The YouTubes, You, and Me Too!

WOW! I've had a pretty active run on YouTube the past few days. It's like I've hit a creative spark over the holidays here.  I've been announcing these over Twitter for the most part, but lemme break it down for you (and catalog it for me) over here on my blog.

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Wizard101 Let's Play!

I've started up a new walk through of Wizard101 with Morgrim from the Art of the Warlord. I'm playing as a Balance wizard named Tarlac and she's playing as an Ice wizard named Brecken, and together we are the champions of THE BEETLE!

Episode 1 -- The Beetle Chronicles

Episode 2 -- Saving Alexandria

If you don't have time for the full, unedited walkthrough (interruptions from dogs, children, and all), be sure to catch the highlights on The Art of Warlord's channel.

Episode 1 Highlights

Episode 2 Highlights

The hope is that we make it all the way through the game -- that's a lot of work -- wish us luck!

~~

Top Ten Favorite Death Spells

I just wanted to do a fun YouTube in commentator style and talk about my favorite Death spells. :) Hope you enjoy it.

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Y U SO MEAN?!

HAHA! I was over on Twitter and decided to take a song request.  Gracebear19 put it out there that I should do a Beiber song since the last "big hit" was about Selena.  After all the recording was done, Uber Wife said, you know you should have at least had one part where you showed the Selena statue with the words "Y U So Mean" over it.

DANG IT!!!  If I could rewind time, I'd do that for sure.

Here's the full lyrics

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh

When you block friend requests

And say your friends list is full

Why you so mean?

Hey yeah

When you call us all noobs

And stitch that wig to your hat

Why you so mean?

Ohh

Why you so mean?

You watch my sigil countdown

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh ohh

Why you so mean?

30 seconds just to discard

Why you so mean?

You're so indecisive what I'm saying

Trying to find the feint, Reshuffle cards

Don't know if you're crappy or good player

Don't want the group to end

Where do I start

First you wanna go quest then train Sprite

Wanna Commons all day, have a Darkmoor night

First your up then you're down and doing Cyrus dry clean

Ohh I really want to know...

Why you so mean

Ohh ohh ohh

When you steal a wooden chest

Because my rental mount was slow

Why you so mean?

Hey yeah

When you want me to tank

But you catch the agro

Why you so mean?

Ohh

Why you so mean?

Watch my sigil countdown

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh ohh

Why you so mean?

30 seconds just to discard

Why you so mean?

I see you casting Satyr just as I’m fleeing

Trying to tower shield but I can't win

You wanna find a boy but you keep begging

You trade me treasure cards, but won't accept

First you wanna go quest then train Sprite

Wanna Commons all day, have a Darkmoor night

First your up then you're down and doing Cyrus dry clean

Ohh I really want to know...

Why you so mean?

Ohh ohh

When you block friend requests

And say your friends list is full

Why you so mean?

Hey yeah

When you don't want me to blade

But you break all of my traps

Why you so mean?

Ohh

Why you so mean?

You watch my sigil countdown

Why you so mean?

~~

If the creative spark continues, you should be seeing even more YouTube from me! Hit that subscribe button on my channel if you'd like to see more.

Thanks for your time!

Happy Dueling

The *KingsIsle* Office

Hope you enjoyed your April Fool's everyone!

I'm just going to leave this here:



We had a lot of fun watching your reactions to the Wonky Donkey mount (which was hilarious by the way--thanks for all the punchlines and for sharing all your pictures and laughs with us).

Ahem! So if I could paint the picture of how this video idea was born, it would simply be me and Leala sitting at our desks, shooting the breeze about the upcoming April Fool's Day event with Wonky when Leala asked (and encouraged), "What should we do? We should do something!" That's always a dangerous question . . .

Before you know it, Leala was writing up a script, and I was donning a robe and black fingernail polish. LOL!

We shot the entire video in a couple hours at the end of work one day with a few willing and accidental victims. (Not to mention Leala's time sculpting the perfect stapler in Jello mold. She's amazing.) After that, our hard working video editing genius, Damon Brown, did his entire production magic over the course of a couple days--then it was just a matter of adding credits and anxiously sitting on the video until today.

Have I told you how much I love working with hardworking creative people? The KingsIsle Team dreamed up a really awesome mount this year (I should mention Karl Holbert was the real inventive genius behind the Wonkey Donkey, not Retired Malistaire!), and our Community and Social Media team simply tried to help us step up to the plate.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did making it for you! Good times.

Happy Dueling!

Ryan's Make a Wish Visit to KingsIsle

I wanted to make sure to catalog this video here on this blog because . . . well . . . at the end of the day, this is what it's all about.



