Gameplay of Scarlet Spider in PS4’s Spider-Man

Posted by John Klein III on October 10, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Games. Tagged: , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Gosh, I really want that new Spider-Man game on the PS4!  I keep thinking of either asking for Spider-Man or Fallout 76 for Christmas, and then getting the other for my birthday in January.  But if dog companions are not an option in Fallout 76, then I might just pass on that game entirety.  I’m that committed to the concept.  I keep wanting to get a PS3 so I can finally play New Vegas but they are still typically a hundred dollars, so that’s not happening any time soon.

In my anticipation of the new Spider-Man game, I’ve been watching a slew of Scarlet Spider gameplay videos.

This was the first video I saw of actual gameplay:

Thanks to GhostRobo for hosting the video.

It looks like so much fun!

This was my second video I found that also added to my hype for the eventuality of me owning it.

Thanks to DVESF for hosting their video.

I prefer the videos that show a few missions as opposed to strictly being free roam videos but both are very nice.

Thanks to kwingsletsplay for hosting their video.

Thanks to Beautiful O.B. for hosting their video too.

There are not that many videos featuring the Scarlet Spider suit so I’ll just upload the other two videos I’ve seen as well.

Thanks to KabukiSage for hosting this video.

Thanks to MaximumGuarded for hosting this video.

I saw there was an All Cut Scenes with Scarlet Spider but I’m trying my best to not spoil the actual game for myself.  Even the ones above, I’ve only seen like the first ten minutes or so.  It isn’t easy for me to watch videos unless I do it at lunch or once everyone is asleep.  But at lunch, I’m trying to catch up with my podcasts (I’m like two weeks behind thanks to Inside of You with Michael Rosenbaum, I’m finally caught up on his show now) and at night, I play my games.

I’m currently bouncing between Fallout Shelter (still!) and Batman Arkham Knight.  I figured if I really wanted to play Spider-Man, I might as well play the other superhero game that I actually already own.  This is another hard game to play as Walker Dennis just likes to take the controller and drive the Batmobile around town, but we’re getting into a nice groove of him wanting to unlock something or those militia tanks show up and I get to take those out, which adds to the progress.  He can’t glide at all, so I’m not sure how he’ll fare with Spider-Man but who knows, he’s getting to become quite the little gamer.  He’s going to be Batman for Halloween, so that’s really added to my wanting to play the game too.

I’m tempted to get a $20 PlayStation card so I can finally get the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle DLC for LittleBigPlanet and I’ll probably throw two dollars and buy Batman too.  I also want to get $20 card and buy the season pass to Batman Arkham Knight, as well.  If the Fallout 4 Season Pass wasn’t still $40, I’ll add that to my wishlist too but if I bought that, I wouldn’t get much play out of my other games.  I’ve been wanting to pick up Uncharted 3 again but my backlog is intense at the moment.

. . .

For a quick update on Fallout Shelter, I’ve made huge strides in that game.  I’m finally getting close to maximizing an elite group of ten lady dwellers to start searching the wasteland for legendary materials.  I have like five legendary outfits and weapons created so eventually I’ll get 20 of each for those two trophies.  I’m 12 more Raider attacks from getting that trophy.  Once I have that one, I’ll relax a bit as that’s the only trophy that is outside of my control.  I just feel like I’m in the back end of the game.  I finally earned the 60 Quests trophy, so 40 more of those and I’ll get the 100 Quests.  I haven’t achieved the 100 Objectives trophy yet, but I feel like I should be close to that one as I feel like I’ve done a slew of those by now but the PS4 doesn’t seem to track how many and there wasn’t a “Complete 50 Objectives” trophy so I don’t have a real sense of progress for that one.  I just keep doing them.

I’m currently have three of them that are going to be time consuming, like successfully put out 45 incidents (I’m at 25 now, I believe), craft 7 weapons (I’ve done two but since I’m strictly doing legendary, the wait times are days long), and send out 10 dwellers to the wasteland (which I’ve done twice now as I’m maxing out Charisma for the other eight).

I finally got my first dweller, Sarah Lyons, to have found 100 items in the wasteland, not a trophy, but most times, they died before getting the total before they come back on their own. So I’m feeling pretty good about all of the progress.

I’m getting into the habit of doing one quest, having them come back, I have a cat that speeds up the return trip by 40% so it usually costs one Quantum to bring them back.  Once they are back, I have Alexander, Andrea, and Ashley train in either Perception, Agility, or Luck rooms.  I have them on a cycle.  Now they all have the rank of six in each of those, so by the time I turn the game off at midnight and turn it back on between 6 and 7 in the morning, they haven’t ranked up yet to the next tier but they are getting there.  I’m getting to the point where the rest of my dwellers don’t have a weapon weaker than an 8 attack stat, so incidents are easily to handle.  I finally have my first male reach level 50 so now he’s guarding the vault door.  He needs a stronger weapon but that’ll come with time.

On reddit, someone made a reference to Heavy armors, which is the highest tier of an outfit, so my next goal is to make three Heavy Merc Outfits.  Those will be counted towards my legendary outfits trophy, plus, that is my preferred outfit for my quest squad.  One of my ladies has a missile launcher which does decent damage the first round, as it is an area effect weapon, so it hits everyone the same in the room.  Which is nice when there are only two enemies but if there are four, it is more of a tickle than anything.  Second round, it usually kills everyone.  So I’m debating about switching it out to another single target weapon but I’m about to create my fourth legendary weapon (I was given the Lone Wanderer, a 10mm gun, earlier), so I have 16 more hours to think about it, plus the time before I can play the game again.

Once I wake up and click on everyone so I have gathered resources, leveled up whomever leveled up, and acknowledged the training as been completed, I sent my quest squad onto another mission so by the time I can play at night, they are already there.

I have 55 Quantums, so now I feel safe in using them, I was trying to bank at least 25 but Bottle (of Bottle and Cappy) has been kind and started giving me bottles and I’ve been finding more on quests as well.

I’m doing quests per level so I’m finally on level 22 and my squad is at level 34 so I have some time before having to force level them so they can be my official team on quests until the end of the game.

For my wasteland explorers, I’ve been concentrating on getting them maxed on Charisma, as that’s what makes finding legendary junk possible.  From there, I’ll max them out on Endurance and Luck.  Endurance to combat radiation and Luck for caps.  Though I have well over 200,000 caps so I really am not hurting for caps anymore, which is another huge benefit.  I’m also able to keep my resource bars green and usually pretty full, except for power, but it is usually never lower than the halfway mark.  Now that I am filling up my Weapon and Outfit workshops with six dwellers each, and the well trained ones at that, the turn around time went from eight days to four days.  I’m also working on the Brotherhood of Steel Diner theme, so that’s taking another six dwellers and two more days.  Once I have that completed, those six can go back to a buddy system and the Nuclear Reactor rooms can produce at twice the speed.  That or they will go back to either being trained for Strength or Intelligence as I could use a few more of those at rank 10, so I’m not relying on the same ones.  My goal of getting all of my dwellers to a minimum of five ranked in Luck is slowly coming along too.  I’m halfway down my vault, playing for five minutes at a time on the weekend has really helped with that.

As soon as one of my ladies reaches level 50, they go off to Charisma, unless that is full, then Endurance and then Luck.  For whatever reason, my three wide Endurance room only tolerates four dwellers when it should be six.  My Charisma room allows six but not endurance, which I wasn’t expecting that.  So I have a good number of dwellers in both Endurance and Luck as I await Charisma training to max out.  I definitely want Charisma to be maxed before sending them out to explore.  It is a lot of prep work that is also time consuming but now that the goals are being met and I’m cycling through dwellers rather well, it is all coming together.

I’m trying to be patient with waiting for theme pieces but after getting three duplicates in a row, I might bite the bullet and speed Quantums to buy theme pieces as I want to continue building all of the themes for that trophy.  I keep telling myself that I have plenty of time as I wait for raider attacks.  Those do seem to be coming more frequently so that’s been nice.  I did end up creating a second vault that I will not get more than 30 dwellers in, as that’s when mole rats start appearing but raiders were not coming any faster over there. It is all random but I’m so close to 50 on my main vault, I might as well stick with it.  It was fun and nice to just make an efficient vault with a three wide power/food/water rooms and one of each of a medlab and science room.  I had to buckle down to get a storage room but I’m hoping to stop there.  I don’t worry about the resource rooms turning red as clicking on one room once it is ready essentially fills up the bar again.  It was nice having a proper vault that isn’t so cluttered.

