Category: Gaming

Lets Save the World

Browsing through steam yesterday I noticed a game called “Eco” that had entered early access a few days earlier. Initially it was the bright and colourful graphics that caught my eye, then I watched the video which was pretty simplistic, but it seemed to be a game that was a combination of minecraft and wurm online, two games I enjoy a huge amount.

There’s single player, co-op, and multiplayer. The premises of the game is that a meteor is going to crash into the world (the timing of which you can control in settings) and your goal is to save the world – and develop your civilization far enough along that you can destroy the meteor, and also keep the ecosystem of the planet intact. You start out building rustic wooden houses and progress to factories and machines, I think in one video I even saw lasers taking down the meteor.

Everything you do has an impact on the ecosystem. Even where I’m building my single wooden house is already changing, the animals, the ground, the plants surrounding the area. I’m not very far into things yet, but I’m hoping other members of the combat wombat team get together and we get a server going where we can work as a team to save the planet. There’s crafting, harvesting, farming, building, hunting, and everything that makes these games a lot of fun for me. Character creation is lacking, but the game is also in early access. I didn’t run into any major bugs in my first round of game play, but to be honest all I’ve done so far is pick some tomato plants and chop a few trees, setting up the basics to my brand new house.

That being said, if these types of games appeal to you, I’d highly suggest checking it out. You can always refund the game on steam if it’s not your cup of tea, but I’m hoping this is one we all decide to stick with for some time. We’ll just have to see!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you fund yourself (oh, and expect a lot more Eco posts in the future. The game is complex. There’s government, shops, currency, and so much more to it that I haven’t even mentioned).

A return to streaming coming soon(tm)!

I had every intention of picking up streaming on twitch again once my family got settled into our new place but then my computer decided to break during the move, so now I’m waiting for replacement parts. This week the new processor and CPU I ordered arrive, and if that doesn’t solve my issue I’ll be getting new ram, and if THAT doesn’t solve the issue I’ll be getting a new power supply. If none of that works then I’ll be out of ideas because we already tested my video card and my drives, and none of those are having issues (swapped them out with the husbands computer and still had my jittery lag problems). Hopefully we figure out what is going on and fix it.

Once the new computer is up and running I’ll be figuring out a tentative schedule for streaming – I say tentative because I haven’t decided how I want to stream yet. My husband works odd hours, and isn’t exactly reliable to be home to watch Llama Bean while I stream, of course I could stream WITH Llama Bean like I was doing previously, but that limits my streaming options slightly depending on his mood and how clingy he decides he wants to be. I was thinking I could start streaming at nights again once Llama Bean goes to bed, but that would be 8pm central, closer to 8:30 by the time he’s actually asleep, and that might be too late for most of my audience especially during the week. It will be some trial and error while I find a comfortable spot to dive back in.

What games do I want to play? I really want to stream some Overwatch and show that it doesn’t have to be a scary evil thing to play a first person shooter even when you’re not that good at one. Plus it would be fun to stream my attempts. I’d also like to stream a few visual novels because those are some of my favourite games to play even though it would just be a lot of me reading. I feel the genre needs more exposure! I also have a huge library of steam games to go through and it would be fun to stream at least one new game a week. RimWorld was always a lot of fun, and I think some Sims 4 could be fun too though I encountered a major bug that broke a few of my games when I was playing in offline mode (grrrr). I’m hoping EA has a fix for them and that I just need to patch.

I’m excited to get back to things, and I’ll make sure to post the announcement of where and when I’m streaming here on NomadicGamersEh in the near future. If you haven’t tuned in to one of my streams before you can find me over on twitch and watch some older streams, or you can give a follow and catch the new ones when I go live (don’t forget to turn notifications on)!

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

How’s the Money Game Going?

Sales have taken a bit of a dip for me lately, and I’m not sure if that’s because my desirable items have all sold, or because I’m pricing items wrong now that the API is up, or it has just been a slow week or two for me. I mentioned before that one of the key points to making gold in WoW with my method was patience – and that’s not usually something I have a lot of but I’m trying. I’ve also been playing the game with my husband lately, and we’re not really doing anything that makes a lot of money, he’s getting familiar with things again and I’ve been flying him around Legion since I have a two person mount. We did duo the first Legion dungeon yesterday which was a lot of fun. I needed it for my alchemy quest, and I suggested we try it together instead of in a group because why not.

