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Blog Your Current Game

After another frustrating afternoon getting killed repeatedly in Elden Ring and losing my hard-earned experience (yes, when you die twice in a row you lose your runes- the currency you need to level up- I was so close to leveling up when I got killed and so basically wasted my entire time), I finally decided not to bother with this kind of aggravation and uninstalled the game.

**** Elden Ring! :mad:
 
I have a few more hours of Tiny Tina's Wonderland in the book and the game is growing on me. I mean, most of the comedy is flat and feels like the next generation of game writers trying to immitate the last generation, but there is the occaisional Table Top RPG based joke and I laugh because I'm an old nerd.

It turns out, after you complete a enough missions in the quest you unlock your dual-class slot which lets you pick one of the other class skill trees to go along with the first. I think every class has a pet companion, so when you unlock the second class you will have two pets following you and causing mayhem (I say that because my dual class has a pet Wyvern and a Pet Poison Mushroom man). The moral here is that when selecting your character, don't worry if you are stuck between two, because it doesn't take all that long before you can have both.

It now makes a lot more sense why so many of the class gear items have buff two different classes...

So anyway, writing not that great, but I still got some laughs and I got to murdalize a Smurf invasion, so two thumbs up.

Oh, one other thing they added which I found more interesting than it is useful: The Exploding barrels now have physics, so you can knock them over and roll them around. I'm not sure it will ever come in handy, but I like to think at some point I'mm be able to pile up a bunch of barrels and blowed up somethin' but good.
 
Falling down the Skyrim rabbit hole again, they've added fishing since I last played. A pretty dumb little "minigame" where you just press button and wait for fish then press button again. There's nothing to it as far as I can see. I did, however, discover a vastly improved version of Skyrim fishing

Destruction magic
 
King Arthur: A Knight's Tale was released last week so I have switched over to that game for a while. I've only barely played long enough to get out of Act 1, where the pre-purchase demo cut out.

THe main story is that following the well known story of King Arthur and his fight with Mordred, the Lady of the Lake attempted to save King Arthur but only managed to make a monster. The former King Arthur and the denizens of Hell were unleased on Avalon.

In an effort to right the wrongs, the Lady brought back Mordred to slay King Arthur again. Through the game you are tasked with rebuilding Camelot and reforming the Round table with the heros or villains of the classic story, depending on your choice of play through.

Throughout the game you will be faced with numerous moral choices that will determine the fate of the reborn Mordred. The two dimensions of moral choice are Rightful -vs- Tyrant and Pagan -vs- Christian. Based on how you progress will unlock various quests to recruit new heroes. If you go far enough down the Pagan axis you could unlock Morgan Le Fay, Far enough down the Rightful path you can unlock Sir Lancelot, etc. Even without the Moral unlocks there are a lot of minor characters that you will come across to recruit with varying skill sets, so you don't need to feel tied to specific decision trees unless you want specific heroes unlocked.

THe Heroes in teh game follow a general class system with Defender, Marksman (Archer), Champion (2H melee), Vanguard (think assassin), Healer, Mage ... and while every hero in a class will serve generally the same purpose, each hero only has a set number of skills to unlock and develop which makes each one kind of unique. For instance, one marksman might get poison arrow, fire arrow skill and light armor, while another only has poison arrow, but can wear medium armor.

Then there are a whole boat load os random-ish gear that drops from chests in-mission that you can use to accetuate the skill sets you choose for your heroes.

Combat is more like a 2 dimensional chess board, or old table-top, where each fight comes down to timing, starting placement and coordination.

The game is mission based, and each mission is a series of set encounters that you trigger by walking into them. THe missions are sort of non-linear this way, but there are some missions that funnel you through encounters to unlock final fights, then others where you can just go straight to the final fight for a quick win... the later tend not to be story missions, though.

My first play through is channeling Mordred through a full reform, taking him down the Righful Christian path. There in lies my first real quible...

Mordred, being a tabula rasa of sorts, is classified as "Neutral", as such he generally has a full set of wishy washy dialogue options. The problem is that it would make sense if they changed dialogue based on your morality choices, but so far that hasn't happened. Basically the point of the morality in teh game is to unlock team members that play nicely togther.


My pros and cons...

Pros:
- It turn based combat, which I always like.. not really X-Com, something more like a table-top experience
- Color Coded loot for the little endorphin rushes.
- Story is interesting And it has a lot of replay potential based on random gear and the variety of moral choices
- A fun alternate reality trip into the story of King Arthur.
- Plenty of Min/Max goodness that rewards you for thinking carefully about your character builds.

