The Friendly Necromancer

I'm very late to the party. Terraria has been around since 2011, and I'm just barely getting to it, but let's just say it kind of consumed the past couple weeks of my life, and I had a blast playing it, which is surprising since upon first play a year ago when I won the game from participating in Blaugust, I wasn't initially all that impressed.

My little town

Terraria had been sitting on my desktop this whole time, and I thought . . . you know what? I'm giving it a fair handshake because I made the mistake as discounting it as a 2D Minecraft, which apparently is a common misconception, and I didn't see the attraction.

There are plenty of reviews online that talk about how Terraria isn't just a 2D Minecraft, so I probably don't need to go into the details too much, but I think it's best summed up by a review from Fuzzbot I saw in Steam on the game:

"Itsa sandbox game.

Itsa sandbox 2d game.

Itsa sandbox exploration 2d game.

Itsa sandbox exploration 2d RPG game.

Itsa sandbox exploration 2d RPG Shooter game.

Itsa sandbox exploration 2d RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot game.

Itsa sandbox exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot game.

Itsa sandbox survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot game.

Itsa sandbox rogue-like survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot game.

Itsa sandbox rogue-like survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Clickfest game.

Itsa class-building sandbox rogue-like survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Clickfest game.

Itsa economic class-building sandbox rogue-like survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Clickfest game.

Itsa economic class-building sandbox rogue-like survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Griefing Clickfest game.

Itsa economic class-building sandbox rogue-like survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Griefing Multiplayer Clickfest game.

Itsa economic class-building sandbox rogue-like sword-fighting survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Griefing Multiplayer Clickfest game.

Itsa economic class-building sandbox rogue-like sword-fighting spell-casting survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Griefing Multiplayer Clickfest crafting game.

Itsa economic class-building sandbox rogue-like sword-fighting spell-casting survival exploration 2d hardmode RPG Shoot-And-Hoard-Loot Griefing Multiplayer Clickfest crafting game that ISN'T a Minecraft clone.

Just buy it. What ELSE do you want? A SEQUEL!?

Well, its apparently getting that, too.

10/10, would waste time googling adjectives and taking adjectives from the comment section again."

That's possibly the greatest review ever written because the game plays like that. You start to play the game and once you get beyond the "sandbox""2D""RPG""Shooter" aspect of the game, you're good to go and the layers keep peeling back.

If I was to mashup games to tell you what it feels like to me, it'd be this

Ghost N' Goblins meets Diablo meets Minecraft

All games that I've thoroughly enjoyed in my life.

Now . . . all that said, I'm kind of to the point in the game where I've crafted some pretty awesome armor, have fairy wings to fly, have an amazing yo-yo of death, a stockpile of potions, a town full of helpful NPCs, and to progress further into the game I have to kill three bosses that randomly appear, but only at nighttime . . . and I'm stuck.

The hardmode bosses kick my butt, and I'm imagining I have to either sync up and actually play the game with friends to progress or really learn how to avoid taking damage from the bosses (either by bashing my head against it several more times or watching a few spoilery YouTube videos).

If you've got $10 to spare or happen to find Terraria for sale on the Steam store, I'd recommend giving it a go, but when you do . . . just know you may need to give it some time until the layers of the game start to peel back and reveal itself.

Let me know when you've beat the Wall of Flesh! Two words . . . water bolt. ;)

Happy Dueling!

So, I've fallen into a bit of a gaming slump lately.

I'm at the final battle for Kane in Valencia 2, and I just need to find some time and mental space to give it a shot.
Morgrim and I have only been playing Wizard101 every other week lately.
I'm stuck in Terraria, so I'm a bit stand offish from it right now
Pokemon Go won't work on my phone.
I'm too poor to go buy a new game.
D&D play is a special occasion.
I'm on a hiatus from my Sunday night game group.
I'm also on a hiatus from DDO -- kinda got bored there.
All the other hundreds of games or so in my collection just aren't calling to me.

Where does that leave me? That leaves me stumbling through the free to play games on Steam, where I found a ninja pig of a different bacon: Iron Snout.

HIYA! (I'm pretty sure that's ketchup on the ground there)

So you're a pig with some pretty sweet ninja skills. You've got low kicks, high kicks, double flips . . . you can cut off the heads of your enemies and then use them as projectile weapons . . . but you aren't much for moving around or being stealthy. No, you're a pig, in the middle of the screen, and this horde of wolves have you marked as enemy number one.

COME AT ME BRO . . . and, yes, they'll come at you wielding axes, cleavers, rockets, chainsaws, and baskets of baked goods . . . and I'm sure as you survive longer, they'll have other nefarious ways to try and take you down.

I wouldn't say this is the most enlightening of game experiences I've ever had, nor the most fun, but when it comes to filling the void . . . thank you Iron Snout!

It even comes with a two-player mode where you can bounce a ball at a pig-friend and try to score points by getting the ball past them air-hockey-style with no animated violence whatsoever! I'm not going to say I beat my kids 2 games out of 3, but . . . ok, I already said it.

If you give Iron Snout a shot or are already familiar with this mayhem, gimme a shout in the comments below with your high score! I just happened to score this . . .

It's a good number, and I got an achievement! (Look at those stupid chuckling wolves.)

Happy Dueling

Hey all!

I just got a question from sir "big goof"!

"Do you know what the beanie is called from christmas? ive been looking for the name everywhere and just cant find it."

I do! Um, or at least I think I do. Those beanies come from the Winterland Pack and are the hairstyles (which you can stitch to hats) known as The Fakie Ollie and The Halfpipe.

OH YEAH! I kind of dig that look while riding the Road Warrior's Chopper! Although some kind of snowboard mount would be amazing.

Great choice of hat there. Probably Christmas in July is what recently brought these hats to your attention, amiright? They're a pretty great looking for sure.

Thanks for the question, Big Goof! If that isn't the hat you're looking for, leave me a comment with more description, and I'll see if I can track it down.

Happy Dueling

Hello all,

I have a great question from Elizabeth. She asks this:

"how do you log into your second wizard 101 account."

Great question, and it's really quite simple. There are actually two parts to running Wizard101. You first run the "game launcher," which is the little window showing RavenWood News and has a place to log in.

This is the game launcher

When the bars have finished loading, you press the red "Play!" button, and this closes the launcher and opens the actual Wizard101 program. (You know, where you see your wizards sitting at their desks.)

If you try to run two Wizard101 Game Launchers at the same time, you'll get the message "Wizard101 is already running on your computer" and it won't let you start. So what you need to do is let the Game Launcher complete, close, and bring up the actual Wizard101 program, and then you can run the Game Launcher again!

