Sidequestin'

Well, as predicted, I've gotten the Blue Dragon campaign to the point of absurd sidequests and distraction galore.  It's a long and glorious RPG tradition; you get whatever the game's equivalent of airship and/or fast travel (in this case the airship, fast travel is useful, but you need the airship to get the extra dungeons), the game tells you its the time of reckoning.  Speeches are often made, camaraderie affirmed, sometimes the oh-so-hidden love is confessed.  But then the player regains agency, and you wander about through the Scary Dungeon of Neverheardofit, Plunder the Region of Obscurehint, then finally smack around the Fearsome Beast Didyoubuyaguideyet.  All of this so you can acquire the MacGuffin of Unlocktherealgoodies and access the Equipment Set of Whythehelldoesntthebadguyusethisheisanidiot.

It can be fun; while we usually wind up with recolored caves and ruins, sometimes we get a game that actually has interesting and flavorful extra dungeons.  I am happy to report that so far, Blue Dragon's stuff belongs to the latter catergory.  There is some of the obligatory backtracking and unlocking things you couldn't get the first time, but its actually fairly painless and gives good rewards.  It can also give an opportunity to find all those search points (and wonderful, wonderful Nothings) you've managed to skip.  And at the very least, we don't seem to have That One Sidequest where you waste two weeks of your life racing and juicing up birds over and over again.  Even us fans never learned to like that one.

In any case, hopefully I put this one to bed at the end of the week, rampage about in a hack-and-slash palate cleanser like Diablo and move on to a Atelier game or something.  We're still on course for the Craft System, Dork Factor Three!

Juxtaposition of Suction

So.

I've been trying to accelerate the Amalur campaign so I can put it to bed and start on the huge pile of JRPGs that are starting to accumulate.  Paypal plus joke of a sleeping schedule equals lots of bad decisions, in case no one else told you.

In any case, I had a bit of a roller coaster experience with it today.  Started off with a bit of futzing about; I needed to get back in the zone.  Some games give you a house or mansion to hang out in and stash your stuff as a reward.  Amalur gives you those, but then it up the ante:  You can have your own mine!  Seriously, a quest chain involves you clearing out a competitor for a gnomish mining company, and they reward you with the (now crushed and outlawed) guy's assets, plus workers and staff to get started.  While it's really just an elaborate gold farm, just the idea of really tickles me.  The only thing that would make it perfect is if you could get mineral-based reagents instead as an option.

So I have a good time with my new mine and Swag Shack, then I buckle down and continue the main quest.  Protip:  There is a major boss fight, with a lot of buildup and drama.  I won't give specifics in case of spoilerphobia; suffice to say that you help with securing a special method to deal with it, you have convince people to help, yadda yadda.  And then you get to the big battle and drama happens and stuff...and the actual fight against the thing is plain boring.  It's Borderlands 2's Wilhelm all over again, with the added insult of crappy drops.

I know that perfect games do not exist, and we have a game that was supposed to kickstart a franchise, so a few rough edges are to be expected.  This one was just, well, tragic.  It does the mook fights pretty well, and its capable of giving you a run for your money when it wants to.  Then you get an actually big scary boss that has been wrecking the good guys' shit for half of forever, and it amounts to three to five minutes of button mashing and remembering to maybe use your shield some.

But hey, the game is still good, and you get a mine out of the deal.

Off Ramp To Punchytown

Blogging, like a targ, awakens hungry after a sleep...

I've been busy as usual, a lot of personal issues decided to explode in my face, and things are still pretty much on fire, but I'm at a point where I can take something of a breather.

I've been tearing my way across Tales of Legendia for the PS2, and everytime I'm about to get bored, things actually start shaking themselves up and I'm having a blast again.  I'm currently in the final dungeon, and probably will not pick up the controller again for a while, since I know a boss rush is coming up, and I won't have three hours where I'm coherent for a good few days.

It's still a fun game, and I'm amazed I didn't hear and start on this series sooner.  A more in-depth discussion will be posted later, since I'm still gushing (this is a game where you can suplex divine beings, dragons, tank-sized behemoths, but sadly not trains) and I don't want to get too crazy until after I beat the game entirely.

