So I just finished my playthrough of the game Home. It is 50% off right now on Steam which means it is all of $1.49 USD. Buy it. I thought Dear Esther blew my mind, but this game takes the cake. It’s not a ‘jump out and scare you’ kind of horror game but rather a ‘slow burn’ of suspenseful anxiety as you try to figure out just what the heck is going on. In the end your mind will be blown. The decisions you make along the way change the outcome of the story, giving it replay-value. I recorded my playthrough and will be posting it in two parts – part one will come out this Friday 4PM (Eastern US time – but actually 8AM on Saturday here in NZ) and part two will come out Monday.
Also episode two of my Lore-master playthrough comes out tomorrow, so watch for that too! I’d love feedback from you LOTRO players!
These are the three main things that have happened since I last posted! I got married to my kinleader that I met through LOTRO, Navthalion. The much-looked-forward-to Summer Steam Sale occurred. And Nav and I got a dog to go along with our cat. The wedding was great – it was a very simple courthouse because we aren’t into big parties or ceremonies or anything like that. I’ll only post the one picture from it (above) because I don’t think people care that much! This is a game blog after all, not my Facebook! But after the wedding we went to the Hobbiton set in Matamata. I brought my Rohan flag and those of us from my kin there took a picture:
So now we have evidence of four Windriders of Rohan gathering together in the closest-to-real Middle-Earth you can get! It was pretty awesome. I hadn’t been to the Hobbiton set since they finished the set – if you remember I posted some pics from July and November of 2010. The finished product is absolutely amazing. The most amazing part, to me, is the incredible gardening they have going on there. They have expert gardeners growing extra large plants just so that everything has that over-sized-because-we’re-hobbits type feel. Also, the food at the Green Dragon pub is amazing! I had the beef and ale pie. Sooo good! It was a chilly day when we went so a nice warm meat pie was perfect. They also have a resident cat there named Pickle who is such a sweety. Click the picture below to get to a small album of Hobbiton pics!
So once all the family and friends and kin-mates left, we got back to our computers and realized the Steam Sale was going on. In the past I’ve never really gone crazy with the sales. I think the main reason is because I’d usually never buy something that I only kind of want in passing. However now that I’ve been making videos, I’m always looking for games to potentially do LPs of. So basically this year I went kind of nuts. For me anyway. I got Anodyne, Bastion, Binding of Isaac, Borderlands 2 (for both me and Nav), Fez, Gnomoria, Home, Mount and Blade (plus Warband and With Fire and Sword), Terraria and Tropico 4 (with a big bundle of Tropico 4 DLC). Quite a haul, I must say. I haven’t played a lot of them at all. I’ve played nearly 3 hours of Fez, a couple hours of Borderlands 2 with Nav and Farwing, and a few minutes of Terraria, Gnomoria, Binding of Isaac and Anodyne.
Regarding my videos though – I should be recording and posting again within the next week or so. As I mentioned in my last post, I was having a bit of recording difficulties. I thought I had it solved however when I went to continue my Don’t Starve series, the problems continued. So I got a new hard-drive, new recording software (DxTory) and new editing software (Sony Vegas). Probably tonight or tomorrow I’ll be re-installing Windows so I have a nice clear build to work with and we’ll see how that goes. My current plans for my YouTube channel are thus:
- Continue my Don’t Starve series
- Start a new LOTRO Let’s Play – I figure most of my followers know and like my LOTRO outfits and content and would like to see more LOTRO content. So why not start a class that I haven’t really played before? It will either be guardian or Lore-Master… or maybe Rune-keeper! I’ve played the RK a lot but… I don’t remember how to play it :X
- Start a series on city-building/god-games. City-building games are what got me into PC gaming when I was a kid. And I’ve mentioned multiple times on this blog how much I love the genre. So it seems fitting to do a series on different city-building games!
Oh yeah, and then we got a dog. His name is Bucky. We thought about re-naming him Bilbo but we didn’t really want to have to re-teach him his name while also trying to toilet-train him and teaching him not to mess with the cat. The cat, by the way, is still quite uncertain about the dog.
