Xenonauts: Dreadnought

[Part of the Xenonauts story]

The time has come to use the plan to end the aliens for good and the old Commander leads Parker Sanctuary, Stray Cat Brandon, Dr. Tygan, Captain Logan, Straggler Rachel, Straggler Rashida, Carol Hattier, Timeflies Stomachio and Billy Bob O'Reagan with hover tank support onto the alien dreadnought to immediately waste the initial lizardmen guards and charge forward to the upper temple.

En route, Billy Bob is flanked and killed by terminators while martian men with big guns and good aim destroy the hovertank from far away - the explosion catching and killing the commander, painting his pieces along the metal walls. Dr. Tygan is sniped by a jetpack guy as he locates the High Praetor whom Rashida snipes. Brandon also falls to plasma fire while the team uploads the virus and clear out the remaining enemy shooters.

Alas, the escape pods aren't working - they have to back track to activate them but to their horror discover a swarm of (never ending) reapers pouring in after them. Establishing a firing line they put down dozens of the reapers before finally a round of bad shooting and reloading lets one get the drop on Logan. They are overrun, impregnated into zombie bitches and then are autowarped by the virus to who knows where. The entire squad is lost but no one cares because it is VICTORY FOR THE PLANET! YEAAHHHHHHH! Once again the Earth is saved.

The Xenonauts last stand.

Decluttering Day 25: Xenonaut rough journal, since this story is done! :)

State of Decay 2: The Forsaken

[Part of the Diary of Zombies]

With more and more enemy enclaves appearing Kraken takes the lead and begins sending out execution squads to eliminate all of them, especially when informant Guy arrives seeking asylum with a warning that all these groups are banding together under a new coalition. Daniel manages to locate some of these and Kraken takes Guy to confront and kill them, leaving the last one alive: it's Chavez!?

He spills the beans on the coalition HQ at a nearby factory then somehow dodges Kraken's execution shot and escapes (bugged out as she fired the completely wrong way). Kraken and Guy race to the factory and kill what they think is the coalition leadership, returning to Fort Marshall in victory. Elsewhere the true leader, Ray Santos, meets with Chavez and IzzBee - saying Kraken's group have killed more humans in the past few days than the zombies. Chavez indicates Beebo Bee has already modified the Haven protocol at the base, all that is needed is for IzzBee to send the kill order against these Forsaken.

Unwilling to be part of another mass murder/accident IzzBee refuses, but Dr. Hoffman has no qualms about testing CLEO's capabilities and sends the order herself. Everyone at Fort Marshall is suddenly wracked with excrutiating pain as their brains begin to boil and one by one their heads all explode. They aren't so much different from the zombies after all, and CLEO is happy to continue to meet her mandate of "protect the most humans". Community killed from legacy screen - only Beebo Bee survives!

Heads go pop!

Insight: It was fun to revisit Trumbull again after Heartland, I just wish IzzBee's Red Talon drop quest wasn't so repetitive. Also at a guess, there's a good chance Quincy, Helena, Keesha and Isaac are dead too from the Jurassic Junction incident as those are all optional characters to play/encounter. On the flip side Captain Logan has a better chance of showing up again than those four as he is a mandatory character from Heartland.

State of Decay 2: The Gauntlet

[Part of the Diary of Zombies]

Despite how sneaky Quincy is (he's so sneaky that he lets all other companions sneak) it is new recruit Isaac, who joined to get away from his husband, who has the best solution to harvesting bloaters: he can produce scentblock, which effectively makes the users undetectable to zombies. With this, Helena and Keesha go on a harvesting spree while Quincy gains a new partner in Chavez, a Red-Talon merc abandoned in the region to help hacker IzzBee take control of the AI called CLEO to provide support drops for the team.

The girls harvesting results in 31 plague busters, while Quincy manages to make some extra ammo and masterwork rifles in preparation for the assault on Marshall back at base. Malik and Logan clear a pub near the outer most plague wall of Marshall for easy access to the gear then Captain Logan sends the civilian away to handle the siege personally.

Winners use high ground.

Using Malik's small car as a combat platform, Logan destroys the first wall but is thrown from the roof by a plague juggernaut! Luckily he has spare busters to take down the horde and the big guy (2 to down a jugg) before resupplying an working on the next three walls - all of which have great firing positions from on top of containers! It really comes down to using every single plague buster and bullet though, with some wiley-pete grenades at the end to defeat the gauntlet of plague walls - and destroying the last one seems to kill all the zombies in the area!

As expected, there is something in the middle of all of it - a CLEO drop pod which seems to be the source of the plague!? Dr. Hoffman gets to work in finding answers but none are revealed as this results in a map victory!

Insight: By now you know zombies are vertically challenged so always look for high perches to fight from. Pressing jump THEN forward lets you climb higher stuff than if you press forward AND jump.

State of Decay 2: Network Expedition

[Part of the Diary of Zombies]

Quincy and Helena arrive in Trumbull Valley in search of Ray Santos, an old friend of their boss. The first person they find is Malik though, and for the little task of clearing out his old base he is happy to provide information and so they do this, taking his small yet spacious car to Jurassic Junction - the biggest base ever! Quincy uses his stealth skills to farm up some plague samples and supplies afterwards before he and Helena head off to the coordinates Malik provides - finding Ray and his mechanic gang to be having easily solved radio problems.