I also do not plan in a Wreckonomics post, simply because this game hands out cash like crazy and doesn't stint on other loot.  Bring on the swag!

Wandering off for now, and remember that only in death does booty end.

All Ur Mythril R Belong 2 Us

Blarg-a-rant!  I live!

Finally have a bit of a breather for a couple of days.  Things are going mostly ok, but springtime at work is somewhere between a riot and a Cub Scout meeting.

In the nerdy front, I'm going to put my playthrough of Shining Force EXA on ice for a while.  It's not bad, really, but it's getting really bland and same-y.  I have some thoughts on the game to share, in no real order.

The Good

The combat is ok, but one thing I really did like was the defensive battles concept.  While tearing about, your home base gets attacked by a semi-random pack of mooks and a boss.  The fun part is that you have to defend a big shiny generator from big-ass swarms of nasties, and not only do you get good rewards for beating the baddies, you seem to get a boosted drop rate for cash and gear.

Another nice thing is that you actually can call in support fire from your base (which is pretty much looks what would happen if Aztecs got their hands on a Death Star).  Canonizing freaks doesn't get much cooler than this.

One really cool thing is the base itself.  You get to upgrade its capabilities, with nifty stuff like blowing more stuff up harder, robot buddies for defensive battles, radar abilities for shiny hunting, and an randomized dungeon you can tear around and plunder in.

The Bad

Could be the hardware, could be somebody at Sega just not thinking things through, but getting a certain threshold of enemies on the screen starts some serious slowdown.  Unfortunately, this is a hack-and-slash style RPG, with extra emphasis on reflexes and mobility, so things can get really crappy really quickly.

One major flaw in the game is that combat overall just doesn't really evolve for your characters.  Toma the warrior is your archetypical beatstick with two similar styles.  One handed weapons which hit faster and allow for shields and more mobility, and two handers which...don't.  Cyrille the Sorceress gets spellbooks which allow for you to cast spells of various kinds and smack fools with a big-ass book.  She also gets crossbows, which tend to be suited for particular enemies.  None of these are crap in and of themselves, but in a genre where one expects at least some game-changers over time, in the from of special loot or level unlocks, this stuff gets monotonous quickly.

The difficulty comes in two flavors, and unfortunately is almost exclusively determined by the character chosen at any particular time.  Toma is simply much beefier and more nimble than Cyrille.  He's far from invincible, but he has a much easier time with both big bosses and swarms.  Cyrille is powerful, escpecially when you can exploit elemental weaknesses, but one unlucky hit and it's game over.  For me, this had the bizarre effect of primarily using Cyrille in the field, since Toma is much more viable in defensive battles, which are all about big swarms and being able to tank some hits to get going.  The end result is that I have to save every five minutes now, since any time I confident, Cyrille dies.  Fricking Horrible.

The Shiny

The loot drops in this game are your standard gold and gear.  Gear is randomly generated, with up to two special properties (usually along the lines of stat boosts, hits a mook type harder, elemental properties, though sometimes a special move comes along).  An interesting twist is that you get "Secret Arts" which act as a third special property and have specific bonuses.  These are earned though various challenges throughout the game like fighting supersized enemies or arena battles.  Another interesting twist is Mythril (not mithril!), which you collect like a second currency, and can spend on "Power Arts" which are basically stat boosts.  Mythril is harvested from big crystals out in the field, can be extracted from gear with special properties (vanilla gear has to be sold or discarded), and dropped by monsters (boosted by a special Change Mythril trait), and also is gained in large quantities from denfensive battles.  Get all the Mythril you can.

On a final note, natural Mythril Crystals look an awful lot like the mineral crystals from StarCraft.  If I get enough Mythril, can I build a Goliath or Siege Tank?  That would be the shit, man.

Another Day, Another Beat Game

Hail to the Spambots.

Well, Stick of Truth is now officially on my kill list.  The game was a load of laughs, though honestly the most laughs I got was from burninating a rat with a fart-splosion.  I'm a bad person.

In all honesty, while I do like a bit of South Park now and then, I got this game based on some Let's Plays I saw.  The whole concept revolved around kiddies tearing around and LAPRing, which is something I've wanted to see in a damn video game for close to 20 years.  Finally got to lead an seige on a damn school.  Now we need an RTS version of this crap, and we'd be golden.

