Shadow and Flame with Magik

The October 2020 PS Plus Titles are :

Need for Speed Payback and Vampyr!

I knew Resident Evil Biohazard was not going to be an option as it is currently on sale, but I really thought Days Gone was going to be the scary game of the month.  I am excited to pay Vampyr, as it has been on my list and it is from Dontnod who brought us the Life is Strange series of games.  I am hoping Need for Speed Payback is fun and for Walker Dennis’ sake, can just be a game where he can drive around to his heart’s content.

.  .  .

PS Prices

Need for Speed Payback is typically $20, but has been as low as $4, for the base game.

Vampyr is typically $40, but has been as low as $12.

Which is a grand total of $16, which doesn’t seem amazing on paper.  But combine that with the $218 in savings plus Call of Duty : World War II, that brings our total to $234!  Which is truly incredible!

PS Store

Like Street Fight V the month before, Need for Speed Payback as a slew of DLC.  None of it free.

$30 Deluxe Edition

$4 Aston Martin DB5 Superbuild

$10 All DLCs cars bundle

$10 Deluxe Edition Upgrade (which is a nice concept).  Comes with the Story DLC, a NOS color, License Plate, Leaderboard Icon, 5 shipments, 5% rep bonus, and 10% discount on in-game content, plus the Platinum car pack including six cars.

$5 Fortune Valley Map Shortcuts

$2.49 Range Rover Sport SVR

$2.49 Alfa Romeo Quadrifogilo

$8 Speedcross Story Bundle (so two more dollars, gets you everything else from the Upgrade – decent deal)

$2.49 Infinity Q60 S

$2.49 Chevrolet Colorado ZR2

$4 Pontiac Firebird Superbuild; if it looked as slick as KITT, it would be an instant buy, but it doesn’t.  It looks great, but the front is all wrong for what I would want it to be a substitute for.

$2.49 MINI John Cooper Works

$4 Chevrolet Range Rover and Alfa Romeo

.  .  .

Vampyr on the other extreme only has a Hunters Heirlooms DLC for $3, two weapons : Paulinus Aurelianus’ sword, Dragonbane, who was a mythical founder of the Brotherhood of Saint Paul Stole.  The other being Carol Eldritch’s pistol, Baker, who was the secodn leader of the Guard of Priwen.

.  .  .

Reads like most of the comments are stating how it is a pretty average month of games, but most have high hopes for November now.

PS4

Playstation Plus

PS4Deals

.  .  .

My YouTube peeps :

Nathan with PlayStation Access :

Adam with PlayStation Grenade :

Ben with Platinum Chasers :

Adam also makes some amazing Fortnite videos, if you are interested.  I have been enjoying his tracking of the map every week, since we’re still playing Fortnite like crazy.

.  .  .

Here are the links to PlayStationTrophies.org’s guides to the games :

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/need-for-speed-payback/guide/

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/vampyr/guide/

I will probably not go for the platinums for these games, but I will at least knock out the four easy to get multiplayer trophies for Need for Speed, as those are my favorite kind.  Just attempt to play ten races, beat your own speed once, and do a daily challenge.  I will attempt to play the game proper, but once I hit a difficulty road block (pun intended!), I will probably be done with it.

Vampyr has collectibles and requires two playthroughs, one being a No Kill playthrough, and I can’t see myself playing it twice, so I will probably just play like I would naturally, and see what happens.

.  .  .

I have been playing Fall Guys on Walker’s name, as he really wants to create his own Batman with the limited suits he can muster.  I finally earned him a fourth crown, so we are waiting for the superhero top.

It isn’t Batman, but it has a cape, and that’s good enough for him.  It costs three crowns, so now we are simply waiting for it come back around in the store.  Hopefully for Season Two, they add a third row to the shop.  There are pants too, but that would be another three crowns, so the priority is top first, and then we’ll see.  It is pretty cute though.

