Author: Kluwes

The Sword of Midras

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I was at my local library the other day when I passed the Fantasy/SciFi section and saw The Sword of Midras: a Shroud of The Avatar novel by Tracy Hickman and Richard Garriott. My first thought was “Huh maybe it’s a series that has nothing to do with the game.” Turns out it’s the first book in a trilogy that’s a prequel to Portalarium’s upcoming, there aren’t going to be anymore wipes but we didn’t launch yet, MMO. I’m all ready reading something but it was less than 300 pages so i decided to check it out.

I know books based off video games aren’t by any means a new thing but I was surprised when something as seemingly niche as Shroud of The Avatar had a book published.It made a little more sense when I did a little digging. A shorter version of the book was distributed to backers as Blade of The Avatar. It would make sense that people who pledged their hard earned money to a game would be interested in a book about their game. The book was already written so why not get it traditionally published as well? Turns out the publishers didn’t want to publish something that had already been giving to 50,000 people already for mass market. So a few chapters were added so that they could get their book traditionally published but who’s the target audience for this now?

I know this isn’t the first MMO to have a book out before it launched either. I remember being very excited when the Guild Wars trilogy came out that bridged the gap between Guild Wars and Guild Wars 2. Those have fairly respectable ratings on Goodreads, while they weren’t fantastic and I barely remember what they were about, as a fan at the time they did it for me. I’ve also seen the scores of books

The people who already received most of it from the kick starter obviously aren’t unless they really want to read those extra 4 chapters. Maybe once the game actually launches new players will want to buy it but it hasn’t officially been launched yet. It also seems like they’re hinging on it being so successful that it will sell two more books. I picked it up simply because I have a vague idea of what Shroud of The Avatar is but I wouldn’t have paid for it if I saw it outside of the library.

The only thing I can think of is if the story and writing are actually good enough to compete with other fantasy novels. This I can’t comment on yet as I haven’t read more than a few chapters  but I’m interested to see how it turns out.

I’ll get back to you when I finish it.

 

The Class Dilemma

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It’s always exciting to start a new game no matter what it is. I’ve always enjoyed the first few hours of learning the basics, getting a foundation in the game, and being prepared for bigger and better things. There are 2 things in MMOs that have me sitting in the first few hours over and over again. One is character customization and the other is choosing a class.

I love games with a lot of classes to choose from. I like finding the ones I like by playing the first couple of levels. Unfortunately this means I play the same quests and missions over and over again until I finally find the class that suits me. Once I find the class I might make one more character to perfect how it looks and then continue on in the game.

Over the past 2 weeks I’ve been through 4 characters in Neverwinter. I started with a Great Weapon FIghter, but I didn’t like some of his abilities, especially his charged AoE swing attack. Then I moved on to a Control Wizard, it felt like he was going to be hard to play solo with and I again didn’t like his kit early on. I’ve been reading that classes really come into their own at 70 but I wasn’t enjoying these 2 at all in the extremely early game.

My main right now, and by main I mean character past level 8, is a Tiefling Scourge Warlock. I played it when I tried the game on PC and I loved it then. On the PS4 the starting skills feel powerful enough that I can do things on my own. Also, it has a skill that summons a Soul Puppet, and I really like the name Soul Puppet. I also started a  Dwarf Devoted Cleric with Jay last night, he’ll  be fun to play in a co-op setting.

The problem with Neverwinter is that it only allows you to have 2 character slots at any given time. So those other characters who I ran through the first 8 levels or so are completely gone. It’s somewhat annoying but I understand, free to play games have to make their money somewhere. There are still 4 classes I haven’t tried yet but right now I’m tired of hearing the same quests again and again so I’ll wait a while before I try those.

Despite all the bugs and growing pains, the games not bad on the PS4. The controls are good, everything is mapped to the controller well. It does take a little getting used to targeting with the right analog stick to attack I keep forgetting it’s not tab targeting. The graphics are Ok, it runs pretty well in dungeons but inside cities like  Protector’s Enclave the game starts to chug along. That’s to be expected though. The UI is a little clunky with the controller as well but it’s not a huge inconvenience. I don’t know if it’s a game I’ll play for a long period of time, but I like what I’ve seen so far.

 

August Gaming Goals

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In my rush of excitement to get my post out yesterday I forgot to mention that I’m participating in Blaugust 2016. This being a post about goals and all I think it still fits the bill. I’ll be attempting to post everyday this month. So far two down and 29 more to go!

I’m fully expecting No Man’s Sky to take up most of my gaming time this month. We’ll see how manhy of these I get to.