Fallout Shelter is such a fun game and I’m allowing myself to be addicted to it but it is all in good fun.

I was leading up to describing my other goals with legendary outfits.  Once I have the three Heavy Merc Outfits, someone on reddit wrote that  there is a level 40 quest that requires Institute jumper and an Institute rifle.  I already have one rifle and one jumper so I need to create two more jumpers and another two rifles in anticipation for that mission.  There was a daily quest, also a level 40 something, that required having a minimum rank of six Intelligence so I got my squad to that level.  They are not leveled enough for it at the time, they still are not, but at least they have 6 Intelligence when that time comes.  I lost a day of doing a quest but I like having them prime for when that happens.

There is another quest, like level 24, that requires only one dweller with a junk jet to go on.  I already have the dweller who was equipped with the junk jet prepped for that mission.  I’m tempted to level up the Overseer’s Office at that time so I can start two quests at once.  It is that or just pick one of my squad members to go on their own, take that other dude’s junk jet for the one mission and then swap weapons again once they have come back.  I imagine it is just easier to upgrade the office and have two quests going at once and then not do that again.  I have the caps for the upgrade and that one dweller has a minimum of rank 5 in Perception, Agility, and Luck (PAL), which are the skills you need raised for quests.  PAL.  ECL, Endurance, Charisma, and Luck, is needed for exploring the wasteland.

In terms of SPECIAL inside of the Vault, S for Strength is great for Power Stations/Nuclear Reactors, Perceptive is great for Water/Purification rooms, Endurance helps with Nuka Cola rooms, Intelligence is great for MedLabs (Stimpacks) and Science Labs (Radaways), and Agility is great for Diners/Gardens.  Charisma doesn’t help inside the vault from what I can tell.

In terms of crafting, I have only needed dwellers with high Strength and Intelligence, thus far.  So I need to start training more people to 5s once I’m done getting Luck to where I want it to be.  My eyes got big when I put my first dweller in a craft room and it stated eight days to build something.  With cats and dogs that take a percentage of time off of crafting, and five more dwellers, I got those numbers down to four days, and that’s mostly as I’m being foolish with not making sure the dwellers in the crafting room are the highest trained ones, which I might take the time to do that once I get home tonight.

I guess that wasn’t quite the quick update I thought it was going to be and it is much longer than my Scarlet Spider initial post.

. . .

In Batman Arkham Knight, I don’t feel like I’m far enough in to make a proper post about it yet.  It definitely is a fun game, I haven’t committed a lot of time with it.  We got the second island opened up, Catwoman has been taken by the Riddler, Walker Dennis somehow found the first race that gave us the first key of nine (for her nine lives, I imagine).  We completed the two firemen rescues of the first island, and found the two bandaged bodies on the first island, I’m wanting to do this mystery as my official quest but I’m not having much luck figuring out where the opera music should be coming from on the second island.  I do like how the game will piece meal clues for us, so I know the body should be found somewhere along a room in the Kingston district.  I’ll figure it out eventually, I know I have to listen for opera music and look for spotlights.  My son, on a rare run along roof tops, came across Man-Bat and that spooked him real good and he attempted to chase him for a good about of time and then got distracted or wanted to drive the Batmobile, so we have that side quest unlocked as well.  Barbara is still a hostage of the Arkham Knight, I’ve been lucky enough to not have his identity spoiled for me and I have a suspicion who it could be but I’ll let the game unfold the mystery.  I’m a tad worried about it being spoiled but not worried enough to commit more to the game.

I really need to learn the names of the islands.  The first island, I took care of all of the militia tanks and I believe we no longer have the two ground bombs to contend with.  I do have another militia side quest with towers.  They work for the Arkham Knight so it makes sense they have a slew of side quests of tanks, bombs, and signal towers.  I think that’s everything I have going on at the moment.  I bought Batgirl’s DLC and the 1989 Batman/Batmobile DLC, as well as downloaded all of the free items of other suits and Batmobile skins, as well as the avatars.

I’ve triple checked that there is no Calendar Man holiday trophies so that’s nice to know I haven’t foolishly missed out on a year’s worth of holidays.  That was a lot of fun in Arkham City but I get them not continuing with that.

We have stumbled across a few Riddler trophies/riddles, my son isn’t great about not attacking the green highlighted thug nor interrogating him so I’ve missed out on three tips (not like I’m counting).

I keep trying to write my opinions on the Batmobile but I keep not doing it.

We got him the Arkham Knight Batmobile a long time ago, I just bought it as it had Batman and Hot Wheels and I’m trying to raise him, not specifically on comics but make him aware of those superheroes.  If I had a Local Comic Shop, I would love to get him comics and into that hobby but we live in a world where cartoons, television series, and movies are a thing, so he’s aware of so many of them.  So he’s a big fan of Batman, which makes sense.

After playing the game and driving the Batmobile around, the design of it triggered my memory and I started looking for it, he has quite the collection of Batmobiles once I got them all lined up.

I probably could have arranged it so the black vehicles were not on the black part of the carpet.  The purple car is a regular car but I’ve always referred to it as Joker’s car so it had to be included and the light blue one is Bruce Wayne’s car.  My favorite has to be the 90s Animated Batmobile.  It is so sleek!

So that was my first interaction with the Batmobile.  It reminds me of the Nolan Batmobile where it is more tank than car.  Which I’m fine with as it makes sense and has that certain cool factor about it.

The driving of it feels no different than say Grand Theft Auto V, which is saying a lot, as it just feels like you are driving a regular car.  I feel horrible when I crash into buildings or I watch a cute four year old crash into buildings and anything else on his way to wherever he’s going.  Battle mode is cool, and I’m finally getting a hang of using the Vulcan gun and the rockets and trying to build up my special attacks with the missiles.

Arkham Knight, outside of the Ace Chemical building, kept destroying the Batmobile while he was in his fighter jet, so I had to update its defense but besides that, I haven’t updated the Batmobile nor Batman or any of the gadgets.  I’m just keeping all of those points for when the game requires me to upgrade certain items, or I can’t make any more progress as I keep dying.  I know I need to update the batrangs to three batrangs, I should upgrade so I can do combos at five hits instead of eight and get disruptors for Riddler clues but all of that can come naturally.  I just learned my lesson from Asylum and I know better than to do upgrades as I want to do them, as the game has other intentions and it takes a bit to level up.

Supermassive Games – The Dark Pictures Anthology – Man of Medan

Posted by John Klein III on September 28, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Games, Websites. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

Thanks to redditor, meatball_submarine, posting in this thread:

Any chance of more games like this?
by inuntildawn

I have learned that Supermassive Games, the studio that brought us the incredible, Until Dawn, is working on a new series of games to be released next year.  Their first game is Man of Medan under The Dark Pictures Anthology label.

Thanks to Supermassive Games hosting their own trailer.

That looks super intense!  Also looks like Shawn Ashmore.  I just checked his Wikipedia page and that totally is!  He’s no stranger to video game likeness as he did Remedy Entertainment’s Quantum Break, the same studio that did Alan Wake.  A game I tried my best to get into but I wasn’t good with my flashlight / gun abilities.  Also, it was XBOX 360 exclusive and I barely played with that console.

Apparently, I’m like a month behind on this news but there isn’t an official Wikipedia page for the game yet either so I’m not the only one behind.

The imdb page only lists Ashmore as part of the cast.

When trying to find the link to the reddit page, I stumbled onto the Wikipedia page for Ourang Medan, the clear inspiration for the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ourang_Medan

I haven’t heard of that legend before, but I’m all in with it!

I like how it appears to be Until Dawn but in the ocean, I’m all for how different the two games are going to look.

I still need to get a copy of Hidden Agenda, Supermassive Games’ other game.  I had my hands on it at GameStop but put it down, like a dman fool.

As soon as I can preorder this game, I’m going to do it!  Also, I’m probably going to GameStop this weekend and getting me Hidden Agenda, I’m beyond hyped!

Here is the official announcement on their website :

https://www.supermassivegames.com/news/man-of-medan

Unlike Until Dawn’s eight playable characters, this game will have five.  Which makes perfect sense as poor Emily and Matt were essentially just also-rans.  Five makes it tighter.  Also unlike Until Dawn, this will be available on PS4, XBOX, and PC.

