LFGryph

With this being my first day (mostly) off in a bit, I think I’ll save the topic I’d planned for another day! I’m trying to get some things done and then spend some much needed time gaming instead of writing about gaming. That said, some thoughts of the day:

Counter Monkey

Every once in a while I get on a kick and watch every episode of Counter Monkey back to back. If you’ve never watched the show, it’s focused on Dungeons & Dragons and other pen and paper roleplaying games. Spoony sometimes gives advice, sometimes tell stories of old campaigns, and usually manages both at once. Fair warning that the show’s language is not safe for work, and I seem to remember some of his earlier jokes making me go, “Really?” In general though, I super recommend it if you’re a fan of pen and paper games or have ever had any interest in them. My old Pathfinder game was made extra hilarious when three of us and the GM were keeping up with the show during the campaign!

Mobile Gaming

A bunch of fellow Blaugustians have recently discovered Fallout Shelter. While this is pretty awesome, it brings to mind a minority opinion of mine. Mobile games do not automatically equal suck.

I know, plenty are cash grabs (though you could say the same of non-mobile games). But I’ve got mobile versions of Minecraft, The Longest Journey, and Faerie Solitaire (also a Steam game). I’ve picked up Final Fantasy Record Keeper after my brother recommended it, and downloaded Fallout Shelter the moment it released. (Yeah…I have iOs devices. I personally prefer Android, but due to circumstances it’s far better than nothing!) I’m sure I’ll eventually pick up Bejeweled, and I’m actively looking forward to the mobile port of Fallen London. Oh, and then I also have Ingress which is a game only possible because it’s mobile.

There is nothing about being mobile that precludes a game being fun, talk to anyone who owned a Gameboy. Speaking of earlier days of gaming, it’s not like Pong or Tetris had sweeping storylines. I have to disagree with the idea that a simple game must suck, since many of the games I loved as a kid were quite simple.

I suppose this turned into a minirant, and I don’t mean to sound like I’m yelling at anyone. I have a pet peeve with the argument over which games count as “real,” and I also think the more we take for granted that mobile games are crap, the longer it will take for folks to start making more good ones.

Eldritch Zoidberg

A few folks commented on the screenshot I used in my last blog post, and there’s a really neat story behind it. At some point, I plan on doing at least one full post on The Secret World’s Twitterverse Experiment, but for now all you need to know is that some NPC’s have official Twitter accounts run by the dev team. It’s a plus of having a modern day MMO, and one reason we have such a huge group of IC accounts.

For a while, these NPC twitter accounts were regularly dropping information to be decoded for mini ARG’s. [Full disclosure, I sadly wasn’t playing the game regularly at the time it was most active.] One of these, when figured out, nudged the players to submit drawings for “The ABC of Monsters.”

What the players didn’t know was that those pictures would eventually find their way into the game. In a context-relevant location, there is a version of the entire book ingame. It’s not the only time the devs have added something like this, either. Just recently, they used screenshots of some of our awesome community members in a cutscene for the main storyline.

And speaking of TSW, I might go run some of my alts in a bit… ^^

Want to join in on #Blaugust? There’s still time! Visit the Blaugust Initiative page, and then head over to the Nook to get signed up and see what everyone else is up to.