This time you'll enter your second account information into the Game Launcher and wait for it to load.

I actually own about five or six accounts myself and occasionally (although it is rare these days) will set the game resolution down to 800x600 and run four accounts at once using this method.

Thanks for the question and have fun!

Happy Dueling

Heya all! With Spring Break headed our way, I thought I'd take the opportunity to blog a bit more in the morning. Not having to get the kids ready for school might actually give me some time this week. :)

I'll talk a bit over the next week about some games I'm playing currently, but for now I want to talk a bit about a mobile game that came out early last month, Fire Emblem Heroes (FEH). Let me get it out of the way: It's a combination of Summoner's War and Puzzles and Dragons with that old familiar Fire Emblem touch.

If you're looking to play, you might want to read over this "Wish I would have known" list from Kotaku. When I started, I didn't do the whole "re-rolling" thing and therefore do not have everyone's favorite character, Takumi. He's insanely strong, and anytime I hit the Arena, I groan every time I see him pop up; although if I can get him separated from the pack, my Marth hero can take him down, so it's not necessarily the end of the world.

So far I've cleared the entire Story part of the game on Normal, Hard, and all I have left is the final battle on Lunatic. (I figure I just need a couple Light's Blessing, and I'll be good to go -- I'm not spending any orbs to revive, that's just crazy talk).

Sorry, Veronica. Btw, I love your style.

yeah I still play miitomo . . . don't judge.

In FEH, things typically boil down to getting 5-Star heroes and leveling them up to 40th level, and as of this week I now have four 5-Star heroes: Marth, Chrom, Hinoka, and Catria.

NOTE, I have spent zero money on this game. I'm a dirty casual free-to-play, and I don't mind that at all. I've had a lot of fun with the game and not spent a dime. But as i've said before on this article about one of Nintendo's other games, I usually ante' up at some point to tell them thanks for all the fun.

Now occasionally, FEH will throw out a challenge that's diabolical. For my usual batch of readers that aren't familiar with FEH and typically are familiar with KingsIsle's games . . . this would be like a battle in Pirate101 where if you lose one companion in a combat, you lose the entire match, and the battleboard is designed to work against you.

The recent battle like this is to win Ursula. Before you read my strategy, you should probably look at this guy's strategy because he beat lunatic mode and made it look easy.

With my current group of heroes, I found it to be pretty challenging . . . ON HARD . . . I'd have to dedicate some time to leveling up another hero to take this down on Lunatic.

First things first, my team was Chrom, Marth, Clarine (my four-star healer), and Hinoka (who really didn't even need to be there . . . I should have switched her out for someone that gives a buff)

This is how we start out.

As seen above, my first round was spent re-arranging my team into this block with my healer (on the horse) in the back.

The game then moves at me like this, lured in by the thought of destroying Chrom. I take a little damage from the ninja down in the left hand corner, and his mounted buddy dragged him back a square.

Now I take Chrom and have him take out that Armored Green fella.

Very important, I use my healer Clarine to heal Marth.

Marth moves forward and blocks the exit. so that mounted blue wizard can't wreck Clarine in one shot.

At this point the game goes nuts on Chrom trying to kill him and he's left with one hitpoint.

Chrom attacks the ninja above him, and in doing so uses his special ability to heal back a little health. Clarine rushes forward and heals Marth again.

Marth moves down and defeats that pesky blue mounted wizard.

At this point the ninja sidesteps and attacks Marth at a diagonal. and the mounted red swordsman sacrifices himself on Marth. Marth and Chrom heal up . . . all that's left is that ninja.

Clarine once again heals marth for funsies.

Marth wrecks the ninja.

Profit.

I hope that guide helped someone somewhere . . . uh . . . probably not, but hey! I was happy about it and excited to share and happy to put out another blog post. It's been FAR too long. Sorry about that. I think I have a build up of new and interesting thoughts I can share with you all again.

Thanks for reading and . . . happy dueling!!

Back in December 2016 I was on vacation for a bit and purchased myself a Christmas gift from Steam's discount aisle. Do you ever just see a game and think, oh yeah, that's something I'd probably like? Dub Wars was one of those purchases that just kind of checked all the right boxes from the get go . . . dubstep (check). What? You thought there would be more check boxes than dubstep? (Actually a lot of the music isn't really pure dubstep, but I digress, and it doesn't matter -- great music is great music.)

Honestly I'm not really a 2-D, top down, shooter kind of a guy; although as I was playing the game I kept thinking to myself, I wonder if Mark Bussler from Classic Gameroom has tried this game? He's totally a 2-D, top down shooter kind of a guy. He lives for this kind of game. Then again, I don't know if he's an electronic music loving type of a dude.

Anyway, the thing that makes this game different is that you don't fire the gun, the music fires the gun, which makes for a very "non-mashy" experience where you just move your ship around and aim your weapons as you visually see the music fire off beautiful lasers of death.

The tempo of the game naturally moves along with the tempo of the music, and when you hear the bass drop is the same moment where you are wrecking enemies with your most powerful weapons fired off in rapid succession. It's actually the quiet moments in the game that can be the most stressful as your weapons are just firing occasionally and you're running away from things thinking, can this song just drop the bass already?

At first when I bought this game I was thinking, this would be super fun to stream, but I did a test video of me playing and it was pretty funny how focused I was at dodging. Just look at this face:

Later in the video it doesn't change much.

Yeah! I don't think I even moved my head to the music lol.

So I don't know about streaming this game, but it might be a different experience with an audience to react to and entertain. I kind of turn into a different person when I stream. :)

The game suffers a touch from replayability problems. There are 10 levels (songs), and while the music is absolutely great, it's 10 songs that you hear over and over. Did I say playing over and over? You end up playing levels over and over a lot to power up your ship, and this is because the first time you enter a level, you will get wrecked -- power ups help so much with surviving.

You play games over and over and collect "wubs," which are then spent to improve your health and weapons. Probably the coolest part of this feature is that your weapons can get massively upgraded and not only become more powerful, more more outlandish . . . whereas you can have little exhaust lasers shooting out of your side at 0 wubs, 1000 wubs will sometimes cause those exhaust lasers to become giant lightsabers of death, which is fun.

There are over 40 achievements to earn, which help replayability, but some achievements are like . . . really? That's crazy. Who would do that? *cough* I may or may not have the achievement for playing a level 25 times in a row. *cough* I may have just boosted my health up and put myself in the corner of the screen and walked away from the game to do that.

So there you have it. Dub Wars! Pretty fun little game, and a pretty great discount rack buy for me over Christmas.

Happy Dueling!

