Favourite Spells: Vicious Mockery

So as you may know I like D&D a lot. To the point that with some friends its all I talk about. To the point that I sometimes wonder if I'm getting annoying.

So I though that rather than continue to pour a steady stream of random D&D over my friends outside of our sessions I'd start pouring it over you.

Thats right, before now I didnt consider that a steady stream of D&D, just isolated D&D posts.

With that in mind I thought I'd start one new segment with others potentially to follow, titles 'Favourite Spells'.

In this segment I will pick a spell and talk about why I like it, and under what situations.

For our first spell, we have;

I have not played many games of D&D, I've DM'd a lot, 2 and a half years of this campaign with 1-2 games a month for the first 2 years and weekly since the pandemic started.

In fact I've probably played three games. Two in D&D 4e 10 years ago and 1 in D&D 5e.

In my 5e game I was one of the most D&D knowledgeable players and so wanted to give the others a chance to shine how they wanted to shine, and then be there to pick up the pieces, so I picked a Bard. Someone who could be the face if nobody else was comfortable with RPing, and had some healing to help the others and also had some Debuffs to make sure that the others were on able to feel great about themselves.

The character sheet of my Bard, Cyran Scepter who is one of the main shopkeeps in my regular campaign can be found here.

So the only offensive spell I had was the vicious mockery cantrip, and that is the spell I will be talking about today.

So the spell reads;

You unleash a string of insults laced with subtle enchantments at a creature you can see within range. If the target can hear you (though it need not understand you), it must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or take 1d4 psychic damage and have disadvantage on the next attack roll it makes before the end of its next turn.

This spell's damage increases by 1d4 when you reach 5th level (2d4), 11th level (3d4), and 17th level (4d4).

 So first of all the spell isn't a huge damage dealer. Despite it being one of the only 2 ways I could deal damage, and the only way my character was willing to do it, considering I was playing him as a bit of a coward, I chose it over a spell that would have given me more damage for a couple of reasons.

First of all it fit with my character concept of a non-combatant croud controller. He didn't do much damage and didn't get into the fight, but he helped everyone by keeping the enemies off their game.

This spell in particular helped me by giving the enemy disadvantage on it's next attack, making it so that other players would be less likely to hit.

But the main reason I like the spell is because it's a fun role playing spell and it leads to some of the best moments.

You literally insult a person so viciously that it hurts.

This spell offers the players an opportunity to throw out creative insults, which if they're paying attention can be great fun.

When I played my bard we were fighting a dragon construct made up of wood and I was able to kill it from an insult. And that moment was just fantastic.

Imagine, if you will, we were on the back foot, one or two or our players were down and Cyran was gettign frustrated. Stuck inside a building, as a last bout of frustration welled up inside him, he poked his head out and yelled up at the dragon 'Why don't you just piss off, you glorified rocking horse' and the thing came falling down from the sky and died as it crashed face first into the earth.

One of the most important things for me is how a spell functions in play, and especially roleplay. Yes firebolt is a much better damage dealer, but it just isn't that interesting from a role playing perspective.

P.S. Since the last post I have completed an additional 4 games to get me up to 22 games since lockdown began.

my full list is now;

1. Control
2. Infamous First Light
3. Beyond 2 souls
4. Titanfall 2
5. God of war (2018)
6. Red Dead Redemption 2
7. The Witcher 3
8. Assassin's Creed Odyssey
9. Horizon Zero Dawn
10. Star Wars Battle Front 2 + the expansion story
11. Rise of the Tomb Raider
12. Devil May Cry 5
13. Uncharted 4
14. Dishonoured 2 (as Emily)
15. Life is strange 2
16. Hitman 2 (2018)
17. Last of Us 2
18. Observation
19. Desperados 3
20. Little Nightmares
21. Uncharted The Lost Legacy
22. The Council

Next I'll be playing Kings Quest (2015). I'm starting to run out of games at this point. I'm planning to move away from home later this year and I was hoping to use my backlog of games to save myself some money since I will not have as much disposable income, however this pandemic has put that plan in serious jeopardy.

I hope everyone is well.

 - James

Recently the Drawfee youtube channel which I have posted a video of in the past, was let go of from CollegeHumor and have become independent. They really are a great relaxing channel where they draw cool things and chat about it. They seem to be genuinely friends and it's great to watch/listen to.

