March 2014 - Page 6 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Being Bad at Mage

March 12, 2014 by Belghast

Big Damned Beta Weekend

This coming weekend that leads into Spring Break here in the United States, represents the last public beta weekend before the 4/4/2014 launch of the game. Now the beta client you will be getting to play has a significant number of changes in it. For point of reference the one that was used during the last public beta weekend was from early December, and lacked a ton of the polish changes that have gone in since. As a result even if you had completely written off the game based on past public beta experiences… you really owe it to yourself to patch the game up and give it another go this weekend. While December doesn’t really seem that long ago, what has happened between now and then is what I like to refer to as a “hallelujah” build… aka the one that fixes so many bugs and makes the game feel nice and tight and polished.

So many of the quests that have been perennially bugged out during the beta weekends should now be fixed and working smoothly. In many cases this involved subtle tweaks to the flow of the quest to make it work more reliably. Additionally this build is the one that introduces mob collision and the ability to skip the starter island. The mob collision seems to fix some of the complaints about “floaty combat” that players have made, and the combat animations themselves have tightened up considerably as well. There are still a number of features missing that are in the private test build, but overall I think players will have a more enjoyable experience. The game is very much an Elder Scrolls experience, but unfortunately if you were hoping it would morph into a standard MMO interface… that has not and likely will not happen.

Another cool thing about this weekend is with my dabbling in twitch streaming with my “Bel Faffs About” series, I recieved an email from support saying that I could stream the entire weekend if I wanted to. Granted we likely have quite a bit of things to do over the weekend, and Saturday since it is going to be nice out we hope to go out and do some photography. However as much of the weekend as I can, I will be streaming out my gameplay. I am not sure at this point if I will be starting a fresh character, or picking up where I left off on my Orsimer Dragon Knight from the previous beta. For those who have not already tested the content, they are asking each of us to start a new character and test the new starter experience sans islands. It works pretty well but is considerably more difficult since at the level you fight some of the encounters, you really don’t have a full set of gear yet.

Technicolor Voxels

I am still very much learning this streaming thing… and I feel like I still have so much more to learn. I was having some issues with FFSplit, namely in the inability to stream Trove. So after a suggestion or two from friends I loaded up Open Broadcaster Software overall I like the way it is set up, and it seems more intuitive to me. However it has copious amounts of settings, and I made the mistake of just accepting the defaults. The above video is passable at times, but pixellated as all get out anytime there is action going on. After some tweaking I improved the results with the WoW stream later in the evening. Additionally I am noticing that I really need to drop the volume of the game by about half so that I am not fighting to speak over it. I was honestly being fairly quiet last night… and I need not to do that.

It had been awhile since I had patched up Trove and played around on the server. With all the excitement over “pretty voxels” and Landmark… my enthrallment with Trove’s simplicity fell by the wayside. This is one of those games where if you stop playing for a bit, you are absolutely shocked at just how much has been done the next time you play. One of the coolest things from the above video is when I find a tree fort in a higher tier zone, and go hunting for the mushroom king that rules it. Last time I played they did not have real “dungeon bosses”, and they actually do hurt significantly. I cheat quite a bit in that the community chest was stocked full of rainbow weapons. However in my travels last night I did manage to pick up an upgrade that looks like the gun from Portal.

The gunslinger class is extremely fun, and it feels more responsive at times than the Knight does. Granted the Knight was their “first class”, so I figure at some point down the line they will apply a round of tweaks to make it feel more unique. If you watch through the video, you can tell I am heavily addicted to using the “rocket jump” attack, that shoots your character up into the air. I am one of those players that jumps constantly, so this only adds to my enjoyment when I can hurdle over big obstacles. One of the things I never could find however was the snow biome full of robots. I am wondering if they made robot parts significantly harder to farm, by only making them drop off punch bots and the dungeon boss robots. I will try doing another stream soonish with fixed settings to make sure the pixelization is gone completely.

Being Bad at Mage

So as I said above, by the time I got around to streaming World of Warcraft last night, I had tweaked my settings significantly. While the gameplay in WoW never includes the kind of spastic jumping that Trove does, it seems to be smoother and not pixellated. I continued my quest to push my Mage to 60. Night Elf Mage is pretty much the least possible “Belghast” character in existence. I have always had a problem with Night Elves, and I do not do amazingly well at “Finger Wigglers” as I call them. That said I have this silly idea that I want to get one of every class to the level cap, and I figured the only way I would actually do this is by using my free boost to 90 on a Mage. Traditionally the characters I was least interested in playing were the Mage and the Priest. When I accepted a scroll of resurrection some time ago, I made an instant 80 priest. So that just left the mage, that I have never really managed to level past about 20.