I don't know if you caught my small blog post fest last year about Dungeons and Dragons, but I tried to start up a new blog about it, and it kinda died: Althea and Company.

Writing out our adventures to that level of detail and trying to remember everything that happened (and finding the time and passion to do it), was a bit ambitious. Anyway, we continue to run through our adventures, and I actually started hosting my own game with the same "Althea and Company" crew -- only this time Jeff Toney is the player, and I'm the DM . . . AND . . . Uber wife is also playing with us. yay!

Instead of working through an official Wizards of the Coast production like the Lost Mine of Phandelver, I'm using a lot of one-shot dungeons strung together with narrative. The first two we've run were Giantslayer and King of the Cats by MT Black. Both were excellent, and I think everyone had a great time . . . they slayed the giant and they rescued the King of the Cats. yay!

So next I have my group set to do one of two things. Either they will take on another MT Black one-shot, Wizard in a Bottle, or they will head down an adventure of my very own make. I'm interested in seeing which they take on and how they do. I definitely don't want to kill my friends and family in a dungeon, and I know I typically build things too difficult, but this is a party of five I'm dealing with here, and they actually have the potential to really dish out the damage . . . or really have a bad day with bad dice rolls . . . or, as we found out last week, get completely distracted and not hear that the bad guy just cast the shield spell and start using magic missile.

The Giant adventure was fun, but the only thing that gave them any real challenge were giant crabs. Oh man they struggled on that one.

The King of Cats final battle was pretty fun, and I think I scared 'em a bit when they discovered their weapons were pretty ineffective vs. a wererat, which you need silver weapons or spells to fight. They were never really intended to fight the wererat anyway. I may have to bring her back at sometime to torment the party, so they can finish her off (especially if they spend the 100 gold it takes to silver their weapons).

Anyway, instead of scribbled notes for my dungeon, I've been typing it out like it's a one-shot, and if all goes well with the group, and they survive the adventure and have fun with it, I may actually try to publish it on a site like Dungeon Masters Guild and see what happens!

I'm not going to type much about my adventure I have planned for them just yet in case one of 'em stumbles upon this blog post, but . . . it's got a couple nasty surprises waiting for them.

Happy Dueling!

Guys! Guys! EVERQUEST!

So, I found out thanks to Massively that Everquest was having their 18th anniversary, and you could get a free level 85 heroic character for logging in. I'm like . . . that sounds perfect. done.

I redownloaded Everquest and hopped in game on my two accounts.

When they ran this offer before I jumped my existing level 70-something Beastlord (This is the original Stingite) to an 85 heroic and created a new 85 heroic Barbarian on my other account (always with the hopes that my wife will someday join me).

Back then I spent a lot of time getting my old cleric (the one that started this whole nonsense of playing MMOs . . . truly my first character in an MMO) AAs in the Plane of Sky by two-boxing the Barbarian and my cleric . . . and then I lost interest as it just stopped being fun.

This time I jumped my cleric (makes all that farming in the plane of sky a bit pointless, but seriously, who cares) up to a heroic 85. And created another heroic cleric on my second account.

Meet . . . Bigdeal . . . he's kind of a big deal . . . or no big deal at all . . . your choice.

via GIPHY

Anyway, there was a particular quest back in the day that I always wanted to do. We're talking 2003-2004 timeframe. Funny enough, it takes place upon a pirate ship named Hate's Fury. There was a hammer from the raid boss that proc'd little pets to help damage your enemy. There were only maybe 2-3 weapons in the game with this unique effect, and I wanted it.

I remember asking my guild leaders about it at the time, and they were like . . . "Let me get this straight. You want us to lead a raid into a zone that no one really does and farm four rare items that spawns a raid boss that takes around 20-30 people to kill for a chance at a rare item? No. But tell you what . . . if you get the four items in advance and have them ready to turn in, we'll give it a shot."

Sigh.

I never could even convince a group to go to Hate's Fury to farm for them.

Oh well.

Fast forward to today. I ran my two new characters over to that old zone and it was cake. I really never even had to worry. I'd pull the whole zone down on me, and my heroic characters were so far beyond this area that it was just ridiculously easy. So, I began my solo farm for those items for a long forgotten weapon that I don't need.

After 3 hours or so, I had the items.

This morning I decided to take my two heroic characters and see if I could take on the raid boss that used to require 20-30 people.

I buffed. I prepped. I summoned the inner zen. Turned in the items and spawned the demon.

About 5 seconds into it, I realized that this was, again, far too easy for these two characters. Before you knew it, Captain Krasnok was dead and I was done . . . and the Vander's Bane hammer didn't drop, but that's ok. I got to do the quest, and I have the items ready to go so I can do it one more time.

Here's to hopefully finishing goals that really are no longer goals 14 years later!

Happy Dueling

About two months ago I started a blog post that I never finished, and it said this:

"Everquest . . . yes Everquest . . . has me firmly held by the hand . . . and I'm completely in love with it all over again. I'm in a new guild. I'm two-boxing. I'm grinding for xp.

Someone send help.

I love it, it's weird graphics, and GOSH DANGIT THIS GAME IS HARD. I don't even want to talk about the number of times I've died. It's literally been two steps forward, one step back for the majority of the time."

I don't know what happened to that blog post. Maybe it was just the time wasn't right. Maybe it said too much, or maybe I just wasn't confident enough that I was really ALL IN on Everquest again.

Let me cut the suspense short -- I'm not really playing Everquest right now and haven't logged on for a month. That said I did grab 90 or so screenshots from my time playing. Here are a few of the highlights:

1- This screenshot comes from a new Heroic Instance (well "new to me") where you help out all of bixie-kind with various problems. I was clearing out spiders, ousting spys, and even jumping into war-zone trenches for these dudes. I was soloing or "moloing" (that's soloing with the help of a mercenary) this instance and dying . . a lot. I later found out that you really should group up to do these instances. I'm not much of a grouper, so . . .

~~
2- Here I am in a dangerously safe tunnel in a zone called . . . I believe . . . The Foundation? Yup. The Foundation. A lot of my first five levels beyond the Heroic Character stages was done here because they now have these great experience quests that are level banded. I honestly don't know why Daybreak doesn't make these quests repeatable for a premium currency price like they do in DC Universe Online. I would have shelled out a lot of money. (This is my character's werewolf form btw and sporting my guild tag.)

~~
3- I purchased a "hoard pack" like item that gives you a random roll on loot. You think wiz packs are bad? You only get two items for about 4 times the price. Anyway, I got a pretty weird looking hand to hand weapon, so I snapped a picture of me looking strong in the guild hall.

~~
4- I snapped this picture in a zone I can't even remember the name of. *shrug* There were sea turtles under the water I needed to hunt for a quest, and you could walk on the floating islands and bridges above. I mainly just loved the alien blue ocean here. Strangely pretty.