The art of changing editions

I've been running my D&D campaign for about 2 and a half years now, and at the beginning of the year one of my players moved away, but he was one of the most invested players and didn't want to lose the game, so I made a decision I'd been considering for a while, which was to transition from D&D 3.5 to D&D 5E.

Pretty much everything we were using transferred 1 for 1, but there were some things that we lost. one of our players was playing a beguiler in 3.5, which was basically a half wizard, half rogue with a leaning towards the magical side.

Transferring over the closest to that we could find was a bard, which had a lot of the magic, but none of the rogue. So to explain this discrepancy I put together a plan, one that would take six months to come to fruition.

Over 6 months of gaming I paid careful attention to what everyone was doing, kept notes of all of the things that they might want to do that could involve a rogue and finally sent them on a quest to a small town that the leaders of the city they lived in had lost contact with.

It took a little over a week to get there, and they had some adventures on the way, but when they finally turned up things were strange. The town was far emptier than it should have been. There were a lot of buildings that looked recently built and never used. People were acting odd, going up to these empty buildings and then looking confused and walking away, some were crying for no reason, others were giving strange pieces of information that didn't make sense, but they truly believed, like there was no town lord and never had been, but the manor was built in case one turned up.

Finally things started to come to a head the following morning when the party woke up. One group awoke in the tavern to find that the bartender that they had spoken to the previous day wasn't there and nobody knew who they were talking about, almost as if he hadn't existed.

What was even stranger however was the second group who slept out of town found an adventurer's bag in their camp that they didn't recognise. Searching through it they found a bunch of equipment, all of which they remembered as their own gear. Looking through their own packs they found the gear missing. amongst the items in the new bag they found this diary.

The Diary was written by a young rogue named Lyra, who, if the diary was to be believed, had always been a part of the party, but they had forgotten her. It  depicted all of their adventures together with small differences that included her into their adventures. It talked intimately about each member of the party and even had her final will, a message to each of them.

Reading the diary together with the group left my players with all the feelings, and a feeling of 'oh this is what D&D can be'. And that's where I ended that session.

The following week was chaos. Characters going all over the place in a frantic bid to figure out what was going on, until finally realising that while deafened everything changed. The buildings became run down buildings with many years of use and several months of neglect.

Every time they were no longer deafened I acted like I didn't know what they were talking about, and every time they were deafened again I acted like it was all new information.

One player had the idea to talk to a tree, which couldn't hear and it led them to the basement beneath the mansion. Finally making their way to the mansion they explored it, some deafened, some not, until they found their way to the basement, where they found a disgusting creature that they couldn't explain, as well as the bodies of many others, including a small halfling woman, dressed as they would have expected of Lyra. And that was the end of game 2.

Game 3 was a battle to the death against this creature, which they eventually won, though they got closer than ever before to death, knocking all of them down to below a third of health. Once they killed the creature  Luro, the one that the Diary said was Lyra's husband carried her up to his flying mount and left, flying back towards the previous city.

Even now, after the creature was dead, they did not remember this sixth member of their party. The game ended there.

We had to wait a game after that as Luro's player was sick, so we followed the others chasing after him back to the city, but the following game we watched as Luro found the ingredients to the spells he wished to cast, took Lyra to a church of Pelor where they helped him to cast Raise Dead, bringing her finally back from the dead.

And she did not remember him and the party either.

We continue the game even still, with Lyra alive, and friends with the party, but no longer knowing them as she once did.

What I did, in short was take Goblin Punches False Hydra combined it with the missing pieces of their characters  and put them together into a team member who has been lost from their memory. The player and characters memories remembered Luro doing each of the things that Lyra did because that's how the False Hydra's ability works. It takes things out and the character's brains fill in the gaps as best as they can.

My players loved it, and yet were broken hearted. It was one of the best things I've done to date.

Specifically I used the mature version Oats1321's false hydra stats, and added 200hp and +1AC.

Cheers,

 - James

Mulaney-Tube

P.S. Since my last post I have completed a couple more games. I'm now at 18 games. I've completed Last Of Us 2 and Observation, I started to fall behind, playing Desperados 3 from 2 weeks ago and having a break to play through observation last week, but I'm hoping -HOPING- to finish Desperados 3 this week, and maybe even something else like Uncharted Lost Legacy.

