Video Games in the Brooding Caverns

Hi there!

Today I'm feeling outgoing and I'm streaming a game I find both fun and relaxing - Surviving Mars!

Feel free to come watch if you want, here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3rKMTjsKLA

Thanks for reading!!


Update: Stream is now over, but the recording shall remain on youtube! Thanks for any interest you might show :)
(Content warning for spider intervention early in stream)

... Is lined with Pokestops... One would assume, at least.

Yes, Pokestops.

Three days ago I downloaded Pokemon Go again, of the first time since about 3 months after it was released. I am sincerely blaming my brother for this but at the same time, I'm not actually all that annoyed with myself about it. I'm hoping to use it as a motivator to get myself out of the house and walking beyond the to-the-corner-shop-and-back I have been doing near daily. So far it has worked. The day after I got it I walked for about 4 hours, the next day I walked for 2 (though that was maybe a little shorter than I had planned)... Today... I checked it as I woke up and basically got out of bed just to go catch a bloody Dratini that had turned up nearby. That was the start of a walk close to an hour long so I'm not complaining.
I'll probably do a bit more later once I've seen Cassini off to work. Just meander around the village again a couple more time until I either get to cold or run out of pokeballs (Home is within range of 2 pokestops so I lucked out there.)

Sorry this has been a little pointless and possibly boring, but I was also aware that I'd not said anything here for a few days and I'm trying to get into a habit of posting (and therefore reading) regularly. Anyway...




Thanks for reading!!

(Rich text still not working, wtf.)

So, today has been all over the place ut it has been made a lot better by the finding and installing of our old Xbox 360. It's been... Literally years since I last played it and after a few nostalgia-driven conversations with Cassini over the last few days they fely driven to dig it out and set it up.
And I'm glad it has been!
Scrolling through the installed games on there I found a few that I can't wait to play again (Keflings, Woo!!) and even Halo: Reach was in the drawer still so that is begging to be played (once we have sorted through our controllers and found a second one that works.)

In other console news, last night I found out about Sony's Play at Home offers and downloaded Ratchet and Clank for free. A game series which, incidentally, I have never played a single one of having previously been a Sega and Microsoft console owner. I'm also looking forwards to getting a few more free in a couple of days.

I have been thinking of either re-starting or even just finishing my play through of the Flashback re-release from a couple of years ago now that I have a better headset, though I'm not sure.

Otherwise this evening I'll probably be playing a little more Ratchet and Clank as well as pottering around the house. Might even find our copy of ODST, who knows.



Thanks for reading!!

Sleepy thoughts whilst listening to Harry Potter: What good does snapping a witch or wizard’s wand serve when they are expelled? In book 7 it says that attendance at Hogwarts was not compulsory and that children could be home schooled if their parents wished. Witches and wizards are also not inextricably linked to a single wand although there is a distinct personal attachment that may form between the wand and its owner. All through the series we see different wands going between different people. Ron has his older brother’s want from the start, in book 5 the imposter uses Harry’s wand in the woods at the world cup and presumably uses Moody’s wand for nearly a year, in book 3 Sirius uses Snape’s wand etc. It could represent a symbolic gesture but, again, what purpose does it serve? Yes the wizarding community seems to be pretty tightly-knit and news and gossip spreads rapidly so, although there may be some shame in having to buy a new wand, unless there is some law preventing the witch/wizard from buying another wand then what good does the snapping do that a fine wouldn’t accomplish? A law preventing the acquiring of a replacement wand would also prevent the witch/wizard in question from completing their education, although expulsion and wand destruction are handled by two different authorities. In book 5 Dumbledore says that the ministry has no power to expel a student of Hogwarts and we are also informed in the same book, at roughly the same time, that the ministry could have only seized and destroyed Harry’s wand if he had been found guilty of using magic underage and whilst in the presence of a muggle without good reason which may then have lead to the situation of Harry not being expelled but having had his wand destroyed anyway. He would be a student of Hogwarts still but unable to participate in practical applications unless he was able to acquire a new wand anyway. As for Hagrid being ‘not meant’ to use magic, I think that’s more in reference to him not being supposed to use the fragments of his old wand. Ollivander asks whether or not Hagrid uses the fragments of his old wand which, to me, sounds like he was aware that Hagrid never got a replacement wand but as he doesn’t ask whether or not Hagrid uses magic says to me that, had Hagrid acquired another wand, it wouldn’t be a problem for him to use magic.

Phew. Now that’s out of my head, time to sleep at last.

