I'm a bad bloggist today. I'm almost in awe of how busy I've been lately.
Regardless, I wanted to share my enthusiasm for the upcoming Star Wars Celebration, and in particular, its live stream.
SWC starts tomorrow, and they'll be streaming from London live. The SWC stream last year was TREMENDOUS. In particular, the Force Awakens panel, and the on-stage stuff with Mark Hamill, and especially Carrie Fisher were fantastic. This year's looks just as awesome. Check it out.
Otherwise, I'm just hoping to catch my breath. Fuck being busy. I hate being busy. I don't mind moving fast, but I'm a very deliberate person, and I badly need to just chill.
Man, I am just a monster on Monday mornings now. Yikes. I can kinda joke around, but I get so annoyed with people that aren't focused on the discussion at hand, and get pretty fucking dismissive about things that I see as irrelevant to what I am discussing at that moment. Wow.
That's like four work Mondays in a row in which I'm just not feeling like dealing with people. I usually roll my eyes at people that are like that, too. When did I become one of them?
Part of it, I think, is that, for the summer, I get up at 530AM Mon-Thurs to accommodate the family schedule. To accomplish that, I dose myself with various pain relief PM pills to help me get to sleep early, but then I'm groggy as hell in the morning, and I still haven't quite slept enough.
I dunno. On one hand, I need to get over it, but on the other, I'm OK with asking people to cut me a little slack at the front end of the week.
On the positive side, I did finish the main campaign for Dishonored, which was a really fun game. And about the right length.
Dishonored and Doom, both, have recently hit home for me just how important traversal can be for a game. A big part of the reason I enjoy them both so thoroughly is that movement is easy and fun. WASD + mouse look + context buttons are great, and when the first-person control constantly lands you where you were expecting ... man, it's just so satisfying. And the 'Blink' power. Ah. So wonderful. By the end, I was Blinking everywhere. I'd Blink up behind a dude, stab him in the neck, Blink to another dude, stab, and on and on. It was so awesome.
And yeah, I ended up with a pretty high Chaos level, but I felt justified. I didn't kill everybody, but I did take out the ones that I felt had lied to me and/or betrayed me. Or if they shot at me. Or if I couldn't take the chance of leaving them alive. You get the idea.
I then moved on to the first of the Daud DLCs (The Knife of Dunwall). I think I should've held off for at least a month or two, actually. One, Daud's jump is just waaay too floaty relative to Corvo's, and two ... it's weird right back in with lowered stakes. I dunno. Maybe I'll chill on it for a bit.
So, I have this thing where I'll hit max-frustration breaking point with a game, in which I decide 'this is no longer fun, so why am I spending time with it? I'll come back when I figure out how to beat this part that's making me crazy.' Sometimes, it's a week, sometimes it's nine months. In this case, it was nine months.
So, yeah, I saw that game in my 'installed' list in the Steam instance on my ROG, thought about it, walked around the house doing a little picking up, and then it dawned on me that a) I needed to leave one party member way behind while b) drawing the enemy forces into a choke point, and it worked!
And, man, I LOVE games by Harebrained Schemes. These guys are so good at what they do. The writing, art, combat, strategy, lore, and world-building are all top-notch in their games. I can't wait to play more, and then jump over to Hong Kong.
Of course, now, I'm at that point where I have too many games all going on. Dragonfall, Dishonored: The Knifs of Dunwall, Witcher 3: Blood and Wine, a second playthrough of Dragon Age Inquisition, the four MMOs I juggle, and I still wanna do another playthrough of Deus Ex: Human Revolution before Mankind Divided comes out. I think I'm gonna chill on Daud for now, focus on Dragonfall and Blood and Wine, then maybe come back to Daud after DXHR is done again. We'll see.
Oh, and this is a separate post for another time, but I installed Pokemon Go to bond with my oldest son, and it's been a lot of fun doing something with him where he's the expert instead of me. It's made him really happy, and it's been a cool way to spend time together. More on this later.
You playing anything cool lately? Anything coming out soon for which you are crazy-hyped?
-Blaine
Oh, and I streamed some Final Fantasy XIV for no reason, but ended up having a great discussion with chat about what defines a 'Final Fantasy' game. Check it out, and feel free to chime in the comments.
At 4PM central US time today, I officially start my career as a streamer. Note that this is distinct from a 'streaker,' though how much, I have yet to find out (pretty sure Twitch and YouTube have policies about this, actually, that I don't plan to test.)
I'll welcome you all to ... The Blaine Blast!
So, today, we'll be talking about some of the big news from this past week, such as Fig, FFVII on iOS, and some new and upcoming releases. I'll be live-streaming my dive into Shadowrun: Hong Kong, and also talking with chat about whatcha playin' and maybe even a topic or two.
And if you wanna take a gander at some of the video work I did last night with Dragonfall, Satellite Reign, and a modded KotOR, you can check out my YouTube channel, which gets all my Twitch stuff post-broadcast.
In fact, here's an hour or so with KotOR:
If you can make it out, light up the chat, and show some support, I'd REALLY appreciate it. If you ever listened to my old podcast, Untitled Podcast, there will be some content similar to that, but I really intend for this to be a whole new endeavor.
So, I've not posted in a bit. Yeah, I hate seeing these 'dude, I'm sorry I haven't posted but my double-wide burned down and I lost my job, and my dog left me' and all the country song bullshit kinda posts, so I'm not making one. I just haven't really felt like posting anything, and I promised myself I wasn't gonna pressure myself to do recreational things I didn't feel like doing. Now I feel like it again.
I will say that I worked a pretty hectic schedule over the summer, and also took some time to think through a few things. Nothing crazy or worth sharing.
What have I been up to?
Let's see.
- upgraded all my development and gaming stuff to Windows 10. That's pretty neat. Everything went smoothly. No hiccups or incidents.
- the Cardinals, predictably, have been doing very well despite the entire goddam outfield getting hurt.
- I don't remember if I talked about it on here or not, but I finished my epic Dragon Age: Inquisition - Pillars of Eternity - Witcher 3 playthrough that I started in November of last year. I actually shuffled Pillars to the end of that, since I kinda wanted to slow-jam that one.
- I also played through the final Dragon Age Inquisition DLC, 'The Descent,' which was pretty fantastic.
- lotsa reading, not as much writing as I'd like; but that's about to change
The big thing, though, is that I'm finally dipping my toe into the streaming world. I'd thought about it for a bit, and after taking some really good pain meds for my back, I decided to really go for it.. I've made some alterations to my setup, I still have some things to work out, but we're kicking off the streaming schedule starting tomorrow @ 1600 central time.
So, on August 21st, 2015, @ 1600 central US time, you can check me out at my Twitch.TV channel and see some live Shadowrun: Hong Kong, see some gaming news for the week, and chat with me about this week's discussion topic.
The intent is to also start posting here more regularly. Sometimes, it'll be quick, funny micro-posts, and other times, it'll be like a feature magazine article. Just whatever I feel like.