All the games in Dark Picture will be horror centric, so that’s good to know that’s what the studio really likes to do.  Hidden Agenda is a detective story, as far as I know.

Like Until Dawn, lots of branching storylines and choices will be made.

They made the announcement on August 21, so over a month ago.

I’ve started following Supermassive Games on twitter and on YouTube, so hopefully I’ll be more informed as we go forward.

Here is the official website for The Dark Pictures Anthology:

https://www.thedarkpictures.com/

Who I’m also now following on Twitter and Instagram, though I rarely use Instagram these days.

The rest of the characters look like they can be easily based on people as well, time will tell.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8876446/?ref_=ttfc_fc_tt

I’m providing the imdb page mostly so I can find it easier in a few months.  Not like finding links online is that hard to do.

Here’s an interesting article I found about the game through engadget:

https://www.engadget.com/2018/08/24/man-of-medan-dark-pictures-anthology-hands-on/

Thus far, Supermassive Games is committed to making four games in the Anthology.  I suspected it’ll be more than three games, as they would have just called it a trilogy.

Once they game comes out, another one will come out every six months, which seems super tight for a deadline.  I’m sure they have massive teams just working on each one.  Each game takes place within the same universe, but most likely not interact as you should be able to play each game in any order.

So that’s going to get expensive but I’ll have to start saving now.

Each game will focus on a different sub-genre of horror.  So we’ve gotten the cabin in the woods story, plus that was in winter time, Man of Medan appears to be a sudden ship / treasure hunting / possibly ghost related, in the summer time.  Until Dawn was a PS4 exclusive, I wonder if they can release it wide now (it came out in 2015) and put that under the Dark Pictures umbrella.

Aaron Souppouris wrote the article and got to play 15 minutes of the demo (so lucky!) and gathered all of the information.

The game is supposed to be around five hours of gameplay, so half of Until Dawn’s length.  Which makes sense as I was envisioning it being like TellTale’s Batman or Life is Strange, where those had five episodes, and I wonder if this series will have that same interface.

It uses a different engine than Until Dawn, but the games look similar enough that I’m sure there won’t be a dip in quality.

Hopefully, the game won’t be $60, I bought Until Dawn for $20 but I’m not sure how much it cost when it first game out, most likely $60 but I’m committed.

I’ll try to keep up on the story and let you know what I know so if you read something, please let me know!

Home Depot Kids’ Workshops 2018

Posted by John Klein III on September 27, 2018
Posted in: Uncategorized. Tagged: . Leave a comment

This is way late and many dollars short!

I keep not finding this photo on my phone, as I have loads of pictures, and every month, I keep saying I should just make a post so I can find it easier online.

I so look forward to the first Saturday of every month as it is our father son project we do.  Walker Dennis has come a long way from essentially me doing the entire project by myself and him providing some commentary.  Now he has gotten great with hammering the nails, I’ll feel better if he would keep eye contact with the nail but he’s great about stopping now.

Buddy, the nice gentleman who oversees the project, is always a delight to see and he recognizes us.  In fact, there are several employees we have gotten to know as we walk around letting the project dry, and it really is a lot of fun.

Hopefully they show us the image for 2019 and I can make this post much earlier.

Scarlet Spider in PS4’s Spider-Man Game

Posted by John Klein III on September 21, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Websites. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Thanks to this reddit thread:

Clips of Scarlet Spider suit
byu/-ZuluWarrior- inSpidermanPS4

I got confirmation that Scarlet Spider is going to be in the upcoming (September 7) PS4 exclusive, Spider-Man title!

Tom Lyle designed the Scarlet Spider costume that debuted in Web of Spider-Man 118 and I’ve been a giant fan of it ever since!

Apparently, if I had followed Game Informer, I would have been aware of this when it was happening live.

https://www.gameinformer.com/preview/2018/08/02/four-fantastic-hours-with-spider-man

The article implies it is unlocked with three Crime tokens and two Landmark tokens.

In another reddit thread:

The Scarlet Spider Suit is Fucking Beautiful
byu/sceesh inSpidermanPS4

YourHostEdge confirmed that at level five, the costume unlocks so I can go around rescuing balloons and collecting collectibles until I can get the costume and then make that my main costume.

So maybe it is a combination of being level five and needing five tokens.  Now that I typed that, I wonder if adding the tokens together for five is what is throwing off the being at level five but time will tell.

I made the mistake of looking it up but this totally exists!

Look how cute that is!  Funko really knows how to sell these!  Scarlet Spider was a Walgreens exclusive that I had in my hands but decided not to buy it at the moment.  Which is silly as I know the greatest commandment is Thou Shall Not Hesitate but I did and now I lost out.

I do own this Scarlet Spider bust

and his Heroclix

I also own a proper action figure of his but I can’t seem to find it through an image search, at least, mint on box.

It looked like this but this one looks pretty new still.

I just really liked Ben Reilly as a character and I really need to check back into his adventures now that he’s back, and he’s been back for a while now too.

His Spider-Man costume looks pretty great to me too.

I probably won’t be able to buy the game until it is around $30 but still, I’ll add it to my wishlist!

Something else to look forward too!

Here is the costume reveal trailer –

Thanks to YouTuber Caboose for hosting the video.

I like how the suit’s power is to create decoys, or “clones” if you will.

Fallout Shelter

Posted by John Klein III on August 23, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Games, Websites. Tagged: , , . Leave a comment

I’ve been obsessed with Fallout Shelter for so long now!

Thanks to PlayStation hosting the video!

I attempted two times prior to play this on my phone and I just didn’t get it, it felt too much like watching an ant colony and I kept feeling like I wasn’t doing it right.

I figured I’ll get it on the PS4 as it came with a free PSN package which comes with a pet carrier, a Mr. Handy, a six pack of Nuka-Cola Quantum, and five lunchboxes.

Thanks to the following link from Playstation’s website for having the contents information.

https://www.playstation.com/en-ae/explore/playstation-plus/this-month-on-ps-plus/

For providing what was exactly in the pack as I knew it had lunchboxes but that was about it.

Last night, I finally got 50 dwellers and I performed my first haircut and got my second one started so I can get the trophy to get ten hairstyles and then I’m done with that room.

I wasn’t even tempted to play it when Todd Howard announced at the end of the Bethesda E3 conference that Fallout Shelter was coming to PS4 but then I saw people were getting the platinum for the game already and I was like, trophies?!  So I looked into and downloaded and again, had a rough start to it.

Then I got my 18th dweller and the game changed completely for it.  With 18 dwellers, you get the Overseer’s Office and can start sending people on quests.  Which meant the game finally became a Fallout game in my mind.  I got guns and outfits and I’m finally figuring out how to maximize my vault.

Pressing X had this great series of super helpful tips for the game.  They are all great episodes but the baby post was the one I found the most helpful –

As I’m not trying to get the best items or best outfits or be overly powerful in the game, but trying to make the best vault possible is something I stumbled to get accomplished.  I think I’m finally got a good spot with it.  The weakest weapon I have for my vault is a minimum of six, I finally got the handle on what outfits to put on people.  At first, I wanted to put everyone in the handyman outfit for the plus three Agility but then I finally understood the “best room for your dweller” mechanic.  So people who are operating a Power Station, should be wearing clothes with a focus on Strength.  People in cafeterias should be wearing Agility outfits, and people working on RadAway and Stimpacks should definitely be wearing Intelligence outfits.

I have tried to play on my phone again, just because I get the game now but since I can’t cross play with my PS4 vault and my mobile phone, the stakes are not as high for me or my phone doesn’t feel real in my mind, there is a disconnect there.  I would say, my vault on my phone got higher gear faster than on the PS4.  I had three pretty great weapons rather quickly.

The game can go on forever but I’m just playing until I get the platinum, and I’m not sure if I’ll go longer than that as I’m already feeling the itch to play other games.  The game really should be played for like 20 minutes and then try another game but I find myself playing for a solid hour and then having a hard time getting away from it.