-Since I failed to keep any semblance of regular posting with this as a ‘30 day’ set of prompts I’m changing it up a bit and I’m going to go down the list in order, but as and when I come to posting them./“/

\”\Anyway.-

-Yet another ‘too broad’ question, in my humble opinion, but I’m going to choose one this time and here goes...|”|


-Cicero!/“/

\”\Yes. This declaration of most annoying character goes to Cicero from Skyrim. The squeaky-voiced, obnoxiously-dressed murderjester that has an opinion on almost everything. Congrats, fucko, you win.-

-Sorry I've missed a couple of days this week. Work has been awful and I swear that it has been trying to kill me./"/

-Anyway, on to the prompt which I've not actually put much thought into./"/

-SO, which character do I think I am most like? I have no idea. There may be quite a few that I have similarities with, but there aren't really any that I could say I'm most like./"/

-As for characters I wish I were like... Again the list is huge but far more easily narrowed down... Once I get my brain to think straight and sensibly, that is./"/

|"|Time Passes|"|

-Ugh. Sometimes I hate having a vast quantity of games in my past because that immense soup of content is making things difficult to pick any one character, or even a small number of characters. But! I think I'd most like to be... UGH! Whiy is this one so hard? I know these prompts are meant to be light hearted but I'm maybe overthinking this waaaay too much./"/

-Fuck it. I'm going to say I'm like *dithers once again* I have no idea. I'm trying to force this but it just ain't happening. I would quite like to be like someone like Arthur Morgan from RDR2. Someone with good survival skills and a fair amount of self confidence and conviction in my own actions./"/

-At first I thought this was going to be a difficult one to answer as I don’t really have much to do with gamers-at-large and wht games are trending and popular but then, as I was getting ready for work, I had a bit of a brainwave which provided me with my answer for today./“/

-A game that I believe is underrated is... *drumroll* Chromehounds!/“/

-Now. I took a bit of a liberty in choosing Chromehounds because it isn’t actually a current game. In fact, it was a pretty early game for the xbox360 that I discovered pretty late into the game’s life. However, I do believe that even when it was current it was a very underrated game./“/

-Chromehounds seemed to have taken influences from games like Armored Core and paired it with squad based capture the flag mechanics to create something rather unique./“/

-The players controlled modular megatanks, called ‘hounds’ and, in teams of up to 8 (i think) fought against each other with a ‘You Die, Your Dead’ mechanic. The entire battlefield was cloaked in a fog of war whicch blocked intra-squad communications which could only be lifted by capturing strategic locations known as COMBAS Towers and the access to communications only lasted as long as your team held the tower, meaning it would be entirely possible to cut off the communication of the other team by cutting the line of towers back to the opponent’s main base./“/

-The Hounds themselves were pretty nuanced and complex. Unlike Armored Core games in which the mechas had arms-legs-body-head-weapons setups, and the orientation and positioning are very strict, in Chromehounds each hound required a method of propulsion, a cockpit and a generator and they could be attached however the hard points would allow. The size and number of weapons that any hound could equip was only limited by the weight limit of the locomotion part and the power output of the generator. I regularly saw Hounds with 6 rocket pods, 4 machine guns and a sniper canon or two, all on the same vehicle. My personal preference was reverse jointed legs and two stacks of two of the most powerful sniper canons in the game, with which I got to be very adept - even managing to hit enemies beyond the typical reach of the weapon by mastering the bullet drop and flight times./“/

-I played Chromehounds a lot but, sadly, the servers were closed down after only a couple of years which speaks to how underrated it was. The mechanics and graphics were solid, and so was the gameplay even if the offline mode was only considered to be the tutorial for the online gameplay. I made a few friends playing that game and it will remain in my top games for a long time/“/

-So the basis of this list comes from Xenoplush here./"/

\"\I say 30-ish because I might group a couple of shorter days together and/or add my own extra questions but I will aim to hit 30 days over all.-

-So. Day 1: Very first video game/"/

\"\This one is very easy for me, as is probably meant to be the intention for Day 1.-
-The very first video game I played was on December 25th 1993. Sonic the Hedgehog. My parents had gotten me a Sega Megadrive for Christmas and it included three games; Sonic the Hedgehog, Flashback and I always struggle to remember what the third was, perhaps Revenge of Shinobi but I can't be certain of that-

-Incidentally I recall hearing an anecdote from my dad a couple of years later that before they gave me the console they had set up the console one night to 'test' it and my mum got playing Sonic and she would lean with the controller while she was playing as though it would make her go faster or otherwise help her play./"/

The tale of Redglare and Mindfang: The perfect example of what happens when you have the Grand Highblood as your auspistice.

Just for fun, this is somewhere to post daft crew reports for Kerbals that I, or anyone else who reads this, thinks up and would like to share.

From the launchpad: “Control, we have a problem; there are only raspberry Swiss rolls on board.”

From the waters of Kerbin: All of this saltwater is ruining the sandwich you grilled on re-entry