Today I Smiled: Font of Knowledge

Been ages since I've put up a Today I Smiled post, and today's one is to share all the strange and wacky stuff I've been learning about over the past few months, like the Babylonian's used a base 60 numeral system, or that there's an island that uses giant stones as currency, or that it takes the whole year's crop from one tree to make 450gms of chocolate. Yes, you can (mostly) blame Reddit! :P

Interested in conflict? Well here are two that might be of interest: The Syrian Civil War and the animated, lazery Norse Attack Map. Just be sure not to ridicule a person who refuses to duel in Mississippi. That's a misdemeanor!

In the event you do get into a fight, in might be better to lick your wounds than to get put into St. Luke's hospital, where they potentially can keep you (or your corpse) hostage indefinitely.

Also don't mess with the Russians, they have a knack for fixing mundane problems with nukes! That might lead to having cities with a population of zero. Or worse, with hoverboard zombies...

Only made worse with XCOM odds to hit! :P

But who needs zombies when there are giant centipedes and spiders that go fishing? I'm guessing the two women who jumped into the river to see which one their man would save (spoiler: he chose Rong) didn't know about those critters!

I've also come across nice art ... made with Microsoft Excel of all things as well as a bunch of doodles that summarize all of this season of the Walking Dead. There's also a hilarious synopsis maker who does the more recent episodes for Arrow, Flash, Vixen and Legends of Tomorrow! Might be worth taking a look if you want to catch up on the shows without actually watching them. :P

Speaking of art, I would be remiss if I didn't share with you at least one song - this one for all the Metal and Vanilla Ice fans, with Metal Ice Ice Baby (wut?). If you are more the type to appreciate the written word see here the Chinese story of Stone Lions composed entirely with the word "Shi" 101 times.

Lastly here's a clip called Ultimate Skyrim, which show cases what happens when one uses too many mods in the game. Have a great weekend everyone!

Futuristic Medieval Fantasy: Atlantica Online

Finally a game where I can drive up to a centaur shaman in a bright yellow sports car and then whack it with my sword, magic and cannons then go pick up Joan of Arc, Anck Su Namun, Napoleon and the spartan Leonidas to take part in the Battle of Red Cliff in China. I think that sentence sums up the WTF time travel factor that's going on in Atlantica Online. Despite age consideration, almost everything in the game feels clunky and the constant popups of other people winning / doing stuff that have to be manually closed don't help. I do quite like the music though, and the combat system is... different.

"Different" doesn't always mean "good".

Each fight is an instance where you and your enemy take turns to command your team (of up to 9) to annihilate the other. There's a small level of tactical play to be had but I can't really say this is an improvement to the standard combat present in other MMO's. It actually reminds me a bit of the old Final Fantasy games complete with lack of useful terrain but with more importance on positioning. I understand that there's a second mode of combat that expands on this which hopefully is better but I haven't reached it yet being only level 56 (out of 150 I think) as of this post. At least leveling is fast, I mean you even get XP from idling. Powerup by going AFK?

Quests are as basic and grindy as you can get, with no branching paths (so far) most of which involve being a courier or to kill a number of fairies/robots/fairy-robots combination and a lot of long distance running. Huzzah for the auto move feature. There's even an auto fight feature if you want the game to play itself for you I imagine. I don't think Atlantica has a whole lot going for it, but for some unfathomable reason I keep wanting to follow that sparkly trail to the next quest just to see how much more whacked out the game can be. Still, I can't really recommend it. If you really want to play a F2P Nexon game give Mabinogi a try instead. It's way better. :)

Update: I just got to the main world map and it is hilarious. The map pretty much tries to emulate the real world (scaled down) with cities and all, specifically during eras of unrest. From Babylon, to Troy, to Yggdrasil, to Sydney and Uluru (yep, Australia is one of the hardest zones. Lol!). The overland zones are strangely very sparsely populated with enemies too (they make up for it in the hostile dungeon zones).

Also it's very funny to be selling stuff to Colombus and chatting with Caesar while an army of players mounted in tanks AFKs nearby. Similarly while wandering through the Troy battle field I turned a corner to find someone chilling in a Ferrari. Lastly there is a housing system of sorts but it looks a lot more like a customizable warehouse than an actual home, the one I went into anyway.