It’s literally a minute and 8 seconds long but it makes me super excited. Working on it and figuring out how to edit and do transitions and everything was so much fun! It kind of makes me glad I’m unemployed.
Yeah, it’s just clips and stock music, but whatever. Let me know if you have any feedback about the editing! I’ll be working on videos where I actually say things soon 
Well, eventually anyway. Those of you who follow me on twitter have seen me talking the past week or so about doing some videos to supplement this blog. My college roommate, ruallinse, has been telling me to make gaming videos for years. Finally I’m caving in. Nav gave me a copy of Camtasia, which is what he used to make his Legendary Weapons videos. The video series will be called “Cith Through Games”.
I’ve got a whole line up of plans and games to cover, but I kind of need to figure out how to use the software first I guess! But I just wanted to make a post to say that I am working on things. My current list of games to cover includes: Proteus, Reus, Minecraft, Dear Esther, Fall Out 3, Skyrim and maybe even some LOTRO :P. I don’t want to say too much about my plans for each of the games so that you guys can be surprised! But if you have any recommendations or ideas please feel free to let me know!
This weekend we finally got the finishing touches (for now at least) on our game room – just in time for Update 11 in LOTRO! It’s been tough not being able to game (well, I was playing Pokemon White version on my DS, but that’s it) for nearly two weeks. It’s one thing not being able to game if you’re on vacation or something, but if you’re just sitting around the house all day? It’s painful. We ended up making the ‘desk’ out of a kitchen counter exactly as long as the room and it’s held up by L brackets. It’s… not exactly level. It kind of bows down in the middle. But for our purposes it doesn’t matter too much. And you can’t tell when you’re sitting at your computer. It’s not like all the pens/pencils roll into the middle or anything. We also got some really fancy pants desk chairs! They are San Marino RaceTec chairs. No, we didn’t actually pay that much for them (yay, haggling!) They are super comfortable and I love that the back pillow can slide up or down and that you can adjust how much the back of the chair pushes forward. It’s nice because we can both have the same exact chair but can adjust it to ourselves (which is important because Nav is very tall and I am very short – so where we want more cushioning is very different!). I also got the whiteboard I’ve always wanted in my battle station! So here’s a pic along with a pic in the other direction of our new cat, Nyx, on her strategically placed bed:
Still to do: Paint the walls (we’re thinking a dark grey to match the table top), get some blinds for the window/get rid of the curtains, put a mini fridge under the desk, I want to get at least one (but maybe two) more monitors, and I need to get a new keyboard soon. Right now I have a Logitech G19, which has been really great for the past 4 years. But because of all the travel I’ve done with it it’s starting to get a bit wonky. Like all day yesterday for some reason it wouldn’t load my M1, M2 or M3 profiles, even after I disconnected it and restarted the computer. This morning when I booted up my PC? They loaded just fine. I’m looking at getting a Corsair K90 keyboard. It’s a mechanical keyboard, has backlights that match my color scheme (very important!) and I have always been a big fan of the Corsair brand (except for when I tried switching to their Corsair Vengeance 2000 wireless headset instead of the 1500 wired one I had been using and its software continually caused my PC to bluescreen, but whatever).
