terrycloth

Aside from MWO, I've been playing the new Tomb Raider because I got it for like $2 or something. Maybe $5? It's not really new anymore, but it's the one where she's on an island of crazy people.

God, it is SO ANNOYING. The core gameplay is fine -- the jumping doesn't require split-second timing, and the enemies you fight normally aren't too different. But the quicktime events. ARGH the quicktime events. Yes, I want to watch what should be a cutscene 20 times because there's no logic to the button presses or timing required to do... whatever. Kick a wolf in the face or something.

It also took me about 20 tries (and three deaths) to figure out that the 'dodge' key is what made you drop off a zipline that you were climbing up. 'Down', 'Jump', etc. all made you slide back down it and then automatically jump off at the bottom end. Sometimes I managed to jump off early, but that just dropped me into a bottomless pit. To get off at the top, it's 'dodge'. So logical.

The dialogue is... mixed.

"The copilot's alive! I should go rescue him!"
"No, we should take care of our own."
"But... he's like, right over there. I can see him."
"You need to learn about sacrifice."
"Seriously, it'll take me about five minutes. I've wasted more time searching every nook and cranny for old Japanese dog tags."
"Sacrifice is when you choose to let someone die. Loss is when that choice is made for you."
"Why do I look up to you again?"

Honest, they do! Or at least that's what Spike wants Lyra to think.

I wrote another story in the same vein as 'Feed the Reaper', only this one is less gory (only candy gets eaten).

Dragons Hate Taffy

It's been a while since I posted anything. I've been reading stuff, but I guess I just got into the habit of only posting 'I did this story', 'let's review this episode', etc. I even stopped writing about my D+D games, although I didn't stop playing.

And a couple people from one of them complained that I stopped, which kind of surprised me. I'm not sure I'm going to start that up again. Although I am still writing that My Little Pony fanfic loosely based on one of the campaigns I ran for two different groups, with some situations stolen from other games. It has a bunch of new chapters since the last time I mentioned it here.

rowyn was over to visit last week, which was nice. n.n We didn't do anything really special this time, although we got to visit Tom and play board games with him two days in a row. Terra Mystica was pretty cool. And Cards Against Humanity failed to completely crush my spirit because we only played to three. God I hate that game. x.x

Just with May, we played a bunch of three new expansions.

(1) Ascension -- a tribal expansion, which was much less horrible than the previous two energy-shard expansions.

(2) Eminent Domain -- added a bunch of new techs and worlds, more complicated military stuff (with 'peace treaties' to help out non-military folks), and 'scenarios' where you start with certain techs. This one was also really cool, and we played it the most.

(3) Race For the Galaxy, which added... a sort of side game where you picked up random alien tokens. Only it was really hard to get more tokens than your opponent, and the effects were really, really random. It was kind of disappointing, I think, especially since it replaced the previous expansions instead of being compatible with them, so the main part of the game was back to being just the base game with a few cards.

I guess there was also a random farmer's market we ran into while getting daily coffee + bubble tea. It struck me as kind of expensive, but I guess that's what you get when a farmer's market appears in the middle of Bellevue. And I do still have some of that kettle corn left.

Oh, and Fallen London. Gah. So far that game has driven me insane three times and yesterday it banished me to the tomb colonies which is much less interesting and much more expensive than going insane.

Otherwise... Jurann was going on and on about Mech Warrior Online, so I decided to give it a try since it was free to play. That ate up most of my weekend after May left.

... I am really, really bad at piloting a mech. It probably doesn't help that I only have light and medium mechs and the matches are infested with heavies and assault mechs. Although to be honest I have the worst time against other light mechs. Stop dodging! I'm supposed to be the one dodging!

This week's episode of My Little Pony could have been good. Most of it was good. But there was one scene in the middle that was just so... so horrible that I was pacing back and forth not only cringing but with my hands over my face, praying for it to end, and it wouldn't, and the only thing that kept me from turning off the television was the knowledge that if I did, I'd have to watch the scene again because I'd want to know how the episode ended.