~~
5- There's a zone called "Fear Itself" that is a remake of an old classic Everquest zone. In fact, that seems to be how they mostly operate here 20 years later. Step one - take an old zone that's pretty much immortalized. Step two -- slightly redo it. Different skybox. A few different landscape touches. done. Step three -- fill it with super insane mobs and bosses. Step four -- itemize those with up to date drops. Step five -- write a few new collection and hunting quests. Step six -- profit. (ok ok . . . there may be just a bit more to it than that.)

In this shot I was giggling over the fact that Baron Bigdeal was trying to pick up on an undead turmoil toad. Hey baby . . . wanna come back to my lily pad?

~~
6- So, to make some money -- and you WILL need money. I would head over to an oldy but a goody -- I remember raiding this area with a guild ten years ago. There were a few drops here that people really wanted to buy -- did I say people? I meant CRAFTERS. Crafters in Everquest are only kind-of people. I believe they're demi-gods of infinite patience and bottomless bank accounts. Anyway, nothing quite like a giant fountain of blood in a land infested with Vampires. *click* That's a screenshot moment!

~~
7- Oh look, I'm back in the "Fear Itself" zone here . . . It was Gorgonrific. Soon after taking this shot I was pretty much done with the zone, which was sad . . . it was probably one of my favorite places to die.

~~
8- I'm a lizard Luke riding my lizard Taun-Taun on Hoth! Naahhhhh . . . this was again a redone old zone. I can't even remember what it was called, but it was over in the old "Scars of Velious" area. Again, a redone classic zone made new again. There were giant wooly mammoths here that were scaled up to around 90th something level. Good times.

~~
9- This may be what killed Everquest for me . . . or a possibly it was just a sign of my interest in Everquest dying again. I got bored around level 96 (there's 105 levels) and went back to do something super pointless -- level up "monster forms." At some point Everquest released an expansion where you could level up your character as a low level monster -- you work your way through a class of monsters. The only problem is they never updated the levels on them. There's no badges associated with leveling them . . . and while a neat different way of visualizing your character . . . it's ultimately un-rewarding.

I WANTED these monster-forms to be something cool so badly when they were first released. I even wrote up some weird role-playing event about them at the time. I'm so drawn to wanting to play as the monster, but it just didn't click in Everquest, and Sony (and now Daybreak) stopped spending time and money on developing the system (understandably so). So, here I am as a wandering eye . . . one of the last things I ever did in my recent addiction to Everquest. Griding to unlock forms for this wasn't fun. bye.

~~
That's about all I have time to write this morning, so I'm going to call it here. Part 2 and maybe Part 3 coming soon.

Thanks to my new Everquest guild for being super cool. Thanks to Daybreak for keeping this game alive and running for 20 years. I may be back again in the future, but for now . . . I'm OUT. It was a fun couple of months though for sure. :)

Happy Dueling

Just continuing here with my catch up posts, let me take a quick post to talk about mobile games and me.

1- I've obviously been playing EverClicker . . . like a lot, but not as much as 264 other people. ;)

If you didn't get a chance to catch KingsIsle's EverClicker launch video, then here you go:

2- AlphaCat! Yup. It's installed on my phone and I still hit up Invasions when I can. I've given up on the dream of owning all the Epic critters and instead just log on to collect my daily reward (trying to get more of those coins), grab hearts, check the daily missions, and see what's up with invasions.

If I have time, I'll also jump into 4 random zones just to see if there's a set of invasion plans on a bad guy. If not, I'll typically just leave the map unless the objective looks super easy to win.

Leave map? Yeah I don't know if many people know you can launch a map and then immediately leave it by clicking the gear wheel in the top right hand corner and then the "leave map" button in the bottom right hand corner. If all I'm doing is checking for invasion plans, this really speeds things up.

3- Fire Emblem Heroes? Nope. I finally had enough and uninstalled it. Sure, they added a really cool new mode where it benefited you to having a deeper team of heroes, but . . . meh . . . after a few rounds of summoning nothing but bronze and silver heroes, I kind of just checked out. Sorry Fire Emblem heroes . . . you were fun in your time!

4- Miitomo? Yup. I still have it installed. It's not really something I'd say I was "playing" so much these days. I mean, I'll log on, collect my candy drop, spend tickets on clothes, answer 3 questions a day, and . . . oh wait . . . ok, I guess I'm still playing Miitomo . . .

I wish I could find a batch of supportive friends that were fun to talk to. When I first started playing Miitomo it was like that. There was a couple from Wyoming that was great. There was a guy who moved to Canada with his girlfriend who really had a Girahim fascination, Avery is always amazing to talk to, and my kids were even playing . . .. mmmmm . . . now I just don't know if I have that awesome "group of mii people" vibe going anymore.

5- Rise & Destroy? Unfortunately I just don't have the memory space on my phone to have all those games installed. I kind of wish I would have had the time and energy to do a full walk through of Rise & Destroy back in the day. There's part of me that would like to go back and do that just for funsies. Would you want to see that? Let me know!

And that's all I got for Mobile Games today. If you've got a suggestion for a great game that you're playing atm, let me know. I've been thinking about re-downloading Pokemon Go since they've had a few updates, but that hasn't really happened yet.

I do have a backlog of mobile games I've played and never talked about on this blog that might be fun:

Contest of Champions
Bardbarian
Draw Your Game
Etc.

It'd be something to talk about at least. lol.

Tomorrow I'll again be continuing my "State of His Gaming" series. See you then.

Happy Dueling!

A lot of fun can be had around the table, and I'd say that lately that's where I've been having the MOST fun. Let's take a looksy:

1- Dungeons and Frickin'Dragons -- Yup! I'm actively participating in four D&D games lately.

The Barrow Maze -- Ben Durbin (aka Ratbeard for those who know him from the Pirate101 forums) has been DM'ing a group of people through a super unforgiving module where you start out as level 0 peasants and hopefully grow to be powerful heroes -- but don't get too cocky or you'll end up dead. Leveling is strictly based on gold acquisition and experience gains. I joined in a little late . . . late enough to watch a couple level 5 characters die before my level 0 characters even made 1st level. let's just say there's an undead knight and his army that we freed upon the world. whoops.

Out of the Abyss -- Sam Johnson (aka Blind Mew for those who know him from the Pirate101 forums) has been DM'ing a group of us over lunch time 1 or 2 times a week for the past year, and we're finally nearing the end of the Out of the Abyss campaign. I play a Rogue with a heart of gold. :) We all leveled up to sixth level yesterday and defeated the Pudding King in Blingdenstone. Good times. Give us 2-3 weeks and we may make it to the surface and out of the Underdark! It's been a riot, and some day I'll have to tell more about our adventures we had here. By the way, having a master storyteller like Sam be your DM . . . it's a choice experience.

