Thanks Blaugust! What's Timmy Wearing?

I saved you all a little cat treat for the last day of Blaugust. It's been a fun month, and I'm happy to have gone the distance. It's been great reading everyone's blogposts and joining in where I can.  The Blaugust Discord server is a fun bunch, and if you're interested in game blogging, you should jump in.

Blogging wasn't the only thing I was doing during August as it turns out. When my youngest would head out the door to school, it gave me a quick 15 minutes to dress up my cat and make a TikTok of him. 

You heard me right, I'm one of "them." 

So, without further ado, I give you my 9 episodes of "What's Timmy wearing?"

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro   #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro  #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

@friendlynecro #catsoftiktok ♬ original sound - Tom Purdue

Until next Blaugust!

Happy Dueling! 

Ding 27 -- Smuggled Lollipops in Tower of Fantasy

I played some ToF last night and progressed a bit with my story quest. As it turns out, there's trouble afoot in the Banges Tech Headquarters! It's THUGS! Crazy thugs with cool stylings!

THUGS gonna die!

As the story goes, after being introduced around the island by Hilda and getting to know a few important characters, you head to bed for the evening. It's a nice scene and you even light off a few fireworks. Ahh, happy days. 

In the morning things are much different. Banges Tech headquarters' shields are up and there's trouble, so Hilda leads you through a back door. When you get there, you find a lot of people in a kind of restraining field and start freeing them and taking down the aforementioned THUGS.

You head into the headquarters itself to see what's going on . . . and promptly get caught while trying to be sneaky.

It was a good try

That's ok, they throw you in a prison cell with a guy named Koh. Koh lets you know that everybody has been captured and put in jail cells, including President Kolador and his son Theo. GASP! 

It's ok. Not only is Koh President Kolador's right hand man, but he's also a thinker! He has a great plan to get the cell door open and have you throw on a guard uniform as a disguise! "Plan Koh" goes off without a hitch and before you know it, you're walking around Banges Tech headquarters in an Heirs of Aida guard uniform freeing people left and right.

Just act natural

I haven't looked up any spoilers about the Heirs of Aida, but I'm thinking that things may not be so black and white with the bad guys of the story. I mean, they could have outright killed President Kolador and Theo, but instead they just locked 'em up, right? 

Here's where the story goes a little kooky. Theo is a pretty sickly kid and looks to only have a couple months left to live. That's driven President Kolador crazy, and he decided to give him some kind of monster making syrum in hopes of saving his life.  However, you only discover this after running a couple of strange black market delivery jobs for a shady character named Hopkins while looking for Astrum. Side note: Keeping things light, Tower of Fantasy makes one of those delivery jobs giving some random kid some lollipops? *scratches head*

The best black market jobs are the ones you pull off for bratty kids

You see, this Astrum stuff we're hunting for is pretty rare and valuable since it's an energy source used to power Omnium machinery.  Yeah, I don't know what that is either. Look! It's all very complicated! 

Anyway, while hunting for Astrum, you then encounter a super frustrating puzzle mechanic that basically wants you to throw a laser box (ala the game Portal) onto a moving platform. Honestly it took me about a good 10 minutes to figure out how to put that cube on the platform.

I hate that stupid cube

Inside the ruins where you're hunting for Astrum is President Kolador, and he's just about done turning his son into a soulless monster. It doesn't end well.  

Theo!  You monster!

In the end, the Heirs of Aida take care of Theo and leave you and Kolador behind. Kolador gives up the "now depleted" Astrum and bids you a final farewell by telling you that "Sean at 201" has what we need as he's left to wallow in the fact that he failed as both a husband and a father. (Dang, I could use some light-hearted lollipop smuggling right about now.)

Heading back to Franz and Hilda, they put 2 and 01 together for you and point you toward Shelter 201 on the east side of Banges Port.

. . . and that's where I decided to stop and do a few bounty missions and dailies and things. Whew. Intense, and I really liked the story there -- even the crazy part of delivering a mystery kid some smuggled lollipops. (especially the crazy part of delivering a mystery kid some smuggled lollipops!) It's all good times in Tower of Fantasy.

Happy Dueling!

Blaugust Journaling -- How about some Guild Wars 2 and Tower of Fantasy?

I got nothin this morning, so I'm just going to do a little quick journaling about a couple of games I played yesterday.

1- Guild Wars 2.

So Team Spode is playing Guild Wars 2 together . . . again . . . and I'm there for the ride! Except last night . . . I wasn't! Why? Because the mic on my headphone decided to not work and I spent way too long fighting it instead of just playing muted. After 40 minutes of troubleshooting and uninstalling Oculus thinking that there was a conflict between the Oculus headphone mic and my actual headphone mic, I organized my terribly messy desk and found the cable I needed to hook in my podcasting mic that I never use. At that point, I was like . . . I'm done, and didn't even log in.

