Chilling Out and Bouncing Around in Slime Rancher VR

So, the other day I was talking with my Discord VR buddy (/waves at NV) about a VR game I want to make. While I was discussing it with him, he noted that in some way what I was describing sounded a lot like the game Slime Rancher. 

Slime Rancher is one of those games that I had always heard mention of, but never really looked at. This is a six- or seven-year-old game at this point, and honestly, I can't believe I never checked it out to be honest. So, because my buddy mentioned it, I absolutely had to go check this game out.

Caging up the Big ol Pink Rock Slimes

My kids were equally shocked I had never played Slime Rancher when I talked to them about it. In their words, it's just a chill tycoon game that's easy to play. 

Although chilling with Slime Rancher sounded pretty good, I was more excited to try the VR playground version of the game that you get for free when you purchase the base game . . . despite the warnings from Goldtail the Steam reviewer.

If you launch with Steam VR, you'll get a smoother graphical presentation, but from the get-go you're greeted with a control scheme using Vive controllers.

Those controls translated over to Quest controllers, however, took a lot of getting used to. I'm not sure why the joystick wasn't used to just move you around . . . instead you needed to point yourself in a direction and use the squeeze trigger on the left controller to move you forward. To rotate your head you have to downclick to the side with the joystick to tilt 15 degrees. Once I figured that out though, it was really no problem navigating the environments.

(Important to note, you can launch the game with Oculus VR from Steam, but I got a lot of graphical stuttering when I did . . . controls weren't much better tbh.)

Rubber Ducks and tons of toys in the base for you to play with

The playground comes with a home base and three world environments: a glowing mushroom swamp, the standard desert mountains, and zelda-esque ancient ruins.

pink slimes and meow slimes playing together in VR

You can use your suction gun much like you do in the base game of slime rancher to suck up slimes, goodies, and plorts. On the quest controllers you'll need to click down on the right joystick to shoot those objects out.

All in all, there's really no game here to play aside from feeding slimes food and putting them in cages to make them combine. Really, this is just to see the world of Slime Rancher all around you in VR fashion, which is pretty fun. Getting in a cage full of bouncing slimes is kind of fun. You'll get knocked around and feel surrounded by happy little slimes.

Magical Green Goobers of fun!

I take that back, there is "one" game-like element that I found. In the desert mountains environment, you can find a basketball hoop that once you shoot a slime into it, queues some new music and floats up and down while you try to make baskets into the hoop with your captured slimes. (side note: it's not that easy to do -- those slimes are slippery!)

Shooting baskets with slimy bois

If you're looking for a fun environment to run around in and own a copy of Slime Rancher, jump on in and check it out. Once in a while you can find Slime Rancher on super discount. I actually bought it for an astounding $2 in November during the autumn sale, but typically when it goes on sale, it's $5, which still ain't bad.

Happy Dueling!

Recent Brawl Pass Updates and the impossibility of Mythic rank

GAHHH! I'm so frustrated right now!  I don't think I'll ever hit Mythic rank in Brawl Stars. I'm not that good at the game and don't have a good, solid PvP team to play with. I went on the worst losing streak today from mid-Diamond 2 all the way down to the bottom of Diamond 1. So frustrating.

GRRRRRR! I SUCK AT THIS GAME!

The highest I've ever reached is Diamond 3 and the creep up the ladder to Mythic seems like an impossibility for me. It's that same level of rage I used to get when I was playing competitive Overwatch and not being able to get out of the Gold ranks.

Ok, now that my rage is out of the way . . . a lot has happened in Brawl Stars since the last time I posted about it. Let's take a couple deep breaths and talk about it.

(calmly breathing -- a zen beach scene emerges in the distance -- ok, let's talk)

First up, we had the whole Angels vs. Demons Brawl Pass season. It was a really cool and well-done season that involved a lot of really great skins, some neat game modes, and, yes, the angel and demon books played a part in it all. Basically, you'd fill out your power books and select which power you wanted to bring into a match. There were some interesting powers you could choose from like siphoning life off your enemies, resurrecting after defeat, and even spawning enemies when you killed another player.  Great stuff.

EMZ's skin was my favorite from the event.

Next, I finished maxing out Squeak, Bull, and Angelo with all of their hypercharge powers and everything. It was a lot of work, but I got it done. I'm now sitting on 19 Max-level characters -- 11 of which also have their hypercharge powers. (Just to put that in perspective, there are a total of 87 characters and I only own 67 of those . . . it's an infinite grind)

Next up to max will be Pearl thanks to this hypercharge acquisition

After Angels vs. Demons, the new season that happened involved a cadre of cartoon styles mashed into one Brawl Pass Season named "Starr Toon Studios 2." There are some super great skins involved in this season. I've actually been tempted to buy this pass a few times, but I'm staying strong. I kind of feel like I've already spent enough on this stupid game . . . ESPECIALLY WHEN I CAN'T RANK UP TO MYTHIC RAWR!

