Skyscale, the litmus test for GW2 Insanity

Well, I guess I should post about this since it was a long MMO project that kind of consumed a lot of free time this last couple weeks in Guild Wars 2. BEHOLD! THE SKYSCALE!

Flap. Flap. Flap. Flap.

The quest to obtain a Skyscale mount isn't an easy one. I'm reminded of the feeling I got from completing the epic weapon quests back in Everquest in a way, but Guild Wars 2 does such a good job at making content more accessible that it doesn't really compare. On the other hand, the complexity of the Skyscale quests in Guild Wars 2 is on another level. So, it kind of balances out.

Props to those that came before me who wrote down and documented instructions on the Guild Wars Wiki. Those are the true time-saving heroes in this world. It's such a noble task. Those crazy wiki people are saints. You know who else is a saint? My friend John, who completely saved me hours and hours of farming by letting me know map currencies are available through the Seasons of Dragons Achievements. THE BEST!

Ok, lemme just break this down for you a bit in case you don't know how the Skyscale quest works.

Step 1- Play through the entire Living Season World 4 content. It's a long story with some absolutely epic story moments. Really great content, and this part of the skyscale quest is just enjoyment of some PvE content. At that point, then you can start wondering about your Skyscale.

Yes, I flew down an elder dragon's throat and punched its heart until it died.

Now, if you look at the Wiki page for the Skyscale quest, you're like . . . hey! not bad! Just five achievements to get this thing. I can do that! But then and you click deeper, you realize that each achievement has nested achievements inside of it and suddenly that five step quest is now much, much more complicated.

Step 2 - Enter the world of Dragonfall. The first Achievement has you circling the world of dragonfall three separate times. Once looking for 21 scales. Once giving medicine to 14 sick skyscales. and Once looking for 21 skyscale eggs. It's not horrible, just time consuming, but all locations are well documented. You'll probably make a lot of money in Dragonfall while you're at it.

Grabbing an egg in Dragonfall

Step 3- Travel the entire Guild Wars 2 map while charging up 12 eggs with 4 sources of energy each. So you'll be making 48 stops around the world. Some are more difficult than others, but most are cake . . . touch some lava, touch some water, blah blah blah.  You gotta follow the guide though!  Otherwise you'll be backtracking a bunch. The most complicated part was solving the Rune-Locked Doors puzzle.

I love the Rune Back Piece you have during this puzzle! I need a perma version!

Step 4- Hatch that dragon and do some nurturing quests. You'll be spending some gold in this step as if you're like me, you weren't charging up quartz crystals for a couple weeks in advance.  I mean, I had a few, but it's not like I log on and charge a crystal each day . . . (but I probably should as a Blackmarket side hustle). That Crystal is a component for a Mystic Forge recipe to make Skyscale food. That quest is throttled in that you can only feed your dragon four pieces of food each real world day. You'll be stuck here for at least a few days.

Baby dragon loves me!

Outside of this you'll be needing to buy your baby skyscale some expensive toys and hunting down 12 of it's favorite treats from random enemies around the world.  Not bad, just another hoop in the series of hoops.

Step 5- Congrats! Your dragon is now a terrible toddler and its flown away to 21 different locations around the Guild Wars 2 map. The only problem is that most of those locations are at the top of jumping puzzles. It's a pain, but you got this!  You're too deep in there now to give up!

My dude, why do you pick the hardest places to hide!

After that you actually get to play with your dragon. After a fun game of catch and hide and seek, you'll be done with this step.  This dragon play part of the quest felt more fun than challenging. I liked it.

Step 6- Now you have to make your saddle. All you need is 250 of the unique map currencies found in 7 zones and 35 gold and 1,750 volatile magic.  The gold and volatile magic are the easy things to come by.  The map currency on the other hand . . . whew . . . it's a bit soul crushing at first when you realize it could take DAYS maybe WEEKS to collect all that currency.

