Like I said in the Big Freaking Podcast podcast I linked earlier today, the Shamus Plays series is the most fun part of the work I do.
This week Lulzy has to help an herbalist make a potion, and you know what that means.
Wolfenstein II

This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Good Robot Dev Blog

An ongoing series where I work on making a 2D action game from scratch.
The Best of 2019

I called 2019 "The Year of corporate Dystopia". Here is a list of the games I thought were interesting or worth talking about that year.
The Plot-Driven Door

You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
Bethesda NEVER Understood Fallout

Let's count up the ways in which Bethesda has misunderstood and misused the Fallout property.
I’ve only played LoTRO as a demo, and never as a hobbit, so this is the first set of quests that I remember playing myself. I remember very well being sick of wandering in and out of this area.
Incidentally, I also played in the beta, back before quests were marked on the minimap. I spent an hour wandering through the woods trying to find that dog farm. When I discovered I had to go back, I almost cried.
I’m currently playing the Free trial and having a lot of fun with it.
Thanks for making me want to play it =D
Hilarious as usual!
The first time through the Chetwood quests I remember thinking “Next time I need to gather up all the quests that send me in here at once so I don’t make so many trips.” The second time, I realized there’s just no way to do that. By design.
Oh, well – at least I’m not carrying pies.
I may actually pick up LOTRO because of your stories. Sure they make it seems like a ridiculous game but I understand the comedy behind it.
Thanks for all these comics you do. They make my office lunch time a laugh. Keep up the good work!
Shamus, I asked a couple days ago, but you are a big jerk and racist against Canadians, so I will ask again. What do you think of LotRO adopting Turbine’s F2P system? Or is there an article coming up about it and you don’t want to spoil anything because you love to keep us in suspense?
I second this request for your opinion on LotRO going F2P :)
Next week’s Shamus Plays will cover it.
Danged Canadians. Devious snowbacks sneaking into our country and stealing all our… snowcones.
Man, I wish we were called Snowbacks, that’d be awesome. :(
Don’t forget borrowing YOUR superheroes. And mobs chasing all the ORDINARY STORMS to your side. I found that this spreadsheet covered most of the important points about Canada.
I think that spreadsheet left a few things off in the “Things They Hate” category like “stereotypes involving eternal snow and penguins.”
Canadia has penguins now? o.0
But… but they’re our penguins!
Although Phillip Island would be more interesting if we had some Canadians (especially one or two in particular *wistful sigh*)
Lemme guess: Killing bears?
[Edit: hah! I hadn’t even looked yet!]
I knew this would devolve into bearcide. What did those bears do to the Canadians? Eat someone in their families?
I’m disappointed that getting the honey did not involve bears (or giant bees).
I was totally expecting giant bees! Or at least having to fight swarms of angry, normal-size bees. With a sword. Somehow.
I would have expected werebears thiefs. Thiefs because they stole the honey from some peaceful, but slighlty neurotic, werewasps. Then I remembered Tolkien didn´t had those.
Actually, Tolkien did have some werebears – Beorn in “The Hobbit” is one. Or maybe he is a bear werehuman – my memory on the subject is a bit fuzzy :) No werewasps, though. Unless… they’re hiding!
Still, guys who can look either like humans or like bears – that could be two-in-one annoyances for Lulzy!
I wonder if there’re any in the game?
Beorn was just a guy wearing a bear skin. Bilbo was kind of concussed at the time.
Beorn DID raise very large bees, so big that Bilbo thinks he would die if one stung him. Those could have been werewasps who just didn’t change form while Gandalf and Co. visited.
There’s a swampy area in one corner of The Shire where you get accosted by swarms of normal-sized gnats (they’re more of a distraction and annoyance than anything else). Swing your sword at the swarm a few times and the gnats fall to the ground and die.
Shamus, Shamus, Shamus.
You should know better by now than to expect sensible behaviour from NPCs.
You’re only setting yourself up for disappointment.
“An herbalist” looks to be a typo.
It’s not. Think of the word honour. It’s the same with herbs.
I think the problem is that some people pronounce it as ‘erbalist’, so it would be ‘an’, like with ‘an hour’ or, as above ‘an honour’. However, for people that pronounce the h at the start, it would be ‘a herbalist’, like ‘a hotel’ or ‘a herring’.
This one always bugs the crap out of me when people (I’m looking at YOU, Tom Clancy!) say something like “an historian.” You wouldn’t ever prounounce it “istorian”, would you? If the word begins with a hard “h”, it’s “a”, if it’s soft, “an.”
/pet peeve rant
I can explain this one. I am told that the use of “an” before some words where the “h” is pronounced such as “historic” or “hysterical” is due to certain segments of English speakers (such as some Irish or BE dialects)which do not pronounce the “h” or barely pronounce it. This has apparently led to confusion amongst world-wide English speakers as to which indefinite article to use.
Alternatively, I’ve been told by some oldsters (we’re talking the octogenarian set) that they were taught in school to use “a” with hard-h words in which the emphasis is in the first syllable (such as “history” or “hospital”) but “an” should be used in hard-h words in which the emphasis is in the second or later syllable (such as “historical” or “hospitable”).
Lies. I always pronounce the h in herbs.
I do too. My ex-WoW ex-GM (<3) never did, being one of the few Americans in our mostly-Aussie guild. He always said we needed more "erbs" in the bank, or some such. And while talking about actual "erbs" he always pronounced "oregano" wrong. :P
Not in honour, though, but I know it's there. “An honourable” and “an hour” sound normal to me.
I hear newsreaders say "an horrific" and it makes me shudder. Stupid English language; don’t even start me on “privacy”. Ve vouldn't have all this contention if ze Germans had von…
* [Edit]: Scrolling up I realised I do say/type “an hour” and so I had to change most of my second paragraph because I was blatantly lying to myself. Stupid brain.
If ever I need to beat someone over the head with how to do pacing properly, I may very well send them to this chapter of the Let’s Play, the whole bit with the herbalist’s house as you know what’s coming….
Much fun!
One possible explanation for the haystack at Skunkwood’s is that the farm was taken over by the brigands (uh, recently, I guess). Of course that would still just make it some sort of husbandry operation for large animals that has to transport all of the feed in, since it’s in the middle of a forest next to a swamp and surrounded by impassable escarpments.
You continue to amaze me with the things I never thought to question, Shamus. There’s another farm on a nearby hill with an actual field, but of course it’s still surrounded by eighty-foot old-growth that would really put a damper on the sun exposure.
Maybe they’re growing cocoa in that farm? Or rubber-trees? Those trees can’t receive sunlight directly, so those farms have large trees providing shade.
Of course, what would those American trees be doing in Middle-Earth (mythic Eurasia) is anybody’s guess… ;-P
A Gandalf did it.
Thankfully they’re colour coded, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find out which one :p
Except for the two that disappeared into the East, who were both Blue.
Hihi, you had me going there with the herbalist for a second. I was really confused and thinking: But this is the point where they ask you to get everything they need! And then I clicked “Next” and the world was right again :)
“You don’t need me to go and quest for any other basic items? You don’t need firewood from Mirkwood or a stirring-spoon from Sauron’s kitchen?”
Pure WIN.
BTW, just ran across this series of comics at a convention my kids pushed me into taking them too, but it catches the weakside of MMOs perfectly:
http://mysticrev.com/index.php?cid=426