Lets play: Cat In Box!

Sometimes you come across games with that certain something. It's not completely clear why the game is incredibly fun, it just is. Enter: "Cat in box".

With a starting screen like this, you know shit is about to get real. The three modes are: Story, timed, and endless. Story you're likely to play once to get the hang of controlling the kitty. Timed is competitive mode where you're basically going to challenge your best bros to beat your time. And endless mode is where you lose your mind playing for hours and then you realize you need to go to class but you just wanna keep getting cats in boxes.

SUCK IT IN KITTY

Like we're in MLG or something, I blast through the story without an issue, and quickly move onto the timed portion of the game.

A pretty competitive hiscore, I think.

Timed mode is actually interesting because of the randomness of the boxes. You could get a really good string of easy to enter boxes....or just get completely screwed over.

Endless mode!

Endless mode is exactly what you'd think, just endless cat in endless boxes. The score at the top is how many boxes your cat has entered...I don't really know if there's much to the endless mode though....

OH SWEET JESUS WHAT HAPPENED TO MY ENTIRE DAY? WHERE AM I?

Let's play: Unreal World RPG! Let's get fishing. (Part 2)

Our journey so far has us moving from our starting point north west to a town which we hoped would hold delicious treasure....but it didn't, and all of the shops in this town really sucked. There's absolutely nothing left for us here, so we continue going north west!

Another town! Thank god because Bartleby is starting to get exhausted. And even if the town doesn't have what we're looking for, he still needs to lay down and take a nap.

A fishing shop! ....It has absolutely no fishing equipment at all. Bartleby, you may be fucked at this point. To the south there's a bunch of different islander villages, so I'm thinking Bartleby might have more luck finding fishing equipment there....OFF WE GO!

On the way to the islander's village, Bartleby stumbled across a small grouping of settlements! Hooray! And in these settlements were shops! HOORAY! AND THEY FINALLY HAD FISHING SHOPS OH GOD YOU'RE GOING TO LIVE BARTLEBY!

Bartleby is now the proud owner of a fishing rod! Which is most excellent! The primary objective for him should now be locating a river. It would be way better if he managed to stumble upon like...20-30 nets, because then we could make a nice huge net line in some river, but that's not going to happen.

Bartleby makes the trip to the south east, and upon encountering a large body of water decides that it's time to stop for the day...He needs to prepare a large amount of food for eating, because his other provisions ran out. The body of water where he is stopped is fairly nice, and is only a short distance from a town to the west.

Good news! Bartleby is literally the worst fucking fisherman who ever did live. No kidding, he spent literally two days of solid fishing and caught 1 fish...Which was less than one pound. He had to build himself an emergency shelter to avoid dying in the rain! We sure did pick the right lifestyle for him to live...

Let's play: Unreal World RPG! A taste of things to come. (Part 1)

Every so often one feels the call....The call of the wild! You just can't resist the urge to go out and hike and kill a fucking bear or something! But since I'm a huge nerd and the wildlife would likely eat me, I have to settle for this: Unreal world.

Unreal world RPG puts you in the shoes of an iron age Finnish (or some such Scandinavian descendant) whose only goal is: Survival. I have played this game a few times in the past, and it has always ended in me becoming a huge cannibal. I'd end up raiding towns and living off of their delicious human meats. So this time we will try to avoid that. Try.

Ah yes, Bartleby the Reemilainen...Whatever that is. It said something about fishing and I think that's how I'm going to aim to survive.

Bartleby is a very average guy, except for the fact that he's scared to death of cats. Which may come to bite us in the ass if we encounter any wild kitties.

And as you can see Bartleby is actually mostly shit at everything. I pumped his fishing up as much as possible, but I'm not sure it's going to help. So in all he has boosted the skills: Cooking, fishing, survival, climbing and axe.

Bartleby is going to be starting near the Sartola tribe...This place looks pretty decent to me, it's not too far north and not too far south, so hopefully we'll get some good fishing. Also if it goes down where we're not having a good time, we can always book it to the ocean. Also, we're picking the unreal world scenario. Woo.

Aaand here's my starting equipment...No fishing gear, looks like we're hunter after all.

An Elk in the distance! We could totally fuck up an Elk and then eat his meats for like, ever!

We basically have one chance to shoot this little bastard before he runs away. Since we're such absolute crap at tracking, it's likely that he will run away and make me cry....Let's make this shot count.

Fuck

Well that didn't go well, going to run this bastard down! Well I lost it's trail pretty quickly...These Elk things are fast, I'm going to need to find some smaller game.

Awwww yiss! We ran down a reindeer! Holy crap, I got a nice shot in his torso, and was able to track him by the blood trail....Now I'm going to EAT HIM.

