Resident Evil: Village

Welcome to Barovia?

Having some bad experiences in the USA (what with all those horrors set lose), Ethan Winters moves his family to Europe where they find a short period of peace before being abducted and taken to a run down village beneath the shadow of a looming castle in a valley full of monsters! No, there's no Strahd here but it's pretty close!

Expect to do a lot of running.

It's a strange setting for the Resident Evil series, but its done very well. There are shocks, scares and awesome terror especially at the start of the game. Later on when you can fight back effectively, the horror level drops a fair bit but its still quite enjoyable. Honestly, the only thing I didn't like is that the protagonist monologues a little too much at the worst times but otherwise, I highly recommend it!

Today I Smiled: I scared the Boogeyman

It's a great feeling when Strahd's pet wraith "the night terror", which serves as a wandering boss in Barovia who hunts down and kills people, decides to run and hide from you in its little sphere of invisibility.

I see you! Get out here and fight me!

Obviously its AI broke because after declaring it was chasing me, I spied him fleeing down the hill at the ruins of Berez and get stuck in a corner. Took some coaxing before he finally came out to be slaughtered. Hehehe.

That's almost as good as the time I was harvesting cyclops eyes from the soon to be "old" Sharandar, and upon killing a single cyclops was surprised to find it dropped two eyes...

Idle Champions of the Forgotten Realms

Now this is a true idle game!

In this simple but addictive clicker game, you are tasked with assembling a team of heroes to take on some well known D&D campaigns, crossing paths with the likes of Strahd, Halaster, Acererak, Valindra and Zariel. To win the missions through each campaign you'll need to mix, match and position your heroes to the best benefit of the party.

While "the tank is up front" might be obvious, there are many less so with some people preferring to be away from others, healers only healing the forward row or DPS buffing the back rows etc. While collecting gear is a thing, collecting and expanding your hero roster is also interesting as there are LOTS to collect. While some are locked behind some tough missions, most are readily available via monthly events, giveaways and time gates (which let you replay the monthly events you may have missed).

Once your party sets off, you can assist with clicking near the start but later on there is little to no input required from you making it a perfect game to run in the background. Indeed, the adventure continues even when you shut down the game albeit a little slower. This is fine as heroes can't die and you can't "lose" a mission unless you specifically back out of it. And you might just do that a few times to increase your "gold find" ratio.

Familiar faces all around.

Gold find is the main advancement metric through out each campaign. The more gold you have when you "end" a run (win or lose), the more gold find percentage you gain which will help you on future runs. How? Simple, your characters can level up sooner and higher. There is a pay to win component here but it is very slight as players are regularly bombarded by free chests and rewards anyway, a feature that really got me sucked into this idler. I give it three mind witnesses out of five and recommend it to people that enjoy this sort of thing.

Insight: If you reach a level that your team can't pass, simply rearrange them for starters as they might not be in the best positions anymore, especially after leveling up. To help on your journey, also regularly check this combinations page for free loot!

October 2020 Review: Level 14

Been awhile since I talked about my guild / alliance in Neverwinter Online, and despite DL's best recruiting efforts the going is still pretty slow. Fortunately our guild (now  on level 14) has advanced to taking a sword position in the alliance, which means more discounts in building construction and if talks of us taking the helm spot hold through, the discounts would even be larger! We're lucky that our alliance is happy to keep shuffling around to give everyone a turn at stuff. :)

Our castle isn't quite as fancy as Strahd's though...

Meanwhile because Epic is such a shit launcher that only has free games going for it, I'm struggling to balance when to download the bigger games. A slow download speed plus losing any progress should your PC shut down midway really blows. This really makes me appreciate Steam even more. As such I'm going to stop putting a backlog list with these month end posts as it's really not important anyway as I'll eventually write about whatever game I finish (or am done with).

Just to push that point, it's almost like any game over 20GB is not worth it due to the amount in increased electricity I would pay to keep the computer on to download for such an extended period. Instead if I really like a game that big, I'll just ask someone to gift it to me on steam. Much simpler.

I'll finish off with some random tips like always also use a secondary search engine when looking for stuff on the internet as your primary is likely hiding and/or shuffling results (for example google + bing) and if you want to save stories from instagram you can use storysaver.net. Oh and for those who enjoyed Civilization VI, here's an epic cover of the theme song by Peter Hollens and the OSU Chamber Choir.

   End 2020 with less weight (dropping this for the more specific goal below)
   +Lose 1kg this month (last month result: success!)
   Web comic (even more world building... too much world building?)

BLOG STATS

One Year Ago

Wow, has it already been a year since Blizzard stepped in the China vs Hong Kong poop? Let's go check how things are going with that... ah, I see Hong Kong is still f*cked and Blizzard hasn't really taken any increased damage, just the usual self-inflicted version from their own releases. Status quo restored?

Five Years Ago

I was running about in A Tale in the Desert, tale six - an interesting MMORPG that features zero combat and a whole lot of player interaction. It seems this game is still going and is now in tale nine! Good on them!

Most Viewed Posts last Month

Waterdeep: The Dungeon of the Mad Mage
Eschalon: Gramuk!?
R3B1 - Theshold (Part II)

That's a nice grouping - a review of a board game with a popular name, a story post that uses name dropping, and a GTFO tutorial that includes a minor bug exploit. :P

Neverwinter Online: Ravenloft First Impressions

So misty. So cool. So Strahd.

Just before my internet conks out for the next two weeks I thought I'd give my first impressions of Neverwinter's latest module: Ravenloft, which has a pretty cool intro cinematic. After a cheesy quest hook that lets everyone traverse the "unescapable" mists (which is mandatory in an MMO I suppose), we finally get to the beautifully spooky land of Barovia which just oozes of theme. I especially like how Strahd's castle is literally just so close to everything.

It's nice that Strahd shows up early too.

The weekly bounty thing from Chult is here and the repeating quests are a bit more time consuming not only because of the slightly tougher baddies but also because said tasks are just slightly longer. Instead of killing 20 things, its now kill 20 of these AND 5 of those. Instead of get the 4 doohickeys, its get the 4 doohickeys AND put them somewhere afterwards.

Best parts for me so far are the night and day cycle which changes the spawns slightly. It's definitely scary to know that the Stalker from Warframe Night Terror (miniboss) shows up randomly each night to terrorize some unlucky adventurer.  Then there are the hunts which are amazing! No more grinding for bait, now you just hop into an instance with a difficulty of your own choosing, ala Mabinogi Quest Boards.

My personal favorite so far is using increase aggro range cards, the higher the better. This means the baddies aren't stronger but they come marching out for you from all over. While I first did it for a laugh, it's turned out to be a valid farming tactic since all those mobs can then drop more cool hunt cards. The bad part - I'm hunting all the time, and not actually progressing in the campaign! :P