secret of the magic crystal

Written in July 2012 (I forgot to publish this one)
Mike messaged me on twitter yesterday. @_Rades: @superdalebot Do you have Steam? (PC game thing, you buy/DL games through it) Go get it b/c I am going to gift you this bit.ly/a36k9C Free game? "alright I'll bite what's this about anyway" So i click on the link and i immediately know this is going to be one of the best presents I have ever received. You can grow and care for a UNICORN and then race it and run through obstacle courses to level up your unicorn. YOU CAN LEVEL UP YOUR UNICORN. We all know the only thing more totally awesome than a unicorn is that same unicorn but stronger, faster, my dexterous and full of even more spirit. I mean come on at this point it's taking everything i have to not just start fist pumping with one hand and slap my keyboard with the other while i make screaming chimpanzee noises. Once my unicorn fueled tumescence has finally subsided I decide to view the different options offered on the farm. Different buildings allow for different services.
At the blacksmith you can make magic horseshoes by using the anvil. You do this by picking three elements to combine and the smithing process is you hitting the arrow keys at the prompts either left right up or down (pretty much the same for all minigames). The ratings are boo, early, late, good and if you're lucky enough to be the unicorn whisperer like myself you get the occasional perfect.
Each new building is more magnificent than the last. My horse is tired from running through the forest jumping over logs and branches so i decided to check out the barn. Or should i say MAGICAL UNICORN HOSPITAL. "If your horse got ill, you would have to look for the stethoscope on the table to examine it." YES PLEASE. "You can cure it with an injection. If your horse is healthy, you might try to mix a magical potion by clicking on the mortar."
By now you can pretty much guess what all of the buildings contain. Either something you make by combining 3 different items or a way to train your magical steed to increase it's stats.
If you don't feel like doing anything productive you can actually just take your unicorn aside and brush it's mane or scrub it's feet... which can actually be quite addictive. You can even send your horse out to race and win money to buy better brushes and even a marble water trough.
As mind shattering as this game is initially there is a reason the price tag is so low and that is there's not much to the game. Once you do a couple of the training mini-games and build an item or two the game gets very repetitive. I actually only played the game a couple of times and that's why it took me so long to publish this post. I kept meaning on coming back to it and to play the game more thoroughly but then Diablo 3 came out, then Borderlands 2, then Call of Duty Black ops 2 and then i dabbled in Star Craft 2 and all the time my poor golden unicorn withered with neglect.

Back into wow... and it's broken

So Mike sent me a scroll of Resurrection for my WOW account. It's been roughly a year and a half since I turned my back on WOW and never went back.

Long enough for me to forget how frustrating of a time sap the game can be but also long enough to forget about all the fun that is to be had as well. I'm already addicted to screwing around in the auction house again and wasting all my money to level up my enchanting for no apparent reason other than something to do with the drops from dungeoning with PUGs.

Speaking of which it's a good thing all my action bars are the same as when I left them because I managed to tank a level 82 dungeoning pretty much by spamming my hot keys until it came back to me.

The reason I am mostly screwing around is I am waiting to reap the benefits of the ressurection scroll mike sent me.

I get a character boost to level 80 no prob I'll just pick one of my abandoned worgens to bequeath this on and then after that he'll get transferred to mikes server and I'll change him into a Horde and then maybe play a dungeon or two with mike no problem....

Except there is a problem. My level jump went through just fine the transfer didn't. I figured it might be because the game wasn't fully installed yet since I was doing the thing where you play while it installs. I open a ticket just incase that's not the actual cause. I'll just kill time with this character till it goes through.

I decided I would level up his skinning since it was still where i left it when he was a level 35 character. So I level up his skinning from 154 for 240 by pretty much committing monkey and panther genocide in strangle thorn. There were some gators in there too but no one really cares about them do they. Bonus is I can sell all those sweet leathers in the auction house and become a millionaire so i can buy the ugliest gear ever and transmogrification my high level gear to be really ugly. Bam all my stuff is in the auctionhouse and since I've been playing for most of the day I'll go outside and cure these WOW rickets I've been working on.

(next day)

Alright i actually talked to people IRL for a while and now to go reap the rewards of my bounty from being a leather peddler. Another problem now i can't even log on to good Old Tankerstein because it says a character update has been started and must finish.

