The Monster Huntin'-ing

The last few weeks have been full of baby bobbing and monster slaying. Without much effort, I've found a group of people to meet at a bar and play Monster Hunter like adults! If you haven't tried it, you should. Drinking a gin & tonic and knocking the holy crap out of a rampaging toad monster won't get old anytime soon.

I'm currently playing Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate (MH4U). It's the first hunting game that's stuck. I played a good bit of Monster Hunter Tri on the Wii U, but, as so often happens, I got distracted by some other gaming purchase. MH4U has some very important additions that make it a fantastic entry to jump into. I'm still glad I play Tri because I was able to find my footing in a game that has a lot of complex systems, but it would be hard to go back. The fourth game in the series introduces enviroments that focus on verticality; requiring the player to jump off cliffs onto monsters or smash their weapon into climbing enemies causing them to fall and become stunned. 

Another big improvement is the story in the single player campaign. MH4U's story is full of humor, adventure, and some kind of evil monster no-goodness! I think my enjoyment is, in no small part, because of the excellent localization by 8-4. They are a Japanese-based localization company that I was surprised to find is responsible for translating some of my favorite Japanese titles! Rogue Galaxy, Nier, Dragon's Dogma, Drakengard 3, and Xenoblade Chronicles X are just a couple I can remember off the top of my head. I enjoy listening to the podcast they do weekly. They are mostly ex-gaming journalists who have lived in Japan so long they don't realize how Japanese they've become.

Back to monster hunting though. We've been meeting up on Mondays and focusing on learning our team dynamic and teaching the new players the ropes. It was really neat to find out what weapon the others gravitated towards. The weapons are each as complex as a good fighting game's characters and it's best to stick with one that you like for a while.

I've been playing the Switch Axe since MH Tri and really love it! It's a giant ax that with the press of a button turns into a giant sword. The animations really make it feel massive and there are a ton of combos that allow you to switch back and forth. The basic rule though is always be swording. That's where you're able to take advantage of the swords innate element and do the most damage. It changes depending on which Switch Axe you have, but each axe has a phial that activates in sword mode to deliver poison, explosive, lightning or a slew of other status effects the monster. In the later fights, it's very important to have the right ax for the right monster. It can decide the fight. 

We'll be meeting next week at a new arcade bar that opened up in Charlotte. It's called Abari and there's not a better place to have our meet up at! I have plans to, at least, beat the story mode before I move on to my next game, but I think Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate will be something I keep coming back to till the sequel is released! 

The next game in the series is titled Monster Hunter Generations and it's considered some of the best hunting yet! It cherry-picks some of the best features of former Monster Hunter games and adds up to one of the most customizable yet accessible games in the series yet! Known as Monster Hunter X (pronounced Monster Hunter Cross) in Japan I've been following this game for a while and it's part of the reason I had to put my fair share of hours into MH4U. A great resource for the game is the youtuber, Gaijin Hunter. I've learned a ton from his videos and high recommend subbing to his channel if you want to learn about a particular weapon.

I'm up for playing with anyone when I can! A new baby doesn't afford all the time in the world, but I sure do love introducing people to the game! Send me a message on Twitter, Google +, or Steam and we'll exchange friend codes for the 3DS.

Backlog for the Baby: Firewatch

In the great backlog wars of 2019 I'm going to regret playing Firewatch first. I had some really great "walking simulators" to choose from, but this one seemed to really just get the experiential first-person narrative right. Since its teasers release I've been intrigued by it's presentation and, seemingly, dialogue heavy experience. I have to say, every bit of excitement was warranted.

The art design captures the grandeur of the great outdoors of Wyoming so well that it made me regret spending my time indoors as a child when I lived there. A lot of the setting of the game my parents and I would drive by on our way into the closest town. It's a game that prioritizes time as a tool for the narrative more than a way to place events linearly on a timeline. The game's days become more like chapters that allowed me to explore with no real penalty and that made all the difference when my searching yielded a particularly heartfelt easter egg. I'd really hate to spoil any of these moments, and they don't change the game in any meaningful way plot-wise, but they can pepper the game with customized tchotchkes of your adventure and subsequent discovers. If that doesn't make sense, I'm sorry, but that's about as specific as I want to get.

The relationship between the two characters is complex in the best of ways. Exposing everything thought transparent in the Telltale's The Walking Dead series. You are given just enough agency to flavor the experience with your own choice, but knowing all the time that these characters are working in the limited scope of their own trauma. You are not in control, they have issues, and you are all the better for it!

This game ranges from 3 to 5 hours depending on how fast the player barrels through the main story. I really think it's a game that can be played through multiple times. After listening to a spoilercast on the game, and learning the crazy amounts of variables that decide what the player experiences, I'm excited to watch my wife's playthrough of the game.

It's pretty annoying writing something about the game, because I very much do not want to spoil anything. I've purposely avoided talking about the actual story, because it was so wonderful for me going in blind to anything other than the great art design and voice direction. I played the game and feel I just finished a fantastic TV series that could only be told in this medium.