Cons:
- The writing is pretty hit and miss. Some seems written by professional writers, other stuff sounds like it was written by children... like they fired the writing staff before the dialogue was completed.
- The aforementioned moral choices do have as far reaching an effect on the game as, say, a Fallout game might.
- The rate of moral choices seems a bit lopsided, favoring the Rightful/Tyrant axis, though not so much yet to rul out RNG

I'm only a few missions into Act 2, and have only unlocked one of the special characters on the Rightful axis.. can't really say he is particularly more useful than the guy I have in that role (2H melee).. but I guess that's the breaks when you have crafted one unit from level 1 versus being handed a level 8 that was designed by the developer.

All told, a rather fun game. We'll see by the end of this play through if I still like it enough to try a new moral path play through with those character unlocks.
 
An observation I have made as I play through King Arthur: A Kinight's Tale that I find a bit interesting.

I have felt like there is something somewhat different about this game that I couldn't quite put my finger on, and just a short while ago while I was in my car with nothingto do but ponder it hit me. What seems so different about this game is that combat is resolved with alomst no random number generation. The only place where RNG plays any significant role, in a traditional sense, is in damage roles, but even then, the damage range of any given weapon is exceptionally narrow to the point that an average damage of 30 points might vary +/- 3 points. It can make a difference on occaision when you absolutely have to have some unit killed, but most weapons, especially the more powerful ones, have a flat damage rating, which means hits will always have the same base damage. That damage is mitigated by defensive abilities and stats that are equally set in stone.

So what does this mean? It means that combat plays out more like Chess than it does X-Com. Imagine X-Com, but your soldiers always hit, and always do the same damage. It really changes the way you think about a fight.

THis method also means that each fight becomes more like a puzzle. YOu can lose a fight handily the first time, change up your strategy and a destroy them on the next play through. Once you have played long enough yuo can almost call to final positioning how a fight will turn out.

I guess it compares a bit to the HoMM games as well like that.

Anyway, that is my little thought for the day on this game.

The End.
 
I forgotten that I had pre-purchased WH40K: Chaosgate, so woke up this morning to find out it's been out for a few days.

I took a break from A Knight's Tale to put this game through it's paces. I will say that it is almost precisely XCom40k. All of the base resource management, combat mechanics, and progress feels second nature.. just with a WH40K Empyrium wrapper.

And none of that is meant to be a knock on the game, it is so far very well done.

The only thing that I can say so far that wouldn't sound like a review of XCom is that the art style to this game is extremely refreshing for a WH40K game, as is the directing. If I had to put my finger on the art style, imagine a more Cyberpunk aesthetic and a Clone Wars feel. I don't know... hard to put my finger on it, but it is definitely well done.
 
Overwatch (twitch.tv/casra76 SHAMELSS PLUG) Play nightly most nights... that's mostly nightly
Or FF14 which I rarely stream but play daily.
 
Chaosgate update:

Holy crap this game is HARD. Easily the hardest X-Com-like I have played... well, on not X-Com: Terror from the Deep hard... but still...

Granted, I'm still early in the game and haven't really started min-maxing my Marines, but my marines feel like tissue paper, and the crazy unarmored Chaos fanatics have better weapon variety and vastly superior numbers.

I'm sure I will solve the riddle eventually and my strategies will change to improve survivability, but so far when a you make a mistake the mission will fall apart quickly.
 
OK, my first major complaint regarding Chaos Gate and it is just poorly thought out game design.

As you play through the game you eventually learn, through mostly dumb luck, that a screen that only pops up every 30 game days allows you to unlock post-mission rewards slots (ie. color coded loot) ... it's bad when essential game mechanics are poorly explained. But it gets worse...

Once you learn how to unlock post-mission rewards you will get a flow of new armor, weapons, etc. into your invetory. This gear has variable gear stats, as would be expected, but also a number of unlocable traits with color coded locks on them.

THere is no cut scene, tool tip or anything remotely help to explain what those locks are, or how to unlock the.

It tturns out that there is a research item that has nothing descriptive to do with gear imnprovements, that unlocks a major early game mission, that if you win unlocks access to a certain kind of color coded resource that you pick up in newly color coded missions.

.. So great, I though, and started running these color coded missions gathering color coded resources to unlock color coded Gear traits... and on getting those resources I go back to the gear screen and... can't unlock the traits.

Do I not have enough respurces? Is there still a hidden research option I need to unlock the feature? Who the **** knows? There is literally nothing in the game to hint at what I'm supposed to do.

None of this would be a problem really if they had just not made these upgrades visible until I after met all the requirements... now I am left beating my head against a wall not knowing if my game is bugged or their tutorials are just awful.
 
now I am left beating my head against a wall not knowing if my game is bugged or their tutorials are just awful.

Just spit ball'n here but it doesn't seem like an "or" situation, could be both.