But my buddy John saved me here. There's a beautiful mega achievement called Seasons of the Dragons, and nested inside this mega achievement are all of the 250 unique map currencies that you desire. All you gotta do is complete "Tier 3" steps for the Crystal Desert, Domain of Istan, Sandswept Isles, Domain of Kourna, Jahai Bluffs, Thunderhead Peaks, and Dragonfall. To do that you'll be harvesting nodes, completing bounties, completing events, completing Adventures, etc. in each of those zones.  It's much faster than the alternative, don't worry.

Awesome Boss Events await you!

Step 7- To cap it all off, once you get your saddle made, you need to do a short test flight with "rental skyscales" in 28 different zones.

Most of these tears in reality are just a few feet away from the rental spot. Not bad, just time consuming

And there you go, after 900 million sub-steps tucked away in the above seven steps, you're done and have an epic mount that can get you to the highest points in the game. 

Really cool to have finished up that mount. Now all I have to think about is if I want the two-rider turtle mount, the skiff, and the roller beetle. (At least I think that's all the rest of the mounts in GW2.) I've got plenty of content still to complete, but I can now join the masses of those who have the skyscale. It's not an exclusive club, but this quest definitely feels like a litmus test for GW2 insanity.

Happy Dueling!

Monsters & Memories Stress Test Day 2

Yesterday around noon central time the Monsters & Memories Stress Test kicked back up and players were once again allowed in to give the servers a workout and get a sneak peak of what the developers had been working on.  I have to tell you that Day 2 went a lot smoother for me than Day 1!

Whereas I was constantly dying on Day 1 and eternally lost, on Day 2 I was able to memorize my skills, put them on the ability bar, and start to really kill some stuff. Those skills being available made a ton of difference.

Killing skeletons! This is the way!

Not only that but I actually finished my first Beastmaster quest, which was to collect 2 teeth each from rats, bats, and jackals. Once I had all six, then all I had to do was press combine to make a new necklace. Running back to the Beastmaster Trainer and handing it in produced my first magic item, the Beast's Initiate Cord.

My first magic item from the Beast Master Intro Quest

By the end of my play time (before my family ripped me away to have a movie night watching The Amazing Maurice), I had reached level 3, trained up dual wielding, and memorized a spell that would turn me True North. 

I can't tell you how much I wish a Day 3 of Stress Testing was happening so I could go back in and track down the Beastmaster Spell Trainer. I took a screenshot of him because I was sure I would need to reference it again to locate him, but as I was playing, I completely forgot that I had even taken the below screenshot and failed to ever find him again.

LOL! He's clearly standing in Saltwater Park or whatever it's called. DANGIT!

I did have some fun exploring while looking for the spell trainer though and really walked the extents of the sprawling city, even the parts that I was clearly not supposed to be in because none of the buildings were even finished. They were still greyboxed and no NPCs were in sight.

Hello Sunrise! How I missed you! I was awfully lost in the dark for a while.

By the end of my play session I was selling vendor trash to the hidden vendor I found and stashing stuff into my bank. I know it seems weird, but it felt good to be completely confused in "New Everquest" all over again. Gauging from the /ooc chat in game, it appeared I wasn't alone in that feeling either. 

We'll see if I feel the same way come next stress test / pre-Alpha or what have you, but for now, my general feelings are BRING ON MORE MONSTERS & MEMORIES! HUZZAH!

Happy Dueling

Monsters & Memories Stress Test 1

I've had my eye on Monsters & Memories since it was announced. In fact, I joined their Discord server right away when I heard about it, and then after a month or so, I realized I couldn't keep up with chat and promptly left. This was way back in, what, 2020? 2021?

Anyway, yesterday I caught wind from Shawn Lord's LinkedIn that this weekend they were holding a couple rounds of stress testing, and I decided to download it and give it a shot. (I used to work with Shawn back at KingsIsle.) 

Of course there were all kinds of padded warnings that came along with their stress test:

"PLEASE NOTE: By registering for, downloading, or logging into Monsters & Memories, you acknowledge your understanding that this is a technical "stress test" of an early development build and not a pre-alpha, alpha, beta, or any other form of test indicative of the game being in a ready-for-release state."

There was even more padding after you installed about the state of the game being buggy and not ready for prime time, BUT there was no NDA or any kind of gag order. In fact, there were people Twitch streaming their gameplay last night.

