Crime and Dalliance

Apt.

I'm not a big fan of multiplayer. I always feel incredibly incompetent against a human opponent, knowing that at any moment I will just get knocked over in an instant because I'm not looking in the right direction, or just wasn't quick enough on the draw, or didn't pump enough bullets into them before they pulled one casing from the magazine and threw it at my head just to spite my pathetic skills.

So when I get into a gaming venue with friends, I prefer Cooperative formats. In this case I mean Heists, part of GTA Online's latest big update.

Everyone, their mother, their grandmother, and their decease families have been rolling in their graves wanting to get heists happening in GTA, and the day it came, the servers basically up and died just trying to handle the influx of returning players, myself included.

My Brother in Law and his best friend were excited too. The best friend works odd and long hours so it has been difficult to convene with him. But Bro-In-Law and I kicked it off with Gusto.

Lester lectured us about the ins and outs of Heisting, gushing with innuendo involving the popping cherries and future experiences that everyone will encounter.

It wasn't until we began the second Heist that we encountered a problem that not only we had to deal with: a lack of assistance.

Now the doctor was a small step towards resolving that solution, being the third to the required quartet of criminal masterminds. But we had nobody else to assist us. Our only solution was to turn to the Internet, request the help of complete strangers to help us through this transition. We found a few players who were all too happy to help, but there were others that were deceitful bastards, piking out at the last minute, less than a hundred metres from the destination before leaving a mocking card and pushing the ejection seat button.

So many times it has happened and it frustrates us to no end that nobody could simply help all the way through, to profit with the rest of us. No, they must give us a taste of what victory could be and leave like it was the funniest prank ever played.

The petty spite these internet trolls plague other players, those enthusiastic to complete these missions, is too much, driving everyone into madness.

Let alone playing by yourself with a pickup party.  It's impossible.  I would spend hours just waiting on players to connect, seeing invites go unaccepted, seeing interested players join and bail, either after seeing nobody else or after waiting five minutes before giving up like I want to.

I could just give up.  But I won't.  We will find our Fourth.  And we will call him Fourthy, and we will worship him like a god.

Air vents should be in Xcom

I'm pretty obsessed with Xcom, and I keep thinking of other ways that would improve upon it.  Xcom Long War goes a long way towards that, but I do feel it misses a point when each class is basically recycled abilities with a handful of unique ones to make sure there is still definition between them.

But other things I think about are the covert missions, and how sub classing would be a fun addition to that.  Sure you have your gene mods and can use them to their advantage in mission, but I would like to play out some part of that covert mission using a unique set of skills.  This is pretty much inspired by Splinter Cell, which I have been obsessively watching videos of lately, and wondered what a single character moving about the secret EXALT facilities would've been like, directly controlling their infiltration and their actions, possibly changing the effect of the eventual battle with EXALT in the end by sabotaging communications or the reinforcements themselves, maybe collecting further intel on their whereabouts or striking at further hidden bases.

And you would have your subclass abilities providing bonuses like "sneak peek: cannot be seen at corners unless theyve shot or are on overwatch," or "Monkey Grip: able to hand over ledges or on certain wall surfaces", or "Execution: able to melee kill living enemies with less than 8/14 health instantly."  Maybe that's a bit much, but it's an idea.

Minecraft for my Mega Drive

Free games are great, aren't they? Its a good thing Xbox have their Games for Gold members, which increases my stockpile of unplayed games fortnightly.

So come the month of April, I'm prepped to download a pair of games that I probably won't get around to for months. One of them I look at and all I are is this poor sod about to get smushed by a giant eyeball that must have fallen off of the rotten corpse of a giant, and a big title saying TERRARIA wrapped in moss and other assorted flora.

alright, I should give it a few minutes at the very least.

I load up the new game and generate my character, making him the closest to a sonic the hedgehog cosplayer as possible, and I was dropped onto Grass Hill Zone, with the world choice of "Small".

Oh yeah, this looks good. Nice colours, and a fella walking around with some boring name. Let's just call him "Knobstar."

I have a chat with him and its pretty suggestive, telling me that building him a house would be oh so very nice. Well that's great, but you've got two arms, two legs, and a digital heartbeat. Do it your friggin self. But apparently Pixelplegia is a natural state for all the NPCs in todays world.

So with a mumbke and a grumble, I said fuck you and built myself a box from the trees I cut down. I listened to Knobstar as he subtly barked orders at me, a "You should build this and that" with undertones of superiority.

Justified it was, when the final thunk of a torch was placed, the fucker moved right on in, putting his portrait in the corner and making himself very comfy as the night rolled in.

My characters protests were silent as I found myself suddenly surrounded by the undead growling at my Door, a metronome of taps from each zombie; children with open skulls, hookers in fishnets, fishermen in raincoats. All knocking at my door as I glared at Knob star in his deadpan, pixelated bastard eyes.

