ScottVee Gaming

After a few busy weeks and weekends with no real gaming, we set off on a 4th anniversary weekend in San Juan Capistrano.  Looking down from the hotel room balcony we saw half a sign for a brewing company, so we went over to check it out ... it was only about 200 feet from our room but it was an annoying busy winding drive through side streets to get there. It was Dawg Pawrk Brewing Company, and at about 3pm on a friday it was a friendly place to chat with people and meet their dogs.  They had some pinball tables, which I normally just ignore.  I hadn't touched one of those in about 15 years.  But there was this one with a Led Zeppelin theme that made all kinds of classic sampled rock-n-roll sounds from Led Zep songs and had a fun multiball mode.   I didn't know there were tables themed after classic rock bands, and there probably weren't the last time I looked.  But they had a table for Guns & Roses, and the Mandalorian table clearly can't be more ...

Chemistry in Games: Nuclearcraft Nuclearcraft was a mod for Minecraft version 1.10.2 which had a pretty solid set of chemical reactions to play with.  I hopped onto my VeeTech2 modpack world to refresh my memory (and notes) about it. First there are the Nitrogen and Helium Collectors which just output 10mb of those gasses per tick from the air.  And with an infinite water source you could hook up to an Electrolyzer to get 475mb of H2, 50mb of Deuterium and 500mb of O2.  That's some funky water. The Isotope Separator has 18 pages of recipes of this sort: Th ingot or dust or grit = 2 Th-232 + 2 tp Th-232 (I use "tp" for "tiny pile", "tiny clump", etc) ... same for the oxide U ingot or dust or grit = 2 U-238 + 2 tp U-235 ... same for the oxide Yellorium ingot or dust = U-238 + tp U-235 Blutonium ingot or dust = Pu-242 + tp Pu-239 Boron ingot or dust = B-11 + 3 tp B-10 Lithium ingot or dust = Li-7 + 3 tp Li-6 The rest are used to recycle fuel pellet...

Anne & I popped back onto our Minecraft world after being away for about a month.  It was fun revisiting our old stomping grounds.  Most of the places we remembered right away but a few of them were almost unfamiliar.  While mining, Anne's illuminati pet gave her a cloud pet, so wow.  After jetpacking to so many clouds and never finding one, she finally had one to play with.  I had fun showing her the controls for flight mode.  We checked out our Peak Isle town from above and tp'd to the Twilight Forest to zoom around some more. Here is our Inventory Pets building in Peak Isle: Later, while trying to sleep, my brain kept playing walkthroughs of some of my other favorite MC worlds.  It's amazing how much information we can store, how I can bring back ghostly images of the buildings from over 100 digital towns.  I'm sure the details are not as accurate as they feel at the time, but it seems like I walked from my Cathedral base out to...

After I spent some time finding portals and exploring new locations, it turns out that the core set of quests specifically sends you to all those places in a sensible level order.  Head to X to talk with Y, then Y sends you to X2 to talk to Y2, regularly going back to the original town.  On one of the visits back to Summer Hollow, it's nighttime and there are no people on the street, carts are turns over and there are papers and debris all over -- at this point NPCs tell you that all the townspeople are vanishing.  I thought that was a nice set of details. When I see other players running through the area I'm visiting, I wonder if they are really in the same world.  Would they also see the debris in the streets and get the same responses from the NPCs?  It would be a serious code challenge to filter the PCs to only see each other if they're in approximately the same quest space. The quests range from classy (find out what someone buried behind the h...

Following my trip through Minimal Dungeon RPG... Stage 46 is Foreboding Castle Stage 47 is Ruins Stage 48 is Cannibal Tribe. The current base level is Town of Survivors.  Not sure when I landed there.  Probably at stage 45. I'm at Lv 242 (8992 HP, 1599 AP, 11665 ATK, 4823 DEF, 1916 RCV).  Ignoring all the little bonuses, my fire set is: sword ATK+1167, ring ATK+1167, armor HP+744, boots DEF+1178. The game is dragging on a bit.  The stages keep getting bigger -- more rooms to complete -- but not much ever changes. Stage 49 is Stone Hut ("Secret of the Cannibals"). Here's something I wasn't expecting.  At the end of Stage 50 you get a message saying "Stay tuned for more content," and that's it.  The game has been completed.  ID. Right before that last boss there was a space that was a crumbling wall where you needed 500 stone and 500 wood to repair it, and no way to continue until you do.  In the Store you can get 5 stone for 1 gem so I spam...

I was thinking of stopping at the end of Stage 40, but this is one of the only game-like apps that runs in a readable size on my small phone screen, and it's perfect for just taking it out while waiting for something and poking my way through a few levels. After Stage 40 there's a new base camp called Ruins, with the first new sace we've seen in a while, called Lucky Treasure.  This is a prize spinner, and you get lucky tickets by watching videos (or if you paid for no ads, just click the video button) with a limit of 3 per day.  There's not a lot they can offer in the way of prizes, since the game is so lean, but you can get keys, seeds and fertilizer, even stat boosts. Stage 41 is Village Ruins, and has new spaces called Lucky Tickets, which drop those lucky tickets.  Also, they got really creative with some of the levels, which start entirely filled with large patches of Dense Fog, and when you click them you get a bunch of smaller normal spaces.  Th...

I tried out a few new apps on my tablet over the weekend.   Villagers & Heroes was an interesting pick.  It's one where you walk around the world looking for people with quests, and those aren't my favorite thing.  But the world is enormous and the quests come in well-written sequences that can be pretty challenging to work out.  Some quests are standard "kill those darn bees for me" or "go get 10 apples" types, but there was a long sequence involving a theater and an actress who vanishes with a variety of clues to look for and return to people. In addition to the size of the world and number of NPCs, there are four or five gathering skills (plant lore, bug lore, fishing lore, mining) so you can always go get more things to sell or skill up.  There are a lot of crafting skills (smithing, tailoring, etc) and hundreds of items you can find or make along the way.  There are announcements of bosses appearing at specific times, and a small ...

