Skyrim - Not Oblivion

The highest complement that I can bestow upon Skyrim is that it's not Oblivion. Oh sure it's obviously similar, but the depth and natural flow of the game are just so much better that it's hard to overstate. Walking from point A to point B (I rarely use the speed travel option) will always have something happen that keeps you wondering what is coming next. And while playing Oblivion kind of felt like I was checking off quests on a list, this time around it just feels like I'm being gently pushed in different directions to experience the game.

Since I got it I haven't been able to put it down as I have dove head first into my roll as a one handed bow assassin. My style is to sneak around and use my bow to take out as many bad guys as I can and then finish them off with my sword and board technique. Having learned how to actually block now has given me a huge advantage. But there is nothing like hiding in the shadows with the bow drawn and letting it fly into the chest of some unsuspecting victim and seeing that little 2X damage text pop up. So many great sniper moments that it's impossible to pick just one, but a highlight for sure was taking out a guy on the top of a tower and watching him fall into the river below, thing of beauty.

When it comes to highlight moments, Skyrim has them to spare. I have two favorites so far, one of those coming last night while I was making my way to the greybeards and I just happened to catch a red dot moving on my radar, it was a saber cat about to attack. I readied my shield and blocked his initial attack and then while he was off balance I got a critical animation where I one shot the bastard, kicking him from sword, it was a really, "take that bitch." moment. I'm only level 14 so I felt pretty proud.

My other big moment was the random frost dragon fight I came across while just wondering around. I did a quick travel to get to a cave that I thought I had left some stuff in and instantly see a dead horse on the ground, which hadn't been there before. I look around a little bit and see a dragon flying around overhead. There are a couple of guards armed with bows firing at the dragon, naturally I pull out my bow and go join the fight. I stay back a bit and pluck away, I see no reason to go make myself the main target, and I watch the guards fight the dragon. In the distance I see the dragon pick up one of the guards in it's mouth and shake him around, finally tossing him aside with weapon and shield flying haphazardly away as well. I start thinking that if I want to take this dragon out, I better move in before all of the guards are killed. I go to melee and as I'm hacking at the hindquarters of the dragon, it picks up the last of the guards and throws him aside too. Now the dragon turns towards me, frost breath blasting away. I do what any paniced adventurer would do, I run for it. The dragon giving chase blasting away at me, I realize that if I keep running I'm a goner, even popping potions. I jump behind a rock the dragon still closing in blasting away at me. I use the rock as a shield and fire some arrows back in his direction, trying to dodge his very fast frost blasts, all the while him continuing to close in. Knowing I can't run, I run up to just behind the rock with the dragon on the other side blasting away at it (sure the AI should have gone around, but I was kind of pinned down too, it seemed believable, even as I remember it it does.) My screen enveloped in white as the frost surrounds me and me poking out between shots to get an arrow in. After a couple blasts from the dragon I get my killing blow in and the dragon collapses in a lump, me staring down at it's now lifeless head. My son gave me a high five after the fight too. It's hard to describe how epic that battle really was, to me it's like it played out in some movie as I can imagine my character racing away through the field and then cowering behind a rock. And while that was a great moment, there have been several that were awesome as well.

Another thing that sets Skyrim apart from Oblivion is that the extra trade skill actions actually have a purpose and make sense. In Oblivion I had no idea how to do any of the enchanting so I just left it alone, here I'm improving my armor, mixing up countless potions as I try and figure out what everything does, I enchanted my sword so that it is now the ultimate weapon of destruction, it's just soooooooo much more intuitive this time around. And it makes sense too.

Character skills are also a welcome change, now instead of picking a class you just play how you want and you level up accordingly. This is the BEST system ever created!!! I have hated the idea that you ARE one type of character, now you just do what you do and you get better at it through your skill points. Again it just makes sense. If only they could make a balanced MMO that played like that, oh my I'd just collapse in happiness. I guess AC was kind of like that, but this is more advanced. It really goes back to the reason why I love Minecraft, the game just lets you play it, there is freedom in everything that you do in the game and it makes for a really enjoyable experience.

Minecraft - Making movies

I've really taken to making my Minecraft movies, sure no one is watching them outside of Ayden, but that's ok, it's more a fun thing to do. Every video I hope gets a little better than the last one, and to help that along I went and bought Sony Vegas yesterday.

I have to say that my initial thoughts on Vegas aren't that good. Having used the Windows movie maker which is very easy to use, going to Vegas was a lot more involved, especially considering that I had to pay money for that one. I was hoping for more flexability and a simpler method for adding edits and features, instead it looks like I got a lot more windows and a lot more minor things to play with that I really don't care about. As an indication on how I feel about it, I went into movie maker and made my title screen because after messing with Vegas for 30 minutes I couldn't get it to do what I wanted, but I could in movie maker in about 2 minutes. But that is my day one impression so who knows, I'll keep playing around with it and I'm sure that I'll get the hang of it.

