Desert Rangers

Taco Bell Salad

As strange as it sounds, one of the meals we used to eat all the time when we were watching our calories is Doritos Tacos from Taco Bell.  Each of them is pretty filling and only 170 calories a piece, and come in a variety of flavors now so it feels like you are eating way worse than you actually are.  For some time now I have had this idea of taking them and turning them into a Taco Salad.  Finally last night we actually did just this.  The idea is that you essentially dump out the contents of the tacos, crunch of the shells and them mix it all together with some form of a binding liquid.  I prepared my wife’s with four packets of Taco Bell hot sauce, and then did mine with some low fat ranch dressing.

The end result was really damned good.  Like amazingly tasty, and it felt and looked pretty much like a Taco Salad.  The only downside was it was a colossal mess to crunch the shells.  You know you your fingers feel after eating a bag of nacho cheese Doritos?  Well take that and multiply it by 100 because the shells themselves are not entirely dry as they’ve had taco fixings inside of them.  I need to find a better way than using my fingers to crunch them up, and if so them bam I have a brilliant fast food “hack” that was super tasty.  Three Tacos made a plate full of Taco Salad and was only 510 calories, I can totally live with that.  It inspired me to try their breakfast this morning, and I have to say it is in no way near as manageable.  In fact their breakfast seems like they ran an experiment of trying to cram as many calories into as little food as possible.

Desert Rangers

WL2 2014-06-28 08-50-25-607 Earlier this week my friend Warenwolf mentioned something about playing Wasteland 2, and as a result I decided to check and see if I had access as well.  Sure enough, when I dug out my forum link from the kickstarter project I had a steam early access code waiting for me.  Last night I intended to just pop in for a moment and check the game out, and wound up playing over an hour.  Now I knew of Wasteland, but I never really played it when it was originally out for the PC.  That predates the bulk of my PC gaming, and I was still heavily a console gamer at that time.  That said I was a massive fan of both Fallout and Fallout 2, and since Wasteland was the logical predecessor to those games I knew I had to get on board with this project.  In truth other than the fact that the original fallout runs pretty lousy on a modern PC, I can still play it for hours. WL2 2014-06-28 08-54-15-264 So far pretty much everything about this game is true to that genre and is a modern update of what feels like a classic game.  There is an over arching storyline that you can follow, or you can simply wander around the wastes looking for trouble.  You cannot however wander indefinitely as there is an interesting movement mechanic while you are on the overmap.  Each step you take consumes water, and you have a finite amount of this.  Every so often you can find an oasis here or there that lets you refill your canteens, but this keeps you from going too far off the beaten path.  Luckily if you follow the actual quest line it leads you to find a large number of Oasis spots that you can always fill up at along the way.

WL2 2014-06-28 09-09-05-758 Just like in Fallout as you wander around the world map you will come across random encounters.  The interesting thing is that each time you come across one of these you have the chance to either fight or run.  So far being the warmonger I am… I have fought all of them and it has been the source of much needed ammunition and medpacks.  Overall the combat is not super challenging, but it is tactical in nature.  Cover rules apply, so since I have a handful of ranged characters I try and place them behind a rusted out car hull or something similar and for the most part this allows me to whittle down the enemy forces.  Another strategy I have found works amazingly well is to simply wait out the enemy.  They seem to be willing to come to you most of the time, allowing you to set up from a defensive position and gun them down as they run towards you.

WL2 2014-06-28 08-55-30-666 The game allows you to assemble your own team of rangers to meet anything you might encounter out in the wastes.  For this first playing I chose to go with some premades so I have Pill the wasteland punk combat medic, Cold Eye the sniper, Bear the Native American tracker, and Big Bert the punk with a spiked bat and essentially my groups only front line fighter.  So far it seems like I assembled a fairly balanced team.  The only thing I am really missing is the ability to pick locks, but up until now I have only actually encountered a single locked object.  Cold-Eye has a mechanical repair skill, which I figure will come in handy eventually.  So far I am absolutely hooked, and looking forward to seeing the finished version.  From what I understand it is pretty much fully functional, just missing some polish.  Definitely glad I backed the kickstarter.

