Orv

I've been looking forward to this for a while, but watching those dev diaries concerns me. You can see them chainswording plenty of dudes in the collarbone, but they're decidedly intact. Plenty of blood! No floppy bits. And I mean really, it's GRIMDARK 40K, we need more bloody floppy bits.

Because to my knowledge (the Thumbs I have on my Steam list being the extent of this knowledge), Anvil/Purple and I are the only ones playing this, so I'm going to put this here instead of making an entire thread for it. Terraria OR Hipster Minecraft OR There Is Something Deathly Wrong With You People So let me disclaimer this before I start. I have; 60-65 hours played Every piece of equipment in the game has at some point been in my possession (and I'm currently clad in and wielding what is considered "endgame" equipment.) I have a base that goes 1254 feet into the earth and is made of every material in the game, except Ebonstone, and you'll learn why later. Finally, in addition to the disclaimer, I'd like to apologize to your free time and Toblix, this is going to be long, and a review of sorts. (Though if this were anywhere else on the internet, I'd expect people to not read all of it.) ----------------------------------------------- So Terraria. Let's get the obvious out of the way. Is it inspired by Minecraft? Yes, absolutely, you'd be incredibly foolish/blind not to realize this. The issue that you run into with that comparison is that Terraria is such a rich, complex set of systems that there's, well, actually a game there. As much as I love Minecraft, it has absolutely zero set objectives. Everything you do in Minecraft is a result of your own impetus. This is where Terraria begins to do things differently. From starting out with a wooden pick and axe, to making copper, iron, silver and finally gold armor, you are slowly (or quickly) working through a process of equipment progression. The four aforementioned materials make up what is referred to as the "mineral tier" and is where you'll be spending a lot of your time in the game. As I said, you start off with two simple items. A pickaxe and an axe proper alow you to do two things; mine anything that the ground consists of (to a point) and cut down trees. Here's where you run into another Minecraft comparison, material quality. The simplest material in the game world is dirt, with the most elaborate being hellstone. Your first issue in material quality is running into ebonstone, which is simply stone that has been Corrupted. Corruption is an area on every Terraria map that consists of terrible, terrible things. Flying cyclopian teardrops of evil and pestilence called Eaters of Souls accost you at every turn in the Corruption, and gigantic, multisegmented worms do their best to knock you into chasms. Chasms are where the game first runs into its serious progression scale. You've been mining silver and gold for a few hours now, you're in mostly golden equipment and you decide to go have a nose about the Corruption. You carefully make your way down a chasm and can see, just out of your reach, a shadow orb. Breaking enough shadow orbs spawns the first boss of the game, the Eater of Worlds. Essentially a hundred Eater of Souls chained together, he's no joke. But how do you get there? Trying to mine the ebonstone with your golden pickaxe has no results, but what about those bombs that you found while spelunking? No dice there either, but you do seem to remember the demolitionist selling dynamite. . . The dynamite does the trick and suddenly you're blasting shadow orbs wherever you find them. Eater of Worlds has spawned! The purple message flashes across your screen and you hear a swift digging sound. You explode into viscous chunks of human and spawn back at base. You have no earthly idea what happened, but suddenly the giant worm that just murdered you is in your house, killing your dudes. After a pitched battle of who knows how long, the area in and around your house is littered with worm parts and you have demonite ore. Now begins the semi-fast track towards the end game. You kill the Eater of Worlds again, kill the Eye of Cthulu for fun, and you're clad in Shadowscale armor, a Nightmare Pickaxe in hand and you're ready to go into the dungeon. From here everything spirals into the endgame and hours later you're decked in armor made from the very ground of hell and wielding an extendo-mace that ruins every boss in the game with a few hits. You've "beaten" the game. The developers have promised content for "years" to come, and can most likely deliver, so you'll likely be revisiting the game for a short time again and again in the days to come. But there's a lot to do in the game besides get the best gear, so let's take a look at many of the interesting additions to the