This is probably the best "entry level" RPG I've seen that didn't involve Mario, possibly even best ever.  The only real complaints I have is that it's short and has some obvious missing elements (which is easily explained by the THQ bankruptcy fiasco), and the lack of a crafting system,  It's really just a personal bugaboo, but the level of cleverness inherent to the little game going on could have been extended to some nifty craftables.  They could be nasty weapons and horrible traps and toxins, basically what would happen if...

Oh hell, this shit is pretty much 4chan The Video Game anyway.  The crafting thing is still pretty much something I'd want personally, but things are just fine, and don't need any more breaking.

Some of the combat mechanics are hilarious in and of themselves.  You want to see your enemies under bleed and burning DoT effects, while also barfing their guts out as another DoT?  In Stick of Truth, you can, and it's a viable strategy to the point where BOSSES are best put down this way,  Let's see Final Fantasy do that, huh?  They're all "Nope, Bosses are Immune To Everything, Screw You!"  Here you can poison and burninate to your heart's content.

Next on the list is hopefully Borderlands the Pre-Sequel,  Until then Legate Wulfe the Unhinged is going to got smack on Ash Spawn with sharp objects.  GRARGH!

Random Insane Idea

Blarg to the spambots!

I've been mostly going to work and loafing about.  Came up with this horrible concept talking about canned tuna.

The whole idea is that the poor little tuna wind up in a cross between The Little Mermaid and Indiana Jones and The Temple of Doom.  Instead of Mola Rom we have the Gordon Fisherman giving gory sacrifices to a giant Big Daddy Statue.  Really crazy shit like chaining Dory to an anchor and ripping out swim bladders.  While poor saps swing upwards to Bieber music,  the removed organ starts bubbling.  The day is saved when somebody brings in some drunk Angler Fish and scares the shit out of everybody.

Godammit, I think I just made a pitch for a Uwe Boll animated film.

Task Force Aflac

Blarg and Hail to the Spambots that "read" my yammerings.

The French tank line for World of Tanks is now out.  The consensus that they look so much like ducks that Wargaming really should hire Gilbert Godfrey to do the voice messages.  Prick or not, it really fits.

I've decided that I do like the new Ops system they got going, however.  Getting little goodies for actually playing the game helps keeps things fresh.  MOAR BITZ PLZ!

I've also been tearing about, working on some kooky concepts.  Some of the highlights include catapults that lob rocket powered grizzy bears at things I don't like, and a old wonko idea my old boss had, basically a home improvement store run by barbarians.  Crazy shit like orientation for new hires is that death mill scene from the first Conan movie, forklifts are powered by Brahma bulls.  Maybe some other stuff like instead of the usual DYI demos, you get things like the plumbing people showing the best way to kill stuff with an iron pipe, the lumber guys showing how to make an instant wood fort of doom, and hardware uses drills as trophy pikes.  Watch them heads spin!  Oh and instead of being tossed out, problem customers are ritually flung into a pit filled with angry Pomeranians.  Very slow, fuzzy, and yappy demise.

Yeah, I need to go away for now.

Attention Trekkies!

This guy has declared that gagh is for pansies!

http://oskarpannier.com/en/monster-meal/

These guys eat land-roving electric eels.

Also check out the other comics here, this crap is the beast kind of nerdy funny: Nerdy, funny
 truth.

In more zany news, I have an inexplicable urge to construct and use a catapult that lobs angry honey badgers at stuff.  Also, RPG.  Rocket Powered Grizzlies.

The Call of The Wild Ordnance.

Random Horrible Idea

The gist of it is this:  Random scenes of carnage and lootiful lootiful shinies dropping from all sorts of lootiful games, with this as the background song:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_wFEB4Oxlo


Salvador laying waste to midgets, demons exploding into goodies, somebody shouting Draugr to death, The Warrior exploding into guns everywhere, somebody getting stabbed by a Tonberry, the Badassasaurus tearing around, more shinies spraying everywhere.  You get the idea, I presume.


NOTE: I don't own the above video, but you just have to hear it to get the idea.

Game Economics

NOTE:  This is not a Wreckonomics post.


