only rained in July, but stormed with thunder, lightning and everything but only long enough to make absolutely everything miserably humid. Also, our office unfortunately heats up rather quickly so not a whole lot of gaming happens when the room is 90 degrees. We did cave and get an air conditioning unit so life is once again good.
  3. We bought a treadmill: Running after work eats into my allocated gaming time, which is something that I am totally okay with. I would however, like to setup a treadmill gaming station at some point.
  4. There is nothing to play: Well, now that the long awaited New Game+ feature has been added into The Witcher 3 via free DLC, I will probably play that and The Sims 4 until Fallout 4 is released in November.

Odds and Ends: Flying in WoW, The Witcher, Etc

Aside from a few mobile games, The Witcher 3 has more-or-less dominated almost every free hour of gaming time that I have had since its release date. After soaking about 90 or so hours into it I have finally finished the game. I can’t emphasize how much I have enjoyed playing this game. But that said, kind of burned out on open words type games at the moment so GTA V will have to wait. What to play next…

Picked this game up for my phone: You Must Build a Boat. At the core it is a match 3 puzzle game (Bejeweled, etc) with an RPG mechanic. If you like match 3 games, this game is worth picking up. YMBAB is available on the App Store, Google Play, as well as Steam. Games of this type just don’t seem to be nearly as fun on a non-touch interface device so I would recommend it up for your mobile device.

I had a post mostly completed and sitting on the backburner in regards the announcement (a week or two ago?) that there would not only be no flying in WoW for the Warlords of Draenor expansion but for any future expansion as well. Apparently because of the massive backlash, flying will be obtainable only after completing virtually everything in the expansion (faction reputations, all quests, etc). Overall, this solution feels like a decent compromise.

As a whole, I think that taking such a huge feature such as flying away from the player base is worse than any negative effect that it may have had on the game in the first place. I don’t remember who it was (apologies) but one of the blogs from my feed suggested changing the flight mechanics to make it less convenient. The cited example was eliminating hovering.

Odds and Ends: April 27th 2015

For one reason or another I chose to drop my level 9 character on Midgardsormr and reroll on another server: Same class and most other choices except for race, for aesthetic reasons. Upon character creation I had chosen to create a max height Elezen. I am discovering that the problem with tall characters seems to be that because of their super wide strides, they look like they are running in slow motion. Also, who the hell does server maintenance on a Monday evening?

  • I have been playing the new Hearthstone expansion on my iPhone on and off at work during my lunch hour. Not so much lately because…busy busy but pretty good port all around. Surprised at how well the interface works on the smaller screen.
  • We got home late on Sunday evening after running around and driving all day so I ended up falling asleep during roughly half of Game of Thrones :/
  • I vow to pick through, edit, and upload my GoPro footage from Sunday’s airsoft game within reasonable time.
  • Because I burned through my previous, “I need a random sitcom or something to watch on Netflix while I either work on or play something” show, I started watching Dexter on Netflix. I don’t recall exactly where I had originally dropped the show.
  • We should have another podcast episode out soonish.

I doubt anyone really cares but I recently migrated this site from Drupal to WordPress. As a whole, it really is a better blogging platform. Unfortunately, my Sims legacy section and a fer other things fell victim to the migration as I was too lazy to port the custom content types over.

Loot Crate April 2015: Fantasy

Obvious spoilers if you haven’t received your crate yet. I caved and purchased one of those Loot Crate subscription boxes that the internet seems to love out of curiosity and a general love for all things fantasy. Pretty fun, awesome loot, though I am unsure I will continue my subscription; Not because I am disappointed but more because of every desk like surface being already overly saturated in random geek doodads. Oh I love me my doodads. The box includes:

  • Dungeons & Dragons T-Shirt
  • Harry Potter Luggage Tag
  • Inflatable Crown
  • RPG Bow Tie (exclusive)
  • The Princess Bride Playing Cards
  • Game of Thrones USB Flash Drive (Exclusive)
  • Game of Thrones Magnet Set

The obvious highlight of the box being the Loot Crate exclusive Game of Thrones 4GB thumb drive. I really like the shirt by the way. It’s not made of the ultra soft T-Shirt cotton that I prefer, but the sizing is on point and I don’t really have too many geeky shirts that aren’t black.

Keiya’s Battlestation: March 2015

Now that we’ve moved and have unpacked most items, I figured I should update the battlestation gallery. Same equipment as the previous battlestation photo in the gallery save for a new UPS that we picked up at Costco recently. Now that we have an actual dedicated office for the computers, the television sadly, is no longer being used as my third monitor (via Synergy). If I wish to watch TV on the actual television and not on one of the screens, I now have to walk to another room. Oh the struggle is real /sacrasm.

I am in dire need of things to hang on the wall. The picture of the vulture by the way is a family inside joke.