You get to shortly see Ryan and me playing before lunch at the 5:00 minute mark. hehe. It was my honor to get to play a few rounds of Pirate101 with Ryan. We're both Witchdoctors! :) At the same time we were playing together, his brother and sister were hanging out in the same room while and we were all talking about the game with Blind Mew. Ryan's older brother plays the game with him and his sister had never played the game. She had a lot of questions, and who knows, maybe she'll pick up the game too! Ryan was playing in one of our conference rooms that has a HUGE TV mounted on the wall. (I seriously love playing Pirate101 on that screen--the game looks great on it).

At the 11:15 mark, Ryan and I go through the Internal servers and look around a bit. We mostly looked at the new player housing the week before it was released. :)

At the 12:13 mark we unveil his poster and Ryan's Yum-n-Ade stand while I drive the computer. Something that's not seen in this video is the amazing work behind the scenes that had to happen to tie Ryan's vocals to the stand and get it working in a stable build of the game in time for our big reveal of the Yum-n-Ade stand to Ryan. Kudos KingsIsle team from me!

Ryan and his family are great people, and it was my honor to meet them. It was a very special day that I will mark among the finest during my employment with KingsIsle. For the full story, please check out the KingsIsle blog.

Happy Dueling

nvm . . . Dragonspyre, Yer Gearz Don't Matta None

Last weekend I had a pretty humiliating string of defeats against Malistaire with Angus. This weekend? *wipes hands clean* Here's your video proof:



This was Angus's winning deck against Malistaire:

Doesn't seem like much, does it? It's not. It made for a long drawn out hour and 20 minute long fight. (Much different than playing Kyle, my son's storm wizzie, in a full group where the whole thing wraps up in a few rounds LOL)

Here was the basic strategy I had to pull off to win against Malistaire with Angus:

1- The first thing that needed to happen was a lucky two strikes of Insane Bolt treasure cards to take care of two of Malistaire's minions. Why not three Friendly? Hey, it's hard enough getting two lucky strikes of Insane Bolt out in a row as it is! I probably could have pushed my luck and swapped out one of the minion cards for an Insane Bolt card, but knowing the way the Damage flies out of Malistaire, I kind of figured I'd need an extra minion card. And at 2,000 gold a piece, Insane Bolt cards could have made me run into a monetary wall pretty fast.

2- The next thing that NEEDED to happen was to get my storm minion up and taunting, then do my best to dance a line between protecting the minion and taking out Malistaire's final minion. As you can see from the video it was a difficult dance, and though I took out Malistaire's buddy, he also took out mine. Good thing I had a back up minion card, eh? SMARTZ!!1!

3- Treasure card of Darkwind was definitely the most economical way to get a boost to my damage for the entire fight. What you don't see from this video is . . . the failed attempt against Malistaire that happened right before where I made a lame decision to use Supercharge instead of Darkwind and a regular Stormblade and RAN OUT OF MANA! I definitely had to play more economically than say someone sporting 400 mana. Yup.

4- Shield, shield, shield, and shield some more. I cannot say how important it was to cast every single shield in my deck before Reshuffle. The easiest way to play these was to cast all of the 80% Death Shields on myself and all of the 70% death shields from Life School's Legend Shield card on my minion.

5- One more fizzle and a bad roll on the damage output of Triton, and I would have been toast. It was incredibly close and intense, and I liked that. :) It made the victory all the finer. I think Uber Wife was pretty done with me as I screamed at the top of my lungs a few times, NO I FIZZLED! or TAUNT ALREADY! or GET ME SOME CHICKEN! Ok, I never yelled get me some chicken.

So, there you have it. The big long drawn out story of Angus that started out in December of 2010 has finally (sort of) come to a conclusion. Quoting that original post, "He hopes to see you in Celestia . . . with nothing but the robe on his back, hopefully, soloing the majority of the way--no outside help from other characters or anything." For me that's mission accomplished, he's in Celestia.

I HIGHLY doubt Angus will survive too long in Celestia . . . the whole world is one giant gear check with crit gear and enemies beginning fights with a slew of power pips . . . and not to mention the cheating bosses, but HEY, how about those cheating bosses? Although I really was just aiming to beat Dragonspyre, my plan has always been to test out the limits of Moon Magic and Star Magic here since MOST of the Polymorphs have built in statistics like Crit Block and resistance and the Auras are helpful, but I guess time will tell!

Happy Dueling!

Necromancers . . . (Katy Perry California Gurls Parody)

Heh!