(calmly breathing -- a zen forest scene envelops me -- ok, let's continue talking)

Also, the holidays happened and clubs everywhere were cracking open a ton of presents for the season. The club I'm in managed to get 14 presents, and on Christmas Day they gave every player a few more. It was a present opening extravaganza in Brawl Stars! Two of the gifts I received were hypercharges: One for Colt (who I already had at max) and also for Jackie. Yay! Free hypercharges are the best gift of them all!

Legendary Christmas presents are the best presents!

Finally, you may have thought the Spongebob Crossover was crazy, but get this . . . Brawl Stars is crossing over with Toy Story right now! That's right, you can play as a super overpowered Buzz Lightyear in regular game modes (not competitive thank goodness). He's a temporary character, but really fun to play. In addition to Buzz, you can unlock new Toy Story-themed skins for Colt (Woody skin), Bibi (Bo Peep skin), and Jessie (Jessie Jessie skin lol).

So cool you can play Buzz three different ways!

Brawl Stars continues to be an incredibly fascinating mobile game for me with a ton of adrenaline-inducing fun . . . even if it makes me rage a bit when I'm playing the competitive ranked games. In my eyes, Brawl Stars is now officially the Fortnight of competitive mobile gaming.

I don't know if I have the patience and skill to move the needle on ranked games until it all comes to an end. This current season will end in a little over 5 days from now and Ranked will do the same in 4 days.  Oh well. The good news is that new fun will be here to ring in the new year of Brawl Stars soon!

Happy Dueling!

Christmas Redux 2024

Hey all! I hope you had a very merry Christmas as we head into the new year. 2024 was a year of big changes and struggles for me and my family, but I'm happy to report that our Christmas was just as great as ever!

With our new house comes a little smaller family room space. Because of that we opted for a skinnier tree that was still very beautiful with presents around it on Christmas Eve.

Santa always lines up the kids' presents and stockings on the couch for them to open in the morning. 

The theme for matching pajamas this year was Kirby. The kids were comfy cozy and ready to have some Christmas fun.

A big theme for this year's gift-giving was warm clothing since we've moved to Utah from Texas. It got cold in Texas occasionally, but not like it is here. New coats and boots were warmly received! 

The family got me a lot of great dad gifts this year, including some of the missing New Mutant comics I don't have in my collection and a few old-school Wacky Packages. 

Also, the great thing about this Christmas was that it snowed just a bit here. I shoveled our walks and snapped pictures of our yard out in the cold for fun.

So there you go! I had a great Christmas with the family!  We got a lot of winter clothes, season passes to a local amusement park, and a bunch of other fun odds and ends. Most of all, we just enjoyed being with each other. 

I hope you also had an amazing holiday season!

Happy Dueling!

Blowing up Asteroids in Bounce Arcade

I'm continuing to play a little Bounce Arcade here and there, and lately it seems to be my go-to, just messing around VR pinball experience. It's pretty light and super easy to get into when I just want to play and not think too much. 

Since the last time I posted about the game, I've been putting up some great scores on all the game modes. Since I mostly talked about Gunpowder Gulch before, I thought I'd talk a little about the next step up in difficulty, Asteroid Outpost.

Time to play pinball in space!

As of this posting, I managed to barely slip myself into the top 10 for the leaderboards.

Diamond Rank, baby! Yeah!

In Asteroid Outpost, your playing field is very much inside the engine room of a spaceship.  In phase one of the board, your objective is to hit the objects lit by crackling electricity and then shoot them down into the engine core to charge it up.  After you completely charge the engine, a secondary objective appears.

The four secondary objectives are as follows:

- Shoot the cannons -- basically target one of the cannons and then shoot the ball between cannons until you've hit them all and shoot it down a nearby tube.  This is by far the easiest of the secondary objectives.

- Target the side chamber -- When the side chamber opens up, it's a bouncy mad-house of point generation. Once you hit all the bumpers inside the side chamber, shoot the lit up tube nearby and you're done.

- Charge up the spinners -- At the top right and top left of the playing field are two spinners. As you shoot the spinners, they charge the left and right sides of the top of the engine. Once you've charged both of them up, shoot the lit up tube to complete the secondary objective.

- Light all the arrows -- Arrows run from the corners of the playing field. Sometimes these arrows are pointing toward the center, and sometimes these arrows are pointing away from the center.  Run the ball down all three arrows in a row, and they'll light green to indicate success. Once you've lit up all the arrows, shoot the ball into the engine and you'll be done with the secondary objective.