Althea and Company -- This is Jeff Toney's game where he DMs for his daughter, two of my kids, and me . . . I play a bard and for the most part I just try to keep people alive with healing word. ;) I dedicated an entire blog to our fun and adventures, but I just didn't have the time to keep up with it. This is straight up the Lost Mines of Phandelver. Our party hit level 5 and we're about to move on to things more . . . giant related. *squeeee*

The Saviors -- This is my game. I'm DM'ing the same group as above only with the addition of Uber Wife. I have a game to DM for all of them on Sunday, and I feel woefully unprepared. I'm hoping to get some time on Saturday to figure out how to approach this. This troop is now around the level 3 range, and I've been mostly running the one-shots of M.T. Black and I even wrote a campaign of my own to get them from level 2 to 3.

2- Boss Monster! Every time we go to our local bookstore, my son Miles would pick up the Boss Monster game box and really want to get it. He likes the retro 16-bit look to the cover, and it just sounded fun to him. Luckily for me, Jeff Toney had a copy of the card game in his car. (You gotta understand, Jeff Toney's trunk is always filled with a few games.) I borrowed it and played it with my family, and we had a great time! It's a bit of a toss up on games like these and my family is a bit burnt from playing Munchkin, which my family really wants to like but surprisingly really doesn't like. I don't know what it is about that game . . . Anyway, Boss Monster was a hit, so I purchased the game for myself and it's in our family rotation of games now.

3- Near and Far. Jeff Toney purchased this game from a kick starter and it's a sister game to Above and Below, which is easier to find at the moment. Jeff, myself, and Karl Holbert from work all played this over a couple of lunches about a month ago and it was awesome! This is one I want to get and play with my family.

And that pretty much wraps up my unplugged gaming news. I'll have to think about writing a Part 4 to this series . . . it'd be about everything else, like console gaming and other PC games outside of Everquest. I'll put some thought to it. :)

Happy Dueling!

So this post really serves as nothing more than a summary of everything that wasn't captured in posts 1, 2, or 3.

Lesseee . . . what's left.

1- Wizard101 -- well well well, if it isn't the game that started it all here on The Friendly Necromancer. I'm going to be honest. Lately all I've been doing is logging on to do my various jobs in game and do a little Monstrology . . . although I really would like to keep my Wizard City to Polaris adventures going with Morgrim.

we left on Episode 26 . . . that was back in January . . . WOW!

I never got a lot of feedback about that series, but there were a few kind comments here or there from people who enjoyed the series. Thanks to you all!

This week looks to be the week we launch our Test Realm to the Live Realm, so . . . hold on to your PvP gear and let's DO THIS THING!

2- Pirate101 -- well well well, if it isn't the game that got me into the biz. I've been enjoying reminiscing back in Cool Ranch lately. My apologies to those of you who don't really enjoy the Cool Ranch part of Pirate101, but it's one of my favorites these days.

If I could again find the time (it's in short supply these days), I wouldn't mind heading back to Twitch to play through more of Pirate101 with Virtuous Vanessa.

I loved having Pet Battles with her:

Watch live video from Stingite on www.twitch.tv

3- Ark, Survival Evolved -- Uber Wife downloaded this and started playing it the other day, so I gave it a go for about 30 minutes. Not a bad game at all! At some point I'd like to explore that a bit more, but honestly . . . I kind of like the 16-bit Minecraft survival game a bit more . . . call me crazy.

4- The Switch! We have one! What the heck am I doing not playing that thing 24-7? AGAIN, not enough hours in the day. I would like to go back and give Zelda a more dedicated play through. I watched my kids beat the game, and they had a blast with it. It's dad's turn now.

5- Rocket League! Ok, so . . . I got really bummed out about Rocket League the other day. The reason why? I can't explain it, but my aim is terribly off in that game lately. To make matters worse, I'm ranked a Veteran now, so I'm getting matched with really good people and if my aim is off, I look like a complete doofus. If I could rank reset for free, I would, but that wouldn't be very fair to the rookies . . . it's just . . . what is up with my aim???

Anyway . . . this video of Morgrim and myself playing Rocket League is hilarious.

6- Elder Scrolls Online -- I was actually set to play this game with my friend, Andrew before I got sucked back in to Everquest. WHY EVERQUEST, WHY?! We managed to sync up our play times a couple times, but group play was a stuggle for us at best. Sorry, Andrew. I may come back to this if . . . I find the time. (this is definitely a reoccuring theme this post, isn't it?)

7- DC Universe Online -- NO! Just no. I refuse to open that game again. I've spent far too much of my gaming life playing this game. (just between us though, it's still loaded on my PC, and I do get tempted to log on just to say hello to my friends -- even if my stomach instantly turns the moment I log on.)

8- Magicka -- I was convinced to give this one a go by Morgrim, so I bought it for $2 and played the first few chapters. Pretty fun actually! I can see how this would be a good time in multiplayer. I'd like to play it again . . . um . . . if I find the time. (It feels silly typing it again.)

9- Dubwars -- what? It's loaded on my PC but I haven't played it for like forever.

10- Guild Wars 2 -- what? Oh yeah . . . I kind of killed myself playing that game last year, and now I can't bring myself to log on. Sorry.

11- classic gaming -- You know what I want to do if I ever find the time? I'd like to have a party where I line up a couple tables, bring out my old gaming systems and invite my buddies to come play classic games with me! Put that one on my bucket list.

. . . and that's about all I have the time or inclination to write about this morning. whew . . . that was a nice 20 minute brain dump.

Thanks for reading and Happy Dueling!

I haven't posted on the Friendly Necromancer for quite some time, so I thought "Why not just say hello and see who's out there and willing to read along if I blog a little?" Let's chat!

The big news for me of course is that I have a new job at KingsIsle! I announced my departure from being a Community Manager on the forums and on KI Live. Now I'm taking a new direction in my professional life, and it's one that probably seems a bit unexpected from those who mostly see me as a "communicator." It's probably more expected from those who see me as a creative person. If you don't know me, I love to be creative, whether it's making music, or writing blogs, or crafting poetry, or what-have-you, I love to create THINGS.

No need for me to reflect too much, but some of my best times at KingsIsle were when I was a brand new community manager for Pirate101. I loved that position and what I was able to do with a new community. As all things do, that position changed and grew to where I was not only doing work on the Pirate101 community, but many other things as well. (NOTE: Ask me in six years how my Designer job has evolved from now.)

