Homeward Bound

This morning as I sit at the keyboard typing away… my laptop remains essentially the only thing not yet packed and ready too be loaded into our rental. I have a mixture of excitement and trepidation… excitement because I will be so glad to be home… and trepidation because I detest flying… and know I have to deal with a 3 hour flight from Newark to Tulsa. Hopefully everything at home is just fine, and that our animals are all happy and healthy, and that the house sitter had no real issues.

Holding Pattern

The most frustrating thing about this trip so far has been that while I had all the time in the world to do anything I liked… I did not have stable enough internet to do much of it. Sunday night when we finally arrived at our hotel room, the internet was awesome… while not quite up to what I am used to at home… it was more than sufficient. Monday the cast of an off Broadway show arrived… and from that point onwards regardless of the time of day… most everything has been unplayable if I could even get connected in the first place.

It feels like so much has been going on this week, with the anniversary events happening in The Secret World and a release of a new content update. Then over in Guild Wars 2 there is quite a lot of stuff happening as well. Finally I am still in the thrall of my Rift resurgence… and for whatever reason this is the game that seems to hate the hotel internet the most. I will start off with a decent ping, but very quickly it degrades into completely unplayable. Often times I ultimately just ended up disconnecting and not being able to get back on afterwards.

Very quickly I realized that I would have to just wait to do much of anything until I got home today. As a result I feel like I have been trying to find things that did not necessarily involve an internet connection to play them. Unfortunately while my laptop is loaded full of MMOs… it is sadly lacking in the single player and offline departments. With the Hotel Internet not being super stable… I can’t really download anything from steam that I have in my archives.

A Game of Cubes

Cube World was released last week sometime… but the store went almost immediately offline… and stayed that way for the majority of the week. When the ability to purchase the game came back… they had taken the new accounts sign-up feature offline. So it became a daily activity of checking whether or not this was open for registration, and finally on Saturday night… before we left for Albany… the registrations opened up and I was able to grab ahold of a copy. This game has served as my mostly offline shiny new thing to play with on this trip.

The game as a whole is much harder than I was expecting it to be. Initially I was thinking this would be much more Minecraft than it has ended up being. Essentially you start out in a completely randomly generated world… with little to no ability to actually kill anything. At first you end up following around packs of NPC adventurers that will help you combat the bad guys you encounter in the world. As a result… the process of getting from “I suck at everything” to “I can survive mostly on my own” feels a little tedious.

I am not sure if this is just another game that loathes melee players or not, because generally ranged tends to be easier as a whole than melee in most games like this. I detest finger wigglers. so of course I had to go for sword and board… though over time I have migrated to dual wield. The block mechanic works well enough… but only for insanely short periods of time. When you are dealing with monsters that seem to be able to do non-stop special moves… it just isn’t enough to make the difference.

My biggest complaint thus far is that the torch feels inadequate for illuminating anything really. It creates roughly a 5 block by 5 block bubble of light around you… but when it comes to exploring anything like a cave… it is extremely hard to see where you are going. I am hoping that over time you can get upgrades that increase your radius of light similar to how you can in Terraria. If you intend to craft metal upgrades… you will spend a lot of time looking for caves, fighting bats and destroying iron nodes. As a result the lighting system feels extremely limiting.

The major complaint I have had with the system… is that I feel it would have been better if it supported a building system like Minecraft or Terraria. I like exploring… but I also like having bases of operation that gives me a feeling that I am actually changing the world around me. The exploration aspect of the game is great, and I love encountering monsters I have never seen before… and often times dying to them the first time. But I wish I could be building things in the world as well. If this game could be blended with Minecraft the hybrid would probably be the most addicting game ever.

Fort Belghast

As a direct result of playing Cube World… and this feeling that I wanted to be shaping my world… I have spent a lot of time alternating back and forth between exploring in that game… and building over in Minecraft. I started a brand new world and the seed I chose had a really nice shallow cave system. I started off boxing that in and using it as a prebuilt base until I started constructing a proper fort on top of it. Right now the underground area has a few large chambers, with a structure growing up into the little fort that you can see in the image above.

I created an elevated bridge style entrance, because it allows me to see what is surrounding my base before exiting out into the dangerous world. Also when there are a large number of zombies or similar around me… it funnels them into one single block place for farming. Additionally if I absolutely have to… I can bail over the wall to escape something. Right now I am quarrying stone from below the base to build up the tower system above. As you can see in the above picture… the tower is currently woefully unfinished.

I hope to do some terracing eventually to clean up the area and make the approach to my fort a little nicer looking. I have really not done that much exploration… my focus has really been on building up a solid base of operations. Eventually I will start a mine system below my base where I can hopefully get plenty of ores and other special resources. I mostly play Minecraft to build structures… but for whatever reason it feels more real to me.. if I do it on survival. I could be just as happy playing on creative… since all I really want to do is build nifty things… but the world then feels completely dead.

I cannot express in words… how happy I will be to leave this area and get back home. I miss essentially everything… my animals… my comfy sofa… a world that makes sense to me. I’ve found plenty of interesting things to do to kill my time… but it was not really the grand voyage of discovery I was hoping for. I know the workshop my wife attended, has been massively useful for her… and each night she has come home with pictures of the labs and activities they did. So the major focus of this trip was a complete success… and my being here… was just to make sure that happened.

I came on this trip just because I wanted to make sure my wife could attend this workshop. While she is a trooper and an amazing road warrior… she would have struggled with driving in this environment. She doesn’t really like driving period… and Tulsa traffic is far more sane and rational than anything I have experienced here. Her lack of depth perception would have been a major issue in this environment where I am essentially constantly scanning both sides of the street watching for some idiot that is about to dart out into the middle of traffic (as has happened so many times I have lost count). So ultimately regardless of how I have felt about this vacation… I feel like my role in it was a success.

So essentially today I have to check us out of the hotel at noon and then figure out a way to kill 3 hours of time until I pick my wife up from class. We are ferrying two other classmates to the airport… turning in our rental… and catching a 5 pm flight to Newark. We have a 45 minute wait until we catch another flight to Tulsa that should take 3 hours. So hopefully by about 9:30-10ish tonight I will be home in my own bed. After the hotel bed all these nights… our comfy bed at home will be amazing.

Wrapping Up

This has been an interesting experiencing even if it has not been super exciting. Time for me to do some googling to figure out how exactly I will kill the rest of the day. Thinking I will play some Minecraft until around noon… pack up the rental and then set off and do something for the rest of the afternoon. Elo was telling me about another mall with another game store… so I will likely set my sights on that. I hope you all have a great day, and that it is relatively uneventful.