Hearthstone Review

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I don’t normally play PC games but lately a few friends have busted my balls into trying a few, including Hearthstone. So I gave it a shot. Deceptively simple. Insanely fun is quite accurate. First few rounds were very easy, and this made sense since it was the tutorial. As we move on it got a bit more difficult. No big deal tho, it was simple to learn. I grew up playing various card games so picking this up was easy. It however didn’t take long for me to get my rear end handed to me. The game won’t hold your hand for long, so when you get over-confident it will knock you down. The game is easy to learn, but not easy to master.

At the end of the day tho, it is still a card game and honestly if you have some money to sink into it, you will have a slight advantage. It is hard to say it is pay to win tho since having the right cards and knowing when and how to use them are very different. I lost a few games I should have won, and I won my share of games I should have lost.

Hearthstone is a fun game and I do wish I played it sooner. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Leprechaun in the Hood

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I love the Leprechaun movies, even 4 where he went to space. They’re fun trashy kind of horror you clearly aren’t meant to take serious. Leprechaun in the Hood is precisely what you think it’s going to be but holy crap does it go beyond that. It begins with the story of a pimp played Ice-T who comes across the stone statue of the Leprechaun in a old subway tunnel  and after besting him and taking his magic flute, turns the Leprechaun into stone and becomes a rap mogul. decades later we find a struggling motivational rap group who are trying to win a contest and when miffed by Ice-T’s MacDaddy, they bust his house up, take the flute, and inadvertently get hunted by the pissed off pimp and Leprechaun.

As I said, the premise is exactly what you’d expect but it goes deeper than that. While the characters talk like its a live action Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas , there’s horny cross dressers, the Leprechaun gets a fondness for weed, there’s scandalously clad demonic rap video girls, people getting there innards randomly blown out and the movie is utter batshit insanity and I love it to death. After watching the rage inducing The Devil Inside , this was a huge breath of fresh air. If you like hilariously bad movies, I encourage you to watch this all the way through the end credits but if you want anything remotely quality or serious, turn away. My the gaming gods bring you glory.

 

Fallout 76

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Now I wanted to post this last week like everyone else and be like “Oh my god new Fall out oh fuck yea its online iuhfiahihfiahifvafhd freak out”…but I decided you would all read that enough. Yes I did just randomly hit keys up there by the way. Its my blog, I can do that. I decided however to write about other stuff and let everyone else fill you in. By now you know the routine. Leaving vault 76 you will be one of the first outside the vaults, and everyone you see will be a real person. Returning is the ability to build bases, but now you can build them where you want and move them when you choose. There will also be nuclear weapons you can go and grab, then just drop them on your friends. This all sounds great and looks amazing. Especially knowing that unlike most survival games, when you die you never lose progress.

I do have a couple concerns however. You don’t really lose progress in Grand Theft Auto either, but anyone that plays it knows it doesn’t take much for some random person to ruin your day. Are we going to spend 10 or 20 hours building a base just for some jerk to nuke my base and send me back to square one? If so whats the point of building it at all? If nuking a base doesn’t do much, why bother doing it at all? I truly hope they manage a nice middle ground between nuking people serving a purpose and making sure it doesn’t ruin the experience for people.

Another concern I have is the story, they have always been known for story, and will this effect that? Fallout 76 could be amazing, but I do understand why many people are concerned. Personally I am extremely hopeful. An online Fallout is something I have dreamed of, and it is finally coming. May the gaming gods bring it and us glory.

Why love the “grays” of Marvel

I wanted to do something kind of different today and talk about something that really changed my outlook on how super heroes and villains are portrayed. Marvel has given us such great examples of gray characters, characters that ride the line between the borders of good and evil. Granted, while characters like Spider-man or the Red Skull are purely good and evil, many are unclassifiable.  Magneto wants safe refuge and rights for mutant kind after witnessing man’s cruelty first hand as a holocaust survivor; Doom just wants his people to prosper and be a good ruler, hoping he can see his dead mother again; Venom wants to protect the innocent; Hulk is just a beast that yearns for peace; Punisher kills, mams, tortures those who do the same to innocent people. The list goes on and while Doom ultimately is a villain, Hulk is ultimately a anti-hero, and The Guardians of the Galaxy are ultimately heroes, the verdict is out on the characters of Marvel as it is on us all in our everyday lives. Are we really good, are we really the villain we appear to be to those who trespass against us or the hero our loved ones take us for? That perspective always drove me in my personal work, and I think that’s why Marvel’s characters resonate so deep with us. May the gaming gods bring you glory, and as the epic Stan Lee would say, Excelsior!

 

Division 2 Preview

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If you are anything like me a while ago you had a friend that was all aboard the hype train for The Division. Talked about this game like it was going to be ground breaking, even showed you the trailer where the guy closed the car door, which at the time was amazing. The problem is, while good the game didn’t go beyond that. The dark zone was cool but it had a lot of issues and the game itself ended up being a love it or hate it kind of thing. The DLC helped a lot tho.

