Blaugust

Lord of the Rings: Return of the King Live in Concert

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Every year, the Cleveland Orchestra puts on a movie score concert series. In the summer, they play at Blossom Music Center, a huge outdoor music venue that usually hosts popular artist. It’s got a pavilion with assigned seats and a massive lawn for first come, first serve general admission. If you’ve never been to this kind of show, the movie is stripped of it’s score and the orchestra provides the music live in time with the film. If you have a local orchestra who does this, I highly recommend going, it’s a unique experience.

Last year, my wife and I saw Jurassic Park and had a blast sitting out on the lawn, watching the movie, and listening to a John William’s score. For the last couple of years, they’ve been playing the Lord of the Rings movies in the summer, one each year. This weekend was The Return of the King.

When we saw Jurassic Park, the place was pretty empty. We’ve been there plenty of times to see popular bands so it was nice to be able to park close to the venue and have space around us on the lawn to spread out. Expecting a similar experience this year, we planned to arrive about an hour before show time to get some snacks and settle in before things started. When we got there we were shocked to see the sea of cars ahead of us. The closest parking options were in the back grass lots which are like a mile out.

Our parking spot for the evening waaaaay out there.

Thinking about it now, it makes sense. While Jurassic Park is a classic it probably doesn’t have the mass appeal and/or fandom of something like Lord of the Rings. The Cleveland Orchestra has played Harry Potter movies as part of this series before and I’m sure that draws a similar amount of people. Blossom holds upward of 23,000 people and the place was packed an hour before the show. Fortunately, there were only two of us so we were able to slot in to a decent spot where we could see the orchestra and the screen.

I’m a fan of the Lord of the Rings as much as anyone who was a kid when the movies were coming out. It was all the rage in middle school. I saw all of them in the theater with my family and probably watched The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers dozens of times on DVD. Even still, I hadn’t seen either of them in at least 15 years. I only remember seeing Return of the King once.

With that in mind, my wife and I had a Lord of the Rings marathon last week so we could get caught up. We split the first two movies up over 4 days because neither of us are good at sitting through long movies these days. I’m glad we did, because I missed so much as a kid. I remembered the general plot lines and how cool all the battle scenes were but didn’t follow many of the side stories going on. There’s so much going on that’s not Frodo going to Mordor that blew past me all those years ago.

Like I said, I’ve only seen Return of the King once but, as I was watching the movie this weekend, I was surprised to find I remembered much of it. Not because I have a good memory, mind you but because I played the A TON of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King on the Gamecube.

Ahhh, so much nostalgia packed in to one image.

Shelob’s Lair, The Black Gate, the Battle of Helm’s Deep (technically the Two Towers), the Southern Gate, and the King of the Dead were all my favorite levels from the game. They all happen to be major plot points in the movie too. My wife also has fond memories of this game from playing with her brother back in the day. We kept turning to each other and saying things like “This level was hard” and “I remember fighting that guy so many times”.

Side note: this was the first “T” rated game I ever owned. I went with my dad to buy it and remember being nervous my mom would make me return it when she saw the rating!

Anyways, back to the show. If there’s one thing I took from this weekend, it’s just how much music is in the movie. There is a very small amount of overall time where there isn’t music of some sort accompanying the on screen action. I find it amazing that the orchestra play so precisely for so long. Of course, they are professional musicians but it’s still a feat to play for over three hours.

Not only do you need a full orchestra for this score you also need a full choir. The orchestra was great, don’t get me wrong, but hearing the choral scores from this movie live gave me goose bumps. The woman who did the vocal solos had an incredible range. I found that while the movie was going, I sometimes forgot there was a live orchestra but something about a live choir just sounds different enough that I noticed it every time.

Seeing a movie with thousands of people also brings with it a lot of audience interaction. We cheered for the musicians when they played our favorite themes or big, musical moments. We also cheered for the characters and storylines we saw on the screen.

The highlight of the night was during Theoden’s speech before the Riders of Rohan charge into the battle of Mines Tirith. The whole crowd yelled “Death!” in time with the movie at the end of his speech. It just added to the epicness of the scene and music.

