For a good number of us this is “return to work day” and I am hoping it is finding you well. Our holiday was a bit odd because my wife and I were realistically too sick to go to any of the family festivities. As such we begged off on a few of the traditions until next weekend. I used to take all of the time off between Christmas Eve and the day after New Years, but I was late getting my request in. As such I am going to be stuck being the sole manager at work, and in truth the only voice of authority on my side of the house… which will be interesting. I did however take off all of next week to make up for it… so I just need to get through the next few days. This partial week is more or less going to be one of retrospection on the blog as I start doing the various year end activities. This morning however I am going to talk about the various gaming related things I did over the weekend, starting with the Starlight Celebration in FFXIV… which was adorable as usual but not really worth talking much about otherwise.
Next up there is a holiday event running in Magic the Gathering Arena where you can play Pauper for free for a handful of prizes. I threw together some black and green jank and immediately lost the first round, so I thought this would be a short lived event for me. My hope was to win a single round so I could get the full art Llanowar Elves. Instead however I went five wins after that initial loss and wound up winning a Firemind’s Research… which is in Izzet colors and not exactly the sort of thing I play but hey… free card and closing out the event by winning. I need to play a few more rounds so I can stack up three more of the Llanowar Elves, but when I say it is a bunch of jank I mean it. There is literally no discernible theme in this deck other than a bunch of cards that I for one reason or another like.
Another thing that I did over the break was farm up a full set of the Universal Studios of Japan gear, which was available for PC players. On the console you had to do a bunch of nonsense to get someone who had actually visited the theme park to start the queue for you. On the PC however we could just join straight away so I got a cool set of reskinned High Rank Rathalos gear and a Rank 7 water based longsword. Mostly these are things for the collection and while I will use Rathalos parts for mixed sets, it is going to be super rare that I actually break that sword out.
Another thing that happened is I played through Return of the Obra Dinn from start to finish in a single sitting. Well technically not a single sitting as I took some bathroom breaks there, but more or less played for six hours start until I beat it that night. For the uninitiated this is a game that is attempting to feel old school… but doing a bunch of things that those elder games never could have accomplished. The elevator pitch is that the Obra Dinn disappeared on the high seas in 1802 and mysteriously arrived in port in 1807. You are dispatched as an insurance adjuster for the London Office of the East India Company and armed with a special pocket watch that allows you to view the last moments of a specific individuals death. This more or less is a logic puzzle as you need to sort out the names and fates of all fifty-ish passengers, but what hooked me was the story being told through snippets… because quite frankly I wanted to learn more and just kept pushing forward. Well worth the play through and is now going on my list for the Games of the Year AggroChat show.
Finally I spent a ridiculous amount of time building in Minecraft because it was relaxing. Ultimately I was watching something on History channel about ancient ruins, which prompted me to want to build in Minecraft. That is generally how my Minecraft sessions go… I will get the urge to build something and then off I go into a project for awhile. I am not entirely certain how this building came out the way it did… but I started off wanting to build a giant pyramid and then decided to shift goals halfway through. Each time I started building it sort of took a different direction and since I snapped this screenshot I have added more stuff onto it. I did it in creative mode since I wasn’t really in the mood to mine tons of materials before I could start this sort of a project. There are times when I will start something legit and other times like this one where I just wanted to build a thing that I had in my head. Right now I am getting a strong urge to demolish the staircase and rebuild it as something with landings every so often.
Regardless that was my holiday break in a nutshell. We also recorded a show along the way at some point which I have linked above. I hope you had the best of holidays and that you don’t have to go back today. However if you do… our tears will keep us moisturized as we return to the salt mines. Let me know how your holiday break went, and what cool things you did along the way!