General Gaming

  • Play No Man’s Sky: It’s almost here!
  • Beat the third boss in Furi: Still really enjoying this game.
  • Continue to play Dark Souls 2: My friends like to watch me die over and over again.
  • Get 2 more gym badges in Alpha Sapphire: Oh Pokemon, I forgot how fun you were. I also forgot that you were a decently long game.

MMO

  • Use my 5 free days in Final Fantasy 14: I’ve been itching to play this and you can’t beat free stuff.
  • Try out Neverwinter on PS4: Its new and shiny an I remember it being kind of fun on PC. I really need to pick a class and stick with it. I’ve been through 4 characters already.

Backlog

  • Beat 1 steam game: I’ve been slacking a didn’t really play any steam games last month.

 

Pokemon Go: From Mobile back to Handheld

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Pokemon Go

In the month since Pokemon GO launched I’ve gone through a whole slew of emotions. At first I was super excited just like every one else. There were Pokemon that needed catching everywhere. It was fun to take pictures of Pokemon with the AR on and it was really cool to see where the closest Pokestops and Gyms were.

After the initial wonder wore off, I understood the basic rules of the game and how to progress. I ended up walking around my town and going places I had never been before. I also started to notice how many people were playing this particular game. People were out in droves near gyms and popular Pokestops  around the neighborhood capturing the creatures and chatting with each other.

Then came the hording. Flocks of pidgeys were captured and whole herds of evees were placed into my backpack. The alpha of the herd was fed the weaker members. Survival of the fittest at its finest. I made a career change from Pokemon trainer to Pokemon exterminator. Lately, I’ve been opening the game less and less. I feel like I’ve experienced everything it has to offer and I had a great time doing it.

Two years ago I bought Pokemon Alpha Sapphire on the day of its release. I never got the chance to play the original on the Gameboy Advance and I was all about seeing that generation of Pokemon in 3d. I put a couple of hours into the game before I set it down and never picked it back up again. I’m not sure why this was, I spent a good amount of time playing Y with a bunch of friends in college. However, as my interest decline in Go I had the urge to pick Alpha Sapphire back up again.

Here’s where I have to applaud Niantic and the Pokemon Company. They’ve created a game with enough features to stir up nostalgia but not enough to overshadow the fun of the handheld games. If anything it was the lack of some features that made me pick up my 3DS and sink sometime into Alpha Sapphire. I’m 4 badges in and still playing.  Now that I’ve gotten back into the 3DS game I’ve started to think I just might buy Sun or Moon in November. You got me back Pokemon and I never would have guessed it would be from a mobile game.

Furi: So Hard It’s Fun

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I spent all of this week trying to down the second boss in Furi, one of July’s PS Plus freebies. I don’t normally play games in the “so hard it’s fun” genre. I like some challenge in my games but I’m not a fan of the all challenge all the time style. But after playing Dark Souls 2  last weekend, I was in the mood to test my difficulty limits.

The story began with a pretty cut-scene. I escaped from my cell,and picked a fight with my captor, the Warden. The fight, which was basically the tutorial, went well. I lost some lives but overall I beat him on my first try.  Brimming with confidence, I started the long walk down to the next level and the new boss all while a man with a rabbit head filled me in on her. Upon arrival I was thoroughly trounced again and again by the Hunter.

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In this twin stick shooter/hack and slash game, each boss has 6 phases and each phase you are given full health and 3 lives. If you lose a life during a phase the phase starts over and the boss gets their health back. Lose all three lives and the whole thing starts from phase one again. Starting over and over had me yelling at my TV more than I’d care to admit. Everything you just did for the past 20 minutes didn’t count.

That’s what I thought at first. But as I came back to challenge the boss once or twice a day  I noticed I was getting better. Taking the approach of playing it a little each day instead of trying to power through it for hours definitely helped make it least frustrating.  I was dying less during the early phases, I started having more health on my last life on the later phases, my parries were getting better and I knew the attack animations and how to avoid them. I was getting better as a player. What surprised me was that even though I wasn’t going anywhere in the game, I felt like I was progressing.Finally on Friday I kicked the second boss into a pit with a cry of victory  and was on my way to the third. Maybe this one won’t take so long to beat.

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Backlogged: Tengami and Where is My Heart?

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I haven’t done this in a while. July has been a crazy month for me in my non gaming life. Between going on vacation and taking on some more responsibilities at work  there hasn’t been a whole lot of time to work on my backlog. These games I actually finished back in June but haven’t had the chance to write about them. Both were under 2 hours long, I wish Tengami was longer but Where is My Heart? couldn’t end soon enough.

Tengami

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Developer: Nyamnyam

Playtime: 114 minutes

Tengami is a point and click puzzle game in a world that looks like its made out of paper. The game itself  reminds me of an interactive pop-up book complete with tabs to pull and flaps to flip. The goal of the game is to go through each level and find a flower to put back onto the Cherry Blossom tree.