Odds and Ends: Moving

I haven’t written anything here or really played much of anything lately other than iOS games; Due mostly in part to having recently moved as well as the fact that electrical work needed to be done before we were comfortable with plugging in our computers. As a result of the aforementioned events, we have been mostly unplugged for the past week and some change which, to be honest, wasn’t all that bad. Though, as we ran out of items to unpack and organize, we quickly ran out of things to do. But alas, now that computers are finally setup, we can once again do whatever. 

  • Currently watching The Walking Dead. I am pretty sure that reading the comics spoiled the television series for me (even though they are quite different). The series was distinctly more interesting once I had passed the point where I had stopped reading. Almost caught up with the current episode in season 5. 
  • Had a brief affair with SimCity 5 once again because it was the game flavor of the month at work. Truth be told, aside from the addition of an offline mode, I am not entirely sure that I have noticed all that much of an improvement since the last time I had played this game. To be fair though, none of my cities had reached critical mass.
  • In that regard, the new Cities: Skylines games looks interesting. Dave picked it up along with Homeworld Remastered. I’ll bum those off of the Steam Family Share at some point in time this week.
  • Cautiously excited for the Sims 4 expansion pack that is coming out at the end of this month. Open for Business was hands down, my favorite Sims expansion. I was pretty disappointment when equivalent content was never released for The Sims 3.
  • I have a small queue of airsoft videos to sort through, edit, and upload. By small queue I mean about 5 to 10 hours worth. :/

Also, we do have every intention of continuing the podcast soonish once things are more settled in. Yay for having an actual office.

Wolfeinstein, WoW, Etc

I picked up Wolfenstein: The New Order, a game that I would have normally blown off, at the end of the Steam Winter sale at the recommendation of TotalBiscuit’s YouTube channel. Wolfeinstein is surprisingly fun and had no right be as good as it was. It is an odd combination of old school run and gun with modern gameplay and narrative. It also has a functional if not basic character progression system. I liked the combat flexibility but I really did not enjoy the boss fights as they seemed to be little more than poorly integrated trial-and error style encounters. Great gameplay, decent characters, decent narrative. Definitely worth picking up; Probably one of the more fun first person shooters that I have played in a while.

I haven’t logged into WoW in about a month. My WoD fixation lasted about 2 months and some change, which is about what I had originally estimated. You can only poke the good old garrison so many times before it becomes routine I guess. In all seriousness, I will probably return and resub when 6.1 is released to finish the last wing of Highmaul, complete my ring, say hi to people, and what not. We should hopefully be less busy by the time the patch is released

Speaking of busy: The podcast is on hiatus until further notice. Though, if all goes well we should have an actual office and dedicated room to record in within the nearish future.

Odds and Ends: December 30th 2014

WoW Stuff: We have been running Highmaul via LFR and it is, needless to say, even easier than LFG heroics. TLDR Strat for all bosses: Don’t stand in things. People however, actually died during some of the fights in the second wing so maybe the instance will get harder? Gearing for raids feels oddly trivial given that I can churn out iLevel 645+ epics without leaving my garrison via the high level garrison missions and blacksmithing epics.

In regards to the Steam Sale/whatever digital distribution network sale, the one and only game that I have purchased for myself so far is Prison Architect. I am pretty tempted to reward myself with either Shadows of Mordor or Dragon Age: Inquisition, especially since both are on sale at the moment at a similar price. But you know what? The older I get the less I care about playing anything at release unless it is a title that I am really looking forward to playing or have some sort of social agenda. So that said, I guess I’ll wait. Plus, we have Mario Kart 8 and Smash Brothers to occupy our time.

We finished two shows recently: The Legend of Korra and Sword Art Online II. We will probably discuss these whenever holiday social activities die down and we get around to doing the next podcast episode.

  • LoK: As stated multiple times before, was an absolute pleasure to watch. Great animation, pleased with overall character development, and satisfied with the plot resolution. Also, without spoiling the ending, we totally called the relationship thing last season.
  • SAO II: We still enjoyed watching this show even though our interest in it severely waned most of the way through the first story arc. I still feel that it lacks cohesion, among well, other things but I like the characters and it was fun to watch, particularly for an MMO gamer. I liked the last story arc and the fact that it ended on a good, non rapey note for once. I could have done without the Akihiko thing at the end but I guess that means we are likely going to get a season 3?
  • Interstellar: Fantastic movie, enjoyed it greatly. Probably one of the most original sci-fi movies that I have seen in recent memory. If it is still in the theater, I highly recommend seeing it.

I kind of want to do a Best Of 2014 gaming post, but I don’t think that I played enough new titles this year to warrant said post. 2014 does however, mark the year in which I have almost exclusively relied on YouTube, Twitch Streaming, Podcast and Social Media personalities for game opinions (in addition to friend recommendation and normal Reddit reading) versus reading Kotaku or any major publication .