Review: Battleheart Legacy

Posted on July 22, 2017 by

The Order of Syncletica

My work and some personal stuff still leaves me playing significantly less than I’d like. But it’s also the dog-days of summer where many players are vacationing. Even the twice-weekly Deathwyrm raid runs are a little harder to fill. But Fall will be here soon and things will settle back. I’ve not yet touched Update 36 for that reason so more comments on that on another day.

Naturally I cannot play DDO at work but I find bits of downtime where I’d like to stay awake with a game. I turn to my iPhone 7 and have searched for single-player RPG adventure games on it. One was Oceanhorn, a total love-letter to the 1990s-era game The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and a very clever game, although short and with limited replay options.

But when I found Battleheart Legacy, I found the closest thing to…

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Subscribe plz!

Posted on July 22, 2017 by

Samius Gurobo

It is finally happening. Twitch gave me a subscribe button, ie i can finally take subs. This is something i have been working for/ banking on for a while now. And it finally happened.
 
But now i need your help to keep this going. Amazon Prime members have a free twitch sub to give each month so if you can take a moment make a twitch account (if you don’t already have one) and sub to my account.If you are not using i would really love being able to help pay some bills and expand the channel. Your support would mean the world to me and my family.
 
 

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Giving MMORPG second chances

Posted on July 22, 2017 by

GamingSF

Zubon over at Kill Ten Rats has a post on giving games a second chance, it’s mostly about single player games but does mention MMORPGs at the end. The post asks if you give a game a second chance, and contemplates how much time investment is a factor.

For most of the MMO games that I have bothered to return to, I would say I’ve at least levelled half-way to the level cap (at that time). In fact for the games that successfully drag me back in with promises of the latest update or expansion, I normally have actually one capped character. That represents one measure of my commitment to the game, and my enjoyment of the games basic content and mechanics. I’ve made capping characters a bit of a focus in more recent years, indeed if I revisited this post now I’d score somewhat better (now 7 of 15…

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5e Sheets Update

Posted on July 21, 2017 by

Dyson's Dodecahedron

Thanks to the awesome Jacob W. Noorman (of Mini Terrain Domain), we’ve added form-fillable versions of all the sheets in the Hand Drawn Fifth Edition Character Sheets package.

The package now contains a total of 8 sheets:

  • The original hand-drawn sheet with typed headers
  • The alternate hand-drawn sheet with typed headers
  • The original hand-drawn sheet with hand-lettered headers
  • A spellsheet / spellbook sheet
  • Form-fillable / interactive versions of all four of those sheets

Fifth Edition Character Sheets Fifth Edition Character Sheets

And the full package remains “Pay What You Want” – we encourage you to download them for free and check them out. If you do like them and want to use them, you can go back to the site and pick how much you would like to pay for them then.

Available Now at RPGnow!

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What Are Your Thoughts on Grinding?

Posted on July 21, 2017 by

PlayingWithThoughts

-by Dylan DiBona

A simple roadblock often happens in JRPGs and RPGs alike; you fight your way through the small baddies and finally come across a boss, and when you fight the boss you get absolutely wrecked. So what is a simple fix? Go back and kill more minions until you level up a few times! For some, this is boring and repetitive, but for others this is a way of getting more playtime out of their games. This concept is “grinding”, but is it a bad thing?

Image result for Persona 4Persona 4, a game I adore was a necessary grindfest at times

My opinion on grinding is kind of like a see-saw; some days I accept and even like the concept while others I despise it like I always have. I’ll never forget having a discussion with a high-school acquaintance about Pokémon when emulators on iPhones became a big deal. It…

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Crash Bandicoot Difficulty Is Shining A Light On The Ugly Side of Videogame Journalism

Posted on July 21, 2017 by

Musings of a Mario Minion

WhatCulture Gaming recently released a video entitled “Vicarious Visions Admit They Botched The Crash N.Sane Trilogy”. Let’s talk about that.