Minecraft formulae. To start with, the demolitionist that I mentioned? He's an NPC that you can build a house for. Among the list of NPCs are a Merchant, a Nurse, a Dryad, an Arms Dealer and the Demolitionist. They all require you to build a moderately sized house, with a table, a chair and a light source. Now, because Terraria is 2D, for something to be called a "house" it must have a back wall. Hammers remove certain placed items and the back walls of the map, allowing placement of man-made walls, from stone bricks, to gold ones. NPCs sell various items and provide various services. The Merchant sells a number of incredibly useful items. The mining helmet gives off a circle of light, meaning you don't need to carry a torch actively to see. The piggy bank is a fun item. Your character is a separate entity from your saved worlds. And the piggy bank means you can store one chests worth of items, and no matter what piggy bank you use, wherever in whatever world it is, you can access the items in it. For that specific character mind. The Arms Dealer sells bullets. For guns. Yes, gun. You can find a musket in shadow orbs, or buy a chaingun that fires hundreds of bullets a minute. All the NPCs do useful things, from the Nurse healing you, to the Dryad selling powder to remove Corruption. They're fun little additions to the game that make interesting game possibilities. There are some interesting possible world events. Blood Moons have a 1-in-7 chance to occur every single night. Zombies and Demon Eyes (flying eyeballs) spawn at highly increased rates, and zombies are able to open doors. It's a hell of a thing to deal with when you're new, but unfortunately is easily dealt with by blocking over your door. Fun, but eventually more a nuisance than a treat. Goblin Invasions have a specific set of spawn requirements (as do NPCs) and spawn a large force of goblins to attack you wherever you are on the map. In multiplayer, each extra player spawns an extra number of goblins. They drop things like the Harpoonitron that is a weighted hook that you fire out and retrieve. They also drop Rocket Boots, that allow you to quite literally fly, but use mana to do so. One of the interesting aspects of gear aside from tools and armor, is Accessories. You get 5 accessory slots (no more, no less) and have to choose what accessories are more relevant to the situation at hand. Accesories range from A Lucky Horseshoe, which causes you to not take any falling damage, to the Cobalt Shield, which prevents you from being knocked back when taking damage. Items like the Grappling Hook, which does what is says on the can, to the Hermes Boots which allow you to move super-fast when running on a flat surface, make for easier travel around the world. And the world can be very large, from a small world taking a day to run across (about ten minutes) to a large world taking almost three days without any movement items. I could ramble on about how much of a bastard Hell is, or how much I hate Hornets in the Underground Jungle, but the simple fact of the matter is that I enjoy(ed) the hell out of Terrarias current content. Not to mention I expect to continue enjoy any further content to be greatly enjoyable, even if only for a few days at a time. I'm still enjoying building bases and helping friends get their items, but I am mostly done with the game for the time being. An enjoyable experience and certainly worth ten dollars. And here's a quick-ish list of Minecraft/Terraria comparisons, because I'm sure there's a few I haven't covered. Minecraft AND Terraria A certain equipment quality is required to mine certain blocks. Any block in the world can be removed and placed wherever you please (with certain limitations.) Crafting is extensive and uses many materials and crafting implements to create a wide variety of objects and blocks. A large, randomly generate world to explore. Monsters of all shapes and sizes. You can change your personal spawn point by placing a bed. Minecraft ONLY Non-domesticated, non-violent animals roaming the world. Pets. Weather. An unlimited world size. A three-dimensional world. Wider variety of landscapes and biomes. A large modding community and the ability to mod the game at all. Food, crafted and otherwise. Farming. Terraria ONLY Projectile weapons. NPCs (that aren't monsters.) World bosses. Linear gear progression. Mine carts and their accompanying tracks. Health potions. Magic spells. Burrowing monsters. I'm sure I've missed many, and keep in mind the Minecraft points are the vanilla game without mods. Hopefully you've got a better idea of the game, despite my rambling. Oh, I totally forgot. If you place Ebonstone anywhere outside the Corruption in sufficient amounts, it has a pretty good chance to spawn the Eater of Worlds.

