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Summer/PAX Update?

11 Sep

WELL HELLO THERE. I haven’t posted anything on here since May. I have a new plan to sort of fix my posting infrequency. Not so much a posting schedule, more giving myself a reason to post more. I’ve also just gotten back from PAX, which always revitalizes me a bit.

So let’s start with the content plan, which is going to be in basically 3 stages.

  1. Twitch: I’m still going to be streaming on Twitch at my regular times (Tuesday – Thursday 6PM – 10PM CDT & Sat @ 5pm – Whenever CDT). My focus is still mostly on shooters and competitive games with a side of JRPGs, and that is what I want to build my content and community around going forward.
  2. YouTube: When Streaming new games, I’m going to take the first hour(ish) of me playing and do a summary of my feelings on the game after that. I’ll then Highlight and Export that to YouTube as a First Impressions video. These videos will be a bit of a knee-jerk opinion, by design, since that is essentially what a first impression is. I’ll also still export other random videos, and might do some highlight stuff as well.
  3. Blog: I’m going to go back to reviewing things. Games and Hardware mostly. I haven’t fully decided how I’m going to write these out. I’ll probably just do whatever feels best for what I’m reviewing and go from there. So these might start off very rough while I get into the groove of doing reviews again. For the record and all that: I’ll only review a game if I’ve finished it if it is single player, if it is multiplayer I’ll put in an equivalent amount of time into the game before reviewing it. I’m not sure what I’ll do for hardware. Maybe just use it regularly for a week’s worth of playtime? I’ll figure that one out. I’ll also disclose any info (free copy, sponsorship, etc) where applicable. I’m pretty small time still, so I doubt there will be much going on there :P.

Stuff I’m playing semi-regularly right now:

  • Overwatch (FPS-PC)
  • Ratz Instagib (FPS-PC)
  • Hearthstone (TCG-PC)
  • Unreal Tournament (FPS-PC)
  • Trails of Cold Steel (JRPG-PSVita)
  • Tokyo Mirage Sessions FE (JRPG-WiiU)

Stuff I want to play in the nearish future:

  • Final Fantasy 15 (JRPG-PS4)
  • Midair (FPS-PC)
  • LawBreakers (FPS-PC)
  • Diabotical (FPS-PC)
  • Shadow Warrior (FPS-PC)
  • Battlerite (..MOBA?.. “PvP team arena brawler”-PC)

 

This next section is going to be all about PAX West. I probably had the most fun at this PAX West since the first one I ever went to. I didn’t give a single fuck about any of the games with large lines except of Gears of War 4, and I was pretty okay with skipping that. Instead I got to take Friday to see all the games I cared to poke at (Namely LawBreakers, Midair, Dusk, and Shadow Warrior 2) and then spent the rest of the convention hanging out with friends or looking for gems (and I found a few interesting things!). In no particular order, I’m going to give some brief impressions of some of the games I played.