Being a Community Manager is pretty intense, and I don't think those who haven't been a CM can really know what it's like. Even describing it to someone, it always sounds a bit strange. Ultimately, you're a gatekeeper, a town crier, an advocate, a marketer, and a "fun committee"(and more!) combined into one person. Every day brings a new challenge.

It's super cool my company has allowed me to shift into a new role so I can grow and learn: and that I am! This is all good stuff.

~~

Some other cool things have been happening too! Like this amazing picture that Dearly Doodles made for me:

IT'S A ME! FRIENDLYO!

And, as to be expected, I've been playing a lot of games (outside of the ones I play all day for work) like Neverwinter . . .

Currently lost somewhere in the Jungles of Chult.

. . . and Overwatch.

I'm a #dumbfist wanna be (but mostly play Reinhardt) main

I've got a tentative date of "sometime this week" to also finish up the Medulla fight in Wizard101 with Blaze and Tara, so who knows . . . I may even have some more Wizard101 gameplay to share in the future!

Anyway, I just wanted to get this first, uncomfortable, and long overdue post out of the way. Hopefully I can post a bit more again soon, and maybe even try my hand at Twitch streaming again. (I don't know if you happened to catch my marathon run of the game Overgrowth, but it's three and a half hours of bad voice over and animal on animal violence. GOOD TIMES! I want to do that kind of stuff again!)

Let me know what you'd like to hear more about here on The Friendly Necromancer. It's been a long, strange road . . . hasn't it? So what's been going on with you? (That's a request for comments, yo.)

Happy Dueling!

It's here! It's finally here!

We've been working on this game for a long time, and I've had my hand in its development for quite some time. This is the first game I've ever had my name mentioned in the credits three times: once for Marketing, once for Writing, and once for Design. So what does that mean? Here's a quick laundry list for my involvement to date:

Initial Social Media setup and posts during early beta
Early responses to initial app store reviews and our beta forums
Sending pre-release gifts to players through the in-game inbox
News announcements on KI Live from Soft Launch until now
Working with the "early" Writing team up through the Park Entrance
Working with the "late" Design team creating Animal Cove levels (my first starts on level 151 and then they're scattered throughout the rest of the game)

Because of Animal Cove, I now have my current job, and I'm getting a chance to get my feet wet with Unity! Woohoo! I couldn't be happier that it's out now on the app stores, and best yet . . . It's been FEATURED in both the iOS and Android app stores. That's never happened for a KingsIsle mobile game before! I couldn't be happier. Someone reported to me yesterday that we had hit the Number One Trending spot for casual games. YES!

The first thing you need to know, is where to download it. It's a mobile game, so download from here:
-iOS: https://itunes.apple.com/au/app/animal-cove-match-3-adventure/id1217914031?mt=8
-Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.KingsIsle.RES&hl=en_US

The second thing you need to know is how to make friends. You can find out how to do this on this Facebook post, and here's the graphic that details how to do it.

Third, Add me as a friend! I'm "DeathUnicorn" in game . . . 'cause you know . . . death unicorns win . . . duh . . .

Fourth, Vanessa Mythdust has already been writing up some stellar break downs of the story. If you're the kind that likes to read ahead, follow this link for some great reads.

The fifth thing you need to know is that we are currently making more levels, when you hit level 300, don't worry . . . more are on the way. After you finish, just log in daily and keep collecting your powerups so that when those new levels are released, you'll be ready to go.

~~

Let me know if you have any questions about the game! I'll be happy to answer what I can (leave your questions in the comments).

Happy Dueling!

You know what's amazing? People . . . uh, gamer people . . . uh, famous gamer people like THEE Blaze Lifehammer and THEE Tara Dawnbreaker and THEE Marcus River.

Just look at this team. We're gonna do great!

That's right! That's us standing tall in Sepidious after a successful run at Medulla that was streamed last night on Tara's Twitch Channel. Tara was kind enough to also put up a YouTube highlight of the run as well:

I couldn't be happier with how smoothly this thing ran. These guys have this down so good it was absolutely the best time I've had in Wizard101 in a long time. Big ups to the Big Names in Wizard101! They've totally earned their reputations. Quality peeps.

As part of the benefit of working here, KingsIsle employees get a stipend of Crowns to spend each month, so I took advantage of that and blew all my KI Employee Crowns on the second chance chest at the end and ended up with a full set of Cabalist gear . . . banner and all. :)

Oooo! glowing green eye of doom!

Looks pretty cool, but I think I'm going to need to stitch that to my traditional Friendly Necromancer outfit because, yo, that's my jam. The Friendly Necromancer needs to *look* like the Friendly Necromancer . . . um, I'll just need to wait until I get my Crowns stipend again. *whistles*

Something I don't need to stitch is this adorable Tara Dawnbreaker MERCH!

Adorable! amirite?

I do need to wash it though. ;) (pulled that out of the laundry bin for the pic -- still need to get out that new shirt vinegar smell)

Happy Dueling!

Several weeks ago, I saw one of my new friends from Overwatch(Oh Hai Eboni! Everyone visit her Twitch channel, she's awesome) playing Neverwinter. I hadn't thought about Neverwinter in forever! In fact, the last time I talked about Neverwinter was back in 2016. And before that, the last time I actually played Neverwinter was back in 2014.

It was that dang Foundry system . . . it pulled me back in! I reinstalled just to see if it was still a thing and if I could play my Dragonspyre tribute dungeon again. What I found out from the Neverwinter Forums was that no, the foundry system wasn't in, but yes, it would make a return in the future! I guess this is a thing. After every major update to Neverwinter, there's a huge lag time (we're talking months) and then the Foundry system quests get published again, and then a few days later after that, the entire Foundry system once again is available.

Anyway, when I came back to Neverwinter, the Foundry system was offline thanks to the new Ravenloft expansion to the game, so I decided . . . what the heck . . . let's give this game another shot. My character, Dr. Philgood, was level 30-something and all I needed to do was get my character to the new cap of level 70.

This free purple Owlbear mount offer from Twitch Prime was a nice encouragement as well.

My leveling up experience was . . . interesting. What I discovered was that all the leveling up areas kind of played in the exact same way. You go to a hub, you solve all the problems in that hub, culminating in a solo instance adventure, which then leads you to another hub, where you solve those problems and go deeper in the zone . . . wash, rinse, and repeat that three times and you're ready to move on to the next area of the game. Wash, rinse, and repeat that exact same thing in the next area -- only this time with different monster types. (Now that I think about it, that describes most MMOs, doesn't it?)

But in how many MMOs can you kill a beholder in . . . 2 . . . maybe 3? Still cool.

