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Gaming Diary: Warframe Again

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Well, Keri is away for two weeks. Something about traveling abroad, celebrating a birthday, and having fun with a friend. I dunno. It sounds a lot like slacking to me.

As for me, I spent a bit of time playing some games with friends that I haven’t gamed with in a few months. Mainly because we are all adults and have a ton going on. Anyway, our time together began with Elder Scrolls Online. We all made new characters so we could start in the same area. We quested for a bit, got a few levels, and had some good times. Yet, adulting would catch me and I would have to run off to handle more house work.

Over the two days we all got to hang out in virtual lands, we played a bit of ESO, a bit of Trove, and a whole lot of Warframe. At some point on Friday morning, my friends had asked me if I had played a game called Warframe, and I responded with a “Yeah, it’s pretty fun. It’s just stupid grindy!” response. Well, that didn’t stop them from getting hooked.

We ended up playing a ton of Warframe from that point forward. I helped them get acclimated to the various mechanics and systems in the game. Then the grinding for blueprints kicked in. One friend ended up just playing Warframe the rest of the weekend. He was pretty addicted to it. Ya know, it does have its claws in me as well.

Now I have something free, fun, and sci-fi oriented to take up my time after I tackle the to-do list. Speaking of which, this post is the end of my list for the day. Guess it’s now time to go ninja slice some baddies!

The Corner of Randomness: Taking a Day to Game

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I’ve been ridiculously busy working on my house with the hopes of getting it ready to be sold in a few months. This has led to very little time for gaming. It sucks because constantly going can really wear a person out after a full week of going nonstop. So, I’ve decided that every Friday will be a recovery kind of day.

Today is the first of the recovery day shenanigans. I recently managed to get a few friends into Elder Scrolls Online. We played for a bit last night, but my crap internet took a beating when a thunderstorm rolled through. Hopefully today will be a bit better and we can all jump into the game together and play for a few hours. This should also help with me in finishing the strategy guide for a possible review next week.

If my internet decides to be a pain, I’ll most likely just jump into some DOOM. Mainly because DOOM sprawled across three monitors is pretty friggin sweet! Or maybe I’ll be smart and start on a game from my backlog of shame. There are just so many options!

I do hope this new day dedicated to chilling will pan out. If nothing else, the sleeping in this morning was totally awesome! Now to fire up the PS4 and go roam around Morrowind!

The Corner of Randomness: Time to EVO!

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Well, EVO is finally upon us. This is essentially the Super Bowl of the fighting game community (FGC). Players of all walks of fighting game backgrounds descend upon Las Vegas to put their skills to the test. There will be upsets. I can guarantee you that there will be pop-offs and tea-bagging galore. Winners will be crowned, money will be won, and bragging rights bestowed upon the best players.

What makes this EVO so special is that there are three pro tours happening. Injustice 2, Tekken 7, and Street Fighter V are all at EVO with premier tour events. While Street Fighter V is still king when it comes to registrants, it’s nice to see Injustice 2 and Tekken 7 getting some love. I do still hope that one day the Street Fighter games will be dethroned as king.

If you get only one day to watch, then Sunday is certainly the day to do so. This is when several games come to an end with their Top 8 runs. While I’d have enjoyed the Injustice 2 finals happening here, they take place on Saturday night. I wonder if Sonic Fox will dominate as he usually does. Then again, the hype level just gets that much more if he comes in second or third.

While I’m busy working on my house, and working on photography classes for the new studio space, I’ll be glued to Twitch.TV as much as I can. Yet, I’ll be sad once Sunday draws to an end. It’s a long wait until Capcom Cup later this year, and an even longer wait until AGDQ rolls around in January. Keri and I might need to form a support group for those of us about to go through streaming hype withdraws.

The Corner of Randomness: Oh So Tired

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I am tired as all hell today. Sadly, this isn’t even by choice. I just couldn’t fall asleep. So today I’ll be running off sheer will……aaaaaaand heaps of coffee. Yet, there is one positive to not being able to fall asleep last night. I got to watch a good amount of SGDQ. Yay?!?!

I knew I’d be up somewhat late as I wanted to catch the Tetris block. Why this was slated for such a late timeslot is way beyond me. Yet, it is what it is and so I figured I’d catch the Tetris runs, particularly the 2-players 1-controller race, and then crash. I’d just have to catch the Zelda runs when they were uploaded to YouTube.

