Forced March

Ack, it's only the start of March and I'm already behind on my planned projects. With no game diary thingies planned I'll try knuckle down and get back on track this month, though it also means I'll be a little quieter post wise (much to the rejoicing of some I'm sure). :P

What's up next in March:
Future Tech: Exosuits and Invisible Helmets (done)
Question Time: The Same Character (done)
Question Time: The Stuff you Build (done)
MMOs: Rewarding the Ordinary (done)
MMOs: A Test of Morals (done)
MMOs: Fame and Influence (done)
MMOs: One of a Kind Items (done)
MMOs: Unmarked Quests (done)
MMOs: Voice Actors (done)
MMOs: Spells and Spelling (done)
47 Ronin vs Bunraku (done)
Review Lost Planet 2 (done)
Review Startrek Online (done)
First Chapter of Guild Story
Finish another NWO module. (done)
Today I Smiled (2/2)
Lose 1 kg.

NWO: Rebel Incursion

Woohoo! My second foundry creation in Neverwinter Online is finally done. It didn't take long because it was difficult, it just took long because I haven't worked on it for awhile. Crunching down the quests to 15-20 minutes play time has really impacted my story telling ability though so instead of still trying to go for the story I had planned I'm scrapping the campaign entirely and just making stand alone type quests (that may or may not link together later).

Hopefully since it has such a short play time it will attract more reviews, and it certainly is easier/faster for me to play through and test as well. To all those who play NWO I humbly invite you to give it a try and hopefully leave a review! If you don't know how to get to it just do the following:

1- Log into Neverwinter Online
2- Press L
3- Halfway down is "The Foundry" section. Press the "More" button next to it.
4- Go to the "Best" Tab.
5- Search for "Rebel Incursion" (without the double quotes), it should come up on the right hand pane and the author should be @josephskyrim.
6- Accept the Quest
7- To start it, you'll need to get to an exit and find the Residential District on the overworld map.

You are welcome to try my other quest too, though that one takes a bit longer. ;)

Quest List so far:
Rebel Incursion [NW-DFHLFGNQY] (15-20 minutes)
One Step to Darkness [NW-DNJC9SK7A]  (1 hour running time)

Dead Island Riptide: Finish Her!

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

Finally deciding it was time to continue the main quest, we journeyed to the dock lands which doubles as the quarantine zone on the island. Despite the high, secure fencing which the zombies still managed to cross, we required an exploding bulldozer to plow our way in - fighting through a bunch of specials that weren't very dangerous since we had a full team. It really was like a curtain call as every type of zombie made at least one appearance.

Eventually we reached the warehouse laboratory that was making the not-quite vaccine. I call it that because upon finding Harlow we see she's been injected and it's not making her better, it's making her crazy... crazy enough to attack us.  For a smallish female she was doing a decent job of knocking us over (hey she managed to kill us a little) and eventually plugged even more mutagen into her to make her more powerful. The only way to beat her now was to do the same, after which we promptly raged on her and tore the stupid, weak and insignificant bitch into pieces.

How Harlow ended up.

Conveniently, there was another boat docked there so we took it just as Serpo came to try stop us. Not sure how he got there unarmed and all, but we didn't listen to his yells this time and left him to be zombie chow. We then went to pickup the rest of our team before escaping out to sea, only I suppose a whole bunch of them died either in the fort defence or the run to the boat because other than the immune we only had the bearded fellow, the doctor and the food lady on board. Nice to point out we didn't actually go back for anyone else, leaving them to their crunchy and hideously gruesome fate. With that we wave so long to Palanai and to the zombies as we sail into the sunset like true zombie survivor heroes... at least until the next expansion. ;)

Music is Magic

Ok, other than the obvious mood transference that some songs have I am amused that as a pianist I seem to follow the same rules as the older versions of a Dungeons & Dragons mage, except in exchange for spells I have songs. It takes me long to learn one, and as I gain new ones I lose the old ones that I don't play. Maybe I'm just too low level at the moment? 

And just like in D&D there are those naturally gifted with magic who can use it better. So too is the case in music. While everyone can train up to a certain point there are just somethings that you are born with. A good example is the youtube aussie muso "Lara Plays" (aka Lara de Wit) who has Synesthesia - she "hears" notes as colors. She also thinks a lot of musicians do and maybe that's true, I'm just not one of them. :P

Lara has the most links in this post!