If anyone’s interested in learning more about the music of The Lord of the Rings, Irecommend The SoundTrack Show’s three part series on the music of The Fellowship of the Ring (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3). David W. Collin’s does a terrific job of explaining film scores and music theory even if you don’t have any background in music.

I’m not sure what will be there next summer with the Lord of the Rings Trilogy finished up. Whatever it is, I’m definitely going back. I would like to get pavilion seats next year to see the orchestra better. We’re considering going to see the Cleveland Orchestra play the Muppet’s Christmas Carol for the holidays later this year.

What I’ve Played in 2024: Part 2

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Here’s a Blaugust tip: If you have a very long post, split it up and slap a Part 1 and Part 2 in the title. Now you have two posts!

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post where I continue to expand on the games I’ve played this year.

May

Secrets of Grindea

This is the game that was on my Steam wishlist the longest. After years, it finally released in Febuary of this year and I immediately bought it. At it’s core, it’s action JRPG but it has a gimmick where you can “grind” monsters to drop cards which are permanent passive buffs for your character. Each monster has their own card to drop and I found it very satisfying to collect as many as I could. I was close to the end when I stopped playing, I may have to go back at some point to finish it up.

Disney Dreamlight Valley

My wife bought this game for the Switch on a sale. She loved Animal Crossing but was bored after a while without any direction. Disney Dreamligt Valley fixes that with a never ending stream of quests and unlocks. I started playing because she was playing (she doesn’t play many games) and it was fun to compare where we were at or who we had just unlocked. The Switch version of the game, however, doesn’t run very well. It runs worse the more characters and object you add to the valley and sometimes just crashes the entire game. I fell off playing because of the technical issues but bought the game on Steam when it was on sale. It’s probably the game I’ve played the most consistently this year.

Garden Paws

While I couldn’t deal with the issues of DDLV on the switch I was looking for other “cozy” games to play that had the same vibe. Garden Paws was in my library and recommended across the board as a similar game. It’s got this off kilter charm and also has a never ending series of quests. I found it a great game to turn the sound off and listen to podcasts while I played. It definitely added to the weirdness of the game, in a good way, to listen to the No Sleep Podcast while playing

Littlewood

This is another “cozy” game that I found with a nice grind to it. The premise is you’ve just saved the world from a great evil and now you’re settling down to help rebuild a town. There’s no combat, but there are a set of skills that you can level up to help out the town. This was a great game to play on the Steam Deck in short chuncks or long play sessions.

June

Trove

Trove remains my most played game of all time. It’s not that it’s a fantastic game, it has many faults, but it perfectly tailors to that mindless grind part of my brain. In March, there was a gear update that introduced a new tier of gear and made the old top tier gear easier to get. I spent the month of June getting the Gearcrafting skill maxed, getting Crystal 4 gear sets compete, and hunting for Crystal 5 gear. There was another update in June wich even added a new difficultly tier. I still can’t believe this game, which is 10 years old at this point, is still getting updates.

Battlefield 2024

The squad picked this up cheap on sale for $7. I know this game had issues at launch but was extremely playable for us now that it’s late in it’s life cycle. I played 20 hours and I know the rest of the squad spent much more time with it.

Crusader Kings III

I cannot remember what compelled me to play this game. There was something that made me go search for it in my library. It might have been an idea that I would like to play a complex game or something. I played through the tutorial and liked it enough to buy a bunch of DLC that was on sale. Then I started up a game and played it for quite some time. I remember thinking, this would be a great game to write a bunch of posts about. Then I just never went back to it. Might be a good one to return to.

Dark and Darker

I played this one co-op with Blades for 3 hours. That’s all I can really tell you about it. I have never had such “meh” feelings about a game. I didn’t like it enough to play it again and I didn’t hate it enough to never want to play it again. It’s still installed on my machine more out of laziness than a desire to return.