This song was a hit last night on Ravenwood Radio, and the requests we got for a separate version of this song was overwhelming . . . so . . . I put a quick text only version up on YouTube for you to check out. Once I get some time I'll do a full video of that if you guys would like me to (I'm so freaking busy lately you have no idea LOL). This is the best I can do for the time being. :)



Necromancers (California Gurls parody)
~~~~~~~~~~~

Greetings necros, let's take a journey

I know a place
Where the spells come up from below
dark, side at night
Lord Nightshade and his scarecrow

Castin' ghoul and wraith
Playin' underneath the grave stones
The boys stack their decks
Tryin to cast a few pirate bones (at us)

You could travel the world
But nothin' comes close to my red ghost
Once you party with us
You'll be leveling up
OH-OHOHOHOH

Necromancers are unforgettable
Plauge and wraith
Dark Pixies are hot
Pasty White Skin
so cold
we'll freeze your fire spells

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Necromancers are undeniable
Malistaire
We call him our pop
Death School represent-
Now cast bone dragon up!

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Death On the beach
We don't mind sand in our scarecrows
You freak
At my sheep
Nelson Everhart
On the stereo

You could travel the world
But nothin' comes close to my red ghost
Once you party with us
You'll be leveling up
OH-OHOHOHOH

Necromancers are unforgettable
Plauge and wraith
Dark Pixies are hot
Pasty White Skin
so cold
we'll freeze your fire spells

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Necromancers are undeniable
Malistaire
We call him our pop
Death School represent-
Now cast bone dragon up!

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Bailey's Rap

Fire school is what's hot
Listen fool to what I got!
Doin' damage over time as I sing this ryhme
Spammin' smokescreen like it's a crime
Don't clown around with my heckhound
When my pips are maxed, I'll blow you down!
Helephant, Quench, and Pheonix fool
hmph ... Not even ice wizards know this cool!

Friendly.. (Sup Bailey?)
If you want to keep it deadly (yeah?)

Then come and join me
cause I'm representin' Pyromancy!

Necromancers are unforgettable
Plauge and wraith
Dark Pixies are hot!
Pasty White Skin
so cold
we'll freeze your fire spells

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Necromancers are undeniable
Malistaire
We call him our pop
Death School represent!
Now cast bone dragon up!

Ohohoh-oh-ohohohoh

Happy dueling!

My Housing Teleporter Run

I haven't done just a random video in a while, so this morning I thought I'd show my little portal path I made through all my houses. Check it out! (Full screen in high resolution is best if your stream can handle that.)



My teleporter pathways all have one thing in common, putting a Thomas Lionblood mannequin nearby and usually quick access to something I need . . . like my garden or my crafting station.

This was just for fun though.

That's all.

Happy dueling!

At long last . . . Grub Guardian

Sometimes KingsIsle just doesn't say a word. You know? It's not very often, mind you, that a press release or a community leader note doesn't show up when something new happens in game, but today was one of those days. I'm sure the announcement will happen in the next few days, but the most I've heard about Grub Guardian up to this point from KingsIsle has been, "It'll be done, when it's done." Well guess what . . . it's done--or at least close to being done. :)

I was casually browsing Twitter when I saw a few tweets about Grub Guardian being "live" from the awesome #twizard people. I immediately went to kifreegames.com and indeed found a Grub Guardian game on the site with a "beta" note by it, but it seemed to be working just fine, and before you know it, I was playing up my pets outside the confines of Wizard101.

I was bummed when I found out it actually wasn't in the game yet, just on KIFreeGames. I was also bummed when I found it wasn't in the appstore for my iPhone. Then again, perhaps kifreegames.com is the perfect place to run a beta like this.

If you're looking for Grub Guardian guides, there's already a dozen threads going over on Wizard101 Central. :)

Basically, Grub Guardian is a Tower Defense Game. You stack up your different types of guardians (each from a different school of magic) and they blast away at the hordes of baddies pouring forth and heading for your pet's food at the end of the trail.

What's extra cool is that your pet actually plays a part in the tower defense and at the end of the game, they gain pet experience and can even be fed pet snacks from your in game inventory (if you decide to play that way instead of for prize codes).


This can in fact lead to leveling your pet (although you don't really get to see what skills they gained . . . you have to log in to do that).


If you do really well at a level of Grub Guardian, you'll end up unlocking new, more difficult levels of play.