  • LawBreakers (Boss Key Productions): Of everything I’ve played, I’ve had the most experience with LawBreakers. I played it at PAX East and RTX, and I’ve also been in the Alpha for quite a while. LB is a good blend of Unreal Tournament style arena shooter, with some class based abilities thrown in. It plays pretty smooth mechanically, but movement can be a bit weird and getting used to it (especially in the gravity zones) can be a little difficult at first. That being said, I’ve enjoyed the game thoroughly and intend to play it a lot more when I can.
  • Midair (Archetype Studios): I was stoked to finally get my hands on this after backing it on Kickstarter. I was a big fan of Tribes and Tribes 2 way back when, and I was really hoping this game would deliver on the feel of those games. I probably played a total of about an hour and a half at PAX and really enjoyed the game. I’m definitely extremely rusty with the Tribes style movement because I botched my movement quite a few times. I mostly used the Disc Launcher and Chain Gun while I was playing, both of which were very responsive and destructive in their own ways. I can’t wait to play it on my own setup. I didn’t care for the mice they used, and couldn’t take time to get my sensitivity right. So playing felt a little wonky due to that. Still, the game looks great and played well.
  • Dusk (New Blood Interactive): This one sort of came out of nowhere for me. Dusk is an old school looking shooter in the veins of DOOM, Half-Life 1, or Hexen. The demo I played looked to be just a wave based endless survival game mode where you could try out a whole bunch of different weapons. I talked to one of the folks at the booth and was told that there is also a campaign for the game where you have to survive the spooky woodlands of the American Northeast. This one was pretty low on my radar but was an interesting play. I spent about 30 minutes and 2 sessions worth on the endless survival mode. The shooting felt responsive and the weapons were fairly straight forward. Some pretty gnarly looking dual scythe for melee weapons or your standard double barrel shotgun for example. Hard to give some solid feelings on this after only 30 minutes, but it was really interesting and I liked the retro style. I definitely want to play it some more. So I’d say that it gets a thumbs up at least.
  • Shadow Warrior 2 (Flying Wild Hog/Devolver Digital): This was the only game I stood in a line for. It wasn’t a huge line, but it did move sorta slow :P. I got to play a 15 minute demo. I skipped all the cut-scenes so I could get to the gameplay, so I’m not sure what exactly it threw me into. It seemed sort of like a Diablo style rift, but enemies kept respawning (which was kind of annoying). I did get to try plenty of weapons though and they were all pretty smooth. They didn’t feel quite like Shadow Warrior 1 did, but I didn’t find anything to complain about. The short demo I played just made me want to play more though. Really enjoyed it and looking forward to the Oct 12 release.
  • Eternal (Direwolf): This one was a bit of a surprise for me. Eternal is a card game, but it is closer to Magic: The Gathering than it is Hearthstone. There aren’t any classes, instead there are 5 different factions. There is actually blocking and counters similar to MTG. I played 2 matches against a bot at PAX and found it very interesting. They were nice enough to give me a beta code so I’ve been poking around at it at home too. I’m trying to get through the single player stuff to familiarize myself with the cards and learn all the mechanics. I like it so far though! We’ll see if it can hold my attention. Depends on how powerful control decks are since those are my style :D.
  • Heavy Metal Machines (Hoplon): This was another game that sort of came out of left field. Heavy Metal Machines is part Rocket League, MOBA, and Twisted Metal. I played 2 matches against bots, both of which were one sided. Sorta dominated them :P. It was fun though, and the game has a great soundtrack. It is top down, and the car moves towards the mouse with Left Click accelerating and Right Click  going reverse so that was a little weird to get used to. Each car (or character) also had QWER abilities of various types. There were also roles for each car Support (self explaining), Interceptor (Kills enemy cars), and Transporter (Runs the ball). It has a pretty interesting dynamic and I’d like to see what it looks like in PVP. The Beta starts soon, so I’m looking forward to getting more hands on time with it. They get bonus points too, because I accidentally left a mouse pad at their booth and they held onto it for me. Awesome folks!
  • Dropzone (Sparky Pants): Dropzone is an interesting mix between a MOBA and an RTS. You control 3 mechs of 3 different roles (Tank/DPS/Support) in any combination. Each role has a few different available characters, each with unique abilities and all of it heavily customization. In the game, you control all 3 mechs at the same time, with the goal being score more points than your opponent (1v1) in 15 minutes. Points are gained by completing side objectives (ex: First Blood) or delivering cores (gained by killing neutral creeps) to a central core. This is an interesting bit of difference on the standard MOBA gameplay. First that it is 1v1, and second that you’re simultaneously controlling 3 unique characters. Sort of like Lost Vikings from Heroes of the Storm, but each character has a full suite of abilities. Players that are really good at micromanaging units will really excel at this, though there are some passive abilities for players that might feel overwhelmed by too many activate abilities. The community manager actually gave me a bunch of beta keys for the game and was really cool. I’ll be playing this on stream in the nearish future 🙂

I think that is everything I wanted to talk about here. Regular streams will start back on Tuesday! Will probably start with some Overwatch. I need to get warmed back up so I can do my placement matches for Season 2. Hopefully I’ll see you there!

 
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Posted by on September 11, 2016 in Misc.

 

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TL;DR The story for the last 6 months or so

01 Feb

Hello friends!