That plan didn’t exactly work out. The Tetris block started way later than it was scheduled for. Still, I watched it in utter amazement as there is no way I could play Tetris: The Grand Master anywhere remotely as good as the runners. After that, the Zelda: A Link to the Past no sword all dungeons run took place. Still wide awake, I watched that as well. While that run was cool, it was more the commentary that made that run totally worth watching.

3AM rolls around and I’ve turned the iPad off. I’m staring at the ceiling. Craziness ensues. I start debating what games I’d speedrun. I start contemplating what categories I’d run on a game such as Super Metroid. Thoughts of grandeur fill my mind. Finally, sleep claims. Thankfully before I started documenting my crazy delusions of trying my hand at speedrunning.

Now here I sit. One cup of coffee already destroyed, and preparing to go make my second cup. I won’t be able to catch the last day of SGDQ 2017 as I’ll be travelling and that makes me sad. Yet, I’m travelling to go check out a new studio space, which means I’ll soon be doing more photography business. Before that all happens, I think I’ll go get more coffee and….oh, wait. What’s that Chrome? Twitch.TV wants me to visit? Right, here I come!

The Corner of Randomness: SGDQ 2017

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Well, SGDQ (Summer Games Done Quick) is just a few days away. This most certainly means that Keri and I will be glued to our Twitch.TV streaming devices for a solid week. We’ll be texting and chatting in amazement as the various games we watch get absolutely destroyed. There will be plenty of hype as games such as NieR: Automata are completed in two hours, and the runner will do that while playing the game one-handed. It’s a stupid fun week of video game streaming.

I figured with SGDQ kicking off on Sunday, July 2, I would help newcomers with some of the terminology that is thrown around. Here are some of the phrases you might hear during the event.

PB: This stands for Personal Best. This is when the gamer achieves their best time in a run.

WR: World Record. That should be pretty self-explanatory.

Frames: Games tend to run as 30 or 60 FPS (frames per second). This means the game is drawing the world 30 or 60 times in one second. If you hear someone say this is a frame perfect thing they must do, that means they have fractions of a second to execute whatever it is that they are doing. 30FPS games are also considered more cinematic in presentation while 60FPS games tend to look much smoother during action sequences.

Save the frames. Kill the animals: The big finisher for any GDQ event is often a Super Metroid run of some sort. Sometimes it’s a race. Sometimes it’s two players one controller. At the end of the game, there is a small area that you can go to that has some animals that can be set free. Over the course of the event, people can donate as to whether or not these animals are saved, or a few frames of time are saved and they are left to die when the planet explodes. This is by far the biggest donation incentive and it gets pretty crazy as the game draws near to saving or killing the animals.

Version of the game: You’ll see a plenty of Japanese versions of games being run. This is done to save time. Sometimes it’s due to text being faster to plow through. Sometimes it is because certain glitches are not patched out.

This also applies to patch levels as well. In DOOM, they tend to run on an unpatched version of the game due to the glitches that exist. The version of the game is a very important part of speedrunning.

Optimized: This refers to the routing used to get through a game. If a game is optimized, it means that plenty of work has gone into finding the optimal route through a game. When a game is considered “optimized”, squeaking out fractions of a second to improve times comes down to player execution.

100%: Speedrunning a game and achieving 100% of all the tasks that need doing so the game says it is 100% complete.

Any%: Speedrunning the game, but beating it as fast as possible. This can mean bosses are skipped, quests are incomplete, and/or glitches used.

Glitchless: Glitches, such as clipping through the world, are not allowed to be used.

RNG: Random Number Generator. This can be how a boss attacks (like Dark Souls III bosses), what items are found, or just manipulating getting specific Pokémon to show up at the exact time they are needed.

OOB: Out of Bounds. Some glitches allow you to go outside of the game world and just cruise to the very end.

Bonus: DS Dad: A few GDQ events ago, an older gentleman was sitting towards the front of the audience. He was consistently playing his DS. He became dubbed “DS Dad” via Twitch chat. He has subsequently donated to the event (AGDQ 2017) thanks to Twitch chat. He has even done commentary a time or two. At this point, he is pretty much an icon for GDQ.

There are plenty more terms that I know I missed. However, this should be a good primer to help get any new watcher into the event. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go watch some 2016 VODs. Cuz I don’t have an addiction problem. DON’T JUDGE ME!

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