July

Lethal Company

While not exclusively played in July, per se, it was the most played game in July. Our group has been playing this off and on since release. I swear, this game seems to has comedic timing coded in to it. It’s never not a good time, and with mods, there’s always something new. We’ve been enjoying the TooManyEmotes mod immensely. The mod adds 200 emotes, many of which add music. You get separate funds to buy emotes in a run from the computer. There’s always a new one we haven’t seen every run. We’ve probably spent more time trying out different emotes and laughing uncontrollably than actually playing the game.

What I’ve Played in 2024: Part 1

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While this year has seen a decrease in overall game time, it’s hasn’t been without gaming entirely. While I haven’t played many games on my own this year, I still get together with the squad every weekend to play something.

I was curious to see what games I logged playtime for this year. Steam makes this easy by sorting the library by recent. Still, I wish I would have re-installed ActivityWatch when I set up my new PC to have some more stats to dig in to. Unfortunately, Steam only records the last time you launched a game and doesn’t provide much more info than that but we’ll work with what we’ve got.

January

Space Engine

Not really a game, more of an interactive planetarium. I picked this up coming off of playing Elite Dangerous at the end of 2023. In Elite, I was mostly exploring system to system, so I thought this might be a good way to do the same thing without all the down time. I spent an hour with it, mostly going through the tutorial, but it was as advertised. It didn’t quite scratch that itch of Elite but that’s to be expected. It also works in VR, which I have not tried but I’m sure would be fantastic. Sadly, I didn’t take any screenshots for this one.

Orc Must Die 3

Every time I look back in my Steam library like this I’m always asking “Did I really play this that long ago?”. Orcs Must Die is a series I’ve been playing with my friend Blades for years now. We get absorbed in it for a month or two a year and then move on to something else. Looks like January was this year’s month of Orcs. I’m looking forward to the new Orcs Must Die! Deathtrap coming out next year with 4 player co-op. We’ve always wanted to get our other friends involved in the series but the games have only been 2 player co-op thus far.

February

Automobilista 2

In the beginning of the year I got very in to Sim Racing. I went home for Christmas to visit family and friends and ended up playing Gran Turismo 3 with Blades. He had the whole wheel and pedal set up and I was hooked. When I got home, I ordered my own wheel and pedals and was heavily playing this game and Asseto Corsa every chance I got. It’s weird because I’ve never been a car guy or even like driving all that much. I found learning tracks and getting better times had me hooked!

Game Dev Tycoon

In tandem with Sim Racing I was also very into Tycoon games earlier this year. Game Dev Tycoon is a simple tycoon game where you start out as a one man shop in your garage and work your way up to becoming a best selling studio. The game has relatively simple mechanics but they work very well to form a story in your head while your playing. I actually kept notes of my play through thinking I’d write about it here sometime. So those might make their way to the blog at some point.

March

Surviving Mars

Another tycoon game, this one I was playing together with Blades via Parsec. You start out with a few unmanned drones on Mars and attempt to create a long lasting colony. Over the course of a few play sessions we were able to go from a barren wasteland to a thriving colony with hundreds of colonsits. It was a lot of fun to plan, design, and execute building a colony. It was a lot less interesting once we got the people there and every thing was established.

Timberborne

Another colony builder except with beavers! I only played 2 hours of this, not because it wasn’t enjoyable but because I was at the end of my management game phase. Unlike Surviving Mars I lost many, many beavers to famine and drought. I don’t think I got to the point with a successful and sustainable colony.

Jedi Fallen Order/ Lego Star Wars

We went on a family trip/ reunion in southern California in February. One of the things we did was go to Disneyland/ Galaxies Edge. I’ve always liked Star Wars but have never been in to Star Wars. So after coming back from the trip, I went through a bit of a Star Wars phase. Lucky for me, both of these games were super cheap thanks to whatever Steam sale was going.

April

Assetto Corsa

Apparently April is when I stopped playing racing sims. Assetto Corsa is the racing sim. It’s usually cheap in sale, it has thousands of mods, it runs really well on modern hardware, and it’s easy to set up a server to race with friends. There’s an awesome third party tool called Content Manager that greatly improves navigating the game menus and adding mods. The paid version,, which is as cheap as $2 makes setting up servers a breeze. I spent the driving time on this one and had many hours of fun racing with the squad.