Hail to the Chief

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-25 06-02-34-557 I logged into Wildstar for a bit, but really was not feeling the MMO thing.  I am in somewhat of an existential funk when it comes to online gaming right now.  I am going through one of my periods where I just want to play by myself, and not be bothered with other people.  These usually last a week or two and then I have recharged and can be my charming self again, but while it is going on it is probably just best for me to play mostly single player games.  Since I had so damned much fun the other night playing Saints Row IV I decided to fire it up and attempt to make some progress.  The problem with me and big sandboxy games is that I never actually get anything accomplished.  I have been wandering around the simulation picking up code fragments and knocking down Zin shield beacons reclaiming sections of the map.  Last night I actually made an attempt to complete some of the quests.

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-27 21-18-53-685

The major accomplishment of the night was getting to the top of this tower.  This is the granddaddy of all jumping puzzles I have ever encountered.  The tower itself is so high that the game lets you save at various warp points up the tower as you try and ascend it.  I admit it took me probably a dozen tries to get all the way to the top, and when I was up there my vertigo was going absolutely insane.  The last bit of the climb freaked me the hell out, and I am just glad it is over.  That said it was pretty cool because I actually feel like I accomplished something difficult.  In addition to this there was a whole sequence of events that introduced me to the various minigames including Fraud where you throw yourself in front of cars for money, and one where you rampage through the simulation on a zin battle tank.  I only managed to get bronze rating on fraud… but damned near got gold on my first try with the battle tank.  I guess my inner rampage pays off sometimes.

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-27 22-22-31-111 I actually progressed the main storyline a bit and in the same fashion as the Matrix, unplugged forcibly and woke up on a Zin Battlecruiser butt naked needing to escape from the vessel.  I can apparently take enough time to find a gun, but not enough to take a uniform off of one of the zin soldiers and wear that.  I will admit the whole naked escape sequence thing was pretty funny, and it makes me happy I went so insane with the various tattoos.  Like I really went crazy when I found the tattoo shop as you can see in the above picture.  I feel like this is what I like the most about Saints Row, is that it is really similar in nature to Grand Theft Auto…  but does not take itself seriously at all.  In fact if there is a way to poke fun at your character, the game is going to do it by putting it in ridiculous situations.  The fact that Saints Row is in essence a parody of a parody makes this the video game equivalent of one of the “Scary Movie” franchise movies.

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-27 22-22-31-111Saints Row is one giant running “dick and fart” joke, but it works and while it is extremely lowbrow it is insanely fun to play through.  Even if you don’t normally go in for that sort of thing…  I think there is something in Saints Row for pretty much everyone.  If this goes back on sale before the end of the Steam Sale… you should totally pick it up, because it is well worth the $10.  I am also happy I went ahead and picked up all of the insane DLC, because some of the costumes are just great.  Last night I was rocking the “cloud” outfit from FF7, but I have zero clue where to find the sword that goes with it.  Instead I was running around swinging the “anal probe” weapon.  At the end of the night I had just gotten out of the “matrix” and had not really explored the “real world” much at all, so I figure next play session I will do that.  This game makes my inner thirteen year old extremely happy.

#Wasteland2 #TacoBellSalad #SaintsRowIV

Packaged Chaos

Best Laid Plans

eso 2014-06-25 06-08-35-784 Last night I had every intent of coming home and playing Elder Scrolls Online all night long.  It felt like it had been ages since I had done so, and since I won’t likely be around tonight I thought it would be cool to play last night.  My wife is coming back into town from her second conference and I have to pick her up this evening around 7ish when she gets into town.  So that is going to minimize what time I have to do anything tonight.  Last night I technically logged into Elder Scrolls Online, but only managed to play for about thirty minutes before my mind wandered elsewhere.  To be honest the game looks even more beautiful than I remember it being, but I just was not in the right frame of mind to play it.

The pace of ESO is extremely slow compared to the games I have been playing lately, and I didn’t really want to force myself into playing it just for the sake of doing so.  So I did a bit of crafting and queued up more research since I had long since completed what I was working on for all of the slots in Blacksmithing, Woodworking and Outfitting.  I think mostly last night I was feeling overwhelmed by not remembering what the hell I was actually doing last time I had played the game.  The last several times I had logged in, it was just to do some Cyrodil with the guild.  As far as where I was in the actual completion of Auridon I had no real clue, and to make matters worse…  apparently the recent patch broke every single mod I had installed.  So more than anything, I didn’t feel like playing the game with the stock interface.