After you finish a secondary objective, the hull of the ship peels back and three large asteroids float out in space. You need to use your pinball (and other power-up balls) to destroy these asteroids and reveal the golden nuggets inside them. 

Time to play Asteroids! (Just not on the 2600)

Shoot the golden nuggets into the collection tubes while keeping your ball in play and eventually, you'll win the third objective and light up a part of the engine. Do this four times and your ship will jump to lightspeed so you complete the entire game loop.

To make things more difficult, enemy laser cubes will activate and target your game paddles with lasers each time you enter the asteroid field. If a laser hits your game paddle, it'll deactivate for a few seconds leaving you extremely vulnerable to losing your ball.

To make things EVEN MORE DIFFICULT, after you complete the game loop once, you'll be given a multiball in the asteroid field and have to keep them ALL in play or you'll have to restart. It gets to be a crazy frantic mess of balls, powerups, golden nuggets, and laser cubes you have to keep track of.

So there you go, that's the Asteroid Outpost game in Bounce Arcade. To be honest, of all the game modes (excluding the tutorial), the Asteroid Outpost is my least favorite playing field. Its mini-games just aren't as exciting as the other three modes, and the game loop is a little monotonous. 

It feels like there's a missed opportunity to bring more sci-fi flair into the playing field! There should be more to the vastness of space than just asteroid mining. Right?! I mean, can I please have some kind of alien contact, ship repair, or planetary landing moments mixed into the asteroid mining? It really does feel like there could have been just a bit more sci-fi fun included. Even just one alien crawling around inside the hull of the ship would have been enough.

That all said, it's not a horrible board . . . just not my favorite. Happy to be in the top ten for now!

Happy Dueling!

Tea Times Two with Thomas Lionblood

Man, I've been wanting to post a thing or two on my blog for a week now, and I just haven't had the time or motivation. I've either been busy with holiday stuff or sick, but as long as I'm here typing, let's just see what I can do to dump out all my thoughts RIGHT NOW! 

Let's start with the Wizard Tea. Bazaar Sniping, a thing that's been in the game since the beginning, is now (from what I hear) a thing of the past. I haven't tried bazaar sniping since I was actively working on crafting.  We always used it to transfer metal scraps and random reagents back and forth between me and Bailey.

I remember asking Professor Greyrose about it once waaaaay back and she noted that it wasn't an intended thing for players to do, but because everyone liked it, they just kept it in the game.

Fast forward to today, players several years ago realized that Empower treasure cards were a stable drop in the game economy that could be traded back and forth in exchange for other things. Think of it like a player invented monetizing system.  In Everquest, they have Krono (which happens to be company controlled and monetized btw -- KingsIsle, if you're reading, look into it . . . I'm pretty sure you could monetize trading with something similar -- players would hate it and call you money-grubbing, but they do that anyway). In Wizard101, they have Empower Treasure Cards.

Anyway, they finally fixed the sniping bug and as expected, people went nuts.

At first I didn't even remember the Empower Treasure Card facet of Bazaar sniping, but @Karlicai broke it down for me.

WHEW! Man, everything KingsIsle was trying to avoid with allowing player trading in the first place was circumvented by players in a super ingenious way. By allowing this to exist for 16 years, players created a discord channel for trading and a whole sub-economy using Bazaar sniping as a method to trade valuable items and bank gold. People going to do people things I suppose.

One of the major problems to the above method is the presence of bots in the bazaar. It defeats the whole system. You want to trade something with someone and bam, a bot snipes before you can snipe. The new system they implemented was that after you deposit an item in the bazaar, there's now a time delay and you can't predictably snipe anymore. In fact, players are saying the new system favors bots now.  Whoops. Not the best fix.

A lot of players seem pretty upset by this, and I get it. KingsIsle will work it out somehow. I have faith. Ultimately, they're trying to avoid gold sellers and spammers in zone chat. If you've played any other MMO, you'll know what they are. They're annoying.

So there you go.  That's the T in Wizard101 lately.

We used to track time in Community Management by what the recent drama was. We seem to be in the Post-Hawkules/Sparck-tell-all and entering into the season of bazaar-sniping-fix. All in all, still not as glorious as the age of Glowing Mushroom Exploit. 

AAAANNNNYYWWWAAYYYY . . . I finished all my quests for the Selenopolis trees and got my new cool blade.

Woot!

Also spent a bunch of Crowns trying to get the full outfit from the new Christmas pack. It's not a bad pack, I might actually stitch this new robe on to my outfit.  The Krampus banner is pretty great as well.

I like that Krampus banner!