So I’ve been a little MIA from the blog for the last few months and a fair few things have happened. I’m going to do the abridged version of all of that and then give some updates on shit I’m doing in the future.

I’m still in Texas and stuff is still pretty awesome. A half-year later I’m still absolutely thrilled that I moved from Troy, AL. The place had just become far too toxic and was very much a dead-end.

I was also going to do a Game of the Year 2014 post, but about a third of the way into the post I realized that 2014 was pretty shitty as far as games go. I did beat Persona 4 Golden last year though, so let’s go with that. Persona 4 Golden GOTY every year probably maybe.

I got to go to PAX South as well. It was very different from PAX Prime. It was significantly smaller and there were virtually no AAA production companies there besides Nintendo. It felt much more like a community controlled event, which was great. I got to meet a bunch of Twitch.tv casters and YouTube personalities that I hadn’t met before. I had a blast because of that, but if anyone went for just the expo alone I imagine they may have been disappointed.

Late last year I had picked up WoW again with the new expansion that came out. TL;DR there is that it started out pretty fun, but once raiding started it became very clear that Shadow Priest was just shit tier again. Add in the fact that the Shadow Priest rotation was a clunky mess I quit basically as soon as my guild had cleared all the current tier of raid content. It just wasn’t very fun. In order to produce the results I would want, I’d have to play a class that has a really boring rotation compared to the complexity I wanted. I quit instead. MMO wise I’m playing Guild Wars 2 with some RL friends, but I’m probably not going to play too much until at least EQ Next.

I’ve also been playing a lot of board games, and have bought quite a few myself. I may start doing some mini-reviews for board games as well. More on that later I suppose 🙂

So where is my focus now? Mostly back on streaming, but I’ve also got a project I’m going to start working on this year sometime. Mostly I’m just conceptualizing it right now. My current main goal is to improve the quality of my stream. Which means getting some new gear. The schedule is back to Mon – Thursday 7PM – 11PM and Sundays being for Final Fantasy. Speaking of, I ‘rebranded’ the Final Fantasy thing into ‘Series Run Sundays.’ The idea there is that Sundays will be dedicated to me playing through a whole series over the course of several Sundays (and maybe some extra days if I want to continue on an off day or if I get bored on a Saturday). At some point I’ll be streaming on Fridays and it’ll be dedicated to Board Games or D&D, but I’m still trying to figure out how I want to do that. The big thing I’m struggling with is finding a portable way to do an overhead camera for an entire table. Any tips would be appreciated 🙂

The above streaming schedule will start tomorrow (Monday). This week I’ll be streaming more Dying Light coop, Shadows of Mordor, and *maybe* some Dragon Age: Inquisition while I work on clearing up my AAA backlog. Series Run Sunday will be Final Fantasy 7, continuing where we left off. After Final Fantasy series is done I’ll be playing Legend of Zelda, and after that I’ll be playing Resident Evil. I’m pretty pump for all of that. I’ll always have 2 series in the queue (which can be found here) and I’ll update the listing as to which games in the series I plan to run and (hopefully) stream.

A few things that are in the project pipeline: Once I upgrade my webcam I plan on making YouTube videos reviewing/previewing all sorts of games. I’m also in the process of maybe starting a podcast. The podcast thing has been talked about off and on several times though, so we’ll see where that one goes. I’ll also try to update the blog a bit more often, but we know how that tends to go, lol.

As always, for updates on my shenanigans follow me on Twitter and like my Facebook Stream page. Also, feel free to add me to any video game service, my usernames can be found in the ‘About Me’ page.

One last big note, the best way to support my bullshit right now is simple to share my stuff around social media networks. Be it Facebook or Twitter. Any support this way will be a huge boon for helping me grow my little piece of the internet. Greatly appreciate any support, as always :).

Catch you later!

 

 
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Posted by on February 1, 2015 in Misc.

 

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August-September Update! Small PAX rundown, Destiny, and some streaming stuff.

21 Sep

Hey everyone!

