Because there has to be something after...

The Midnight Sky

It's the end of the world.

Left alone on an Arctic science base while the rest of the planet dies, a terminally ill man (played by George Clooney, who also directs this film) makes it his mission to try contact any space mission in range to warn them of the danger of returning to the irradiated surface.

A nice cup of depression.

All the spider levels are great nightmare fuel!

Ascendant

A relaxing rogue-like?

This action platformer sees you fight through randomly rooms of enemies and bosses until you finally ascend. Thankfully it plays pretty quickly and has a very handy map to help you out as any death means restarting from scratch.

Fortunately, the tutorial is really good and lets you practice the numerous abilities available to you. The knock back mechanic is the best though, as it lets you whack enemies into each other or into deadly spikes!

During the course of a run you will also be picking up currency and upgrades to help you out. Despite lacking in depth it is definitely fun and well animated, and worth a look if you are into this sort of thing. I give it two flies out of five.

Insight: Despite having less life to begin with, Theseus is the better choice of the initial two characters.

Stick it to the Man!

That's one way to get super powers...

What starts as an ordinary day in paper town all changes after getting you get hit on the head, waking to find a spaghetti arm that has the ability to grapple onto pins, read minds and influence people with stickers!

Just what stuff in there using your third hand...

Some cute characters and some surprising plot!

One makes it work, the other doesn't.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

Proves it doesn't need super powers.

This seven season series follows the titular secret organization and their continued missions to save the world while dealing with terrorists, traitors, aliens, robots, time travel and everything in between - and that's on top of "powered individuals" since this show exists in the Marvel universe.

Very cool.

The weakest / most worthless Arrowverse team so far.

Tough luck if you dislike wine.

In this strange walking simulator, you are tasked with collecting stories all across the USA to then "use" on other travelers to unlock their stories, which is the main challenge as not only do they wander around but they ask for specific types of tales before sharing their own.

You run into all sorts of things!

Two stupid movies but only one is entertaining.

Wanted

Gives physics the middle finger.

Wesley (James McAvoy) is a nobody who keeps getting pushed around until he is recruited by a group of assassins who reveal he actually has crazy physics defying firearm abilities.

Angelina Jolie as eye candy always gets a thumbs up!

Three games that I quickly dropped!

Football Manager 2020

Do you like soccer so much that you wish you could be the manager of one of the teams rather than play on the field yourself? If so, this game is for you! In it you'll spend most of your time reading and replying to emails, managing funds, player recruitment, training regimes and developing on-paper strategies to use on the field.

Don't worry! You'll also get to watch all of your teams games and yell stuff from the sidelines. Honestly, that's just too much for me and it's much simpler if you were just a dude kicking a ball instead.

Railway Empire

Do you like model train sets? Then this game is for you! In it you get to build your own stations, tracks and plan train routes across the USA to supply various cities with goods and transportation. As part of the package you need to worry about how trains will pass each other, because having only one locomotive is too easy and not profitable enough to meet the time limit goals put upon you.

Also, no building game is complete without fund management! Yep. In addition to train sets I hope you like accounting! Does supplying out of the way cotton make more of a profit than supplying timber which is en route between two towns? But an over supply will drop the prices, hmm! Yeah. Not one for me either.

Rollercoaster Tycoon 3

Since building a railway is too complicated, how about roller coasters instead? Those are fun right!? Especially when you can custom make one and then actually get the camera to ride it (which is cool). It is a wee bit technical to get started here, but then you will soon realize that even theme parks require... accounting!

Yep. Decide what you charge at the gate, what you charge for the rides, what you charge for food, where the queue for each ride goes, how long the wait time for a ride is, how many maintenance crew and entertainers you can afford to pay, and of course - the careful placement of toilets. Yes, what good is a roller coaster without TOILETS!? Yep. That's about the point where I gave up.

The Walking Dead is a popular zombie show that has spawned a number of spin-off series, and I'm not going to talk about any of those here. Instead, this is a review on all the tiny web series currently on offer.

