Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
This week we had a full house with everyone on the podcast. With the way, life has been lately this has been a rare treasure. We start off with some talk about Grace’s experiences in Torchlight Infinite and Kaichu. Ash talks a bit about Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom and how the entire Wonder Boy series is nonsense. Thalen shares his thoughts about the launch of Marvel Snap. Kodra talks a bit about Mario and Rabbids Spark of Hope and how wrong it is that the Rabbids can now talk. From there we dive into the New World Re-Roll and how in spite of our best intentions we still could not get everyone on the same damned server. Finally, we wrap up with a little talk about the not-MyLittlePony fighting game called Them’s Fightin Herds.
Good Morning Friends! I thought I would give a bit of a progress update on my adventures on Themiscyra and the re-roll in New World. The server is still very much on lockdown from new players which is unfortunate, but it does mean that there appear to be zero problems actually getting in and playing. I crashed to the desktop around 9 pm last night and made it back into the server without any queue. Given that our peak last night was only around 2000 players, I fully expect the gates to open up at some point soon. I am accidentally level 36… and by that I mean I have mostly been focused on gathering and crafting and the levels have just sorta happened without me really intending them.
I did focus a bit on questing last night because I wanted to go ahead and choose a faction. Previously you could sort of rush the faction choice and get there by around level 8. That is no longer the case and you will not encounter factions at all until you are in the second zone which is Everfall. Since we went with Greysky Expedition previously, I chose the tried and true Greysky Armada for our re-roll adventures and once again went with Syndicate. Firstly team Science is better than team Religion or team Military as far as themes go, and purple is a pretty damned solid color. The huge benefit is that pretty much everything you get from Twitch drops… matches the faction theme. While green is my favorite color… in my experience since launch Marauder players tend to be the crudest of the New World community.
All of my efforts have been on pushing Armoring and Weaponsmithing up. I hit level 100 yesterday on Armoring and should be able to easily hit 100 on Weaponsmithing today. Similarly, I have reached the 100s on all of my gathering professions except Lumbering… which just means I need to grind that one out as it seems to take longer due to the resources being more plentiful. Nothing is better honestly than chopping down trees while watching a movie, series, or even a YouTube video. Gathering in this game is legitimately the best feeling version in any game, and I think that might be part of why I am so attached to the game.
The worst part about starting in Monarch’s Bluff is that it is weirdly horrible for all gathering professions. While there exist some harvest routes… none of them are terribly good and the zone is especially awful for hemp. It is at this point that I share my secret with you all, and the side benefit of having memorized so many resource spawns. Since the routes are in general awful… I suggest camping out at a location that has what you need. Outside Prydwen is a hut shown on the map above, and this one location has basically everything you are going to need just in small quantities. Along the ridge, there are three Iron nodes, surrounding the hut on either side are a half dozen hemp nodes, some herbs, and some carrots for harvesting, and then pathing around the hut in and out of the trees are low-level wolves. Essentially while I was working up my trades I lived here and would alternate between grabbing the resource spawns and hunting wolves for leather.
Eventually, as you need larger quantities of materials you will need to roam the world to find better spots. The area between Monarch’s Bluff and Windsward is notoriously good for hemp and has Bison that each harvest for a huge amount of leather. Similarly, there are better places for farming Iron and other resources that you might need, but that Hut will get you started on your tradeskill journey. I stumbled across a great sacrilege though yesterday, where someone was killing all of the Bison but not skinning a single body. So of course I followed along in their wake and raked in the benefit of all of that free leather. I guess there are folks out there who simply do not engage in trades at all… or else did not get the message the town board quests were no longer lucrative.
Things are about to slow down for me significantly now that I am fighting for heavily contested resource spawns. Unfortunately, I don’t have a fat stack of cash in order to bankroll my tradeskill leveling, so instead, I am going to have to rely on my knowledge of resource spawn locations to get what I need. This means that I need to migrate out of the starter zones and up into the higher areas to start farming nodes as they spawn. I have my trade secret and ideas about where I am heading next. I do know that I am going to still need so much iron in order to progress but that is at least something I can get trivially. Starmetal, Wyrdwood, and Silkweed are my next major targets, and while I know a ton of spawn locations… I figure the longer I wait the more contention there will be.