August was PAX month and some other stuff has going on where I was fairly busy. I didn’t get to stream as much as I would have liked in the past few weeks and I’ve definitely slacked off on Final Fantasy progress. I’ve gotten less busy lately so i’m playing stuff again, and by stuff I mean I’m playing a metric fuckton of Destiny. I’ve streamed a good bit of it, and I’ve really been enjoying that. So today we’ve got a brief PAX rundown, a Destiny Mini-Review, and some updates to stream schedule (For the sake of progress!).

We had a bigger group go to PAX this year than normal, which was pretty nice. I also spent less time in the expo hall this year than any year previously and probably went to twice as many panels. Frankly because the Expo hall sucked this year. Unless you’re down with standing in 2+ hour lines, which fuck that noise. The panels I went to were all really great though. The best ones were probably the Giant Bomb live panel and the PAX Game Industry Rumble (which the Giant Bomb guys are a BIG part of). The Giant Bomb guys are hilarious and put on a great show. I hadn’t been to any of their panels before, and only went this year because I have started listening to the Giant Bombcast more and going to their website more frequently (I mostly read/watch IGN, Giant Bomb, and Escapist now). Overall, it definitely goes to show you that the PAX community isn’t really on the show floor and the panels are bigger. Next year I’ll probably make a point of spending next to no time on the show floor period and just go to a bunch of random panels. I wish I had gone to more of the Polaris panels this year. Overall, it was a great PAX. Definitely better than last year.

Destiny has been the big game in the news lately. It seems like the gaming press didn’t really care for it, which is sad. I kind of thing some of them didn’t really give it a chance, or maybe the game just wasn’t what they were looking for. It is hard to tell really. Personally I think the game is fantastic, and there is a lot of room for growth in the game’s universe (which Bungie plans on doing). The game is a bit grinding, but it is more-or-less another shooter take on the Diablo formula. It isn’t quite an MMO, but it comes close. At best I’d call it MMOLite. There are a couple of places to go that you can see more than just your party (Patrol missions and the Social hub), but you can’t (and really don’t) interact with these people in game. Occasionally there are public events and that is probably the only time the game kinda feels MMO-like. It is a great coop experience though. Get a friend or two (or 5 for the 6-person raids and PVP) and go kill some aliens. Most of the missions are well done, but you will end up seeing a lot of the same places. There is a good bit of repetition because of that. It probably won’t be as bad after they add a few DLC expansions, but there are only 6 strike missions to do outside of story missions. Many of these missions send you to very similar places, but you’ll take a different door to a different boss. It isn’t too bad, but the missions are all fairly similar (Go here, defend this, kill boss, that sort of thing). I’m having a blast with it so far though doing all the grinding for loot so me and my friends can do harder stuff, daily quests, and PVP. Overall, I’d totally recommend this to someone that has a group of friends playing or wanting to play. You’ll have a blast.

So some quick updates to streaming stuff here too. I’m still going to stream from Sunday – Thursday, but I’m going to kind of change up what I’m streaming for a couple of days. My general plan is this:

  • Sunday: Final Fantasy Marathon (X – 10PM CST)
  • Monday: Random (6PM – 10PM CST)
  • Tuesday: New Release I purchase OR Random (6PM CST – 10PM CST)
  • Wednesday: Random (6PM CST – 10PM CST)
  • Thursday: JRPG Day (6PM CST – 10PM CST)
  • Friday & Saturday are not scheduled so those will be totally random. It is unlikely I will stream on Fridays at all.

I decided on this basically because I want to make progress on the Final Fantasy marathon without burning out, and I wanted to make progress on my JRPG backlog as well. Those are also may favorite games and the stuff I would mostly want to feature when streaming (outside of new releases). Now Monday – Wednesday I could also stream a FF game or a JRPG, but Sunday and Thursday are the dedicated days. I feel like that makes the most sense. Also, all times are ‘ish’ times. Meaning I can be a few minutes late or early. I always post on Twitter when I start streaming though. This new schedule will start tomorrow.

I’ve got some other things I’m working on, but I’m not quite ready to publicly talk about them yet. Both endeavors will involve me creating more content, which could be fun. More on that once I have something to report.

That is it for now. Sorry there isn’t more here, outside of PAX I’ve had a fairly uneventful past two months as far as gaming goes :).