Oogaooga the Ogre Beastmaster

The game in its current state feels very much like a love letter to Everquest and classic MMOs, and it was every bit as confusing as that first time you logged into Everquest and had to kind of figure out what it was you were doing. At the same time "/attack" worked just fine . . . so it felt instantly familiar.

Of course I got my butt handed to me by a beetle the first time I tried slash attack

The real fun of the game didn't seem to be attacking things right at first anyway. The city behind the gates you spawn at was sprawling and impressive in its size and maze-like qualities.  Just like in Everquest, this was a city you could get lost in.

Looking out upon half of the city late at night from up on a ledge

Eventually the server I was on crashed out, and I had to hop on a second server and try again. While I was there, I finally figured out how to scribe my spells into my spellbook, but I couldn't quite figure out how to then transfer my spellbook spells over to my ability slots to cast them. I wandered the city a bit with my new Gnome Beastmaster and then logged out for the night. 

Somewhere in here, there's a quest giver waiting for me to put a note in his inventory box

I'm glad I was able to add my bandwidth to the stress test. There's another stress test for a few hours this afternoon as well, so I may jump on again. Either way, it was interesting to see so many people there pining for the old days in Everquest to be new again. Can't wait to see where Monsters and Memories is a couple years from now.

Happy Dueling!

Jenga Meets VR Match-3 in Jentrix!

Ahhh, so you're up to your old tricks, eh?  But are you up to your old, Jentrix though!? No? Don't even know what the heck I'm talking about!? Well, I can't blame you!

I'm here writing what is possibly my last review (at least for now) in a series of Match-3 VR game reviews.  Yeah, there's one or two more games I could write about that technically fall in the Match-3 genre, and who knows what's yet to come in this crazy subgenre . . . but I've reached the end of my original list of Match-3 VR games I wanted to check out. 

And how do I end this series of reviews? With a crazy game that's a mad mixup of Jenga and Match-3 in a VR game that has some good ol' goofy physics fun! It's Jentrix! Check it out:

Jentrix is an $8 game on Steam with a "coming soon" store front message on Oculus. Unfortunately at the time of writing, it doesn't appear this game is included with Steam's Puzzlefest going on right now. I'd say the price is still right on the money for the experience. Even better, apparently they just added multiplayer to the game?  I've yet to try it out! I bet you it's a lot of fun.

Time to get your Berries, Bananas, and Peas in a row

So in Jentrix you slide elongated fruits out from a Jenga-like stack of elongated fruits and try to match up three of a kind. You gotta be careful though since the slightest upward or downward pull can send your whole stack of fruits tumbling. To make matters more frantic, you have pieces that are actually mini-crocodiles, birds that somehow freeze your pieces in blocks of ice (don't ask me, I can't explain it), and a timer that spits out pieces to the top of the stack every few seconds. If your fruits fall on the floor, you have a limited time to pick it up. Let too many fruits fall on the floor and it's game over.

Still lots of progress to make on the Jentrix campaign map!

The game has 20 achievements, and a good majority of them have to do with progression along the campaign map or with achieving high scores in arcade mode. So far in campaign mode, it seems like it's all about reaching point goals. When you achieve a certain score for the level, you win and progress to the next node of the map. It feels like I'm about 1/4th of the way in currently and I'm not sure what new mechanics they'll throw at me as I progress or if it will be just turning up of the five difficulty knobs they seem to have:

1- pieces fall in a faster cadence

2- new and different pieces

3- more and faster freezing birds

4- increased point goal markers

5- fewer allowed mistakes

I'm kind of excited to see what else they've got!

Giving a frozen strawberry smackdown to a red bird

This game isn't really meant to be played sitting down. You've gotta stand up to get all these angles. You'll also be doing a lot of toe touches as you bend down to pick up fallen pieces. So for a puzzle game, there's actually a lot of physical movement you need to do to play Jentrix.

