Friday, March 3, 2017

Monthly Update: March 2017


Looking over the notes I have for February and what I'm looking at towards Smarch and all its lousy weatheriness, there appears to be quite a lot.

In the physical games front, D&D has been happening on its regular basis since the beginning of the year, and again, the current quest has taken a lot longer than originally anticipated.  The group is actually meeting up tomorrow to officially finish the current story and then do a one-off quest so that people don't leave after the first hour or two.  Plus we may not be meeting up again until April so I want to make our monthly meet up count.  We have also decided to focus on more single one-off quests that do not necessarily require all seven PCs to be present.  Chreekat has even expressed interest in DMing a western/Fallout world type campaign that would still have all of the same rules, just the setting is different.

And last weekend, Conklederp and I were able to play a round of Mansions of Madness 2nd Edition with D&D regulars Himo and Folly at their place.  That was the second time that we had played MoM2 with people other than ourselves and it was so much fun to play.  The only thing that I think I would have done differently, was forcing people to solve people on their own, although that would be hard to do since we were using the application through Steam.  Now if there were a way to force people to use a mobile app in order to solve puzzles. . .actually that might be more difficult to implement and possibly increase the overall cost of an already expensive game.

In the PC game market, I have had a resurgence in playing The Witcher through GOG's Galaxy client.  I think I had hit a wall where I was under the impression that I would be unable to learn a spell that I had missed in the previous chapter, which I had read was the most useful spell in the game.  After a fair amount of Google searching, I used some FAQs, found the spell, and dove head long into Chapter 3.  43 hours in now and I am thoroughly enjoying this fictional world again.  

I've plodded a bit more in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, although I hit a story wall that I am not sure how to break through.  I guess I could just "kill" my character and start over, which is sort of how that game works, but I feel that I have progressed too far in this particular story to quit now.

I also cannot believe that I have yet to talk about the Mega Man inspired game Nefarious. a game that I pledged on Kickstarter back in Fall 2014.  I am about 2/3rds of the way through the game and for the most part, I think playing as the bag guy in a Mega Man inspired game is a pretty brilliant idea and the game is mostly well executed, with only a couple of gripes on my part, but I will get into that later in the month after I have beaten the game since I feel I am too far for a First Impressions article.

On the 3DS, I am still emotionally working through Chrono Trigger, which I anticipate I will be finishing in the coming weeks.  And in flurried bits, I am playing Ultimate NES Remix, which is a nice frustrating diversion from the the longer games on other systems; also the fact that asshats still insist on buying out and overcharging for the Nintendo Classic Mini five months after its original limited release; but hey, you can still buy the official carrying case for $19.

In the mobile game arena, I had been playing (up until my phone went stolen) a lot of Fire Emblem Heroes, Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius, and Pokemon GO on the ocassions that I left my house and was within swiping distance of a Pokestop.  However, since my mobile playing/calling device is no longer in  my posession, an article about the first two games will have to wait, if only because I feel that both of those games deserve to have pictures posted with their respective articles; as free to play games, they are pretty damn good looking.

In the TV realm, Conklederp and I finished powering through Penny Dreadful, which ended its third and final season, which ended in kind of a disappointing way.  The short of it is, is that it is an amazing series with Eva Green doing an Emmy worthy performance as Vanessa Ives (although never nominated specifically for an Emmy, she was recognized by other award groups), as well as brilliant acting by both Josh Hartnett and Timothy Dalton that actually made me like them more than anything else they had previously done.  If you have not seen the show, think of it like a mix between The Monster Squad, Castlevania, but heavily character driven and without a lot of camp that could have easily been instilled by someone who thought they knew better. We also just finished the most recently released season of Bates Motel, and now we are waiting for the fifth and final season to be released either later this year or early next year.  And I recently started watching The Expanse, which I am enjoying a lot, even if I have a hard time tracking all of the characters' names; something I acknowledge is a weakness of mine when it comes to large ensemble shows.

Regarding movies, both Conklederp and I have been kind of lite as far as going out to see them.  We did see A Cure for Wellness which was as good a movie as we were expecting based on the trailers.  And as Dr. Potts pointed out, Get Out and Logan also look like they are both right up our ally, although I might end up seeing Logan by myself as it Conklederp is not one for comic book movies.  And now that I think about it, I do not think that I have seen an X-Men movie since the atrocity that was X-Men: The Last Stand.  Maybe that movie will not hinge itself on not having seen any of the other Wolverine or X-Men movies?

In the books frontier, I recently finished Critical Failures: Caverns & Creatures Book 1 and will have a Book Review article later in the month.  I am still trudging through Ship of Theseus, which sounds a lot more negative that intended.  I love the concept of the book, but finding time and a safe place to read the book can be challenging sometimes.  I also just started reading Elizabethan Demonolgy by Thomas Alfred Spalding, which is not as evil as it sounds.  It is a book that attempts to put into context devils, demons, and other forms of evil by looking at how they have been utilized throughout history; at least up until the book was published in 1880.  At about 43% of the way through, it is an amazing read that uses myth, biblical citations, Shakespeare (spelled "Shakespere" throughout, which apparently a common enough way to spell his name at that time), and Sir Walter Scot as sources cited throughout the entire book.  As someone who loves history and finding out contextual evidence for things being the way they are, I could not recommend this book enough.

Oh, and apparently the Nintendo Switch was released today, which most gaming and like-minded sites are probably talking about.  So you will just have to wait until one is acquired by either Dr. Potts or myself for us to make any informed comments about the system and games.  Nope, that FedEx truck that just drove by was not meant to drop of a Switch at our place. . .unless they flip back around. . .



~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

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