Down The Road - Red Dead Redemption 2

Finally after however long I got to finish Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PS4, so I'm going to talk about it.

Red Dead Redemption 2 was the long awaited sequel of the adventures of cowboy with a heart of gold, John Marston. It's set a couple of years before the events of Red Dead 1, following John's kind of adopted brother Arthur Morgan as the events that lead to the end of the gang of Dutch Van Der Linde play out.

So I have to say up front that overall this game was good.

Not amazing but good.

I started Red Dead 2 when the game came out, like everyone else, but after several chapters and many hours my motivation got a bit weaker, I reached a bit of a slow patch and I stopped playing. It wasn't exactly because the game was bad, but because it was providing something I wasn't looking for at the time, which brings me to my main gripe with Red Dead 2, Time Wasting.

Now this is something that I feel like other people really liked in this game, but it annoyed me to no end. there was so much time in the game spent on not doing things, because in real life you wouldn't be able to do them so quickly, that it made the game feel really slow and boring to me in a lot of places. The main way this came across was in the travelling. Red Dead 2 has a fast travel system, but it doesn't want you to use it. You have to wait a while and spend a bunch upgrading your camp before you even unlock it and it only works from your camp to somewhere you've been. The rest of the time it expects you to ride your horse around or take a train. Now the riding does have a nice cinematic mode that lets you stop controlling so that it takes you there, but not only are the cinematic ride and the train ride all in real time, but the horse ride doesn't stop random encounters from happening, so you could very easily be halfway through a journey, when your not playing and suddenly a bunch of bandits are shooting you, and you have to get back into the controls very quickly.

So when you finish up a quest and you're far from your base you have to ride all the way back, which can be up to fifteen real world minutes. I found this very frustrating because it meant that in my 1-2 hours of gameplay per night I would find that I've only been able to do one or two missions because I've spent a little under half my time just travelling.

The other gripe I had was the epilogue, for the same reason mostly. It felt like a waste of time.

Without giving away spoilers, it's a 4+ hour epilogue, most of which you spend building a farm, doing ranch work and mostly just being a rancher. The final part of the epilogue was a big fight on a mountain as you try to get your vengeance, but waiting 3-4 hours between the admittedly excellent main story finale felt like a massive break in the pacing that didn't feel nice at all.

I kind of understand what they were doing, they wanted to show you how things came to be in the original, but the things that they showed felt a lot more like how in 'Solo a star wars movie' they gave the dice on his mirror significance and a history, like it wasn't important before but you're acting like it is. showing where wolverine got his jacket in the x-men origin movie, I would have been happy with 'he bought it' but you've given it significance. In this they show how John got the farm from the original game. I had always assumed that he bought it. As it turns out i was right so I'm not sure why I needed to learn that over 4 hours.

What I will say though is that it's a game that knows how to make you care. It knows how to pull on your heart strings.

The end of the main story, the music, the slow deterioration of the gang and your family... it's brutal and beautiful.

The characters for the most part were great. I had the same problem early on with the game that I did with Last of us, where the main character was just kind of an ass hole and I didn't like him, but as the game wore on and I did more and more honourable things to improve his outlook the more I cared. To the point that I simply cannot imagine the game played dishonourably.

Overall I think it's a good game that just requires more patience than I have. By the end I loved the story, and it was almost enough to get over the time wasting.

Right now Red Dead 2 has a metacritic score of 97 and  a user score of 8.2. I think that the user score is pretty close to the mark. I'd give it an 80%, maybe so low as a 75%, but no lower. It was a genuinely good game that just happened to be asking for something I wasn't willing to give; my time. Something that at the time of playing was a high value commodity so the constant having to manually go everywhere in real time was frustrating.

Cheers,
 - James
Red Dead Tube

P.s.
Recently completed Hitman 2 and then had a couple days off of games and now I'm playing Last of Us 2!

