Frankenstein: Master of Death

Every now and then I look on Steam for the absolute cheapest game. If it has Steam cards and looks vaguely interesting I tend to pick it up in the hopes I'll eventually play it. Frankenstein: Master of Death is a game that was on sale for 16 cents a couple weeks ago and said it was a 'hidden object' game. I enjoyed playing a 'hidden object' game on Facebook but eventually got put off by the free to play business model... So I thought putting up 16 cents for a game without those annoying paywalls was a worthy risk.

It ended up being more of a point and click adventure game in the sense that you had to find keys that fight the right doors to progress through the plot. Finding the keys was pretty trivial; remembering where the lock was happened to be a little annoying. Only occasionally did you get into a 'hidden object' minigame and those only ever had a fixed 12 things to find. Not the best offering for someone who just wanted to click on a bunch of hidden objects.

Ultimately I beat the game in a little under 3 hours. I wouldn't say it was the most fun I ever had playing a game, but it was reasonably fun. I had to leave the game running in order to collect up the Steam cards that came with it (they added in a refund option to return a game with under 2 hours played so now cards won't drop until you've clocked at least 2 hours in a game) and ended up selling the cards off for 26 cents after Steam fees.

All told I made 10 cents and got to play a decent enough game. I'm not sure it was actually an optimal use of my time, so maybe buying the cheapest game on Steam is actually not a very good idea...

On the plus side, it is now the second game in which I've earned 100% of the achievements. Huzzah!

Hearthstone Ranked Prizes

My brother came over for supper a week or so ago and in the course of conversation let me know that Blizzard apparently added minor prizes to the constructed system. The higher up the ladder you get, the more free stuff they throw at you. The free stuff really isn't very much, but it's more than the absolutely nothing you used to go. (You get one golden common at rank 20, with increments of 5 extra dust per rank most of the time, with sometimes extra cards thrown in instead.) The biggest jump is at rank 5 where you go from getting 2 golden commons and a golden rare to getting 2 golden commons and a golden epic. Not a huge deal, but it is a bunch of free cards and since they're all golden they're worth more if you want to blow them up for dust in order to help put together other decks.

I haven't played constructed in an awfully long time, since I grinded up to Legend a couple of times at the start of the year. But I figured I like free stuff, and I wanted to stream more Hearthstone anyway, so I played for a few hours on the 21st and then a little bit yesterday and today. I was learning patron when I last played and the newest set didn't seem to change anything for that deck so it seemed like the thing to try out as I went to scoop up some free stuff.

When I last hit Legend it took me 148 games to go from 25 stars to 71 stars, which is where rank 5 kicks in. This month it took me 47 games to go from 1 star to 71 stars. That's a whole heck of a lot faster! I was winning around 52-54% of my games back then. This time I won a little over 87% of my games. There are likely a few reasons for this difference. Patron warrior is a much better deck than mech mage used to be. I started much later in the month, so the people I played against at each rank rated to be a fair bit worse this time around. Perhaps most importantly the metagame shifted and a new paladin has emerged that is terribly positioned against patron warrior. I don't know if it beats other things, but it sure can't beat me!

I'm still not sure I really know how to play the deck well. I am getting a better feel for things just through practice, and it definitely makes me think I'd need to invest a lot of time into constructed to actually have a shot at doing well in tournaments. And that would also require way more cards than I currently have... Which means more drafting?

Diablo III: Season 4

The next season of Diablo III starts in less than an hour, and it's looking pretty sweet. They put out a new patch this week to use in the new season and it has a ton of interesting changes! The biggest one is the addition of a new 'cube' with powerful new recipes. It lets you reroll legendary items to get better stats, or trade in an extra copy of a set item for a different piece of the set, or convert a rare item to a legendary. You can swap gem types, or crafting material types. You can remove the level requirement from an item to really power level an alt. But the best part is you can destroy legendary items and then equip 3 of their passive abilities onto your character! One of the constraints to builds in the past was which slots you could get passives from while maintaining overpowered set bonuses... Now those options have multiplied! So many more builds should become playable as a result!

On top of that they've added in higher difficulty levels (useful since the previous highest difficulty for the base game was massively eclipsed by the greater rifts)! New items! Quality of life changes to crafting and rifting!