Goals for Blaugust 2024

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While 31 posts in August is not my goal it’s an aspiration and something I might be able to do one of these days. Looking back, my most “successful” Blaugust was in 2022 where I eked out 26 posts. That’s successful in the sense that it was the year with the most posts, but really more than 0 posts in August is a success in my book. More realistically, I see myself in the 10-15 range this year and would be very happy with that.

I joined Blaugust this year to give me some extra motivation to start writing regularly again. I already feel like that’s working. It may only be day two but I’ve already doubled this year’s post count. I even have two more posts scheduled out this weekend!

You never know though, my future self might find pleasantly surprise me at the end of the month. No pressure on you future self!

To get to that 10-15 post range I will need to spend more time playing games than I have been. I’m not sure if that will come in the form of trying lots of things from my library I haven’t played before or finding a game to sink some time into all month. I’ve been eyeing No Man’s Sky since it just had a graphical update and I haven’t played it in years. I also have a horde of games I, inexplicably, picked up in this years Steam Summer Sale that I really should should play…I’m suspecting it will be a mix of both.Either way, I’m hoping to find something that re-capture my interest and give me some posts to write.

And if not, well, I’ll just have to find something else to write about this month. That could be fun too.

Re-Introductions

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It’s always hard for me to figure out what to say when there’s a large gap in between posts. Do I talk about where I’ve been? It’s been like 6 months after all. Do I start back up like nothing happened?

I was  going to do the whole ‘This is why I haven’t written in a while’ thing. More for myself, really, than any one else’s beneift. Then I got to the end of it and it all seemed very familiar. It turns out, I basically wrote  the same thing earlier this year. So I scrapped that and started thinking about another angle.

I didn’t actually need to do much thinking after all. In the Blaugust kick off post this year, Bel has suggested using the first post of Blaugust as an introduction post. What better way to end a long hiatus than talk about my blog and participate in a month long event with a great community!

I’m Kluwes, this is my blog Many Welps. I write about video games and sometimes fiction podcasts/audio dramas. What you’ll find here are mostly accounts of play sessions either on my own or with my friends (like this). They’re my favorite blog posts to read and also my favorite to write! You’ll also find summaries of games that I finish in my Backlogged posts which I don’t like to call reviews but kind of end up being them anyways.

I started blogging in 2016 during the Newbie Blogger Initiative event with the idea that I would write mostly about MMOs. I also had this, frankly, naive idea that I would play through all of my games in my backlog at the time and write about that. I had only had a Steam account for 2 years at that point, but still 79 games is a lot to go through.

Over the years the blog has changed quite a bit. I found that forcing myself to play games in my backlog was not fun and abandoned that idea after a while. I did get a nice re-occuring post format out of it though so it wasn’t all bad. Over time I had less time to play MMOs and now mostly write about single player or co-op games. I changed the name of my blog from I’m Not Squishy to Many Welps 4 years ago to better align with what I was writing about at the time. I still play games every weekend with my friend group who we’ve deemed the Welp Squad so the name still fits today.

Over the last few years I’ve been spending less and less time playing games and instead focusing on other things. I may try branching out and trying to write about other things. One of my goals for Blaugust is to see if I can’t rekindle that love of games over the next month. Or I might try writing about some other topics and see if I enjoy it. Either way, I want to write more than I have been.

I’m very excited to get back to blogging this month. Bear with me here as I find my footing again. I am so out of practice.

A Short Wrap Up of Blaugust 2022

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Another Blaugust is in the books. It really flew by this year!

As always, a huge thank you to Belghast for organizing this event year after year and continuing to make it something to look forward to.

I enjoyed the Blaugchievemnents this year. I ended up with 15/19. Way more than I thought I would get at the beginning of the month.