Firstly I am fundamentally bad at playing a Mage. I know this. I had been using Frostfire bolt all this time… because it was “the prettiest”. Really though the animation does look amazing as compared to the stock Frostbolt… so that meant it had to be better right? Wrong… apparently it is a spell that no self respecting frost mage would ever cast except in the rare case of a mob being frost immune. Last night oddly enough I had one of the best mages I have never known watching the stream. Helkim was commenting over twitter, since I fail at using Twitch chat and gave me the realization that I should never press frostfire bolt again. Sure enough my damage went up to respectable levels in dungeons… viva la shorter cast time!

Towards the end of the video someone took the bait. I made this channel on our guild Mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming”, and since my friend Drathis has no self preservation instinct… he decided to join me. Within a few minutes several other friends had popped into the channel, and I think before too much longer we had all pretty much forgotten I was streaming. As a result you guys get a glimpse into what our mumble sounds like on an almost nightly basis. This might be confusing to the listeners because we end up often times playing completely different games, and there will be cross conversations going on about each. Everyone else in the channel that was not me, was playing Diablo 3 torment mode I believe. If I did not have this burning desire to get my mage to 60… I would likely be doing the same. Basically I decided that I would far rather level a character to 60, than level tradeskills to 600.

Booster Gold

March 11, 2014 by Belghast

King of Mondays

As I said yesterday, I struggled with the time change like I normally do. As a result this tends to be the worst Monday of the year. Of course that would be the Monday my wife’s sister decides we need to go out to eat. By the time we finished work both of us simply wanted to go home and crash. However we felt obligated to go act normal and attempt to enjoy dinner. Thing is we don’t get to see my wife’s sister that often. She works this really odd job where she cleans nuclear power plants when they go into shutdown periodically. So as a result she and her husband drag their RV all around the country, and it can literally be years before we see them again.

So I did my best to pretend to be normal and pleasant, when all I really wanted to do was go home… climb upstairs to my office and decompress. Since the night was already pretty much shot we decided to run a few errands when we got back to town. Dinner was at least relatively enjoyable, and by the time we arrived home I had gotten a bit of a second wind. Over the years we have been to three different Ruby Tuesdays. One in our town that just closed this past week, one in Joplin MO and another one in Upstate NY. It seems like they were doing it wrong. The one we ate at last night was really rather nice, and had free biscuits and salad bar. Maybe the one in my town would have survived if they also had this.

Watching Me Sleep

I’m a fat man, and I will likely always be fat. I have reached a point of acceptance with that. However my wife and I have been trying to be “less” fat. Over the course of the last year I lost 70 lbs, and my wife has lost an amount that I have not kept up with as closely… but as much if not more than I did. She looks absolutely great, and I pretty much still look like myself. We have done pretty well with diet and while I have fallen off the wagon a bit in keeping track of my food intake… I have managed to remain the same weight… so the habits seem to have stuck. One of the things we both struggle with is exercise. So for awhile now we have kicked around the idea of getting a Fitbit. Yesterday we picked up a couple and now I am under constant surveillance.

One of the interesting features is that it keeps track of your sleep patterns. When it comes time to go to bed, you rapidly tap your bracelet until it buzzes and it knows you are going into sleep mode. I have often wondered why I feel like shit after getting what seems to be an otherwise good nights sleep. Apparently last night for example I woke up ten different times through the night. Some of these I remember, but the majority I do not. This also explains why the covers on my side of the bed are always fubar. Granted last night it was a bit odd trying to sleep in what is essentially a watch band, but I will get used to it.

Booster Gold

The big news yesterday that I have somehow neglected to talk about until just now… is that while I was off at lunch running errands, it seems that Warlords of Draenor preorders went live. Granted this weekend there was a leak of a boost to 90 trailer video. So we mostly assumed that at some point this week the preorders would go live, as well as the boost to 90. The other thing that caused quite a bit of a ruckus was that a “release date” has been entered into the systems for 12/20/2014. However minutes later Blizzard came out saying that this was not the final launch date, but that the game would be launching sometime during the Fall. So that begs the question… what exactly does “Fall” mean. Some are saying September, and at last years Blizzcon they stated that we would be playing Warlords by the time the next Blizzcon rolled around.