On the downside they decided to put crowd control (CC) caps back in. This was part of the initial game and it sucked since you couldn't permanently CC hard enemies which meant everyone had to build to be invincible. Eventually they decided that was a bad idea and took the cap out. Now they put it back in and I'm not sure why. On the plus side it came with massive damage nerfs across the board to enemies so maybe they've decided everyone needs to be invincible again but actually made that feasible this time? I guess the setup where every group needed a CC bot that did no damage was pretty bad too. So if everyone can mostly survive just fine with the damage nerfs and you can use short bursts of CC to help against bursty monsters or something that could be good.

I tried out my old crusader on the highest difficulty just to see what it was like. He was built to infinitely CC things, and couldn't anymore, so that sucked. On the plus side I was able to kill all the monsters in torment X. I died to most of the blue packs. But my build was undoubtedly bad now, and I had none of the new cube bonuses, and I wasn't tip-top as it was, so the new difficulties are probably just fine.

All in all I'm pretty pumped to get playing Diablo III again. This version of the game is probably going to be the best one yet, and that's really sweet.

Rocket League

Rocket League is an online MOBA game where you drive around in a car, with a rocket strapped to the back of it, and play soccer. It seems to have pretty good physics for a rocket boosted car game... At the very least it seems to be consistent! So even if it isn't 'realistic' for the real world, it feels realistic for the Rocket League world.

Ike is always on the lookout for games we can stream together, and he really wanted to get into Rocket League. I wasn't sure it was for me, but mostly I wasn't sure the price tag was for me. But then Ike was awesome and gave me a copy of the game on Steam. Hurray! I ran through the tutorials and was pretty bad, but it was fun.

Last night after my WoW raid I played some games with Snuggles, Sceadeau, and one of Sceadeau's friends. The game plays up to 4v4, and we were pretty terrible, but it was really fun. We played for close to 3 hours all told and there were noticeable improvements in both our mechanics and our strategy. Still really bad, but not quite as bad as at the start!

I watched Witwix playing H1Z1 this morning, and then he finished his stream by playing Rocket League. It was like he was playing an entirely different game! My tactics pretty much boiled down to driving fast near the ball and hoping it did good things if I hit it... He was able to do these jumping dashing hits that actually made the ball move fast, and in a planned direction! Definitely some more practice will be needed... But it seems to have a reasonable matchmaking system, so even if I always suck I should just play against other people who suck and then we can have fun driving around near the ball!

One big plus the game has is you only play a 5 minute game with almost instant queue times to get into the next game. So even if you start getting blown out, the game is almost over! It's not like some LoL games where it's obvious you've lost in 6 minutes but have to play for another 20+ minutes until the game actually ends.

It's definitely worth checking out if the idea of car soccer sounds interesting.

Seven Springs Lodging Options

The World Boardgaming Championships are moving locations starting next year. It's moving from a self destructing hotel an hour from Philly to a ski resort an hour from Pittsburgh. From the sounds of things the ski resort is under newish ownership and is working on setting themselves up as a summer convention destination. Convenient that our convention needed a new summer destination...

One of the big concerns people have about the move is the increase in hotel cost. There were a ton of cheaper motels and the like around the old location (as in, the next building over) but a ski resort is more likely to be secluded and cut off those cheaper options as a result. On the other hand the ski resort does have a bunch of different types of rooms but actual information about what is available is sketchy at this point in time. Someone told us there were chalets with bunk beds and pretty low quality buildings but I found pictures of the chalets on the website and there were no bunk beds to be seen.

At this point I suspect the best play is to just get a room in the main hotel for the 2016 convention and then actually see what the other options are in person to make decisions for later. But for anyone unwilling to pay the main hotel price that's not really a good option. Getting to cram a ton of extra people into a chalet of some kind could be a really economical option for large groups of people... But there's a problem here in that no one has told us when we can book these things, or even how much they're going to cost! Waiting to get that info before making decisions is apt to have a faster group yoink your chalet out from under you! So it seems like a prudent thing to do would be to look at what the options are going to be and then it'd be easier to pivot and make a decision when the pricing is actually revealed. I will be listing the default web pricing when I can find it, but I have to assume the convention will have reduced rates.

