Redwolf's Journal (continued)

A couple more thoughts... 7.3 in WoW is a goddamn playground for my paladin main. The story feels almost as much like an extension of the paladin campaign as it does the main Legion storyline. And while I'm a little annoyed at the density of enemies, I have had zero issues taking them on. Level 112 rare? Oh, that'll take a while to burn down, but I'm not going to die. Pull 8-10 normal enemies? Inconvenient to wrangle together, but again not a lethal threat. I'm sure other class/specs work just fine as well, but protection paladin feels almost ideal. I managed to squeeze in about half an hour with the Destiny 2 beta this morning. That was just enough time for me to finish the initial mission, skipping some of the cut scenes. Overall, it looks and plays pretty good. Of course, a beta doesn't necessarily accurately reflect the final product, but I do some some criticisms. For a new player, there was very little explanation of how to play. "Super charged....

The Long Dark remains my go-to background game. The first couple chapters of the story mode were enjoyable enough, though there's a bit of a disconnect when having to gather a bunch of supplies for one of the few NPCs you enounter. Comparatively, the survival mode is all about you. I'm still learning some things about it, and I find it enjoyable, if quiet. I'm easing back on Secret World Legends play. Transitioning from blue to purple gear feels like a pretty steep climb, and some of the later content in Transylvania and Tokyo is a bit rough to solo at that gear level, it seems. So the game's feeling a little more grindy at the moment. I've considered paying a month to be a "patron," but the rewards are surprisingly unmotivating to me. Lockbox keys and a few extra skill points seem unlikely to make much difference in the experience. GW2: Path of Fire is out at the end of September, which otherwise looks like a fairly bleak month for new releases from ...

Pepsi Fire is one of the oddest drinks I have sampled in quite some time. As a "cinnamon flavored cola," I suppose it's not really surprising - it has a taste far closer to liquid Red Hots than any a simpler cinnamon-sugar flavor. There's a little burn to the aftertaste. I can also see, in the initial flavor, how someone described it as being "vodka flavored." Not what I would call particularly desirable, but I told myself I'd try it and I did. I finished the "original" story quests to Secret World Legends and have pressed past some things that were old post-release content in TSW and into the recently released (for SWL, at least) return to Tokyo. There have been a few quests in that bunch that ramped things up a notch, in a good way. Driving an armed snow mobile was a little clunky, but fun. The additional cut scenes help with the storytelling. Of course, the story being told is still kind of hazy, but the experience there shows improvement...

My costuming has stalled out after I sewed a bunch of velcro to the vest, took a look in the mirror, and decided everything needed move up about an inch. So I really need to remove and re-sew all that velcro. Or just start on another vest entirely. Neither enthuses me. I've played a good bit of The Long Dark story mode over the weekend. It's not without its faults, but it does add some direction to the directionless sandbox version of the game it's been up until recently. I like it. It's not overly complex. The graphics are somewhat simplistic in style, but manage to be beautiful sometimes. I like hunting for resources, and exploring new areas, and judging how far to go and how much to try to accomplish away from shelter, and I like struggling to recover after overextending. In the story mode, so far at least, I haven't been mauled by three wolves in a row and killed. The bear hunt, however, may be a bit overly difficult in my opinion. I think I'm nearing the ...

So, watching the  Angry Joe review of The Dark Tower movie , I'm stricken by his use of the terms "dull" and "boring" (repeatedly). Though he hadn't read the book, his overall reaction to the movie was actually a lot like mine to the book - which I found to be atmospheric, but unrewarding and not interesting enough to draw me into the series. So, between that and what I've read elsewhere about the movie, I'll probably give that a full pass. Playing through the most recent Guild Wars 2 story, I was asked to do it with someone. So it's been slower. And I've been shoved off to the side in some of the scenes as a spectator - the game lets party members take credit for those segments, it seems, but only the primary character who starts the instance is actually in the center of it, swearing into a secretive sect and facing its trials. Normally, this sort of thing would make me feel left out. And it might on some level. But I also find it unusua...

I've mentioned before the legal suits between Harmony Gold and the companies behind Battletech . It's based on a mess of international licensing rights that others have researched and explained better than I every will.  I don't have all the details of the settlement, but the end result seemed to be that certain mecha designs which originated in Macross could/would not be used in Battletech . And so those models, even though they were iconic, became the "Unseen." There have been attempts to redesign them over the years, but mostly they're just sort of avoided. Well, it looks like this has come up again. I wouldn't have noticed or cared, except Harmony Gold is including in its current case the Hairbrained Schemes Battletech game in development. They've also targetting Piranha Games' Mechwarrior Online . This annoys me largely because it may delay (probably not prevent) release of the former, which I've backed and look forward to. If you look...

Yknow, after cutting out a bunch of sintra and suffering at least three different forms of finger injuries, I though "hell, that was tougher than expected, but at least the difficult part is done." Then there was the challenge of shaping, forming, attaching, filling, molding, sanding, and eventually painting a helmet. "But at least the hard part is done!" Sometime Sunday, while blasting myself with a heat gun to shape velcro-affixed plates to my torso and lamenting the difficulties in reaching certain pieces, much less seeing them all, it really started to sink in that any thought of being mostly done or whatever might be the hardest part is really premature. A little decision like, "I think these chest plates need to come up about half an inch," is going to necessitate pulling stitches and resewing velcro patches.  Getting my back plate positioned properly is something I still haven't even wrapped my head around a way to approach solo. Shoulders a...