My friends have suggested that we are likely going to see a significantly truncated beta cycle, but even at that… it would be nice if that actually started. I would feel significantly better about the projected launch if I knew that friends and family alpha was at least going on. Not that I am expecting to be in it mind you, but just knowing it is happening is a good sign. Now that I have a free boost to 90 that came with my preorder, I am not exactly in a huge rush to use it. For some time now I had planned to use it to boost up a mage to 90. I figured this was the one class that I was least likely to level on my own. I had been playing my little Warlock, and even streamed the hell out of it on Sunday. Demonology is essentially the “faff about while your demon kills things” spec, and I was perfectly okay with this.

However it is starting to seem like Frost is the “faff about while your elemental kills things” spec. At one point last night I ended up having to afk in a cave to take care of something… and I fully expected to log back in dead and have to run back to my corpse. Turns out my elemental killed everything that got anywhere near me. I am sure this will not last for long, but it was entertaining to watch for a few minutes before I took back control of my character. At this point my plan is to level the mage to 60 and then boost him to 90 with the doodad. Essentially my logic is this… I would far rather level to 60 in the cataclysm old world content, which I enjoy… than level three tradeskills all the way to 600. If you boost a 60+ character you get your primary and secondary tradeskill to 600 as well as First Aid. So last night I proceeded to strip my warlock of all of his heirlooms and am now in serious mage leveling mode.

Another Experiment

Yesterday I talked about my experiment over the weekend with streaming through FFSplit to my Twitch.tv channel. It seemed to work pretty well, and the overall video quality was acceptable. Now it is time to take it to the next level… the one where I actually unmute my microphone. To go a step further, I have created a channel on our guilds mumble server called “Bel Is Streaming” and my hope is to coax my friends to join me in the channel and be entertaining… so I don’t have to. I can’t say I will have the most exciting stream in the world, and I don’t even hope to do it as well as the Qelric… but it might be fun. I decided to name this endevour “Bel Faffs About!” in honor of the Godmother of Faff who raised the consciousness of all things faffing over the last year. My plan is to post on twitter anytime I am streaming something, and just let the chips fall where they may. I’ve heard rumor that this weekend is another big ESO beta event, and if that is the case I will stream it as much of the weekend as I can. In the meantime, expect me leveling my mage to 60 and playing some Diablo 3.

Faffing in the Fjord

March 10, 2014 by Belghast

Losing Time

It seems that no matter what I do to prepare for it, Daylight Savings time still kicks my ass every year. This go round I purposefully started trying to get more sleep from about Thursday onwards, in an attempt to get used to the earlier bedtime. Saturday night I even started referring to things based on EST instead of my normal CST time… to attempt to trick my brain into thinking that was normal. So last night… I hoped above hope that my brain would be able to power down and go to sleep at a decent hour. But instead there I lay in bed trying to get to sleep. I ended up taking some nyquil and playing Bravely Default in bed until I fell asleep.

I am sure Daylight Savings time made sense when we were primarily an agrarian society, however I have no clue why it still exists. Why do we as a country do this to ourselves each and every year. To be honest I do like having a lot more sunshine in the evenings, but since that is the case why not stay offset an hour permanently instead of shifting back in the winter? I mean the days are so short that it really doesn’t matter at all in November if we offset back or not. For whatever reasons even falling back and gaining the hour still seems to screw with my internal systems. I realize that bitching about it will do exactly nothing… but it makes me feel better.

Faffing in the Fjord

So yesterday thanks to the time drain I was feeling a little bit out of sorts. I got up like I do every Sunday morning and played through my Steampowered Sunday game pick for a few hours, then wrote my review of sorts over it. This week was of course Brutal Legend, and if you were interested in winning your own copy… make sure you click the extremely obnoxious vote here button at the bottom of the review. Once I got finished up with all of that silliness I began the massive chore of laundry for the week. Actually in truth it had been a few weeks since we had done laundry, so I knew I needed something that I could walk away from and check on the loads periodically. Generally speaking solo leveling fits the bill perfectly. I am not sure exactly why, but I decided to fiddle with FFSplit and try and figure out this live streaming business.