The second time I watched it, I distracted myself by counting how many seconds the scene went on, and deducting a point from the episode's score for each second. So to get it out of the way, this episode gets a rating of -81/3.

I don't know what I'll do if I ever watch the episode again. Maybe fast forward.

( other things that might be spoilery I guess )

In today's My Little Pony, we learn at long last the origin of King Sombra and the Crystal Empire.

Just kidding, it's Spike and Rarity co-starring in an episode in which basically no one else appears (each of the other ponies gets one brief scene, except for Twilight who gets two).

( spoilers )

Overall... it was probably as good as a Spike + Rarity episode can be. If you actually like Spike and/or Rarity... you'll probably hate it. n.n

I'll give it a 2/3 and then remind myself that I've been giving *everything* 2/3 and that I should probably go and watch everything back to back to do an actual comparison.

Again! Again!

...right. This episode of My Little Pony pretended to be all about different methods of learning, but it was actually about repeating some random ancient facts over and over and over again until the people watching the show had no choice but to remember them.

( spoilers )

Argh. I really want to give an episode 3/3 but no, the ending was just too clumsy, so 2/3. Stupid endings.

I blame Diablo 3 for me not getting around to watching For Whom The Sweetie Belle Toils (again) until now (I watched it once the morning it came out).

I also sort of blame the episode. It was just sort of there.

( spoilers )

I think I'll rate it 'not applicable'/3. Or maybe 2/3. It wasn't bad enough for a 1.

A man breaks into your house, while you're arguing with your wife. He knocks you to the ground, then pushes her up against the wall and holds a gun to her head.

"YOU ARE MINE," he snarls at her.

"Get away from her," you protest, trying to get to your feet, but his blow staggered you and you know you won't be able to accomplish anything in time. Besides, he is armed.

"She is mine," he says, in a quieter voice. "She was mine before she was yours, and she should never have been yours. You've been abusing her." He turns to her, and says, "You agree, don't you? I will let you choose. Stay with him, or come with me." He smiles, and lifts the gun from her head and points it at the ceiling. "I promise not to shoot you, no matter which you choose," he says, still grinning, his eyes wild.

She leaves with him. How should society react?

Apparently, my alarm clock updates itself automatically for daylight savings time. This is good, because otherwise I probably wouldn't have noticed, unless I checked the clock on my computer or something of course. I did have to set my watch and the car's clock manually, and those are the things I look at most often.

So, yeah. I was completely blindsided by losing an hour, so why did I still wake up 10 minutes before my alarm was about to go off?

In other news, over the weekend, I wrote yet another short MLP one-shot for the EQD writing prompt. It's sort of an alt-script for the episode, mostly making fun of the really lame monster. And by 'lame', I mean literally handicapped. Seriously. It has to coordinate its attacks between its heads *verbally* and Applebloom gets away as a direct result, although that wasn't really obvious until I wrote this story making fun of it by having it work that way and then was like OH MY GOD ITS SO TRUE.

Poor monster. Very poor. I give it an F for effort.

...

I played some more of Lightning Returns and:
(a) Found out how you get money -- little 'medals' appear randomly scattered on the ground and you can sell them.
(b) I completed a few quests and got another day added.
(c) I failed at a whoooole bunch more quests, including two different main quests. One was 'explore the city and find the codes written on walls'. I'm pretty sure I looked at every wall in the city twice, but obviously I didn't because I only found one code out of four. Then, I went to the grasslands and got butt-raped by all sorts of monsters until I staggered up to the white chocobo and got devoured repeatedly by a chocobo eater.

Obviously, I should have played this on 'easy' difficulty, because I *can't kill the fucking monsters* that spawn alllll the fucking time. As in, after you kill them they respawn before you can move out of their spawn radius.

I kept track, and during the course of the day I got a total of 1.9 EP or so from fighting dozens and dozens of monsters. That's almost, but not quite, enough to heal yourself once. It's just not worth fighting them at all. x.x