Now comes The Division 2. The game looks amazing ( there will be a video below) Taking place after the virus has died down while humanity tries to rebuild we have a new problem. That problem is each other. Trying to survive people have formed bands of people willing to rob and steal. Now agents have a seemingly new task. There will also be 3 episodes with new stories and places to explore. Oh, and those 3 episodes? 100% free. The game looks good and it sounds like they have learned some valuable lessons. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Trials Fusion

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Trials Fusion is free this month for Playstation 4 along with XCom 2. Which of course means I am going to play and review them.  Trials Fusion was up first since it is the easiest and quickest to get into. The first few levels are training stages, but they mostly don’t even feel like it.

You will ride a bike (or a little later an a 4 wheeler quad) across a track and have to guide your bike across jumps and various obstacles. It varies from pretty simple to I wanted to throw my damn controller through a window. Fusion is however fun, and at the great price of free you should try it. I love seeing my friend’s name alongside my bike going through what their trials and trying to beat them as well, a great feature that I am glad to see. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

Unfriended: the Dark Web trailer 1

Why is this a thing? I know we live in a digital age and there are plenty of opportunities for horror in that age but I give up when you have movies based off social media or Skype. I will say the second movie has a interesting premise and I’m glad it’s not a ghost story, but I can’t the trailer really wowed me. I’d watch it on Netflix or something like that but wouldn’t pay full for it. May the gaming gods bring you glory.

Just Friends (2005)

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Oh Ryan Reynolds, you wily bastard. This dude pretty much always makes me laugh, and just friends is no different. From him starting out as a nerdy fat kid that can barely talk to his best friend and woman he loves to player that warns a friend that once you enter the friend zone you become a total non sexual object, like a lamp. He plays his role perfectly.

After being humiliated and swearing to become someone, and a pop star accidentally setting a fire and grounding a plane in his home town in New Jersey he must spend a night at home where he hasn’t been since. Of course we have the usual runs into girl, tries to date girl, things go bad, hilarity ensues. It is a rom-com, we know the routine. There isn’t anything new here, and honestly do we every expect there to be? The movie is funny and the story good but it is cliché. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.

The Devil Inside

devil inside The tagline directly above is true, I’m sure the Vatican doesn’t want you to see this movie but I have to say after seeing it, it’s Ok to follow there advice.

Maria Rossi murdered three people during a failed exorcism in 1989. In 2012, her daughter, Isabella journeys to the Vatican to try getting answers after not seeing her mother for all those years. The first act dives into the teaching of priests as exorcists and how the Vatican declares demonic possession from mental illness. Isabella reaches out to two students who privately practice exorcisms, and some interesting ethical questions are raised concerning the Vatican’s involvement with exorcism or lack thereof. To understand, she accompanies them on a trip, deciding she wants to try on her mom to disastrous results that prove fatal..

The Devil Inside is a good example why I don’t like the sub genre of found footage. There are good questions brought up in the movie and it looks alright enough but its a pretty forgettable horror movie. The interesting questions disappear and we get the same possession cliches redone. I never actually believed or felt immersed in the found footage experience like I was in The Last Exorcism or the first Paranormal Activity  It was a lot of little things how the lead actress always looked perfectly made up the whole movie or how people seemed really lenient waving a camera through the streets of the Vatican, a high security mental institution, a basement where a girl that is clearly dangerous is being held. The ending is an absolute insult I’m going to spoil- it’s a advert for a website that isn’t even still running. That’s it. If you were enjoying yourself, that final minute will turn your pissed meter to 11. In the end, it’s fine to skip the Devil Inside and the gaming gods will bring you all the more glory for doing so.

Graveyard Keeper (Preview)

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Graveyard Keeper is an odd game. It starts out with your character going to the store and getting hit by a car. You then talk to what I assume is death and him telling you that you are now in charge of a graveyard. The game gets so much weirder. You are told to dig up Gerry and he will help you out. Gerry is a bouncing talking skull, that happens to be an alcoholic. He wants you to sell meat for beer. Where are you getting the meat? Well the meat is being dropped off by a talking donkey. Well he isn’t dropping off meat, he is dropping off dead bodies.

Your job is to fix up the graveyard so you can reopen the church. The alpha build is nice, and looks a lot like Stardew Valley. It functions nice and I haven’t hit any major bugs but admittedly there are some HUGE parts of the game missing, but they do warn you about this.

The game is well made and quite hilarious. The decision of what to do with the bodies is also interesting, you have limited space in your graveyard and I found myself occasionally ditching bodies in a nearby river to save space. This did however cost me valuable money. I am very much looking forward to the full release which should be in August. Best wishes and may the gaming gods bring you glory.