Yeeeeeeeees! Now I can use these cuts that I got to get me some fishing equipment...If I can find a freaking town. We're moving west from here in order to find some kind of settlement, and if we're lucky they'll have some fishing gear...If not, we'll kill and eat a few of them. WHAT? THIS IS SURVIVAL!

Our first village...And thank god, I kept falling out of trees trying to find this place. They had one shop, which was a grains shop, which is literally useless to us at this point. The good news is though, that we can use a town like this as a staging point to find bigger and better things. So in part 1 of our adventure we were able to secure both food and temporary shelter, and our long term goals are going to be to establish a long-term base camp and to refine our ability to catch fish! WOOHOOO

System Shock 2 first time, 14 years after the fact.

System Shock 2 has been on my "Games I should really play" list for a really long time. Primarily I kept away because the operation of the multiplayer function eluded me, and I had resolved to play it with Maestro. I really do mean resolve, because we've been trying to get this thing working since at least early 2000 with absolutely no luck. Well, we finally got it working (mostly thanks to the steam release of the game), and I am placed in a very interesting position whereby I get to play this game for the first time...14 years after the fact.

What

Having never played the game when it was initially released, and having only played in multiplayer mode it actually works pretty well. We are absolutely awful at videogames...So despite the fact that we're currently playing on "normal" mode, it's incredibly common that the most standard of enemies destroy us with little effort. It was incredibly important for us to coordinate our attacks, as I was a psi user who's spells would hit my ally if I wasn't careful . This caused us to overly abuse the use of the wrench as our primary weapon, which was only occasionally supplemented by maestro's use of a gun. But at the end of the day, when his gun was jamming, broken, or out of ammo we had to rely on the good old wrench. All of this meant that we needed to coordinate, and cooperate to the highest degree of our ability. Not really, we basically just zerged everything kekeke.

You know, there's this thing about incredibly old RPGish games like this: if you fuck your skills up in the slightest, you could very well completely gimp yourself. That's basically what I've done in our current playthrough. I went the psi side of things, which should have been "pew pew pew fire laser beams" and whatnot. But what it turned out to be was  "oh hey I'm out of mana again time to use the wrench". I'm very clearly doing something wrong, but it's basically come down to focusing on melee attacks, and spells that buff / heal me. So the one hand there's the fact that I feel like I could have gimped myself, but on the other hand I seem to have developed this odd balance with the game.

HOW TO I HOLD WRENCH?

For all it's quirks and weird shit going down completely out of nowhere, the game seems to stand the test of time. It's still really fun, especially with the cooperative play available, and the learning curve really isn't that massive for a game from this era. I'm kind of at the point with videogames where my suggestion for this game would be "try it or something whatever".

The curse of Final Fantasy XI, or how I fell in love with my abuser.

Okay, so it's probably the most predicable thing that happens every year, but we've burned out on FFXI again. Both me and Haud completely gave up on the whole thing before the expansion pack even came out. But again, this is likely the most predictable thing that could happen. So as the sun sets on another episode  of "why I hate and love this game at the same time", we look back and reflect. See what I did? There's a picture of a sunset.

I feel it

Me and Haud had a fairly decent jaunt through the world of vana'fuckin'diel. Our main objective was to complete the old story content before the new expansion pack came out. Well, apparently all those fuzzy memories of the game were through rose tinted glasses, because fucking hell that was just tedious. No words can describe how utterly boring the story missions actually are. It would honestly boil down to 2 hours of walking with a 2 minute fight at the end of the walking. All of the delusional thinking about this game actually being anything but terrible is exactly that, a horrible fantasy that we constructed way back in the 2000's. It was like a form of escapism that we used to just bury ourselves in to forget...I dunno school? We were like fucking 15 years old why do we need to escape from something?

"But there's more than just the story to take part in, Echdah" you may predictably say. Hah, yeah fucking right there is. FFXI is in this weird state of MMOs where unless you're on the top, you're not going to find other people to help you get there without sucking a dick, or owing someone a kidney. Not to mention the fact that the steps to get up to that top tier I mentioned are arduous as hell. Getting decent gear is like pulling fucking teeth. Involved in this horrible process include waiting around in port jeuno all day, and shouting for people to come with you to kill some mob. Then when you're there, you better hope you can actually kill it...Then there's the drops, oh god the fucking drops. I've never seen something so good in theory fall so flat. It's worse than communism! And you're not a commie, are you? ARE YOU? If you are then whatever I don't really even care anymore. So even if you do manage to get your drops from the motherfuckers, it's really not much of an increase over what you previously had. And, as much as I hate to say it, WoW has this aspect down pat. Every other fucking second you get a new kind of purple item that makes me pitch a tent. Whereas in FFXI, I work for weeks, and weeks to get a single item, and at the end of the road I got blueballs. BLUEBALLS I TELLS YA!

