Paleo

Much like Robinson Crusoe: Adventures on the Cursed Island, Paleo is a cooperative game for up to four players who take control of caveman tribe members trying to survive through a decent bunch of modular encounters. Unlike Robinson Crusoe this game is much easier to setup and play and apart from survival your main objective is always to draw a mammoth on the cave wall.

It doesn't matter if there's a giant river you need to cross, or if you are in wolf territory or have an enemy tribe warring against you - you must always draw the mammoth to win. Unfortunately cave people aren't that smart so it will take some time to do that. During the day the scenario cards are shuffled out to each player in their entirety, then using only the card backs as guides players must pick one out of three to explore with plenty of opportunity to not do your card and help someone else instead usually to get resources, build gear or draw the damned elephant.

Once you run out of cards or choose to sleep (which means you can no longer help others but also means you can dodge the rest of your hand if you feel they are all "bad") you are finished for the day, and once everyone is in that state - night descends. This is when you must spend all those resources to feed and/or protect your tribe, suffering skull tokens for each failure and each death. Gain five skull tokens and you all lose. All the components here are quite nice, as is the art on the cards.

It takes a bit to get used to the card iconography but once you get it the gameplay loop goes very fast and is quite fun. You will start remembering card backs as you play though which means player experience has a tangible effect, for good or ill. "I'm sure there was an elephant on this sort of card for this scenario," sort of deal. That said you'll get at least seven games out of this, and number seven is quite a bastard, but if you enjoy cooperative card games this one is worth looking into!

Warframe: Hildryn and Protea

Later game female frames.

Hildryn

If you ever felt your warframe doesn't have enough abs, then Hildryn is probably the bodybuilder you are looking for. Her main blueprint is locked behind rank 3 of the Vox Solaris syndicate though which means it might take awhile before you can get at her, and even when you do - you'll need to collect her other components by facing the Exploiter Orb a minimum of six times. Remember too that you can only fight the Exploiter if you've done the Thermia fractures event which isn't on all the time.

Once you get her, you'll quickly find Hildryn's gimmick is shields instead of energy. Yep, she spends the thing protecting her to do more things! These include flying around (slowwwwly), link shield power to boost allies shields or -tickle- damage enemies, powerup her exalted Ironman blaster which you can toggle to use instead of your secondary or pillage enemy shields to recover your own while clearing status effects. Just remember to do that last one while you have shields, because without shields you have no power to steal more shields. She really takes this shield maiden thing seriously huh?

While Corpus seem to be her chosen prey it balances out against the infested who have no shields for her to pillage. Despite that, Hildryn is quite readily usable "out of the box" as long as you have some shield mods (which by the time you get her, you will). It's also funny that energy leech eximus enemies will just look at you and cry.

Protea

While you can potentially meet Protea early on with The Deadlock Protocol quest (which also gives the handy Xoris) getting her parts will take a bit of doing: you'll need to hunt down Corpus treasurers who spawn on Corpus ships, kill them to take their coin of which there are three versions, then use said coin on a golden hand in one of the Corpus ships (can only use one per mission), defeat the specters of Granum void within the time frame (the Xoris helps a lot, and also pick up any little gold pyramids that add 10 seconds to the count down), and if you do well in there and win the original mission too you have a 11.11% chance to get one part of Protea (based on the coin you used).

Phew! Got all that? Great, now you can get this time engineer frame who can toss grenades that either kill enemies or protect allies, deploy short lived but powerful turrets, pull out ammo/energy/life pickups from her shapely bottom, or drop a temporal anchor which gives you a few seconds to deal damage before time rewinds (only for her) which somehow deals the same damage again, but restores anything she might have lost in that period. Including her life.

That last one is particularly amazing visually, but in reality? I hated her kit. As per her lore she is more geared for defense but there are better defender frames out there. The ammo/energy/life poop is her best skill, and since that is subsumable by the Helminth well... she's worm food.

Locke & Key (3 Seasons)

A grieving family moves into an old house where they begin to discover magical keys that do all sorts of cool and dangerous things, often needing them to solve problems that they created in the first place! While I laugh at where some of the keys were "hidden", the story starts off quite well and most of the characters are likeable enough.  

Alas it slowly degrades as things happen that just aren't explained or worse, characters become stupider - because the writer's couldn't handle what I call "the Flash syndrome". They get all these powers that are super handy and... forget to use them? Also, in Season 3 they are still blindly testing new keys with no contingencies which is really moronic.

Still an entertaining series though, and one with an ok ending despite the convoluted path it took to get there. If you like the "dark fairy tale" vibe (but not too dark because the creators still tried to be kid friendly) then definitely check this one out.

The Night Cage

Drips with the theme of darkness.

In this cooperative "horror" board game, one to five players find themselves in a pitch black and crumbling maze with only a candle to light the way, a motif well represented by the board itself. Working together they must collect a key each and ALL make it to an exit before time runs out.

This is trickier than it sounds as a) there is a limited number of tiles which acts as the timer, b) some tiles are monsters that turn off your light and make the tiles run out faster and c) other than the exit door, players cannot move through each other or hold more than one key.

On your turn your choice boils down to move or stay (if your candle is still on), and staying gives you some nerve tokens which you can then use to sprint or stop the darkness from closing in. When you move, you light up what you can "see" (one step away with a candle) and remove any tile no one else can see. This means the maze shifts constantly, and monsters (who don't move when lit) thankfully wander off once you lose line of sight on them.