🤣

WW
 
To give you an idea about what a ball buster of a game CHaos Gate is (it's the Elden Ring of X-Com-likes!):

Just had to step away from the game after fighting a boss fight that channels your strategy into a very specific group sunergy that, even when you have your ducks in a row, is nearly impossible.

You see, the boss in question has 32 Health, which is about Par for Chaos Gate (CG) bosses, but he has a special trick, the trick is he heals 100% of his health back immediately after taking damage... not end of turn, I mean you hit him for 6, he adds back six to close out the attack animation. So how do you kill him? Well, in CG they have a stun mechanic that gives you a guaranteed critical if you hit a stunned enemy with a melee attack. With this boss one of the crit options is to lower his maximum health by 2 points.

I have a heavy weapons marine that can hit for 8 damage with a citical, so I would need to get 12 critials to knock his health down to a level where my heavy weapons marine can bring him to 0 health in a hit.

So far pretty straight forward

Ok, so getting crits is hard against this Boss unless you have skills that do auto crits.. but those skills usually are 1/combat kind of skills unless you spec your marine for willpower (which fuels skills).

I wasn't really specced as a Crit team, I was specced as a bleed team, which didn't help since he healed back all bleed damage. So I had to stun the boss to get a crit... but I also wasn't stun specced so every attack lowers his stun by 1, and he has 9 points in stun.. so I have to hit him 9 times to get a crit, when he blocks melee attacks at a high rate, and then I get to lower his health by 2

rinse, repeat x 12

But wait! There's more!!

Even enemy turn the boss spawns little pods all over the map that persist until you destroy them, and launch stick poinon globs that freeze your marines for a turn, make then volnerable, as well as whiping vines that sprout near your marines wherever they are to do melee attacks.

I must be missing something because this mission is impossible unless you have specced a team specifically for stun and crit... which I guess I may have to do.
 
I've ended up going back to Hell Let Loose, FPS game built on the unreal engine but greatly modified to act like a simulator. Pure HC mode, one shot one kill 95% of the time with more reasonable movement environment to environment.

Some gaming rags have called this the most difficult FPS game there is.

(The new Battlefield ended up a complete disappointment.)
 
I took a break from Chaos Gate long enough to come back to the game with fresh eyes. On rethinking my strategies I have greatly improved my team effectiveness.

Myy previous attempts were focused on maximizing ranged combat based on my conclusion that melee units are too vulnerable, but it turns out I was missing a key piece of a melee squad build: The Librarian.

While the Librarian has a lot of handy abilities, the one skill he has that makes him essential is his teleport ability. Librarian isn't the only unit that has teleport, but when he empowers his warp ability he arrives at his destination with all of his squad along for the ride.

What makes this exceedingly powerful is that in new encounters, all of your units get their action points set to full, so if you lead with the Librarian you can then warp the librarian, and all of his squad members, right in among the enemy squad, all with full action points. At that point the combat becomes elementary. With this tactic you will want to run a full melee team build which can, in most cases, eliminate the enemy squad in 1 turn. At that point the main concern is Warp power maintanence for the librarian since the team-teleport is pretty costly. Because of this I hold as many killing blows as I can for the Librarian since a kill grants him some warp power.

With the new strategy to game is fun again.

The only caveat is that the Librarian unit doesn't come available right away, so the early game is still a slog.
 
I go to waste a few cheap moments on Diablo III. Haven't in a while.

"celebrating 10 years". Time flies. Hurry TFU with IV so I can burn out on it and do other things.
 
Finished Chaos Gate. The game was fun, and the story was pretty interesting.

I'm not sure about replayability since most of the challenge to the game was figuring out the best strategies for various mission types. Once you've solved the puzzle for all the bosses and mission types you would only really reply the game to beat the crap out of the game from start to finish rather than hunt your way to solutions in the first play through.

But, come to think of it... I may play it through one more time specifically to kick the crap out of all the missions and bosses that frustrated me the most...

8/10
 
Currently playing Project Zomboid. 5½ days in, have a great food stash, but still zero tools. Have some welding materials, but not much to do with them. Looted the neighborhood convenience store. Leaving the laundromat alone. Hopefully when the helicopter event happens I won't be outside.
 
Random gaming thought: It is amazing how many videos from the game Arma 3 are being shared as scenes from Ukraine, and being believed. I really need to pick it up and try it, it does look incredible.
 
The endless cycle of modding and tweaking Skyrim, playing for a bit, and then quitting because I remember the terrible, terrible truth:

I don't actually like Skyrim's gameplay.
 
Today I played WTF is wrong with my computer.