Celebrations ensue because now I'm sure some one sweaty with glasses is making sure I don't have to suffer anymore before I can make my wolf into an Orc a decision solely based on the size of the shoulder pads he would get. I'll just go check on battle.net and see if i have to pick his race one the website.

There's been an update to the ticket... they're sorry it took so long to get to the ticket but decided the best thing to do is call the support line. I call the line and guess what It's broken and i should call back in a few minutes as they recorded message tells me because it might be fixed.

It wasn't.

It wasn't the next time I called... or the next.

Ok fuck it it's sunday I'll call tomorrow now I try out an Orc death knight so i can get an idea of the majesty my character will be shrouded with if he ever stops being broken and fulfills his destiny.

I should have known there would be more problems when i immediately got booted off the server once he Fetuid was created. Nope I just kept loggin in and slogging through the death knight area every time I got booted, which was many, on the bright side i get to shoot cannons and if I slog through I can play some Pug action as a death knight.

I fiiiiiiinally make it through the starting area and all it took was a few crashes and one weird error where I couldn't interact with NPCs because i was in a permanent glitched "in combat" state. Alright lets mount up and get the fuck out of the plague lands and finish the last quest that takes me into the wide world and finally out of the starting area.

Due west as they say on to a yellow question mark and freedom.

Problem I'm stopped dead on the road. Weird. It's like i'm running into a wall. try to go around it nope just like running along a straight wall. Back up maybe it's some sort of clipping problem that will fix itself.

Nope.

Alright this was the glitchy character maybe if i restart the game it will work.

Nope.

RAGE QUIT! right after I create another ticket and send it out. Comeone Blizzard I'm ripe for WOW i have a failing social life and i just want to play some mindless dungeons. Besides I already leveled up my enchanting to the highest level and wasted all my money.

Update: Today I woke up and decided to check on my tickets before I did anything usefull... yes I would say I'm now full into WOW. And now it's as if this whole thing has turned into a comedy of errors because Battle.net is down for repairs.

I'm dangerously close to becoming bitter.

live tweets from arkham city from December

This post was meant to be an ongoing thing where I would tweet about Arkham City while I played it over time. Problem is I played it a couple of times and then traded it in for Saints Row the third and forgot all about these tweets. Well here they are 3 months later.

how bout i live tweet #arkhamcity instead of playing #mw3 you say. why who am i to deny a request

just getting a feel for #arkhamcitybefore i go to work seems like a dirty one button assasin's creed at the beginning

got my batman suit after the intro. Shame I kinda liked kicking ass in a pinstripe suit#Arkhamcity

i can already tell the chunky cartoony characters on this unreal engine are going to annoy me#Arkhamcity

love the simplified controls of#Arkhamcity just mash x then if a guy gets lightning bolts mash y and repeat makes combat very smooth

downloading the add on pack to use catwoman #arkhamcity. Still wish they would let me use the pin stripe suit

in case you need a combo move cheat sheet for #arkhamcity it's x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x

since you've probably already heard aaaaaaaallll about #Arkhamcity i'll play as catwoman and tweet about that instead

so when you play as catwoman you replay the beggining as batman? #arkhamcity

damn twoface looks awesome #arkhamcity

ooooooh use detective mode to figure out who's shooting me #arkhamcity never played #arkamasylum

great another riddler question mark that i have absolutely no idea what to do with #arkhamcity

wait bane is a goodguy? won't this kind of ruin that movie coming out#arkhamcity

fell in lava... yeah apparently there wasn't enough death in #ArkhamCity so i had to dive down a chimney to get to some molten hot death

mr. hammer is easily the best bad guy in the game so far #ArkamCity

that's about 12 fails at this riddler test i'd say about 37 more before i rage quit #ArkhamCity

well it only took half a thousand tries but i finally shot my remote batarang down the broken airduct to hit the riddler button #ArkhamCity

awesome now all the bad guys have guns and i can't stop dying #arkhamcity

this game is in dire dire need of quick travel #arkhamcity or at least put me back out on the street after i complete a mission

this old dilapidated city in the sewers is totally awesome #ArkhamCity

MW3 fiiiinally

It's inevitable I write about Modern Warfare 3. I'm not saying this begrudgingly the Call of Duty franchise has become a stable in the Game industry. A flag pole every November that fans can look forward to. When Modern Warefare 1 came out it took the industry by storm and every FPS has been using the franchise as a ruler since. Whether you like it or hate it if your gamer your well aware of it's presence when it's on the horizon. That all said this is the fifth installment since the game got it's revitalizing injection and I've bought over iteration happily.