If you don't know what I'm getting at she talks a little bit about it in a question and answer video here. The part you are interested in starts at 0:40 and goes to 2:20. Or, you could just listen to her play stuff! Her side by side vid of playing Rebecca Black's Friday and Nyan Cat is particularly funny since they gel so well together.

Anywho while I'm on the topic of music here are a few other links that I really like, so I thought I'd share them. At the very least check out the first link, because it's bloody amazing.

Amira Willighagen (9 yrs old) - Audition for Holland's Got Talent
(Skip to 1:40 to get to the singing)

"Defying Gravity" from Wicked by Evynne Hollens
(I'm a fan of her husband's layer stuff too)

"Pierce the heavens with your drill!" from the Gurren Lagann OST by Animenz
(This guy does a lot of cool pieces)

"Spain" - Chick Corea and Hiromi Uehara piano duet
(Old clip but one of my favs, very jazzy though)

"Mendelssohn Wedding March" by Arcadi Volodos
(Listen to it fully to be blown away by dexterity! :P)

And if music isn't your thing, maybe learning Elvish is. Elfish? Sylvan? I dunno, you'll have to ask Ravanel for a "Ravalation" as I got the link from her blog. :P

Dead Island Riptide: E-E-Elec-Electrical Scraps!

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

It's side quest time on the island and thank the developer gods that they decided to include a fast travel system in this game, otherwise this would be literally hours of walking through horrible disconnect zones. The walking itself isn't that bad. Getting d/c-ed is BS. Other than doing a few of the instanced locations for nice loot and saving random trapped people, we accomplished a few things this session, the first being that we discover Jacqueline is an idiot. She didn't come with the rest of our team and instead opted to stay again in her theatre. This is only slightly better than the handful of women that opted to remain in Halai Village, just waiting for the plague to blow over. Even telling them the fate of their missing friends did nothing to change their minds.

We also helped out the Zombienator, a local "superhero" retrieve his cape, shoes and fish to help him fight zombies. There was another guy in an apartment who kept asking for stuff too, but by the third iteration of him going "oh... I don't remember what these are for, but could you get x now?" we decided to let him rot. Our most important sidequest this round though was a simple delivery trip to Dr. Kessler back at his Dome lab, where he wants the rather commonly found electrical scraps item for his non-descript inventions. Given the late stage of the game and the number of these items we had on us, we went to town unloading on the good doctor.

"Electri... E... Ele... Electrical Scraps, bring them to me," he would say - or try to because giving him the next one forced a line repeat leading us to believe that the good doctor is actually a robot. This must have been the single most rewarding quest though. Each scrap gave 30+ thousand XP (same as canned food and painkillers but those items are more rare). In comparison killing one of those "dangerous" screamers gives 6k.

Congratulations, you have just won at life!

This is a perfect example of why levels should be done away with, as it meant handing the doctor something in my pocket increased my skills far faster than fighting any zombie present on the island. ELECTRICAL SCRAPS - It's the stuff of heroes!

Dead Island Riptide: Serpo Derpo

[Part of the Dead Island Diary]

Once all the dead are still, we decide that our next task is to try capture Serpo (if he survived the crash) to then force him to evacuate all of us. Of course his helicopter crashed on pretty much the opposite end of the island meaning we had to trek a fair distance (made longer by the D/C issues that plague this part of the game) before reaching the fort. During this there was a small highlight of me in a rage, sucker punching a wrestler zombie so hard that he went flying... to the moon.

We eventually found the downed chopper. A trail of blood walking away from the crash led us on our merry way to the interior where we eventually found the wounded pilot telling us that Serpo was up in the tower, and also that Serpo should die. No arguments there. Sure enough the suit wearing Serpo was at the top of the tower and we greeted him with a good number of bullets - only the man seemed impervious to them, he must be wearing a bullet proof suit! Instead he just told us that he had captured Harlow previously (when she went missing) and now she's a liability that could spread the disease if she escapes the quarantine zone with the not-quite vaccine mutagen. He promises to get all of us out of there if we stop her first. Why do we keep listening to this idiot?

There's a face you can trust.

Anyway, the rest of the NPCs do another quick cut scene run and this time all survive the trip to the Fort which they patch up as their next base. We on the other hand, decide to piss of Serpo by not going after Harlow and instead doing other things on the map. Just out of spite.

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.