My Blaugust run this year was quite successful. This will be my 26th post this month making this my second best Blaugust showing to date. Leaps and bounds better than Blaugust 2021 where I only posted 3 times. August 2022 accounts for more than half of the posts I’ve written this year.

Per usual, I’m feeling super positive about blogging coming out of this event. I’m looking forward to continuing to post more frequently in the months ahead. It was such a pleasure to see so much varied content this year and a whole lot of new faces. Though it will be nice to see a small slow down in the torrent of posts next month so I can read everything.

Hope to continue seeing everyone around the rest of the year!

The Lessons of Blaugust 2022

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Another Blaugust is almost in the books. This week’s theme is lessons learned and the day before the event ends is as good a time as any to reflect on this. As others have mentioned this week, collectively we seem to learn the same lessons every year and then forget them until we learn them again next August. This isn’t a bad thing. I 100% fall in to the same pattern every August.

Before I sat down to write, I went back and read some of my earlier lessons learned Blaugust posts. Three things that I always come away with from this event are:

  1. I have time to blog as long as I make time to do it.
  2. I enjoy the blogging process
  3. Posting every day is not for me

This year I did in fact learn some new things:

  1. Scheduling posts ahead of time makes posting every day much easier
  2. I can write more than one post a day as long as I have time
  3. Sometimes I have to choose between blogging and doing something else.
  4. It’s ok to take a break.

You would think in my 6 years of blogging I would have figured these things out by now….but sometimes the simplest things take the longest to sink in.

My start to Blaugust 2022 was strong. I was four or five posts ahead for the first week. By the end of the second week some days I was scrambling to get posts out. And by the third week scrambling was not so fun anymore. For next year, if I want to hit those 31 days or any kind of consistent posting schedule having that buffer is hugely beneficial.

The second lesson seems kind of silly in retrospect but it’s important for the first lesson. I’ve found myself a couple times this month really in the zone and diving in to another post after I finished my post for the day. Usually I would save the idea for the next day but there’s no reason I can’t write multiple posts in the same day and schedule them out.

I have less free time now than I did a year ago and I have to choose how to spend it. You would think blogging might fall by the wayside but it’s been important for me to keep it going. This month, I found myself playing less in order to write more. This only works for so long when your blogging about games though. Sometimes I just have to skip a post to play some games.

Which leads me to my last lesson.

This one is the most important lesson I learned this year. 31 posts over 31 days is an aspiration and a challenge but not necessarily the goal for me. I’m going to end this event with 25 posts this month. Considering that’s almost half of the posts I’ve published this year that’s quite an achievement. I could have probably gotten those extra 6 posts out but I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Allowing myself to take a few days off this month really helped me maintain my motivation to finish out the event!

Motivation or Lack There Of

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This week’s theme for Blaugust is staying motivated. It just so happens to also be the week where I have found the least motivation. Not to the fault of anyone but my own. Posting every day is a great goal and I’ve done a pretty good job so far this month if I do say so myself. But Posting every day also takes time away from other activities. I was starting to feel like I had been posting more but gaming less and I needed a small break. So I chose to game rather than write the last few days for a bit of a reset.

This isn’t an uncommon occurrence for my Blaugust participation. The difference over the years is if I catch it in time before I lapse into not writing at all. I was feeling on the verge of one of those lapses today so I decided to sit down tonight and write something.

I think part of staying motivated is recognizing when your motivation is running dry and making a decision to do something about it. Seeing as it’s Staying Motivated week and I need some motivation of my own I’ll tell you what motivates me (which will in turn motivate me).

Let’s start with my biggest motivator: reading other blogs. It’s what got me in to this whole blogging thing in the first place. I find that, if I read enough posts, eventually I’ll get the urge to write something as well no matter how long I’ve been away from it or how little motivation I have to write. The inverse, is also true, the longer I go without reading other posts the more likely it is that I won’t write. Sometimes I find inspiration from others’ posts to riff off of but other times just the act of reading what other people are up to makes me want to knock a post or two out.

