Bjorn

Frenzy is like Bleed from DS1. A Frenzy meter builds up by certain attacks on you, and if it fills, it just obliterates a fixed amount of your health bar instantly. It's possible Insight might affect some defenses. I know it does affect the Beasthood stat, high Insight, lower Beasthood, so less of a damage bonus when using the Beast Pellets (which I still haven't remembered to try out).

I was actually "wait, whatting" the insight affecting difficulty thing I think I'm up around 40, mostly because I haven't spent any (except for summoning help once) and I've co-oped most bosses at least 2-3 times after beating them myself. I just had no idea that it had an effect other than as a currency and summoning.

Yeah, as far as I know it's a super small team. If he was one asshat who worked at a 500 person company, yeah, I get not necessarily holding the company responsible for his actions. But when he's the co-owner of a small company, that's a different thing.

Seemed like a bunch of people liked it, but since then one of the co-owners of the studio has come out heavily in favor of gamergate and written a few essays on the subject, arguing in that first one that there is an obvious biological component going on that explains why men like League of Legends and women prefer Hidden Object Puzzle Games. Pretty much turned me off of supporting his work.

Wait, what?!

We played some of B2 on Sunday, three player split-screen worked great. The menu screens are small, but much better than the weird, scrollable screens from B1 (the last Borderlands I played).

That's exactly what I do

So I'm browsing Bloodborne stuff instead of working, and just learned that if you turn off the hud, use the monocle and sit down (not sure if that's necessary) you can take incredible and completely uncluttered screenshots. This game is fucking gorgeous. I have yet to find an oath. Oh, something I hadn't praised that I had been meaning to is how nice it is to have two different usable inventories, Square for emergency/combat stuff and the secondary one for bells, notebook, antidote, all the crap I don't want cluttering up my combat stuff.

You'll start rolling in shards and twin shards naturally after awhile. I've got enough to take 5 or 6 weapons up to +6 right now. Make sure to keep an eye out for the new version of the Crystal Lizard, they're called Skull Beasts (I think). They do not stand out like the lizards did, they tend to blend into the environment, and I've found a few that were hiding under or near large enemies, and I actually had to chase them down and kill them while the enemy was chasing me. Oh man, that sucks.

No one else may care about this, but I was super excited. Obscure and Obscure 2 (PS2 era survival horror games that have local co-op) are on sale on Steam for 50 percent off. I've had these on my wishlist for years and have never seen them on sale before.

Yep! Place is super hard, I haven't got through it yet, but I did make some mad dashes to grab some loot, including my new favorite weapon, the Tonitrus. First melee weapon I've seen with innate elemental damage. It's fucking cool. As far as them being in unexpected locations, near as I can tell... So it turns out you can backstab in Bloodborne! *mind blown* It's really, really situational. You have to score a charge attack on an enemy's back, then you'll get the *gong* stagger sound, and an R1 will backstab them for critical damage. Discovered it by accident going back to get my souls for the umpteenth time in the Forbidden Forest. It did make a couple of areas much, much easier. I also got invaded for the first time tonight! In someplace called the Nightmare Frontier (subtle name is subtle). It was great, we probably traded blows for a good 2-3 minutes, bouncing around, firing guns, withdrawing to heal, and re-engaging. I thought I had it won, got a parry crit on him, only needed one more R1 to kill him, but I only had enough health for a couple of hits and he got a combo on me before I could finish him off.

Yeah, I loved that. I actually went back on purpose, because I wanted to backtrack and that lamp is a little closer, and I then found I couldn't fast travel to it. Thought that was weird, and probably something I should check out.

I'm already on a STR build path, so I'm really tempted to put in the few extra points I need to get to 30, but the Stake Driver is a quality (equal skill/str bonus) weapon, and I haven't found a STR replacement for it yet. And I'm sure it would ultimatley be something just to use for giggles anyways, as the most shots you could possible get out of it would be 3, and that would take filling up twice with Blood Bullets. I looked up what the Beast pellets do. Beast pellets and at least one weapon draw on your Beast stat. I assumed there would be a physical transformation, but there isn't. You get a new meter (temp for pellets, permanent when using the one weapon) that as it fills up your damage increases, but your defense decreases. The damage bonus has some relationship to your Beast stat. I'll definitely have to mess around with them next time I play. Oh, I also went all the way through my first dungeon this weekend. Has anyone done more than one? It seemed like it wasn't very rewarding. All I got was stuff for more dungeons, and the echo payout was shit. I don't know if bosses are randomized, but fuckfuckfuck the third layer boss I had to fight. Got through him in one go, but it was close. He was a...

Probably 60ish percent of the time that I click on a spectre, I get nothing. Which is really disappointing, watching other people die in interesting/dumb ways is one of my favorite Souls pastimes. I always get real excited when I find a stain at the bottom of a tall ladder. "Look out belooooooow!"