Backlog for the Baby

Over the past few months hanging out with my brand new baby boy hasn't afforded much time for gaming. While I'm not surprised about how little not being able to play games has affected my life, it is my main hobby and I've been missing it. My wife and I, with some trial and error, have agreed on an evening a week that the other person can "take off" from kid duties and do something all for them. My wife goes to karaoke, while I plan on playing video games. Also, over the past few weeks I've been peer pressuring a co-worker to get Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate in hopes that we'll meet up on my gaming night for some beers and monster slaying! Anyways, onto the explanation of the blog series.

I've wanted to get my thought down on the huge backlog of games I have on various platforms for quite a while. There are so many games that I start and never finish, it's a problem I share with a lot of people in my online social circles. I want to friggin' beat some of the games! I usually get distracted by an online game of some sort and by the time I comeback to a game I feel I have to start over. Also, I've used the idea of this blog as a pretty easy excuse, not wanting to start really making progress till I feel like actually writing. So I think it's time just to make the promise and stick to it!

I'll just say it now...Earth Defense Force 4.1 is that last game I'm going to purchase for 6 months! This may backfire horribly because I haven't looked at games releasing in the near future yet! I figure, if I do, I'll just make up some concession for myself and compromise the whole affair if I start looking at the calendar. I just chose 6 months out of thin air but that's a pretty good length of time to hold off on buying games and even though gaming is slow going now a days, for me, I think I'll be able to finish some of the core games that have been bugging me that I haven't finished yet!

First on the list is Firewatch! I've been anticipating this game for quite a while and the one evening I played it made me excited to jump into it! The art direction drew me in immediately, and the voice acting is amazing! I'll talk more about it during the next post, but I'm excited to play the game tonight.

Time for some Whiteout!

I've taken quite a long break from Champions Online, but I guess that's the way of things when you have a lifetime sub to something. Eventually you assume it'll be there whenever you feel like coming back to it! Luckily, Champions Online is bustling with crazy amounts of players and last month they wrapped up their second comic series called Whiteout. I followed their previous comic series, Aftershock, closely and made sure to play each episode as soon as it came out! When Star Wars: The Old Republic released I completely neglected Whiteout and figured I comeback to it when it's all finished. Within that time they've rolled out a few neat travel powers and two whole new power sets!

 I hopped in and created two characters using the new power sets but I just plain don't know which one I should take into Whiteout! I'm going to get my gamer friends together and make them read this to help me decide! Muhahahahahaha! Anyone is free to accompany me on Whiteout for the first time! Let's do this!

Kresh

This character just came out of the oven! I created him to check out the new earth-based power set! I haven't come up with much of a backstory for him but I used a few pieces from the new 90's Iron Age and the neat Roin'esh set. I also used the new Distortion Field Acrobatics travel power and it's really sparking up some potentially interesting lore that I'd enjoy developing as I play and unlock more diverse powers. The earth power set seems to have some interesting powers focused around area-of-effect with some great animations!

Relio Windspear 

The other power set that was introduced a while back was wind-based. I created this character when the powers first came out, but it just really couldn't pull me away from the much more interesting electricity power set that I was playing at the time in DC Universe Online. This time around I colored the few wind powers orange and got him out of the tutorial area. Now he's shooting crazy blasts of sand-filled air and flying around in a tornado! I'm sure he'll become more interesting with a few powers from other sets! 

Nailbunny and Omuro Velios

The next two characters I created a while back and used while going through the first comic series. I keep logging to both of them and just hopping or flying through the city! Nailbunny is a Lobo-like screw up who uses a huge weapon that looks like a cross between a mace and a chopper! 

Omuro Velios has the most developed backstory because of his relationship to my main character in CO. He's pretty much some elseworld variant that decided to delve into dark magic to ward away his pact with a very powerful and sadistic god. It comes with some shadow minions and a bunch of other nasty demon powers!!!!

I'm really trying to use this as incentive to pull the trigger on working one of these character up to level 25! I really miss creating an archnemesis! I haven't experienced the nemesis content since my main character and anyone of these characters would make great fodder to develop further! What do you guys think? I'll go with which ever gets the most votes, because I really like them all!

Techland Devs I'm Still Enjoying Dead Island!

I stayed up last night until Dead Island unlocked on Steam. I was ready to rush in and have a ton of fun exploring the island of Banoi! During the three hours we played it, the only time we really ran into a bug or annoyance collectively was when we were all trying to meet up together in-game.

Dead Island does allow you to invite friends into your game, but as of now it's not functioning. It also tells you when another player is adventuring in the same area as you and allows you to join their game with a button press. We eventually had to all stand in the same area of our individual games and wait to see the person's name that we wanted to host the game. It was pretty weird, but we were too determined to get our zombie killing on to think much of it.

What ensued after that was a wonderful meandering adventure that started with me insisting we should go in the exact opposite direction of where the main quests was leading us and try and get into some trouble! I chose the character named Sam B who specializes in pounding dead things with blunt weapons! Dead Island has characters are the real world zombie-apocalypse survivors of Left 4 Dead mixed with the crazy Shooter RPG archetypes in Borderlands. Each of the four characters in the game specialize in a different kind of weapon and have individual skill trees that decide their play style, but in the beginning everyone is pretty much just frantically beating things with paddles and flimsy crowbars till either the zombie or the weapon breaks!