Participating in community events/ projects are another one of my big motivators. Just this month I participated in Unwise Owl’s call for Humble Choice Reviews which I hope continues! Blaugust is sure to get me to write every year to varying degrees. Some years I make the 31 posts, some years I’m done after two weeks, and some years I make a short introduction post and don’t write anything else, but I’ll always attempt to participate. Then there’s the Blogger Succession XCOM Game that’s been going on now for over a year and a half. Last year was one of my biggest blogging slumps but every time my turn came back around I knew I had to write at least one post. Nothing motivates quite like a bunch of people waiting on you to play your turn…

My last motivator is simply writing something, anything really. Preferably something that ends with a published post. Kind of like what I’m writing now. There seems to be about a three day shelf life on my own motivation. Any longer than that, and the chances of me writing decrease significantly. It really is a wonder this blog has been going for so long…

Making a Return to Temtem

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It’s been two years since I’ve played Temtem. The last time was just after Blapril 2020. . Logging back in to an MMO after an extended period of time is always tough. I had a party full of Temtems of which I had a vauge idea as to why they were there and what they did. I had a storage full of other Temtems of varying levels, most of the lower variety, which I assumed is why they were there. I also had a log full of quests and, after looking at the map, couldn’t figure out where they were suppose to lead to or where I had to go to finish them. I made the executive decision to ignore those completely.

I spent my first few hours running around this grassfield looking for fights. Brother was the one who mentioned he wanted to play the game again and his Tems were around level 30 already. Mine were not and I had some under level 25. I catching up to do. I got most of my Tems to 30 with my water type Tem, Umishi, falling just short at 29. I put the Cowards Cloak on him which is an XP share item since most of the Temtems in the feild were Nature type. Water and Nature don’t mix.

Umishi did evolve in to Ukama at some point in my leveling. I learned that 50 SV is considered a perfect stat which can change when a Temtem evolves. Ukama ended up with 50 SV in Special Defense. I have no idea if that’s good or not but I got an achievement for it so it’s something!

One of the nice thing about co-op is that if your partner hasn’t fought a trainer yet you get to fight them and obtain the rewards again. The partner battles are interesting. Each person gets to use their first 3 Tems to create a team of 6. I didn’t realize this until I summoned one of Brother’s Tems and wasn’t able to control it the rest of the battle. You still retain your own team of 6 outside of battle and can swap out Tems that have been knocked out or aren’t looking good into the combined team for the next battle.

This week we took on the second Dojo Leader, Rawiri. This is the Fire type Dojo and much like Sophia the trainers and Dojo leader here have multiple types of Temtems. For this Dojo, eveyone had a mix of Fire and Nature types which is clever. Fire is weak against Water but Water is weak against Nature so, yes, you can bring your Water Tem out to knock out the Fire tem but it’s going to get beat up by the Nature Tem as a result. It forces you to come up with a strategy other than exploiting the type weakness to win.

My character appeared without clothes in this battle for some reason

After beating Rawiri, we continued on with the main quest. We had some technical difficulties with a cable car that was suppose to take us to another zone. Somehow I ended up spawning outside the cable car and got stuck. I rebooted my game but wasn’t able to see my co-op partner anymore. In an effort to see if we could interact at all I challenged him to a Casual Battle. It was a close fight, coming down to my final Temtem and Brother’s (PancakeJohnson above) final two. I lost but my last Temtems put up a valiant effort.

After the battle we were able to see each other again. We tore off to the next zone, anxious to find some new Temtems and explore again. We found a tube that appears to lead to a housing sector. When talking to the real estate agent they let us know that the volcano next door was currently active and they wouldn’t sell us a plot. Maybe when we get further in the story this will open up. I wasn’t expecting housing in a game like this but I’ll definately be trying it out once I have the ability, and money, to get a plot.

We did get to the zone the main quest wanted us in. There was a whole host of trainers to fight along the way and a few new Temtems we hadn’t seen yet. At one point, we ended up on a detour without a place to heal our Temtems with a bunch of trainer fights. I’m not sure how, maybe we’re still a little over leveled, but we made it though a gauntlet of fights with a few Temtems still hangin1g on. At the end of the night we rushed the detour to get to a healing station.