The reason this inevitable blog is so late is because I originally wanted to play the single player before i wrote any kind of review on the game. I didn't want to be the asshole who only talks about the multi-player of the game and thereby ignoring all those people who buy these FPS for the single player story.

Well I played the single player for about two hours and it's like all the other Call of Duty games, AWESOME. I've only played for what i hope is a fraction of the campaign but it doesn't take Nostradamus to know that your in for good story, good shootin and occasional chance to hop on a giant gun a rip shit up. Which is more than enough to keep my trigger finger satiated.

Back to the multi-player. There is nothing drastically new from the other iterations of the modern warfare series which is a good thing. Too often games get caught up in the "making stuff new" trend and they throwaway all the good parts you loved from the last installment. I'm sure Infinitward is well aware of this because they have supplied everything you love... they just give it to you a bit differently which is just enough feeling of that new and improved thing developers are obsessed with.

The biggest difference is the unlocking system for weapons. Instead of attachments being unlocked as you level up your character they are unlocked as you level up each gun seperately. This is was a wise choice on the developer's behalf because now each weapon has even further uniqueness with since they have only changed the attachment unlocks from weapon to weapon but even the order they are unlocked. Ie for an assault rifle you'll unlock a silencer and then an underbarrel mounted grenade launcher whereas the light machine guns will be a grip instead of the launcher.

Another big change is the killstreak rewards. There are now three different sets of said rewards. There's the assault type which is the old killstreak system you know and love. You simply set up your order go kill some chaps and make it rain explosions and all manner of great murder. What's new though are the two new additions, Support and Specialist.

These two new streak rewards are set up just like the Assault but each on offers a slight twist on the old mechanic.

Support keeps your streak going after you've died instead of resetting it. The only thing is all the rewards are beneficial for you team and not so much you. That said there are some damn fine rewards including a remote sentry and a care package drop that has an osprey helicopter to defend the area so those pesky enemies don't run up and get their hands on your glorious prizes. The best package is a booby-trapped airdrop crate that appears to enemies as a care package but when they go to steal it it blows up in their face and kills them. The jokey smurf exploding present aspect of the whole ordeal is not lost on me and is in fact quite hilarious. Hilarious untill you yourself fall for it a few dozen times... then it's just annoying.

The third strike package is called specialist and this is the most original of the three by far. Instead of unlocking air strikes or getting to man the guns of various bitchin' aircraft you unlock extra perks. It sounds a bit wankish to unlock an extra perk at two kill intervals but it could actually turn out to be just what you needed. If you have a hard time deciding on which perks to assign your created class this is your answer. At six kills you could be working with six perks instead of the, at one time adequate but now paultry, three. Of course this package is only optimal once you in the higher levels and actually have unlocked most of your kill streaks... I've never used it.

With the newly added theatre mode MW3 is finally up to date with that certain other FPS game. You can watch old matches you've been in and take screen shots and make little movies. Sure a certain other title had these capabilities 6 years ago but we're not talking about Halo 3 now are we. Even though with Halo 3 the online support and heat maps and award tracking is free instead of subscription based were still not talking about it.

I only have minimal dabbling in the theatre mode having made only one screen shot and one kill clip but i can already tell space is a problem. You have ten slots to save either your screen shots or you movies that you have cut yourself. The slots doesn't seem like it will be a problem for me because I can't see myself really caring too much about making cinematic opuses but for a person who gets right into it I could see how this would appear disastrous. I mean if you're getting right in there doing some matrix camera cuts on the kill shot and really get some good Bayhem then i would imagine your going to need about a thousand slots and not just ten. Which brings us back to the subscription based Elite service I image they'll give you more slots there... FOR A PRICE.