Ultimately it's more a game of planning ahead and opening paths / clearing ways for your team mates, and since we are pretty good at that we've not yet lost a game of this, even on the advanced mode. Still quite exciting though, especially when the darkness starts closing in and it is fast to teach. Just a little slower to setup each round. Thumbs up!

Warframe: Steel Path Conquered

PSA: Veilbreaker  has been released! Log in to the game before September 22 to get the newest warframe, Styanax, for free! Now onto the post...

Just hours before the Veilbreaker update I managed to finally complete the Steel Path! Huzzah! The little planet decorations now adorn one of my orbiter's shelves. I thought I'd post what worked for me but with the new changes these might be moot now anyway...

A perma invis 1 forma Loki with a 3 forma Xoris and a 1 forma bleed Nataruk was the main stay since both are basically AoE and infinite ammo. While I mostly used the firewalking Loki variant I also used regular Loki with irradiating disarm for some of the hijack missions. I did make heavy use of specters though, with Frost, Moa and Osprey being the champions in defense and mobile defense and a Vauban being instrumental in interceptions too (I'm literally out of specters and salvage now).

Big thank you to veteran and crazy fashion framer, theclownpriincee, for assisting with the interceptions on Mercury and Ceres and those maps were too small for me to outrace the horde. Turns out actually playing a Vauban and using the vortex grenade skill is an easy way to recapture points as "lifted" enemies get no capture.

As energy siphon is a permanent aura mod for me, I only used a Taxon sentinel throughout the whole thing because it "looks" where the closest enemy is - a good way to tell if something is behind me without radar. More importantly it has a max vacuum mod to help collect all those health and energy orbs because I don't use the item versions of those restoratives.

Operator wise I just stuck to the Naramon school (low 5/18) the whole way and the Sicorro that you get from New War is good enough to solo SP Ropalolyst with some patience. It is not good enough to defeat a steel path Void Angel though (thank you again theclownpriincee)! Archwing wise a mix of Velocitus and Mausolon (from the necramech) was fine, as was the Odonata starter wings - just have to use the "4" (repel) a lot for the space mobile defense one.

I did use Revenant for the two Deimos bosses though as his "1" (enthrall) can skip through some Zealoid Prelate phases and his "2" (mesmer armor) can keep him alive through the freaking long fight against Lephantis (longer than Ropalolyst).

I used the Mausolon again in this fight as well as my 1 forma radiation tomb finger kit gun sidearm "Chernobyl" while waiting for the Archgun deployer timer to cool down. While I brought that pistol to every mission it really only got used against Lephantis. With the Veilbreaker changes to ammo I'm not sure how feasible that is anymore.

Stuff I didn't use: any health / energy restores. Any bonuses past rank 6 intrinsic everything (no on call crew etc), no lich/sister support or gear because I've not yet managed to kill my first one, and no necramech because at this point I am stronger outside of it.

Special note with Disruption on Lua: this is an utter piece of garbage since you need four conduit "wins". Definitely get help here. I was lucky enough to squad up with two others since it was a steel path alert and we still almost lost with one guy becoming perma-dead and only being able to "win" one out of four conduits per round. If you can't kill the exploder in time, you can still win by keeping him away for two minutes. Loki's switch teleport can help, but only when their red aura is off!

Tekken: Bloodline (Season 1 - Netflix)

Where people are super durable.

This (currently) six episode animated series centers around Jin Kazama and the Tekken game franchise. As it's a fighting game, the plot here is predictably only a little more than "main character is too weak and has to go train and fight a bunch of people" which is fine. The animations are actually very fluid and I'm guessing most of the moves used actually follow what is in the game.

The slow speech is a nuisance though. "You must... fight... to win... honor... for... your... heritage." If you imagined that was a dying man giving his final words, surprise! That's pretty much how one of the main characters speaks ALL THE TIME. The others aren't much better. I'm not sure if this was something lost in translation (I watched in English) but it was a poor way to extend an episode run time.

The only thing more irritating than that is the disconnect between the character models and the background. For some reason all the characters have the same "there's a giant floating pyramid or cube above them, just off camera" light effect regardless of where they are. A shady forest. Dark tunnel. Night time. Mountain top. Volcano. All the same. I'm still going to watch season 2 if it ever is made though! :P

Rampage and the Man with the Iron Fists

Action movies that are unbelievable? :P

Rampage

When cutting edge, experimental genetic alteration experiments end up in the wild it turns a number of creatures into gigantic, angry mutants. Luckily the protagonist primatologist (played by Dwayne Johnson) is on the case, complete with cheesy lines and death defying feats of "no one should have survived that".

In all fairness I'm surprised they managed to get an OK script for something that's based on an old cooperative arcade game which soley focused on destroying cities. With decent CGI it's certainly entertaining as long as you turn your brain off.

The Man with the Iron Fists

Jungle Village becomes the cauldron of wire fu martial arts and ridiculous weaponry when various clans vie for control of a caravan full of gold that comes through. Embroiled in the middle of it all is a master weapons blacksmith (RZA) who happens to be supplying all sides.

"Spectacle" is probably the best word to describe this, and while the plot is so / so it features many good action sequences (even if some are hilarious)  and a good amount of gore which always gets points from me. I'd say Rampage is better than this movie, but if you like martial arts and wire fu you should definitely check this out afterwards.