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Each of the four levels reflect the four changing seasons and have a few puzzles to solve on each. The puzzles are difficult but not impossible to solve without hints. The glowing circles on the interactive parts of the world were very helpful. While I tried to use hints sparingly, there were some puzzles I just couldn’t wrap my head around to start until I looked up a walkthrough.

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At the end of each level you are rewarded with a Haiku

While it did feel a like cheating to use a walkthrough for some puzzles, I really wanted to see more of the world. I love the art in this game, it’s simple,unique and very visually pleasing. Couple that with the great soundtrack and you can see why I didn’t want to spend hours figuring out that a few symbols were actually Japanese numbers.

I wish the game was longer. It seemed as soon as I was really getting into it it was over. That’s one of the issues with short games. Overall it plays really well, the character walks a bit slow but other than that it’s a really enjoyable experience that I highly recommend.

Where Is My Heart?

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Where is My Heart? They’re all over the place.

Developer: Schulenburg Software

Playtime: 98 minutes

I picked up this game in a Humble bundle a year or two ago. What started off as a cute platformer with an interesting idea became a headache after about 10 levels. Where is My Heart tells the story of a family of forest spirits whose world has been fractured. You are tasked with guiding them through each level to put their world back together and gather  hearts.

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Hey Ma, I’m in two places at once!

The main feature of the game is the shattered world, the level is broken up into different pieces and shuffled around. This adds a challenge to the platforming. Jumping out of one square could drop you into one across the screen. After a few levels, this becomes more of an annoyance than anything special. It’s not the easiest platforming and when you don’t know exactly where your character is jumping to, it ends in a lot of missed jumps and miserable deaths.I wouldn’t recommend trying to play this in one sitting, I ended up with a headache trying to keep track of how all the shattered pieces were connected together.

Each forest spirit can power up and transform to have different abilities. This adds a few more mechanics to the game. For example the Rainbow spirit, who looks like a fluffy marshmallow, jump and rotate the screens to get to hard to reach places. The Deer spirit can jump higher than the rest and the bat spirit can reveal hidden passages and platforms.

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The spirits are allergic to spikes and water. I must have died 50 times on this levle.

I think I would have liked the game if it was a normal platformer. It’s challenging enough as such but throwing in the confusing, jigsaw, shattered levels makes it frustrating. I understand why they did this, it’s a unique idea and it is fun for the first few levels and if you took this feature away, it’d be just another retro looking platformer.

Out with the Old and In With the Older…and Older

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Trove

I tried, I really tried to get another 5,000 blocks placed in trove this weekend but my heart just wasn’t in it. As the two week long anniversary event drew to a close so did my interest in doing anything in the game. So I threw in the towel at 6,000 and decided I could live without the extra 5 Golden Ticket Chests.

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I don’t know what this is

This morning I opened my new shiny 13 Golden ticket boxes and got a whole lot of nothing. I wasn’t really expecting anything out of them but there’s always a chance with lock boxes, part of the excitement of opening them I suppose.Honestly, I just wanted some new mounts to ride around on, that would have been nice not sure I’d be all that excited for a full year of patron subscription.

While it was fun for a short period of time, I got bored of the endless zerg in the higher level portals. Plus it always crashes when I launch Spotify along with it. If I’m going to mindlessly grind I want some music to grind to. I’ll definitely try it out when it comes to consoles though.

Dark Souls 2

I’ve played Demon Souls, I’ve played half of Dark Souls, I finished Bloodborne, but I never got around to playing Dark Souls 2. It’s my friend Jay’s favorite game and he’s been bugging me for years to play it. For years I’ve been telling him that if I ever found it for 5 dollars or less I would get it figuring that would by me sometime. Well I walked into my local game store a few weeks ago and found Dark Souls 2 Scholar of the First Sin for exactly 5 dollars and, keeping my word, prominently bought it. Which,means yet another game to add to my backlog

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This weekend I started playing and streaming Dark Souls 2 partly because I had some friends who wanted to watch and partly because I wanted to try streaming solo. Me, Jay, and some other friends had been streaming Diablo 3 as a group which was a blast but I wanted to see what it was like by myself. It was a fun time, I’m sure my more experienced friends had a good time heckling me very time I died as well as giving me a few pointers.

I sunk about 4 hours into it Saturday night. I played Demon Souls and Bloodborne mostly Co-op so this is the first time I’m trying to complete a Souls game completely by myself. So far it’s been difficult but fair and I had a good time with it.