I finally also got a handle on rushing a room, and when the best time to do that is.  You’ll collect a resource, either Power, Food, or Water, and the best time to rush a room, which means to try to get more resources, is right after collecting from that same room.  Don’t rush the same room more that the one additional time.  I have a hard time keeping my power high enough, I can get my food and water fully green but power seems to be the resource I’m constantly attempting rushes with.  I also don’t rush rooms if the percentage of failure is over 35% and now I’ve started only doing it as high as 31% failure rate as now I’m dealing with radscorpions, which they start appearing once you have 50 dwellers.  Which knowing that, I was putting off getting up to 50 until I got them decent weapons and now, I don’t worry too much about radscorpions, pending on where they appear, it is either a prolonged fight or a rather quick one but I have to monitor the fight to cure my dweller of radiation or to give them stimpacks for their health.

I don’t get attacked by Raiders as much as I like, I’ve read that is most people’s last trophy to accomplish.  They start appearing at 61 dwellers.

Which I should add, another great resource for the game is this website:

https://github.com/therabidsquirel/The-Fallout-Shelter-FAQ/wiki

Which is a great resource to read and review, I would credit them for finally helping me click with all of the information and then Pressing X was great for the visual element.

A fun habit I’ve gotten into is timing the game so that I can send people out on a quest, saving my Quantums – which in this game, speeds up travel times – and by the time I wake up or can play again the next evening, they are at the quest and ready for me to play.  Or they are on their way back to the vault and I can get them ready the next morning though that doesn’t seem to be working out for me irl.  I’ve been tending to be staying up later and hitting my snooze button too many times and lose my window to play the game but still, they are there when I need them when I get to play again.

I’m finally at a place where my stimpacks are at 55 and my RadAway is at 35, which I don’t tend to need RadAways as much but now that I’m doing quests or sending one person to the Wasteland, I’ve learned I can only send them out with a maximum of 25 so I wanted to make sure I could at least have over 55 stored.  I was giving my person who goes into the Wasteland like five or ten but now I’m going to start giving them the full 25 and seeing how far out they can do.  That lady finally hit level 50 so now I have to take her power armor, her gun (a flame torch), and her dog and give it to another lady to start getting leveled up and gathering caps and resources for us.

One eye opening situation was sending a team out to do a quest and one of them died, like quickly, and I had to start taking the game more seriously, which is what spurred me trying to figure out what hazards I was going to come up against.  I had to start gathering guns and now I can craft weapons so now I regret all of those items I scrapped or sold as I was desperate for money and for storage space.  Now, I have plenty of storage space, I have 112 items and a maxed of 200 and I can easily build up another storage room.  I have a tap of 65 dwellers so my plan is to open another living quarters to get that number just over 100 as I need 100 dwellers to build one of each room and from there, I’ll probably stop building rooms.

I do like how many of the trophies are for things you will do anyway, just that you need to do more of them to get more trophies like complete 60 quests.  One of the harder ones is to scrap 500 items but doing quests and sending folks out to the wasteland, should help with that, I’m only sending the one person out to the wasteland at a time, besides my quest team, eventually, I might send out two, if I could get a second suit of power armor.

I haven’t built a theme so I don’t really know what that entails, I have the room to do it but I don’t have all of the fragments to make a theme much less, have enough to make all four themes so that’ll take a while too.

The collect 20 legendary weapons and outfits, should be easier now that I have stimpacks for days but I’ll want to make another Medlab so I can get more of those as 55 will go rather quickly.

I need to do better to skip an objective with my free daily pass as I’ve been sitting on the same three for days now.  Two of them, I’ll eventually do, complete six quests and send five people out to the wasteland, which I could have easily done and maybe I will once I get home.  I’m sort of at this awkward place where I have 50 rooms and 50 dwellers so each room has a person in it.  Well, it might be like 55 rooms but I don’t have anyone in the storage rooms or the living quarters unless I’m trying to make babies, then I have people in the living quarters.  I’m doing this thing where I’m having all of the babies be born from Mr. Cook but I have a hard time remembering who the original mothers were but I think I finally figured that part out.  I have at least five ladies who will give him more children so I went from 45 dwellers to 50 in pretty quick succession, especially once I learned that giving him higher charisma helped with the speed of making babies so he’s always set in the training rooms.

I like the training rooms as it gives me five people who I can use to help out in case of an incident like a fire breaks out, radscorpions, mole rats or radroaches – all due to a rush failing.  If I’m attacked by raiders or ghoals, my top floors crew take care of those threats.  I was doing it wherein whoever was in the neighboring rooms would help with the incidents but I started noticing that they got XP from assisting with the threat.  If they are training, they increase in their SPECIAL stats but were not getting any XP so they were not leveling up.  Since learning that, I’ve started only using my training crew to help with incidents so that they can earn whatever small amount of XP that is, as I know I’ve started doing that for a week now and none of them have leveled up, as far as I can tell.

I can’t express how thrilling it was to get that Overseer’s Office open and started doing quests, it was so much fun and my learning curve for this game was like, super low.  Which I don’t now why, as the tips and the in game tutorial seemed pretty straight forward but it just wasn’t clicking with me.

So I can send my training peeps out in the wasteland and get that one objective fixed in a hurry.  Pretty much, whenever I send someone to the wasteland, when I turn the game on again, I know that person will be dead so another thousand caps to relive them and then they come back to me.  Apparently they will auto return once they have 100 items but I haven’t had that happen yet.  I didn’t get the trophy for the lone wanderer reaching level 50 but I’m hoping it will trigger once she’s back in the vault but maybe it has to be someone in the vault actually leveling 50 or she wasn’t one of my original folks but I believe I’ve only ever been given one dweller who didn’t start at 1 so who knows.  I’ll get it eventually.

With quests, I’ve started just doing the lower ranked ones and working my way up, I was going to do it by one mission at a time, as there are like eight story quests where each one has like seven chapters per over all mission.  But then that one guy died so quickly that I had them all come back and changed out I approached quests.  You are given a daily quest and a weekly quest to work on but my dwellers are not there yet to take those on.  We’ll get there eventually but my highest weapon only goes up to 15 damage, maybe 22 but it isn’t much.

Even if a dweller who was sent out to the wasteland got 100 items, I wouldn’t have enough space for all of those items but I’ll just build more storage in that scenario.

. . .

This is the habit I’ve gotten into.  I turn on the game, I load Vault 129 (Kitty Pryde’s first appearance!), and I quickly gather all of my resources, from top to bottom, leveling up people as I snake my way from floor to floor.  My two Mr. Handys are on the top floors but I usually get to those before they collect the resources on the floor for me.  When I earn my third Mr. Handy, I’m going to send him out to the Wasteland, all it can gather is 5,000 caps but I’ll be happy to get 5,000 caps every two or three days and then he’ll auto returned and I’ll just send him right back.

I had 22,000 caps and then I hit 50 dwellers and put into place my plan to open a three wide power station, one medlab, one science lab, the barber shop, and another power station (I really need more power).  All of that, plus the two elevators, cost me essentially 12,000 caps.  I got the trophy to increase 20 rooms to level 3 so now I’m no longer increasing rooms as with each increase, if an incident is to occur in the room, that room is either doubled or tripled the threat.

I had thought I had to leave a person in the barber shop, to be the official barber, but there is a machine that does the styling, so now I do have a bonus dweller who I might just put to the wasteland or into another room to get her experience.  Right now, she’ll go to whichever room the person I grab to get their haircut next was in so that I can get the 10 haircuts trophy but after that, she’ll either be in her own official room or sharing a room or outside doing her thing.

My next floor, when I get 10 more dwellers, probably all from making babies, will consist of storage (probably a two wide), living quarters (another two wide, or whichever gives me 100 dwellers as an option, so a two wide but increase it by a level or two until the 100), another medlab, I’ll hold off on a science room and then whatever that room is that you unlock at 60.

60 dwellers unlocks Nuclear Reactor, which will replace my power generator rooms.
70 dwellers unlocks Garden, which will replace my cafeteria
80 dwellers unlocks Water purification, which will replace my water treatment rooms
100 dwellers unlocks Nuka Cola Bottler, which will replace both my food and water resource rooms

Some people take the time to destroy rooms and replace those rooms with the higher tier rooms but I imagine I won’t do that.  Mainly because it is extremely expensive to do so, as I’ve been tempted to destroy my left side of the vault to put elevators on that side.  I accidently clicked a new elevator on the right side and was going to destroy it but I had enough money to go all the way up and it has been hugely beneficial having it on that side.  But the reaction time to get someone from the middle to the top floor isn’t that bad, plus my training rooms are on the right side so it all works out.

Typical me, I’ve become quite obsessed with this game too.