Now that I've spoken of mostly the icing I can tell you the cake is the same you've grown to love and or need. If you're like me and have developed a strong addiction to these games over the last six years you've got nothing in store but about a zillion hours of gameplay ahead of you. The levels are just a complex and awesome as you would expect. There's ones you'll hate and ones you'll love. Those likes and dislikes will change as you get better at the game. So far my favorite is the France map because it makes me feel classy to head shot some mother effers there. amongst the little cafe tables of cobblestone streets

One last thing the G36C is back which is the best news ever because it is far and away the best gun of MW1 and was missing in MW2. I had to settle for the Aug which i thought i loved but now that I have my baby back it was a shallow false love.

Skyrim

I finally finished Dead Island

I finally finished Dead Island using the character Sam B. As you can tell, since the game came out roughly two months ago, it took me quite some time. 24h 46m 04s to be exact. Actually that's not quite exact since I died a billion and two times and I am almost convinced that your game clock doesn't ding you for the multitude of times you play for two minutes from your save just to get punched in the face and genitals by a grandma zombie and loose your pocket wad. (The game dings you a random amount of money every time you die.) Since there is no way to tell how much time I wasted falling of cliffs and getting brain punched by Thug zombies we will just go with the aforementioned amount of gorey hours.

After playing through the game I would recommend it to anyone who's got some time to burn and hankering for carving up some zombays as my co-op player Anthony Whittrock affectionately called them--right before I blew him up... A lot.

While I'm on it the co-op in this game is great for farting around, blowing up propane tanks to close to each other, driving off cliffs while your friends are in the passenger seat and once in a while even accomplishing some meaning full tasks. In fact the game is near impossible to finish without the help of another person wildly swinging weapons in your close proximity. Which conveniently is what I will blame the large chunk of my deaths because I was alone for most of my playthrough.

Don't get me wrong it's nobody's fault but my own since there is an endless amount of faceless zombie destroyers waiting to team up with you online. The drop in and out co-op makes this painless. I didn't want to use it, though, because I like to play games while I watch TV and find all manner of ways to get distracted and forget that some poor sod halfway across the world is getting angrier and angrier at me because I am in the kitchen burning a pizza and not going through a door that would progress the story line of the game. That said I also dislike the thought of loosing and precious treasures while I am afk.. or afcontroller more appropriately. I need my preciouses, all of them.

I am a giant loot hoor. I care about loot and I care about it a lot. This is another reason why Dead Island is fun to play--there's literally shit lying everywhere. Well not literally shit more like a vast array of weapons and ingredients tucked into every nook and cranny of the island. That's right I did say ingredients there and you can make your own weapons. You know what's cooler than slashing a zombie's arm off with a machete? Well when you cut it's arm off and then the zombie gets electrocuted, or poisoned, or starts on fire, that's what. Well in Dead Island you get to take ordinary weapons and then you bad ass em up a bit. You can wrap barbed wire around a sledgehammer, there's the classic nails in a baseball bat and even make poison bullets--somehow you can poison something that's dead. Don't ask just shoot because your gun doesn't get damaged like your melee weapons.

Going into Dead Island I thought the weapons getting damaged mechanic was going to be a game killer for me. After all I famously rage quit Fall Out 3 after my launch anything weapon broke after a mere hour of shooting flaming teddy bears. but I digress. It's true your weapons do get damaged at a speed which is highly unrealistic. Shouldn't your weapons suffer less damage since zombies are so soft and pulpy? More annoying though is you can't upgrade or modify a damaged weapon so you have to constantly repair your bent knifes and broken sticks. This would be a giant pain in the ass if the developers didn't graciously litter the landscape with workbenches, at which you can repair your wares for a nominal fee.

If you're like me and you can't help your self from rooting in every zombies pockets and bikini bottoms, then you'll have no shortage of cash flow to make it rain on your favorite baseball bat that you turned into a spiked morning star (yes it's gloriously true those exist in this game). There are also traders littered around every human base. So, if the corpse robbing you've been doing isn't up to snuff for your needs of tools of destruction, you can also sell your bent hammer that you don't feel like fixing again. You might as well sell your hammers since the blunt weapons don't progress as high in damage output as the sharper stabbier ones.