 
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Posted by on September 21, 2014 in Misc.

 

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June & July Update!

04 Aug

Hey friends! Time for super late June/July update. I’ve got mini reviews for Wolfenstein: The New Order, Transistor, and Watch_Dogs. I finally wrapped up Final Fantasy 6 and I’m about 4 hours into Final Fantasy 7. I’ve started playing through Dragon Age: Origins with the intention to beat it. I’ve gotten a PS4 and Wii U. I’ve played a ton of the Destiny Beta as a result and a little bit of Mario Kart 8. And I’VE MOVED! To a different state even!

So we’ll start with the paragraph mini reviews:

Wolfenstein: The New Order was pretty much everything I wanted from a modernized take on a classic FPS franchise and more. While there are some story loop holes they’re not massive and overall the story is actually fairly well written and designed. It is pretty basic vengeance/save the world but I won’t fault it for that. There was a lot of interesting character development for the main character, William “B.J.” Blazkowicz. They did a good job in portraying him as an actual human instead of some gun toting meat-head most of the time.

I’m pretty sure the game ran on the same engine that RAGE did because both games feel very similar as far as gameplay flow. Very smooth shooting and movement, but Wolfenstein has some added stealth mechanics that are actually really good, and I hate stealth. The level design and stealth mechanic were done in such a way that it was just an option you could use in one battle to the next. AND if you fucked up, you just had to fight it out (very similar to Dishonored). None of the forced stealth bullshit you’ll hear me bitch about shortly. I should also mention the game is very brutal and pretty dark, though I think that is expected it actually surprised me in a couple of places. Overall the game was really good. It played great, had a great story, and was just a great job in bringing a classic franchise into more modern gaming. If you’re looking for something to play and haven’t picked this up yet, definitely give it a shot. It is still $60 on steam, but I’ve seen it go on sale several times for much cheaper.

Transistor has everything in it I should love from a video game. Great art direction, amazing sound track, combat that sounds unique, and it was made by the guys that made the phenomenal Bastion. Unfortunately, I ended up finding the entire experience rather dull. It played fine, but for some reason the game felt lifeless and the gameplay wasn’t really all that interesting after playing it a couple of hours. The world, while pretty at first, got pretty bland pretty quickly. I can’t help but compare it to Bastion, who had a beautiful world with lots of variety and colors. That statement alone, may be part of my reason for being disappointed. I couldn’t help but compare Transistor to Bastion. Transistor had a lot to live up to due to that, and I think it wasn’t quite at that level. The story was really good, the pace was questionable but forgivable, but really the gameplay was just too much of a turn off for me. I wanted to like it, but I just couldn’t quite. It was just alright, not the brilliant follow up to Bastion I was hoping for.

Now, to Watch_Dogs. I was pretty excited about this game. I played it a lot the first week I bought it, despite UPlay really not wanting me to. I ran around and did a lot of stuff, because there is a lot of stuff to do. Notice how vague that is? Well honestly that is because there wasn’t much to remember. Everything was mostly stuff we’ve already done before in similar games (Grand Theft Auto being the obvious example, but so does other Ubisoft titles like Assassin’s Creed and FarCry) and so none of it was very exciting or memorable. It was more like a jack-of-all-trades Ubisoft title that mashed in a lot of stuff from Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed, threw it into a more modern setting, and then slapped a ‘hacker’ theme over it. By hacking I mean that you’re solving some tube puzzles but rotating some tubes (think Bioshock if the tubes were already placed you just had to make stuff line up right) or just pressing the hack button. I will admit that I didn’t even finish the game. Somewhere around the halfway mark there was a forced stealth section that required you to march through the middle of an enemy camp without making so much as a stick crack. If you did anything fun you’d get Mission Failed. So I failed it 10 or so times and uninstalled the game. Forced stealth sections in games are one of my pet peeves with game design. No one finds it fun in these types of games. Forced stealth is fine for Hitman, Splinter Cell, and Thief. Games where you expect to be running around in stealth all the time. However, in a game that is mostly run and gun with the occasionally puzzle these stealth sections are just tedious and annoying. Why can’t more games do stealth like Wolfenstein did? Add some stealth sections to the game, sure! But when the player fucks up, punish him for it by having to fight out of the situation. Don’t just show a fucking game over screen, it is frustrating and not fun. This game was very meh, I wouldn’t really recommend it unless you like GTA a lot but are bored of it and need something new to play.