Been tearing about in Adventure Mode on Diablo 3.  They've added randomized dungeons chock-full (chock!) of shiny goodies, especially on the quite lootiful Torment Difficulty.  Unlike Best Shooter Ever, they ramped up the difficulty but clearly remembered what this whole solo play concept is, and actually made the legendary drops more frequent but also more meaningful.  Gearbox needs to take notes, especially since this is the big daddy of procedurally generated goodness.


Lootiful is my new favorite not-a-word now.


Unfortunately, they added a mechanic that I honesty am quite ambivalent about.  There is a new secondary currency called Blood Shards.  They're mysterious shiny bits of mystery, and since Scooby Doo isn't around, nobody really knows what the hell they really are.  Their only function currently is for this 'gambling' mini-game.  Pay X shards, get a loot drop.  One might get better goodies doing this on the insano Torment 3-6 settings, but right now it's really just been a roundabout way to turn shards into crafting materials, which already grow off trees at these levels.  Literally, tree demons drop this stuff.


It got me into thinking.  Games have been trying to do secondary currencies since friggin forever, but they've very rarely done it right.  Some examples, both good and bad:


Borderlands 2:  Several secondaries, particularly Eridium, Torgue Tokens, and Seraph Crystals.   Eridium started as the stuff for extra storage space and therefore useful, plus needed for access to the main bonus boss.  Later on, you got more bonus bosses that require Eridium to access, plus whole extra things like chests that enhance results and redonculous gambling machines of goodness, keep the stuff relevant and useful.  Tokens were used for specific vendors, mostly granting access to some nasty legendaries with minimum fuss, and were very easy to farm.  Crystals...well they were also used for special DLC vendors, but you either burned ridiculous amounts of Eridium to get them, or fought bonus bosses at max difficulty.  This requires a party to pull off, so frankly Best Shooter Ever dropped the ball for forced lone wolves like me there.


Final Fantasy VII:  One secondary, GP.  This stuff is pretty much putt-putt tickets for the Golden Saucer fun dome of terror.  Spend cash on the games there, do good, get GP.  Chocobo Racing (but not betting in CPU-only races) was very profitable for this stuff, especially for folks going for the Golden Chocobo.  The real use for GP was the Battle Arena, which had it own secondary (tertiary?) system called battle points that vanished if you left the lobby (total bullshit).  You got Cloud's level 4 limit break plus other nifty toys there.  Overall, the whole thing was fairly well done, since it really just amounted to getting goodies from doing random fun stuff, without slurping up your cash supply.


Star Ocean: The Last Hope:  One secondary, Fight Tokens.  While I do feel this game gets a lot of undeserved hate for not being Final Fantasy (and I smell that not the FF7 remake a lot of RPG nuts want), it has some flaws, some stemming from being a Square B-list title, some just quirks gone wrong.  One flaw is Fight Tokens.  You get them from fighting in the battle arena, and spend them at one specific vendor for specific goodies, most of which only available from there.  The flaw is that to get the stuff unique to this place, you need to either do Disgaea-style uber-grinding so you can afford them when they're useful as upgrades, or wait until the post game, then uber-grind the arena, but with less hassle.  In either case, the rewards (from the shop itself) are very underwhelming, and really the stuff you get are only good for crafting, and arguably not much good for that.  Glorified putt-putt tickets, given out for really boring grinding.  Bleh.


SaGa Frontier 2:  One secondary, Chips.  I already covered this in the Wreckonomics article for the game.  To wit:  You turn most of your gear into chips, which you can either convert into Crowns (the primary currency), with better rates for higher amount of chips, or use them (plus crowns) to make nifty high-level gear.  What you can make is dependent on your overall chip-stash size and in-game skill levels.  You really don't have much choice about getting this stuff, which can be a pain since that means either whaling upon critters until your weapons break for chips or finding the very vendors that convert stuff directly into chips.  The whole system really feeling like an attempt to both avoid the usual RPG lol-heug gold inflation problem and give a bit of magic-ey, crafty flavor.  Okay overall, but kinda feels half-assed.  Still not sure if right cheek or left cheek, though.


One final example, that doesn't really fit in.