Normally speaking I always end up leveling my characters through Northrend in Borean Tundra. While it is extremely boring and grindy, it just seems quicker. The zone itself is laid out in more of a hub and spoke pattern and you can progress your way through the zone without a ton of travel time. However since I had not done so in a really long time… I opted to move my little dwarven Warlock to Howling Fjord. A few hubs into the zone I remembered why I stopped doing this… so much travel time. I figured I would share my pain by streaming it so the world could see. The above video is not terribly interesting, but is me spending my afternoon… or at least roughly two hours of it going through the paces of leveling a warlock in Howling Fjord. You can watch me playing video games badly!

More than anything I used this as a way to test how well streaming directly to Twitch.tv works, and then using that to upload to Youtube. So far so good, but I kept my microphone muted during this trial. I was feeling fairly antisocial, but at some point soon I hope to livecast something meaningful. I still need to figure out a good size to put my postage stamp video feed into the stream. At this point I am juggling back and forth between 320 wide and 240 wide, but before I do this for real I want to pretty up my twitch stream a bit with some artwork. Right now this is just stock FFsplit with no real alterations. However credit goes to Scopique, who told me this would be a much easier way to record videos… it just took me months and months to actually fiddle with it.

Belazon Lives!

The other big thing to come from this weekend is that I managed to push my Barbarian to 60 in Diablo 3. The irony of this is thanks to a certain drop, I have completely shifted focus in the way I play it. Previously I had been all about dual wield and cleave, using rend to soak back up some health. However it was either Friday or Saturday night that I got a truly amazing drop that caused me to completely change my build for it. I ended up getting the level 59 version of the “Three Hundredth Spear” to drop, which buffs my throwing damage by 55% and my ancient spear damage by 59%. So as a result I completely rearranged my abilities to be able to use this and now I am more of a hoplite build with spear and shield. Funny how my pure melee class ended up turning into a ranged.

Overall it works extremely well, and I can throw out some truly silly damage on a boss fight. At one point Saturday the trio shown above were working our way through the various bosses in the game, letting Ashgar get the achievement for killing them all wearing nothing but blues. At this point I was using the Boulder Toss rune for Ancient Spear, and it was insane to watch the bosses health move significantly each time a boulder landed. The only problem with this rune is that it changes the functionality of ancient spear significantly. The thing I like the most about it is that it acts almost like a League of Legends skill shot, in that if you can line up a bunch of mobs in a “wave” you can burn through them quickly as your ancient spear will hit each of them in a row.

I was never really a big fan of the Amazon in Diablo 2, but so far my Belazon build seems to be pretty enjoyable. While on a “role”-bending trick, I decided to start a baby mage and attempt to go for the melee mage build. While functional, it just doesn’t feel like a class I would really enjoy. I don’t really like feeling like a glass cannon, and apart from a few shield abilities the class has really weak survival. In my few minutes of playing with my friend Tibuant, I died several times… when I have maybe died twice in total on my Barbarian. I think it might be a class that is enjoyable to solo on, because many of my deaths were simply because Tib and I were not really in sync while playing. He would be off in one direction and I would be off in another, which always ended up with me getting swarmed. I think until the Crusader actually gets unlocked I will mostly piddle around on my Monk and Barbarian attempting to get paragon levels.

Brutal Legend

March 9, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #8

This week I decided to mix things up a bit. Instead of me picking the title I let my readers pick. I learned a few things about this, firstly google docs apparently is not a great option since one of my more “inquisitive” friends decided to see if he could skew the results by voting multiple times. Sure enough you could, but it was pretty easy to see his results and weed them out. Additionally it seems like giving you guys ten titles to pick from was a bit too many. For most of the week there was a four way tie, with two results each for Brutal Legend, FTL, Assassins Creed II, and Alan Wake. On Saturday there was a deciding vote cast for Brutal Legend so that is precisely what I played this morning. I am thinking this week we will have a runoff between the other three titles.

Let’s Rock!

First off a little background about this title. I grew up at exactly the right time, during the height of the hair metal era. While I did not actually have cable television until college, I jealously watched Headbangers Ball anytime I was over at a friends house. I had my faded jean jacket with a Metallica back patch, walkman in the inside pocket and headphones permanently cranked full volume. That’s right… I was a Metal kid… and while Metal turned into Alternative turned into Industrial… I still have a penchant for it. So much like Blood Dragon was going to be a nostalgic ride, I knew this game would as well. Thing is… I didn’t buy this title on purpose. I ended up getting it as part of a humble indie bundle.