It's a ton of fun and can be really challenging. Once you develop a pattern of where to place your spells on the map and which spells to upgrade along the way, I'm sure it will become a lot easier. I expect YouTube videos of the patterns to be forthcoming any moment now. LOL.

Oh ok fine . . . let me be the first . . .



Woot! Oasis level done! Whew, now if I can just keep going. Some of these levels are tough!

Happy Dueling

Angus vs Mavra!

This morning Angus finished up the first big wall of Dragonspyre: Mavra Flamewing.  Here's the YouTube video for the fight. :)



What you don't see in this video are the numerous failed attempts before this successful one.  My deck had to be massaged a few times until I came up with a winning combo.  The first few seconds of the video show what I was eventually packing in my mega awesome starter deck.  ;) In retrospect I should have dumped one of those tempests for another storm shield, but it eventually all worked out (even if it meant an extra reshuffle).

You know what else needed massaging besides my deck?  My patience.  I kept jumping the gun on my cards, and I was doing exactly what shouldn't be doing (messing around with Wild Bolt).  Once I straightened out my deck and got my head in the game, my cards fell in place and I pulled out a win!  The Shatter treasure card, of course, was invaluable.

Thanks for reading and watching!

Happy dueling!

Casting the Red Ghost

For those of you who'd like to see what the Red Ghost spell looks like, here you go!



I'm digging my Red Ghost at Ancient! Kind of a fun pet.

Happy Dueling!

Mooshu! Your Gear Don't Matter None!

YES!

It is all true, a level 42 Angus Unicornpants, weighing in at a mere 1000 or so hitpoints with 100 or so mana and clothed in only what the dear headmaster gave him at level 1, has bested all of Mooshu (except for a few sidequests), including those pesky Onis in Mortal Kombat!



Angus . . . wins!

FATALITY!

Pretty much it all boiled down to Angus's regular play style: minion, shields, blade, traps, aura, Triton, and a reshuffle or three.

On to Dragonspyre! (Although, I might go finish up a few of those side quests now . . .)

Happy dueling!

Angus vs. Chester and Friends (Wysteria completed)

Check it out! Here's my latest video of Angus Unicornpants! As most of you are well aware, Angus is my no gear/starter wand/starter deck storm wizard that I'm taking through the game. This particular fight is with Chester Droors and his two side kicks. (I *still* smile about that name.) It's not the last fight of Wysteria, but I feel safe in saying it's probably the most challenging. Good times. I actually wanted to add two other fights to this video but Media Maker was hating all over my files.



Fun! I want to thank KI for a fun side world now that I've played through it with Angus. It was definitely a nice distraction from my exp quest grinding in Mooshu and helped pad Angus's level a touch. He's almost 40 now! Woot!

ANGUS ANGUS ANGUS!!!

Happy Dueling!

Bailey wand strikes Malistaire Dead . . . 35 times over

Yesterday I came home from work and this screenshot was up on our screen:


"Oh nice!" I said, "who did the big hit?"

"It's a wand strike I did from Amber's character with the help of Joshua Lionbane," replied one uber wife.

"whoa, wand strike?" I queried with as much query as a query could query.

"Yup!" Bailey said with a smile in her voice, "I recorded it too!" SQUEE!



Nice hit! Imagine if she would have crit on that wand! It's too bad they capped damage at 1,000,000 . . . I'd shudder to think what people could hit for these days. Tracking the big hits was fun for a while. :)

Great hit Joshua and Bailey!

Happy dueling!

Angus Finishes the Crimson Fields

Heya!

You asked, and here he is, ANGUS UNICORNPANTS!



I couldn't believe how harsh those last two or three fizzles were against the War Oni. haha! OH well, Angus still pulled out a win. :-)

So as of today, Angus is sitting in the Cave of Solitude at level 35.

Happy Dueling!

Video Time! Tearing up the Krokotopian Arena . . . WITH ANGUS!

hehe. I just *had* to do this . . .

So waaaaaaayyyyyy back when I started this blog, I posted up a video of one Thomas Lionblood in the Krokotopian arena. September 21st, 2008. Since that time it has gotten 45,000 hits. And that's WITHOUT commenting enabled. If I had comments enabled on my video those hits would be much more.

Why don't I allow commenting on YouTube videos, you ask?

1- I freaking hate YouTube comments. ("newb casting outside of yr class LOL l2p." "W101 is for babies, why R U Not playing WOW! failzors!")

2- I'd rather have all discussion happen on my blog instead.

Anyway . . . Angus just finished up the Krok Arena a couple days ago, and I did some video for you all. I couldn't resist taking that very first Wizard101 YouTube I made and doing a new one for Angus. :-)



Pretty straight forward. Heals, Shields, Sharks, and Krakens!

GO ANGUS!

Happy Dueling!

Friendly's Selwyn Strats

Heya!

So, I've been somewhat silent on the blog here since Celestia came out. Well, I'd say that's a good thing. :-) That means I've been enjoying the game and doing that whole less talkee more playee thing.