I’m looking forward to playing some more and seeing if I can russel up any new Temtems. I sure won’t be waiting another two years to play again, especially with the game’s launch right around the corner.

Teenagers Vs. Killer Robots

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I’ll be honest with you, I have no idea what’s going on in *Generation Zero*. Part of that is my fault, I changed voice over language to Swedish for immersion (it takes place in Sweden) and then kept forgetting to read the subtitles.

From what I gathered from the opening cutscenen rouge robot war machines have been rampaging through the Swedish countryside and everyone has been evacuated. Except my character, and my three other teenage friends. No, we were on vacation in a boat in the middle of a river and had no idea what was going on until we made it back to land.

I thought that was rather silly.

We look kind of old to be in High School

Anyways, now we’re hunting down military radio relays, searching for bunkers, and shooting at every robot we come across and stripping them for parts. I’ve turned the voice over back to English so maybe next time I’ll catch up on why we’re doing all of this.

The squad jumped in to Generation Zero again this weekend. We’ve played it three times now, all to a varying degree of success. Now that we’re out of the “hitting things with bats until they blow up” phase we’re making some progress. Ok, who am I kidding? We’re still doing that but not as often.

This is what happens when you stand on a big propane tank and someone shoots it.

Last time we played, SuperToast wasn’t able to join us and we made a fair bit of progress across the map. It’s a big map so we were worried he’d have to run for a while to meet up with us. This was not the case. I think the save state of the game is based on the host so Toast was able to jump to our latest Safehouse fast travel point. He also was on all the same quests we had picked up last time.

I have some gripes with this game but this is, by far, my favorite feature Our group can’t always play together so this kind of multiplayer system makes our lives easier. No one has to play on their own just to catch up. The only downside was that Toast was down a few levels from the rest of us. It didn’t seem to matter to much.

This session we decided to clear out our side missions and move forward with the main quest line. One side mission we had missed back at the beginning of the game. We had to backtrack a little ways to complete it. The other side mission had us go to a town and clear out the robots there. There not a robot in sight when we got there. I even threw a boom box down to make some noise to attract attention but nothing showed up. They must not have liked the song.

We gave up on that mission and tried to do more of the main story. After we cleared out another radio relay our next mission was to the north on the mainland. We were currently on a little strip of land at the bottom of the map. It was a hike to our next destination so we started walking.

In fact, the majority of our play time was spent walking. Like I said, it’s a very large map and the majority of it is kind of empty. There are towns to explore, sometime you find a safe house fast travel point, but sometimes you’re walking down an empty road with a few cars to loot and nothing else in site. Every once and a while we’d stumble on a pack of angry robots but a lot of the time there was just nothing.

Surprise, surprise, this pistol was not effective

Along the way we went robot hunting. There are several named bots across the map. Sometimes you’ll get a notification that one has become dominant in an area and they even level up if you leave them too long. Kind of wonder what they’re doing while we’re roaming around the country side. Is there some sort of internal robot war going on? Some struggle for dominance? Sounds a lot more interesting than whatever we’re suppose to be doing.

Anyways, we found the biggest robot we’d seen yet in the middle of an open field minding it’s own business. We couldn’t resist engaging it. It took a whole lot of ammo to take down but it was a fun fight. Every once and a while one of us would get hit with a barrage or rockets, get thrown, a ways, and then revive at the near by church. Giant-A632 was mean but we wore him down with our never ending respawns.

It’s hard to tell if it was worth it though. Most of the time, the big enemies drop a bunch of crafting materials and we have yet to figure out how to craft anything. The crafting materials take up a ton of space in your inventory too. Inventory is weight based, one of my least favorite inventory mechanics, and crafting materials weigh a lot. There doesn’t seem to be a way to throw them in storage either so I found myself constantly dropping 10-20 pounds of crafting mats every few fights.

Maybe we’ll find a use for them and I’ll regret it but I doubt that. They seem easy enough to come by.