Warframe: Citrine

Make your gemussy sparkle...

Clearly it is worth being on when the red text updates just prior to a patch appear because they are hilarious.

That aside, Citrine is a gem themed support frame that you can harvest from the mirror defense mode on Mars. Like Voruna, if you get unlucky with blueprints you can also purchase her blueprints from Otak on Deimos (using currency you get from running mirror defense).

Her abilities include fortifying the armor of her team (up to 90% only, no invulnerability), putting a big gem that helps blast status effects at enemies targeted by the team (awesome), covering enemies in gems to both paralyze them and increase damage done to them, and throwing a cone type gem attack to make enemies bleed, have a greater chance of dropping HP or energy orbs, and can increase her passive HP regeneration for the team if she personally kills them.

A very decent frame especially for those who play with squads often, but I'm not sure that HP restoration is the way to go especially since higher level Steel Path laughs at your HP bar no matter the numbers on it and a lot of players seem to enjoy being in nigh invulnerable walking nukes to counter that. I'm sure with work you can make the Citrine into this too, but there are far easier frames to do this in.

Still, as a frame available from Mars it's definitely a viable on for players earlier in their Warframe careers. Mine is going to the Helminth.

The Martian

Where it feels good to be isolated on an alien planet.

The premise of this movie is so simple: An astronaut (Matt Damon) is trapped on Mars. How can he survive and/or escape? After a strong opening that set the scene right away, he combats the despair of being abandoned and the incredibly high probabilty of various horrible deaths with... humor. It's awesome. There's no weepy Tom Hanks Cast Away here!

It's good to be him. :P

This movie kept me very entertained and definitely wide awake and for a plot about a guy stuck on Mars there are certainly a lot of characters in this, each one with memorable enough quirks which actually strengthens it. I don't think there's any particular "bad guy" in this movie, just bad luck, which is awesome and adds to the whole feel good thing it has going. I mean, at least you've got disco music right? :P

Definitely a good watch and one I wouldn't mind seeing again! I give it four potatoes out of five.

Today I Smiled: Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day all (yeah I'm probably one day early)! :P Regardless if you are spending this with someone or on your own I hope to have something in today's post that will get everyone smiling. I figure I may as well start with "things cats do that'd be creepy if you did them".

Not a cat person? Well, how about learning of the people volunteering for a one way trip to Mars? Honestly, a few years ago when I first heard of this mission, I would have loved to be one of them.

On to game related vids, I'm not sure if you saw my Attack on Titan game tutorial compilation post but this opening, made from Feng Lee's tribute game is pretty damn cool. Another game that seems to have been getting upgrades without my attention is ye olde Sherwood Dungeon! I remember trying to reach the bottom with Juris via running - obviously we never made it. :P

As usual, I have to have a paragraph about music in here since it is one of my passions and I was super pleased to hear that Australia is joining Eurovision this year as a contestant. Also I've recently come across a strange instrument called a hang drum (because I don't get out much) and thought I'd share this clip of it in a solo by Daniel Waples.

If that's too zen for you then I also have a newly released piano solo by Animenz of "Unravel" from Tokyo Ghoul. No idea what Tokyo Ghoul is, but man does that look hard to play. And if that looked tough, here's one more appropriate for today... Animenz's "My Dearest" from Guilty Crown.

Anywho, that's it for me - hope you all have a wonderful day! :)

The Red Solstice (Early Access)

On Mars, everyone can hear you scream - regardless of distance. When you die anyway.

And you will die a LOT in this cooperative, top down shooter. There are currently only three maps, but they are huge and the missions (and secondary missions if you choose to activate them) pop up in semi-random spots for your team of space marines to hunt down. There are different suits you can use as you level up, and again proficiency in each suit lets you use more abilities from it.

There's a long list of abilities but you can only bring four with you each time. Fortunately you can assign and unassign points to each of those "components" as you like during the game. For example I like the Assault suits "knife" ability but if I need to be shooting stuff I can remove points from there and put it into something gun related. It's a bit messy but useful. Also messy but useful is the inventory. While you can only bring two weapons each player can carry up to six items that you find while scavenging on the field.

There's quite a large variation of "stuff" out there from medkits, bandages, and ammo to flares and a variety of explosives which all behave differently. There's also no tool tips on how any of those work in game so it comes down to trial and error and the occasional friendly fire incident.

Oops. Didn't mean to nuke the team. Soz guys.

That aside, while running the missions (which are easy enough on their own) the main enemy comes in the form of monsters originating from somewhere beneath the surface. They come in ever increasing waves from clearly marked spawn points but there are some that just can spawn out of the ground any where, much to the ire of people that like to establish strong defensible spots. Kinda pointless if enemy units can freely skip all your turrets, sandbags and mines.

I quite like that "darkness" is a thing in this game. Shooting enemies in the dark makes half your shots from already hard to find ammo miss, making lighted areas and flares of great importance. This is on top of the huge monsters later on that you simply will not have enough fire power to deal with (unless you brought 7 allies with you).

What I don't like is the player respawn system. If you die, you have to wait 2 minutes before re-appearing. There's currently a bug where sometimes you instantly die when you try to respawn making you wait another 2 minutes. Oh, and you can only respawn twice. Die a third time and you might be spending up to an hour just watching your team mates instead of playing with them. That is bad design in my book.  Currently I give this game two out of five bullets.