It was a little boring grinding out to max, but that's actually when it became a bit better. What I discovered was that Neverwinter has a gear rating system similar to DC Universe Online, which is a game I've played MORE than my fair share of. To level your character, you undergo "campaigns." Campaigns lead to permanent character boosts, which equate to higher gear rating.

Oh good . . . you're still reading this blog post . . . I thought for a second all that talk of leveling and gear rating would have scared you away by now.

Long story short, the game gets a lot more fun post-70 when you're doing campaigns rather than grinding out the leveling areas.

Yes, I run from T-rex's . . . standing very still didn't work.

Just last week the Foundry system was put back into the game and I discovered that I had unpublished my "Dragonspyre" adventure in the hopes of fixing it since it was a bit buggy. I went ahead and republished it with the bugs still in it, and after a day or two it showed up as an available quest! It was exactly as I remembered it only a lot easier since my character is a lot more powerful now.

Now for the good news for returning players in Neverwinter who want to experience Ravenloft but have bad gear ratings . . . what I also discovered was that any character that can make it through a relatively easy intro-quest to get into Ravenloft, also gets a free set of gear that boosts your character's gear rating up to a nice new minimum. You can't beat free gear. It won't be quite enough to really demolish things in Ravenloft, but you can survive a few quests.

Barovia is a nice place once you get past the gloomy forest and deranged cultists.

And that is, in a nutshell, where I sit currently with Neverwinter. I think my current plan is to keep logging in daily while I still have VIP membership and grind out some of these older campaigns to get my character a few more boosts. When I reach a certain gear level, I'll be able to survive a bit better in Chult and Ravenloft, which are kind of the end campaigns in the game currently.

I'll let you know how it goes, and if I'm feeling brave enough for the challenge, I might take my hand-written D&D 5e dungeon and try to recreate it in the Foundry system . . . we'll see.

Happy Dueling!

Saturday morning I was out early mowing my front lawn when all of a sudden I saw a grey "thing" moving right in front of the mower. I'm glad I caught a glimpse of it because I was able to stop my mower in time to not run over a little, grey bird dude.

At first I just tried to shoo it away, but soon discovered this little guy couldn't fly, despite his efforts to get away from me. In fact, one of his wings looked in pretty bad shape.

I ran inside and asked Uber Wife to grab a box and come see this bird. At first she brought out a shoe box, and I'm like . . . ok, this will do for now. We scooped him up into the shoe box and then transferred him over to a bigger box.

We own a parakeet, so I put some seed and water in the box and I snapped this picture and sent it out to my follower buds.

As you can see, the responses I got were fantastic, and I really didn't know what to do with this guy. He was pretty chill though and I was kind of taking to him at this point, so I sent out a second picture and dubbed him "Pedro."

My followers were on point, as to be expected . . . Pedro was quickly identified as a birb . . . most likely a dove birb . . . and most likely a fledgeling mourning dove birb.

I put Pedro in a safe, warm place underneath the trampoline at our house at this point because Jeff Toney was headed over to play another session of Althea and company's ongoing D&D Game. You might have read a bit about our adventures on my sub-blog about it (which is now sadly out of date). It was a great session on Saturday where our characters finished up a quest chain in the Feywild and took a portal back to the Neverwinter Woods. It involved hunting a pre-cooked pig and partaking in some "intrigue" at a party in honor of Princess Buttercup of the Summer Court . . . but that's a story for another time . . .

We leveled up to 6!

After the game I did some quick research on the Internet and found out that you could feed Fledgeling Mourning Dove's the same stuff you use to hand-feed more domesticated birds, so I ran down to the local Petco and picked up a packet of this stuff for $10 and tweeted it out because Pedro had become the weekend project. I was now fully embroiled in the story plot for A Weekend at Pedro's.

Feeding Pedro wasn't easy. I took that yellow mush and sucked it up into a syringe and then would drizzle it down to his beak. At first he wasn't interested at all, and then suddenly I saw a little light go off in his birdy head, "Wait a second . . . you want to help me?" I'd squirt a drop of food on his beak and then he'd nibble it a bit. After he got a taste of it, he started really working that beak, sliding it back and forth along the edge of the syringe like he was trying to figure out how to really feed from this thing. So I kept that up, drizzling a bit on his beak and letting him nibble a bit, drizzling a bit on his beak, nibble, etc. It was a messy operation, but got the job done.

After his first feeding he let loose with a really cute and soft satisfied chirp. OMG PEDRO IS ADORABLE! You gotta play this two-second clip I tweeted out.

By this time it was night time, so I tucked his box away in my stuffy, yet perfectly safe, garage. And muddled over what to do with Pedro.

When I woke up on Sunday, he was still doing good, so I fed him his mush again, and Uber Wife (being "uber" as she is) committed to taking Pedro down to the Austin Wild Life Rescue, per Leala's excellent suggestion on my Twitter Feed. Uber Wife sent me pictures of the whole drop-off and even staged a great pic for me of his box near the drop-off sign.

No, we didn't actually just drop him off at the foot of the sign . . . Uber Wife took him inside the building, filled out a form, left the baby formula as a donation, and Pedro was finally being cared for by some professionals. As cute as Pedro was, it ultimately was better that he was left with the center. They were going to x-ray his wing, see what could be done, and do a better job at feeding him.

I just want to give a big thanks to my Twitter followers for their excellent suggestions and for joining us for a Weekend at Pedro's. I'm glad I can count on my Internet buddies to help with my wildlife mishaps.Thanks for the hand!

Happy Dueling!

Listen, y'all. It's The Art of Warlord's fault . . . straight up . . . that I play Overwatch. Make no mistake. I would have NEVER given this game a shot if it wasn't for Morgrim hounding me to play this game so much.

There was a Twitter spat and everything.

Then I finally caved and started playing on a free weekend last November, dubbing the game "Junkrat" instead of "Overwatch" because that's the only character I played for the first couple of weeks. Watching my first ever highlights reel video is hilarious now. It consists of me spamming at the enemy group, using riptires out in the open, and I think the final clip is even from a medium bot match.

Since then I've clocked 370 hours of game play and fallen in and out of love with various heroes, but what I've mostly found is that no one really wants to play the tank . . . so that seems to be where I fit best with Reinhardt.

That's 93 hours playing Rein -- not quite the 100 hour mark, but I'm getting there. When I still had my beard growing, I kinda even looked like a Reinhardt main.

Don't worry my friends, I am your shield.