So I’ll gather all of the resources, which pretty much is in every room.  I was crafting weapons and outfits but I’ve built the ones I wanted and now I’m awaiting resources to make even better weapons.  I’ve made all of the outfits that I didn’t already have, I should double check to make sure I have all of the weapons crafted as the game keeps track of weapons, outfits, pets, and dwellers that are obtainable.  I’ll click on people to level them up and give birth in those circumstances.

So gather resources, try to craft new weapons or outfits, I’ll add new haircuts for the next eight times, I’ll start watching for any rooms to provide a new resource so I can start rushing those, if I don’t have water completely filled up, then I’ll rush those rooms but I definitely rush food and power rooms and food almost always gets filled during a game session.  Power though, if I stay in the game for like two hours, it’ll be close or fully filled.

I’ve since learned that if an outfit as luck, there is a high chance of getting caps from collecting a room, so now I’m trying to change outfits to incorporate a luck stat.

I do all of that so that I can check on my two outsiders.  I make sure my quest team is ready for the quest, and then I check my wanderer, who is most likely dead.  If dead, I revive them and recall them back to the vault.  Then I’ll check on the vault, as a few rooms will be ready within a minute or two.  Once every room has been collected again or I have dealt with any incidents, then I finally check on my quest team and start the quest.  Do that and come back to my vault and recollect all resources.  From there, it is a waiting game to try to earn another thousand caps and call it a night.

I play on mute as the sounds can get pretty loud and repetitive so I rely on the controller vibrating to let me know the mysterious stranger has arrived.  If you click on him, you can get bonus caps.

Thanks to FlyingScull for providing the above image on DeviantArt.  I wanted to find an image that had the bars at the top, they have 11 more dwellers than me but around the same happiness level of 84 to 86%.

I haven’t played on Halloween or Christmas but apparently there are special events on those days, including outfits.

I’ve also found the game to be so much easier to play on the PS4 than on my phone, I blame my giant man hands or lack of nails for that.  You don’t need a huge reaction time but you do need to have the ability to press a person and then be able to move them to another room.  Not being able to do that can cost you a person and reliving them can be as cheap as 100 caps or as expensive as 800 caps, pending on gear and level – from what I can gather.

Here is what my upper vault looks like –

Sorry for the poor quality, I have to figure out how to do screen grabs through the PS4 and then upload them to Twitter, as that’s how I’ve read others have done it.  One would think there would be a mode within the game to take a screencap of your vault to share with the community but maybe there is and I haven’t found it yet.

I’m suffering for power and I keep adding more and more three room power sources.  I finally made another three room storage to have a total of 230 but I’m at 150 items right now so I’ll probably be making another three room storage again relatively soon.  I also made a three room residence so I can have up to 106 dwellers so that’s one less room I have to make going forward.  I also got my ten haircuts trophy so I don’t need that room either but I’ll keep it for keeping its sake.

I keep getting attacked by radscorpions due to having to attempt so many rushes to get my energy into the green bar again.  I need to make at least five more babies, to man a few more power generators.  I’m trying to keep those new ones at the first tier so they can handle the threats.  I definitely don’t think I’m ready for deathclaws yet so I have to get better weapons by the time I get 60 dwellers.

I unlocked Sarah Lyons so I have 51 dwellers and she’s in power armor, naturally, so she is out in the wasteland.  I keep sending my one gal at level 50 which I like that idea, so I think I’ll keep doing that with my level 50 peeps as they should be able to handle themselves in the wilderness.  I’m going to have to make another medlab so I can get more Stimpacks but I do enjoy how everything is finally coming together, I just need more power!

. . .

Edited on August 24, 2018

I figured out how to upload from the PS4 to my Twitter account.

I had to had another storage unit as my three wasteland peeps did not end up dying and are rocking out there and gathering so much so I have 203 items with 300 total capacity.  I really have to start getting rid of stuff but I don’t want to until I can figure out what I really don’t need.  I try not to keep any outfits that I have more than four of, so I’ve been scrapping those and any weapon with a power of six and under.  I keep getting low on power so I had to upgrade my power generators from tier one to tier two.  I’ll have to make like five more babies and just go crazy with power generators.  I just don’t want any of my rooms to go dark.

I’ll pump up my other storage unit to a second tier as well as that will give me 346 total space which doesn’t seem like much so I’ll have to either spend the additional 1500 for more space after that or make another three wide storage unit.

. . .

Shopko has this travel mug that I can’t seem to find anywhere online.

For $12, it isn’t that bad.  It is too tall for my coffee maker but I could simply transfer from the mug to the Fallout Shelter Travel Mug.  Even Bethesda’s official site doesn’t have it on there.  Shopko also got a magnet and an air freshener, both five dollars. I bought the magnet but I go back and forth on the air freshener.

I was slated to buy the travel mug with my next paycheck but now I really want to save up for Gamestop’s exclusive Dogmeat statue.

https://www.gamestop.com/collectibles/toys/fallout-1-6-scale-dog-meat-statue/163480

Forty dollars for this great looking statue seems super reasonable to me!  My wife has already politely told me she won’t buy it for me, which I get, I already have twenty put aside so next payday, put another twenty aside and go straight to Gamestop to reserve it.  I imagine doing it through the store means no shipping so it would be a straight forty and it looks amazing!

After that, I’ll get the travel mug.

I still go back and forth on Fallout 76, it sounds amazing, I’m way into the Fallout franchise, to the point where not owning it seems like an odd thing for me not to do.  My issues with griefers seems to have been handled, I just probably won’t get it day one or heck, by month two (unless as a Christmas present).  By the time I can own it, it’ll be well tested.  I’ve been pretty loud about how all I really want for Christmas is a sixty dollar PSN card so I can renew my subscription as that thing pays for itself after the third month of free games.  But if I can get the $80 game, that would be a swell present!

LEGO Dimensions

Posted by John Klein III on July 23, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Games, Websites. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

Walker Dennis and I have been enjoying playing LEGO Dimensions this past month.  I had gotten us to the Prime Time level and something odd happen to the PS4.  We started getting the CE-34878-0 error and I thought the PSN was auto updating our saved file, which wasn’t happening and this past weekend, we got our saved file corrupted.  So I thought “no problem” went to our cloud save and it was barely on the Simpsons level, which is the second level.  All of our progress, our vehicle upgrades, the gold bricks, everything was essentially back to zero.

At least, we’re smarter now, so I knew to quickly get to a million points, go to the Lord of the Rings adventure world, receive the red brick that provides a 2x multiplier, and that was my first goal.  To get to that first million, I highly recommend getting the Knight Rider adventure world, as there are gems for days there, you can easily get to 300,000 with barely any real work, and then you either go into the Knight Industries semi truck, or you go into Devon’s mansion or the warehouse next to his office where R3 is.  Jump out of either of those locations and the world resets itself and you do that three to four more times, and you get a million points/studs/gems.  I go back and forth on the terminology.  So I was putting that entire thing off but Walker Dennis has been eagerly wanting to get back to the Scooby Doo level, Monster Mayhem Mash Up, so again, I’m trying to beat a level a night and the levels are very long.

At least my trophies didn’t get reset, I may have lost my mind if that was the case.

We have added to our list of characters, so we had the Starter Pack of Batman, Gandalf, and Wyldstyle and of course, we had Michael Knight and KITT.  My wife got us Mr. T and his van.  So we lost all of the progress we made to the A-Team Van, KITT, and the Batmobile.

Next, my wife saw that both Aquaman and Chase McCain (from LEGO City Undercover) were both priced at eight dollars.  I had done my research and both are super important to the worlds but Chase gave us a new world so I asked for him.

Thanks to YouTuber packattack04082 for hosting the above video.

I still haven’t had use for Chase’s sixth costume, the farmer one.  I’m sure it’ll become useful eventually.

I also had to redo getting his costumes, the farm land isn’t easy to come across in his world.  I also had to redo all of the gold and the A-Team world, so that I can change Mr. T into the other A-Team members.

Thanks to TheBricksFamily for hosting how to make McCain’s helicopter.

Sometimes, it is just easier to watch a YouTube video instead of turning on the game, loading the game, putting the character on the toy pad and having the game walk me through the process.  Though, doing it through the game, I don’t have to pause the screen, so that’s nice or it is easier to go back a step.  Both come with the pressure of trying to assemble it quickly.  I do enjoy putting LEGO pieces together and following directions, that is pretty fun.