Down the Road - Last of Us

When I was in Uni I always wanted to create a games review website called '3 weeks later'. it would be your average run of the mill games review site but with one big difference; I'd do the review 3 weeks later after all the hype died down.
Grand Theft Auto 4, amazing game when you first play it, but 3 weeks later? it's pretty good, but I want to kill my cousin, and the fact I'm still getting tutorials is jarring and makes me feel like I'm still not out of the opening. You see what I mean, how would I review the game 3 weeks later with the benefit of time?
However I don't have the time to be sure that I'll have a review ready exactly 3 weeks later so if I want to do it I have to change the title (or be okay with people being confused). Thus 'Down the Road' is born.
So with the sequel coming out in a couple of months I'm going to start with;

Specifically the Remastered version.
I played the Last of us when it first came out in June 2013, and I liked it, but I found the controls a pain, especially in combat and eventually just sort of stopped playing. I remember getting about 1/3 of the way through and just picking something else up and not going back.
I also remember going back once more when it was remastered and not getting into it, not even getting as far as I had, but I'd always heard how amazing it was, and I've spent the last couple years watching Critical role (one of the cast of which plays Ellie) so recently (7 years late) I finally went back to try and complete it and boy was I in for a ride.

So first of all lets address the issue I had when I first played it; the controls.
The controls, even now, are garbage. Especially the combat controls. Aiming was awful, trying to hit things without wasting a ton of ammo on flailing shots felt awful, and trying to do anything in that scene where you're hung upside down and there's zombies running in is like trying to hit a bulls eye while throwing your darts with your ass.
That said, by about halfway through the game I started getting better at it. I don't know if this was because I'd bought the right upgrades, or because I'd just gotten used to the controls, but I started being able to shoot straight, which felt fantastic. It didn't make up for the shoddy early game controls, but now I was past them I could enjoy the game, potentially how I was always meant to enjoy the game.
There's also a part of me that wonders if the bad controls were intentional because you're not playing a soldier, your just playing some guy and you're not meant to be good at shooting, but even if that's the case it's bad game design. If a dev studio did that on a free to play game they'd be out of the running before it reached launch.

So the controls were garbage and it took about half the game to make them usable, and it's about then that something strange starts to happen.
It's about then that you start to care. Ellie's always been this tough no nonsense kid that you root for, but Joel's always been kind of an ass hole, and then suddenly, a little by little you can see the humanity coming back into Joel and while he's not great at saying it, you can see how much he cares about her.
The story and the twists of this game are the only thing that matter about it by the end. The things you experience with them, the stuff that happens, good and bad... it's very possibly the best story game I've ever played. At least one grounded in the real world. I love me some sci-fi/fantasy.
It's hard to express how good the game is without spoiling things, but it really was great.

The best advice for anyone wanting to play this again and having a tough time with the controls is this; Stealth is your friend.
At the beginning when I couldn't shoot for shit I spent the majority of my time sat in one spot silently watching everyone and slowly picking targets off one at a time and never firing a shot. If you can't shoot, then don't be seen.

Overall I loved this game, hard to get into, but once I did I devoured it. played it every night until I completed it.

Does it hold up to the 95% it has on metacritic? probably not, I can't give a game that has such bad early game controls a score that high, but is it worth it for the story? without a doubt. If this was a movie or a TV-show I would have binge watched it five times by now.

Hope that was an interesting read. I'll see if there are any more of these that I could do in the future.

 - James
Cat-tube

Fallout 76, a bad experience.

So I went into Fallout 76 knowing how bad everyone said it was and to be honest I didn't have that experience. i played it for a couple of hours with my uncle and we had a good time. It wasn't a full fallout game by any means, but I hadn't paid full price and looking at it as just a sandbox to have fun with someone it was a fun thing to do. Run around murder things and maybe build up my settlement, but today, only my second time on the game things started going down hill.
I was level 4, just out of the gate, hadn't even finished tutorial quests they give you to learn about the game and these 2 guys about 10 levels higher than me started attacking me. At first it was just annoying, they were hitting me but it was doing nothing because I was below the level where I could engage in PVP. but then I levelled up, still not out of the tutorials and they started being able to hurt me, sure it wasn't a lot, but they just wouldn't stop. they followed us around for the entire rest of the game attacking and then killing us.
there's a system they have in the game that is supposed to prevent this sort of griefing and that is that if people attack you and don't respond they kill you and they get a bounty on your head. but there are 2 things this doesn't take into account; until you respond this takes a long time to do so you're basically stuck not playing the game because you have a bunch of ass holes griefing you slowly to death, thus destroying your fun
and 2, there has to be players on the server that want to go after criminal players. on this server world clearly there was not because We got killed a couple of times and they just kept finding us on the map and keep on coming for us.

