#my first playthrough i was all about chaos and lightning magic

[beedalee]

"this was supposed to be a warm-up" drawing of my V Rising-sona. I called her Moonlight to go with naf's Sunset. it's a fun game!!! 🦇

[ranger-report]

Review: Minecraft Dungeons (2020)

Picture this: an isometric action-RPG in which you play as one of multiple intrepid warriors, gathering loot and rare weapons in order to steadily progress through multiple worlds in order to stop a maniacal tyrant from ruling over a terrified land. What game am I talking about? If you picked any number of games, from Gauntlet to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance to Diablo, you’d be right on the money, but this time we’re talking about Minecraft Dungeons, Mojang’s first foray into a non-creative Minecraft experience. Yes, there was Telltale’s Minecraft: Story Mode, but that was Telltale’s baby through and through. This dungeon crawling experience is all Mojang, with a little help from developer Double Eleven, and while the results are somewhat of an uneven experience, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable experience the further you get into it, ultimately to the point of obsession.

Let’s call it Baby’s First Dungeon Crawler. The game is as simple and straightforward as possible. You create your character by choosing their “skin” (read: skin tone and clothes all mixed into one), then dress them up with armor and weapons picked up on a daring quest to save Minecraft land from a vile king called the Arch-Illager. The Illagers are evil versions of the standard Villagers who populate the world, and they’re a little pissed at having been kicked out of good standing just for being themselves. Story means little in this game, a series of events strung together to create a sense of progression, and maybe there’s something here based on Minecraft lore, but to me it felt simply a means to an end: you need to know why you’re on this quest. Here you go. As villains go, the Arch-Illager surprisingly succeeds, a nasty little Napoleon of a ruler who somehow gained a magic wand from the Nether (Minecraft’s evil alter dimension) and so was able to rise up against the Villagers. He pops up at various points to conjure hordes in ambush, shouting “Nyah nyah!” annoyingly to the point where his juvenile taunts come to feel downright abrasive. You want to kick this guy’s teeth in, and it feels so good once you finally do...depending on the difficulty. But that’s getting ahead of things.

Opening up with a basic tutorial level explaining controls, Minecraft Dungeons then introduces Camp, where you and one of up to four heroes make your base between running through levels. Here you can practice your melee weapons and ranged weapons on straw dummies to see how they work before committing to a style. You can also purchase random weapons and gear (called artifacts) which you can equip. Weapons and artifacts can also be found during adventure, always at random Borderlands-style (right down to the Common, Rare, Magical, and Epic tiers), which is one of the most maddening aspects of the game. There’s no way to outright purchase gear that you actually want, meaning as you slog through level after level, gaining hundreds of emeralds to spend at camp, there’s a strong chance you’ll be abandoning a strong weapon in favor of something that’s simply at your actual level rather than what you want to be using. Minecraft Dungeons is an exercise in Letting Go Of Shit, in which you’ll be constantly switching up your play style because your gear, not your preferences, demand it. Adding to this is that weapons and armor can be enchanted, adding bonus stat effects. Higher level gear unlocks multiple enchantment effect slots, each slot allowing your to choose a stat to upgrade -- but again, each enchantment is randomized. Some gear have fantastic stats, which picking up higher level gear afterwards can result in terrible enchantments compared to what you’re currently using. Madness. Chaos. Dice rolls dictate what you pick up, how well they work, how they work, and whether or not it’s worth it to you to equip it.