I saw the Beetlejuice set at Walmart and I failed following the Thou Shall Not Hesitate Commandment (the greatest commandment) and didn’t buy it and I’ve regretted it since.

We bought the Marceline set, from Adventure Time, as I saw she was pretty important to the gameplay, plus she was the only one in the Walmart clearance section.  Since I failed before, I was adamant about not passing her up.

Thanks again, packattack04082, for hosting another great video.

So I built her Amp Monster as well and we maxed out all of the vehicles’ abilities and forms.

And our file got corrupted so all of this had to be redone.

My wife bought the Ghostbusters 2016 story pack and that is coming shortly and I bought the Goonies level pack, mostly as it has the 4x multiplier, which stacks with the 2x multiplier, for 8x the collected gems.  I let Walker Dennis build up as he saw fit during the week, but when we played together last, I had him make sure to boost all of the vehicles to get them to the point where they magnetically collect studs from all around them, which is a real time saver.

We have since got all five vehicles fully upgraded and all of their forms unlocked.  We have all of the red bricks we have access to unlocked and paid for.  I haven’t had a real chance to play the adventure lands with him but we have to go back and buy all of the renovations of each of the adventure lands, each one has six but we should have plenty of points to unlock all of them as we visit them.

I was holding off until the Goonies came in but Walker Dennis has been a real good sport of wanting to make progress in the game, which I’m with him on that, and I have to maintain two million points so that I can unlock the Goonies red brick as quickly as possible.  I just want it to get the Rule Breaker achievement in the story missions with ease and to help increase the value of the gems in the Adventure Time world as I had gotten five easy gold bricks and barely had the rule breaker bar filled up a quarter of the way and that was with the 2x multiplier so I definitely need help there.

I also just learned that the giant (than the minifigs) lego bar that turns yellow, silver, blue, and purple, if you hit it when it is a particular color, that color gem comes out.  I’ve been taking it for granted which color gem appears but I noticed it turned purple once and I’ve tested the theory.  So if you see one, wait until it turns blue or purple and break them up at that time.

I’ve looked for a picture but I can’t find one, I may have to take a picture with my phone to see if I can get the right wording of it.

Walker Dennis really liked creating X-PO from the portal Gateway –

http://lego-dimensions.wikia.com/wiki/X-PO

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/X-PO

I’m at the Lego Dimensions wiki all of the time now!

At first, I didn’t bother making him and then the next time Walker Dennis saw the Voltron main area, he recognized some of the pieces and immediately wanted me to create it.

Thanks to cusman for including the instructions and the video of his first appearance in the game.

. . .

We got another CE-34878-0 error over the course of the couple days it took to write up to this point and I performed the quick option of initializing the PS4.  The full version stated it’ll take a few hours so I didn’t want to subject our son to the long wait (though I could have done it over night, I supposed).  Doing the initializing means that everything is erased and started fresh, which I felt pretty confident that everything else was uploaded from a while ago, and if not, I’ll just commit to getting all of that progress again.  I also knew that the bulk of my games I’ve been playing recently were through the PSN, so those games would be easy enough to reinstall.

One real benefit of doing that was that I was at the halfway mark in terms of storage, like 5GB, and now we’re at 1GB, so without Fallout 4 being on the system, I’m pretty sure we got all of that space back.  I’ll slowly add my disc games again and the downloaded games, as I feel like playing them but right now, we are all about Lego Dimensions.

While waiting for Lego Dimensions to full load, and then getting the DLC (the adventure worlds) reloaded as well, I started Fallout Shelter, and it was much better on the PS4 than on my phone.  I haven’t gone back to it besides playing it for that almost hour but it isn’t bad in short chunks.  I should play it like I hope to play Knack, where I do a chapter segment and then play another game but instead of a segment (as there are no segments) I’ll just commit to doing it for 30 minutes or so.

My real grief with initializing the PS4 was that we still ended up with the error so now I’m not sure what to do.  I’ve read that people contact SONY and get a replacement PS4 that way but I’m hoping the next big system update might fix whatever problem we’re having.  Gosh, how I wished I knew what exactly happened that afternoon I was driving home when the PS4 wasn’t turned off correctly.

At least I’m being manic about uploading our saved data (which I’m sure is the root of the problem but we’ve made so much progress that I have to live with the threat of the saved file being corrupted) after beating each story mission.  I have a suspicion that it is related to Chase McCain as the game seems to have an awkward pause in-between his costume changes.

The real problem with initializing the PS4 was that my son lost all of his trophies on his guest account.  He didn’t seem to mind, as he’s four, but we played for maybe ten minutes and all of a sudden, he earned like seven trophies, so he’ll probably get the bulk of them back as we play together.

. . .

We are expecting the 2016 Ghostbusters story pack to come in as well as the Goonies pack.  I’m on the Phantom Zone level of the story (the Ghostbusters one), so I’m three more levels to catching up where we left off.  Its been pretty fun going back as now that we have Chase McCain and Marceline, we’re able to get even more minikits than before.

With the trailers and teases for the 13th Doctor coming up, I’ve been really wanting to get back into Doctor Who so we watched the Husbands of River Song Christmas special.  Walker Dennis was really into it until the ship they were on started to crash and then he got a tad scared, which is super cute.  But now I really want that Doctor Who level pack, it is still over $20 but I’m not sure if I can wait until it is under $20 but I’ll give it another month.  I imagine it won’t go down in price that much, due to the franchise still being very popular and the TARDIS being pretty useful in the game.  Our son started calling this other toy of his “Doctor Who box” and that was pretty cute too.  I can’t believe I don’t have a toy of the TARDIS, I guess I never came across one that was cheap enough or not a Christmas ornament.

I also can’t believe that from 2015 to 2016, there was no new episodes of Doctor Who, that sounds amazing to get BBC to commit to doing that.  I was confused as Husbands of River Song and Return of Doctor (Rey) Mysterio were both Christmas episodes and I had to read those Wikipedia pages a couple times as I thought there would be a season in-between them but nope, there sure wasn’t.

I really did enjoy Jenna Coleman as Clara Oswald, I keep thinking that she’ll probably be ranked as my favorite of the companions, they (Steven Moffat and his crew) did such a great job with her character and I really like Coleman as an actress too.

 

June 30, 2018 – S&FwM’s Fifth Birthday!!!

Posted by John Klein III on July 2, 2018
Posted in: Retrospective. Tagged: . Leave a comment

We turned five years old on Saturday!  We’re doing it!

Like always, here’s our latest stats!

All Time Views :                     163,203
Visitors                                   74,322
Posts                                       1,482
Comments :                          339
Review Posts :                      814
Posts :                                  1,482
Categories :                           39
Tags :                                  1,365
Followers (Blog) :                176
Followers (Twitter) :         459
Followers (Facebook) :       24
Followers (Tumblr):            50
Followers (Pinterest):         82
Followers (Total) :              791

At 3,602  views – our most popular post is still my post about Bounce Patrol.

At 1,468 views – our most popular comic review has been New Avengers 51, beating out last year’s Death of Wolverine 3.

Best Ever Single Day View : 275 -July 24, 2014 . I imagine this must still be it, it is the only stat I can’t recreate it.

Best Month : May 2018, with 6,157 views

I’m still a tad obsess with getting my visitors from countries with nine views to ten views so if you know anyone in Cape Verde, Guyana, Laos (still!), and Armenia, please let them know they are always welcomed back. Moldova went from 9 to 11 from last year.

Once again, thank you, all of the visitors who have made all of this possible – I wouldn’t keep doing this if it wasn’t for the constant encouragement of visitors.  Thank you.

I’m trying to do a better job of thinking of posts and maybe I should just bite the bullet and start doing posts that are barely 50 words but I never think that’s worthy of a full post but if I do enough of those, maybe it’ll ignite a desire to do longer posts. I’m just not really doing anything besides being the best husband and father I can be and that’s been cutting into my time to do other posts. I should just do posts regarding the television series and movies I’ve seen. I just have to get back into the writing habit.

Thank you again for everyone who has come to the blog, even with the lack of reviews of current comics. People do seem to be coming for older reviews.

Right now, I’m making some slow progress in Lego Dimensions. We saw Incredibles 2 in the theater, and really enjoyed it. Last night, we got an hour into Last Jedi and hopefully we can get back to it relatively soon. Its just hard to find time to do everything I want to do, there are only so many hours in the day but I’m going to work harder with the blog as I do enjoy the outlet it provides.