What the hell was I talking about? Oh yeah, video games. If I had a point in writing this, then it'd be that the great hope in all of this is FFXIV. The game has completely abandoned the stubborn ways seen in FFXI, and instead decided to adopt a more pragmatic approach to the whole being a fun game situation. So far the beta is, dare I say, playable. Further than that, it can be downright fun at times, and with the prospect of getting more classes and shit it should be even more fun in coming months. The point of all of this is that the category of MMO that FFXI belongs to is a dying breed. More and more games are becoming geared towards a WoW model, and who can blame them? It basically set all the new rules for making an MMO. We are currently in the world of warcraft era, anything before this time was the pre-wow days....Anything after is the post-wow days. 

So it is now that we bid farewell to that shitty fucking MMO for another god damned year. Next year I will forget how much I hate it, and fall for it's siren song yet again. Or maybe I will find this blog and be all like "Oh shit son, I ain't going there again fuck that."

Aww here it goes

This is what it feels like to be a drug addict. Once again I have gone into the rabbit hole that is known as Final Fantasy XI, and I literally have no excuse. Joining me this time on my drug addled delve into this shit hole are Haud and Maestro, who promise more excitement than a school girl on prom night. We also resurrected that red pearl of awesomeness known as ChocobusMaximus while we were at it. And I can say in all confidence after my first week back, that this game is as addictive as ever. Why the hell should you get stuff done when you could just idle in Jeuno all day looking for shouts for some notorious monster that no one is ever going to shout in a million years. But if they actually do, oh boy am I going to upgrade my axe to the +1 axe of asssplitting. Whatever, my point is that this game is still actually pretty fun. Logging on as a mid-level 80 beast master I immediately started working on some of my Magian weapons which proved to be both a huge time sink, and oddly attractive. That is the general idea of this game though: general disgust on the surface of idea, but then somehow it's fun in practice. I don't even know.

I feel it

So far our adventure has just underlined the serious issues that the game suffered from prior to both the raise of the level cap, and the removal of level requirements for missions. How the fuck did anyone do the Zilart missions before the quality of life updates? Seriously I want to know, someone tell me. We spent a few hours farming some fucking torches or lanterns or something, and then when we got to the boss, which was 3 tonberries, they housed Haud within a minute of the fight starting, and quickly turned their sights on me. Got out of that one by the skin of our teeth. We're also working on the CoP missions which are a clear improvement over their Zilart counterparts, both in narrative style, and mission execution. Well, I need to make myself clear on this matter: CoP sucked balls before the level cap restrictions were removed too. But at least we didn't have to run around finding fucking lanterns for the CoP missions! YEAH FUCK YOU ZILART. I don't even know whats going on in Zilart, I'll be honest with you. There's some crazy shit going on, but I have no idea what it is. Fucking ghosts and shit.

Quality of life~

While I'm ranting about quality of life, can you believe that those motherfuckers at SE went ahead and made it so that you could reduce the size of the god damn chat box? I'm not even kidding when I say that we flipped a shit when we found this out. There was actually a moment of silence from amazement when we discovered this feature. The SE that I knew back in the day would never have allowed such a thing to pass. You would have used the huge, clumsy ass chat box made for a 600x500 resolution and been happy about it. Thank your Japanese game developing masters, you insolent mortals! But now the development team has decided to do shit like this. They also reduced the timer for 2-hour abilities down to 1-hour. Which means that I can no longer call them 2-hour abilities. What the fuck is that? How am I supposed to erase a decade of saying "2-hour ability"? Hey bro, I'm going to activate my 2....My 1 hour ability. THANKS SE.

I know that sometime during the course of writing this I had a point. Oh yes: this shit is actually really fun. And I'm greatly looking forward to the release of the expansion pack, which drops next month sometime. Also going back and doing the old content is pretty cool. Yay

Returning to the fray

Almost each and every year there comes into being a single event which has happened since the ancient forgotten days. Anyone who has spent large amounts of time in the world of vana'diel knows the irresistible allure that comes every so often. Like some horrible drug addict you're drawn back to that which had once taken you to a magical place. And like a drug addict your scramble desperately to fulfill that feeling that you had the first couple of times you hit the hard stuff, but nothing ever seems to measure up to the first time you got that high.  Anyway, it's happening again for whatever reason. Perhaps it's just about that time. The time that my resistance for this drug has expired, and it's time to indulge. Better yet, it's likely our last hurrah into this game, and the lure which draws us in is none other than the new expansion pack: Seekers of adoulin. That's right, like some horrible necromancer, SE is attempting to breath a little bit of fresh life into the rotten corpse of FFXI. As the foul stench of death and decay permeates the air, those of us originally driven off by the foul odor are drawn in by the scent of fresh life which cuts through the mired air like some kind of stinky angel. 