The real problem through all of this though has been the audio. I have been fighting with that issue since day one. Vegas does have some nice features to help eliminate the feedback from the mic, but it doesn't totally solve the problem like I was hoping. That means I'll probably need to go spend some more money on a decent mic, but not knowing if that will make a difference really keeps me from wanting to go spend yet more money on my little hobby. So far I've spent about $100 on everything so a mic on top of that seems a little crazy, considering that I'm only getting about 20 views per video and I can't even be sure how many of those are just me visiting my page.

Another factor that is discouraging is that to make what I consider to be a good 15 minute video it takes me about an hour of editing. My thought is that if I'm going to make the video, better to make it the best that you can. Which again leads to the mic decision.

But saying all of that, I really do have fun with it. Sure I'm probably ages older than most of the kids out there making videos, but I figure I'm just late to the game. =) So it's a little silly to be making movies about playing a video game, but then again what else am I going to do, besides it might open up for me to do some other stuff with home movies. Or it might get my son fired up about doing something creative like this.

Speaking of my son, he loves the movies, heck he tricked his mom the other day into thinking that he was sick so that he could stay home from school to watch the last 2 in the play series. Now he wants me to show him how to make movies as well, we'll see how that goes, who knows, maybe he'll be the internet superstar I secretly wish I was.

The thing is, I think the videos are pretty decent, but I don't really know how to get people to watch them. I've been trolling the boards to self promote and been cross promoting as much as I can, but I don't know, I guess it's like anything, you just have to keep working at it. And for all I know, maybe the videos are just terrible and I'm looking at them with rose colored glasses.

In the end though it all comes down to one thing, and that's not the number of views or the number of subscribers (although it helps) it's about enjoying it. Right now I am enjoying making the movies and sharing my game play. It's the same reason that I started this blog and after a year am still plugging away at it. Well sort of anyway, been a quiet October.

Minecraft - Let's Play

Got the series up and going. Here are episodes 1 and 6.

enjoy

Minecraf - Let's Play

Finally working on my Let's Play series after talking about it for months. There is a link on the right sidebar.

It's a work in progress as it's season 0. Figure I'll work out the bugs and get my audio adjusted before starting the Season 1 Hardcore with 1.9 (official release). If you end up watching it, please feel free to comment (aside from, this is lame), would like suggestions on how to make a good LP.

The LP itself is like this blog, mostly for me. I like writing about playing and I think it would be fun to make some movies of my adventures, at least I'll have lots of pictures now for my blog. If someone watches it and finds a little bit of entertainment value, cool. But I'm not looking to make any money from it with ad revenue.

Minecraft - Game in a game

So I'm talking to my brother and the guys about buying TOR when it comes out, but the nagging feeling that I have is that if I do, I'll be wasting my money because I'll probably still only want to play Minecraft. And then it hit me, I think watching the development of the game is just as much fun as playing it.

I'm the type of person that goes all in on something when I find something interesting. I played as hardcore as I could on WoW back in the day, I'd read the forums, I'd watch youtube videos, etc... A movie that I like is coming out, I'll go looking for clips, I'll read up on back story, essentially if something I think is cool is coming, I'll go dive into it, hell read my Lost blog! It's the same thing with Minecraft.

Before Minecraft I thought Twitter was one of the stupidest things I had ever seen, I don't care if some famous person is going to tell me they're taking a dump. But now I'm like an addict constantly refreshing my phone to see if there has been a new post from Notch or Jeb with some new feature that is coming in the next MC update. "Oh wow, Snow Golems!", "Ravines!!!", "XP? Fuck you Notch!" =)

While I enjoy the adventure on the screen, the entire development has become an adventure in it's own right. What will be coming, how will the latest additions work into the way that I play the game? I can honestly say that I have liked 99% of all the additions, thus with each coming patch I'm excited to see what is next, it's like a little MC Christmas everyday.

I can't remember another game where the development of the game has been as open as this has been. Sure there are betas, but then there is the MC beta which is essentially the transparent development of a major game (sorry it's not indie anymore) over the last year plus. Other games you hear a rumor about some feature, or some big announcement of a single item (live cash AH in Diablo 3) and the gaming world goes into an uproar. With MC there is an uproar everyday on the forums as haters hate and fanboys.... er fan...

What gets me is how Notch and Jeb keep their cool through all the "feedback" that there is on the interwebs. Maybe it has gotten to them and whatever comes next won't be in such open development, I guess we're too close to the end at this point to pull it all back in house, besides I can only imagine the pitchforks and torches that we'd see in Stockholm if that happened.

