Leveling up the least fun ability

Seems to me that in GW2 my roleplay will be determined by howmuch I dislike the other abilities rather than by how cool a particular tequnique is. First of I rolled a thief so that I could play Hyperdimensional Frog, the athletic Sheila. But I find I never use the F1, its out of the way and not terribly usefull and I feel like I’m supposed to know what I am steeling and how to use it. Then there is the dodge, normally Frog really likes dodging, but its also normally an innate. Double tap is hard to do. Maybe I’ll have another go at this later but for the time being a necromancer will be my main.

Anoiki has the same issues though. There isn’t enough different tactics options for me to struggle to choose between them. This is partially because in ADOM I could have a hoard of zombies and skeletons following me. So for a choice of three minions I figure “why bother even summoning them?”

Berzerk the Cataclysm: Deck strategy

Mostly I have been getting the standard booster pack, hoping for more mercenary cards. I figure I should get one useful card for every 20,000 that I spend. For me that is usually UR or SR without the assassin trait (or with less than 4 crystals).

Then I built a deck of each type, trying to minimize then number of low level cards. I decided each increment from C < F < R < SR < UR < P is roughly the same, so replacing a common hero with a frequent hero gives roughly the same improvement to the deck as replacing an Ultra Rare with a Promo level card. That said I like fire, rage and vampire and I don’t like formation, direct strike or assassin.

For my castle defense I have a snowball deck, it either wins or loses dramatically. I like to keep 5 or so barbarians and only have 2 people defending. Hopefully this encourages other players to think I am AFK and then they will attack me. Otherwise just waiting for income is rather dull.

For attacking barbarians and defending I like my dark deck. Often my two item cards land next to each other and so thirst is nothing like the debuff that I thought it would be. If I made a third dark deck it would have only C and F cards, so I haven’t used it. When I need a three card deck I go with more mountains.

Mostly though I’d recommend people just bake the best out of the cards they are dealt. My prime dark deck is still better at fighting swamp decks than the one with all the swamp assassins. So aim for leveling up you cards and one day you will have enough to start thinking about strategy rather than sheer power & speed. Or you could build a deck like this for funnies, even though it loses a lot. To this end I’d like a fire only deck because I don’t really know what fire cards do.

Although no matter how much you want a card you only have something like 8 in 300 chance of getting it. I don’t know the exact numbers but of the 600 available cards some you only get as achievements/quests/gift ~10; Some useless cards from the basic booster ~40; Then maybe 250 standard cards and 300 real money cards.

See Also:
Berserk: The Apocalypse
Parting forum post
Berserk: The Cataclysm: Deck strategy
Berserk: The Cataclysm: A reviewF2P: A quick overview and review

F2P: A quick overview and review

What I like: Paying for vanity items or for variety. Give me something bland for free to demo the full game then let me see everybody else using exiting abilities and colorful clothes. Then If I actually like playing the game the vanity items and niche abilities will add more variety to my game. I also like donation games like T.O.M.E. where you give the dev money if you like the game and want there to be more of it.

What I don’t like is having to pay to be able to compete. In Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. The beta was fun and the first year or so was fun but it got to a point where the uni student I was playing with had so much more spare time than me that they always had the best equipment for that particular level. So they might be reliably twice as effective than me until the endgame where those people were about ten times as effective as me. So in the end the only places I found enjoyable challenges were in PvE and beta servers.

There are also pay to win Freemium games like Berzerk: Cataclysm. Where the more cash you splash the more game there is to play and the easier it is to beat other players. I believe all F2P games try to avoid this label, some more successfully than others.

Pay to not play; League of legends uses this a little. Either you decide you will eventually reach level 30 and eventually grind enough IP to unlock all the champions. Or you buy experience boosts and the collector’s edition. That way a novice can easily play practically all the game with the first week.

Ao no Exorcist: A review

Also known as the Blue Exorcist

I really liked the female lead in this Moriyama seems like a normal decent person. She isn’t a helpless crybaby like Sakura from Naruto, neither is she a sex symbol like Yoko is in TTGL. Although Moriyama is competent at what she does and is rather strong willed she is still defiantly a girl, unlike Shakugan no Shana whose only feminine qualities are boobs and that she cries when she is sad. (Normally anime blokes don’t cry, they just have a blue aura, AKA Bleach)

Of the protagonist Rin, I will say this, he reminds me of Azuma Kazuma  that makes me happy and is sufficient description for him I think.

Levi put me onto this anime and said that despite being about exorcism and quoting multiple religious texts and having Satan as one of the main characters, he was able to watch it and rather enjoyed it.

I found it to be a nice interpretation of exorcism and a very Japanese take on demons and the underworld. So rather than Satan being the Deceiver/Destroyer he is just the űber powerful king of the spirit world, most spirits being practical jokers and curiously seeking chaos.