Secret of Evermore:  Instead of secondaries, we actually have four primary currencies:  Claws, Jewels, Gold Coins, and Credits.  All four are indigenous to one particular region of the game, and there are merchants that exchange one currency for another (typically in the listed order).  Money was earned in the usual manner (i.e. killing stuff).  This was actually very workable overall, and helped give some character and contributed to the whole idea of diversity the game was going for.  Pretty well done, though I still can't figure out who decided individual jewels are crappier that gold coins in value.  Maybe the money jewels are flawed, or really cubic zirconium or something.  Other interesting economic features included a (limited time) trading bizzar where you could exchange one commodity for another, in hopes of various stat-bonus goodies, plus a token (spheres of annihilation if I remember correctly) usable in only one instance, in this case a cool undead ferryman doing business in the desert.  Technically a secondary, but really just a macguffin.


Anyway, as you can see, secondary currencies in games are not a new thing, but really, it's very rare for a game to do them any better than "Meh."  Hopefully Blizzard gets its crap together about it.  Maybe use it as an in-game fee to actually trade legendaries between players (dammit Blizzard).  Currency is only any good insofar as it actually being used and valued through use.

Brain Barf

So here we are again...


Still tearing about in Diablo III.  My Crusader has proven to endure like a boss, vindicating my giving him the name Tankred.  In funnier news, I wound up with a Puzzle Ring that didn't have horrible stats, so now my big grim do-gooder is being followed around by his loyal treasure goblin, Giggles McLootsalot.




A funny glitch happened, too.  I was tearing around a graveyard, laying waste to zombies.  One of the shambling dead got a hilariously funky death animation, where his head and body went in different directions, but the neck remained intact, resulting in a corpse with a neck at least 20-25 feet long slapping up against a wall.  That's right, the Nephalem just kicked the shit out of an undead Mr. Fantastic.




Some quiet insanity has been percolating in my head, mostly with some of the weirder, darker bits, in mind.  Even in a setting grim enough to warrant comparison to 40k (including massive pauldrons as a status symbol), who in their right mind makes a huge boiler room cavern thing full of bones from all sorts of  creatures underneath their city?  That is not how fossil fuel works.  And why?


In less funny, but no less mockery, I read an old issue if Game Informer I had at work.  This was from the glorious period where they had a damn sense of humor, and the funniest geek captions.  One article was about the then-new release of the 360 version of World of Tanks.  The guy writing it gave off this whole vibe of passive-aggressive apathy, whining about how dated the graphics work, but you got a chance to have "nuanced" shootouts.  then he proceeded to prove a complete lack of fact-checking, misspelling the M3 Stuart and referencing a "German UC 2-pdr."  The UC 2-pdr is a British vehicle.  Both of these mistakes were in the same damned sentence.




But hell, the loser snidely stated he didn't care about the historical side at all, despite the simple fact that in-game, there isn't exactly a mountain of lore or even a database to root through.  Almost everything is historically based, but to get more that a short blurb, you have to actually research things in the real world.  Everything he said amounted to what felt like a bizarre hipster-esque complaint that he couldn't have killstreaks and teabaggings, so it didn't belong on consoles at all.  Just not vapid enough for him, I guess.  Thank God that it was not a full review with a score, and that nobody listened anyway, from the way things went for the game afterward.


Oh, and he whined about the kiddies getting on the mikes and using their paltry profanity prowess to cover their immaturity like it was specifically endemic to World of Tanks.  Idiot.




The lesson here, kiddies, is that if you don't like a game, say you don't like it.  There's plenty of games out there I've played and filled with indifference, some with even outright loathing; but I was intelligent about my criticism.  Acting like an egocentric, self-important twit with a spoiled sense of entitlement and "I'm too smart for this crap, my audience is a bunch of morons" simply because you either didn't like something or felt like half-assing a job is something best left in the pits of Facebook and 4chan.    




The sad part is that current GI issues are all pretty much nothing but this...bizarre mess.  It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe were Yahtzee isn't allowed to swear like an angry sailor and stuck doing free-verse at nighttime coffee joints.  All the honest hostility has been replaced with passive-aggressive hipster cattiness.




