Featuring: Ace, Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We are back in full force and continuing our adventure through the second part of the Games of the Year 2025 podcast. We cut the list in half, giving us fifteen games that we were talking about in each episode. This is not necessarily a numerical list, but the titles that appear later in the shows did get more votes. It was a great year for gaming, but also a year where we were constantly getting distracted by the next big thing coming down the pipe. While we played a lot of games… we did not necessarily FINISH a lot of games.
Good Morning Folks! For those of you who are off for it or celebrate it, Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day. I’m choosing to celebrate it… by stacking up a bunch of appointments and then trying to speed run my way through them. So essentially I will be out and about this morning but I wanted to sit down and do my normal Monday morning summary blog post of the shenanigans that I got up to this weekend. It has become a bit of a tradition for myself, Ace, and Ammo to get together Sunday mornings and run whatever strongholds we have unlocked for the week in Destiny Rising. Sometimes if there is time we run whatever event happens to be going on. For example we knocked out a 5 key run of Morgran’s Hunt which is active currently. I enjoy these little group interludes greatly, and any time I can group with Ace and Ammo it is a joy.
In other Destiny Rising news, I have fully unlocked the Jade Rabbit exotic Scout Rifle on all three accounts. Since there are now several Scout Rifle specific characters in the game, this really goes a long way into making them feel more beneficial. Slapping this puppy on Umeko or Kabr 2.0 immediately makes them feel much more solid for group content. I do wish there was a way to change the element of these weapons, but alas that is not really a thing. Basically there is an event running currently that through doing daily content you can unlock this exotic and a skin for it, and if you have not played Destiny Rising in awhile you probably should pop in to get this while it is available. I am not sure if this is going to end up on the exotic shop or not, but at least on my free to play characters it is a massive pain in the ass to gain enough currency through the black market to buy any of these weapons.
I also spent quite a bit of time this weekend in Path of Exile 1. Essentially I am trying to grind out two more of the league challenges so that I can get the same 34 point totem pole that I have for the last several leagues. Essentially I set the focus on grinding out as many Originator influenced maps as I could because you need to run essentially 200 affixes worth of content divided up in as many different ways as possible. If I were doing this with maximum efficiency, I would have made sure I was running only eight mod maps… but I did not do this thing. So a lot of the maps I ran were somewhere in the five or six mod territory making it take significantly more maps in total to grind this out. Essentially I just put my head down and ground until I came out the other end. I did have to snap up some maps off the market and it seems like the going rate for originator influenced anything is around 5-10 chaos each.
Now that I have completed that difficult grind, I am back to just running maps as fast as I can and have chosen to do so on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, The character is a heck of a lot of fun, and does a much better job at dealing with the Breach Fortress maps than Righteous Fire did, because I am blowing up most of the screen at all times and also freezing it. Essentially the grind I am working towards is Quality Quandry and I am sitting at 39886 or 50000. Basically going forward I need to run max quality on my maps, which then combines with 15% from the tree, and 20% from running four sacrifice fragments. Regardless…. it is going to just require grinding out a bunch of maps and is honestly the perfect idle activity while listening to an audiobook, podcast, or youtube video. There is the additional side benefit of throwing levels on my elementalist while doing it.
One of the things that I learned this weekend is that you can right click your world and edit it after having created it. This grants access to a few things, for example you can slow down or speed up the day/night cycle. More importantly you can completely disable falling damage and completely disable the death penalty that causes you to lose items on death. I absolutely did these things because I was dying an awful lot and it was annoying me to lose so much stuff in the process. There is one thing that is extremely overpowered in this game, and that is any kind of monster that can poison you. Your health just plummets almost instantly from the damage over time effect. So I figured by disabling the item penalties I am way more free to roam around and run amok. I don’t play games for the challenge of them, I play games for the fun… and not losing shit on death makes things more enjoyable to me personally.
I’ve started on some semblance of a permanent base. There is a floating rock not too far from my original spawn point and I built a staircase up the side of it and then began flattening the top so that I could build a platform. This is essentially going to be my resource sink for awhile as I keep dragging rock of various sorts up here to start building away at a final creation. Probably the most important aspect is creating an optimized crafting area so that I have a bunch of storage chests that are all accessible by each of the machines. I wish the game had some sort of automated filtering system when it comes to chests, or at least some way of labeling each chest for a specific purpose. There might be mods that do this thing, as there are a staggering number of mods already available. For example I installed one that gives you the name of any item your cursor is pointed at, and another one that creates lucky mining streaks for ore so that it will produce additional ore nodes near the one you are mining when it procs.
Not having to worry about losing everything on death, has made the entire process of exploring the world so much more enjoyable. Firstly I want to now hop down every hole that I see because I can’t take falling damage, and the worst thing that can happen to me is that I get ported back to my spawn point. Secondly the entire process of pushing myself deeper under the earth in search of resources is just a way more fun way to play the game than trying to be careful all the time. Combat is always a bit of a battle of attrition and in spite of using your abilities to the fullest, you are always going to take some damage which compounds the longer you are exploring. I think for me this is the ideal way to play, but your mileage may vary if you care about challenge. I also really like the fact that I can just kill myself anytime I get bored of exploring an area and go back to base… rather than having to painstakingly make my way back to the surface.
I hope you had a most excellent weekend. What did you get it up? Have you been playing Hytale as well? Drop me a line below.
