Welcome to my little rabbit hole of Imaginatary spewings. I cant tell you what you may find in here because I dont know myself.
Beware. Thar be Dragons.
It's been a spell, but I have finally gotten around to a semi-regular let's play schedule. My new laptop and sound setup mean that I am able to record footage with a good framerate, and with a decent level of audio quality. (Not perfect, but it is a £40 Fifine USB microphone I am using).
At the moment I am working through a Hardcore Minecraft series, if that's your bag, come check it out!
Episode 1 of my latest attempt here: https://youtu.be/W8F-fsy4yt8
So, yesterday Minecraft V1.8 dropped. The longest and biggest patch/revision to date, having taken almost an entire year to develop after the release of 1.7 in October last year.
Having spent some time reviewing the changes, and a little time in game, as well as the fact me and my friend Evic will be kicking off our new cooperative lets play this evening, I can confidently say I am excited to get into the new version of the game, and some of the changes I have seen or read about are awesome!
My world preview video for the Coop Lets play world.
The major changes revolve around new blocks, new mobs, material changes, changes to villagers as well as a batch of fun and interesting miscellanious changes.
World Generation:
There is a new option on world creation to create a custom world. With this, you can use a selection of sliders and check boxes to decide what is in your world, and how much presence for certain things there will be. A fantastic way to create challenge maps, or just something that looks a little different.
In ocean biomes, there is also the chance of discovering an ocean monument - large underground structures containing rare materials and guarded by new mobs - the guardians. To say they sound challenging is an understatement. Physics changes mean that arrows wont work under water (beyond 2 blocks) so you need to get up close to them, and to do that likely means crafting lots of water breathing potions.
Mobs:
On the subject of mobs, there are a lot of mob changes and additions. There are passive mobs, such as bunnies, that can be killed for food and leather scraps that can be combined to make leather. Guardians, which guard the monuments, and Endermites, which spawn around nether activities, like Endermen teleporting, and are similar to Silverfish. Sheep now drop meat, bunnies drop meat and can be used with a large recipe to make Rabbit Stew that restores 10 food and 12 sustenance, making it the most potent food in the game. Additionally, the Wolf AI has changed, they now actively hunt skeletons, and scare them away. Give a dog a bone eh?
Villagers:
Villagers have had an overhaul. The trade system is more effective and there are more unlocked trades, and villagers also have a level of willingness that goes up as you trade with them, making them susceptible to breeding with other willing villagers if they get to a certain level. They also have professions, which will dictate their tradeable goods. Best keep them villagers alive ;-)
Enchanting:
Enchanting levels have been changed, and enchanting also uses Lapis Lazuli. Finally, a use beyond blue dye for this most useless of blocks.
Some other changes include making certain items stackable, like doors, and also making wood items like doors, fences and the likes actually have colour to match the base material. This makes for much better customisation. Other items include armour stands where you can hang up armour or mob heads - which themselves are gathered from blowing up mobs with a charged creeper. THere are also a load of new blocks ranging from new types of stone, to slime blocks (trampolines!) and sponge blocks (hold water).
On top of this there have been a butt load of tweaks and bug fixes. If you have not had the chance yet, get in there and enjoy!! :D
I played Unturned for the first time last night, and I have to say, for a game that comprises of the most basic of graphics, it is an excellent and fun game. Taking elements of DayZ, where you start with nothing and have to scrounge everything to survive against the zombie hordes and remain 'unturned', and elements from Minecraft - the styling and crafting, it is a very interesting and rather intense game, at times. The impact and effectiveness of the game was immediate, and it was very simple to play, and better than it's appearance conveys.
Here is how my first few lives went:
My first life I walked into a town, and was promptly zombified in the back of a shop when it turned out that not only can these zombies run indoors, they are also a little faster than you and miss a LOT less than in DayZ... They also hit a LOT harder.
My second life lasted a little longer. I even got a rifle. I ended up being flanked by an un noticed zombie whilst hunting a deer, and was hit from behind for my last 10% health.
My third life seen me accrue a good inventory of weapons, start using the crafting system and the built in XP sytem to upgrade my attributes to better survive and combat the undead hordes. I then went ahead and assaulted the local military base, mowing down zombies left and right with a stolen car, gearing up, grabbing a Hum-Vee and spiriting away into the sunset.
FUN!
I have thus far only played single player. It is a tough little game, but is very thrilling... and gore filled! Let's just say a shotgunned zombie will paint the internal walls of a building liberally.
The game includes a few systems that work well, including crafting (Hang onto that last bullet because you will want to refill the clip using the crafting system!), and experience points. Feel like going on a Katana wielding zombie Murder spree? Go for it - you will get XP to spend on swinging that bad boy better! Whilst lives tend to be somewhat atomicised - when you die you lose everything, you still regain some of your skills that you have invested, and your corpse will litter the landscape somewhere to recover some of your equipment.
Recommended!
My suggestion: Get your asses on Steam and get this game downloaded and try it out. It is Free to Play (At least at the moment) -- I will be commencing a short series let's play shortly to see how well I do in this game before I look to hitting up a server with other players.