SGDQ 2015

It turns out it's that time of year again. Summer Games Done Quick started up this afternoon and will be running for the next week. It's a speedrunning marathon which raises money for the Doctors Without Borders charity, which as I understand is one of the best charities in terms of actually making charitable use of donations.

These marathons are really, really cool to watch. Check it out! (Especially Monday night during the Tetris block...)

The First Rule of Don't Starve Together

Eat.


Easy enough, right? Actually, it is pretty easy. There's a ton of food all over the place! I'm much more likely to die from bees, or spiders, or tentacles than I am from starving. Of course, I tend to be fighting those things in order to get at more food...

Anyway, I've been playing a fair bit with Ike recently and we figured out a couple of recipes in the crock pot device which lets you combine 4 pieces of food into a meal. We found out that meatballs seemed to give lots of food but no health while honey nuggets gave lots of health but not nearly as much food. We wanted to know more details, but it turns out my interface with a controller doesn't seem to show any numbers at all. We wanted to explore the game without just reading all the stuff about it, but not having a real way to get numbers for things was frustrating. So we decided to actually search for the crock pot recipes and see what was actually going on.

It turns out it's a pretty complicated system. There's a ton of recipes, but the real key is that many foods are interchangeable in the recipes. For the most part all of the meats are the same. All of the vegetables are the same. All of the fruits are the same. Some specific recipes care about specific items (turkey dinner needs turkey drumsticks for example) but otherwise a drumstick is the same as a frog leg is the same as a morsel of rabbit meat. Cooking food before sticking it in a crockpot also doesn't do anything in the vast majority of recipes.

The only real twist is that each category of food has some foods that are just bigger than others. Meat, monster meat, and the cooked/jerkied versions of those are twice as good as all the other meats. Berries and cooked berries are only half of a fruit. All of the mushroom varieties are only half of a vegetable.

Because there's so much interchangeability between the different categories it turns out there's a lot of overlap in terms of what you can make with 4 given ingredients. They put in a priority on every recipe and the highest priority recipe gets made if multiple legal recipes are put in the pot. If there's a tie then each recipe has an even chance of being made. This actually means there are ways to turn monster meat into real food!

And in a weird turn of events, twigs are a legal item to be put in a crock pot. I tried to cook with poop, but I didn't try to cook with twigs. Oops!

So there's this huge list of recipes... What recipes are the 'best' ones? A given world layout will have different levels of access to the kinds of food, but is it worth killing frogs in order to make frog leg sandwiches? Are honey nuggets as awesome as it felt like they were? I decided to go through everything and crunch some numbers, because that's just the sort of person I am. Unfortunately this meant reading a little more about some other aspects of the game (base stats and the like), but I still have no clue what the actual goal of the game is, so I don't feel like I've actually spoiled anything relevant yet!

Ike tends to play Willow, and I tend to play Wilson, so I didn't have to do too much poking around. Both have 150 max health, 150 max hunger, and lose 75 hunger per day. Wilson has 200 max sanity, Willow has only 120, but she can gain sanity back by standing in fires. (And is immune to fire damage!) So if one is planning on going on a multi-day adventure to explore the map one should bring 75 hunger worth of food per day.


I built a spreadsheet and tried to guess the cheapest way to make each cooked food. Then I compared the gain of the ingredients against the gain of the result and I was actually pretty surprised. A lot of the recipes didn't seem to actually help all that much. Roasted berries are actually really good, it turns out, so using them as the main ingredient in most things isn't helping all that much. The real gains seemed to be found in terms of sanity. Eating basic ingredients doesn't give any sanity for the most part, while some of the recipes can give some decent sanity.

Roasted berries are worth 1 health and 12.5 food. That's the same value of most things that I thought were better than berries, like cooked fish, cooked frog legs, fried drumsticks, raw carrots, and cooked morsels. Cooked carrots are actually better than all of those at 3 health and 12.5 food.

Honey nuggets, which I thought were really good for health, give 20 health, 37.5 food, and 5 sanity. The ingredients are worth 6 health and 46.875 food. So you actually lose almost 10 food by cooking them up, but they give an extra 14 health and 5 sanity. I'd say that's pretty worth it if you need healing.