Walking Dead: Torn Apart

This low quality and cheap production is set at the start of the epidemic, and is obviously a trial "add on" for the Walking Dead universe. Some B-class acting abounds from the protagonists trying to decide what to do but it did actually do justice in the jump scare department. Best watched before the main series as it includes characters encountered in season 1.

Walkind Dead: Cold Storage

An obvious upgrade from Torn Apart with better quality everything really. This follows a survivors encounter with a safe haven in the form of a storage building. The decent story is one of my favorites in this set, and is best watched before the main series.

Walking Dead: The Oath

Apart from some poor quality at the start, this one has a decent story that follows survivors looking for a medical facility to treat their wounds. For a change there are some nice surprises here, but I still prefer the story of Cold Storage altogether. Again watch before the main series as the location is visited in season 1.

Walking Dead: Red Machete

Definitely different from the above in that this artistic and almost voiceless series follows the titular red machete from its unboxing and across its many, many owners. The cartoon segment while nice feels a bit forced, and would have been better replaced by actual shots from the main show. Still an interesting watch, but unlike the above three this one should only be seen after season 7.

The weapon is the main character. Interesting...

Nothing lasts...

Kingdom: New Lands

As monarch in a land filled with vagrants, it is up to you and your coin purse to put people to work on building a boat to escape and the defenses to survive each night against greedy monsters (known as "Greed") who want to rob you and your subjects of all their material goods.

While the controls are very simple there is actually quite a bit of gameplay that is unexplained which is a bit of a downer. There is also a good amount of idling at the start when you are still trying to get your capital flowing and the idea that you just need to keep running from the monsters kinda sucks. Still an interesting look into this series, I give it two and a half forests out of five.

Insight: Towers (built on rocks) are not as good as hiring a lot of archers and upgrading your walls. Also vagrant camps and trading posts only exist if they have trees around them, so don't go nuts with deforestation.

Just another day in the Kingdom...

Kingdom: Classic

Insight: Go slow when upgrading your camp as the daily tax chest money really dries up once you hit stone buildings. You need a literal army ready before you start attacking the greed.

There's no such thing as too much information.

Secret agent analyst Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) dreams of becoming a field agent one day, like Agent 23 (Dwayne Johnson) and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway), to help his covert agency "Control" from stopping the evil plots of their counterparts at KAOS.

He's got everything under control.

My new favorite.

Odd things are afoot at the city of Gloomhaven and it's up to your cooperative party of up to four to solve it and more importantly, beat up those behind it. At its core, this is a tactical battle RPG but the game play is so different to anything I've played before (and no I've never played the original Gloomhaven).

At the start of a turn, each character selects two cards (out of a hand of 10-ish) to play and must use the top part of one and the bottom part of the other. Usually, movement is at the bottom and attacks are up the top. The cards also have an initiative value, and since you aren't meant to talk exact numbers with your allies (and the bad guys get random initiative anyway) the board can change drastically before you get to do your two moves - after which those cards are discarded.

The pages in the books acting as the "board" is brilliant and should be used more!

There's a way to refresh discarded cards, but it means permanently losing one for the mission. You can also opt to lose a card to negate damage and some cards are simply super strong, but one shot - which means you lose them too. Lose all your HP OR go down to one or less cards and that character is down/exhausted/out of the mission.

While being very alien at the start It's a very cool system and one that encourages loads of thinking. Yes, your characters level up (get better cards to swap in), get perks, can buy / sell gear, have random city events, but the main bulk of this is the thinking, and it's great! It's almost like chess, but you don't know when your move will take place so you probably should have a pair of cards that will work in multiple ways. But does that pair have a low enough/high enough initiative value? Are you hoping the baddies move into range first? Or do you want them right where they are now to do an effective combo?

The tutorial of the game is fantastic too as it really helped my gaming crew get the hang of what is going on while slowly adding more and more mechanics. Also, having the maps simply printed in the book is pure genius as well as that cuts down a lot of setup time. I can't recommend this game highly enough and give it six hatchets out of five. Yes, it's so good it broke my scale. Obviously it's my new favorite. :P

Insight: Reach level five before attempting the missions past number 17.

Demon fighting media aimed at specific people.