My long-term goal for this adventure is to get Armoring to 200 and Weaponsmithing to 200. If I can do that and then craft myself a new set of Voidbent armor, I will have felt like I have replaced the progress that I made on my original character. I am having a heck of a lot more fun on this adventure than I did tooling around on my “main” over on Valhalla. It feels good knowing I have so much of the game ahead of me and can do things right this time… as opposed to a lot of the mistakes I made the first time. It feels like everything is so much easier to do as well, and while I know I have a grind ahead of me… it is so much less of a grind than I have already been through getting armoring to 200 the first time. That said other professions seem much worse to level like Cooking and Arcana because the easy “hacks” which involved gathering a ton of very cheap materials no longer seem to make a dent.
I get that it probably seems like nonsense that I am sitting at 36 already, given that the patch dropped late Tuesday afternoon. I think instead it is just a testament to how much faster the early game goes than it did previously. If you are interested in joining in this nonsense, you might watch my twitter as I will be announcing when the server opens again.
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Good Morning Friends! As we are well into the “season of spoop”, this morning I am picking up a series that I started a few weeks back where I talk about my favorite horror films. The problem with that undertaking is that horror as a genre is too broad to ever boil it down to a comprehensive top-ten list. Instead, I am tackling things by various subgenres, and to date, I have covered Zombie films and Vampire films. This morning I will rip the bandaid and get this genre out of the way because I have to admit slasher films are not exactly my favorite. There are gems in the genre, but my preferences tend to align more towards dark fantasy or films with a clearly defined monster and some deep world-building. That is not to say that I do not occasionally enjoy watching some villain tear through a bunch of drunken college kids.
I am saying this ahead of time because my favorite slasher films are likely not going to align with someone who is really into that genre. This is probably the most “your mileage may vary” that we are going to get with this series of listicles. Again these are not necessarily in any particular order.
Halloween
We have to start things off with what is maybe objectively the best movie on the list. Halloween is a master class in suspense and leaving the worst parts unseen. It also introduces what is potentially the most relentless hunter that does not dip down into the supernatural. Jamie Lee Curtis will always be the queen of horror movies in my book, and this movie highlights why. The Michael Myers appearance is reportedly a cheap William Shatner mask, but the end result leads to one of the most creepy and soulless killers out there. There are a handful of sequels that I have enjoyed, but nothing will beat the original.
Friday the 13th
When looking at Friday the 13th it is impossible not to think about the deeply derivative number of sequels this movie has had. I think to date there are twelve different movies in this series, including the truly dumb Jason X which is set on a space station. However, the original movie is a truly creepy film and I think deserves our respect. As far as villains go, Jason is known for being this relentless force that will track you forever but the first film didn’t even need the supernatural to lean on. While I really dig some of the later films like Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter, I still feel like the first film is the best.
Nightmare on Elm Street
Continuing the sequence of bringing out the great slasher baddies, let’s talk about Nightmare on Elm Street and Freddie Krueger. If you were a child of the 80s… we all wanted that glove. Sure Robert Englund did an excellent job bringing this bloodthirsty oneiromancer to life, but the glove… that is the part that made everyone love Freddie. Again you have a series with many sequels… some of which are not all that good but I think the first film is probably objectively the best. That said I really loved dream warriors as a kid in part I think because it gave the “victims” way more agency.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
One of my core problems with the slasher genre as a whole is that so often it devolves into torture porn. That really is not my jam as far as films go, so you are unlikely to see any movies of the Saw series on my list. That said every so often there is a movie that is ABSOLUTELY torture porn, but it is delivered in such a compelling manner that it has to be respected. For me, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is one of those films and while it is legitimately hard to watch at times, it presents a world that is deeply disturbing but also extremely unique for the time in which this was released. Not only is Leatherface an iconic villain but the fact several of elements from the movie are lifted directly from the life of Ed Gein makes it even more traumatizing.
Childs Play
I love this movie for entirely the wrong reasons. In the 80s there was this toy called “My Buddy” and the commercial was played so often during Saturday morning cartoons that the theme song drilled into your brain. The Chucky doll is a play on this and what if this object of safe childhood play… went horribly wrong. The BEST version of this is the Simpsons Treehouse of Horrors Krusty Doll satire, but the original Child’s Play movie is still a pretty solid outing. I love the world that got built around this movie and more specifically the phenomenal performances that Jennifer Tilly has given as Tiffany the girlfriend/bride of Chucky.