After stage 30 comes a new base called Traveler Camp.  One of the quests on Stage 30 did not work: finding the poisoned doctor in the crypt passage, he asks for 4 ghost spiders. I cleared the whole sub-level and even killed 5 more spiders on the main stage, and it did not recognize it.  Oh well, on to the next levels.  I did finally get a decent piece of armor in the fire set, so that set now looks like this: sword Lv 140: ATK+342, total ATK +19%, immunity +16%, crit chance +19% ring Lv 135: ATK+316, immunity +15%, crit dmg +40%, DMG + 15% armor Lv 170: HP+346, crit chance +11%, block str +21%, block chance +13% boots Lv 170: DEF+557, block chance +13%, crit chance +11%, block str +21% Double crit damage. Again, it's very similar to the other sets, with attack bonus in the 600-700 range.  Big boost in DEF. Maybe I'm dense, or I just stare at the phone so much I'm not really processing information, but in the Adventure stages, you don't heal automatically....

A few weeks back I was looking to delete some apps I hadn't played in a while.  I saw Empires & Puzzles which I played heavily 2-3 years ago, and thought about removing it, but once we've invested so much time and levels (and sometimes actual cash) into one of these, it's hard to just click Uninstall. I ran it, and it was a nice homecoming.  All so familiar, there was my strange assortment of heroes again.  Boy does it spam the ads whenever you go back to your base, though, usually 5 or 6 in a row.  No, I don't want that, or that ...or THAT.  The offers go up to $29.99 and more, so be careful what you click on. I got to play their Valentine's Day special event, fighting angry boxes of chocolate, Cupid & friends.  That was fun for thes first 12 levels or so, then got out of my league.  They had a Wild Pets event for about 3 days, and I did invest a few $$ into the summons to get Ferdinando the big dog and some angry muskrat to add ...

Here's a title I was really looking forward to.  It's a huge game, 25 gigs of downloads.  I just picked the default fighter character to avoid getting bogged down in details right away.   The game world is gorgeous.   As it claimed, it was the first major orthogonal map world using the Pathfinder system.  I really should be enjoying it more, but I'm a sandbox guy and an explorer at heart and you start off stuck in one particular castle in one particular story.  I picked up some NPCs along the way, mostly because I have no idea how to remove them from my party. There were some fine choices of UI, like using the Tab key to highlight all items in the scene that you can interact with.  But using the old WASD keys (or moving the mouse off the side of the screen) to scroll the view is clunky.  When traps appear or combat comes up, it automatically pauses to let you make choices, which is nice.  Actual voices performing the dia...

I took a quick first ride on Meow Express and it reminded me of using the jetpack to get around my Minecraft world. So I thought it might be fun for a while before bed. Except that I can't seem to go more than 10 seconds without crashing.  Every balcony kills you, every rooftop below kills you.  Even touching a cloud kills you. I guess there are things I am supposed to be picking up, but it would be nice if I could not die for a few seconds ... argh! I can't see myself spending hours trying to get better at this.  It is definitely cute, but the frustration level is a bit out of my range.

The Humble Bundle site has really come up with some big bundles lately.  I got an add for this one , for charities supporting victims of the Turkey/Syria Earthquake.  It includes Steam licenses for about 60 games including an early access game set in the Pathfinder world, plus Paizo downloads for the Starfinder Corebook and a Starfinder module, and about 10 PDF downloads of comic book collections, all for a minimum $35 donation.  It sounds like this deal is only good until March 8. Most of the games did not appeal to me (either too dark or bloody or just annoying platform games), but my interest was piqued by their inclusion of a bunch of games from developers IN Turkey.  That is just good curation of the collection.  Of the games from Turkey, I saw two with cats in them and one chemistry game, and those were my first downloads.  Sure, there were some big-time games from major developers (Gotham Knights, Ghostrunner, XCOM-2 and so on), but I lik...

Since we were going to the Del Mar Fairgrounds for some events anyway, we figured we would check out the Beyond King Tut exhibit put on by National Geographic. The exhibit itself was disappointing and literally nauseating.  After a 5 minute short film it's just hallways full of text and photos and black lights that made our heads hurt.  The dizziness kicked in right away and by the time we got to the final room which had rippling, whizbang graphics on every surface (walls, floor, ceiling) we just wanted to get the hell out of there.  There was not a single actual artifact in the exhibit, not even a pinky bone.  Just flash with no substance.  Nothing I have not heard or seen before.  Nothing we could not have seen in smaller form on Youtube.  I have no idea who the audience was, but I assume it was ADHD people with no ability to focus on things. There was one game tie-in, though.  I have already covered some ancient games here.  Kudos for sett...

230224 Hacking my way through more levels of this fun little graphics-free RPG ... Stage 18 was Interception. Stage 19 is Conflict, and my level 111 feels like just the right strength to complete it: 1675 HP, 445 AP, 2078 ATK, 997 DEF, 535 RCV.  With some well-timed dodges I can beat 17000 HP creatures.  The overall balance of levels has always been spot on.  Assuming you break every box and get all the bits that pop out, you will always have enough keys and enough coin for the stat boosts. I finally got a complete set of something: the mythic set for double leech.  A new set has been popping up with level 110 gear, the Ancient Set which gives double bonus attack.  I have 3 of 4 of these. Stage 20 is Anpassi City, and everywhere I go folks are interested in whatever they think is in my backpack.  This is a new base level with 3 gardens, grapes for $3K, legendary gear for $30K, and the usual spaces. Level 120 and I can now wear the full Ancient s...