I think my favorite part of this game isn't necessarily its gameplay, but rather its colorful skin and humorous physics fun. It's fun to grab these fruits and slot them in to the puzzle.  It's also pretty funny when you just spill the whole tower and wait to start over. That said, they've somehow allowed for a certain amount of leniency with the game's physics and made a pretty great system in what seems an impossible scenario of stacking.

Happy Dueling!

Rainbow Reactor Fusion, A Futuristic Match-3 VR Game

Back over to the Quest 2 today, and I think I've discovered a pretty cool VR Match-3 game that might just be my favorite of the bunch yet! 

Rainbow Reactor Fusion comes in at a little bit of a higher price point at $15, but I'm finding it absolutely worth it. At first I thought this game was only available through the Sidequest, but their Sidequest link led right to the Oculus store. Unfortunately this game isn't yet available on Steam, but it says it's coming soon. Check it out!

At its heart, Rainbow Reactor Fusion is basically a VR version of a carnival ball toss game. Balls of paint roll down at you from ramps that are to the right and left of you, and you have to grab them and toss them on to the game field. When you toss a ball in a spot where it touches 3 or more colors, all those colors are removed and you score points. Throw a ball out of bounds, and you'll earn a strike. Three strikes and it's game over.

To make the game more interesting, they've also made it where you can fuse colored balls together to create one ball of a different color. The fusion doesn't really work in true color wheel fashion, but once you start fusing colors, you start to get the hang of it.

Red and Green make Yellow, Yellow and Teal make Green, Green and Blue make Teal, etc.

Now, if this game was just what was stated above, it probably wouldn't be worth $15.  What makes this game worth more is the factory-wide restoration/puzzle-solving story game you undertake while playing the above game . . . and its charm. Yup, this game is also oozing with fun Portal 2-esque character charm while solving the factory's mystery.

At the start of the game you find yourself standing in an elevator, watching a black and white video of one Alfred Luzan von Hoffenhasselbrock as he breaks down the history of the Rainbow Reactor Factory and how it all works.  Once the tutorial video is over, you're introduced to a little robot buddy named Dottie. Dottie guides you in restoration efforts from this point forward.

Dottie welcoming me back to the Rainbow Reactor Factory

Over time you'll purchase an axe, a wrench, a brush, and other tools from an in-game shop. These all help unravel the mystery of the factory. All the while you'll be playing the Rainbow Reactor Fusion Match-3 game as part of it all.

I haven't yet made it to the end of the game, but it is getting more challenging the further up the factory I go. Multiple colors on the board make the game interesting and the speed at which the color fusion paint balls start coming toward you also raise the challenge. 

The game itself makes really good use of VR as a medium for the match-3 game and it is a very physical experience. The UIs bend around transparent screens and look like they are a part of the world.

Notice how the game UI makes sense in the world and doesn't look slapped on the screen?

Overall, this is just a really well put together game. I'm happy to have discovered it in my hunt of VR Match-3 games.

Happy Dueling!

Button Bombers, a creative match-3 VR mashup

For anyone that owns a Quest 2 headset (affordable VR woot), I'm not sure how many know they can unlock the immense library of Sidequest games that you can play from little known developers. Just think of Sidequest as the Roblox of VR development.

To actually make your way on to the Oculus Store as a legit game, you have to undergo a certification QA process that seems to stop many in their tracks. That's where Sidequest comes in. People can load their un-QA'd games up to a third-party download site like itch.io, make a trailer, set a price, and BAM . . . you're a VR developer.

On the other end, as a player you have to configure your Quest 2 in a certain way to play these games, but it's not rocket science, just follow the tutorial.

The reason why this review has all this padding is because I'm starting to exhaust the library of VR Match-3 games that are out there and today's game comes from Sidequest.

Button bombers!  It's a VR Match-3 Demo from a fella named Andrew Stout. He's actually put quite a bit of work into this demo and it plays really well. Check it out:

The style of match 3 found in Button Bombers is the upward elevating style. The game that instantly comes to mind for me was Wizard101's Wizardblox since I played so much of that game. (Wizardblox wasn't the only match 3 that used this technique -- just the first that came to mind). Basically, you start with a board that is 2/3rds full and new matching pieces come from the bottom of the board as they slowly rise upward.  If an object on the gameboard hits the top, then it's game over.