Wrong Turn
This is another film that borders on torture porn but still is extremely interesting. City folk especially have deep-seated fears of the unknown in the undeveloped green wastes of our world. I come from “Rural America” and even then there are always the weird people that come to town very rarely, and largely live off the grid. This movie dials this up to eleven and presents a clan of highly deformed mountain folk who prey upon outsiders. There are multiple versions of this film, but I think the 2003 rendition is my favorite. It feels like it draws heavily upon the banned television episode of the X-Files called “Home” from 1994. It is a disturbing watch to say the least.
Happy Hell Night
I can pretty much guarantee that this film is not going to be on anyone else’s list, but it means a lot to me personally. Once upon a time, there was a movie rental place near me called Video Giant, and they had this 20 movies, 20 dollars, 20 days deal exclusive to effectively “B Movies”. My friend Kaleon occasionally comments on this blog and I would go over there, each get 20 movies, and then swap back and forth until it came time to return them. There was many a treasure unearthed through these adventures and one of my favorites was Happy Hell Night. It features a very young Sam Rockwell and Jorja Fox and is not likely something they specifically promote on their resumes. Everything about this film is “not great” except for the villain which is this demonic priest that has a “catchphrase” of a sort each time he kills someone. He does not really speak at all other than uttering things like “No Sleep”, “No Sex”, or something similar with No and something relevant to the context of the killing. Something about the absurdity of it all made me fall in love with this film and recently I tracked down a DVD so I could rip it and add it to my digital collection.
Happy Death Day
Also in the absurdist sub-sub-genre is Happy Death Day. Essentially this movie is what if you combined a slasher flick with groundhog day. It is Tree Gelbman’s birthday, and at the end of the night, she is going to die. Each time she dies… it resets the loop and she wakes up in a dorm room after a one-night stand each day she has to live out a walk of shame… and a sequence of events leading up to the same conclusion. Essentially she has to figure out how to solve her own murder so that she can avoid it… close the loop, and live to see another day. The movie is definitely not your standard brain-dead slasher fare and is extremely funny in the process.
Candyman
I love Clive Barker and this is his ode to the slasher film genre. What this has that so many other films lack is this rich mythology that is built up around the titular villain the Candyman. Into the narrative are woven statements about social class structure and racial violence, that make this far more than just a tale of the boogeyman. The brush chosen to paint this story however is borrowed from the Bloody Mary style mythos where someone saying a name three times in the mirror summons forth a demonic presence. Like pretty much everything that Barker has been involved in, it is both compelling and terrifying at the same time with a palpable sensuality. Sweets for the sweet.
Scream
Scream is a great film… full stop. It is a satire of the slasher film genre, while at the same time being one of the best and most competent examples of it. While this gets watered down greatly over the course of a series of movies, the first film is still phenomenal. The Ghostface killer also walks this line between being one of the most generic-looking villains ever but also summoning forth an iconic appearance at the same time. What I find so interesting about it and that will not be understood by future generations… is the mask used in this movie was like the cheapest of cheap Walmart discount bin costumes for years. Much like Michael Myers gave new life to a discount bin William Shatner mask, Scream made this awful ghost mask design the stuff of legend. If you have never watched this film I highly suggest doing so.
More to Come
This is probably going to be one of the more controversial lists that I have released in this series because in creating it… I left out a lot of fan-favorite slasher films. That said this is “my” list of favorites not designed to be universal. I think next up we are going to tackle Werewolves, which moves us back into more of my favorite sub-genres. Like I said before, Slasher flicks are not exactly my favorite in the genre but I wanted to tackle them just so I could talk about Happy Hell Night, a film that I think more people should appreciate for its absurdity.
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Yesterday was the launch of the New World Brimstone Sands expansion content and with it the potential rebirth of the game. On the 8th of October, we had set plans in place to roll on Themiscyra which at the time was the lowest population of the US East servers with an average population of around 300-500 players. It was in the same server group as three other servers, which would in theory allow it to merge down later and still be a reasonable place to play. My hope was that this would allow us to weather whatever burst in activity came with the launch and still have a viable population after mergers.