Supernatural

Saving people, hunting things.

This fifteen season show follows a pair of brothers, Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) Winchester face all sorts of supernatural horrors and drama yet at the same time can make fun of itself in full comedic episodes and get away with stuff no other show can. They even managed to do an animated crossover with Scooby Doo!

As expected from a long running series the quality does fluctuate a bit but it was still a mainstay for our watch list simply because it's entertaining. Worth watching for sure, I give it three Impala's out of five.

The Textorcist

A bullet hell typing test.

With evil spreading across the world, it is up to you and your handy bible to exorcise the demons to oblivion! This very cool idea becomes very hard really quickly especially later where you need to type Latin, and then the text is reversed or obfuscated.

Type (in Latin) and dodge is around the part I gave up.

[Part of the Design Folder]

Roger once asked if in MMORPGs, you should have expectations of other players - especially when it comes to PUG (randomly grouping player) instances. In his example, the event in Star Trek Online required a minimal effort from everyone to cover all the objectives but since the rewards were based on repeated attendance and not actual participation this encourages a lot of people to just AFK / let the others do the work for them. This is a rampant problem that exists in pretty much every MMO.

Since it boils down to being a social problem, I think the easiest way to handle this is simply via vote system which already exists in many games. The only difference is that this one will only show up if you fail or don't complete all the objectives in a random queue, and it simply asks "in your opinion, which of your team mates performed the worst?". An option to select no one will always be present.

Then, these votes are simply tallied per character/account. Otherwise, if the average of their votes/fails exceeds a particular threshold, they earn some sort of "shit" badge. People with a "shit" badge will only be paired with other "shit" badge holders. There is a way to get rid of that hindrance though - every time they fail a instance/event in a random queue and are NOT voted worst by anyone, the vote count drops by one and eventually the average will sway them back into the good books. 

Note: This is only for failed random queues/instances. If your team wins or you group up with others intentionally (not a random grouping), nothing happens vote wise positive or negative.

That's my idea anyway. Let me know what you think!

Where the heck did this month go? Not only did my work load get heavier but I've hit the common problem that occurs when you can suddenly download a whole bunch of backlog games: too much hopping, too little progress. To top that all off, I'm now working on the New Sharandar release in Neverwinter Online. 

Nothing like some Wordsworth to say good bye.

Like Shintar, I'm a bit sad at the loss of Old Sharandar and more annoyed that Cryptic has removed yet another piece of content from the game. Anyone keeping a tally?

So far I've got: Original Sharandar, Original Castle Never, Gauntlgrym PvP (Delzoun vs Luskan), Fardelver's Crypt, Dwarf King Crypt, Foundry, Gateway (where you could send your companions on adventures), language support for Polish, Portugese and Turkish, the old craft system, the hourly events, intergame chat (you could talk to friends playing STO) and arguably all the dungeons in "Tales of Old".

Let me know if you can think of anything else...

 Lose 1kg this month (fail)
 Web comic ("I should just restart")

BLOG STATS

One Year Ago

I was playing through Sekiro and LISA: The Painful RPG while Neverwinter went to hell Avernus.

Five Years Ago

I posted a request to help Louie. Alas, that was a battle he did not win. I was also playing Star Trail and Shadows over Riva while Warhammer: Vermintide and Helldivers kept our co-op game nights busy.

Most Viewed Posts in the last 30 days

GTFO: R4C2 - Pabulum
Mortal Engines
Metal Gear Survive: The Lord of Dust

The GTFO walk through and the Metal Gear Survive boss posts I get. Not sure how or why Mortal Engines is up there. Guess it's more popular than I gave it credit for? :P

The Iliad lives on.

Troy: Fall of a City

You already know the outcome.

This one season miniseries depicts the Trojan war mainly from the perspective of Paris and reminds everyone that the actual siege takes 10 whole years.

While I did like that the Greek gods actually show up and play a more hands on role in the story, it is also marred by some stupid decisions plot wise, not the best acting, and some questionable casting.

Yep, she's ready for some action!

Getting Attack on Titan vibes...

Can you endure the wrath of the gods?