I love going super necro in Guild Wars

That said, I got in a couple hours of play on Guild Wars 2 last night and this morning, so it's not like I feel like I'm "behind" or anything. Our buddies John and Clara have been playing tour guide to Team Spode in the Heart of Thorns expansion, and as it turns out, there's lots to do there . . . waypoints, points of interest, vistas, challenge points, etc.

Standing in a council of angels?

For me personally I've just been going through the story in Heart of Thorns and getting a bit road blocked by the need to grind enemies. Sounds like an MMO, doesn't it? It sure does!

2- Tower of Fantasy

I logged in a bit this morning and man . . . I don't want to like this game, but I'm really liking it. Every time I log in, something cool happens that's like, dang, this is really freaking good.  Case in point, there was a battle with this lady named Frigg and it was friggin' intense. She gave me an amazing butt kicking with a super cool cut scene.

About to get my butt kicked

My brain keeps telling me, please don't let me like a game with the name Tower of Fantasy, but there's this troll inside of me that's like . . . YES, YOU LIKE GAME! YOU PLAY GAME! TOWER! FANTASY! ALL THE THING YOU LIKE! PLAY GAME, DUMMY!

Me . . . it's me. I'm not a crybaby.

That's all I got time for this morning! Thanks for the quick read, and I'll catch you tomorrow.

Happy Dueling!

Some Lessons Learned Blaugust 2022

According to the Master Schedule over on Belghast's blog, this week is to be the Lessons Learned week after a solid month of blogging. So, hmmm, what did I learn? Lemme brainstorm that a bit:

• I learned that you can't view 360 photos hosted from the Momento360 website on your Quest 2. I even e-mailed their support about it. They pointed the finger at a change to how the Quest 2 works and said they wouldn't have a fix for at least a year.

Looking out over Lonely Lake Georgetown

• I learned that my old Runes of Magic guildmates probably aren't interested in reading my blog anymore now that I'm not writing about RoM and logging on daily. LOL! It's fine. I get it. Same thing happened with my old Project Gorgon guildmates.
  
  
• I learned that I can't hack doing Blaugust and Mutant Reviewers at the same time. I didn't get any movie reviews done this month. I suck.
  
  
• I learned that I think I'm finally getting my Sea Legs in VR. Vection sickness is no joke and there are games that handle it well, and there are games that handle it poorly, but over time, the more you play, the more you start to get an immunity built up to it.
  
  
• I learned that along with gaining an immunity to vection sickness, the more you play VR, the more the illusion of a fantasy world around you starts to crumble away. I'll never forget how I felt playing Astrobot for the first time and how marvelous that fantasy world was in the midst of an apocalyptic pandemic. I don't know if I get that deep into the illusion of a VR world anymore.

Do I have to climb that tower? It might make me seasick.

• I learned the impact that Breath of the Wild and Genshin Impact had on the gaming world. I feel like I missed out on riding a really important cultural gaming phenomenon by not exploring those games more (although my kids played the heck out of it). Tower of Fantasy . . . I'm looking at you!

Feeling the Impact of Genshin Impact

• I learned that looking back on your game portfolio can get a little tedious and dredge up some old buried feelings. I mean, it'll help me if I ever need to start looking for a new job somewhere, but probably not the best material for a Blaugust.
  
  
• I learned that if you happened to make it through that whole list and read to this point, that I appreciate you. Not a lot of people are willing to read a long list like this and invest time in what you have to write, especially when you're a niche game blogger. Thank you!

I'm sure there's more I learned, but I've gotta get ready for the day. So many things to explore and never enough time.

Happy Dueling!

Chronicling the Karnage!

I picked up Karnage Chronicles the other day as a part of a VR Bundle sale (Incidentally it's also 60% off in the Steam store at the moment), and it's really good! It feels a lot like Vanishing Realms (which I've talked about in passing before), but with what feels like a bigger budget of a game studio behind it instead of a solo dev company. In fact after a quick peep at their LinkedIn Page, Nordic Trolls, seems to be a small 2-10 person team located out of Beijing.

Immediately what grabs you in Karnage Chronicles is the art style and the embodied choices for game selection. To choose one of the two classes, Warrior or Archer, you simply walk through a doorway.  To choose a difficulty (easy, normal, hard, or impossible), you, again, simply walk through a doorway. That's great. Nobody wants clunky, ugly UI elements in a VR space . . . unless you're in Roblox. I jest. Even in Roblox it sucks.