But what makes this tolerable is that, as Minecraft Dungeons progresses, scalable difficulty can make or break your hardiness. From the opening, there’s three Play Modes: Default, Adventure, and Apocalypse. Each play mode has difficulty you can adjust at the beginning of each level, which will let you know what xp level it’s designed for. It will automatically ratchet up as you progress, but maybe you’ve got a hankering for a challenge, or for higher-level gear sooner than you’re getting to it. Minecraft Dungeons will happily and frequently kick you ass if you ask for it. That is not a sentence I ever expected to type, but it’s true. Beneath the simplistic design and free-for-all gameplay, this happy-go-lucky kids game is vicious and smart. Upping difficulty not only adjusts how potent enemy attacks are, but which enemies you run into, and how often. Just when you think, yes, I’ve got this, I can kick this game up a notch, it jumps you. There are moments when the game point-blank overwhelms you if you ask for it, and if you’re not prepared then you’re dead. Of course, the game is generous: you get three chances to make it all the way through the surprisingly huge, sprawling levels which are full of secrets (and can unlock secret levels), and this can make for sublimely tense moments of gameplay where you’re doing your damnedest to utilize every stat and weapon you’ve picked up just to stay alive long enough for your healing item to regenerate so you can safely pick away at the huge mob of skeletons, zombies, mages, golems, and so forth that are piling down on you. Herein lies the beauty of Minecraft Dungeons: play. Play and get good. Get good and go higher. Go higher and die. Try again. Deeper into the game and difficulty and you’ll be picking up even better tier weapons and armor, which really highlight the sweet shit you can do. Suddenly the huge mobs mean nothing in the face of your lightning rod or corrupted beacon, your crossbow that shoots five explosive arrows at once which all shoot out five more explosive arrows in all directions upon impact. Players can become ridiculously powerful as they progress. Beating the game on Default unlocks the aforementioned Adventure mode, which ups the ante by a large amount, and beating that unlocks Apocalypse, where there is no difficulty scaling -- there is only the game.

Some minor performance issues abound. Playing local co-op sometimes felt a chore trying to get other controllers in, with my PS4 not recognizing that someone was trying to play. Graphical glitches pop up here and there, the most notable being bright colors covering the whole screen whenever someone would exit their inventory. Hopping back into the inventory and hopping out would make the colors disappear, but how they got there in the first place is a mystery. And while the game itself plays well enough, the button to loot items/revive other players is the same as the attack button, and the game would have a hard time discriminating between what I wanted to do whenever I was just a little too close to an object. Am I trying to pick it up or swing my sword? Oftentimes, that which I wanted to do was not what I was actually doing. And in the chaos of multiplayer gameplay, it can become confusing as to what is on the screen, so when I suddenly couldn’t attack because there was a person I needed to revive that I didn’t see, I was flummoxed.

At the end of the day, Minecraft Dungeons does not reinvent the wheel. If anything, this is a game that many have played, and played better, in several other games. Getting into the game from the beginning can feel like a chore, a kid’s game, something that you can hit the snooze button on and wake up a little later in having missed nothing. But go deeper, find the good weapons and armor, scale up the difficulty, and suddenly this isn’t just for the kids anymore. Suddenly you’re on the edge of your seat wondering how the hell a goddamn kids game is pushing you back. You’re picking up epic gear with wild stats that give you a giggle as you jump back in, ready to face the mob. What would make the game more worthwhile would be if it introduced many of these elements sooner, rather than teasing them for a second or third playthrough. Many players above the standard Minecraft age group will be turned off at first, and will turn away. But for those who stick around -- and I do urge you to -- there is a hefty dungeon crawler beneath the hood that, for its flaws, succeeds at being a wild party game and a grit your teeth one-more-try experience. 

Final Score: 8/10

[goji-pilled]

MK-S: Dark souls update. (Semi-updated this as as played.)

Lost somewhere between 30-40,000 souls to the rock worm centipede things…not the boss, I’ve read that’s coming up, but the ambush. Most of the time I was trying to get the souls back, and they just kept building up. I was using pyromancy and I just found out I can basically two shot them with some magic/sorcery. (I discounted that notion earlier, given how my moon butterfly spear was only dealing mid-double digit damage, but now I see I was wrong. Mainly because I’d enter the “screw it, let me bring everything I can throw at it for that darn ember” phase.)