One of the messages of the story is about anti-racism, and accepting people for who they are, not their appearance. If you stand on your own two feet and be yourself and accept others at face value then people may get to know you, and once they do they will realize what a nice person you are. This is also seen in Rin’s interactions with Eyebrows girl.


Spoilers:

The plot centers around twin boys that were immaculately conceived by Satan, their mother was of priestly decent, she and Satan became friends.

The boys earthly father was a Paladin and one of the elite of the church, apparently the strongest exorcist ever. When he was sent to kill his girlfriend and the spawn of Satan he found he couldn’t kill the children and raised them as his own. So the boys are raised as humans and have a human body but the soul and magic powers of a demon.

There is the normal anime bit of growing as a person, overcoming adversity, being ostracized and making good friends.

Then at the end of the first series the protagonist is sacrificed on a cross for the salvation of all mankind, his blood given as a pure offering where none other would suffice.

Again here Moriyama shows up and is actually helpful, not just a love interest/bystander, and along with Kirigakure the women stood at the foot of the cross.



That got me thinking then. If the boys here are physically human and have a demonic soul and people/things can be possessed by another soul; then maybe that is something of what Jesus was? A physical human with the soul of God, given the breath of life by the Spirit (pun intended). As it says in Heb 4:12, its not easy to separate those things. Following on from that then would I be a lump of meat that was possessed by an angle (I’ve passed on lots of messages) and given the breath of life by the Holy Spirit?

Berserk: The Cataclysm: A review

Berserk cataclysm: Is just now out of beta. It’s a deck building game where the fun is in creating your card deck. I’ve sunk $10 into it making me one of the pay to win players . Tony got me into playing it and over the last week I think I have had it online the entire time I have been home. I wouldn’t say I have “played” the game for 30 hours but I will say the only competition for my time was an occasional FWOTD in LOL&WoT. One of my main goals is to beat VRBones’s swamp regeneration deck. The mountain card I got in the welcome pack can do this but not reliably. All the cards have a similar ability so once there are three of then there are quickly 8 and all doing 5+ damage per hit. But often I lose having only got one card on the field, a prime example of Snowball Strategy.

I wanted to have an undead deck so I could play with Leviathan from the research tree. But the neutral cards looked good too and the only way to get them was from the standard booster. So I only spent my silver there and ended up with a half decent deck of every colour. Now that I have been at it for a bit I’d like more quicker cards, as they can beat both my snowball deck and VRBones’s healing deck. Other than that in spite of my snowball deck I prefer the cards that stand alone and don’t rely on any other cards around them.

Now that I found out what the second tier of the tower does my strategy is to gain as much interest as possible from my lands and use it to get cards from the standard deck until the next game update.

See Also:
Berserk: The Apocalypse
Parting forum post
Berserk: The Cataclysm: Deck strategy
Berserk: The Cataclysm: A reviewF2P: A quick overview and review

Dungeons: A Review

Dungeons seems to be remarkably similar to Notorious, the heroes are the source of the most deviation, as they actually die. The dungeon has a crystal heart and minions that you can assign tasks to and you place Gimmicks about rooms to change their function. You establish contracts with monsters and geolocate their spawn sites.

At first I jumped straight into the campaign but I was baffled as to what to do first so I had to resort to playing the tutorial. Your psyborg tries very hard to maintain her “Suspension of disbelief” and muses about what she might do next, she also talks to herself a lot and uses the royal “we”. I actually felt a little but sorry for her seeing as I broke her out of prison only to bend her will to mine. There is a goblin called Mr.Sidekick who reminds me when I am getting attacked, most of the time I didn’t know as I was busy building things elsewhere in the dungeon. Deo found it amusing that I was so absent minded as to need this prompt.

Unlike dancing, having completed the basic steps in the tutorial I feel like I have mastered the game, so now all I have left to do is follow the parody of lord of the rings and rinse and repeat the same game mechanics. In dancing though I suppose there is only one mechanic “move like you know what you are doing”. Once you find out how to do a particular set of dance steps and they mesh with your partner and the other people on the dancefloor; Then you can start work on improving your finesse and efficiency (everything I better with a high score list). But before that happens I get distracted by another dance, still the same mechanic but the steps are different or I have a new partner and they move differently.

I wonder if Notorious will be as complex as dancing? It’s not simple a scaled up version of Dungeons as there are several extra mechanics. Eg you have to establish contracts with minions as well as provide them a home. The whole rumor system. And you never totally control anybody, they may always do something unpredictable.

My first impressions have me continuing with the game, it’s nice that I can go to the loo without any adverse effects so I’ll probably play this one whilst I’m making tea, just like the sieges in M&B:Warband. I like Dungeons as a step along the way even though I think Notorious sounds a little too feature heavy to be able to pull off.