This really feels like a flaw in the game to me. maybe because I don't come from a DayZ background, maybe cos I never really picked up on Ark survival, but I went into this game to play with my friend and that experience ended up not happening because these two guys wouldn't let us. not only that but when they killed me they stole resources off me, so it actively reversed my game progression up to that point, and that's a really bad feeling when you've barely started the game.
It didn't even give us the option of changing server worlds, We could have quit and come back, but by that point we're basically done playing.

For me this is a very poorly designed system, it relies too much of the assumption that other people will want to stop the griefers, and doesn't take into account the idea that people might buy the game 2 months after release.

We will likely pick it up again, because we like playing co-op enough to give it a second shot, but if I'd been playing this single player I would be uninstalling the game now.

- James
Fallout Tube

Wild FAQ Star

Don't worry, for those of you who don't care in the slightest about Wildstar, MMOs, Games or Sci-fi in general this isn't going to be turning into a wildstar blog - however if you don't like any of those things I'm not certain what your even doing here. Do you even Geek?

Since playing wildstar I've noticed that a few questions come up more than any other in the zone and advice chat systems so since I am still verymuch infected with the Wildstar bug I thought I'd write yet another post about it with these questions answered.

Question 1
"How do I change my costume?"
Answer!
You've been playing for a little while, huh? found a sweet outfit that you think you want to keep wearing, but it's stats just don't do it for you anymore? Well that's fine because wildstar has costumes!
Unlike in the beta there is no longer a button or a menu to bring up anywhere in the game that allows the player to change their costume on a whim. There are now NPCs in all main hubs called Protostar Appearance Modification Vendors (or Stylists). These NPCs are protostar employees with a special symbol in the shape of an eight point star with a falling drop of ink in the middle above their heads.
Since launch the player can go to these friendly Protostar employees and change their costumes.
Last thing though: the player must be level six in order to use them and level fourteen to dye their clothes.

Question 2
"How do I get a mount?"
Answer!
It can be tiring running around all day on the thing at the ends of your legs. With this advanced a society it seems quite ridiculous that anyone should even have to think about walking or running on the ends of their legs. Thankfully the exiles and the dominion both came up with a solution to that: Mounts! That's right, they came up with the same idea at the same time and implemented it simultaneously. See? there's more that unites than divides. but its still fun to blow up each others faces.
At level fifteen the player unlocks their riding skill, and if you've been scrimping and saving since you landed on nexus you should be able to afford one! Alas you will not be able to use your beta reward or your deluxe edition reward hover boards as they are locked until level twenty-five, but you will be able to go to the mount vendor in your capitol city and buy a mount for the low, low, low price of ten gold, sixty-seven silver and fifty-two bronze. You do get some really nice options that are different for Dominion and Exile, but at this point in the game it's unlikely that you'll be able to afford a mount, especially since you'll have just spent all your money on your house at level fourteen.

Question 3
"How do I get a house?"
Tired after a long day adventuring? after making Nexus a safer place for those around you? Then you probably want somewhere you can lay down. Somewhere you can relax. Somewhere you can hang your hat and all the other décor items you've looted off of big bad monsters!
At level fourteen your likely not quite leaving the first big area of gameplay yet, but that's the level you can first use housing. You get it from the main hub, either by ignoring the quest line that pops up when you first spawn in your faction hub, or by following it. I suggest following it as it gives you free décor items to use in your brand new Protostar house!
At fourteen you can use a taxi to travel to your faction hub and a quest com will come up from a protostar housing representative. It will lead you to where you get your housing plot and explain a little about the housing system and transforming your tent into a fully fledged house.

Question 4
"How do I form my guild?"
You've been playing with these guys for a login time, just playing together, working together, levelling up together, its almost as if your a little gang all of your own! Well why not make it official? Make a guild!
At Level twelve, with ten gold in your pocket head on over to your faction hub and go looking for your friendly neighbourhood guild registrar, ask a guard for directions. Its as simple as that. Go to a registrar, Put in your new guild name, create your insignia and your good to go.
Invite players either by going into the guild menu (social menu with O, then switch to guild tab) and press invite and insert their name or type /ginvite [playername]
And that's it, enjoy your guild.