Not that us Philistines would get what they're whining about.  Also, Philistines were actually a helluva lot more advanced than most people realized, so nyah.

Diabolic Ramblings

Been tearing about on Diablo 3 some more.  Cleaving a bloody swath through the hordes of wickedness and grabbing all the shinies doesn't really get old, to be honest.


Whether any of us admit it or not, a typical playstyle for just about everyone is smash-and-grab with capers.  I still like having crafting  along for the ride, especially since it's reliant on recycling excess goodies.  Diablo is actually a good deal more upfront about the whole thing.  Tristram's economy is based on looting dungeons, pillaging monsters, and robbing the dead.  Even all the heroes and followers, who really come across as people that don't give a kobold's ass about filthy lucre, tear about and take everything that isn't nailed down.  The scoundrel seems to be the only openly greedy one of the bunch.


By the way, the Crusader/Templar bromance the dialogue implies is fricking hilarious, but hell, closer to reality when it come to warrior types.  Just no air guitar, please.


In other news, my thumbs kept mysteriously sliced open.  Took two damn months to figure out my apparent subconscious emo tendencies were actually my belt developing some ever-so-slight burrs on the buckle.  Wish the truth hadn't been so costly, though; tons of bandages and an out-of-print Videssos book all bloodied up now.  Still better than finding a secret stash of Green Day and black candles hiding somewhere though.  September's very over, so I'm awake now.

Brain Barf: RPG = WTF

Grargalarg to the spambots.


Been tearing about in various games, mostly that Rim Sky thing.


Starting thinking about things and came up with something I doubt is original, but wanted to say anyway:  RPG backgrounds are frickin' weird.


Do not get me wrong; I'm pretty hardcore in my addiction to the vidya game monster mashing and looting.  It's just that, well, I've also been doing this for-frickin'-ever.


Take the Elder Scrolls games.  The least bizarre thing is that the local furries are all crack heads.   Its so pervasive I'm amazed "WillYiff4Skooma" isn't a meme.  Maybe I should fix that.


Those moons?  The corpse of a god.  By the way, from what I gather about the lore, there's a third black moon out there.  Totally not a Dragonlance reference.  Also when the three are aligned properly, its extremely significant to the cat-folk.  That's the plot of a whole damn Dragonlance book, damn it.


And these are tame compared to some of the other crap in there.  Celtic Zulu with plant hearts.  A god whose background reads like what would happen if the Kama Sutra became a religious text.  Artificial gods made from mech-sized golems that break time over their knees.


Like, damn man.


It got me thinking.  Other RPGs are usually no slouches in the bizarre department either.


Take Chrono Cross.  We start with the primary (but largely ignored and all but unexplained) antagonist being a fusion of a giant space termite thing and a princess.  It manages to manipulate all of space and time within the game world, creating two primary antagonist factions.  The first is a supercomputer and it minions from the future, set adrift in the past and watching over the descendants of their creators, using what amounts to hypnotherapy and eugenics to get its way.  The second, somewhat nastier bunch, is a city of dinosaur-descended reptile folk ripped from an alternate universe by the planet itself as a counter.   Highlights include these elemental golem...doll...things, and a biocomputer that is an embodiment of all the local magical elements and happens to be a dragon with some sort of jewel laser mouth cannon.  Oh, and after an apocalyptic battle with the first bunch, the biocomputer was fractured into seven dragon gods; three in one universe, three in another, and the seventh set adrift to screw around with main characters.


All this nuttiness is compounded by nobody bothering to explain this crap until the two final dungeons of the game!  This was right when Square was in the middle of there hipster-esque "minimal explanation means maximum profundity" phase.


This is only two examples out of the many, many RPGs out there.


Please don't get me wrong.  I'm not some dullard that only goes for smash-and-grab, screw-the-plot antics.  I love having complex stories and interesting backgrounds.  There's a reason I own stuff like Tactics Ogre, Atelier Iris 1-3 (not at straightforward as they seem, trust me), multiple SaGa games, and so on and so on.  But sometimes, I really don't get why game writers seem to come up with stuff that requires enough hits to buzz a Grateful Dead concert to actually figure out.


Now if you'll excuse me, I need to find something uncomplicated to do for a while.