I started off with a very simple take: Replace the awful RBG front fans with some good, silent Be Quiet! as well as add another Be Quiet! fan as a rear exhaust. Cooling has alway been merely addequate in the case to begin with, and LOUD when the fans were on high.. and I have a severe RBG alergy, so upping the fans and going RBG-less seemed simple enough.

I pulled the bad fans out, disconnected the RBG and fan headers, installed new fans, plugged them in to CPU Fan 1, 2 & 3... easy enough. Get everything hooked up, PC starts up fine gets to the login screen and freezes and then blue screens.

On reboot it comes back to the basic "Something has changed, hit F1" screen, I did that, went to the BIOS, everything looked normal... and then the BIOS froze.

W.T.F.


I checked the error codes on the motherboard and it said there was a RAM issue, so I pulled both RAM sticks, and tried one at a time in slot A1. With 1 stick in A1 I got a green light on the BIOS, the monitor registered a signal, but nothing came on. I tried other RAM I have lying around in my office... nothing.

I suddenly had the horrible feeling that it was the graphics card. I uninstalled teh 3080 and swapped in a spare 1080 I have, same thing.. I was kind of relieved that didn't work.

Now I started to think maybe it was the motherboard since I could be pretty sure that all my RAM and graphics cards didn't go bad simultaneously.

Popped the CMOS battery to reset the BIOS.. still nothing.

.. ASUS manual was telling me it was probably the CPU.

Either way that would be a couple hundred dollars of a fix.

I finally decided I would cleanup and close up until I could make a trip up the Micro Center... not even knowing what I would need to replace, so resolved to buy a CPU and RAM.

I still had loose leads in the back of the case from the fans that I had disconnected that were part of a branching lead that went to the RBG controller for the fans and the AIO, so I figured since I wanted no lights at all I would just pull the cable from the motherboard RBG header all together to shut off the AIO lights..

I put that RAM back in it's original slots, and hit the power switch one more time.

And it booted to F1 again. I went in and reset all of the fans and RAM speeds and CPU clock, crossed my fingers and saved it. It booted to WIndows. Ta Da!

So the subsystem that decided to kill my system in the first place was the ****ing RBG controller.

OK, well next step is to pull the AIO and replace it with a quiet, RBG-less alternative.

... the God Damn RBG.. unbelievable...
 
Still playing and streaming Overwatch generally nightly, feel free to pop in and say hi! Casra76 ;) FF14 and sometimes I fire up the Series X for whatever has tickled my fancy on the console front since my wife has the PS5 in San Antonio.
 
The endless cycle of modding and tweaking Skyrim, playing for a bit, and then quitting because I remember the terrible, terrible truth:

I don't actually like Skyrim's gameplay.
That's a shame. I love Skyrim, have literally played it for years. Then again, I use 4 cheat-codes... unlimited coin, unlimited lockpicks, flying and god mode. And eventually I am skilled enough in enchanting/smithing to make a sword powerful enough to one-hit a dragon, lol. :giggle:

Flying is breath-taking! The views are gorgeous, landscape you can't see without being in the air! And of course, flying allows you to "discover" places simply by flying over them, enabling you to fast-track to places you've never actually been! It's impossible, imo, to see/do everything available in Skyrim. Over the years I've put well over 150 hours playing (with dozens of different characters) and I can't even count the number of quests I've never done or places I've never found. The only mods I have are the add-on Dragonborn (highly recommended) and Dawnguard (don't bother unless you adore being attacked by vampires every time you step out a door).

So many tricks to learn, as the game changes completely based not only on what you do, but when you do it!

Bah, I talk to much, I know. Skyrim still excites me, lol!
 
So I decided to try out Diablo: Immortal on my phone and played just long enough to remomber why phones suck as a gaming platform.

Here's the weird thing though... it turns out they are releasing Diablo: Immortal on PC as well for free, and so I just went to download it.

The Phone version of the game is 1.9GB ... the PC version is 26GB ... will let you know how it goes.
 
So I decided to try out Diablo: Immortal on my phone and played just long enough to remomber why phones suck as a gaming platform.

Here's the weird thing though... it turns out they are releasing Diablo: Immortal on PC as well for free, and so I just went to download it.

The Phone version of the game is 1.9GB ... the PC version is 26GB ... will let you know how it goes.

Yeah, pass...
 
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is an odd one. I am just getting started, but I love the humor so far(your initial contract is so worth a read), the gameplay seems slow and frustrating, but then I noticed that I had been sitting playing for 3 solid hours(which, as a smoker, is pretty much unheard of...I need to get up and go have a smoke every hour or so normally) totally engrossed. I am not sure how long the game will hold my attention, but so far it is doing pretty well at it. Picked up Arma 3 also as it is on sale, will report on it when I have spent some time in it.
 
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