Sometimes cars just fly off on their own. Best fix if you are at base is to quit and load.

One of Ray's associates, Keesha, also reveals they are having "rent" problems with Mickey - a scum bandit thug in the area who is easily scared off. Keesha decides to join their proactive group thanks to this and helps establish outposts in town while at the same time avoiding plague hearts as for a change, that doesn't seem to be the main goal here... instead that is spelled out when Keesha and Malik meet Captain Logan, the last soldier in the valley, and his ally Dr. Hoffman. They explain the military had come in and were wiped out trying destroy a new type of growth: a plague wall!

He demonstrates the resilience of one such plague wall at a downed aircraft. Only with Dr. Hoffman's newly invented "plague buster" grenades crafted from plague bloaters can the hard outer shell be exposed (temporarily) to damage the bulbous growth within. Like plague hearts, the walls also summon zombies to defend it but with the supply of "plague busters" the Captain brings, they aren't a problem (lethal to them too) as the plane wall is destroyed.

Logan then explains the town of Marshall is surounded by plague walls, and believe that whatever lies in the center is the key to undoing the blood plague. After collecting equipment to let them produce their own plague busters, the Network Expedition crew is tasked with the onerous task of harvesting plague bloaters.

Insight: Heartland has no customizable difficulty setting. All zeds have blood plague and you have a limited pool of fixed survivors, however all these survivors are pretty strong and the combat difficulty itself is below dread since you can ram your car into many enemies AND there are many cars available.

Logan

Proves that old dogs are saltier...

It is the future, and mutants are dying out. Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) is tired, old, and not regenerating as he once did. His limo driving job is mainly just to cover the expenses of looking after an even older and now demented Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart), who occasionally has seizures which he shares to everyone around thanks to the strength of his "gift".

It's a pretty dark and depressing state, simply waiting for the end. Fortunately having a little girl who is wanted by the "bad guys" (of course) suddenly thrust into their care, forces them to go on another adventure. It helps that the little girl plays her part well - always risky with child actors (she's better than Mowgli for sure)!

Thumbs up!

Visceral, on-screen dismemberment and gore is featured right from the get go, which is a big step up from just suggesting "he stabbed a guy / bloodlessly" from the rest of the X-men franchise and the action sequences are great, which makes up for the ok plot.

While people say this is a "dark" movie, I disagree as it still features some up beat parts. Perhaps I've just gotten used to the likes of Hotel Inferno and Adam Chaplin though. If you just want a more mature X-men film, this does a great job. I enjoyed it a lot and would definitely watch it again. But would I buy the DVD? Hmm, not sure. Three and a half comic books out of five.

Dead Island Riptide: Who Do You Voodoo

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

We were in for another surprise when we got to the comm station of the base. Major Briggs wasn't around to take the video call, but that suit wearing bad guy Frank Serpo was. He offered us a helicopter ride out of there, and we had no choice but to accept. Colonel Hardy was concerned that Serpo only wanted the immune people though, and would leave the rest of the civilians behind. Still, with it being the best way out we started a fire on the roof top to signal the chopper - and then because the fire was so noisy it was luring a whole bunch of zombies nearby... what?

We quickly needed to do a side quest to a nearby stage to play some music on max volume, and what better song to play than "Who do you Voodoo" by Sam B? Killing zombies to that track is pretty fun. Pity we couldn't hang around as we had to get back to the cinema roof to catch that chopper, pronto.

Once it arrived Colonel Hardy was proved right by trying to get the civilians to safety first. Namely himself. Serpo's hench dude was having none of it though and opened fire, killing the good Colonel. Logan, being the angry American (wait I thought that was Sam B), pulled up a rocket launcher (from hammer space) and in a show of terrible marksmanship, hit the tail rotor of the chopper sending it crashing down away from the cinema.

The noise still brought a horde upon us though, the largest we've had to fight yet - and for a change this time we were being pushed back from our positions. Couldn't tactically fall back into the cinema staircase to bottleneck them though as something fell and blocked the path earlier. We just had to duke it out there in the rain against the almost endless swarm of walking dead.

Dead Island Riptide: Can't Escape from Paradise

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

Previously on Dead Island, we escaped from a zombie infected island via helicopter along with random convict guy as well as most-likely infected native girl and specimen zero leaving everyone else who helped us out to their gruesome and crunchy deaths. It was a stroke of luck then that before our fuel ran out we found an Australian Navy vessel to land on where we were immediately arrested by one Colonel Hardy under the orders of the suit wearing man Mr. Frank Serpo. Unfortunately while being transported to holding one of the soldiers got bit by the native girl. Guess what happened next?

Here we go again!

Alone in the chaos of the zombie ship (solo mission only) I managed to escape the cell and fight my way through zombified scum to the bridge but was just too late to drop that anchor. With a sudden jolt the ship ran aground on some reefs and I found myself falling into the water. Eventually I awoke on the shore, saved by some girl named Harlow who conveniently saved all the other immune survivors plus the Colonel as well. She was telling us to be careful because some sort of disease was spreading on these islands (called Palanai) too and no, it wasn't Syphilis.

It was a good thing she saved all of us too, because all hands were needed once we arrived at the nearby "Paradise" beach resort as the zombies were attacking in full force.