Loop Hero -- All the stars go out

 Welcome to Loop Hero . . . 

Goodbye Stars!

I'm reminded of some lyrics from the 70's band, Bread. 

If the world should stop revolving spinning slowly down to die,
I'd spend the end with you.
And when the world was through,
Then one by one the stars would all go out,
Then you and I would simply fly away

Except we don't fly away . . . what we do instead is travel an infinite loop where monsters spawn endlessly and we attempt to rebuild the world and equip ourselves with super cool gear so we can kill a lich.  

So that's what made the stars all go out . . .

Loop Hero is a pretty fun game with that good, old school aesthetic. I'm no stranger to the idle combat genre, but I have to say that this is the most ACTIVE idle game I've ever played. It could be I just haven't got to the part where I can walk away from the computer yet, but as you travel the loop over and over and defeat more and more monsters, the game naturally spits out cards, which you use to rebuild the map, and gear, which you use to upgrade your hero.

As this happens, you're earning resources.  Once you pull your hero out of the combat loop or are forced out of the loop by death, you take a portion of those resources back to town. The size of that portion depends on where and how you retreat.  

Can we build it? No we can't!

As you build new buildings for your town and place them down, you start to get new personalities in your town like this crazy, old herbalist lady. These new buildings start benefiting your play by providing you advantages when you're running the loop.

She's more like a sweet old lady . . . but something about those eyes says "sinister" to me.

After running the loop a bunch, you will eventually (and I'm not exactly sure on the particulars of how this happens) "level up" in a sense and unlock a temporary buff. This is presented to you in kind of what I call "an archero" style, where you are given a choice of three buffs and you choose one of them. Some buffs affect combat in interesting ways, or some affect resource collection.

Then after some time of circling and building up your character and map, BAM! You summon the first boss of the first map. To be honest, I'm not sure what it is that caused me to summon the boss. I simply had tipped over some threshold and put down enough cards that he came back to fight.

Au contraire squelette!

The lich is no pushover the first time you encounter him. One of my three deaths in game came from this guy.  Anyway, after defeating the lich you're then presented with the option to keep looping and restoring the map or heading home with no resource loss. You also unlock a new class (because this whole time you've been traveling the loop with a warrior) and unlock a new chapter in the story where things get much more difficult.

The most I've ever filled my map

I'm 5+ hours in on Loop Hero and really enjoying it.  If I was to make a guess of where I am in game progression, I'd say I was maybe a third to a fourth of the way through? I say that based on the steam achievements I've earned thus far and the space for adding more chapters on the home screen.  It'd be nice if I was wrong because this is a game I could put a lot of hours on.  It's super easy to play and well worth the $15 I paid for it.

Thanks to Tipa from Chasing Dings and Team Spode for the great game suggestion! It's like she knows me and the games I like to play very well! I guess playing together for multiple years does that to ya. ;)

Happy Dueling!

How does Dungeons and Dragons Work?

 A cool follower of mine on Twitter, named Guardian Eatos, asked me if I could explain how Dungeons and Dragons works.  I can do that!  

Ok, so . . . a little bit of background to D&D. As I said on my blog back in 2009 when Dave Arneson died, 

"So Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax are the fellas who came up with the Dungeons and Dragons game back in the 1970's, and I'd have to say, really, all RPGs in general owe something to D&D for their origins. All of you young wizards out there, thrusting yourselves into dungeons and using such things as 'hit points' or 'health,' have no idea that Wizard101 and all RPGs owe a lot to the roots laid down by these two fellas. You want high health on your character? Well, Gygax and Arneson invented the concept of health on your character!"

Since the 1970's there have been several different versions of the game released. The latest release is D&D Fifth Edition.  Fifth edition has been pretty great ever since it came out in 2014. The real question here is when will the 6th edition be released?  There haven't been any recent announcements that I know of, so you should be fine investing in 5th edition materials. It's going to happen sometime, and when it does, you can be sure we'll all be buying new stuff. Typically old versions don't mix well.

Don't be like me and buy the old edition the week before they publish the new edition.

So, the first thing I'd recommend doing for any new player is to head over to D&D Beyond. This website is great! The New Player guide they have is great. Here you can make an account and even roll up your first characters from the comfort of your own computer.

The second recommendation is that you decide how you want to play this game . . . do you want to play virtually or in-person?  In-person has been a little rough lately because of quarantine, but may I just say that in-person D&D games are about 1,000 times better than virtual games.

