My Longest Consecutive Gaming Session

 I have played video games for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories of them are of the Atari 5200, and on an old computer at my grandmother's house. However, I am not generally known for super long play sessions. Usually after about an hour and a half to two hours, and I need to stop for a bit. Illness or extreme circumstance have lead to slightly longer over the years, but very rarely more than 4 hours. However, there is one that stands out.

It was back in '08. I had just upgraded by computer with my friends old graphics card. I didn't have anything to test it with, well nothing other than a friends copy of Bioshock that he had forgotten to take with him a week earlier. Well couldn't exactly test it with Half-Life 1, so in went the copy of Bioshock.

 It had been a long day, and it was nearly midnight when I finished putting the card in and started installing Bioshock. Now I was not very into FPS games at the time, truth be told I am still not. Bioshock for whatever reason was very compelling to me.

I started playing almost exactly at midnight. I kept playing till I began to see the morning sun beam through my window with the sound of birds. At that point, I thought I would stop at the next obvious check point. I didn't, I kept playing. I didn't stop till I had finished the game, seeing the good ending for saving all the "little sisters". It was a few minutes after noon. 

I had sat and played Bioshock for 12 hours straight. Even as a child when home sick from school I don't think I ever did anything like that. No game has compelled me in quite that way since.

Lumines Remastered Review

 

Mount Farming

I don't always play World of Warcraft. I played it when it was new, didn't much care for it. Many years passed. Didn't think much about it. Some friends of mine played, and I would hear about it usually rolling my eyes.Then sometime in 2012 a close friend of mine gave me an account with a  fairly large amount of playtime on it. I began to play, and found something in the game that interested me; mount collecting. 

So I saw the end of the Cataclysm expansion, and the beginning of Pandaria. The account ran out of time, and I didn't return till right before the next expansion would hit. This is where my mount collection got much bigger. 

The expansion, Warlords of Draenor, had two things about it that made it very friendly for my hobby. One it was a very friendly expansion for making new characters and getting them to max level. It was also a very easy to farm gold in due to the addition of Garrisons. So once a character was at max level you spent 5 min doing your garrison stuff, and then had free time.

So between lots of easy gold, and lack of much else to do, I was able to acquire most of the available mounts at the time. Mounts from old raids that have a 1% drop rate, not to hard to get when you run the old raid 10 time a week with all your alts. Mounts from 5 man instances, there again no problem, but even faster because you can run those every day. And of course the ones that you can just trade between players, that is where the garrison's gold comes in. It was a wonderful time. 

Then Legion came out. It was not friendly toward alternate characters. Nor was it a great from gold. So again I left. Came back just last month, friend gave me some time. Not sure if I will stay.

The Outer Worlds

The Outer Worlds is an open world RPG FPS developed by Obsidian. It is currently on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC.

The game is overall very good. It is however rather short, taking less than 40 hours to complete. If you are a fan of the modern Fallout games, you will definitely enjoy this game. That is the short of it, it is good, from here on there might be spoilers, this is your only warning.

The story is not overly complex. You are saved from suspended animation aboard an abandoned space ship by a mad scientist. The scientist wants you to help save all the other people from your ship still trapped, and save the colony that you will be having adventures in. Of course you can get through this a number of ways, being helpful, being greedy, being a complete asshole, and many other options beside, all depending on you and your play style.

The world is slightly different than most open worlds. As the game takes place on several worlds that you can freely travel between. So rather than one large sandbox, you are given a series of relatively small sandboxes. Most of them have a few quests do. Oddly despite being different worlds, many of them have the same wild life.

Your character progression has some twists too. You gain level as you might expect, but you then put points into categories that give you improvements to multiple skill, to a certain amount. After a certain point, you must then level up each skill individually. Lots of varibles effect your skills, nearly every piece of equipment will modify your skills in some way, and the NPCs you choose to take with you in your travels will also effect your skills.

The NPCs are well voice acted. The ones you get to follow you will give you bonuses. Each one also has a very short quest. Some of them are better written than others.

The gameplay takes several forms. Out in the world you are mostly shooting things. In towns you are mostly talking, and in nearly every conversion you will find a way to apply one of your characters skills, assuming the skill in question in high enough. You get quest, you turn in quests, you get experience, and maybe another piece of the story.

MMO Guilds

I have played more than a few MMORPGs in my day. One universal truth of the genre is that at some point in the game you will need a larger group to accomplish something. As picking up random people is rarely a recipie for success, this will lead you to join a guild. A "guild" might gi by another name is one game or another, but the idea is the same, a group of people with goals helping one another in said goals. Raiding usually being one of the biggest aspects of a guild. However, there are many other reason you might be in or even form a guild. Questing, group finding, trade skills, company, etc.

However not all guilds are created equal. Goods ones deal with an even hand. Bad ones generally work by having "haves" and "have nots". It should be noted. that you might be a member of a guild only to find out that the goals of the guild and yours do not line up. Some games have ways to research guilds, some do not. Here I want to talk about my worst, and best experiences with guilds.