 

Until Dawn

Posted by John Klein III on June 6, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Games, Websites. Tagged: , , , . Leave a comment

I finally got Fallout 4 platinum-ed and I had Walker Dennis pick out my next game (a traditional I’m going to continue to do, as it was pretty cute) and he selected Until Dawn.

Thanks to PlayStation for hosting the launch trailer.

This was probably my most anticipated game that I receieved for the PS4.  My wife couldn’t find a copy of it to add to the Christmas bundle of games so she got it for my birthday in January.  I just was able to start playing it recently due to finally getting Fallout 4 out of my system, though I could easily jump back into that game but I think it is good to take a break from it.  A nice long break from it as it was all consuming.

I spent a lot of time looking into Until Dawn and it sounded like an amazing game.

What initially sold me what the Honest Game Trailer for the game –

Thanks to Smosh Games for hosting their own video.

Which, thankfully, by the time I saw this prior to Christmas, and by the time I started playing the game in May, I had forgotten most of the trailer though there were moments from that I couldn’t explain and I didn’t want to watch it again without spoiling myself.  What really really sold me on it was this amazing line –

 

Thanks to Tumblr user, sodiumcqueen, for hosting the above image.

Emily’s “Understand the palm of my hand, bitch” was a line that captured my imagination and I wanted it to become my new catchphrase and I desperately wanted to understand the context of the situation.  It is a very intense moment in the game.  She’s slapping Ashley in the above scene and pending on how you got there, Mike has a tough decision to make and Ashley has an awkward decision to make after that.

So the game takes place a year after Josh’s twin sisters had died and the eight friends have come back together the following year to hang out.  Things go horribly wrong almost immediately.  There is a psycho who starts terrorizing them but there is an even larger more deadlier threat beyond him.

There are three ongoing mysteries in the game:  What happened to the twins, who is the mystery man, and what happened in the mines in 1952.

The game has eight characters, four boys and four ladies.  The boys are Mike, Chris, Josh, and Matt.  You barely play Matt.  The ladies are Sam, Emily, Ashley, and Jess.  You barely play as Jess.  At least, I barely did, as Mike, her boyfriend, was not fast enough to catch up to her and she was the first character I couldn’t save.  My initial play, I ended up getting Jess killed, and like a real idiot, I got Mike and Ashley killed as I had Sam flip the switch way to early and I blew up the lodge instead of waiting one more time, so I had to replay Chapter 10 immediately to correct that.  Josh also died but I fixed that by finding the journal that makes him live so I lucked into that.

Once you beat the game, you can either start a new game, or replay a chapter and continue from that point forward.  I’m on my second playthrough now, where I try to keep everyone alive.  I’m in the middle of Chapter 6 and I got Jess to survive through Chapter 4 so I’m well on my way, Matt is still alive and Ashley and Chris are super scared in the basement.  I’m really loving this game.

Another fun aspect of the game, is you can turn on global statistics so you can see what option was the more popular decision.  Of course, I’m choosing the less popular ones to mess with the statistics.  The game out  August 2015, so the majority has long since spoken.

The reddit page for the game isn’t as active as it first was, I imagine, but there is a loyal group of people on it.

https://www.reddit.com/r/untildawn/

This is the website I’ve been using for the trophy clean up –

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/until-dawn/guide/

My plan was to initially do my first playthrough, with no guidance (which I did), then a playthrough where everyone lived, a global statistic playthrough where I choose the least popular option and another one where they all die.

I’ve decided to flip the last two, as I do enjoy trophy hunting, I’m not sure if I’ll get the platinum as collectible trophies (ironically) are my least favorite trophies.  Well, besides multiplayer ones, unless it is simply, log into multiplayer, successfully play the first one, or whatever Uncharted 2’s multiplayer trophies were, I was able to successfully do those two, and never went back to it.

Which were Complete One Cooperative Multiplayer game and Complete One Competitive Multiplayer game, thanks to

https://www.playstationtrophies.org/game/uncharted-2-among-thieves/trophies/

for having the answer to that question!

It appears most of the trophies I’ll end up getting with the everybody dies trophy, so that’s why I want to do that one third.  I figure, by that point, I would have most of the clues and totems so I’ll make the decision about finding those and getting the three collectible trophies by that point.  Which, if I’m looking at the guide correctly, would be the final three trophies and that already feels annoying to me so I probably will collect all of the clues, as I really do enjoy the story so it makes sense to get the back story of those three events.

Especially after my fourth fun playthrough with the choosing the least popular decisions.

There is a companion app that won’t work on my Samsung Galaxy S7, so that’s disappointing.  The companion app for Beyond : Two Souls also doesn’t work with my phone so I sent feedback for both of those apps but I doubt anyone cares this far removed from the game releases.

Another fun thing I hadn’t realized about the game is that they actually casted known actors for most of the roles.

Thanks to Gaming Since Gaming for hosting this video.

I keep referring (for myself) to the Wikipedia page, so here is that website:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Until_Dawn

Josh is played by Rami Malek, who I apparently saw in Twilight Breaking Dawn Part 2 but he’s probably well known from Mister Robot and the upcoming Freddie Mercury bioflick, where he plays Mercury.   He is also Pharaoh Ahkmenrah from the Night at the Museum films but I only saw the first one and I sort of recall the pharaoh character.  He was also in three episodes of 24, during season eight, the Freddie Prinze Jr. season.

Ella Lentini plays both twin sisters, Beth and Hannah.  I don’t recognize any of her credits.

Hayden Panettiere plays Sam, the main lady from the game.  We all know her from Heroes and Nashville, amongst a slew of other projects.

Brett Dalton plays Mike, the main guy from the game.  Who I immediately recognized and figured Mike was the psycho (he isn’t) or was going to betray the characters at some point (he doesn’t).  I thought that as he’s Ward from Agents of SHIELD, where that’s exactly what he does, on multiple occasions.  Heck, he even was a bad guy who was secretly good in the Framework, so he can’t be trusted.  I’m not a fan of Ward, at all.

Noah Fleiss is Chris, who was apparently in Storytelling.  Which I only really remember Selma Blair’s section of that film (the first half) and Fleiss is in the second half, and I only remember Conan O’Brien appearing in that story as himself.

Galadriel Stineman plays Ashley, who was in season four of The Middle, a show I don’t watch but that looks to be her biggest role to date.

Nichole Bloom is Emily, who I know her from Shameless as Lip’s college girlfriend, who I really liked.  Lip was my favorite character on that show until they broke him and I started losing all interest in the show but it took my like seven seasons to just give up on it.  She’s in Project X which Malek is also in so I might have to watch that, it was on my watchlist before but I never got around to it.  Stineman was also on Shameless, apparently, but she wasn’t on the List of Characters list so it must not have been a large role.  Bloom wore glasses on Shameless and that threw me off, so that disguise clearly works!  She was in seasons four and five of Shameless, better in four.

Jordan Fisher is in the thankless role of Matt, Emily’s boyfriend.  I mostly know him from winning Season 25 of Dancing with the Stars with Lindsay Arnold, and via that show, I know he was part of Hamilton.  He must have been one of the dancers in Teen Beach 1 and 2 as I don’t recognize him from those films.  He may have been on Teen Wolf after we quit watching it due to MTV’s messed up schedule around season three.  he’s going to be Seahawk on the upcoming Netflix She-Ra show which I hope is good.

http://he-man.wikia.com/wiki/Sea_Hawk

I don’t recognize that dude at all.  Like Bow, but a pirate?  I guess that is the motivation there?

Meaghan Martin is Jess, Mike’s girlfriend, who I’m hoping to see more of in my second playthrough.  She’s in both Camp Rock films, but I only got like ten minutes into and lost all interest.  It was at whatever minute mark where Demi Lovato is the chef’s daughter but she doesn’t want people to know she’s the daughter of the chef and so has to hide that fact.  Which is dumb so I quit.  Also, Demi is way young in the film and that felt weird.  Martin is also in the television series 10 Things I Hate About You and Awkward, which I’ve been tempted to watch Awkward but I haven’t done it.  Too many episodes and that was at season three, who knows how many seasons it is now.  I simply clicked the link and there is five seasons.  She also provides the voice of Namine in the Kingdom Hearts games, and Panettiere provides the voice of Kairi in those games.  So there are some crossovers but not many.