Option A -- So, if you're playing in person, I'd head to a local game store that sells D&D supplies and purchase a standard set of dice.  They come in a little box or bag usually and have a 20-sided dice, a 12-sided dice, a 10-sided dice, an 8-sided dice, a 6-sided dice, and a 4-sided dice.  You'll want to have all these for your first game.  

Be sure to get a set that's easy to read!

The next part involves asking around. If it's a good game shop where you bought your dice, I'd ask the guy at the counter if they ever host games for new players.  If yes, the guy at the counter will give you a time and a date to show up and maybe even a flyer if you're lucky.

If not, that's when you'll need to recruit some friends to play and one of you is going to have to be the dungeon master . . . and that's when you start laying down money for books.  As a player, you really only need the Player's Handbook.  As a Dungeon Master (DM), you'll need the DM guide, a Monster Manual, and a Player's Handbook. So, we're talking a good amount of money for all those books just so you know. (You can also find free pirated versions of the books online, but you risk getting a virus and out of date information.)

Option B -- If you're playing virtually, I'd go make an account on Roll20.net. Be sure to read through the Getting Started page there so you know what you're getting into. 

Again, I'd probably try to convince a friend of mine to go into a game with me so I have a buddy. It always feels better to have a buddy with you when you do something for the first time like this.

Next, find the perfect game for you by using the search function to see what's out there. Be sure to click on the Advanced options and select that you want to play "D&D 5E" and fill out all the options you'd like to find in your game, and hit search!

Tons of options to narrow down the game you're looking for

Hopefully the game will be a lot of fun and be a good introduction to D&D! 

There are a lot of strange controls on Roll20. Hopefully the DM will talk you through them all or you've read all the introduction materials to familiarize yourself with them.  People are generally chill.

~~

As for how the game works . . . Basically a DM runs the game and sets the frame for a story where you and the other players are the heroes of the story.  If it's a good game, it'll last several days over several weeks, you'll make great friends and have fantastic stories of clutch moments where you saved the day.  It doesn't always work that way, but that's when you know it went well. :)

My wife recorded a little bit of the last adventure I ever DM'd before quarantine hit, and I got some really fun emotions out of my players when their favorite NPC fell overboard in the middle of a storm on a ship.  Good times.

If you give D&D a try, let me know how it goes! I miss playing on the regular.

Happy Dueling

Wizard101 -- Weekend Fishing Overload!

It's been a couple days and my fish collection continues to grow. Last time I posted, I was at 13 fish just starting out, and now I'm up to 68 fish.  YEAH! FISH COLLECTION!

Space is filling up fast!

I filled up the bottom level of the entrance after the second day and then today I started filling up the top tier (as pictured above).

Fishies!

What I really wanted to do was use the advanced housing placement feature, but I found a bug. You can only move and adjust the position of one fish. The moment you try to adjust the placement of a second fish with advanced placement, the position of the first fish resets. :(  I guess they're all bottom feeders for now.

Although all these fish fit in this house without fishtanks, it's very "underwater dim" in this house, so . . . I dunno. It's not an ideal presentation. Ah well.

I can tell already that there are two fish in particular that are going to give me fits. I gave up on the Pompeiino fish in Aquila and the Goldfin-ger fish in Mooshu. Each of those took a full batch of energy trying to summon/winnow the fish and I still didn't find them.

Along the way I've discovered that I didn't complete the fishing quests in Mooshu.  Finishing those will be super helpful since you can get a winnow rank 2 fish spell from completing the quest.

I keep thinking in the back of my mind . . . if I was a designer given the task of improving fishing in Wizard101, what would I do?  Speeding it up and adjusting the resulting gold you receive per fish would probably be the first thing on the agenda. Unfortunately these fish don't have run, attack, jump, and swim animations, so although turning them into in-game pets seems to be a win, it's not, It's a huge lose.  Anything you do with fish has to involve idle animations and that's it.

I'd probably then focus on the collector aspect of fish and make a checklist of fish more forward facing for the player. 

Making pet snacks out of fish seems to be a win, but these fish have such personalities that it almost seems morbid to do so. That said, it is very easy to end up with several duplicates of fish when you're participating in a fishing tournament or fishing for an epic rarity fish. Fusing duplicate fish or trading duplicate fish as currency could be pretty great -- then it's just a matter of the result from fusing or trading.  What could you get in exchange? I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that fishing is probably one of the least used side systems in the game. If I could trade fish in exchange for potion buffs, I might do that; for example, I'd trade 12 charred decoy for a minor fire damage boost potion. Using Alchemy as a side system that ties in to fishing could be pretty interesting. Minecraft ties fish into alchemy doesn't it?