Besides the basics, what Button Bombers has going for it is creative flair. On the "Button" side of the "Button bombers" equation are a ton of sewing puns and head nods.  Your match pieces are buttons, your training grounds are a "sewing dojo" (although I think he should have just gone with "Sewjo") that's decorated with needles and scissors. 

Even the volume controls are on zippers in the options menu

The game pieces have sewing themed mechanics to them. Your buttons can get "pinned," and you have to make matches with them to unpin them. Your buttons can be stitched together, and you have to make a match underneath them to break the stitching. Your buttons can instead be "snaps" that act as bombs. It's a sewing themed match 3.  

there's a lot of mechanics going on here . . .

ON the "Bombers" side of the "Button bombers" equation are a ton of warfare puns and head nods. Your match 3 games are 1v1 battles against AI. When you or the AI make large matches, you throw bombs, bricks, and torpedoes on to the other player's game board. You travel a war map defeating opponent after opponent. Your opponents are on a sewn together ship that you're trying to sink with cannon fire from your ship.

On a ship, looking at a battle map, ready to bomb some buttons!

So not only are you creatively meshing VR and match-3, but you're also meshing sewing with warfare. It's a combination that makes absolutely no sense, but somehow works at the same time.

In addition there's a strange dialog system mechanic that probably has some future meaning to it where you can earn +1 scores to traits that don't currently do anything. Add a +1 to my confusion! Where was he going with this system? Will we ever know?!

At the end of the day here. Yeah. I don't really want to offer criticism of this project. It's a free demo. It's a single dev. It's something where you can tell a lot of heart and thought was put into the project -- probably a lot more than some of the other VR Match-3 games I've been playing. 

I hope he finishes it because I had fun playing it. If he ever happens to read this post, here's me wishing you the best of luck! Thanks for adding to the VR Match-3 genre.

Happy Dueling!

Match it! A Simple and Surprising VR Matching Game

Not going to lie, I'm kind of excited to show off today's matching game. The past few days I've been doing a few reviews on match-3 VR games, and in my search for games I stumbled upon "Match It!", which is a colors and numbers matching game.  The best part of Match It! is that it's absolutely free, so there's absolutely no buyers remorse at all.

Now, just to be fair to the Match-3 VR genre, this isn't a match-3, but it is a match 2. I had "match 3" so firmly embedded in my mind that as I started to play this game I was grabbing hexes and trying to drop them on top of other hexes. It didn't work. You need to use both hands to play . . . like so:

There's zero instructions on this game, but after experimenting a bit, I quickly came to find out that you can do this one of two ways, either by simultaneously clicking on matching hexes or by grabbing one hex and holding it with one hand and clicking on the matching hex with another hand . . . the latter being more effective with larger boards, but the former being more of a mental workout and faster on smaller boards.

What's genius about this game is the tension they're able to bring into it by making the leaderboards an active part in gameplay.

As you begin clicking and playing, you're elevated up between a cube of skyscrapers. You have this feeling of being ON TOP of the world as you start clicking and begin your game.  Then you begin your descent as you slowly drop a step each time a faster past leaderboard entry is reached. For some reason, feeling your descent in VR while simultaneously hearing a descension note as you drop a place on the leaderboard is absolutely genius. It gives this really nice competitive tension to the game and makes it an experience I hadn't yet felt in VR. 

I need more copycat games that use this tension, please!

There's actually a leaderboard for each variation of match it game. These leaderboards certainly don't feel faked if they are.  If you happen to download it and see "It Stings" with a time of 8.64 seconds or better on the default numbers, 4-color, 32 blocks game . . . let me know!

Top Ten!  I CAN DO BETTER!

I found the REAL fun of this game was the numbers, 8-color, 128 blocks game. Awesome and such a workout as you spin around trying to find a random number between 1 and 64.

So there's not much to this game and it's very simple. It's all it needs to be, and it's 100 percent free. No complaints from me.  If you're looking for a great intro to VR matching game experience, Match It! appears to be a great starter game.

Happy Dueling!