Four day migraine. No write. Only pain.
Wednesday Action Log 3-20-24
This week I’m emulating Wind Waker. This is my first time playing it, and I can see why it’s a lot of people’s favorite, it has a lot of quality of life improvements compared to Ocarina along with the combat feeling a lot smoother, Ocarina is probably still my favorite but I think that’s mostly just the nostalgia talking.
What are you guys playing?
SWTOR: NO PUNS ABOUT DAILIES
I don’t normally partake of “dailies” in MMORPGs. For those who don’t know, “dailies” are a traditional component of MMORPGs that USUALLY aren’t included in the initial release of the game. Or at least, that’s the way it started; newer games frequently have this repeatable content included from the beginning. Dailies are most often repeatable quests using assets already in the game. A good example would be adding a repeatable quest that is nothing more than doing the basic parts of a story quest once per day. For instance, if you had to fight through a bunch of enemies to reach an NPC you needed to talk to in order to advance the story; the “daily” version would just be having to go kill 10 of those enemies again. The reward, instead of moving the story along (since you’ve already done that) will usually be some of the game’s primary currency, PLUS some “reputation” currency. The “reputation” will be assigned to a faction connected to that area of the game, or to some kind of bigger faction…it can be as general or highly specific as you want. The IMPORTANT part isn’t the additional XP and money that you may or may not receive. The REPUTATION currency can be saved up and then spent with a new vendor added that will sell items UNIQUE to that reputation faction. I never did dailies in World of Warcraft until I started collecting mounts, and I found that dozens of factions in WoW offered a special mount. For FREE, you just had to play the game a lot. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, I only recently started looking into the reputation awards available from different vendors and found not only MOUNTS/VEHICLES, but ARMOR DYES. So, I started doing dailies with Rix’larril’an.
Continue reading 〉〉 “SWTOR: NO PUNS ABOUT DAILIES”
DM of the Rings Remastered LXIII: Overly Requited Love
Sims 4 Overthinking: Reno Day
Alright! It’s finally reno day for the downstairs. What used to be a just kitchen is becoming an entirely self-contained studio apartment. Having a playable separate home space wasn’t possible when this series first started a year and a half ago. But now, The Sims 4 For Rent pack has finally released and you can section off different parts of a build to be separate households. You just have to ignore the $40 price tag, and the fact that it’s deeply and broken and almost unplayable. The bugs include but are not limited to: Tanking frame rate on lots with rentals on them, landlord sims receiving little to no payments if someone moved out or in within a in-game weeks time (several playing hours) and every renting sim inexplicably baking several cakes a day, slowly filling your residence with cake.
But, you know, other than that, it’s great.
Continue reading 〉〉 “Sims 4 Overthinking: Reno Day”
Wednesday Action Log 3-13-24
This week I’m emulating and playing Ocarina of Time I don’t really have much to say about the game, it was the first Zelda game I had and I’m glad I have save states.
What are you guys playing?
Saying Goodbye/Lif Goes On
I knew late last Sunday I wasn’t going to get my weekly post done by midnight. I had the structure in place and most of the rough draft in hand, but the words weren’t flowing. I intended to get it banged in shape Monday morning rather than miss a week. But other things happened. I’ve been eating unhealthily and hadn’t been in a great place mentally, and ended up having trouble sleeping. I finally got up around 4:oo AM and went back to my office. At 4:30 my elderly dog woke up the entire house yelping. He sleeps every night in the second bedroom with one of my children and their spouse. He was let out of the room and spent the next forty minutes trotting through the house, yelping and otherwise vocalizing. He would stop only briefly for some petting, and slowly calmed down. He finally found a comfortable space to lay down and went back to sleep.
Continue reading 〉〉 “Saying Goodbye/Lif Goes On”
Trashing the Heap
What does it mean when a program crashes, and why does it happen?
What is Vulkan?
There's a new graphics API in town. What does that mean, and why do we need it?
Video Compression Gone Wrong
How does image compression work, and why does it create those ugly spots all over some videos and not others?
Shamus Plays WOW
Ever wondered what's in all those quest boxes you've never bothered to read? Get ready: They're more insane than you might expect.
The Biggest Game Ever
Just how big IS No Man's Sky? What if you made a map of all of its landmass? How big would it be?
Who Broke the In-Game Economy?
Why are RPG economies so bad? Why are shopkeepers so mercenary, why are the prices so crazy, and why do you always end up a gazillionaire by the end of the game? Can't we just have a sensible balanced economy?
Spider-Man
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
How to Forum
Dear people of the internet: Please stop doing these horrible idiotic things when you talk to each other.
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
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?
T w e n t y S i d e d