Packaged Chaos

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-25 06-02-34-557 I have to admit, somehow I completely missed playing Saints Row 3.  Now I have seen video of my friends doing completely batshit insane things…  and have it on multiple platforms, but for whatever reason I never actually played it.  I did however play Saints Row 2, and while I enjoyed myself it just felt like a “better” version of Grand Theft Auto 3.  It was charming, but for all of the same reasons why I never really cared for GTA, it didn’t just inspire me to go out and play Saints Row: The Third when it came out.  That said everything I have heard about the franchise has been amazing, so when Saints Row 4 went on an extreme sale yesterday I opted to pick it up and give it a shot.  So while I was playing Elder Scrolls last night, my mind was wandering to giving this game a shot as I had it remotely install to my main gaming machine.  That still is a great feature, I just wish that you could stay logged into steam on all of your computers and remote install to one or many.

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-24 22-49-07-500 For starters… where has this game been all my life, and why did I not do this sooner.  Basically Saints Row 4 scratches so many itches all at once it is silly.  Some of my favorite games are open world non-linear titles like the Elder Scrolls series, Fallout series, Just Cause 2 and this game is firmly in that wheelhouse.  You play through a rather long intro sequence, but it is so silly that it is wildly entertaining to me.  This sequence of events might somehow connect to the events at the end of Saints Row 3, but I have no real clue having not actually played it.  Essentially through a series of illogical leaps… you end up the president of the united states.  Then like a sequence out of Duke Nukem, these very familiar looking aliens invade the planet capturing all your friends from the previous game.  All of this is just enough plot to set up for the fact that you become trapped in a matrix like simulation and have to work to escape it.

I Know Kung Fu

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-24 22-53-21-358 Remember the crazy shit that Neo did in the Matrix where he “pushed” off the ground to leap insanely high up into the air… well gratz we get to do that here.  So on some level it feels a bit like running around City of Heroes at times as I have both Super Jump and Super Speed.  The system is familiar to anyone who has played GTA, that the more mayhem you cause the more attention you get from the police… and in this case eventually the alien invaders.  The escalation is pretty slow actually, but the it becomes extremely hard to “get away” long enough to let the system reset and for the police to stop chasing you.  I reached a point last night where every few minutes there were more aliens arriving on the scene and eventually they called in this insane gunship that I just simply could not take down as I did not have access to a rocket launcher yet.

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-24 22-55-39-996 Another cornerstone of the series is the insane options to dress up your characters.  While I did not purchase the above outfit… I came really close to doing so.  The only thing I wish is that I had the ability to change outfits on the fly, but that might be in there that I just haven’t figured out.  I seem to alternate between various steampunk and futuristic fusion looks.  I am really thankful that overall the costumes seem to be really cheap.  You tend to be rewarded several thousand “cache” each time you complete a mission, and I have yet to find a costume more than a few hundred.  The ability to play “dress-up” definitely helps out with the enjoyment of the game.  As is the ability to customize your base weapons to look insane.  Right now I am wielding Deckard’s pistol from Blade Runner, the heavy bolter from Aliens, and a Thompson machine gun…  all of which make me extremely happy.

Driving Funtime

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-24 22-52-50-195 So my Grand Theft Auto experience pretty much is limited to GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas.  But in all of those games a major detractor for me was that when you boosted a vehicle that it performed like crap.  It was a struggle to get the vehicle to do what you want it to do.  Saints Row 4 does an amazing job at making the different vehicles feel awesome.  Above is a picture of me zipping through the city streets, and it feels like I am really hauling ass thanks to a really good use of motion blur.  I was able to zip around the city at max speed and still be able to make my turns when I needed to.  I also really like the variety of vehicles I have found so far.  I’ve even hijacked a garbage truck and it was equally fun to control, albeit a bit more unwieldy to maneuver.

SaintsRowIV 2014-06-25 06-47-32-833 I think one of the problems I have had with the Grand Theft Auto universe is that increasingly it has seemed like a felony simulator.  The game seems to favor a more realistic depiction of crime, while still maintaining a sense of gallows humor about it.  This makes me feel like a complete and total asshole while playing the game, and generally speaking I feel like the characters I am playing have little to know redeeming human values.  Saints Row goes in a completely different direction, making absolutely everything about the game over the top cartoony violence.  So playing it makes me feel like I am watching a Tom and Jerry cartoon from my youth.  This game goes one step further by telling you that you are just trapped in a simulation.  So when you blow away a pedestrian… they were just polygons in a simulation right?  The game lets me run amok without feeling horrible about it, and that works for me.  At this point I have just scratched the surface of the game, but I can see this becoming something I play quite regularly for awhile.

#SaintsRow4