I signed up for that list, because damnit, this sounds amazing. I've been reading his 'dev blog' for a while now, and I like how he thinks and it approaching this game. (Much in the way that I'm enjoying Andy Schatz's [Monaco] dev vidoes.) So yeah, I'd be up for this at some point if other thumbs do such things.

Moby Dick. . .man. Don't get me wrong, I really love that kind of literature (Tolstoy, for instance, Jack London for a lesser example) but. . .Moby Dick is oppressively, needlessly long. And wordy. And prosaic (in the dull sense.) You can finish it if you really feel the want/need to, but it's not anything that you're missing. Chances are you already completely know every reference that will ever be made to Moby Dick. Though. . .there are some fantastic quotes, a la First Contact. (Yet I really enjoy Tolstoy, speaking of oppressively long. Odd.)

So "beating" Terraria (which I've had more fun with than some AAA titles in the past few years) gave me a terrible itch for Minecraft. So I booted it up, installed a couple mods (airship, GSLS shaders) and started a world on Peaceful, because I've just spent 60 something hours being attacked by slimes, zombies and flying eyeballs at all hours of the day. I haven't played Minecraft in. . .probably three or four months. So when I'm standing on the cliffside examining the area below my new hole in the ground, and I hear "KSTPHOOOOOOOOOOM" and it starts raining I nearly jump out of my chair. Rain is really nice, but it's, mmmm, just don't look directly up, I guess.

Well, it is the internet 'teaching' it, so. . . Yes. Eventually it will only respond with memes.

I may suck twelve kinds of ass at Starcraft, but give me a good Artosis and Tasteless stream and my day brightens right up.

That's. . .that's a satire, right? Yes? Please?

That's the video (primarily the complete block of Chun-Li) that made me finally respect "professional" fighting gamers. I still don't get the appeal, but holy shit.

That's the issue with putting a "learning AI" on the internet. Shit like this. . . Which is admittedly awesome! But uh, kind of ruins the experiment.

Oddly, it took about seven or eight minutes for it to formulate its response when I put my name in, so maybe it does learn.

So because of its response to actual names, I decided to do something about that. What the fuck. Oh, and just because I could.

Very cool! I'd probably do that sort of stuff if we had anything of the sort around here. That kind of stuff doesn't bother me, because for starters, nature be awesome. It's the sort of, mmm, desolation and emptiness of Pripyat that bothers me, for the most part.

Shit. Moments later. . . Computer, end program.

. . .I have nothing to say that will add or detract from how incredibly correct that video is. Man.

Pictures of the exclusion zone (especially Pripyat) have always been. . .disquieting to me. Things like the (fairly famous) shots of the cribs and the playground just make my brain go "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck. That's not right." How many years has it been now, anyway? It's a weird place.

Perhaps "awwwww" would be more appropriate to express disappointment and expectation? Either way, your request is unlikely to be fulfilled.

Oh, don't get me wrong. I love two-parters. They're absolutely fantastic. That said, there have been a lot of "Ohhhh man!" moments for me this season.

Man, what's up with Doctor Who? Is this Season Of The Two-Parters or something? Also, The Shadow Line, featuring the council assassin from Serenity, and Christopher Eccleston isn't half bad.

I think I've said it before, but my primary issue with religion is how it's viewed/used in many cases. I'm fine with Option A, that being; - Live by the Ten Commandments/similar scripture - Consider the guidance of God #21293 in your daily life And there are people who do this, no doubt there. But the number of outright psychopaths who claim to "talk to God" concerns me. The number of things that have been done "in the name of God" concern me. I'm not saying organized religion is a totally bad thing (though I do think in many cases it's used utterly improperly), but I think it might be better off not being around as it is. A reformat, if you will. But eh, not really the place for such discussions.

What gets me is the one family (though there are no doubt others) that with a newborn child, sold all their shit and moved to their dream location so they could be raptured from there. They're no no-doubt utterly broke and have probably killed their kid. Religion, arghhhhhhhh.

While I have enjoyed all three, they're not something I go out of my way to watch. If I get bored during a TV screening, I turn it off. That said, this scene will always be with me. 9A-eluzWfbY Fantastic.

Jump scares don't get to me. And 99% of horror films are just too over-the-top/cheesy to do anything. But I'm really easily wigged by promises of bad things. Or creeping horror, instead of ZOMBIE THROUGH WINDOW. Amnesia, for instance, fucks me up something awful. That's the kind of horror Doctor Who has. Things like the Speaking of the Ood, those poor fucking bastards always get the short end of the stick. Every time one pops up, I think "Oh, maybe they'll redeem themselves!" Ten or fifteen minutes later "Ood death army. Possessed by so and so. What a shame." Poor guys.

Jesus. I did mean presently, because there are several past shows that at least come close. But Doctor Who is the only show that occasionally has me looking over my shoulder as I walk through a dark house, after some episodes.

First impressions: Jesus christ, this is improved combat? 5 guys at once and my only defensive options are either knockback with two charges, or roll and take a sword in the back regardless? Argh, no! I am far too tired for this bullshit parade right now. I'll try it when I wake up, but I'm not enjoying the combat, so much so that it's drowning out my enjoyment of the story. Oh! Sidenote: There is a block key, and it is 'E', and the game never fucking says a word about it.