Having angered the gods by turning to science it is up to you and up to six other Atlantean councilors to cooperatively construct the ten component device to save your people from the rising waters. Constructed from a modular board, Atlantis looks like a star fish with six legs. Each of these peninsulas provide a different resource required to build your escape.

Those furthest from the center have a chance to bring more rewards (dice rolling) but are also the first to be flooded, and since you place all your "workers" prior to the flooding phase, it is a push your luck mechanic that sees if they can even attempt to harvest, or are sent back to your pool empty-handed.

Here's one game we barely won!

When feeling safe is boring.

Blair Witch (PC Game)

PTSD is magic?

Volunteering to help look for a missing person in a spooky forest goes all sorts of wrong when witches and walking simulators collide. As someone who hasn't watched the movie, I wasn't expecting much from this game but I was actually pleasantly surprised at the start. Good graphics, decent voice acting, and a cool mechanic / ally in your dog, Bullet.

Who's a good boy!?

Well that's a game over. 

The puzzles are for the most part also straight forward, what with less things to interact with on the maps but one big negative for me, and it might just be due to my graphics card, was the draw distance being abysmal - especially in dark areas. I suppose this could be so you can't "gamma cheat" to see in the dark, but even with the light on it didn't change. Still a fun, suspenseful game and one I recommend, and give it out of three pigs out of five. While on par for me with it's predecessor, I still feel the Justine DLC in the original is superior.

Insight: Use the light on that padlock or you'll be stuck for a long time like I was!

Troll dentures are a thing.

Years after the war against Malabog, adventurers are sent to investigate why the crossing to the Feywild is being closed only to find a "new" enemy force attacking the upgraded elven city. I use "new" a bit loosely as the few new enemies can be counted on one hand and are only encountered in a few instances.

Everything else are just graphically updated powries, trolls, cyclopses, fomorians and the like from old Sharandar and while there is a possibility they are being mind controlled this time around that doesn't stop us from murdering their army encamped at the ruins with intense prejudice - because the elves want them dead, and we obey. Who is mind controlling who now? :P

Graphically, everything is pretty and I do like the first map / portion of the map we are allowed to get to, particularly the remains of Celadaine's tower. Also good is that the grindy quests are quick to do and often overlap making them fast to get through. While there is a high volume of enemies there are paths you can use to dodge them you want which also gets a thumbs up. Campaign wise it is rather light though, which is probably good for those who have many alts as you will reach the weekly limits pretty fast (an hour per alt at most if you are taking it easy).

All up, it's fine. Is it a good enough replacement for old Sharandar? That's a question best answered after we see the next two releases of this module but right now, nope - simply because old Sharandar released in one big hit and not in this piece meal format.

Insight: Characters with ranged attacks will also have an easier time with everything. Also, on your second return to the Feywild Crossing, if you bring Xuna with you expect a really fun fight at the end as she will wake everything up.

Home of the Red Pony and continual soiree.

Don't mess with him, cause he really doesn't let things go.

Bet your mind went straight to the gutter for a minute huh? :P

Mudrunner

Where you can literally go nowhere.

Are you tired of those other driving simulators where you test sleek prototype cars that can powerdrift at mach II? If so, Mudrunner is definitely the game for you! In it, you must select your truck - choose the correct type of carriage for your cargo and then navigate between pick up spots and drop off points before running out of fuel!

Not my idea of fun.

She also serves as the eye candy.

Mostly true to the show, but more grindy.

Dark times are upon the little town of Hawkins again but not only are there fiends from alternate dimensions, there are also ... RUSSIANS!? Mechanically this adventure game is pretty sound which follows the exact same story as the Netflix show of the same name. Your team roster will slowly expand to fill out with all the major characters and everything will be just swell!

Or not. For starters, the game characters are a bit different to the ones in the show. For example, Will is way more useful than Eleven... which is cool, but quite different. If you've seen Season 3 of the show you also don't have many surprises here other than the amount of monsters and people (mostly people) you will need to murder. Don't worry, they're "bad Russians" so it's ok.

I don't remember that happening in the show...