World Of Warcraft-Trial Edition

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I never played WoW at all. Ok that’s not true, I played a few private servers in high school with friends but that wasn’t fun. You were too powerful and gained everything too quickly. It probably wasn’t the best way to be introduced to a game. Of course, the game was around when I lacked any sort of disposable income of my own and my parents didn’t understand why I needed to pay monthly to play a game.

With all the hype around Legion coming at the end of next month, I wanted to sit down and try for myself the king of MMO’s.  I started my exploration into Azeroth as a Draenei Monk. It was a pleasant way to pass the time doing quests, killing things, looting things, leveling up. All of it was great, the quintessential MMO experience. I managed to get to level 15 this weekend and plan to get to my account level cap of 20 next weekend.

I like games with a lot of classes. With 13 classes to choose from it looks like it would keep my attention for a while.If it wasn’t for the inability to delete my character I would have re rolled countless times and probably not made it past level 10. But I like my name and being a blue space goat felt right so I stuck with the Monk for the weekend. Plus,those hooves look like they’d hurt to be kicked by.

Though strangely enough, playing World of Warcraft over the weekend actually made me miss Final Fantasy 14. If it wasn’t for No Man’s Sky coming out in a few weeks I would have plunked down some cash for the starter edition of Wow or Heavansward and upped my sub to FF14. I have a feeling most of my gaming time in August will be taken up by my quest to explore the universe and name some plants and creatures. Maybe even fly some spaceships or something.

Creativity is Such a Grind

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I’ve been playing more Trove this week snatching up goodies every day from the one year anniversary event. I have to admit, they have been pretty lack luster. Most of the time its 2 Golden Ticket Chests that are a lot like scratch off tickets. You could win a pack of mounts or a whole years subscription but most of the time end up  getting a measly style surprise.

Trove holds competitions every week and players can compete and climb the leader boards for prizes. This week one of the competitions is Blocks Placed. There are no prizes for being a certain place on the leader board, all you have to do is put down 10,000 blocks to win 20 of these Golden Ticket Chests. So instead of building a 10k block wall I decided to try my hand at actually building something.

My friends who play have always been really into building sometimes more than actually playing the game. They’ve built some interesting stuff including a giant monopoly board,  a large city,giant pinatas, and even a whole club world dedicated to aviation history. They’re creations always look crisp and well planned out.

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Meanwhile I built this Narwhal once while watching Interstellar.  As a result I was banished to building in the desolate corners of our club world.

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So I sat down and thought about what to build as I rode far away from our main hub. I wanted to build a robot, one that looked like one of those tin toy robots with the square body and square head, a classic robot. After about 3 hours and one delightfully awful horror movie later, the Grinda-Tron 5000 was built. While he’s not exactly what I envisioned I think he turned out pretty well. He consists of 5,100 blocks and is my second creation in Trove.

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I was never a fan of building in Trove. It’s kind of clunky and there isn’t a good way to do anything fast. If you’re building something tall and accidentally fall off, better hope you have enough jumps to get back to the top. Sometimes it can be insanely frustrating and it takes a long time. For a game that tries to promote creatively and building, there should be some useful tools in build mode to make it easier and more fun.

Despite this, I am excited to build some more and get my boxes at the end of the week. Building was somewhat fun once I got over all the limitations of the game and things started to come together. It was almost like doodling in 3D. I’m not quite done, I still have 4.1k blocks left to place, maybe Grinda-Tron needs a friend.

 

 

Pokemon Go: Keep Out

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private-property

Like many, I’ve spent the last couple weeks living out my childhood dream of setting out and collecting Pokemon for real. The hunt has brought me to places I’ve never been, I’ve met some people I otherwise wouldn’t have, and I’ve stopped in the middle of a sidewalk or a store more times than I can count.

Pokemon Go hit and it hit hard. Almost every store, restaurant, or bar in my neighborhood has some sort of deal for Pokemon Go players. Every night there are people young and old wandering the streets with their eyes glued to their phone. From my apartment I hear the yells and cheers of people who have finally found the little critter they’ve been searching for, usually right under my bed room window at 3am…while I don’t really mind, it seems like more than a few people do.

I’ve slowly seen more and more “Private Property: No Trespassing” signs pop up around town. There are three right around my apartment. There are a few more around more of the popular Pokestops as well. The majority  I’ve seen in the residential part of town on people’s front yards,I guess not everyone wants hordes of people standing around their house or business in the middle of the night. Even where there aren’t signs posted I’ve seen a few people jup fences and even one wandering around a construction sites.

Just because we’re playing a game doesn’t mean we should wander around places we aren’t welcome. Especially other people’s yards, you would think this would be common sense but apparently it’s a problem around here. While there are Pokemon everywhere, maybe we as players shouldn’t be going everywhere.