I also switched my main DPS to Doomfist from Pharah because I play a lot with "Elik" from work who mains Pharah. I need to make a more up to date Doomfist highlight reel, but here I am in all my "punchy guy" glory:

I'm curious to find out how many of my followers play Overwatch. It's totally different from the usual game I write about here on TFN because traditionally I'm a super passive PvE playin' type of a guy. I mean, you "could" technically play Overwatch as a single player game, but that would be pretty boring ultimately. If only they made some kind of practice bot match somewhere in between Medium and Hard? (I mean, look at a game like Dota II and they've got their bot difficulty tuned pretty perfectly. I'd play bots on Dota II all day and still feel like I had a good challenge. It's probably intentional . . . I doubt they want you playing bots all day.)

As it is currently, I mostly queue for quickplay matches and mystery heroes either by myself or with the self-dubbed "Austin Potatoes" group. We're the potatoes because . . . that potato aim though!

Outside of this, I've recently had the pleasure of playing a bit of Overwatch with Miss Courtney Olivia. She plays an amazing Junkrat btw . . . So if you tune into her Twitch channel you may even catch me there from time to time? Maybe?

I've been kind of wanting to try another Team Fortress 2 / Overwatch knock off game called Paladins. If you have some experience with that game, please give me your thoughts in the comments.

Happy Dueling!

As some of you might know, I have three kids. On this blog I've referred to them by three names:

- Amber DeathSong (now 17 years old)

- Kyle SkyStaff (now 14 years old)

- Diapermancer (now 9 years old)

We might as well keep those names going, and it's been a while since I've talked about this amazing trio, so I snapped a few pictures yesterday as they were playing games and thought I'd talk for a bit about what they've been playing lately.

Amber DeathSong

It's all about the SPLATOON! Lately she's been playing Splatoon 2 (Octo Expansion) on the Switch.

There isn't a day that goes by lately where she doesn't comment to me about how much she loves playing Splatoon and listening to the Splatoon soundtrack. I'm all about that awesomeness.

Outside of Splatoon, she's also knee deep in a D&D campaign, a Starfinder campaign, and I don't even know how many GURPS games she's embroiled in currently, but I hear tales of her roleplaying a character named "Gef Dalby," a paranoid mongoose who's "really good at computers." Her gaming group is made up of artists like her, so they draw each other's characters, like this!

Kyle SkyStaff

Kyle has been playing a metric ton of Katamari Forever lately. I'm not sure why, but it's back in a big way. I was digging for a trailer for the game and found one, but you have to see this other (but related) trailer's intro for "Touch My Katamari" for the PS Vita.

Amazing. No other words can describe that.

This ball of goop has been rolling around on our TV for days!

Diapermancer

So . . . Diapermancer really only has one game of choice, and that's Roblox. This kid is a die hard Roblox player -- he's played it for . . . as long as I can remember . . . and I understand why. The variety of experiences and games you can find on Roblox is pretty intense, plus it's online, and as we all know here on The Friendly Necromancer, multiplayer online experiences is where it's at! He's a kid after his own father's heart.

Can you believe he's grown so much? And to think this kid's birth was announced on the Wizard101 launcher back on the day. Wild.

He's invited me to play Roblox with him a few times, and I always have fun playing with him. Cops and Robbers is good one we've played together.

Anyway, these three have always had interesting game choices (outside of Roblox). Honestly though, I'm just waiting for the time that Paper Mario 1000-Year Door comes back into all of our lives. :) You know it will! It always does!

Happy Dueling

Overwatch's 11th Season of Competitive Matches has five more days until it's over. I don't know what that means for you, but what that means for me is that I need to finally get these placement matches out of the way, so I can get a spray that I never use and earn a few more points toward this golden weapon thing that I will never obtain!

You see, the Austin Potatoes just don't do a lot of comp matches. We generally like the more laid back atmosphere of quick play and tend not to extend ourselves outside of that. That's what potatoes do. That said, we'll always give placement matches a go at, like, you know, the last minute.

To be honest, Vanessa MythDust and I were rocking those matches over the past couple of days.

Curse you random disconnect!

(That one loss pictured above was actually a disconnect that counted against me.) And sure . . . we ended up losing those last two placement matches, but I'd say it was pretty great overall for us.

Back in January, I did my first ever placement matches and ended up mid-gold with an SR of 2372 -- this was back in my days of playing Pharah all the time. After that I had switched to a Reinhardt main and did another round of placement matches that didn't end so well and my SR plummeted to low silver. Since that time we've been working our way back up -- just through placement matches mind you, because that's how potatoes do -- and this time I ended up with high silver.

So close to gold!

After placements, I stuck it out for another tragic loss and both Vanessa and I were both done with placements for Season 11. Here's how we're looking for that, team.

Don't worry my friends, I am your shield.

Pretty 50/50 between Rein and Doom with some Pharah and Junkrat sprinkled in for good measure. I had an excellent round as Pharah, scored 33 elims, and was able to play my rocket air guitar emote a few times, which is the most important unrepresented stat in that picture above.

The end result was that Vanessa and I felt better about Comp Matches! They typically are a cess pool of taunts, disparaging comments, and utter discouragement, but we didn't get that this time through. I'm sure if we played Comp enough, we'd find that behavior again, but one week before the season is over, it sure felt full of more people just like us -- generally chill peeps who just want to have a good match . . . and win! (And not just throwing a match on purpose to get into bronze; I realize that happens.) I may end up doing more comp matches in the future if it stays this chill. I'd much rather be earning points toward a golden fist or hammer than not.

And while you're here reading about Overwatch, you might as well also see the latest Animated Short if you aren't one of the 3.6 million people that haven't caught it yet.

What do you think, is this a set up to learn more about the guy with the hover bike? I sense future hero!

And also check out this Reinhardt Karoke from the Overwatch play test server. I will absolutely be doing this when it comes to the live game.

Happy Dueling!

Finally Tried (and fell in love with) Terraria!

A ninja pig of a different bacon

What's that Beanie Hat in Wizard101?

How do I Log into a Second Wizard101 Account?

Fire Emblem Heroes -- Blue Crow Ursula & Other Thoughts

Friendly Necro vs. the Dub Wars

Catching up with Althea and Company

Ahhh, that old Everquest jam. :) Hatesfury

Stingite . . . and the State of His Gaming: Part 1 -- Everquest

Stingite . . . and the State of His Gaming: Part 2 -- Mobile

Stingite . . . and the State of His Gaming: Part 3 -- Unplugged Gaming

Stingite . . . and the State of His Gaming Part 4 -- The Kitchen Sink

Hello, old friend!

Animal Cove has arrived: Friend me!

Medulla Conquered at Long Last: Thanks Cat Club!

Revisiting Neverwinter 2018

Weekend at Pedro's

Let's talk Overwatch?

Gaming with the . . . kids these days!

High (Ho) Silver, Away!