I like it, and I have a lot of cool pictures to share . . . eventually.

Anyway, today I was finishing up the Stellarium and came upon a boss I remembered fighting on the Test Realm. It was a pretty fun fight (thus why I remembered it so well).

I decided to hit the record button and make a YouTube out of it where I could discuss a bit about how Selwyn Cheats. :-) I'm a necromancer, so of course, I soloed it. ;-)

Check it out!



If you have any more information on this fight that I might have left out, feel free to leave a comment.

Happy Dueling!

New spells video from IGN (and WTG fans!)

Hey all!

Well, here's the new spells video (the one I saw at Kingsisle) over at IGN:

More Wizard101 Videos

This is a much higher quality video than the "over-the-shoulder" video I shot when I was there. I'm happy that all of the spells were found before this hit the streets. GO FAST LEVELERS ON THE TEST REALM!

The fans totally pulled their weight over on Youtube to get these out and published. This is one from PrestonW101, who pulled all the videos together into one:



Haha! Nice song on the end of that one. ;-)

Gratz IGN for the exclusive!

Happy Dueling!

Day two -- Friendly Necromancer (at KI) video

Ok, the video has finished encoding, and it's up on Youtube! Whew, now I need to get the heck down to GDC and then hurry to the airport. A couple more videos are coming over the next day or two. It's been a lot of fun here, and I feel like I've learned so much by being here.

Just as a plug for the recruiters, talent scouts, and video game design schools hanging out at GDC the past couple of days, GDC is a great place to be if you're interested in getting into the video game business. I talked to more schools and recruiters than anyone down on the expo floor. They are there . . . waiting to talk to you . . . wanting to see what you got. Go get 'em!

More on GDC tomorrow . . . today? Today I have a condensed video of my tour of Kingsisle aka Wizard101 Land. Thanks so much for not keeping me locked outside, KI! WOOT!



Do I seem a little extra excited there? ;)

Happy Dueling!

Postcard Raffle Winners and Day 1 Austin Video

Ok! Let's head over to random.org and click us some winners!

*click x3*

And the winners of the Postcard Raffle are as follows:

- Duncan Dragonblood
- Tyler Deathstalker
- Benjamin Nightfist

Gratz winners and thanks all for the interest! I will be picking up some postcards momentarily and rushing off to Kingsisle.

So, I made a little video of my landing in Texas and my hotel room. There's nothing earth shattering here. You get to see the Austin airport. hehe. More later! Follow me on Twitter for more updates today and tune in tomorrow or the next day for some video footage. It's going to be a crazy busy few days.



Happy Dueling!

Happy Dueling--BASIC video

Check it out! It's a video of Bailey and I playing the BASIC version of Happy Dueling! We sat down with the camera last night and played a hand or two and filmed us.


The ADVANCED version has also been filmed, but I just haven't had time to put words to it. The ADVANCED version has a lot more strategy to it, so it will probably take a bit more time to explain the game in the video.

After I get the ADVANCED version published, I do believe I will be ready to also publish a .pdf of the card game so then you all can print it out and enjoy it yourselves if you'd like!

WOOTS!

Happy Dueling!

Why does the storm minion taunt?

Question from Dustin over at Wizard101 info:

Hiya, Thomas (seems like everyone calls you Friendly and not Thomas, your characters name... ;)). Love TFN. You rock. ROCK ON. I've gotta question about the Taunt Spell. I'm a GrandMaster Diviner, and I've never had use for the Storm Minion card. All it does is put Elemental Shields on itself, and Taunts the enemy. But what does Taunt do? Does it make the Minion worth using? I wanna like the Storm Minion, so what's the deal with how it uses Taunt?

I much prefer the name Friendly over most of the alternatives (like egomaniac), so it's all good.

I have a very good example of how the Storm Minion can help a GM Diviner. Here's a video I took of me farming Valerik.



So, the taunt from the storm minion saved me three hits there. In fact, the storm minion is probably one of the better helpers out there because the storm minion doesn't blow your traps as often as some of the other minions. For instance, If I was a life wizard, I'd use the life minion every single time because it's such a great help except for one little spell that my little pixie friend uses: imp. So much for stacking traps for damage . . .

For a more detailed discussion on taunt, check out this question I answered a while back. It might help unravel the mystery.

(oh, btw, I can kill Valerik in three rounds when I duo with Thomas and Kyle and use Thomas to feint and curse . . . so I'm not going to use the minion in every instance . . . this was just an example)

Happy Dueling!