Featuring: Ace, AmmosArt, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Good Morning Folks! We are running things a bit differently this year. Due to unforeseen reasons, Thalen could not join us this week. As such, we paused our games of the year show to record a brief intermission show. This week, we talked about Star Citizen, Pokémon Legends Z-A, Hytale, OrcaCon, Starfinder, Void Miner, the Amazing World of Retro Handhelds, and Kodra finally enjoying Path of Exile II. We ran a bit longer than normal and, as such, cut the show a bit more abruptly than usual. Pretty packed show for being something we pulled together on the spur of the moment, and also bumped a bunch of topics for our show after we wrap the games of the year.
Yesterday was the day that the Anthem Servers went offline officially. This poor game lived such an ignominious fate, and in truth I had not really thought about it in years. However my friend Carthuun reminded me of its passing yesterday, as did a bunch of YouTube channels. It was a really important game for me… until it wasn’t. I wanted this thing to be so much more than it was, and I tried the hell out of making it my next Destiny. It has so many problems, so little content, and so many hamfisted decisions. There was a fun core there, but in an effort to slow players down and keep them from grinding through all of the content… they made the game feel deeply unrewarding and lost me in the process. If you want a proper eulogy for the game then I would suggest that you check out the video Paul Tassi posted yesterday.
I think for me personally I am going to prefer to remember the good bits. There was a really fun gameplay loop when it worked, and roaming around the big open world in an Iron Man suit was a fucking blast. Once they dialed it in, the controls felt amazing and all that it really needed… was more content. However that is unfortunately the most expensive thing to create… and it felt like EA was trying to foist this game out on us and not really fund it. I am not sure what came after those first six months, but supposedly the game improved over time. I don’t think it actually got much in the way of more content, but there was a weirdly devoted Reddit to the game. The thing I am probably going to remember the most is the soundtrack and how much I really loved it. I would love it if someone figured out a way to make this game work with emulator servers, since we should be able t still get the client via steam. However I doubt it had a large enough player base to support that sort of nonsense. You were a cool idea Anthem, but sadly Electronic Arts is a shitbag that did not allow you time or funding to turn into something cool.
I’ve been back in Path of Exile a bit working on challenges and this morning I checked my mappers and finished up Legendary Leagues. Essentially I would really like to hit 34 challenges, and I am sitting at 32, which of course means that I need to squeeze out two more. There are some that I could just pay for carries to complete, but I always hate doing that because it feels like failure. There is one for having run a bunch of map modifiers and fragments, and that one just takes immense time mapping in order to knock out. In theory it is relatively easy to do so, I just have to play a lot, and if I put on an audiobook I can burn through that. However I have not been on my audiobook game lately because I have wanted to spend every moment I can with “Erasure”. However last night we just hung out on voice chat while we both did our own things and that was extremely nice.
This morning I rolled a bunch of originator maps in an attempt to get several that did not have truly onerous affixes on them. That is my core problem with Tier 16.5 is that they have the same pure butts modifiers that T17s have. In theory I should be able to burn through these without much issue, and since I am already level 100 on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, I don’t much care about taking deaths. I know yesterday at one point I took a death, momentarily cringed, and then remembered I was max level and it was no big deal. I think leveling in Path of Exile II made me once again conscious of the damage loss penalty, and I am having to remember that I already beat that boss in Path of Exile 1. I am off today so I am probably going to throw on a book and grind maps at some point.
I also played a bit of Minecraft last night, working on my world that I created named after “Erasure”. It continues to pay off significantly and I found some pretty early diamonds at -5 Z height, or just shortly after ending the deep slate layers. This allowed me to craft my first diamond pick, and sped up my progress descending to bedrock. I’ve harvested so many resources while hollowing out my 8×8 chambers on the way down. I’ve got worlds of iron, gold, copper, redstone, and lapis and an overabundance of raw rock resources. In theory I am probably going to start using the deep slate in combination with cobblestone to build up my tower a bit more so that I can see it even further from base. I also made some shears and got some wool. When I deforested the top of the hill I was building on, it made it so more farm animals spawned giving me much better access to resources.
In theory I need to find some wheat so that I can start breeding cattle. I have tons of cows roaming around near my base and in theory should probably go with the good ole tried and true “meat hole” approach for infinite food production. In order to do that however… I need grain, and in order to find grain…. I am going to need to roam around a bit. The tower is going to make sighting where I am in the world much easier so that is probably the next major expansion project. I should also start to create an above ground fenced in area for crop production and the eventual creation of said “meat hole”. I did hit bedrock and at some point I am going to start setting up branch mining, because once I have access to diamond… I want more of it because diamond picks speed everything in this game up so much.
Tonight is going to be sibling time. We need to make another attempt to get out of relegation territory in Calamity Ops. In theory it really does not matter to much other than it being a point of pride, but we just need to stay together in rank so we can keep doing it together. We also have a new set of Grandmaster keys so we will be doing that tonight, and during the day I might try and unlock the full tower defense mode so we can do some of that. I am not sure when Morgran’s Hunt begins, but I know it is soon as well. Thursday is reset so we may get together really quickly that night and try and get in some early Calamity Ops then as well. I love sibling time, but I am also trying to coax “Erasure” into joining us if for no reason to hang out and listen to the nonsense that Ace and I get up to.
Anyways! I hope you are having a great week. I am pretty freaking happy at the moment, or at least happier than I have been in awhile. I kind of want that for everyone.