Goblin Archers . . . the worst!

Being in this world feels like being inside a fantasy amusement park ride. Everywhere you look at a rock wall, there's also some kind of bioluminescence that gives the world a fanciful Underdark kind of charm. Just like in an amusement ride, there's pockets of decoration off to the side for you to look at. The puddles on the ground reflect this bioluminescent glowing as well. Around every corner is some kind of urn or bottle to break with a bow or even pick up to throw. It's just a fun world to be in. They've done really well making the cave system wind and turn and open up into natural rooms.  

Timing my run through a trapped corridor

The inventory system feels like a complete rip off of Vanishing Realms, but they've made some improvements to it. You can stack similar items! It's easy to drop and sell!  But at the end of the day, it's exactly like the inventory in Vanishing Realms, which is good!  I'd love to see someone innovate beyond this system, but as far as VR RPGs go, this is as good as it gets.

To be honest, live action melee combat is really hard to pull off in VR. It's super easy to get inside the middle of an enemy and slice around in a strange haphazard fashion that doesn't necessarily feel cool. Karnage Chronicles suffers from this. Archery in VR, on the other hand, always feels cool. In Death Unchained is still one of my favorite games in VR. I've raved about it before. Likewise, I love shooting arrows at things in Karnage Chronicles.

Sticking the End Boss of Wyvernscale with several of my deadly arrows

So far I've been exploring Wyvernscale, which appears to be the first of three areas. In fact, as of writing this blog post, I believe I've just entered the second area Caves of Decay. Little hint if you play this game, there is nothing more valuable than the scroll of Town Portal. Every time you go to town, be sure to buy a new one because you won't stumble on a replacement while out adventuring. I can't tell you how many times I've been bogged down with a full inventory. Meh, inventory, the bane of all RPGs. Am I right?

At the beginning of the Caves of Decay, you run into an orcish innkeeper, a full size NPC, that is absolutely amazing. They really handled him well as a character. All in all, I'm really impressed with the art and sound in this game. It's just done extremely well. The way the sound echoes around the tunnels is amazing in a 3D space and completely unnerving in a good way. Immersion is the name of the game, and they pulled it off extremely well in this game.

Love this guy . . . feels like an Australian Orc

Best part of this game of course, is that you can play it with friends. I'm pretty sure a group of us at work is going to jump into this game and play it together over lunch breaks. It seems to integrate really well with your Steam friend list. Because of that, I'm sure I'll have plenty more to write about Karnage Chronicles in the future.  It's one of the great ones! 

Happy Dueling!

Merrily, Merrily, Merrily Hades Full of Tricks

 As it turns out, Journey for Elysium is a game of two parts . . . and thus a follow on to yesterday's post, "Row, Row, Row Your Boat Gently Down the Styx" is absolutely needed today.

After my play session a couple days ago, I happily took off my headset thinking . . . "Oh, what a quirky little VR boat game." Yes, it has its problems:

• No haptics on the bow weapon
• Sometimes the bow just disappears out of my hands
• Speaking on hands, they don't even grab on to the bow correctly
• What a horrible decision it was to make a 360 game interrupted by a UI telling you to face forward the other direction
• Pffft, what motion sickness . . . we're just gonna ignore all that and make a spinning tower as a part of the end boss encounter!

OH, what's that I said right there? End boss encounter?!

Eye see what I should do here

The last half of the game has little to no rowing of a boat and instead has a ton of puzzles and, you heard me, an end boss encounter! 

Inside Apollo's temple you end up navigating several puzzle rooms where if you make the wrong step, it'll spike ya dead with a trap. There's also several climbing challenges involving the Lyre instrument where you play a tune on your Lyre and hand rail bricks pop out of the wall for a limited time and then you have to  hurry and VR Climb them before they disappear.

At the very end of the game, your unfortunate past is now made crystal clear as you get caught up in a battle between Melinoë (bad) and Vanth (good).  Apparently Melinoë was jealous of your wife because as it turns out you are a half-god and she's a bit of a stalker. What's strange here is that I don't think Vanth really is a Greek mythology character, so they're bending the rules a bit, which is fine by me. I'm not playing this game for a Greek Mythology lesson or anything.  

Trying to Enhance the Vanth

Your final boss fight goes a bit like this . . . after plunking a few scary tentacles with a bow, Vanth surrounds a now water-insect-demon-like-Melinoë in a sphere of energy as you solve two climbing puzzles, return to the middle, and then fire your Vanth-empowered god killing bow straight into water-insect-demon-like-Melinoë's big ugly alien eye. 