With that done, let’s talk about Destiny. I put a solid 20 or so hours into the beta and I must say it is a blast. I played a Warlock to max level, and I’m likely to stick with that on release. It fits my playstyle pretty well. I like the whole Borderlands meets Halo feel to the game, and the mix of PVE and PVP with both being equally meaningful is awesome. Items in PVE carry over to PVP and vice versa, and rewards earned by your character apply everywhere. This is probably the best design for this type of game. There will obviously be the ‘best’ weapon for each weapon type, and eventually people will figure out what stats to min/max for PVE and PVP. Still I think it is great that both types of gameplay are pretty much equal in terms of meaningful rewards. I think the only exception being that you get better experience in PVE (I’m honestly not sure if you get experience in PVP. As I’m writing this I cannot remember), but you get different rewards in PVP, such as reputation and certain tokens for loot. The beta only let you level up to 8 and do a handful of missions, so after 2 days I had already knocked out most of that stuff and spent a bunch of time on the PVP. The PVP was pretty well balanced from what I saw. Nothing in particular seemed OP or anything to me. Shotguns are probably the strongest weapons on some of the smaller maps, maybe borderline OP but that is pretty expected from Bungie. I like how they dish out ammo in the Multiplayer. Instead of having heavy weapons spawn somewhere on the map, heavy ammo spawns in certain time intervals on two different sides of the map. This creates a mini-objective on top of the objectives you’re already going for, which I liked. The heavy ammo felt appropriately powerful too. From the beta I don’t really have any complaints. I’ve already pre-ordered the game and look forward to playing a ton of it. Here is a VOD of a full multiplayer game from the Beta (I’m only talking to myself because the PS4 streaming thing doesn’t capture party voice).

I haven’t really gotten much time to play Mario Kart 8. I’ve spent a few hours on it, enough to know that I’m terrible at it. I haven’t really sat down and just played it for an evening though. I honestly don’t enjoy playing certain multiplayer things without playing it with friends and I almost exclusively bought the Wii U to play games with friends (Mario Kart, Monster Hunter, Smash Bros, etc) and the occasional JRPG or something (HELLO XENOBLADE CHRONICLES X). Once I dive more into that I’ll probably talk more about it. Feel free to add me on there, I was able to get Klokworkk.

In streaming news I finally wrapped up Final Fantasy 6. You can see a VOD of me beating Angelic Kefka and the ending here. Feel free to make fun of me chewing gum and then trying to get chicken out of my teeth with my tongue. Lesson learned to not chew gum while streaming and get some damn toothpicks, otherwise I’ll look like a dumbass. I’ve started Final Fantasy 7. I’m not too far in though, about to get to Shinra building part. I’ll be starting the stream up as soon as I’m done typing this. I’m also going to be periodically playing through Dragon Age: Origins but I have no timeline on trying to beat that.

Only other thing of note is that I’ve moved! I no longer live in Alabama, I have moved back to Texas. I still have my own place though, I didn’t move back in with anyone. That wouldn’t be fun. I live about 45 minutes north of Austin now, which is a great location. Austin is such an awesome city too. If you’re ever in the area make sure you check out Pinballz and Dragon’s Lair, as well as the plethora of game shops. Tons of cool shit to be found.

Alrighty, I’m wrapping it up here. In August I’ll try to beat FF7 and Tales of Xillia 2. I also plan on writing a post about recently released, upcoming, or popular MMOs and my thoughts on them (spoiler: most of it isn’t too great). Expect that before PAX. I’ll probably also ACTUALLY make a PAX post this year, so I’ll probably take a bunch of notes and/or pictures during that. That’ll technically be an early September update though so I’m getting ahead of myself so I’ll stop now.

Cya!

 
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Posted by on August 4, 2014 in Misc.

 

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