The days went past. I dug down, exploring and finding treasures and beast alike.  I reached the bottom and panicked more and more as demons and fire imps and worms began swarming me while I raided the obsidian towers standing amongst the lava until I eventually died from heat exhaustion...  also known as melting in lava after being pushed into it.

After resurrecting at the surface, I found the map, showing where I have and haven't explored.  What were merely moments going from one side to the other meant so many more minutes traversing that same region.  After a little bit of thought, I worked out that through all the hours of time that I had spent exploring and killing and dying and everything... It was less than 10% of the actual map.

That's when I reeled back in horror.  It had literally been a couple of days since I started the fuggin game, and I had dug and searched and built and died and though I knew there was more... I didn't think that taking five, maybe ten, minutes just to walk to one side of what's called a "small" map.

But... I trundled on until I thought to myself... I should build a Castle.  Somewhere all my NPC's would be happy to live in.  I laid out the plan and dug into the mountain nearby and laid out the stone, the walls and some platforms so I could go up and down.

Then a message popped up.

"An Evil Presence is watching you..."

Well that's unnerving.  But I plodded on, thinking all would be fine.  I finished the lining the walls of my castle, and was ready to start annexing all the rooms when another message appeared.

"The eye of Cthulhu has Awoken!"

And that's when the aforementioned giant Eyeball from the cover came crashing down on my parade (Thankfully not destroying any of my walls). The panic was real. A giant flailing pixelated eyeball was throwing itself at me, or sitting by while it shot minions at me. It took a little bit before I figured out how to dodge his charges and attack when he's not. It all worked well.

Until his retina fell off.  It dropped off and suddenly rather than staring into the blue rimmed soul of Cthulhu, I was staring into the many fanged maw of Cthulhu.  Then the fight started again, jumping and running and striking until it reached the motions and the whites of his eyes plopped down in defeat.

That's the life and times of someone playing Terraria.  And yet there is still more for me to do.  So much more...

Now to figure out how to kill Knobstar...

Are you, or are you not alone?

I laughed WAY too hard

A few months ago, Jygg made a pretty straightforward facebook post.

"Its 2015. Suppose i should get around to watching Evangelion."

Knowing that Jygg is much like our mutual Blokenstein friends, in that they can rarely pass up giant monstrosities beating the snot out of each other, i was a little surprised that he had waited this long.  Then again, everyone and their mother would warn against Whingy- Sorry, Shinji- and that can turn everyones nose up at it like spoilt milk.  Not that i can blame them.

Worse yet, the last couple of episodes were a train wreck, so the first thing i said to him was to find a way to dodge those and get the End of Evangelion film, since that gives a proper ending.

It got me to thinking though.  A few years ago, there was a reboot that richard had in his collection.  Now forgiving its shitco- sorry, shortcomings- i really quite like Evangelion so I gave it a crack.  I wasnt really disappointed.  In a movie length time, it covered all the basics and changed things up enough to make it feel fresh, rather than just the same old guff.  New visual touchups put it into a darker, and smoother, light; and it really hastened the pace from the original show.

It left me excited to see the next movie, but alas it was a long time away before they would release it.  Since then, i kept a stray thought to the show and delved through online wiki pages to learn more about the Angels and the other behind-the-scene characters and events.

Naturally, Jygg posting about watching it for the first time, and i figured i might see what i can get from Netflix or Hulu.  Sadly the show isnt available through the Apps, but the DVDs are in Netflix.

Just quickly: Netflix is a godsend.

So i put my request in for the first and second DVDs and now im waiting for the third to be available, and now i can see where it really changes up the story.

I had started from 1.11 and plagued through it a few times so that I could pick up on all the nuances that cropped up.  Then one time for the fan service, which was surprisingly not that flagrant.

Then I got 2.22 (or whatever it is, fuck knows why they're doing like that) and immediately began with a story as far off from Tokyo-3 to the tune of a bat shit crazy girl singing along lile sjes goong to school while in a quadrapedal Eva with a lance.

Immediately I sat up wondering where the show was going to deviate and I was happy to find that aside from the overlying tone of deceit from the higher ups and the naivety of the kids, it was practically unfamiliar territory. A new show even, providing information that I didn't know before.

Like, did you know that the entire southern hemisphere is uninhabited, and flooded with blood?  Cos the oceans all turned to blood from the impact on Antarctica.  That completely went over my head in the original, if that was a thing that came up.

The end of the mini movie left things up in the air for me. While there are elements from the original show used in the leadup, I really want to know what's going to happen.  I just have to wait for episode 3.fkn-whatever-it-is to come out for Netflix DVD collection.

I expect this to be part of the next episode.