Froggle bunchwiches give the same amount! But you can make them with mushrooms and twigs instead of honey and berries so they're actually really good.

Trailmix gives 30 health and 5 sanity, but only 12.5 food. You lose a lot of food value making the trail mix, but you get even more health than the honey nuggets.

If you're looking for a big food boost you're looking at wanting to make meaty stew or meatballs. Meatballs actually are only worth 25% more food than the base ingredients, so they're not fantastic. The meaty stew is a full stomach in one item and also gives 12 health and 5 sanity. The real cool thing about the meaty stew is you can use one monster meat in there with no risk of monster lasagna. So 2 morsels, a meat, and a monster meat will make a meaty stew. Getting the normal meat is rough, and it may be better to use it in a honey ham recipe, but it is a good way to use monster meat to good effect.

The best use of monster meat is probably bacon and eggs. You can use a full 2 monster meat with a tallbird egg and a twig for that recipe which gives 20 health, 75 food, and 5 sanity. Even with regular eggs (which I've never seen) you can use one monster meat with a morsel and 2 eggs for this recipe.

Some of the fancy fruits and veggies have individual recipes which are pretty cool.

Turkey dinner is awesome. More food than meatballs, the same health as honey nuggets.

Fishsticks actually restore 40 health, 37.5 food, and 5 sanity. Which is way better than trailmix! I found a way to mine for fish the last time I played with Ike, and it now seems like a really good idea.


At any rate, what I learned is cooked carrots are better than I thought. Cooked berries are as good as most of the meats, so throwing them in as filler is not as good as I thought. The recipes are still pretty good if you need the extra health or sanity from them, or if you're using them to convert garbage items like monster meat or red mushrooms into real food. Trail mix is bad for food, but really good for health. Stuff you get by fighting low level monsters (bees, frog...) makes the same sort of stuff which is good but not fantastic. Meatballs are not as good as I thought but still worth making I think. Runs to collect up berries and carrots are looking like a really good idea.

World of Goo

Sceadeau and an anonymous blog commenter (who was probably Sceadeau) urged me to play the game World of Goo that I'd picked up in a prior Steam sale. That someone I know says a game is worth playing is reason enough to give something a try, especially when I already own it! It also makes me feel less guilty about buying games during this Steam sale, so it's win-win!

Anyway, World of Goo is a physical based puzzle game. You have a bunch of goo balls which you can connect up with each other. The connection is a little like a girder would be, in that it provides some support to your structure. But it's goo, not steel, so it's bendier than steel would be. Gravity exists, and can drag your structure to the ground if it isn't secure enough. The goal varies by level, but it's mostly to build a structure from a starting point to an ending point on the level using as small an amount of time, moves, and balls as possible.

It reminded me a little of Lemmings. I like Lemmings a lot, and this game was pretty interesting.

Unfortunately, it isn't all sunshine and roses. My primary goal for a game most of the time now is a game I can stream that might be of interest to other people. World of Goo as a puzzle game actually felt like it would fit in pretty well there. People worse at the game than me might want to watch to pick up tips. People better than me might want to watch to provide tips and make themselves feel better. People around the same skill might want to tune in and feel like they could help out with suggestions some of the time. Hurray!

But then it turns out the game is pretty old, and was not coded with my computer in mind. It only runs in full screen mode. It only allows you to scroll the screen by positioning the mouse on the edge of the screen. It doesn't restrict the mouse to staying on the monitor. And it jams up the resolution of my second monitor. These issues combine to make it hard to navigate around in the game, really hard to make quick moves, and impossible to watch chat while streaming.

It was also set up to have internet leaderboards, but couldn't find my internet connection. I like leaderboards. But I can't use them, despite having an internet connection. Maybe their servers are down? Or they don't understand wireless connections? Regardless, it makes the game less fun for me to have a broken feature than it would for that feature to not exist at all.

I certainly won't be streaming the game again, and I suspect I won't play it again on this computer either. But I might well put it on my laptop to have a fun puzzle game to play. And it was worth a dollar.