Seekers of Adoulin promises the same empty bullshit that I eat up every single time: new zones, new classes, more fun. The thing that interests me the most is actually the new areas. While it is interesting to try out new classes, the exploration aspect of the game has always been very interesting to me. Maybe this was because while you were exploring you were subject to SE's idea of humor: an unending army of monsters which could peer through the most powerful of invisibility spells, monster who could rip you to shreds but who were also a lower level than you (to add insult to injury), and generally anything else that you can think of that's terrible in the world. So it was exciting to be out there on the field checking out these new areas and possibly die a lot. And I mean a lot. That game was just generally about dying a whole fucking lot.

It's interesting, but all joking aside the expansion pack looks like it might actually be worth playing. That is to say, the nostalgia factor aside it looks passable. The continent of Ulbuka seems to be rather large, and the new zones are going to be a welcome respite from the abyssea zones (yay why is everything red). The story is as follows: An empire had basically locked itself away from the rest of the world for some unmentioned amount of years, and only now that the king has died (I think) will the empire be opened to the rest of the world (thanks to san'doria). So now there will be a big ass town and huge ass motherfucking forest to explore and shit! Awwww yeah, who didn't like yhutung-oh....wait....

The plan is as follows: Haud, Caboose and I (Echdah) are resubbing in February. The goal here is to get to the cap, and finish off all the old content that we didn't have the time or patience for. This way we will be well prepared for when SoA (Seekers of Adoulin) comes out. The question is: who will join us on this magical journey into the depths of FFXI? I hope a lot of people come and join us again, who knows....This might be the last time we get to play this awful fucking game, or just MMOs in general. You know, it's not even that bad anymore...You level up pretty damn quick. They let you at that content post haste now-a-days. No more waiting like, 3 days to get a party. Also it's not even that hard to install the game anymore. Back in the day we had a general rule for life: Never uninstall FFXI because you will be back. This rule held basically true, but in those days it was fairly impossible to find a FFXI player who had not basically dedicated their life to the game as it was, so quitting was not an option. Fortunately, with things like steam, we basically don't have to worry about the horrible reinstall period that existed back then. A reinstall time that took not hours, but days...Literally, like 2 fucking days. Now if you're downloading the main game at 5mb/s the update process is only a few hours.

I don't think I've made myself clear, this shit is going to be so fucking badass that they did something that NO ONE ever thought was possible:

New fucking Crab.

Balancing school and games

Every time a new semester starts I feel like I'm going to have a fucking aneurysm. It's not even like the new material is particularly hard, or that I'm struggling to understand things, it's just a matter of change. Whenever things change suddenly, it's hard to make a clean adjustment, and this spring semester is no different.

Since we started producing videos of us playing video games back in god knows when (I sure as hell don't), it's been an interesting mix between maintaining an upload schedule, and keeping up with work and school.
For instance, if we record about 2 hours of video, I might spend half that time sifting through and cutting out about 5-10 minutes per hour of the video. From that 5 to 10 minutes I cut together a (hopefully) hilarious video of dick jokes, and throw that bitch up on youtube. We don't have many people following us regularly, but it's not really about getting people's attention, it's about having fun with our friends and sharing the resulting hilarity. So the bottom line is that this newest project of ours, the "let's record ourselves being idiots while playing games" project is simply an extension of what we've been doing for the past decade...we're just sharing it now.

Producing has been both incredibly different/difficult for me, as well as being incredibly fun. There are a huge amount of things that need to come together in order to get a video out, let alone getting stuff out regularly. Fortunately we're not actively working on anything like let's plays, which require even more effort. The clip show format has worked amazingly well, and basically allowed me to keep working/schooling while maintaining some sort of presence. With the addition of our regular streams, we've also been able to keep some video content flowing out there without the huge amount of production effort that go into the regular videos.

Creating the twitch.tv end of the entire thing has been incredibly fun, creating an environment where you can instantly respond and react to anyone who has questions, or who just basically wants to talk about the game you're playing is insanely useful. Instead of a horrible disconnect between when we play a game, record it, and post the highlights, we can field questions and establish friends and followers ad hoc. This also makes my screen look like a fucking command center when I'm recording. Between video recording software, audio recording software, and the streaming software I'm amazed if I have any screen space left.

Also we're apparently going to be playing Final Fantasy XI again in feb, so prepare your fucking anus.