Minecraft scary moon

If you'll remember I was bragging about how awesome I was for skinning my mine craft with a zelda pack. Everything looks rad I'm the smartest man alive because I can now live a sandbox zelda fantasy.

That is untill I saw that scary ass moon from Majora's mask peering down my sun hole.

I didn't mean to sound dirty with sun hole there. What a sunhole basically is is dale slang. In Minecraft if you want to grow trees in you sweet cave you need sunlight so you have to dig a pillar straight up to the surface and top it off with glass so no baddies get in. This is also a great way to tell if its day or night outside. Hence why I was looking up to check where the moon was to see how long night lasted so I could go outside and get some supplies without worring about exploding zombies or human sized spiders.

When the moon isn't this scary monster

it's basically a white dot

Minecraft fever dreams

I always know I'm obsessed with something when it shows up in my dreams. Sometimes it's work, often it's sexy ladies but 90% of the time its either video games or something to do with Sci-Fi or, as my horrendous stomach flu treated me to, a mixture to both.

A couple of days ago I had a torturous night riddled with dreams which mixed Minecraft and the BBC One TV show Outcasts. If your not familiar with Outcasts, well shame on you it's really quite exquisite but for the plot of this blog it doesn't matter to heavily. Basically all you need to know about Outcasts is a bunch of people abandoned earth and settled on another planet where some of them do shitty things to each other.

The best thing about fever dreams is they make no sense. Just like the movie Lost Highway your treated to some startling imagery and intense story fragments that ultimately don't connect. Instead of playing the Saxophone and transforming into a younger self I laid black explosive blocks and could peer through walls and the ground. I know, no sense at all, awesome huh?

As far as my cognitive normal thinking mind can place together of my dreams this is what I get. I was on a planet with some other refugees from a dying planet earth. We had taken some technology with us and since I was in the future the tech was awesome. Since I am not from the future I don't really know what it was. Since we were new settlers we had to mine for resources. My mind instantly went to mine craft and the whole scenario was fashioned after the game.

Since I had the ability to see through the ground I was the miner leader. To set the scene there is a giant storm. (Since it's a new planet just take the cop out of most sci-fi and just think of a variation of a Sandstorm. The Darude kind is most preferable.) Since my mind was not being especially creative on all fronts there was a trapped family, a mom, dad, brother and sister deal. They are in a cave under the ground and I have to free them with my miner awesomeness.

Since I am still Dale in this dream I choose explosives as my tool. I get black smoking blocks and lay them down and when I want to I trip these remote mines and they explode. Every time I accidentally frappe the family the scene starts over. This triggers another constant of my fever dreams and that is a short loop. So in reality I rock back and forth clutching my stomach in a cold sweat while dream me Ground Hog Day style repeatedly blows up an innocent and tragic family. In the dream I realize the error of selecting explosives to get a family out of a cave but to my horror I don't care and continue to blow them up.

Finally a hot girl comes and tempts me with her wonderful tidbits if I basically get my shit in order and save the family. Since it's a dream the family is instantaneously saved and I am warped a bubble in the middle of space. Like in the movie the fountain except I'm not tattooing my fingers, I'm inserting them... In that hot chick.

Minecraft getting back in

So I'm playing Minecraft again. Which also means I am playing nothing else. I really really get obsessed with minecraft and making my base.

before I talk about my base and how awesome it is and how awesome that makes me I just want to touch on minecraft skinning. I finally skinned minecraft with a custom design found online. It took 15 minutes and i would urge everyone to do this. You can google one pretty easily because apparently theres a hundred million Minecraft nerds who want to make your life better.

Theres a pretty extensive list found here http://www.minecraftforum.net/viewtopic.php?t=12352 with a very easy to follow tutorial on how to install the skin. I would also suggest to make a back up of the default one becuase you never know what could happen or if you get sick of a skin you chose.

I choose the Legend of zelda theme because well lets face it Zelda is the shit. Heres what it looks like.

Finally now onto building my base.

I am on my third iteration of said base. First there was a vertical mine room design where there were about 10 rooms on top of one another and were not that large. Then Mike decided that he wanted to try a new server and thus create another world for us to inhabit. I mostly think he did this because he set half of our old world on fire screwing around with lava.

It was a good decision because I had also screwed around and toyed with landscaping halfhazardly. I did learn how to make sweet water and lava pillars which I put to good use in my second floating lair.

