Month: November 2020

November Wrap Up: Scattered Gaming

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I’ve been all over the place in terms of what I’ve been playing this month. I blame that on losing interest in Runescape completetly this month and trying to find something else to spend my time with.

Below are my most 10 most played games this month:

OSRS – 22.7 h

November saw the end of my crush on Old School Runescape early in the month. Everything was going great, I was well into the Trailblazer league, and then my interest just dropped. I remember the exact momment I lost interest too. I had spent 4 hours gathering materials to craft a bunch of yew bows to alch for money. I ended up with about 500k and spent it all buying armor sets for a few medium tasks in a matter of minutes. I stood there and asked myself, do I want to put even more time in to do the same thing on my main account. I haven’t touched Runescape since.

Trove – 11.7 h

There’s a saying in Runescape: ” You don’t quit Runescape you just take longer and longer breaks.” The same can be said for Trove. I once again find myself back after 6 months away from the game. Not much has changed, there was an update to the Hub that added object to interact with to open menus. I’m not sure who wanted to run to an object and click on it instead of pressing a hot key but it’s now an option. Trove also makes for a fantastic Podcast game now that Runescape is off the table.

Phasmophobia – 10.2 h

I’m not surprised this is one of my top games this month. We’ve been streaming this one recently and I’ll usually join for a few rounds if anyone’s around. It’s starting to get stale for me personally but the addition of the new map will help with that for a little while at least.

World of Warcraft – 8 h

That’s right, it’s that time again where I see everyone in the new WoW expansion and tell myself I should get in on that! Except this time I actually bought Shadowlands…fifth times the charm? So far I’m loving the new leveling experience and I’m questing through BFA with my Pandaren Mage.

Sea of Theives 7.8 h

SoT has been one of my favorite games I’ve played this month. It’s one of the few games I wrote about this month. I’m hoping to play more of it in December.

Genshin Impact – 7.6 h

I’ve read more than enough blog posts recently that inspired me to install this game. I didn’t know too much about it going in but what I found was a very nice game with a very questionable buisness model. This game has left me with all sorts of mixed feelings. I like the visuals, the gameplay, and the combat but that gacha business model really has me questioning whether I’ll continue to play it or not. Though, if I’m being honest with myself, I’ll be back in there next month….

Closers – 6.7 h

Genshin Impact left me with a gaming itch that I wanted to scratch. I wanted that art style and hero collector motiff without the gacha for characters. Closers is an instanced, side scrolling, online beat em up. It features a whole cast of playable character with their own stories. It was good mindless fun and I want to revisit it soon.

GTFO – 6 h

GTFO will not make an appearance on this blog for a long time to come. This month I wrote about how I liked the changes to difficulty that were added with this latest rundown. Unfortunately, the levels themselves are still to long for my and my groups liking. 2 hours is a lot of time to lose for failing a mission so we’re putting this one on the shelf for the time being.

Raft – 4 h

Raft lau1nched it’s second chapter not too long ago. I had plans to go in and check out the new content but it wasn’t meant to be. I think I only got one session with the game this month and that time was spent learning how to tame animals and hunt puffer fish. We did manage to get to one of the new destinations but didn’t finish the objective on it yet.

The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky – 3.9 h

This was another attempt to scratch that JRPG itch Genshin left with my. I’ve run through the first hour of this game so many times but didn’t manage to stick with it. This time around, I got a whole 2 play sessions out of it and I think it will be the next game I’ll beat from my backlog.

Sunday Stream Recap: Ghost Prison

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The Sunday Stream Recap is a new weekly post chronicling our Saturday night streams over at WelpSquadTV. You can learn more about WelpSquadTV here. Catch us live every Saturday night at 7pm EST.

Our group has been playing Phasmophobia for almost two months now. You know, that ghost hunting game that blew up on Steam in October? I love playing this game with 4 people but after 2 months of running the same maps, it’s starting to get a bit stale for me. Once you hit the level for professional hunts and you’ve racked up a few thousand dollars there isn’t a whole lot more to do.


So last night I had an idea to make things a little more interesting. Lose the thermometer and only use the EMF detector to find the ghost’s “room”. The thermometer is the most overpowered item in the game. As soon as you get below 10 degrees Celcius you know you’ve found the room to set up all the other equipment. The EMF detector doesn’t always trigger right away when you enter the room. I find it adds a bit more suspense and mystery to the whole thing.


On the smaller maps, with the thermometer, you can find the ghost’s hiding spot in a matter of minutes. The high school has the phone that rings in the room so you don’t need one there either. The only exception to my new rule was the Asylum. There are too many rooms and the map is too large to not use the thermometer. Unless, of course, you want to spend a lot of time in there looking for the ghost.