Tentacle Target Practice

Just when you think you're out of troubled waters and on your way to heaven aka Elysium, Hades stops you, breaks your key, tells you I both love and hate you now (thanks for killing my troublesome daughter, but also what the heck man, you killed my daughter), and makes you his ferryman. If you can earn him enough gold from the poor souls trying to get to Elysium, you'll be able to buy your freedom back from him and mend the key.

Thanks for the 2 gold. I have a feeling this is going to take a while . . .

Story wise and creative wise, I actually really liked the concept of this game. I liked slowly rowing the boat. The puzzles were interesting, but not too challenging. The hardest part of the game was climbing that right tower at the end. Holding on to a spinning tower in VR was not something I was expecting to do yesterday. Here's the full video if you'd like to check it out.

At the end of the day, I'm glad I bought this game on the cheap as a part of a VR bundle. $10 is chump change for a VR game, but hey . . . paying $3-5 is always better. Speaking of which, if you're looking for some great deals, go on and head over to the Fanatical website and check out their Build Your Own Bundle going on for VR games right now. I picked up five more games today for a fraction of their regular cost. Now to just find the time to play them.

Happy Dueling!

Row, Row, Row Your Boat Gently Down the Styx

I picked up Journey for Elysium as a part of a VR-centric humble bundle a few months ago. It's one of those games I've been wanting to try "when the time is right." The time was right yesterday since I was looking for something new I could play and write about for Blaugust.  

Journey for Elysium is a cruel game that immediately walks you to a cliff where you witness a beautiful sunset, and then immediately kills you as you plummet to your death. Weee! 

Time to die!

It's funny because just yesterday I was talking to someone that joked he gets the fear of heights feeling when he gets close to an edge in VR . . . even though he knows it's not real. As cruel as I am, I should offer this game to him to play.

Not to worry, it is the last time you'll be dropping from a cliff like that because now that you're dead, you've forgotten who you are and it's time to make your way to the river Styx where you'll be rowing a boat, traveling down it, solving puzzles, and unraveling your story.

Not ominous at all!

The first time I strapped on my headset and started to play, I was offered the choice of teleport to move or moving with a joystick. I chose teleport to move because I thought it would be the right choice. It was the wrong choice. 

Immersive for the win

At the time, I didn't know the the right joystick on my controllers would reposition me in 45 degree increments, and I kept ending up facing backwards looking at two lines telling me to not to do that and it really broke the experience. 

It's kind of strange that a 360 VR game was so bent on telling me which direction I should face. the reason it appears was to always orient me onward and in the direction of the story. After progressing in the story a couple beats, it was time to jump into the rowboat on the river styx and row, row, row my boat . . . and immediately got vection sickness, so I took off my headset and got busy doing real-life stuff.

Later that night, knowing that a Blaugust post was looming, I decided to give Journey for Elysium another shot.  This time I chose the immersive movement. I was nervous that immersive movement alone would give me vection sickness, but to my surprise, it didn't and now the weird warning lines were gone. In fact, I think the weird warning lines were actually causing me vection sickness because when I hopped in the boat this time, all was well.

Pausing the journey to listen to tales of how cool I am as an orphan hero

This game is all about immersion and has an interesting feeling about it as you slowly row the river Styx. Slowly.  Remember that.  Don't over do it on the rowing. I found that a slow row caused almost no vection issues and made the whole experience much better. While traversing the river, you run into memory bubbles that tell you a bit of your story as a "bastard" child that became a hero. By the way, if I had a 3% discount on the game for every time they used the word "bastard" I would have gotten the game for free.

In between the story bits there were simple VR puzzles for you to solve. They weren't hard, but they were entertaining. The whole time I was playing I kept puzzling out in my mind . . . am I supposed to be a famous Greek Myth hero?  If I am, which one? I think I'm just a random unknown hero? 

Anyway, at the end of my play session I had arrived at a temple of Apollo, played a lyre to open the gates and arrived at a larger puzzle.  From everything I've read, there's really only 2-3 hours of gameplay in this VR title, and really for a VR title, that seems to be all that's expected.

If you don't have a lot of room to move around in VR, this game had me sitting in one spot and not moving my body much. If you're into that and a slow-paced story and easy puzzle experience, this is a good, short title that has a lot of gloomy atmosphere.  Honestly I kind of wish my floating orb guide had less of an upbeat chipper tone about her and instead was more ghostly and spooky to really put me in the mood of traveling through the underworld.

I kinda liked the two-handed rowing stuff!

Once I got used to the rowing, I kind of loved the boat ride aspect to this game, it made me want to experience all the slow moving parts of Pirates of the Caribbean in VR. I wonder if that exists somewhere?  If it does, that sounds like yet another Blaugust post in the making! 

Happy Dueling!