I didn't keep going to see if I could get the new mount. It's a little weird and I already have far too many mounts to even think about wanting a new one. Still debating about this new pet. I kinda like it.

Smelly Gracie seems neat, but nothing will ever top my precious Lady Dexter.

Anyway, hope you all are enjoying Wizard101 and the holidays. I need to find some time to log on and finish up a few more of the quests in Selenopolis and hopefully convince my wife to play again. I WILL FINISH KARAMELLE!

Happy Dueling!

December 2024 Zone of the Month -- Karamelle City

Hey all! I thought I'd try to bring back a time-honored tradition as I discussed in a post last month and do another Zone of the Month!  

To those ends, I made a list of the 256 zones in Wizard101 and used a random number generator to let randomness do what it does best to choose our zone.  The random zone of the month this month is none other than an idea that was first birthed from a flight of fancy from the old Professor Greyrose on this very blog.  Thus, the rumors of Candyland began back in 2009 and finally became a reality with the World of Karamelle in 2020.

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Name: Karamelle City

Location: Karamelle -- Karamelle City is the main hub of the world Karamelle and is the location all players will enter upon taking the spiral door to that world. You'll wander through Karamelle City often as you weave your way through this world's story.

A wonderful world of sweets and treats!

Description: As described on Wizard101's Karamelle World webpage: "Karamelle is a world of smiles, of Gumdrop Forests and Licorice Trees, of Chocolate Mines and Soda Lakes. Happy villages stretch from Karamelle City to Gutenstadt and everyone, everywhere, is always singing and whistling while they work." Of course, as you travel on, you begin to understand that happiness in Karamelle really is just skin deep.

Spilled Ice Cream in Karamelle City, complete with a trail of ants leading to it.

Cost: When you purchase Karamelle City, you'll also receive the zones of Von Trap Estate and Rock Candy Mountains for the price of 2295 Crowns.

Zeke Item: In Karamelle, Zeke has you hunting down Lemonheads. In Karamelle City, you can find the zone's Lemonhead right inside the gateway leading to Rock Candy Mountain. The Lemonhead is quite easy to see to the side of a bench there.

Someone dropped a lemonhead next to the bench here.

Chests: There are no chests or silver chests in this zone for players to collect, which is too bad since there are plenty of places to hide them. 

Secrets: The biggest secrets of Karamelle City come from Nana herself and her factory! You should go talk to the Grandnana in her office. While you're there, make sure to inspect her desk, you might just find a free Dinette Set housing item waiting for you there!

Is stealing dinnerware behind Nana's back a crime in Karamelle City?

Reagents: There are no reagents in this zone for players to collect. You'll have to head in a bit deeper in the world to find the Pretzel Sticks you may be hunting for.

Fishing: Despite having a wonderful, bubbling Soda Stream, no fish can be found in Karamelle City. I take it as a hope for things to come! Just imagine fishing up some Swedish Fish, Caram-eels, or a Tetra-misu. Lots to hope for the future!

Teleporters: While there aren't any teleporters to get you around within Karamelle City itself, there is a Nanavator to help you traverse the different worlds within Karamelle, like, Sweetzburg, Nibbleheim, Gutenstadt, Black Licorice Forest, Candy Corn Farm, and Gobblerton.

Just take the Nanavator to where you need to go!

What’s the 4-1-1? When you arrive in Karamelle City, you've been sent there by Ione as the Arcanum Liason. Maulworf Von Trap is your inside informant on Cabal activities and a summit happening there at the request of The Great Old One. 

Upon arriving in Karamelle City you quickly find the problem of Sweet things gone sour and must dispose of evil gummy bears. It's a plot to be more fully explored later in Karamelle City.

Not the Xtra Limes bear!

At the summit of The Great Old One, you are asked to join the cabal by the Great Old One himself. As you're about to shake his hand, the great old one falls into a giant hole, or rather, a cavity. Sour candy is causing all kinds of problems! Perhaps Nana herself will have answers about what's going on with the candy gone wild?

Who’s that Boss?  There are a few Bosses in Karamelle City, but the most notable one is the one you fight at the end of Karamelle. If you follow the world's story line to the end, you'll find yourself facing off against The Aberrant Paradox, which just happens to be . . . YOU. Looking for a strategy on how to fight the big bad, The Final Bastion has all the info you need.

Don’t miss this Side Quest! After you've completed the main quest titled "Candy Crushing," make sure you talk to the Good Will Ambassador to take the Quest "Good Will Stunting" and the follow-on quest "My Stars and Gobblers!"  It's worth it just to get a look at Professor Plump in the Nana Corporation Lobby.

Professor Plump I presume!

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If only I had the power to discount this zone for you all!  Hope you enjoyed reading about this month's zone of the month.

Happy Dueling!