As it is now, fishing is more just a chill activity that gets you a lot of gold in game. There are the fishing tournaments and the fish of the day, but that's pretty much it. I mean, you get a fishing experience bar and fishing badges, but that's to be expected.

Back in the day, I remember pitching a fishing app for Pirate101, but that pitch didn't go anywhere.  In my mind it was where you would come to a fishing node in your ship, and then the game would sync to your mobile app where you'd play a mini-game and get the resulting fish in Pirate101. I always felt fishing should have been in Pirate101 before Wizard101. It just made sense.

Anyway, none of these interesting questions are mine to tackle. I'm just here to collect as many fish as I can and write blog posts about it. ;)

Happy Dueling

Something Fishy in Wizard101

It's funny. The very last KI Live I did before passing the mantle of Community Manager to Mr. Manderson featured 20 or so boring minutes of me trying to catch a fish in Azteca, but the pure elation when that stupid Chupacarpe finally showed up was pretty funny.

"This is my campaign slogan for 2018: speed up my nibbles!"

. . . and then . . . I never finished the rest of the quest . . . until today! Yes, my friends, I finally caught the elusive Pirahptor fish from Mangrove Marsh, like 3 years later.  34.6 inches long and full of spitfire.

"pure water-based nightmare fuel"  I love it.

The past couple days Fishing in Wizard101 has been a super chill experience for me. I'm loving this game more for fishing than anything else right now. In fact, it's kind of making me want to catch all the fish and make one of my castles all about fish keeping. I haven't personally used fishing to scratch that collector itch inside me. I've only used it for making money, and I have PLENTY of gold -- I probably just need to do a whole bunch of hatches to spend more, but I'm already overflowing with pets to the extreme. How you like them 1st world Wizard101 problems?

 To those ends, I've purchased a twelfth castle for 100,000 gold. The Sunken Palace!  What's great about this is that you can place fish directly in the "sunken" part of this palace without a fishtank.

It's so small and cute!

There we go . . . the humble beginnings of my new collection.  Gotta catch 'em all! Only 193 more to go!  Anybody have a link to a good checklist for fishing? Catching all those seasonal fish is gonna be tough.

Have y'all seen my fishtank I got this past year in real life?  I've been doing tik toks of it.

@friendlynecro

techno tribal fish tank!

♬ Healing Nature - Sonic Mystery

@friendlynecro

fishtank life 1 *hugs*

♬ Steven Universe - L.Dre

@friendlynecro

aquarium life 2 *hugs*

♬ Peaceful - Arnaud Gauthier

@friendlynecro

the fish cookie is mine! mmm yum! FISH COOKIE

♬ 115 - Treyarch Sound & Brian Tuey & James McCawley & Kevin Sherwood

I'm such a nerd for fish right now!  I love it!

Happy Dueling!

DK Country Tropical Freeze -- DONE!

Wow. Just wow. Honestly, someone more sane than me would have moved on from Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze when they saw the difficulty of that final boss, but I finished it up today at the beginning of my lunch break.

Celebrating with the kong clan.

So, what changed from Saturday to now? Here's the story: I went and did what any person would do when they're stuck on an old level from an older game -- go watch a video of someone beating the boss. That did a couple things for me. I was able to see that in actuality, I was really close to beating the boss already.  There wasn't any great strat or new thinking I got from the video. Zephiel810 basically flexed in that video by showing it could be done without any special powerups or anything. The real win for me was reading the comments to their video. 

It's not just me . . .

That gave me a bit of confidence just knowing that it wasn't just me that struggled with that end boss, but also it gave me a pretty interesting clue that made all the difference.  I was buying invincibility potions, I was using Dixie Kong for the heart boost, I was even using the roll-into-penguins trick to get hearts back . . . the real difference was ditching the invincibility potions in favor of extra Dixie Kong barrels.  

He was my Internet hero!

The finishing cinematic scene was pretty epic. You punch that walrus back to his fleet of ships and basically cause a huge explosion that sends them plunging to the depths and steal his magical horn.  You then use that magical horn to blow away the snow and ice and instead bring a magical slide of flowers to your island as all is restored to its natural order. Roll the credits.