Not knowing how the future development at Mojang is going to go, I can say that I am enjoying the ride that I was able to get on board for, it's a daily adventure much like the MC world where I never know what is going to be over that next mountain or in the next tweet.

Minecraft - 1.8 I build

One of these days I'll really take the time and put up some pictures. Hell I might even take a video, that's really what I need to do.

Over the weekend I got to spend a little more time in my world, not a lot of dedicated time to go hunting for the stronghold, but time enough to scout out some caves near my house and keep building my now giant house. The structure is simple, the house if built around a cross farm, that grows wheat in 4 directions off of a single water source. I really like the design, even if it's a little big. The great feature of the design is that all drops will either fall to me, or fall in the water and then flow to the outer reaches of the farm. On two the points of the cross I have built structures, the first is my bedroom (initial house) and I also built a cobble generator. I like my cobble design in that the water flow under the cobble block allows the broken block to flow to me, but I should adjust the height so that not as many blocks end up in the lava. The lava problem might just be a fact of life for a generator, but the system works pretty well.

On top of the now castle I put a vault in so that I could increase my storage capacity. I put the vault on the ceiling after reading that Endermen can take a chest and destroy everything in it. I might be sick, but I personally think that is awesome, I like enemy mobs that are trying to fuck my shit up, I say bring it. Heck I even asked if someone could make a mod so that mobs don't burn up in daylight, I think that will add a nice bit of spice to things. Or I'm insane!

When I get back to serious work on my world I'll have to decide if I'm going to try to make a arrow machine out of the skeleton spawner I found. Great location for a spawner too, right in a lava flow, doesn't get much safer than that. In 1.9 spawners aren't supposed to work, but I guess I could ride the exploit while it exists. The spawner is located in a giant ravine, I've made it to the bottom, but man is it a shit storm down there, mobs are just spawning everywhere.

Speaking of mobs spawning, I was playing with my son this weekend on our server (and to confirm mineshafts do spawn in 1.7 worlds) and we came across a spawner. Now we play with the mob spawning off, because he's 5, I think a creeper blowing him to pieces would make him cry. Anyway we find a spawner, actually we don't see it, but I hear a moan. A moan? WTF, that sounds like a zombie. I turn around and there I see it, my son is face to face with two zombies WTF!!! I tell him to just run, he doesn't know what to do, I pull out my iron sword (yes I actually had one for killing mobs in 1.7) and I go to work. I beat them down without too much trouble and light up the spawner before breaking it. As Bdouble0 says, "Fix your game Notch!"

From the dungeon we were able to find a passageway that took us deep underground and to an abandoned mineshaft. It was time to get off, but we marked it as a place to return to.

Next time I get on, I'm going to finish up my ravine, maybe there are some goodies down there, and not black fog (not a goodie). So far in my short exploits around the map I haven't found anything that looks like a stronghold, but I did find a mineshaft to put on my list of places to visit.

Minecraft - 1.8 Initial Thoughts

After MUCH anticipation 1.8 finally dropped yesterday and for the most part I am very pleased with what I see. The following is a breakdown of my thoughts on the update.

First off, for some reason it's a lot more fun. It's the same game, but for some reason it's more fun. It's hard to say why, but I think it has a lot to do with having a goal this time around, which is similar to how I was playing hardcore (FYI, never finished my hardcore, I beat the Bronze, but then started playing online on a public server).

The goal in 1.8, at least to me is to find and clear out a stronghold. A stronghold is essentially a very large dungeon that is randomly located somewhere on the map, beyond 500 blocks from your initial spawn location. But here is where it gets tough, as of right now only 3 of them spawn, so in order to find one, you're going to need to do some exploration. Notch said that the game would require you to explore, sign me up! I've heard that in 1.9 the stronghold will hold a boss, we'll have to see, I guess that would be a good indicator if you really finished off a stronghold.

So in order to find a stronghold, it's going to take a lot of exploration, with hunger now a requirement, I'll need food, hence my base needs to become an actual supply station. Animal spawning has also changed so there isn't a limitless number of pigs to be found and eat from, to counter this, I built a large wheat farm. I was in a little bit of luck with my spawn location, I spawned in a swamp and there were mushrooms everywhere so food has not been an issue. I wasn't really sure if I was going to need a large wheat farm, but not really knowing how the animals were going to work, I figured it was probably a good idea to make one. And one final note on food, cows are like hitting the jackpot for meat!