The fall of blunt weapons bothered me since I was playing with Sam B, the expert in blunt weaponry. Since I juiced his skill tree to favor blunt weapons I was sorely disappointing that I had to abandon them later on in the game and have a lot of wasted skill points. Oh yeah there's skill trees in this game now pick your jaw up off the floor and put your genitals back in your pants. I know it's pretty ridiculously awesome that this hack and slash has all the right parts of an RPG and not to much of the sleep inducing forever-long conversations. Knowing what I know now though about the skill trees I would highly recommend playing as Xian since she specializes in sharp weaponry.

The good thing about each character is that even though they have specialties they are still customizable because each character has three skill trees you can plunk a point into every level your character progresses. You can choose everything from lock picking to zombie head stomping. I would have said corpse there instead of overusing the word zombie but that would be misleading because there are human enemies you have to fight in this game and you cannot stomp on their heads when they become corpses, sadly.

That's right this game is not exempt from that annoying zombie premise that makes you have to fight humans because "we're the real monsters". Which is even lamer because aren't the zombies just resurrected dead us's anyway? As much as I hate this cliched turn of events you don't have to worry about it too much because any pea shooter you happen to be packin will pop the human eggshell heads in a single shot. If however you don't blast them in the face and choose rather to get in close to mele range you'll just die because they can take a severe beating. True to the annoying overused sub plot of humans vs humans it is you in these situations that is always the pulpy tender victim.

That should pretty much cover everything about this game besides the plot. I don't want to ruin it for you so I'll leave that out. You'll just have to find out for yourself. They say the real enjoyment is in the journey, which is even more enjoyable when your committing zombie genocide everywhere from a beach to a jungle to a prison.

Live tweets from Deus Ex Pt:3

#DeusEx is about to loose me if i have to do one more conversation tree before I get to shoot things again

of course I forgot #DeusEx is an RPG and of course that means I get lost in the world and can't figure out how to get to the next objective

I would really like to not be running around like a lost asshole right now #DeusEx

And now I'm in some random hoble because I went up a fire escape and climbed through a window. Found some ammo dealer... still lost #DeusEx

- MattyDorf @superdalebot a couple guys I work with have been talking about that game. Sounds like it's great, but hard.

@MattyDorf ugh tell me about it I've either been lost or talking for two hours I need to shoot something #DeusEx

As much as I love the slick design, I keep getting hung up on the wardrobe. It's like a NuMetal fan Raped 80's futuristic anime #DeusEx

Oh sweet i found the police station. Time for some hot action? NO ANOTHER CONVERSATION TREE. Oh joy non-consequential back story #DeusEx

- iamanth @superdalebot How far are you now?

@iamanth just got to the police station sooooo still the beginning

Oh nice you do an inventory search on a corpse and pull out his hacker brain chip. They called it a wet drive. Silly #DeusEx

- iamanth @superdalebot I'm just pass that. I haven't played since Thursday. Are you playing it on the 360 or on the PC?

@iamanth 360

@iamanth i havent shot anything in hours

- iamanth @superdalebot Taking the stealth route, huh? Did you save the hostages? I didn't... I feel so awful :(

I am not taking the stealth route just got lost and then too much talking. i did save the hostages I thought I had to #DeusEx

-iamanth @superdalebot I completely forgot about it. :( How did you get into the police station?

@iamanth that riveting conversation with the knob police officer who shot the kid when we were partners. I HATE the conversations #DeusEx

-iamanth @superdalebot Ah... I wasn't able to talk him into letting me in since I don't have that social augmentation. So I went in through the roof.

@iamanth I have no augmentations yet. Haven't figured that out. Roof would have been faster than talking #DeusEx

- iamanth @superdalebot I stacked crate after crate to get in over the fence lol

@iamanth haha Nice i never even thought about doing something like that

When do i get to kill something again. Snoooze #DeusEx

Sweet I didn't get lost enough in the street might as well head into the sewer I can't see this going badly #DeusEx

Of course there's electrified water in the sewer because if it wasn't i wouldn't die when i fell in #DeusEx

Finally in a gunfight. Made it about as far through gang territory as i could by stealth... 20ft #DeusEx

When it rains it pours with #DeusEx directly from one firefight into 4 more. This game has serious pacing issues

From talking for 2 hours to death 12 times in a row fighting mercs #DeusEx #RAGEQUIT