Unfortunately, it seems as though the New World team directly conspired against these plans as on the 10th they released this population heatmap post. While I realize that the team has no clue who the hell we are or the plans that we were making, this was compounded by the fact that yesterday according to folks in chat Themiscyra was the server that was being suggested to brand-new players. The end result is that over the course of several hours, we went from being one of the lowest pop servers to one of the highest population servers. This also means that by around 6 pm CDT last night, if you did not already have a character on the server you were effectively locked out from creating one or transferring. So once again I know of at least a handful of people who did not manage to get onto the server before the window closed. I am sure over time it will open up and apparently anyone who has not logged in since February got an additional server transfer token, so maybe over time, everything will sort itself out.
I guess the positive is that the door slammed shut at pretty much the optimal time for playability. I disconnected in the middle of the night when the game crashed on me, and it took me maybe 15 minutes to get back in through the login queue. So while Themiscyra is locked off from anyone who did not pre-stage a character on the server like a number of us did, it does appear that those who managed to get into it can play freely without much concern. Valhalla the server my original main is on had an estimated 16-hour queue last night, so I really do think that the re-roll was a great idea. Unfortunately, it appears that you have to log into your character before you can transfer off to another server, so that means anyone on these higher-pop servers is largely stuck.
It is impossible to ignore the impact that the last few months have had on the game, and the onslaught of players is palpable. On Steam last night the game had the 9th highest active population behind a number of the usual suspects and beating out Wallpaper Engine… which is a thing that is just always running in the background so it rarely drops in concurrency. It isn’t just returning players however because at one point yesterday New World was the third highest-selling game of the day behind Destiny 2 and Call of Duty Modern Warfare II, so some heavy hitters. This is a pretty significant feat and if they can hold this out, the game might make a legitimate comeback. Unfortunately, we are already straining under the poor system design.
I have talked about this so many times before and I will mention it again. The core remaining problem with New World is its server infrastructure which greatly impedes maintaining a reasonable population, while also allowing you to play freely with your friends. It is that last part that is extremely important to most MMORPG gamers, and we are less than 24 hours from the release of this patch and already the doors have slammed shut for anyone who might have wanted to play on the same server we targeted. Thankfully Ace, Kodra, Tam, and I pre-staged characters on Themiscyra but creating the character and then logging out in the starter experience allowed us to pick up from there when we logged in yesterday. Anyone who did not have the foresight to do that however is out of luck.
I spent most of yesterday working on trade skills and I am deeply thankful for my memorization of harvest routes. Over the course of alpha and beta I did spend quite a bit of time in the Monarch’s Bluff area, and while I do not know it nearly as well as say Windsward, Everfall, or Brightwood… I do at least know several good spots for much-needed low-level resources. Funny enough is that I have not been spending almost any amount of time questing, and instead through almost harvesting alone I am already sitting at level 19. My key focus has been getting all of my harvests up to 50 so that I could easily gather random rare resources as I stumbled across them in the world. From there I am working on leveling Armorsmithing first to 50, and then will pick up and focus on Weaponsmithing to 50. Then raise those both to 100, and so on until I eventually get both to 200. After that, I will probably work on leveling Engineering and Furnishing since they will both be extremely useful late game.
You can see my progress for the first day, as I have all harvests but skinning up to at least 50 as well as all of my refinings except leatherworking. Unfortunately, Monarch’s Bluff lacks a really great resource like the near-instant respawning boar valley near Everfall. Across the board, I would say that Prydwen is one of the rougher starting areas for raw resource gathering. I do wonder if that was intentional, in order to get folks to spread out a bit more across the map. First Light has phenomenal Iron Ore and Windsward amazing Flax with then Everfall being a bounty for lumber and leather. While there are pretty much all relevant resources near Prydwen in Monarch’s Bluff it is not exactly plentiful, which probably does a good job of dispersing the player population and keeping them from “turtling” around their first hub city.
As it stands I am running up Greatsword and Sword/Shield first and favoring the first former leveling and DPS and the latter to eventually tank. There are a ton of weapons that I greatly enjoy but most of them are strength-based so at some point, I will work those up, probably the first alternate duo being Warhammer and Blunderbuss. I am deeply excited to have a real focus in New World other than just running Orichalcum and Iron Wood routes on my main. It legitimately feels like a fresh start. It is however tarnished by the fact that I know any friends who contemplated joining in but were slow in getting started are now locked out. I will be monitoring the situation and if our server unlocks I will be talking about it over on Twitter.
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