Hopefully if they ever do more license suits like Batman, that it costs Kudos and not Crowns.  I know the Portal and Gris suits have been crowns, but those are a lot more specific, whereas everyone will want Batman.  At least do a Crown version and a Kudos version.

I finally spend five real dollars on the game for 12,000 Kudos, as they added a white duck to the game, after I just said the night before how they should add a cute yellow duck.  Plus, I’m well pass level 40, so no free money was coming my way.  Walker Dennis had enough on his account, so he bought it too.

.  .  .

So I start every morning playing Fall Guys, and I start my gaming night, either finishing Walker’s leveling up, and then straight into Fortnite!  So I level Walker up once, then I level up myself after that.  It takes longer for my name, plus, then I can move onto another game while still logged in as myself.

Walker just earned the Groot screen saver, and next is the Rocket Raccoon icon, then it is the Rocket Raccoon buddy for Groot to run around together on the map.

Fortnite just turned three years old, so getting all of those challenges done, really got him caught up to where I am in the Battle Pass.  I just earned Storm’s emoji and next is her trail blazing, the part before the glider comes out.  I am two challenges away from earning 80s Storm, but I am not sure I will be able to accomplish those as the weekly challenges are becoming a tad difficult.  The two easier ones are to eliminate Iron Man three times, and get three eliminations in the Woods.  I have now defeated Doctor Doom thricely, but from the few attempts at Iron Man, he seems much more difficult.  Wolverine is finally coming up on the Wolverine Challenges this week, so hopefully he isn’t too difficult to earn.

I also got both of us Red She-Hulk, which is fun.

I have been regretting not participating in the Deadpool battle pass, but I am not sure if it was ran like the current Marvel one.  I couldn’t justify the $20 for Captain America this time around, plus Walker said he would really want it as well, so I really couldn’t justify the $40 for two Captain Americas.  I have made peace with him wanting Batman and buying the suit for him, and not doing the same for myself.  If they ever release a Riddler, that one, I may have to spend real money on.

Thanks to the Battle Pass, we have earned V-Bucks, but not enough to warrant any cool purchases, and I will definitely be saving those V-Bucks for actual characters instead of weapons or dances.

.  .  .

The game we are currently playing together, and is Walker’s new obsession, is Portal Knights, again.  But this time, he is player one, and the game is finally clicking with me.  Or I am just more committed to figuring it all out.  We have two dedicated homes; Dusty Junction, a pleasant desert island, and North Point, a deadly winter island.  Dusty Junction is the second island you visit, and Walker has really put a lot of time into turning one of the mines into a home, and it is super cute.  North Point is a place where I have built essentially a war room of upgraded Workshop, Alters, Anvil, Furnace, and chests galore.  I found out that if we built an Arcane Compass, it directs us to where Portals are.  Though it is hard to determine if we have to build down or up, but I default to building down to mostly success.  Sometimes it is just right around the corner on the surface, and those are always nice surprises.  We both have iron weapons, I play as a Warrior and he is a Mage.  We defeated the first worm boss and are trying to get to the second one, but we skipped over the key island for the second one, so we have to go back and figure out which island’s portal gets us there, but we also haven’t found the second grandbeast’s portal either, so we have time.  I am having a hard time getting yellow shards to activate the portals, but it has been a real blast locating the portals and figuring out the locations.  I really do like mining for gems, and building my staircases either downward or upward.  This time around, we are building actual bridges to take us across gaps, so that feels good to be opening up the islands.  We just have direction that we didn’t have the first time we played it, so the game is a lot better now.

.  .  .

I finally completed my fifth playthrough of Erica, so I am two hours away from earning my 34th Platinum, and I meant to go straight into my sixth playthrough.  Well, I did start one, but kept dozing off in the beginning, so I turned it off that night.

Then Rob with PlayStation Access released the Weekly Store video :

Wherein he describes a new game, Genshin Impact.  It is a free RPG, which are two of my favorite things!