That rule went right out the window when we loaded up the jobs and found that there was a new map: The Prison.
The prison map was teased a few weeks ago on Twitter but I assumed we wouldn’t be seeing it for a while. There’s nothing in the Steam updates page that mentions the map being added. In fact, the only place I could find that this was added was in the official Discord. Even then, it wasn’t tagged @everyone so I didn’t get the notification there either.
To play the new map, you need the beta version enabled. We’ve always had this enabled as without it we couldn’t get the proximity voice chat to work correctly. And it’s lucky we did, otherwise, we may not have known about it for a few weeks.


The prison is a large map with two floors and one entrance/exit. Unlike the Asylum, with its long hallways lined with rooms, the prison hallways are sparse with only a handful of rooms to duck in to. The lower level features two cell blocks, the main entrance, and a cafeteria while the upper level contains mostly offices. It’s a better map design for a large building than the Asylum by far.


We were able to do three hunts on the new map last night. My favorite of the night was the ghost haunting Cell Block B. This ghost was haunting the entire right side of the cell block and could be detected in every cell on that side. At one point, Greg and I were standing cells trying to get the ghost to talk on the spirit box when, suddenly, all the cell doors slammed shut at the same time!

You can find the VOD from 11/28/2020 here.

GTFO Rundown 4: A Much Needed Change

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I haven’t written about GTFO in a while. We’re still playing it once a week to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it’s fun and sometimes, sometimes we lose, and sometimes we feel like we’ve wasted 2 hours of our night. For the most part it’s fun hence why we’ve played it for 6 months now.

This will be our groups third rundown together and there’s a good chance we’ll make it to the bottom this time. That’s because this run down brings some difficulty scaling with bulkheads. Instead of each level having a flat difficulty, bulkheads let you choose which degree of torture you would like to inflict on your group.

With the difficuly slider compes a new way to unlock tiers of the rundown as well. No longer do you need to complete each level in a tier to unlock the next. Now, you need only need to clear enough levels on the required difficulty. For example, Tier C is unlocked after doing 2 High Bulkheads and 1 Extreme bulkhead. You can only complete one bulkhead a level so if you really hated a level you could skip it and do another one on a higher difficulty. At least this is how I think it works I can’t confirm until we do an Extreme Bulkhead.

I think this is awesome. I know GTFO is a “hardcore” game but it’s nice to have a bit of a choice on how “hardcore” we want to be. It would be great to at least see all of the levels in a rundown without getting carried through by one of our friends who is much better at progressing.

So far we’ve completed A! and A2 on the high difficulty. It was noticeably easier. We got to the end and were expecting the worst when the level just ended. We were all in the lobby saying “That was it?” So far we’re thinking A2: Foster will be the level we go for the Extreme bulkhead.

But just because it’s a bit easier doesn’t mean RNG and sloppy play still won’t end your run. This week we did B1: Malachite. You’re tasked with putting batteries in power supplies. There’s also thick fog accross the whole level. Once someone finds the fog turbine, you’re down one man in fights if you don’t want your whole party infected.

I’ll admit, this week I played badly. I kept alerting whole rooms on accident either stumbling into enemies or forgetting to turn off my flashlight. That lead to us using more ammo than we needed to. But the bad ammo spawns also didn’t help. We made it through to the last alarm door on the level and only found 2 ammo packs.

In the end, we ran out of ammo and couldn’t clear the second to last alarm door. Here’s to hoping next week turns out better.

Sea of Thieves: A Pirate Life Might be for Me

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Sea of Thieves has been on my Wishlist for a while. It was the next great multiplayer we were going to get once it’s on a reasonable sale. Last week it just happened to be on sale when we were looking at new games to try out so here we are.

To start off, I didn’t know much about Sea of Thieves before playing it. I knew it existed, there was some hype around it when it was coming out, and I knew it had the world’s worst character creator. And that’s about it.

A note on Character Creation: I spent a good 20 minutes here rolling randomly generated pirates until I found one to my liking. I’m surprised that a game this heavily focused on cosmetics doesn’t have a proper character creator. At this moment in time, I don’t even remember what my character looks like….

The following is a recount of my first time playing over the weekend.

The Tutorial

The tutorial is a little better than “Use WASD to move…” It’s short it’s sweet and covers about half the game. You get a treasure map, you find treasure, you dig up treasure, and return treasure for money. Seem’s fairly straight forward so far. You can swing a sword and shoot a gun like a proper pirate. Great! Oh and by the way here is your boat, here’s the sail, here’s the anchor, try to drive it in a straight line and you’re good to go!

As it turns out, I am not good at a sailing in a straight line. I’m pretty sure I managed to get turned around and was going backwards at one point….I was not in charge of driving when we got into the game.