With the addition of the Magic Carpet in minecraft you can basically walk around in mid air. I took advantage of this and built a three room single level floating platform base. Problem was theres no where to go mine and piss around in mid air and using the Magic Carpet is actually a giant pain in the ass.

I needed resources so I would teleport from my base to a mine. Until Mike suggested I build a way station in my mine so I didn't have to go back to base to craft anything. This was the inception of my third base.

I admit it sometimes when it comes to video games I get obsessive compulsive disorder. I have to cut down all the grass in a Zelda game or I have to kill only one type of bad guy for a while. In minecraft I have to dig the dirt out of a tunnel... ALL the dirt. This means that if I am digging a mining tunel and I come up on dirt I switch to a shovel and get rid of all the dirt I can see. If i see uncover more I get rid of that dirt too. Ends up there was a catacombs of tunnels left over after one infuriatingly long clearing spree.

Third Base ended up being me digging out these catacombs in to one giant room thats something like 30 block by 20 blocks with tow floors. I have been adding to this base over the last couple of days and now there is a pool a verticle sunlight tunnel to let the trees grow and even a lava disposal area.

Cans

DCUO: Part 4 Pots, Vaults and Castles

I know I promised to talk about Gotham for part four but I would like to touch on something else first since I am just in Gotham and haven't done too many quests yet.

There's two things about DCUO I haven't mentioned yet... well three things but only two were deliberate. Pots and Vaults are really the two brilliant touches of this game. I didn't mention them yet because I didn't want to burn out your awesome sensors and have your pleasure nozzles ache from too much delicious stimulation.

You already know what pots are. Their basically anything you break and get shit out of. I call them pots because it's a nostalgic reference to Zelda: A Link to the past for SNES. Just like other nerds I like to reference games that are irrefutably awesome so I don't really have to take a risk by attaching myself things and possibly open myself up for criticism. Digression this is why shitty games that are perceived as good trick you. People attach themselves to them because they are supposed to be 'good' then they won't have to deal with hate on the net.

Back to breaking shit in DCUO there are barrels and other items you can pick up and either smash over or throw at enemies. Really what good would a hero game be if you couldn't smash someone with a foreign object. Now even though these items aren't full of rupees and really only hold experience rewards if they are part of a quest they are still thing that you can smash SO I SMASH EM. With a big idiot grin on my face.

The fact that there are things to smash everywhere in an MMO is amazing to me. Even though I hate to run down WOW, it is the only other MMO I've played and it didn't have pots or barrels or random shit for me to smash and I am retroactively angry about it.

I'm not going to talk about Vaults yet because it's too awesome and I don't want you to pass out before you read about castles. That's what we in the industry call a tease.

So like pretty much everything else I reference with a made-up-term-and-just-hope-you-can-interpret-what-I-mean-and-it-is-ultimately-wrong-and-theres-an-already-existing-internet-nerd-term-that-I-think-is-dumb you most likely have no idea what I mean when I say castles. Well children what I mean is a building in which you go through killing dudes and solving puzzles until you get to a boss and then kill him/her/it and I don't mean a dungeon because it's in a building not a cave. So yeah those are in DCUO and they are fun.

I've only gone through 3 so far one was a regular warehouse one was a high tech lab and one was a crack house drug den sort of deal. These are pretty cool because so far they fit the flavor of the enemies and the boss. The drug den I aforementioned was populate by Bain thugs who were making and selling the drug that makes Bane, well Baney. The boss of the castle was the main dealer of the drug.

Finally Vaults. What do you think of when you think vault. Some sort of thing with a thick metal door and awesome shit inside most likely. Your almost there but add presents you have to break open (we already know how much I like to smash things) and a voice over by THE JOKER not just any random ho hum Joker either it's THE MOTHER FUCKING MARK HAMIL JOKER YOU ASSHOLE. Yeah I told you it was awesome.

The way it works is you have a vault ticket in your inventory that you just get near the beginning of the game and after a while you use it to go into the Jokers vault and punch shit and get money and items. From that point on you can pull up your instance menu and go in periodically (I suspect it's a daily thing).

DCUO: Part 3 Brain Punchery

Ok there are a number of reasons why I am writing another post. Four to be exact

1. Mike wants to vicariously experience DCUO through my beautiful fingers

2. I did my first instance or in DCUO terms Alert

3. I've progressed to level ten but still don't really know what the fuck I'm doing

4. I FOUND A BRAIN PUNCH FOR MY CHARACTER

OK I'll start with the most important one obviously, THE BRAIN PUNCH. Anyone who knows me knows that I easily get obsessed with video games for one of two reasons A. Something is Hilarious or B. Something is awesome. When it is magnificently both, well I shit my self.