Now the demon firesage is dead first try, so that’s making me feel better.

Got centipede demon down about 2-3rds then got one shot stomped.

Got guardian of the sanctuary down to half health. Honestly, didn’t even fully equip to fight him, just figured I’d get a rhythm.

Update to that, Sanctuary guardian is dead and it’s been an hour or less. Didn’t keep track. I think this was attempt five or so. I’m crediting survival to a +5 eagle shield and high lightening resistant mage gear. Plus a lightning resist ring. Found that I need to try to sneak in some pyromancy after his attacks, and be willing for the fight to last a couple minutes. (Difference between trying to do as much damage as fast as you can, and trying to win the fight. He set the tempo, so I danced to his tune…and I really like how that line came out.)

Artorius was surprisingly easy to defea-nah, I’m just messing with you all with that one. Haven’t beaten him yet and he’s shoved my face into the floor with the sharp end of his sword about five times or so.

Decided to switch focus and after a few attempts, now the centipede demon is dead. (Mainly spammed great soul arrow, wish I bought a second set of that spell).

Funny story, I was 500 souls short of a miracle, so I role-played told the shrine maiden girl in the church to “give me a moment”, walked over to the three baulder knights, and chaos fireballed all three of them in quick succession. Walked back and made my purchase.

Also, met Patches (who politely pointed me in her direction with his foot; knew it was coming, but got a twin humanity out of him), which is how I found where she was while under-equipped (exploring loadout). Her hollow guards killed me, one shuffling of spells later at the nearby and warpable bonfire, they both died to the same great combustion. Oh, and I killed what’s his face who would have killed the shrine kid. Sheesh, firelink is starting to run low on residences. Got another lamp, so now I can trade one in for a ring of fog, otherwise unattainable with the servers down if I’m correct.

Oh, and found an easy way past the pinwheel skeletons, prior to the tomb warp spot: cast hover light, and hidden body, in that order while wearing dragon ring of silence; reduces detection and ago radius, while giving you enough light to see. Lantern also seemed to reveal the, for lack of a better word, safety railing. Currently going after the silver serpent ring.

That’s it for now! Thanks for reading, and I hope you all enjoyed! Have a good day everyone!

(I also feel inclined to mention, but I think I maybe have said this before, that while this is my first dark souls playthrough, this isn’t my first FromSoftware game; Sekiro holds that title. And the Guardian kinda reminded me a bit of the Guardian Ape fight, in terms of arena, and minus the screaming s-…I recommend looking up a reaction compilation of that boss entering phase two. FromSoft has gotten a tad trolly with that one.)

PS: is it just me, or does this NPC in the DLC look like he’s from bloodborne?

Well that sounds like youve been greatly successful over all

[ddrkirbyisq]