I am not that far into the game, and I am committed to playing it until I have earned at least one trophy.  It looks pretty great, it reminds me a lot of Omega Quintet, which also reminded me that I had to go back to playing Omega Quintet as well.

I probably only played for about an hour or so, but I am really enjoying it.  It looks great.  I chose the lady twin, whose names are Lumine and Aether.  We have the option to changing their names, but I looked it up to see if they had canon names, which I am glad I did as the brother clearly had a defined name.  There was a moment where I was going to name her, Kristie, and be done with it, but there was a thought I had that I was pretty sure she had some fancy other worldly name, and she did.

https://genshin-impact.fandom.com/wiki/Bows

I am very much still into Archers, so I looked it up and the game as three of them.  Amber, Fischl, and Venti.

The game started off as a mobile game, so there is a wealth of information out there.  Except for where the chest is located on the heart shaped rock, as that’s one of the trophies, and once I recruited Amber, I was going to go to that chest for trophy, but no one has written about the location yet.

That website is pretty great, but nowhere does it reference where we recruit the characters, so hopefully I can get a chance to recruit those two before I move onto another game.

Right now, I have completed one of the three temples, and going to the second temple, it looks like I will be recruiting at least two more characters from Amber’s Knight clan.  I chose her temple first as I wasn’t sure if I was able to lose her, but I didn’t, and we’re definitely moving together to the second temple.

Gacha Gamer has been releasing a slew of helpful videos relating to the game, including this handy tier list.

He comes down pretty hard on Amber, saying she is in the lowest tier, but I have been enjoying her a bunch.  We have met Venti, but only in passing, and I have yet to see Fischl.  I want a team of Lumine and the three archers.

Gacha Gamer also has two great tips videos, but they made no sense to me prior to playing the game, so I would recommend playing for a bit to get familiar with the mechanics, and then watching those videos.  That helped me as I had a better frame of reference then.

There are 18 characters, and I believe we create teams of four; which seems like a lot of options, maybe too many, but it is a free game, so they are probably providing a lot so we spend a lot.  Though I haven’t needed to spend any money yet, so hopefully the other two characters are not behind paywalls.

.  .  .

That heart shaped trophy is titled, Unswerving, and YouTuber, Nier Zero has a video up for it!

Thank you!

I believe Kaeya is one of Amber’s friends I am about to recruit.  Looks like a lot of effort is going to be put into getting this trophy.  At least I know it won’t take ten minutes, just four.  Though I wonder if we could just swim there?  From the comment section, it looks like we need a co op partner to have the chest appear, so hopefully I can log Walker in real fast and get the chest.  Also from the comment section, the second player does not get the trophy.  I wish the map section was in the beginning of the video, but it makes sense to show it at the end.  I may have to set another trophy as my goal.

Actually, the Beloved of the Anemo Archon trophy appears to be much easier and I know right where it is!

Thanks to YouTuber R o b for hosting the video!

I was totally tempted to climb that statue last night too!  But I opted to not do so as I was way into seeing where the story was going, but I will go there immediately after starting the game.  I’m pretty excited!

.  .  .

Looking back, I do not believe I updated everyone that I finished the 2013 Tomb Raider game.  It was such a great game, Rise clearly took everything that worked there, and just made it better.  I found all of the tombs, and most of the collectibles.  Multiplayer is dead, which I thought for three dollars, I would have found a like minded player, but I play super late at night, so the chances are pretty low.  Shadow of the Tomb Raider is still new enough where the lowest price is $20, but if it ever dips below $10, I will definitely buy it.

VUDU and all of the other streaming services continue to refuse to stream 2018 Tomb Raider, so I keep checking on that.  I recall there is a Need for Speed film with Aaron Paul.  I can only imagine it is not very good, but I wonder if it is at least an enjoyable . . .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_for_Speed_(film)

130 minute?!  ooof, that seems like a lot of time, I wonder if it would have done better with a shorter length.  I will see if I can stream it anywhere, and if not, add it to my list of films to check every Friday morning.