It has been a while since I last updated this blog. It is not for lack of content, trust me!
I have so many things I want to blog about. I want to discuss my thoughts on The Elder Scrolls Online, I want to talk about Wildstar, DOTA, League of Legends, Hearthstone, World Of Warcraft and it's upcoming expansion, Warlords of Draenor. DayZ. Minecraft. What I am planning now I have started recording Let's plays again. So much to talk about.
Do many things I want to post about. I shall endeavour to get some more content created soon.
One thing I will note, is that I have changed the name of my YouTube channel from Velkairiwyth (Which is a bit of a silly name for visibility...) to VelkGaming, for the obvious reasons... :p
It has been a quiet couple of weeks here at the LandOGeekery. My time has been spent either sorting some personal things at home, or creating let's plays on my YouTube channel.
I have finally pre-ordered XCOM which is released here in the UK on Friday. In anticipation for this I started an XCOM: UFO Defense / UFO: Enemy Unknown speed-play which I have been recording and putting on YouTube, with the intention of completing the game before release of the new game. FYI: I will start a let's play from the start of me nubbing it up in the new XCOM game, so come by and check it out :D
Other than this I have been playing Minecraft, and recording my Let's play & Let's build series, which can also be found on my channel - and playing on the MissMoonica minecraft server, which has a pretty awesome batch of folks playing there :-) Griefing is a problem, but in general the regulars are quite pleasant.
Oh, and lastly - Star Wars Roleplay... Have been having epic fun with friends playing this, I am thinking of posting some stories or session encounters here - but not sure how I would go about it considering we have clocked in excess of 50 hours so far playing.
So I finally got around to tying my YouTube channel and this Blog along to a Twitter account. You can follow me @Velkairiwyth and you can become a Velkster by subscribing to my YouTube channel! Here I post my let's plays, and intend to post periodic V-Logs aswell. I am fast approaching 100 subscribers and have in excess fo 10k views from my first month of (properly) posting Let's play videos. I am thoroughly enjoying it and dont intend to stop any time soon :-)
So, Minecraft 1.3.1 came out at the beginning of the month. I have spent a fair amount of time playing it, I have also been doing a let's play of it. I must say I am thoroughly enjoying doing this let's play. I had been doing one for Hardcore minecraft before it, but the videos started bugging out and glitching and I lost a chunk of it so have paused it in favour of this for now. I have also been doing one for XCOM and periodic Portal and Blacklight Retribution videos, as well as a more recent series for Skyrim - with Dawnguard. All good fun :D
Now, I dont know what it is about Minecraft, but its hella addictive. When I first started playing it, it was creepy, jumpy but at the same time very simple (especially if you have the wiki page open! :p)
I learned to play whilst watching Tobuscus play that and Skyrim, and also watching the epic videos from The Yogscast. I think these helped to feed the addiction just a little... haha!
So, in 1.3.1 - a butt ton of new features have been implemented, from Enchanting enhancements (see what I did there?!) and Experience sources to new items and features such as gem trading (which as Gamechap and Bertie would have you believe - is not great yet...). So far my experiences have all been positive. The game runs just fine and dandy, and the only thing that seems to have changed is the amount of creepers. Dang creepers! dont just take my word for it tough, go check it out! :-)
I have linked part 1 of my let's play below, I hope it amuses you!
In addition to my minecraft let's play - I now have one for UFO Enemy unknown / XCOM: UFO Defense. I decided it might be interesting, and fun to try to play this game in a superhuman challenge. I have completed the game on all difficulty settings in the past, but I invariably finish the game with a vast squadron of super soldiers - half of whom were there at the start due to the ability to reload and reload and reload after every mistake. Well, not this time! Come see how long I can last against the vastly more advanced, numerous and more powerful alien forces as they seek to Harvest our organs, turn the governments of cities against us and generally try to destroy life as we know it.
As with the Minecraft let's play - I shall attempt to upload videos daily although I only really do the recordings at the weekends, so if I have short sessions - I apologise if the end of the week is a little stagnant ^.^
It has been tough finding time to play games over the last few months what with working on my honours degree, and having two jobs. To this end, I started watching a LOT of Let's play videos. Below is a rundown of some of my favorite YouTuber's :-)
TobyGames(Toby Turner... silly to the max, and very entertaining to watch anything he does.)
The Yogcast (BlueXephos mainly at the moment - though there are many people who upload videos from here, especially for the Survival Games videos ^.^)
Kikoskia(My first Let's Player - always amuses me.)
The games that I have been enjoying the most are Skyrim play throughs, Minecraft games and UFO Enemy Unknown... To this end, I have decided to start trying to make my own!
I have already done one session of recording for my Minecraft playthrough, >Linky< - it's good fun, though I clearly need to get more practice at commentary and video editing. I hate the box window view, and I think this is something I have sorted now though, so later let's play videos should be of a much better visual quality.
To this end - I also intend to start a UFO: Enemy unknown (Xcom - UFO defence)Lat's play - on Superhuman mode, following Hardcore methodology... The load button shall only be used in the event of technical issues... Yeah, Im crazy - but I am confident I can give it a good shot!