I've been obsessed with brain punches since I played to game Two Worlds waaaay back at the beginning of this blog when I chronicled my adventures through the game. One thing that happened on those adventures was my character kept getting brain punched by a troll. At first I thought it was pretty funny and decided that I would kill the troll no matter how long it took. You see in that game when you died and came back to the same villain who killed you they still had the same amount of damage you managed to inflict. Mike thought this was bad design and I sort of agreed and proceeded to do my favorite thing in games, exploitation. Not in a dirty under ceded criminal way but in the way that has me win, the best way.

Eventually I killed the troll after about 237 tries but the brain punch with all it's awesome was born. In reality it is nothing more than a jumping over-cut aiming a blow at the top of the head.

Now to get this train back to the station. The way combat works in DCUO is it's action style you press a button you attack. Left mouse is mele attack Right mouse is ranged. I found out also that as you power up you get combo attacks ie hold left mouse for BRAIN PUNCH or right then left does an arc attack and so on and so on at increasing complexity and awesomeness.

Here is what my Brain punch looks like, please keep in mind as this was taken my charcter is about 12 feet in the air.

In DCUO the instances are called Alerts. It's a pretty cool idea Martian Manhunter lets you know where trouble is going on around the globe and you can warp to those areas and solve the problem.

The first one you get is in Area 51 where you have to stop brainiac from acquiring green kryptonite. That's all that I could really gather about the whole situation because the whole time I was running around like an asshole trying to figure out what the fuck I was doing.

The downside about the super speed movement method is you can run up walls. Which is awesome most of the time but it's also fucking annoying. Your running along then you hit something like o say a lamppost then you run up the side of it. The camera will spazz and invariably end up zoomed into the side of a building then I'll spazz then some fucktard will have their computer turned up way to high so all you hear is ear bleeding tinny echo of the game noises on their end mixed with feedback and what ever fucking horrors are going on in their real life house. It's actually pretty stressful all around. Since everyone is just zipping around the area of the alert doing their roles and completing the dungeon like well trained video game nerds I end up loosing them and getting mobbed by a throng of brainiac robots who inevitably knock me out (the death equivalent in DCUO). Then have to run back from the alert entrance, rinse, repeat and swear. I do have to assert that there is no ghost run in DCUO and for that it deserves a medal or an award of some sort. Further more in the games defense I am pretty sure the running wouldn't be so spazzy and disjointed if I had a better video card... but I don't so fuck the game.

The good old roles are still in DCUO. There is the option of being a Tank or Healer or Damage in the alerts but I'll wisely be sticking to damage for some time. I'll need to get a better idea if any of what is going on in the dungeons before I attempt anything else. I really hope I figure it out at some point though because I do love tanking. Speaking of which I found a beautiful coincidence, Fire and Ice are the two power types that can tank, which is nice seeing as to how I chose fire. It's a weird system though, were you change your role at any time by hitting 't' and it will toggle through the roles. For me it switches between tank and damage and then it automatically adjusts the stats of my character. I find this an amazing way to approach the whole party system, the ease of switching back and forth will allow you to make the most of game play either Dungeoning or questing. The toggle system is much better than setting up a skill tree specializing in one way and just being screwed when your playing the other.

Dungeoning aside the quests have been entertaining so far. The first string had to do with Gorilla Grod and stopping his army of devolved humans. Running around beating up gorillas wearing pin striped suits and carrying hand guns is exactly as fun as it sounds. When you complete the kill these and get those quests you have to fight Grod with the Flash's help. It's pretty cool that you get to help real heroes in the game and even fight along side them I found it drew me into the plot happenings a lot more thoroughly than if I would have had to fight him solo.

There is a side quest line that is basically a tour of Metropolis with a delicious booster gold voice over. You run from one tourist kiosk to the next and it's pretty uneventful aside from the aforementioned voice over which are full of self indulgence as you'd expect from ol BG.

I have stuck to Metropolis and have only quested in there but I am getting pretty ansy to move on. The HIVE quests aren't really holding my attention like the gorilla ones. The next area I will move to Is Gotham which I am anxious to see because since Metropolis is so beautifully rendered I can only imagine the magnificence of Gotham. This sounds like a good place to end with promises of Batman and his Gotham for part 4

A normal day in the life of a British policeman of the Yorkshire Constabulary.