My worst guild experience was with the first guild I was ever a part of, in the first MMORPG I ever played. The game was Everquest, the guild went by "Free Norrath". I joined because several real life friends I was playing with joined. This guild talked a lot about working together, and being more of a family than a guild. That should have been a warning sign to me, but I was new to this and maybe a little naive. Frequently there was talk of doing big events, such as raiding, and these would generally not happen. If you went on their forum to ask about what happened, you would be told "you shouldn't be complaining, we are not a serious raiding guild". Which is fine, but when you schedule and event, it is reasonable for members to expect it too happen. There was also a lot of members that expected people to drop everything to help them, but would never return such favors. Also, voicing any dissenting opinion was meet with harsh reprisals This included most of the officers. This left a very bad taste in my mouth. I eventually found a good guild by the name of "La Catena". It ended poorly, but that is a story for another day.

The best guild experience I ever had happened on World of Warcraft. It was guild named "Red Ribbon Army", which I joined only because of liking the Dragon Ball reference they were making. When I joined, I joined only to have one character with the tag on them, mostly for my own amusement. I soon found that they were all very nice people. Almost all willing to work toward goals, and have a good conversation while doing it. Events that were scheduled always happened, in one form or another. If something did get canceled it would be made known in advance. You could voice your thoughts without fear of anyone trying to stump it out. Easily the best guild I ever spent time in. It is a shame that this guild came to an end. Not because of drama in game, or real life tragedy. No it came to end due Blizzard, and their apathy toward making worthwhile content. While I don't really miss World of Warcraft, I do miss the people of the "Red Ribbon Army".

There are many other guilds I have been a member of, even a few I have been an officer in. No need to go into all of them. At the moment I am without an MMO to play, and not really looking to find one. If I do, I hope to find another good group, but that is hard.

Retrofitting a story.

So Borderlands 2 tells is meant to be a direct sequel to Borderlands. Except, all the story elements, and personalities of the characters are pulled from no where. Which is fine, it is used to make the game more interesting, and make the player care about the situation.

If you play the original Borderlands, it is made clear that all playable characters are only here for money. They have little to no personality, we get a few words of backstory, and now they are "vault hunters" and are here for fame and fortune. It is not exactly deep. The various antagonists get much more in the way of story and personality, but they are all dead by the end of the game.

Then you start Borderlands 2, you have 4 new characters, this time with backstory and personality out the ass. Which is good. However, you the meet all the playable characters from the first game (now as NPCs), and suddenly they are acting far different then what you would expect. Now the old characters have distinct personalities, and apparently are not just here for money, they want to protect the poor people of Pandora. Where did this come from?

No where. These personalities came from no where. There wasn't much to work with to base a sequel on after the last game, they had to make some up. The second game was more popular, and many of its players never played the first game. So, they get a pass on this.

Powera Xbox One Wired Controller

I was in need of a controller for my Xbox one. I also didn't have interest in paying for an official one. At Walmart I found a cheaper option. 

This is a wired controller made by Powera. It was only 20$. It is a pretty good deal.

It has a good hand feel. The buttons and d-pad are responsive. The analog sticks are accurate. As mentioned it is wired, it comes with a removable 8 foot long cable.

The controller is much lighter than standard controller, and its rumble motors do not seem to be as powerful. Neither of these are real problems, but worth noting.

For 20$ this is a great deal. Good to have around as an extra for player 2, or as a back up when your first party controller runs out of batteries.  It also works perfectly on a Windows PC.

Let's Talk About Console Gaming

Improving World of Warcraft

The last two parts of "Let's talk about Dark Souls"

These are the last two parts. I hope you enjoy them.

Finally done. Took a long time. Glad it is over. The next thing I do won't be so long.

Let's Talk About Dark Souls Even More

Yes two more video about Dark Souls.

Part 3:

Part 4:

If anyone is wondering, there will be  part 5 and part 6. Then that will be it. Enjoy.

System Shock 2 FINALLY Out again.

It took long enough. I am not getting paid to spread the word about this, I am just a fan that wants as many people as possible to play this masterwork of a game. It is out now on "Good Old Games" (GOG), and is supposed to come to Steam later this year. GOG has an exclusivity contract for the game for the next 5 to 6 months, after which it will likely show up on Steam, hopefully in time for the summer sale.

Greetings insect.

Originally released in 1999, System Shock 2 was mind blowing at the time, and far beyond anything else on the market at the time. While today the graphics are not much to look at, the gameplay and story are still far beyond most of the other games out there.

If you are wondering what this game is like, it is a lot like the first Bioshock. However, it is much harder, and has actual RPG elements, not just the window dressing of them. "Deus Ex" might be a better comparison now that I think of it. The point being that it is a first person game, with guns, and with lots of stats and skills to keep track of, that allow you to approach the same situations in many different ways. This leads to a very high replay value.

So pick it up on GOG http://www.gog.com/gamecard/system_shock_2. Or wait for the Steam release. Either way, you owe it to yourself to play this masterwork.