You'd think that being unemployed I'd blog more often instead of less often...but I guess it's more just that the days of me feeling like i NEED to say something about =everything= are past.  I definitely remember that stage in high school where I just found it really nice, theraputic even to just type everything out as a way of processing it and to distill any of those leftover thoughts and feelings that I had.  I'd like to (?) think that I am a little bit better at being able to acknowledge my thoughts and feelings as they happen and "let them pass", so to speak.  Kind of like meditating, you know?  Where you don't necessarily feel obligated to act upon every single thought or feeling. Speaking of which, I think I'm really feeling a lot better so far about (not) stressing out about things in general.  Of course there is still an internal alarm bell (or whatever metaphor you want to use) that starts going off whenever I haven't gotten to one or more of my responsibilities for a long time, but I think it's been easier to not stress out about that alarm going off (and trust that I will be able to get to it).  Perhaps more importantly, it's also been easier to manage that alarm in the first place, since I really feel like I am doing a better job of keeping up with things in general now, with letters, music, etc.  Things will never be perfect and my plate will never be fully empty, but as long as I'm making forward progress I'm happy. I did some tai chi for the first time in forever the other day!  It felt nice, just went out to the park after doing some stretching and such at home.  I'm super out of shape of course, but actually not =as bad= as I thought, so that was nice.  It didn't take a ton of time either, so hopefully that's something I can start doing randomly a bit more often.  Though it is a bit less fun doing it alone compared to when it was with others.  But it's sort of fun to be alone in its own way, too, I guess. Worked on a bunch of music stuff today!  Got started on an interesting request to remix Gliding Dance of the Maidens, which took quite some tries to get started on, but I think I'm making headway there, yay.  Also did OHC today, in which I tried to emulate puru's progressive sounds.  I was eh...about halfway successful I think.  I managed to get pretty tight drum sequencing, which I think worked really nicely -- I'm going to have to push this "clean" style of drums more in the future.  I really stumbled on making the proper trance pluck sounds though, something which I feel like I used to be able to do but I guess I've gotten out of practice with it.  After OHC ended I spent some time experimenting with that, trying to get the hang of it not only with the classic 3xOsc synth, but also with Harmor and Sytrus.  I actually might start trying to use Sytrus a bit more often for this type of supersaw sound, as it's fairly easy to get a good unison saw sound out of sytrus and the filters actually work pretty nicely.  Harmor can do it too, of course, but...I dunno, the UI in harmor just feels more clunky and confusing, really.  Both Sytrus and Harmor are capable of doing subtractive synthesis, even though Sytrus is built for FM/ringmod and Harmor is built as an additive synth.  So maybe more Sytrus is in my future when I want to play around with synth stuff...?  Anyways, it felt good to be doing so much work on music.  It's just as well too, since I already have a commission lined up for next month too! Xmas letters are progressing smoothly!  I've gotten 25 of them done, and also took care of some birthday letters along the way as well.  Only 6 more days left!  I still have some of the longer ones left to do though, so hopefully I can schedule them in at good times.  I still have to do my Japanese letter too, which will probably take a while, haha.  Once all the letters are done I have to make sure to not relax -- need to get all the gift shopping done early otherwise deadlines will sneak up on me before I know it... Progressing further and further in Dark Souls, which has been keeping my interest pretty well!  I've also started listening to the Bonfireside chat podcast (that, the "Analog" melee podcast, and Limited Resources for MtG are my 3 podcasts to listen to while driving) alongside my playthrough, which...well, I wouldn't say it's the =greatest= podcast in the world, but it's enjoyable enough, for a drive.  Anyways, the main cleric character (Sayuri) has a bunch of points into Faith and uses lightning spear in addition to the Jagged Ghost Blade (currently reinforced to +4), which fortuitously dropped from one of the ghosts in new londo ruins.  It's just as well too, because we spent a LOT of time down in those ruins fighting those ghosts wayyyy before we were supposed to...we ended up clearing the ENTIRE area out and got confused because there was nowhere else to go (turns out I had just completely missed the door to the lower undead burg, argh).  Anyways, it's been serving really well, as it's got really nice base damage AND procs a nice bleed effect as well.  The only thing is that it doesn't do too well in narrower spaces or against short or flying enemies as it mainly has horizontal slash attacks, so occasionally we'll switch to the good ol mace (one of the better weapons in the game actually) and use those vertical attacks to smash things. The jagged ghost blade doesn't have much scaling, so eventually we'll replace it with some sort of divine or just regular reinforced dex scaling weapon.  