Pumpkin King

The Hammer

VictorVranSteam 2016-01-12 18-35-22-67

All day long yesterday I had been craving some more Victor Vran, so when I got home last night… I fed the animals… fed myself… and plunked down on the couch to play some more.  Firstly I have to say how nice it runs on my aging gaming laptop.  For many games that I would want to play downstairs… like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4… they simply do not run well on the dual 650 video cards that the laptop has in it.  This game however looks gorgeous and runs at a solid 60 fps, which makes me happy.  Granted graphically it is a much more simple game than the ones I rattled off, but nonetheless it makes me happy.  While roaming around last night I found this crazy boss fight, that spawned after taking down several other bosses in an area.  Upon defeating the specter it announced that if I would only spare him…  I could have access to his truly rare wares.  When I opened up the vendor window I saw my very first purple weapon…. the Pumpkin Hammer.  So I proceeded to liquidate everything in my inventory except my handful of favorite weapons… and was barely able to afford it.

It is every bit as cool as you might imagine.  Firstly you are running around with a giant jack-o-lantern on a stick which in itself has a cool factor.  To add to the effect however, when you hit anything…  it spawns a pumpkin bomb on the ground… which moments later then explodes taking out more stuff.  The only negative here is it actually cost me an objective last night.  The objective was to take out a handful of monsters with the hammer… problem being that in one case at least the pumpkin bomb went off and finished off the monster and as a result it did not count.  So that is something to watch, but what I like about it is the fact that the attack animation seems much faster than the standard hammer.  It hits for slightly less than my previous hammer, but since I am able to hit more often it balances out in the end.  Other than the hammer the ghost sold a few spells, that also looked pretty great…  but after bankrupting myself I could not afford anything else.  From the sound of the message it seems like the creature appears at random in various levels, so hopefully I can build back up my gold reserves by the time I see him again.

Guyver Time

Warframe 2016-01-12 22-28-43-07

Warframe and I have this strange relationship… where I have downloaded it for PC, PS3 and PS4…  but never actually played it.  I’ve seen friends on my various social media timelines playing it for ages, and been intrigued.  The problem being that I apparently had the wrong impression of what sort of game it actually was.  In my head I had this filed away as some sort of PVP experience, when in truth it is largely a PVE team based experience.  Over the weekend Ashgar and Tamrielo discovered the game, and Monday night I was going to join them.  Unfortunately there were some complications…. namely that for whatever reason my ISP could not connect to Warframe.com or any of the game servers for a period of time.  As a result I instead spent the entire night playing Victor Vran and had a blast doing so.  Since I spent the evening on the sofa, it meant that I needed to download the client again, and about half way through the evening I switched games.

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So far I have to say I am pretty impressed.  I am only running the game at 720p because I didn’t want to have any possible frame rate issues on the laptop, however the game itself looks gorgeous.  In many way its missions remind me of the missions from Mass Effect 2 and 3.  The most fun I had was this mission we did as a group where we entered a ship, triggered an alarm and then tried to hold out as long as we could.  We managed to make it up until the point that the ship started spawning in waves of level 5 mobs…  at which point we retreated to the extraction zone and held that tunnel for as long as we could before making a break for it.  Towards the end these firebombing mobs started coming in and we damned near lost Ashgar.  I myself came precariously close to dying a few times, only to get revived in a similar fashion to how you can players in Destiny.  All in all it was a really good experience, and I think honestly the Excaliber warframe suits me pretty well.  I like the blade, and for my main weapon I ended up choosing a bow.  Later I spent a little money on the game and got some upgrades and now my secondary weapon is a heavy double firing pistol called the Kraken.  I also spent some time making the suit look more “me”.  Look forward to playing more over the coming weeks.