From the moment I saw this game I was intrigued, but one thing scared me away from it. Everything is voiced by Jack Black. Over the years I have come to have a love/hate relationship with him in anything. Essentially he seems to be capable of playing two characters… the loveable dumbass, and the egotistical schmuck. I have had more than my fair share of the later, and seeing him involved with a project is cringe worthy these days. So I didn’t know which version of him we would get. I love the music of Tenacious D, but over the years the stage act has shifted from the loveable dumbass character to more and more of the egotistical ass. So my fear going into this game is that we would get that character.

Loveable Dumbass Rules

While the character is not necessarily a loveable dumbass, we get the Jack Black treatment of such… which makes the game enjoyable. You play as Eddie Riggs, which is essentially a Jedi Master Roadie. He is set up as the best roadie in the business, can fix anything or build anything… but is a man out of time. The game starts with him working for a emo numetal type band, that clearly does not appreciate his aesthetic. Through a chain of events, he steps in to prevent the death of one of the band members and ends up falling to his own demise. Where his blood summons the elder fire god Ormagöden through a sigil in the form of his belt buckle.

Chaos ensues, and the fire beast destroys the crappy band to the cheers of the crowd, as your character is transported to another realm. Everything about this game is completely over the top. You find yourself awake on a sacrificial altar with a group of skeletal monk things praying before you. Your character mistakenly thinks that it is you they are worshiping, but instead they mean to sacrifice you to Ormagöden. Sitting there on the ground just happens to be some fabled weapon, and the games tutorial directs you to pick it up and use it. The game controls itself feel a lot like Darkstalkers. I had intended to play the game with an XBox 360 controller, but for whatever reason it got confused. Where it had only some of the keys active through the controller and the majority not.

Thankfully however the game does control very well with WASD and uses the standard E to interact with things. I am always glad to see when some thought is put into the PC controls rather than having a half assed port like Force Unleashed… that you can’t even really use your mouse to interact with things. The game is a bit of a smorgasboard of things. Firstly the game is very much a 3D beatemup with your left mouse button being your axe attacks, and your right mouse button being your guitar chord based attacks. This gameplay style feels really fluid and like I said earlier just like a Darkstalkers game. The only thing that is frustratingly missing is jump. I am not sure why but this is a big deal to me. I am one of those people that jumps around aimlessly while playing games. So instead of the standard space to jump, we get a space too defend mechanic and no jump ability that I have seen so far… or at least none that you are introduced to during the tutorial.

Burn Rubber Baby

In order to make your big escape from the temple of Ormagöden Eddie uses his Jedi Masster Roadie abilities to create a really slick deuce coupe out of spare parts laying around the temple. So this introduces a yet another playstyle into the game. Controlling a vehicle feels like most GTA style games where you W accelerates S brakes and we have a decent mechanic for turning on a dime by hitting space to apply the handbrake. You get to test all of these out in a really odd vehicular battle sequence against a very spikey worm creature thing. Did I mention this game is completely over the top? Everything and everyone is pretty much coated in skulls and spikey bits… as god intended them to be. In the same way Blood Dragon was a love song for 80s action movies… this game is a love letter to the Heavy Metal era.

After the big car battle you have to make your escape over a crumbling bridge by avoiding holes in the road and boosting over gaps by hitting Shift to apply the nitro. Overall this is a pretty simple minigame, and nothing really cringe inducing. Overall the game I pretty damned forgiving when it comes to the minigames I have encountered. While normally I hate when a game breaks out of its normal control scheme and forces you into something different for an “event”, but so far this game feels pretty natural about it. Primarily I have problems with the games that do so, but make it so QTE or twitchy that if you screw up once you are dead. The obstacles you have to avoid on the bridge you can pretty much see for the entirety of the screen giving you plenty of time to react and avoid them. It messages the fact that when you see a big guy fixing to stomp the bridge… you need to avoid that area because it is about to fall.