Crash Bandicoot Vicarious Visions.png

A hype train is easy to catch, no matter how fast it’s raging past you. The video game journalism industry already knows that all too well. However, just as games can be over-popularised for small reasons, they can be vilified as well. This seems to be what is happening to Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy since developers Vicarious Visions released a statement responding to comments on the remaster’s difficulty level.

The ground up remake has received amazing responses from reviewers and players, succeeding in giving old Crash lovers a new lease of life and introducing a brand new generation to the fuzzy l’il rascal. For many, however, the first title in the trilogy felt considerably more difficult. After some investigating from players, Vicarious Visions released this statement that listed new jump…

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Two rangers and a rogue walk into Tethyamar…

Posted on July 20, 2017 by

Even Now

… and the rogue says, “OW! I hit my head! All the doors here are made for dwarves!”

Indeed, the architecture in Update 36, aka Duel in the Underdark, definitely looks as though it were designed for dwarves, by dwarves, one especially low portcullis in particular.

Vic, being elven and somewhat taller than the average dorf, had to mind her head a few times… and being somewhat squishier than Even, should have minded her red bar a bit better as well. Two days earlier, Even and the Flower Sniffers had had a relatively smooth, painless trip through the four U36 flagging quests on LE. Our gimpier toons, though, had a few struggles on LH.

Melee DPS and/or crowd control and/or better hjealing than Garret and Erytheia might have helped. Two arcane archers and a ranged trapmonkey don’t give you a lot of variety when it comes to dealing damage.

But…

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Age Doesn’t Make a Game Dated

Posted on July 20, 2017 by

VIRTUAL BASTION

It was thanks to Cary’s recent post, Playing Games Past Their Prime, that I had a revelation concerning a few questions I had been asking as of late.  It largely boils down to: why do some old games feel dated, while others from the same era do not?  Furthermore, how is it that even new games can, on occasion, feel dated right from the start?  It’s a strange paradox, isn’t it?  One might expect all old games to feel dated by virtue of being old.  And that means it’s not possible for a new game to feel dated until enough years have passed.  Right?  No, not right.

Dated, put simply, means old-fashioned.  Of course, you all know this.  In less simple terms, it means, I outgrew this, or society as a whole has outgrown this.  It means, this would have been acceptable years ago, but we’ve advanced beyond this…

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Held Hostage, Part III of III: Taking Action

Posted on July 20, 2017 by

AmbiGaming

Welcome to our third and final part of this Held Hostage miniseries on the effect of violence in video games on gamers/children. For part one (an introduction to the topic), click here, and for part two (delving into the research pertaining to children), click here.

Backstory

Over the past few weeks, we’ve discussed the differences between violence and aggression, posed ideas about desensitization and observational learning, and jumped into research pertaining to whether or not video games make adults and children more aggressive or more violent. Long story short, the answer is that video games do cause increased aggression in children and adults, which can lead to violence, but video games, by themselves, have not been shown to cause an otherwise non-violent human being to become violent.

Image result for ice cream and swimming Remember, instances of drowning doesn’t increase ice cream consumption.

But there’s so much more to the story than what…

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Am I missing out by not having a collection?

Posted on July 19, 2017 by

Bio Break

Time and money. Money and time.

Two things I’m often very short on these days and work against the idea of harboring a collection. But it hasn’t stopped me from being wistful that, as a geek, I don’t really have a collection. I kind of wish I did. I have collected things to varying degrees over the years but not seriously and not extensively. I have some SNES games, but not really a collection. Star Wars Legos. MMO memorabilia. I tried vinyl collecting for a hot month last year. But not really having time to commit to cultivating a collection and the funds to support it keep killing it.

I feel like I’m maybe not as interesting or fulfilled without one, sometimes. I have a friend whose “thing” is collecting PEZ. He’s been doing it for decades now and has an amazing collection. He’s even got a tattoo. Everyone knows…

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