Completionist 2014: April Additions

I... I couldn't help myself. The bundle... Looked good. My will crumbled and I purchased the Reboot 3.0 Bundle from Bundle Stars. And I must say, my free time is horribly paying for it.

They had a discount going that dropped the price from $3 to $2. TWO DALLAHS! I could almost buy a bottle of soda with that $1 savings! I did have a few doubles so not all of the bundle will count against me. Yesssssssssssssssss.

Bundle Stars Reboot Bundle 3.0

• Rune Classic
• X Blades (Already owned)
• Hoard
• Ion Assault (Already owned)
• Knights and Merchants
• Planets Under Attack

I primarily picked up the bundle for Knights and Merchants. Ching had only good things to say about the game and he also picked up the bundle specifically for it. For a game that's almost 20 years old, there is a very active community and a crazy good mod called KAMRemake that helps to modernize the game. If you decide to start playing, I would suggest checking out at http://www.kamremake.com/ .

So Ching and myself have been playing a lot of Knights & Merchants Remake COOP missions and wasting a ton of time. And I it is really starting to drive my INFRASTRUCTURE bug. Games like Anno 2070, Tropico, and Banished. Actually... I don't have banished. NOOOOOO.. I'll probably wait a bit till it goes on sale... But its definitely on the list. I did cave in and pickup another INFRASTRUCTURE sim game called Craft the World

Craft the world plays like a cross between Terraria/Starbound/Minecraft and Knights & Merchants/Banished/Gnomoria/Dwarf Fortress. So rather than you build your entire house and dig for stuff, you assign NPC's to do all the work for you. The crafting uses a craft grid, just like Minecraft. There is a foreground and background tiles, like Terraria/Starbound. Your workers need to eat/sleep/be happy just like KaM/Banished. Lots of similarities. I'm enjoying it, and hopefully I can "Beat" it. 

Well... This put a dent into my plans. Goddamnit.

SCORE - 5;

>SCORE = -5

Path of Exile adventures in theorycrafting

Sup guys! Well I've decided to keep going with my Path of Exile series and focus on Theorycrafting, which is the aspect of the game that I really enjoy and the shinning part of Path of Exile that really sets it apart from other games in the genre. I made a short video showcasing one of the first characters I really stuck with and got to level 75 with. He is a lightning strike templar, but with a twist.

So here is the thing. I died like a noob on the video. I will blame it on not being focused because I was trying to narrate, but honestly, it made me realize I NEED more health. This is one of the pitfalls that many people fall into in theorycrafting their characters, they get enough health to get through most things, but don't give themselves enough of a buffer to withstand the really harrowing situations. That is what you should be speccing for. The normal and magic mobs should be nothing more then jungle vines under the might machete that is your build. They should be nothing. I realized this and had another look at my build and realized that the crit that I talked about having was not doing me any favors, so I specced out of it and got the 3 life and armor nodes in the marauder tree as well as bloodless with gives 8% max health and makes it so enemies cannot leech life, which isn't really a big deal, but 8% is definitely nice. Here is the build

So the point of the video from the get go was to show the beginnings of my foray into theorycrafting and that you will learn things as you progress your character and to let that inform your build. I looked at tons of Lightning strike builds and they all had different ideas about what to focus on although, I think the most popular and probably most successful is the one that uses staves and goes to the shadow tree to get 30% lightning damage with weapons and was mostly crit based. However, I started with an idea "I want to make a Templar that uses maces and does lightning strike." Suddenly, Galvanic Hammer jumped out at me, hence why the build is named Galvanic Hammer of Doom, so the build evolved to not only be about lightning damage, but having high elemental and physical damage and using abilities and gems that use the high physical damage to turn into elemental damage. The problem however, that I am seeing and want to fix having already released the video to the world is that the crit isn't doing me any favors, I might as well get Resolute Technique and never crit and use the rest of the points from accuracy nodes to put into life and armor. I just have to get enough Regret Orbs and I am suddenly wishing I hadn't sold them for an exalted T_T. Anyway, this is the new series, sort of a light hearted talk about theorycrafting and stuff I have learned along the way. Nothing super hardcore about it, hope you guys enjoy. Thanks for watching.

Completionist 2014: Jamestown

Well... Seems like I've been slacking. So I decided to beat a game tonight. I started working on Jamestown a few months back. I think it came from a Humble Bundle. But, I did buy a bunch of bundles over the holidays, so my memory not so good.

I thought I'd man up and just finish it. Jamestown is a top down shooter very much like Raiden or 1942. I found it to be pretty fun. The missions are gated by difficulty. Meaning in order for you to progress, you need to beat the previous missions on increasingly harder difficulties. So I couldn't just Easy Mode my way through. And at times it became quite the bullet hell. My only gripe is that the game is pretty short. There's about 5 maps, each one taking only around 5 - 8 minutes. Well... It feels like it only takes that long.

SCORE++;

>SCORE = 0