Live Oaks is Bad, And WG Should Feel Bad

I hate that damn map.  Dying with a face full of soggy wood does not make my day.


Been quietly considering getting back into 40k.  Some of those models look damn sweet, and to hell with the damn rules anyway.  The Dark Blood Templar Wolf-Smurfs will probably be back in action soon.  Deathwing Knights FTW!


Skyrim is going very well.  I no longer live in fear of bandit chiefs, while most everything else stopped being a threat long ago.  Looting dwarven ruins is still an absolute hoot, though.  Legate Wulfe the Unhinged is happily making those damn Gollum wannabes snarl for their mama and turning robots into shiny shiny bitz for the bitz can.  Windstad Manor AKA The Swag Shack, is finally fully operational, with materials kindly donated by idiotic bandits and the dumbest giants this side of New York.  The process had been accelerated greatly thanks to that guy in Morthal and the respawning vampire menace nearby.  Now if I could just get some damn general merchants or fences to move closer.


Oh, and they handed me explosive crossbow bolts.  Run my shiny chunks of XP, RUN!

Original Thinking

It doesn't happen much anymore.


Another tale of Legate Wulfe The Unhinged came today.  Did the Malacath daedric quest more or less for the hell of it.  Wound up at this stronghold of Klingons--wait, Orcs getting ganked by a giant.  Apparently the chieftain, Gowron Yamarz managed to displease Kahless Malacath.  He was summoned by the Monks of Boreth Atub and told the guy to man up.  After some oddly manly whining, he got squished by a different giant and I wound up with the Sword of Kahless Volendrung, which looked kinda Khorne-ey.


I also digged up some info on the Dark Brotherhood quests.  You get to wear a chef's hat.  Behold as the Dragonborn tears about with the fearsome shout  BOY AR DEE, that smothers his foes in canned ravioli and BORK BORK BORK which summons deadly ethereal chocolate mooses.  And finally CHEF  RAM  ZEY, that doesn't do much but intimidate anybody within 50 meters of a cooking pot.


Also, burninating trolls never gets old.

Ahab, Eat Your Heart Out

Things are coming around in their usual schizophrenic manner, but nicely for once. 


Been tearing about like a lunatic in World of Tanks some more.  The TOGII*  is still a frickin' hilarious bundle of death.  A buddy and I tore about and actually outmaneuvered people in these things, unleashing all sorts of lulzy doom.  Some highlights:


Actually managing to snipe British AT tanks and making them go boom.
Sidescraping a StuG III up against a wall, leaving it a sitting duck for our guns.
Letting some lights circle us and pretend it was going to work and being all "lol no" and making them go pop.


Also tried out the M7 tonight, realizing that there are very good reasons this thing never saw any action at all.  Damn thing just doesn't have what it takes.  Plus it has a badonkadonk.  Tanks should not have badonkadonks, dammit!


More randomness is forthcoming; too tired to write much right now.

Brain Barf

Now its Coward Killing Time!

The Soviet tanks have come, and they are awesome.  More trundling death is always welcome.

In any case, I realized a few things today.  My friends and I were discussing what would happen if a Halo Scorpion tank was included.  The consensus was that the obvious weak points (the driver is exposed and usually bright green, crew of two, can't handle high-end ballistic weapons worth a damn) would make it little more than a nice squishy novelty at best.

Realization 1:  A fictional tank in a grim dark future, a product of a ridiculous amount of time, resources, and research, can probably go squish to tank designs twice as old as the developers that created it.  Even worse, this can be deliberate, since the problems are actually gameplay decisions more than anything else.

Realization 2:   A group of grown men with grown men jobs and grown men lives and grown men problems were going on about whether a fictional space tank could handle a panzer.  Damn we're nerdy.

Realization 3:  Now I want WoT to release a Scorpion.  I'd want 40k tanks even more, though.

Emergency, Everyone To Get Off Of Street

Hello to the spambots that quasi-read this.

Been tearing about in World of Tanks for the Xbox.  Things are actually going well.  Wargaming is going to finally release the Soviet tech tree, so soon All Patriots will be able to bury the Imperialists in an avalanche of steel, lead, and Heavy quotes.