Skyzer the Skraeling

Skyzer the Skraeling, Playing Progress Quest there is a race called the Skraelings. I couldn't help but call that character Skyzer. Then I went to look for where the name came from. According to Wikipedia Skraelings are the people that the norse Vikings called barbarians. That is to say they are the barbarians, barbarians. Although they were happy to trade anything for milk & honey. That seems like a very biblical thing to do to me. Apparently 23 verses mention milk and honey, but none are in the 23rd psalm. 20 of those verses refer to “ A land flowing with milk and honey” the other three are SoS 4:11, 5:1 and Isaiah 7:22 these ones fit better with Skyzer I think. There would be no point in obtaining more milk and honey if there were already rivers of it flowing through your country.

So that makes Skyzer a barbaric savage who doesn’t own a goat, but I am a bit of a romantic fool and a mercenary when it comes to the finer things in life.

Recently I found Skyzer the Squire in Dungeon Defenders and once he picked up a katana I knew I had found my weapon, although I must say that mostly I've been upgrading the attack speed of my towers.
All in all this is a decent game for psizomijitsu, but its a bit disappointing that only 4 technomancers can play at any one time. There is DLC to double that but none of us have picked it up as yet. Ive already been playing as Anoikis, the healthy monk. Seems to me that i need two high level heroes to help my friends, one for towers and one for melee. and since Deo is talking to me that is all I will write now.

Hydrophobia Prophesy: A Review

Hydrophobia Prophesy, after the intro I started looking for mods to remove the swearing. I did fine where the sound bytes were stored although VLC didn’t play them well. I removed about 20 files and felt pleased with myself. Initially I was going to replace them with a sound of Kate groaning as it could serve as a good analog, but not for that many files. Although even after that though the main characters still swear a lot. It’s not just taking the Lords name in vain; it’s also the repetitiveness of the so called “Colorful adjectives” that irritates me. People plagued by the word “Um” irritate me in the same manner. Sometimes I can live with it like Red Steal on the Wii, the first line of your girlfriend is “my god, you’re here” or something along those lines, so forever after that I was talking to the ingame characters and gently chided her for giving me the pet name of god. If it wasn’t for that I would never have called out all the sword moves as I did them, and that added a lot to the game. That said unlike Saints Row I am keeping with it and should probably see the tale through to the end.

My next gripe is that the MAVI idea is a great one that would have been better if all the UI was contained within it. As it stands there are a few things that glow on their own like a corpse that I needed to loot and exploding barrels, both of which broke my suspension of disbelief. Also its nice when a game doesn’t tell me that “W” will walk me forwards. The only game that I can think of that specifically doesn’t use “C” for crouch would be the rougelikes. Can there be a difficulty setting for “I have played a FPS before and I know how to configure the kemap” Then only the people who fail to understand get forced to sit through a tutorial. There is also the high score system, that would definitely work better if it was constrained to the NAVI at least in the first playthrough. Plus when you are looking through the MAVI at the world then bring up the overhead map you open another new MAVI over the top of the current one and it is slightly larger.

All the rest is good, It’s nice to not start a game with coming out of a coma. The water mechanics are nice, the confusing half in half out of the water works well in this game. While its frustrating to constantly lose vision as you go through the phase change of water-air-water it feels like it is supposed to do that.

I am wondering at this stage how my mate in the computer knows what I am doing. But his help is not invasive; it actually feels pretty cruisey that I don’t have to think for myself. Also after the first few checkpoints I found that while I am in a rush to not die I always die when I rush.

So it’s a nice immersive game. This also means that I need to play at nighttime to build up the atmosphere. And never run to quest objectives because then people stop talking mid-sentence, moving onto their next piece of dialog.

I also like the boob wobble, reminds me of anime. Although since I first noticed that I’ve been looking for other things that wobble and take advantage of the fluid dynamics system but I haven’t yet noticed anything yet. Maybe I will go through a cafeteria later that was serving jelly. I wonder if there will be oil on water mechanic too?

Ooo a sound gun, that sounds nifty, I suppose I’ll never have to reload it. I’ve yet to try it underwater. I saw somebody complain that there were no air bubbles under water but I don’t mind, with the overhead camera I’m sure they would always get in the road of what you are trying to see. I recently played a mermaid mod of CS Source and the most funest bit of that game was gaining speed and leaping out of the water, then hitting something on land with a wet slap. That game had a good mechanic for getting me to panic about suffocating on land, but here I feel too relaxed about the whole endeavor to be bothered by drowning.