Hope that helps!
Anything else you want to know leave it in the comments and I'll post another!

Love-The-Quickness-Of-The-DLC-Drop
- James

Wild Star Post Launch impressions

So wildstar head start started on Saturday and I played it. A lot.
It came out officially today and I'm playing it. A lot.
Playing on the beta was different from the full game, not a lot, but there were some things that I didn't notice or that changed between beta and release, so I figured I'd give you my opinions post-launch. Both new points and some things I've been thinking the whole time that I had hoped would be fixed by launch.

First of all I want to point out that I really love this game. Gameplay wise and world wise it's fantastic compared to any other MMO I've ever played. the world looks amazing, the gameplay is fun and exciting. It's the first MMO I've played in a long time that I think I might max my character out as a solo player.
Seriously, I can't stress enough how much fun I'm having.

But there are a couple of things that are bugging me, or that they could have done better.
The first of which is getting into PVP as a solo player.
Now I'm not usually one to indulge in the PVP madness, but this game was different, it felt like something I'd really get into, and at level 6 it tells you that you have access to a battleground. But it doesn't show you how to get into it. before you ask, yes theres a group finder, but its not intuitive. I didn't understand at all what it was showing me because it was offering me things that I wasn't high enough level to use yet, and the things I thought I was allowed to use were greyed out. or at least that's what it seemed like to me.
I'd love to tell you that when I got into the PVP it was better, but I never got into a game. I THINK I queued for one, but an hour later I had to leave and hadn't got in so I'm thinking that I was in the wrong queue.

The second thing is that the free mounts that the player gets for playing the beta or buying the deluxe version are not accessible until level twenty-five. I know this isn't a big deal, you still get the mounts, you just have to wait an extra ten levels. But I feel like; if the player pays extra for mounts then they should be allowed to use them as soon as they can use mounts.
If the developers wanted to make sure they player had to spend all of their money at level fifteen then they should have added a mount skill of some kind. But to make the player pay for a mount when they were given one by the company seems a bit sucky.

Third thing, and I think this is the most important one, is that the missions are not epic. They've spent a lot of time making the game seem awesome. Like; fireworks and huge metal characters for levelling up awesome. Like the biggest, baddest raids I've ever seen awesome. Like the voice over whenever you die, teleport or level up being freaking hilarious awesome.
But then the missions are just pieces of text. Just little speech bubbles that feel a little... meh. its like we're back in the beginning of MMOs and its the only way we can show it.
Look at TOR, look at TSW, theres no reason to use speech bubbles- un-VOd speech bubbles. if they added that, made it so that the missions felt more epic, if they gave me a reason to read them, put me in a cut scene maybe, it would be perfect, but right now? meh I'll just click and skip the flavour text.

Still amazingly fun though, the crafting is so in depth, the gameplay is amazing, grouping up is hella fun. I'm loving it. but I'd like it if they fixed the above stuff... and put in a pet system and/or a class that could tame the wild animals of Nexus.

Launch-Tubage
James

Doctor Who Legacy

I found this game on accident. Really, most things work out that way, right? But I found it while looking for a different Doctor Who game in the App Store. It was free, so I figured what the heck.

Now before this game, I was kinda addicted to Candy Crush. And I HATE that game. The company is horrible IMO and I didn't want anything to do with it, but the game was simple/challenging and I needed a mind-clearing game before bed.

So I started up Doctor Who Legacy and was surprised to find it's a gem matching game. Like Candy Crush, but so much better and more complex. The game works like this - you have a bunch of colored gems, and you match them in a row of three or more. Even better, you have a team of Doctor Who characters that you put together, that dictate what attack type (by color and strength) you do.

That means I can have my favorite character of all time - Stormmaggedon!!!! - and other favorites - like Elizabeth X and Clara - damaging up while Rory heals. Sounds fun, right? Hopefully, cuz I'm horrible at explaining it.

The art is the real shine of this game. The characters are beautiful in their own right, and the backgrounds look fantastic. Aside from the occasional confusing background (Rorybot in New York?), the cleverness and thought process into the details is fantastic.

Gameplay is repetitive, which is to be expected, but it's still fun. I find myself playing this outside of my "bedtime" because I enjoy it so much. Plus the different characters and abilities make the game exciting and challenging in an enjoyable way.