No, I'm reading up on my Marx and shit, just getting excited about having EVEN MOAR TANX to tear about and wreck things with.  Very excited.

In other news, a Wreckonomics post should be forthcoming within the week.  This time will be a very tough nut to crack, SaGa Frontier 2 for the PS1.  It's one of the hidden gems of the era, when Square wasn't covering everybody with belts.

I may as well talk some about that before the rant the post will require comes up.  It's actually a very good game with a challenging combat system with lots of surprises.  The graphics combine watercolor--but not cutesy--backgrounds with very distinct character sprites.  There are some pitfalls in the artwork, including the classic invisible walls, but overall its very well done.  The sprites are nice too, but the close-up version of one main character looks less like a badass and more like Ronald McDonald had one of Indiana Jones' many, many lovechildren.

The music is also very stunning; stunning enough that I hunted down the soundtrack years ago, and when a disc cracked (sob!) I hunted down a second copy.  If you're actually reading this, go on youtube and search for Freiluftmuzik and Zauberkraft for a good taste of it.  Oh yeah, the composer spent a good deal of time on Germany, so all the song titles are in German.  That gives us a soundtrack done by a Japanese dude (Masashi Hamauzu) with German names gushed over by a redneck-ish American guy.  Being provincial is for the weak!

The story is...well it's a SaGa game.  It's linear and convoluted at the same time, with many, many viewpoint characters.  You need to experience for yourself.  Suffice to say somebody managed to take late medieval history and politics, Lord of the Rings, the Darksword Trilogy, and more and managed to make this bizarre, but tasty, plot smoothie; and it works!

I'll get into the combat mechanics later for the Wreckonomics post, since they are intimately related to the ecomonic challenges of the itinerant dungeon looter.

Just remember, Coward Killing Time on set for June 3rd.  Come and let us give tanks!

HMS Tank

Hail the Spambots!

Been a crazy month.  Now I'm busy with all sorts of fun explodey goodness, plus it looks as if my hardware job is now permanent.

In nerdy news, I have been tearing about in World of Tanks for the 360!  I've already made some fellow tankers fear the guy that's rampaging about screaming random quotes and making the other team go squish.

World of Tanks is a fun game, with just the right combination of tanks, cash, tanks, grinding for guns, tanks, proving your dominance over noob bitches, and tanks.  And they have tanks too.  Protip:  The Alecto (light British Tank Destroyer) is meant to shoot tanks to death, no ram them.  Whoever that was, thanks for the entertainment for me and the free kill for my teammate.

I've been grinding my way through the American and British lines, and honestly, some of these things are beasts.  Whoever stuck a howitzer on a Stuart is friggin' crazy awesome.  Not to be outdone is the British TOG II*.  It's a tank-boat that drives like a whale, looks like a whale, and hits like a whale.  I wanna paint mine white.  Beware Moby Tank!

Now to find my plushie and tear about some more.  The Sharp demands tanks and cake!

Call to Agriculture

Hail to the spambots!

Been busy farming for goodies in Borderlands 2.  It's a cycle of firearm-based abuse;  I shoot various freaks, they drop goodies.  Then, I take the goodies and shoot bigger and angrier freaks so they drop better goodies.  Finally, I plan to use the goodies on gigantic and furious freaks so I can have the best goodies. 

How the hell Pandora isn't completely covered in spent brass is beyond me.  You'd have to mine a few solar systems to get the copper, iron, tin, etc. needed to keep the guns supplied, without accounting for propellant, oh and building the guns themselves!

In other news, I've stopped playing Atelier Iris: Eternal Mana again.  I've the worst reason ever:  I'm bored.  I can't say I hate the game.  The mechanics are somewhat flawed, but not terrible.  The story is a unique setting on a blender filled with anime and RPG tropes.  The economics are a bit unusual, but pleasantly so.  I'm probably going to do a rant, and almost certainly going to do a Wreckonomics entry about it.  The only thing holding me back is the I don't want to until I've beaten the game and ensured I've found the gas pedals.

I plan in trying another RPG soon, most likely something darker like Legend of Dragoon, or perhaps Divinity 2:  Ego Draconis.  I'm also planning on continuing to play B2 and some more of Diablo III.  Loot, loot, loot!