2048: Sign of the Beast
For those of you who are not currently playing this game, I suggest you skip ahead to the next section. I feel like a crack peddler by even mentioning it, and this is from someone who is “lovingly” referred to as the “games pusher” by some of his friends. It was a few months ago when one of my game developer friends stumbled across this simple but deeply nuanced game and it made the gamut of my friends. I suck at number puzzles and even I played it quite a bit. The problem is each time I started down the path towards the mythical 2048 I would get to the point where I wanted to throw my phone across the room. I managed to get 1024 numerous times but could never seal the deal and get the other half of that equation.
It was much to my horror that I awoke this morning to find my wife laying in bed beside me playing this game on her phone. As a math teacher I was honestly surprised how long it took for this craze to cycle around to her, but apparently it is now infecting her “community” as well. The only cure is to NOT play, but that seems to be harder than it sounds. She said some of her students have actually lost sleep trying to reason out how to get to the magical 2048. As a result I have now decided to dub this the devils game… I am sure that Advanced Dungeons and Dragons will be disappointed that it has lost the title. I realize this is just a rework of the existing threes game, but there is something inherently more addicting about it. We NEVER count in 3s, but each time we sit down at a computer everything we do is based around binary… so 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, etc etc are all numbers we are so damned used to looking at in terms of memory or whatever we happen to be doing on a computer. Threes just looked at the problem from the wrong angle, and this little freeware version is better than it in every possible way.
Finishing Stormhaven
I was absolutely taken aback at just how gorgeous this screenshot came out. Anyone who says something negative about the graphics in Elder Scrolls Online has likely not actually played it. Last night I dinged 27 and am still finishing up the last few things in Stormhaven. I technically should have moved on around 25, but I have a hard time leaving a zone until I have at least made an attempt to turn all of the black icons on the map to white ones. I got the last Skyshard last night, and now I think I just have one quest line to follow before I can happily move on to Rivenspire.
The above armor I am wearing is the tier 3 Imperial heavy armor, and I have to say it looks pretty damned awesome. Right now I am trying to gather up enough orichalcum to craft a new onehander, but I upgraded my two hander last night. I have reached a point where I desperately need Orichalcum, but can’t seem to find much in Stormhaven… whereas before I couldn’t find the High Iron I needed. I have literally dumped a few 100 bar stacks into the guild bank since I don’t really need them. Hopefully it will help out some of the up and coming smiths in the guild. What I am desperately in need of is tempers… especially Dwarven Oil. I feel like I need to farm some of the world bosses in an attempt to get items to deconstruct.
Getting our Asses Kicked
Up until this point my friends and I had managed to make our way through the six dungeons to this point on a mixture of luck, skill and determination. However last night we hit a hard and absolute wall. The Crypt of Hearts is a dungeon in the next zone up… Rivenspire. It is scaled for level 30, and last night we had two at 31, and two at 26. We just did not have enough healing, damage, survival…. to push through the content. We managed to down the first encounter, but got completely gummed up on the second. We put in a bunch of attempts on Archmaster Siniel, and while we improved we always seemed to hit a point where we just could not survive the damage.
There is a lot of stuff going on in that zone, and it involves a lot of adjusting to what is happening. I think we finally had the right way to handle the fight, but just were hitting a gear wall. Can I tell you how damned refreshing it is to completely fail at a dungeon? That might sound odd, but to have a game with dungeons that can absolutely break our group is pretty damned impressive. Normally we steamroll content in these games, and after a few deaths we have figured out whatever “trick” there is to a fight and then from that point on have mastered it. To have our asses handed to us so thoroughly gives us a mission to figure out how to beat the place. This dungeon is going to become our new “sand giant” and we are going to want revenge.
#ElderScrollsOnline #StormHaven #CryptofHearts #2048 #RivenSpire