Yes, it takes 10 bullets per shot Are you talking about where someone spilled some ResEvil into my Bloodborne? If so, I have found the first couple of examples of those. Been really good with getting a parry kill on them, but I'm sure I will start fucking up the timing on that soon, as that's what's happened with both the big cleaver guys and the burlap bag guys.

I always try to do that on my first enemy, so I'm starting with five free bullets. And if I think an enemy has dropped a health vial, I'll fill up with blood bullets, burn a vial, and then replace it from the dead enemy (assuming I'm at 20 vials already). Soooo, those of you who are further along, have you messed around with the beast pellet consumable at all? I've had a bunch for awhile, but been chicken to try and don't want to spoil too much by looking it up. For a weapon, I've actually been rocking the Stake Driver. It hits almost as hard as the axe, but is faster with shorter range. It's transformation switches it between a swiping attack and a pure thrusting attack, which is really useful to have in a weapon. The charged R2 attack is an explosive punch that does almost as much damage as a parry critical, but is slow as fuck so it's mostly a gimmick to use for entertainment purposes. But otherwise I really dig it. I killed my first NPC tonight, which was the right call. First NPC that has set off a red flag for me. He's relatively well hidden in the... Also, fuck those burlap bag guys. Fuck them hard, then set them on fire. They cost me two different bloodstains tonight, one of 35K and another of about 14K. Fucking bastards. I've lost more bloodstains in Bloodborne than I think all 3 souls games combined. I rarely lost a bloodstain of any value in the other games.

That's amazing! I actually went back to my character with the cane for a bit to tonight to mess around. The whip is arguably the stronger half of that weapon, it's range and AoE are actually really good, just takes some time to figure out. There are other weapons that outclass it easily though. I do have some concerns about weapon variety. I've found or bought about 7 melee weapons, and only really like two of them. You can get the ability to buy the other starting weapons pretty early on if you want to swap out, so you're certainly not stuck with the cane if you don't like it. I wouldn't mind the teleport back to the garden if the load times weren't "let's fix a sandwich and go to the bathroom" long. That ends up compounding the healing issue, where there are some good spots to farm, but the load times to reset make it a pain in the ass. I've managed to bottom out my heals at least 4 times now, and haven't enjoyed having to farm them back up.

Eeeeep!

My relationships were almost opposite when I was younger, I was very close to my mother and fairly distant from my father. Now I feel like it's much easier to communicate with my dad, and I feel fairly distant from my mother. Even though my dad is almost diametrically opposed to me in politics and a lot of personal philosophies, he's been much more open to just accepting me and my life the way they are.

Super easy, you have two bells, a summoning bell and a be summoned bell. Ring your be summoned bell, and you get hooked up with someone who rang their summoning bell. Now, they did make one change that is mindboggling bad to me. It appears to me that you show up in their world where ever you are in YOUR WORLD. So you might spawn in and have no clue where your summoner is.

Pretty good, I think? It's obtuse as you'd expect. I'm finding it more engaging than the Dark Souls 2 story. Oh, I forgot to mention I accidentally trolled my someone in co-op last night. The very first time I got summoned into someone's world was in the abandoned village. I wanted to go into someone else's world to take on the mad hunter there with someone else as I had already been killed by him twice (this was before I summoned the lord into my game). I was helping this guy clear out the area, it was obviously his first time through. And there's a secret path with some goodies on it you need to drop down a couple of ledges to get to. He was looking at the ledge, trying to figure out if there was a way to go down, so I was just going to go by him and show him how to drop down. But I accidently walked into him and nudged him off the ledge, killing him. Whoops!

I'll probably pick it up this weekend. We haven't had anything new coop to play for awhile, and this is the rare game that supports 3+ person split screen, which is great for us.

I'm glad I forgot that there were games on tonight that I cared about and played Bloodborne instead. I didn't need to see both the Shockers and another Big 12 team lose.

I'm actually impressed by that. So tonight ended on a weird note. I've been slowly exploring all the branches out of the Church Ward. I found a pair of mad hunters who needed put down. I was about done for the night, but wanted to finish them off first, and thought I had spotted a way to separate them before they killed me the first time. Went back, worked like a charm, killed them both, figured I'd poke around the area before warping back to the lamp and quitting. Found a new enemy I'd never seen before, tall guy with a sack, and....(this may be a significant spoiler, as it was definitely a surprise) I also summoned my first help tonight, actually for help against another mad hunter (the guy in the abandoned village). I summoned a fucking lord who escorted me through the whole level without me having to do shit, and then we roflstomped my third boss. The game went from hard as balls to a cakewalk with a good companion.

I just realized that the lady and I met this week 20 years ago. It seems like it's been no time at all, and like I've lived multiple different lives in all those years. Time is weird.