Trying to Form a Party/Crew

I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to figure out how to add friends on Xbox Live for PC. I spent a good chunk of time figuring it out for PSO2 but couldn’t for the life of me remember how to do it here. Our first attempt at grouping up led to Greg’s game getting stuck on a black screen. We ended up force quitting and joining from the lobby. Once we were in the same place and could see each other we grabbed a few voyages (quests) and set off to find our boat.

The First time on the boat

After a bit of search we spot our ship in one of the docks. We’re below deck trying to figure out how to accept a quest and finding our destination on the map when suddenly the lower deck of the ship is on fire. I thought I accidently shot something explosive with a miss click. But then we heard the yelling….

It turns out Sea of Thieves has open voice chat. And that went about exactly as you think it did. Before we even knew what was going on our whole ship is on fire, Greg’s dead, and some guy is chasing me around yelling that he loves me over and over….Welcome to Sea of Thieves I guess.

The Second time on the boat

It took us a good 15 minutes to figure out how to meet up again. Greg was dead and had been transported to another outpost. Meanwhile I’m still alive on our original outpost. The tutorial failed to mention that the mermaids in the water would transport you to where your ship currently is. This goes for if your ship is sunk or you fell off and your buddy sails on without you.

This time we managed to sail out of the outpost without sinking. We found a very small island, killed some snakes, fought a few skeletons and found the treasure chest. We returned to the outpost without incident and turned in our first voyage.

On our way back to our ship we hear a cannon shot. Just off the dock, our ship is once again on fire. We swim out to the ship to see if we can atleast fire back. This takes us into the range of voice chat and the man attacking us is going on and on about how these are his waters and to get out of his outpost. We informed him we couldn’t leave because he set our ship on fire…he wasn’t having it. So again we’ve lost our ship in port.

We almost quit right there. But we decided to give it another go.

Respawn # 3

We decided we wanted to get a taste of PVP after being blown up 2 times. So we went sailing to a new island for quests but were keeping an eye out for any small ships we could engage in combat with. About halfway to our destination we find another sloop on the horizon.

Queue a half hour battle of 2 small ships circling and missing each other. About 15 minutes in we hear: “These are our WATERS!” Apparently we’ve run into our friends from before.

Now the fight isn’t over until one of the ships sinks so if you die you respawn back on your ship. No matter what state it’s in. Twoards the end our entire ship was again on fire so we’d lose half our health just spawing in it. Seeing it’s a losing battle, I jumped off our ship and swam over to theirs. I managed to kill one guy with the blunderbuss from the water and then get the other guy coming up the ladder which left me alone on their ship while they respawned. I quickly grabbed their fire bombs and set fire to their ship before finally succoming to my fate.

The whole thing was hilarious and everyone had a great time. I’m definitely starting to like this game.

The Final Voyage

The last hour of the night was not as eventful. We did a longer voyage that involved solving a riddle to find the treasure. I’d like to point out our ship was docked for a good 20 minutes without incident.

We turned in a few more voyages, took a look at all the cosmetics, and logged off for the night.

The Conclusion

I’m sure we’ll at least get another play session or two out of it, hopefully more though. I can see the find treasure take treasure back loop could get boring but the threat of PVP everywhere makes things a bit more interesting.

As terrible as most of this sounds I actually had a lot of fun playing this. I had no idea what to expect going in but I was not disappointed in the gameplay. It feels like Elite: Dangerous, Guns of Icarus, and The Hunt all mixed together.

OSRS Trailblazer League

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The Trailblazer League in Old School Runescape has been going for a week now. This is the first chance I’ve gotten to write about it because I’ve been so busy playing it!

The Trailblazer League is a limited time game mode that takes place on a handful of worlds for the next few months. Why would you want to play a limited time game mode instead of your main account? For cosmetics my friend! Oh and because it’s super fun too.

The premise of the league is every one starts in Misthalin and Karamja Progress through the league is split between unlocking areas and unlocking relics There are a lists of tasks to complete ranging from easy to “elite” to complete. Each completed task awards some league points which are a currency for your main account to buy limited time cosmetics and system that unlocks relics. After you complete a certain amount of tasks you can unlock another area.

What’s a relic? It’s an overpowered buff that’s unlocked on a tier basis that changes the way you play the game. For example, I took the Endless Harvest tier 1 relic that allows me to instanly bank items from woodcutting, fishing, and mining. On top of that I also get 2 times the resourses per action.

Everyone in the league is an ironman account which means there’s no trading between players, there’s no grand exchange to buy items, and you can’t pick up other players drops. Everyone has to be self sufficent and since the areas are locked it may be difficult to find the things you need.

I made some decent progress this week. I’ve unlocked 2 additional areas so far Asgarnia and Kandarin. I’ve also unlocked 4 tiers of relics. I plan on writing later posts all of this but I wanted to get a post out while I was in the writing mood!

Now back to the league….