Bottom line: it's free. Seriously. You should try it out. And when you love it, drop a few bucks and buy some crystals in the game. It helps you out AND unlocks the fan area, which lets you get some characters first and easier. Plus it supports the game, which it is well deserving of.

Upcoming

I've been doing a lot of game reviews recently so I thought I'd take a minute to give some advance notice of games I'll be looking at. This way at least if you're getting excited for something you'll know when/if I'll be taking a look.

 

Well, this weekend I may or may not be playing Wildstar, it's uncertain as their Non Disclosure Agreement is still heavily in place and I wont be able to talk about it whether I play it or not. So I guess theres no reason to mention it... except that I'm really looking forward to the game eventually coming out. it looks like a lot of fun, and like it's mixing up the MMO mechanics really nicely and in a way that brings a breath of freshness to the genre.
If you haven't seen it check it out here, http://www.wildstar-online.com/

I've been playing Toukiden for a week or so now and I'm enjoying it, but I haven't played enough to give a good review. Next week I hope I'll be able to do a review. It's fun, a lot like monster hunter but with a more eastern overlay. Where Monster hunter had dragons, dinosaurs and reptiles Toukiden has demons of all varieties. If you want to check it out here's their website, http://www.toukiden.eu/

Thief 4 is the latest game coming out on the PS4 and it'll be out next Friday so I'm hoping for some fun with that. I didn't play the old games but it seems to have all the things I've liked from other games like Dishonoured, Bioshock and things like it. Not so much magic powers, but multiple ways to do things, realistic stealth. I'm hoping to hit it hard on the weekend it's out and write up a review the following week. Here's their website, http://www.thiefgame.com/

I started playing Killzone Shadowfall recently and while so far the story is a little generic and confusing it looks very nice, so I'll definitely give it a good chance and write up my thoughts at some point. either the week after Thief or if I'm not ready for reviewing thief I'll do it in it's place. https://www.killzone.com/en_GB/shadowfall

 

The last game on my list I'm not sure when I'm going to play. I don't like scary games. I'm not good with scary films. Things that scare me in general... not good. It's strange, I'm not the sort of person to believe in the fantastical and yet this stuff... well it freaks me out and that's why I want to play it on camera. the problem of course is I only have twitch.tv to show from my PS4 (which I have it on) and at the moment they don't archive from the PS4. I'm not sure when I'll be taking a look at this, when I do I'll let you know. http://redbarrelsgames.com/games.php

Tubage
-James

Not so secret

I always find it odd when I meet another person of my age that's into the same things that I'm embarrassed to be into.
Whether its anime, or magic the gathering, or comic books, or in this case, pokemon games, it always throws me when someone asks if I like it and they aren't looking to make fun of me.
In the case of pokemon games, a new one came out on Saturday and I though it might be fun to talk about it, then Liz said we'd do a podcast about it and I couldn't do a blog post so instead I thought I'd talk about how silly it is to be insecure about liking things that you like (except my little pony, you bronies need to stop... now... okay, even the bronies can have their horses)

For years I've quietly enjoyed the things that I like but am embarrassed to like. Collected models, played games, watched movies, silently afraid that someone might find out that I have sci-fi statues or play pokemon games or watch anime films and movies.
But why do I do this? Because in our society it's frowned upon? No, people might find it odd but it's not frowned upon. Because people find it odd? maybe, but why should I care? the sorts of people who find it odd, and that it being odd matters to are not the same people that I would interact with.
But I think that's it, me, and people like me are self conscious about that sort of thing, about being considered weird.
But here's the truth: we are weird, and that's great. I'd rather be weird than identical to everyone else, so why should I care what other people think? Why should you?
Since getting this game, since starting to play it I've bumped into a surprising number of people who don't necessarily fit the games target audience, who play it anyway. They don't care, so why should I?

I guess my point is that you shouldn't hide who you are. You shouldn't pretend to be something you're not for the sake of others because if they care that little about you that something like pokemon is going to stop the friendship then it wasn't a great friendship to begin with.
Love what you love, do what you do, have fun where you can have fun. Life is too short to pretend not to love the things you love so that a few people will dislike you a little bit less.

Tubage
- James

p.s. extra life is coming up, are you getting involved? - or do you just want to donate?