Other Games

Just started playing Grim Dawn, an old school-style RPG I kickstarted sometime in the distant past. I’ve been looking forward to this game for quite a long time, and so far – having played about half an hour of it so far – it’s a return to form. My dual-wielding nightblade kicks butt. Nightblades get an aura that debuffs and confuses nearby mobs (at the cost of a constant mana drain). There’s way more additional abilities on which to spend points, and knowing how and when to spend these points is part of the larger game. I don’t know if it’s possible to respec if you want to go in a different direction at some point. ...

[gallery ids=“11194,11193,11192,11191,11190,11189,11188,11187”] It’s #Darsana today! Ingress players from all over the northeast are gathering today in Hartford for the Darsana anomaly. I don’t know the storyline – I haven’t played much Ingress since work transferred me to a location without many nearby portals – but there was no way I was going to miss this event in Hartford. And besides, end of next week, I’m transferred back to Hartford so Ingress will be back on for me in 2015. ...

Incident at the Barn It was an odd chain of coincidences, we thought – Escobert sends us through a secret tunnel, straight into a kobold and cultist ambush. Then he sends us to a mill – straight into a cultist and mercenary, this time, ambush. The burning mill behind us tossed our shadows at our feet as we dragged the prisoner to the edge of the forest. Losing the mill wasn’t really part of our plan, but … at least we were all still alive. And now we had a prisoner who could tell us… everything! ...

Mill map Spend enough time in a kobold suit, and you begin to understand them, a little. The sideways sneers from those who don’t understand. All the gnomes in the lab calling you a “scaly”. But you need to really know your enemy in order to truly ridicule them. Honor them, I mean. Really, two sides of the same cognozzle, right? We’d snuck up to a mill, the mill that the red-bearded dwarf had sent us to protect moments ago, though it seemed like weeks since we’d left the keep and battled the cultists outside the tunnel grate. ...

Cultists on the River I’ve never seen such a tough crowd. I do mean crowd. The humans are stepping on each other’s shadows, and even we more compact sort are having to watch our step. Still, they seem upset, and why? How often do you get to see a DRAGON? I haven’t seen one in a long time. Well, there was that platinum dragon from whom I bought a single perfect note. I keep it in a box at the very bottom of my pack. Someday, the time will be right, and I’ll open that box, and that Note will sing out. ...

Entering Greenest There’s a song I wrote once. Everyone in Elturel was singing it. They loved me there, but what could I do? I’m just that good. They love me everywhere. The song was “Get Off the Cart”… I don’t know if you’ve ever been to the gnome cities beneath the rolling hills of the Western Heartlands, and why would you? You love the sun, the wind, the trees, and why not? Gnome cities were all mines in ancient times, and some still are, with the stone brothers ceaselessly chipping. ...

Captured Huyblein Tower and the two other uncaptured portals up on the mountain on the way home. I didn’t have any resonators, so I just hung around hacking until I had enough to complete the tower and get the portal key. I can keep recharging it from ground level at work (which is nearly directly below the tower on the floor of the river valley) until I get enough L4/L3 resonators to make it as strong as I can at the moment, then head back up.

Captured the two portals on East Hartford’s Town Green as well as the East Hartford Historical Society on the way in to work today. Slowly building Wickham Library and the E. Hartford Police Dept back up to strength. Will check up on the E. Hartford Main Street trifecta on the way home. A couple portals around work are uncaptured, will grab them at lunch. I wonder what happened? Was a lot more activity in this area a couple weeks ago. ...

I picked Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons up during the Steam summer sale, after remembering hearing good things about it when it came out last year. The very day after I bought it, I lost internet for almost a week. This was my opportunity to play through some offline games, and this was top of the list. The game opens with the younger brother remembering witnessing the drowning death of his mother, leaving him bereft and ever after fearing water. The shouts of his older brother bring him back to the present – their father is ill, and to save him, they must journey to the Tree of Life and bring back some of its health-returning sap. ...

On the occasion of my hero, “Muddill”, reaching level 60, an update of progress with my favorite Zero Player Game, Godville. (http://godvillegame.com/) Godville is is inspired by Progress Quest (http://progressquest.com/) and other games that required no input from the player in a thin parody of the RPG grind where the hero is sent off on various trivial tasks in order to pad a game’s running length. Godville turns that idea on its head by taking the ZPG idea… and turning it back into a multiplayer game that now boasts thousands of somewhat committed but nonetheless fanatical players. ...