Speaking of cows, here is one of the real problems that I have with the update, there cows are too rare. Normally I use leather armor to get me going in the game, then upgrade to iron once I find enough, but in order to get underground and get that iron I will make a leather suit, that's not an option now. At my spawn there were 0 cows, only after I did some exploration did I find 3 of them. By the time I found the cows I was already up to about 15 iron, just from finding some near the surface. With cows not respawning, the ability to get a leather set of armor is almost impossible or at least pointless because you'll have iron by the time you find enough cows anyway. This is a serious balance issue.

Exploration and the biomes. I was lucky and spawned in a swamp, now while that doesn't sound like a good thing, swamps are flat, have lots of trees, lots of sheep (useless except for a first night bed), and mushrooms. Finding coal in the swamp was a little tricky but overall it was a good starting location. I was also at the intersection of 4 different biome types, a forest, a desert, and a mountain biome were all bordering me. I took a quick look at the desert and it was vast, just huge, I figure that my stronghold will be in there, just because. The forest is dense with trees, it will be very hard to cut through there and do some serious exploration, can we say fire coming.... Finally there was the mountain, it's large and pocketed with caves at it's higher elevations, I didn't bother to explore in those caves as of yet because I figure there is probably only monsters and coal up there so why bother.

A couple other neat geographical features were the stream that separated the forest/swamp and the mountain. It wasn't a full on river, just a thin stream that ran along the side, the effect of it was great. Later on, on the other side of the swamp I found a large river that separated the swamp from some planes on the other side, that had the 3 cows. And finally there was the ravine, a deep gorge that ran under the swamp. The gorge went from the surface all the way to exposed gold, I'm not sure what level it is down there, but in having gold exposed to the surface, that's deep. With vines from trees dropping down in to the gorge and the river flowing in from various points, it was a great piece of landscape, just begging to be explored.

Naturally the gorge was where I decided to start my underground escapades, through various side tunnels I was able to get about half way down before it got late and I needed to get off. I was still without armor as well so I didn't want to be down there after it had gotten dark. (I'll get to the lighting in a minute) Being unprepared I didn't test my luck too much, but the mobs are the same as usual, skeletons are Olympic archers, zombies are idiots, and spiders are loud and annoying. But what is this black mob with purple nether stuff sparkling off him???

The Endermen, overall I have to say I'm not really that impressed, but I don't dislike them either. I found my first one in a small little cave, it was just doing it's thing not taking notice of me. They look great, the tall skinny black figure and those glowing purple eyes, they really do look great in the dark. But they're kind of pointless too. On the forums A LOT of people are bitching about the Endermen, because they break their buildings, honestly I was disappointed that they weren't more aggressive in that regard. Before I got off, it was night time and I decided that I'd get up on my roof and see if any Endermen would spawn so I could learn a little about them, watch them build. Just my luck, one of them spawned on a hill near my house. He picked up a dirt block and and... and just walked around aimlessly carrying it the whole time. Now I know that they have very limited AI, but I never saw him place it or pick up another block, he was a tall zombie with a block in his hand, that I better not look directly at. When day came the Endermen burst into flames just like the other undead, I decided that this was a good time to look at one of them. While on fire, he turned and looked at me, getting all smoked up and pissed off that I was looking at him, and just when I thought that I might shoot a charged arrow at him, he fell over dead. I really didn't want to fight him, I was just messing around to see how the mechanics worked so that I'd know in the future.

Speaking of charged arrows, I love charged arrows! I only had 3 arrows that I had found from a couple of random drops but there was a creeper outside my house that just wanted to blow me up. I decided that this was a good chance to test the new bow mechanic. I charged that puppy up and shot him right through my door, it was great the arrow stuck in the side of his head and the impact that it had sent him back a few blocks, it was very satisfying. The second shot, killed him, yes two shots kills a creeper, that is awesome! Swords will also do double damage if you jump and hit with them as well, useful for sure, but the bow is now OP in my opinion, but I like that too.

In my couple hours of play I did take some damage, no longer are you able to just eat and be healed, nope, healing is now over time. A LOT of people are complaining about that on the forums, after all it is the internet, but I like the way it works. The hunger bar doesn't deplete that fast, in fact I hardly noticed it until it got to about half way. When the bar is full, you heal over time, so taking a stray arrow or some light fall damage gets healed up automatically if you're full. For me this worked great, before if I were down a heart or two I'd just let it be, now those are healed up for me, fantastic.

And finally, the lighting. The new lighting system is amazing! The transition from day to night is so subtle that you don't even notice it if you're working in a lit area, and it looks great. Torches have a soft orange glow to them, the moon give everything a slight blueish hue, it all looks very nice. But I can't say enough about the day/night transition, it's phenomenal.

Overall I was very happy with 1.8, I never found a village or abandoned mine, but I'm sure I will. The new small features like the hunger bar and the strongholds are great additions in my opinion, the game now has a sort of purpose to it, we'll see if that holds up once I get going.