Larry Fessenden, who co-wrote Until Dawn plays the Stranger.  Apparently, he wrote, directed and editted a movie titled, Wendigo, that I have to watch now.

Rounding out the adult cast is Peter Stormare, as Dr. Hill.  I know him from Season One of Prison Break.  He’s been in a slew of films and television projects and heck, he was even the voice of Dregg in the 2012 Ninja Turtles cartoon.

I played TellTale’s first Batman game, and really want to play the second one once it is out on disc, so I was used to the play style.  You move the characters and interact with the environment via pressing X or by quick time actions using the square, triangle and circle buttons.  R2 to pick up things, R1 to get to the menu of clues, and L1 to put a little pep in your step.  I used that mostly during Chapter 10 as I knew what to expect.

It really is such a fun game and I enjoyed it so much!

I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as NyxRising Industries though.

I stumbled across their ten part series, The Blackwood Files, on YouTube.

Thanks to them for hosting their own video.

I saw the first episode, Until Dawn retold via found footage and I’m looking forward to watching the rest of the series and seeing how they incorporate everything.  The first episode is barely 16 minutes so pending on the length of the next nine episodes, I should be able to knock them out relatively soon.  I saw all ten episodes and these are all simply amazing.

You could probably safely skip to Episode 8, to get into the true elements from Until Dawn.

Then nine and ten are pretty amazing and super faithful to the game – all things considered.

Their portrayal of Chris could have been a tad better, but I like what they did with him and all of the other characters.  There are several Community references which I appreciated.  There is a fun silly bonus episode as well as a wrap party video that I would recommend.  There is also a three hour live stream video that I think I’ll pass on at this moment, as I spent a lot of time this past weekend in the world of Blackwoods Files.  I didn’t play the game as much, as this video series was satisfying that itch.

Looks like they do a lot of fun videos like this.

https://nyxrising.com/

So I’m sure their other video series are of similar quality.

The game is a PS4 exclusive so if you have the system, I highly recommend it.  I read on reddit that Sony announced the PS5 is a couple years away.

Lastly, another great resource for the game is this site –

http://until-dawn.wikia.com/wiki/Until_Dawn

I wish it didn’t have the black background to be more work friendly but maybe I shouldn’t be looking at the site at work, which I don’t do.  Lots of great information on there, especially their character pages.

. . .

A kind reddit user, jayderaine, introduced me to this cool website –

https://howlongtobeat.com/user.php?n=jackalsiii

As they were discussing in a thread how to chose which game to select in your backlog, and many said to based the decision off of the length of the game.  I hadn’t realized there was a website that kept track of how long it took to finish the main portion a game, and how long to fully complete the game.  Which is a fun thing to keep track of and so I took the less than ten minutes to select my current backlog and it wasn’t that bad.  Plus, I’ve been needing a quick guide to which games I own as there is usually two or three of them that I forget about.  So just for my own knowledge, here is the official list of games I have.

Physical Copy

Grand Theft Auto V

Last of Us Remastered

Uncharted Collection, I’m playing Uncharted 3 on it

Uncharted 4

Uncharted : Lost Legacy

Batman : Arkham Knight

Life is Strange

Fallout 4

LittleBigPlanet 3, I still need to buy the TMNT on there, as they are so cute!

Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy

Inside + Limbo

Flashback Classics Vol. 2, I bought it for my wife’s love for Maze Craze.

LEGO Dimensions

Until Dawn

Fallout 4

Digital Copies

Thanks to the PSN Free Games, I got these added to my backlog

Knack

Beyond : Two Souls

Bloodborne

Bombing Busters

Clare : Extended Cut

Darksiders II

Forma.8

Mad Max

Mighty No. 9

Psycho-Pass : Mandatory Happiness, took me so long but I finally finished one storyline with the guy and now I’m playing it again with K for one more trophy and then I’m pretty much done with it.  It got really interesting towards the end.

Ratchet & Clank (2016)

TrackMania Turbo, I love how this game keeps track of me and the other 511 Montana racers.  That’s a fun statistic.

So a pretty decent back log of games.

Fallout 76

Posted by John Klein III on May 30, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube, Games, Websites. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

Like most people yesterday, I was pretty clued to reddit and Twitter.

My phone told me that Bethesda was going to make an announcement soon.

Bethesda’s Twitter page had this –

Their Twitch channel had this as the main item –

https://m.twitch.tv/bethesda/profile

So I followed that, on my phone, at the top of every hour.

reddit was the true hero yesterday.

This thread had the various fun events that broke up the live stream –

Here's all the little events that have happened during the stream so far. (Whisper guy, thumbs up, etc.)
byu/PM_ME_CODES_4_STEAM inFallout

with most of the actual discussion and time killing taking place in this thread –

Bethesda Softworks Twitter: #PleaseStandBy
byu/RebelLandShark inFallout

With it all leading up to this teaser trailer!

Thanks to Bethesda Softworks for hosting their own video.

It is a short trailer a minute and 34 seconds but it is glorious!

Lots of speculation going on, naturally, but answers will be given on Sunday, June 10, at 6:30pm, and you best believe I’ll be following that news that evening.  What we can tell is that it takes place in West Virginia, which could be super close to Fallout 3’s DC location.

From the Fallout Wiki –

fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Vault_76
Vault 76 was a controlled vault, so not one of the experimental ones.  Which is nice for them!  It was supposed to open 20 years after the great war so this could take place before Fallout 3, even!  The year would be 2102 and had 500 occupants.  It is referenced in both Fallout 3 and 4.

I’m so pumped as this could be my first Fallout game that I actually buy day one!  I’ve been super late to Fallout 3 and Fallout 4 and completely missed out on Fallout New Vegas, which I was hoping they were going to announce a remaster of that one just so I can finally play it.

Obsidian had this awesome tweet –

which was pretty fun and I’m sure they were getting questions galore.

The Call of Duty peeps apparently put up their own Please Stand By feed that is also pretty fun.

Apparently Bethesda did this way back when Fallout 4 came out, pretty much exactly the same way.  Two weeks before E3 and with a 24 hour tease before a teaser trailer.  So that’s all pretty good and fun for me.

Whenever I take Walker Dennis to Target for our quest for new Hot Wheels, we keep seeing a Fallout Wallet and these Fallout Shot Glasses –

https://www.target.com/p/fallout-shot-glass-set/-/A-52677207

Apparently the wallet isn’t on their website anymore but I wouldn’t mind the shot glasses now.  It felt silly before but I’m all about Fallout again!

When we got our new Galaxy S7 phones back in February, my wife had me look for a phone case for mine and I thought about getting a Fallout related one but didn’t find one plus I thought it would be silly to have a constant thing related to the game, with me at all times, but now I sort of regret not buying one.

The two I’m able to find now are not available and I’m just going to tell myself that was the case then too.  Maybe I’ll get a new one once the game comes out.

I’m currently playing Until Dawn and working on a post for that game but I wanted to get my thoughts about Fallout 76 while it was fresh and current.

 

What’s a Computer Commercial

Posted by John Klein III on May 23, 2018
Posted in: Fun With YouTube. Tagged: , . Leave a comment

Thanks to Apple for hosting their own commercial.

This is a tad older but it was what started making me take note of which commercials were really starting to annoy me.  If only they didn’t run nearly as long as they do, they wouldn’t have such a lasting impression.

If you stream your entertainment a couple months ago, you would have been bombarded with this commercial.  It seems fine and dandy until literally the last couple seconds.  That nice lady simply asks what the girl is doing on her computer and that response.  What’s a computer?  Like girl, you know what a fucking computer is!

Irritates me so much!

Some streaming sites have no supervisor or anyone apparently watching their ads – or worst, are aware of the problem and are not going to fix it – like the CW app.  They will air a commercial, and then immediately air the exact same commercial.  Some will even air the same commercial thrice times!  Like, is no one watching this?  When I worked for KSWT (a CBS officiate) in Yuma, we watched that channel and knew which commercials aired if one aired twice, someone was looking into it the next day.  Maybe those streaming channels don’t have many different advertisers or someone has an exclusive advertising deal but that sure doesn’t convince me to purchase their product as I haven’t.  I guess they run the risk of free press but it isn’t positive press but if they aren’t talking about you, you aren’t doing it right, is the old adage.