After the credits roll there's a little secret cinematic that shows the Kong clan receiving a big gift box.

What could be inside?!

What's inside is apparently a "relic." So if you collect all the KONG letters in each and every level, you get a relic . . . you combine those six with the one from beating the end boss and it opens up a hidden level for you to play.  So . . . no . . . you're actually NOT done with the game, but . . . yeah . . . I am done (at least for now).  That final boss actually gave me nightmares in real life.

68 percent complete is done enough for me . . .

This has always been the beauty of the Donkey Kong Country series to be honest. If you didn't have the re-playability from finishing all the extra challenges in the game, this wouldn't feel like a true Donkey Kong Country game. 

Thanks again to Angela Shadowgarden for the great game suggestion.

Happy Dueling!

CR 330 -- World of Flashpoint releases in DCUO

DCUO has released Episode 40 and it's all about Flashpoint, a comic series from 2011. The same Flashpoint that played out in Season 3 of CW's Flash (It was after season 3 that I stopped watching myself).  Things are all upside down in flashpoint, where Cyborg is the main hero while Superman is locked away in a government facility. Flash messed up the timeline and now it's going to take a lot of work to restore it.

Apparently you can read Flashpoint #1 for free on the DC Comic Subscription service if you sign up for it. I may have to do that. Apparently you can also watch the animated Flashpoint movie on HBOMax . . . also something I may have to do. (But I may have to finish watching the Stargirl series first though.)

Chillin' with the boss in Flashpoint

For players, this means we get a new duo event, a new 4-player event, 2 new raid events, and ye' old standard fare of open world daily missions. In other words, it's exactly what you'd expect from new content in DCUO.  

For me, it means my CR needle can move once again! The last time I posted a CR update on my character was way back at the beginning of January. So far my gains have only been through the standard boxes you get from completing missions and the duo. On Thursday when the new content released, I was lucky enough to find my buddy, Teal Lantern, online and we crashed through the duo without problems.

Batman . . . or rather Batman's Dad in Flashpoint . . . backed us up to take down Amazo.

The open world raids are interesting and involve taking down a couple of super villains and fighting 100 enemies.  One of the villains you get to fight is Doomsday.

Laying the smackdown on Subject Doomsday

It's a pretty standard fight, but I do like how he ends up grabbing a gigantic chunk of metal towards the end and starts smacking people around with it.

I'm pretty sure Team Spode will shift back to playing through this content for a little while, at least to do the new 4-player event and raids. It'll be fun to play through this new world with my buddies once again.

Happy Dueling!

DK Country Tropical Freeze -- That last boss though!

My right thumb . . . HURTS!  Hours later, it still feels like all the blood has been squished out of it repeatedly. I hate to admit this, but, I can't beat that last boss in Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze. I'm out of money in game and I can't afford to buy more invincibility potions. I've played the level at least 40-50 times so far. I . . . can't . . . beat . . . it.  WHAT?!

Blow your evil horn, Walrus King . . . you are victorious . . . for the moment

I know what I need to do to overcome this level, but I really really don't want to do it.  sigh.  Funky Kong has a shop and he sells items in exchange for coins that you collect while playing.  For Boss fights, the best item you'll want to buy is the invincibility potion. I believe it might be the most expensive item in the shop at 15 coins for one.

Delicious Banana Juice!  Why do you have to be so expensive?

I fully believe the designers made this last fight so difficult because they knew you'd need these potions to beat it.  It's an absolutely unforgiving fight where you have very small hitboxes to deal with. I've beat all the other bosses, but this guy is wayyyyyy tougher than all the others, and I mean, he should be, but WHAT IS HAPPENING TO ME?! Why can't I kill this guy?!

I've battled through an underwater nightmare with a angry octopus.

He was really really angry! I've survived a myriad of maze-like minecart tracks. 

So maze-like! I've even punched a purple popsicle loving polar bear in the face.

. . . and boy did it it feel good! But this final boss is absolutely the stuff of nightmares for me.  I think it's going to drive me crazy until I beat it. Up to this point, most levels I could figure out and get past in 15-20 minutes. It's a seriously great game (as I've already said in my previous posts). BUT THIS?!?!

I just need to beat that final boss. *cries*

Can I get some well wishes?  Also, can I get some ice for my thumb?

Happy Dueling!