So I was very glad to have all of this set up for yesterday because, yay updates! Of course the first thing I went to was Lalia’s Market. I saw it on Bullroarer before I had to pack everything up for shifting, so I knew it was awesome. When I heard about it, I was just so excited. This is a great direction to take cosmetics in, I feel. I know it sucks having to pay so much for them in Mithril Coins (which means spending real money), but I would honestly much rather Turbine focus getting money from things like horses and cosmetics than more game-play central things like armour, high-end potions, etc. I especially love that they have gloves, shoulders, legs, chests, boots and helmets as separate purchasable items. That was something I was disappointed about with the original implementation of mannequins – you either had to buy the whole outfit or nothing. I love the mix and match! And of course I bought a pair of boots, gloves and shoulders within minutes of stepping foot into the market! I decided to make a new outfit for Cithryth for questing in Wildermore. It needed to be warm (because snow) and tough because “wild” is right in the name of the region! So I put this together:
Scout’s Weathered Leather Jacket – black
Ceremonial Shoulder Guards of the Porbad
Ceremonial Secret of the West Gauntlets – black
Ceremonial Boots of the Gambler
Cloak of the Unwelcome Guest – grey
Shaggy Roan war-steed hide – black
Simple Tail – black
Burglar’s Saddle
Burglar’s Caparison – black
Burglar’s Gear
Captain’s Halter – black
Captain’s Leggings
It kind of reminds me of the Night’s Watch from Game of Thrones… but I think that’s just because of the black and the snow. Something I noticed in Wildermore that really intrigues me are the horse blankets that the horses in towns have:
They seem to come in all the regular dye colors… and I really want them! Or something like them. I’ve always really wanted a very plain blanket, easily dyeable blanket as a war-steed caparison. The Guardian’s Caparison is the closest I’ve found, but then you get the big red and white shield on the horse’s chest, not to mention you’d have to buy the whole Guardian Steed to get it.
Today they officially announced the members of the LOTRO Player Council… and I’m one of them! I’ll be honest. I kind of was expecting to get rejected because my application was basically “My play style is pretty outfits, I am interested in talking about pretty outfits… oh and I guess ‘solo’ is a thing? Whatever. Outfits > everything else”. Yeeeeah, I’m paraphrasing but that’s pretty much what it was like. Anyway, it’s true. My goal is to focus on “fluff” gameplay – especially player cosmetics, mount cosmetics and the housing system. Secondary to that I will focus on solo play, namely zone questing and making sure it is an enjoyable experience for soloers of all skill levels.
There’s not much more to say about that at the moment. Especially since that’s about all I can say until they give us specific assignments to make reports or something like that. Anyway, I don’t have any new outfits to post really though I do have one that I think I am aiming for (or for something similar to it). I logged into my baby champion last night because I love playing with outfits on her. She’s an elf who dresses all in black/grey/white. She’s the only character I have that I feel like I can dress in the heavy elven armours, so when I really get a hankering to use those stylings I pull her out. Here is the outfit I’m looking at and still tweaking:
Battle-leader’s Breastplate – white
Trousers of the Hopeful Melody – white
Boots of the Steely Dawn
Battle-leader’s Gauntlets – white
Shoulders of the Deathstorm – white
Ceremonial Helm of the Lady’s Secrecy – white
Cloak of the Silver Birch – white
I think I may change out the leggings and gauntlets. I also absolutely love how elegant the shoulders look, but they are just so… inefficient and look kind of ridiculous when you are looking at the character from behind. But I love the leaf/butterfly kind of effect! So I’m not sure what to pick for those yet. I still have plenty of time when I get enough marks and medallions.
In other game news, I decided to start learning to play DotA 2 this week. It’s really fun and I hope to one day get good enough at it to play with actual people. After playing for 9 hours doing the “Practice with Bots” I figured I’d finally try my hand playing with others. The first game was not bad. I mean, I died a TON! But the other players didn’t really say much about it, just kind of kept saying which lanes to push, announcing misses, etc. The second game though… my goodness. They really hated me. I died within the first minute (which I do admit was my fault because I kind of was zoned out) but then the rest of the game they spent telling me how “f****** stupid” I was. I told them this was my second game and to give me a break, jeez! Nope! Apparently you are supposed to know everything before you ever think about playing with people. Duh! I think the experience just reminded me why I have mostly stuck to LOTRO for so long.
I did get some friendly advice on twitter though (Thanks, @ALLout_DotA!) and have decided to really double-down on reading guides and watching videos. I’ve also decided to stick with one support hero to focus on: Dazzle. He heals, can stun/slow a bit and is generally pretty helpful and seems to be recommended by many for new players… and he’s also pink. So hopefully with hours more of practice I’ll get better. I’m also trying to convince Nav to start playing.