Our scimitar is currently a divine scimitar although we haven't needed it yet (once we go into the catacombs, I guess?), and we just picked up a falchion so that could be a candidate.  Some sort of katana would actually be great -- apparently there is an Iaito somewhere in blighttown that you can get to by jumping to a platform, so maybe that, if we end up going back there.  I might just do some backtracking through blighttown (ugh) anyways, as I'm sure I didn't get everything there.  I actually also should go back to the lower burg since I apparently completely missed Griggs there, lol. Anyways, we actually made our way all the way through the depths, through blighttown, and beat quelaag, rang the second bell to presumably unlock sen's fortress (?) and are now near the ruins of chaos.  There are quite a few different directions we can explore go at this point, though I guess sen's fortress is the next real progress area (?).  There's no shortage of unexplored areas, at any rate, as there's the bridge in valley of drakes that i don't know where it goes (shortcut to somewhere?), there's the crest of artorias door which I don't know where it leads to, and a bunch of stuff in blighttown probably.  There...is certainly a lot of stuff in this game, lol.  Also, we accidentally killed the Chaos Servant guy guarding Quelaag's sister, whoops!  Didn't see the option to talk to him since I was holding my shield up.  Fortunately that doesn't really matter all that much in the grand scheme of things, just sort of unfortunate.  Wish somebody had left a message there that indicated something about that dude though.  We also missed beating Kirk in the sewers -- didn't realize he was an NPC to be beaten.  Whatever, there's no way to expect to get everything right on the first playthrough. My second character is a sorcery-focused int build, which is a drastically different playstyle, as she gets to really nuke things with hard-hitting magic attacks, but it requires a different set of tactics as she's sort of fragile and the magic takes time to cast, so it's tricky sometimes to find a good window of time to fire them off.  I've beaten the Gaping Dragon with that character, so next is to head down to blighttown. Third character is sort of a lolzy one, just focusing on strength and two-handing huge weapons.  I haven't played with that one very much at all, I think I only beat the taurus demon so far.  Don't know if I'll continue, though it does seem funny to just hold really huge weapons around haha. Cleared a Space Alert mission successfully for the first time in about 3 years, which was fun!  Really gotta keep your wits sharp to succeed in that game...it's still fun though. I've started playing through Hollow Knight as well!  In earnest this time, as the last time I tried I didn't get very far at all.  Currently just got to the Fungal Wastes...man, a LOT of attention and detail went into the art for this game, it's pretty insane how fully-featured all of these environments are and so far the different feel of all the areas is coming across really well.  It's been fun so far. Things that are coming up (a.k.a. things that I have to get done, lol)...besides stuff that is not really worth mentioning (getting my flu shot at some point), I actually still might want to do a short post-mortem for Bath Time, lol.  Speaking of which, there's a pretty annoying touchscreen bug, so (sigh) I probably will try to fix that up and make a new mobile build for it.  At SOME point I'll have to try to actually get back to development on Rhythm Quest, though it is certainly intimidating since there is so much that needs to be done there.  Besides all the content, I want to redo how the map screen works entirely if possible, maybe the main menu as well, but also have to make a calibration screen of some sort, etc etc etc. For anime, Inuyasha (lol) is on hold at the moment, but I finished off Evangelion for reals (yay).  I didn't expect the ah..."change of direction" at the end of the series to be so...SUDDEN...but thinking about it, it makes sense.  For some reason I expected that to start happening earlier, but it really was compacted into the last little bit.  Anyways, now I'm making my way through the latter parts of Onii Sama e...which has had some quite nice episodes.  I don't really know what to say about it without having to explain a lot of other things about the anime, so I won't really bother, but it has been good. Not much melee these days, but one thing that is exciting is that Rishi and KJH made it into summit!  Woot!  Should be a good lineup!  That's pretty exciting. Also been catching up on going through random music that I've got backlogged on my drive, including Chronology (jazz rearrangement album of Chrono Trigger, it's pretty nice!), as well as Harmony of Heroes (super smash bros giant rearrangement album) and the Final Smash extension (those two didn't have that much that was to my liking, but a few things here and there were nice).  As I said, it just feels nice to be making progress on things.  I even went through all of my accumulated deviantArt notifications the other day, haha.  I'm actually trying to get back into my habit of using my little batch script to open up a bunch of websites every morning for me to check for updates!  Anyways, all of these things feel great to be going back to.  I should also be putting out my "Monthlies" release for this month relatively soon too!