Real Metal vs Glam Metal

You go to Blade Henge and meet Lars the leader of the fledgeling resistance, his sister Lita… and you find out the girl that helped you escape from the temple is Ophelia. The games central conflict revolves around “Real” metal struggling against the “Glam” metal sellouts. So while the protagonists are dark and brooding and full of spikey bits, the evildoers are wearing pink and zebra print… with teased out hair and a very obvious sellout attitude. You can tell exactly where Double Fine stands on the age old Poison vs Metallica metal debate. Considering I tended to shy away from the glam rock, and favor the more hardcore stuff… I definitely feel them here. It is all the more enjoyable for me to beat up the pretty boy rockers in the game because of it.

As roadie extraordinaire your job is to help them build an army, using your mystical roadie powers. The game employs another mini-game to accomplish this. At various times you can play a power chord that will have some effect. The one you end up doing the most often will summon the Deuce to your location. There is another one that will allow you to pick up new abilities at these shrines of sorts scattered throughout the world. I am guessing that over time this has a Legend of Zelda type trope allowing you to access new areas. As I wandered around the country side I noticed that most of the shrines were chained up, and when I tried to access them there was some flair dialog about needing to find a way to free them.

The first mission to help build an army is to gather up a bunch of brutes that have been trapped in the mine and forced to bang their heads against the wall to break rock. The result is they have turned into this muscle bound troglodytes. As you roam around the level you can play a power chord to rally them to your side. Upon hearing the music they swear allegiance to the heavy metal and will do your bidding. This introduces yet another game play style… I told you it was a smorgasbord. Much of the game seems to rely on small group based squad tactics. You can deliver some simple commands like stay and defend, follow and attack your target. The system lacks any real fine control, so essentially you point your mindless mob towards a target and then go do something else.

The Kill Master

At this point I have only made it about an hour and a half into the game, but I am enjoying it so far. I was pleased to see a cameo from Lemmy Kilmister as the “Kill Master”, a mystical healer type character. I have a feeling that the majority of the gameplay is going to revolve around doing missions to free followers and then using those followers to band together in an army against the evil Doviculus voiced by Tim Curry, and the Glam Metal sellout General Lionwhyte voiced by Rob Halford. While at face value this seems like pretty standard fare, what makes the game worth playing is the fantastic dialog that only a Double Fine game can deliver. While the game sounds pretty Frankenstein in its stitching of a bunch of different genres together. However for some reason it works really well.

I’ve heard that there is a grand switcheroo that comes towards the end of the game, but I have yet to make it there. Where essentially they throw in yet another genre, making you do battle with your army RTS style. If it is as well carried out as the other bits and pieces I think I will be okay with this, but I can see how confused it might feel. I know I was pissed as hell when I got to the “force you to split everyone up into small groups” army battle phase of Dragon Age Origins. But that mostly was because I am notorious for playing that type of game with only my chosen group of four characters, and pretty much ignoring everyone else in my party. In this case I hope I will just be given units and I won’t have had to do much to power them up outside of the normal game play flow.

Overall Enjoyable

While I don’t generally give these games a rating system, I have to say I greatly enjoyed this one. I can see myself cracking it open again and finishing the game. That is about as high of praise as I can really give. I played an hour and a half and I want to play some more. The movies and cut scenes feel like they are part of the game, and not something tacked on for filler. The story crafting is superb and I am definitely a fan of the subject material. Nothing feels cooler than running around kicking stuffs ass while Def Leppard blares in the background. I have loved the games of Tim Schafer since Maniac Mansion: Day of the Tentacle and Full Throttle… and this definitely feels like a worthy member of that family, if not a slightly oddly designed one. It was not exactly what I was expecting, but the sum of the pieces add up to a really fun game.

Next Steampowered Sunday

There are many times when it feels like the readers of this blog are all somehow already connected to me, either through being friends on twitter or somehow having played in one of the many guilds I have been at the helm of. This week however surprised me in that the winner of the Bioshock give away was someone completely unknown to me. I delivered the copy this morning through steam, and having learned a few things from last weeks I have made some tweaks to the lineup for this coming weeks contest. First up I will be using Survey Monkey, to try and cut down on the skewing of the poll by well meaning friends. Next up we will be having a sudden death round among the three titles that came close to winning this time: FTL, Assassins Creed II, and Alan Wake. Finally I happen to have a spare copy of Brutal Legend, so we will be giving that away during the voting. As always you can vote without entering for the copy of the game. To make the link easier to see… I am introducing a “Big Damned Button” below. I made it the most obnoxious 80s induced color palette I could think of just to make it stand out even more.