Ah the balance mechanic is also interesting I had no idea what was happening at first as I never fell off anything. But now I know what it is about I’ll give it a go. Incidentally you lean forward when drawing the pistol and it seems I leant forward enough to be on a balance beam, but I cannot have a drawn weapon there so Kate stopped moving. Since I couldn’t do anything else after that I called it a night.



Overall thus far I’d say the game is ok in spite of the swearing and because of the swearing I don’t think I can recommend it.


Part 2:
Wow roughly 3 hours in before I am climbing into a vent. And I have vet to see a box/crate puzzle. Although I think the first instance or crate clutter was just after the elevator in the tutorial.

In one room the apparent exit was blocked with a shipping container and I thought “In real life those barrels could be used to float the container” then proceeded to explore every inch of the room looking for the way out. Eventually I resorted to using the map, then after a while of trying to squeeze through the gap I nearly gave up. Then I found out I could grab the floating barrels and swim down.

Facepalm…

The water powers were cool when I eventually go them although I couldn’t find enough places to play with it. Throwing dynamite barrels is so much more effective than shooting them. Also you can throw people but I didn’t manage to throw one person at another. Also it takes a while but they do drown, they give of a greeny glow when you kill them.

The boss fight had me stumped, after a half dozen attempts I could get her 2/3 dead but then I always died from a tsunami of grenades. I even had to google a solution, I spoilt the fact that this was the only boss fight and found out that the boss was definitely 2/3 defeated. But now how to beat her?

It was simple really, don’t use cover. When you hide the boss throws grenades. All the other attacks you can move out of the road of.

That’s it then, all done and dusted. Apparently this is game 1/3 and they are still looking for player feedback. I like that It made me review the game and got me more interested. Although I’m not about to restart it and hunt for more collectables (I may have found them all but I don’t know). After my rant on swearing I didn’t really notice much more, so that was good. More brain scratching puzzles would have been good, and more combat to play with the water power. Also less chaos may make it better, or worse. Maybe just a faster graphics card to make the chaos smoother is all I needed in those explody electric flooded firefights. Jelly would be a nice addition and having the floor rock under you feet, maybe sway? Yes sway like a real boat. Having a boat rock sounds like it is beached or you are listening to the Beach Boys.

Ramen in Melbourne

 Wandering around Melb yesterdy I saw a nifty Ramen shop that looked simmilar to the one that Naruto frequents. But when it came lunchtime I couldnt find it. I found another one though. It turns out that all the ramen there used miso chicken soup, so the variety was in what went on top. I asked for spicy vegetables and told the girl that I had attempted to make ramen at home and failed miserably. She thew me when she asked if I would like a drink, so I said yes. after a little more confusion I ordered a Kirin Beer because I have not had it before. tasted like a normal beer, but the Japanese drink it.  So this is what I ended up with.

I Remember Choji telling Naruto how to try a new ramen out. so I tested the broth first. The orangy oil is nearly too spicy for me but yes that tasted like the miso soup I had made, the sesame seeds added to it though I I had not tried them.

Next I ate some on the noodles, there were two different sorts and they were a little crunchy still. Particularly the big ones. So last time I definitely overcooked my noodle. Also by the end of the meal all the noodles were cooked through by the heat of the broth.

I am quite pleased that I had a decent attempt at using the chopsticks, also found out that if you slurp the noodles juice flicks off them and makes a mess. Very bad when the juice also burns of chilly. So I chewed out the noodles instead.

The ingredients that I could taste/see and name were:
Ginger, couldn't see any though
sesame seeds (black white and yellow, some of the black ones sank the rest floated on broth)
Lettuce, bite sized pieces, must have been put in last and was uncooked.
Carrot cut in sticks 3mm thick, also somewhat crunchy
Spring onion, sliced into disks.
That was it, I should have ordered a meaty one so that I could get a half boiled egg in it. that looked nifty.
There were a few other veggies that I could not identify.

Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising

Just completed the final mission of Dawn of war 2: Chaos rising. Ran through the entire campaine with Joseph. we didnt get corrupted and used the easyer difficulty. Steam says it took me ~20 hours to finish. that took all the heros from level 19 to 30.
According to steam I played the original campaign for 80 hours, that would be a campaign and a half + some arena matches. There were only ~3 optional missions this time around and windows live has lost all of my previous achievement unlocks again.
Not a bad game in all I will probably play it again single player and maybe also try to get as corrupted as possible. Also it would be nice to run through the entire story from go to woe. I think I used the hack to give me all the exclusive items in the second mission I may do that for this one too, then spend an hour or so reading all the item descriptions.
They left the game wide open for another sequel, I'll probably get that too despite games for windows live and having lag issues between computers that are 6 meters apart (normally less than 30 seconds of lag).

Yakitate Ja-pan

I intend to add in when I first watched these things, but not yet.

One anime that I will recommend. it is about cooking bread.