We ended up making a huge circle around the island looting bungalows whenever we found them and eventually piling into a truck and making our way to the first or second main quest of the game. We found side quests hidden everywhere! Some led us to confrontations that ended with us getting kicked off a roof by a bulky zombie and snazzy loot, while others had us flagged down while we were cruisin' to help a man who was pinned in his car.

Eventually I was just too tired and  couldn't play much more. I was starting to realize that I may enjoy things a bit more by myself because anyone in a co-op game can accept quests and I'm really picky about hearing every bit of dialogue and taking time to read all the little extra portfolios and personal I.D. cards. I was playing with a group that barrelled through the quests and never really stopped to listen. It's a rushed feeling that really dampens the experience.

I'd intended to go off to bed but I decided to hop in just one last time to check out some of the other characters statistics that I hadn't really look at yet. The game stuttered and the framerate tanked and since I hadn't yet quit fully from the client after my long session of gameplay I assumed it may be a performance killing memory leak since I'd played the game smooth as a whistle on it's max settings for over three hours.

I popped over to the Steam forums for the game and it was alive with chatting about a ton of bugs and crashes that I really hadn't experienced yet. My memory leak problem was there but also the theory that the devs accidentally submitted the dev build of the game on steam filled the board! Lines of code which supposedly only be in a dev build of the game popped up and also the statement that a debug feature that most PC players are familiar with, No Clip mode, could easily be accessed by simply pressing the Y button.

I was excited to find out if it was try or not so I recorded a video of myself attempting it, and it sure did work! Here's the video:

I had far too much fun with this game to be angered at all! I'm interested in recording a few more videos showing the fun gameplay but I couldn't resist my first new post as I'm getting back into blogging to be about this crazy situation! I'm really glad I had a blast with what is supposedly the buggy, unoptimized version of the game. I'm sure the devs will either have me redownload the whole client or there will be a crazy patch in the next few days! If they don't, imagine the scandal!!! SCANDAL!!!!

Milestone Achieved! Time for a Breather!

So the dust has settled from Funcom’s Reevaluation period, and it’s gotten quite hard to recruit for the guild. I started The Creeping Darkness in Conan, partly, as an experiment to see if we’d be able to start a brand new casual guild that could be support by the game. I’ve spent a few months now recruiting, and to say the least it’s tough.

I’d have to say we were pretty successful since we finished a Tier 1 city. The core members, Openedge1 and his family, Turindal, and I have gone our separate ways for now, trying out new games and all that. We’ll no doubt start things up again when the veterans points are implemented or when the new expansion comes out. Openedge1 still plays the heck out of the game, and I’ve moved on over to Champions Online! For now though The Creeping Darkness in Age of Conan is on hiatus!

The Creeping Darkness: Guild Night Raises The Wall!

As usual, I’m busy as ever. College, Age of Conan, and now…..Champions Online!
Last night we had a huge guild night,all focused around our guild city. The Creeping Darkness is a rather small affair. I refuse to spam /globalchat with a guild recruitment link, and that is certainly to my detriment. I, truly, don’t find anything wrong with it. I just enjoy grouping, or politely chatting with someone, and asking them if they’d like to hear about the guild.

Now that the official rush of the “reevaluation period” is over, we are back to a steady but decidedly quieter pace. We have about eight regulars that hop on and off during the week. The guild night, now on Thursdays at seven o’clock EDT, has become a set group of five returning people. Openedge1, his wife, their son, and a great guild member  known as Krayor, consistently join me to go off and cause some trouble in-game.

For a group of five people, raising the outer wall of a guild city is a daunting task. The resources can be acquired rather easily, Krayor and I saw to it quite early. The real kick in the face is the forty gold that had to be raised to build and move my architecture crafting profession forward!

As I might have said in an earlier post, Openedge1′s wife is the money maker. They have been generous enough to place earning their sons one hundred gold War Horse mount on hold to help build the city. Since launch, The Creeping Darkness has always been a small guild; I actually like it that way. I’d gotten used to the fact that completing a Tier 1 guild city was probably not going to happen.
Imagine my surprise when last week I realized I had enough resources, in my inventory. to build the outerwall, and then was given the rest of the cash from our resident sugar mama! Holy Smokes! It took me about an hour and forty-five minutes to count out, verify, and craft all the things needed!
Here are a few screenshots from our initial meet-up in our city, and the construction of the outer wall:

So that’s that…well not quite! After getting all the materials together for last night, I spent time setting up our next goal. It being the inner wall, and having another nineteen gold investment, I’d figured it be a far off goal. That was until we found out that we’d collect all the resources need…just needed the cash! Yet again, Shanrhiana, popped in like some Dickens Age Benefactor, and gave us the gold needed! A few minutes of hurried crafting later:

What a great guild night! A full Tier 1 city! Next week we’ll be trying our hand at some more interesting instances, and I’ll attempting to recruit a bit. Thanks everyone who saw the guild city to completion!

The Creeping Darkness now has a Champions Online branch! Anyone that would like to join just in-game mail me, @Blamefulgecko.