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.