I still make a couple of thousand gold a day, but at this rate it will take me a lot longer to earn the gold for a token or two, and if it keeps up I’m sure three is out of reach completely. Since I’ve already bought the “essential” things I wanted it’s not a huge deal and I certainly don’t mind paying for my account with real money instead of blizzard tokens, it’s just something that would be really nice. I’m selling on three servers at the moment, two low population servers and one high. Things tend to sell faster on a higher population server, but you also have a lot more competition. One server I just added into the rotation yesterday, so I haven’t gotten a good feel for the market yet. One I’m pretty comfortable with, and my main server I’m still also trying to figure out. We’ll see how it goes.

I’m still really enjoying the market game, but taking a break is nice too so you don’t get burnt out. Finding a balance of everything I want to do can be tricky but I know I’ll get there.

As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!

What if we all played what we wanted?

My game time is precious. I don’t have a huge amount of it any more, and I don’t mind that. It has made me optimize what time I do have, and appreciate the gaming that I do. One thing I still see gamers doing to other gamers is berating them for not playing the “right” games. Talking down to them for their games of choice. I wonder how many people are playing games they truly want to play, and how many are playing due to social pressure, or even fears.

I still hop from game to game and get excited about new releases, but for the past 7 months I’ve been playing WoW quite steadily. My husband returned from 6 months at depot and started playing with me, which reinforced my desire to be in Azeroth. I’ve gotten some flack for playing and enjoying it, but I haven’t let that stop me. I don’t care what people say. I don’t care if others think the game is beneath me. I’m having fun, it’s relaxing, the world (for me) is amazing, and again my husband is playing with me, so that’s just one more hook. There are so many awesome games out there that I like to think there’s something for everyone and we don’t have to put down folks who are not interested in playing the same games as us. I don’t care if someone decides that Hello Kitty Online is their main game, more power to them.

The world is filled with some really scary things. Video games give us a moment or two to get away from that, to be a part of something magical, to suspend reality for a brief while. Lets not take that away from anyone by being negative to them about what they’re playing. We don’t have to like the same things, but we should certainly learn a bit more tolerance, in every aspect of our lives.

My first FPS ever

Even though I’ve owned a few first person shooter games in my time, I’ve never actually managed to play them (that includes a lovely copy of Fortnight I was super excited about that a friend gifted me). FPS has been one genre of game that I have avoided, for no real reason other than it simply didn’t appeal to me. I am not a fan of guns, violence, or killing even in a video game. I don’t like realistic games where you play at war. I admire the skills required but that’s about all.

Slowly, games started hitting the mainstream market that appealed to me a bit more. Bright colourful games without blood, characters that had personality and were more than just army characters. Cartoon like graphics that help take some of the edge off of the genre for me. Of course I’m old enough to understand the difference between a video game and real life, and I don’t worry about me being influenced like that – but it has still always made my stomach a bit queasy.

When Overwatch came out I was interested in it right away, but the price tag and the fact that I had no idea if I would even enjoy a FPS kept me from buying in. There was an awesome sale around Christmas where I almost folded and picked up the Game of the Year edition for half price, but life got busy and I balked. When I started turning my gold into tokens and adding them to my Blizzard balance I waited to see if it would go on sale again, and as my luck would have it, this weekend they also offered a free trial for people along with a 50% off sale.

My PC is still having issues with FPS in games even after trying a new video card, so I knew playing would be awkward at best, but that didn’t stop @scopique, myself, and my husband from jumping into game and playing a few rounds against the AI on medium difficulty.

It. Was. A. Blast.

I had so much fun, despite the lag (playing at 13 frames a second is really hard in an FPS). I played a bunch of different healers which as it turned out, is something I really love doing. I got to level 5, got some lunar loot boxes, fell in love with the different skins you can collect, and because I had enough coin saved up in my blizzard balance, bought the game of the year edition.

Being able to convert coin into WoW tokens into $19 CAD has been amazing. I had enough in my balance for Overwatch, and I also moved my alliance hunter to the server my husband and I are playing on. With future coin I’ll pay for game time for my account, though it’s not needed. It’s just nice. Sales have been a bit slow lately, but that’s alright I don’t expect every week to be huge, I’d rather look at a monthly picture, and I bought 5 tokens last month, which (to me at least) is a lot.

I’m really eager to solve whatever issue is going on with my PC and be able to game properly. I know playing against the AI isn’t the “real thing” in Overwatch, but for my first time ever playing that sort of game, I think I did OK. As always, happy gaming, no matter where you find yourself!