Author: epicnooblet

Categories
Games Reviews

Stardew Valley has taken over my life!

Maybe someone should send help. I can’t seem to stop playing this game. If you haven’t already heard of this game (a fact I would find rather surprising) check out the game on Steam or GOG. By GOG’s description this game is a cross between Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing and it is amazing. So far I’ve put over 50 hours into the game and it just released last week. I guess I must really be into this country-life RPG, who knew? Well actually I did. After all I also put countless hours into Animal Crossing without a second thought. I spent all last weekend sitting at my desk, mostly forgetting to eat even (always remembering my coffee though)

Stardew Valley is so much more than just a simple farming sim though. It has actually a really good underlying story as well, one that I haven’t fully discovered yet but that events and interactions with NPCs hint at being much bigger than it would appear at first glance. There are certain comments that hint at darker messages in the game and I find myself completely enthralled by this. I’m sure that I’m far from getting anywhere near an end, if there even is one. You also get the chance to craft friendships and relationships, something I didn’t even know or realize when I first started the game. I also have to make mention of the music, which I find equally as well composed as the rest of the game.

My farm is not very big yet, it seems like a massive undertaking to grow it, but I’m slowly getting there. I have setup to somewhat small plots for farming and have built a barn for my cows and coop for a couple of chickens. As for my house itself I have upgraded it once, which gave me a kitchen, and it’s otherwise a mess of stuff I keep getting and just putting on any empty spot of my floor I can find.

Stardew Valley Farm Stardew Valley Barn and Coop Stardew Valley House

It’s safe to say that this game was absolutely worth the $14.99 that I spent for it on GOG. I easily would have paid twice as much for this game. And the best part? Concerned Ape, the game developer, has been absolutely amazing when responding to bug reports and implementing fixes for them!

I have been streaming some of my game on my Twitch channel if you want to see how the game plays. You can also find the videos of the streams on YouTube.

If you want to learn more about the game visit their website or their official Wiki:

http://stardewvalley.net/

http://stardewvalleywiki.com/Stardew_Valley_Wiki

Now it’s time for me to go continue playing!

 

 

Categories
Games

Post Holiday Craziness

So after I finally made it back home after the holidays, I left again a week later and was away from home for an additional 3 weeks. Finally got back home the first week of February and since then I have been spending most of my time trying to play catch up. To be honest I’ve barely had any time to play any games. I’ve been working on trying to find a new job for starters, and we’ve also been house hunting!

That’s right, we have finally determined we can’t keep living in apartments. We keep not being able to find a place that can fit all our stuff, and I need a separate room for video recording as well as some workshop space for cosplay projects. Good news is that we did put in an offer on a house yesterday, though apparently it would seem that a lot of people were unavailable due to Valentine’s Day, so I have no yet heard back from anyone (except our own agent) regarding the offer. Wish us luck!

In other news, I think I will be having to shift my video upload schedule a bit. It will probably be in flux for a few weeks, hoping to eventually settle on a Tuesday / Thursday upload schedule with some possible live streams during the week. Eventually the live streams should fall into a regular schedule as well. Ideally my blog updates should become more regular as well as I start better organizing my time between all these changes going on.

I will have a new Fran Bow video posted tomorrow! Stay tuned!

 

 

 

 

 

Categories
Stray Thoughts

Wrapping up the holidays!

Well the holidays are no over and it’s finally time to start organizing my life again. It’s been somewhat hectic the past few weeks.

In early December I made the decision that I needed to finally upgrade my computer. I had just been mainly waiting for the Intel Skylake processors to release before upgrading. Turns out when I went to order them, they were sold out everywhere. I set up several notifications on various websites, and just kept checking every morning. In the meantime I ordered all the remaining parts, including the motherboard and CPU heatsink, all I needed now was the processor. Finally about a week later I found the processor in stock somewhere and ordered it. As it turns out though, the processor arrived, and the motherboard was still nowhere to be found. The status of my Amazon order simply said “Shipping Soon” for about a week. So I finally contacted Amazon and they informed me that there had been a glitch, so it basically never would have shipped if I hadn’t called. Thanks to Amazon’s great customer service though, after that I had the motherboard the next day! And now most everything was complete…except for my sound card… On black Friday, Creative Labs had a sale for 5.1 speakers which included a sound card as well. I received the speakers, but the sound card was nowhere to be found. I contacted Creative (which btw doesn’t have the greatest customer service) and they sounded almost confused when I asked where the sound card was, the rep asked me “It wasn’t in the box with the speakers?”. Anyway, he finally must have found in his system where the sound card was and said he would request it be shipped right away. By this point it was about December 10th-11th and I was leaving on vacation on the 16th. So I asked if it would be here before then, he said it should be here by the 14th. Safe to say it wasn’t. On December 21st I finally get a shipping notification for it. Luckily they had shipped it USPS because I had submitted a mail hold while I was out. Had they shipped it FedEx or UPS it would have just been dropped off at my front door.

Continue reading “Wrapping up the holidays!”
Categories
Games Stray Thoughts Videos

Of Mass Effect and other things

So I don’t know what got into me, but I suddenly felt the need to replay Mass Effect. However, I was one of the people that weren’t OK with the endings as they were. Not necessarily because they weren’t happy endings, but simply because I felt they weren’t well written. They were jarring against the rest of the games and the story to me. But luckily I discovered that there were several mods already that changed the ending of the game completely and so I decided to do that. I ended up deciding on MEHEM because I still thought it fairly reasonable. It didn’t seem too much of a stretch to get the happy ending, and overall it made many of the characters’ actions make more sense and stay in line with their personalities. The main thing that I love about this mod is that it eliminates the star child scene altogether, and that makes it all worth it! (I hate that star child…) It had been years since I played Mass Effect. Actually hadn’t replayed any of the games since playing through ME3 the first, and only, time. After watching those endings I felt I just couldn’t replay the games at all. So, in turn, I had also never played any of the ME3 DLCs aside for From Ashes which had been included when I bought the game.

Anyway, so I’ve been pretty silent because I spent the better part of the last week and a half buried in Mass Effect. I played all 3 games in quick succession. Before that, I was in the middle of another Inquisition playthrough. This time taking my time, though. So now that Mass Effect is done, I can go back to finishing that, though I’m not sure if I’ll get it done before the holidays come around. December will be getting pretty busy and I’ll be gone for the better part of 2 weeks around Christmas, so I’ll be away from my computer. 🙁

Continue reading “Of Mass Effect and other things”
Categories
Games

Back to Dragon Age: Inquisition – Speedrun

So about a month ago I had started a new playthrough of DAI. I got about 30 hours in before I got sidetracked with other games. Been primarily focusing on the horror games I’ve been playing for my YouTube videos.

However, yesterday, after a friend told me that she was just now going to get around to playing DAI, I congratulated her, yet stated that starting less than a week before the release of Halo 5 might not be the best idea, as a good playthrough of DAI is at least 150 hours. Then Dragon Age’s twitter account asked if I was up to the challenge of completing (100%) Dragon Age before the release of Halo 5, you can see the tweets below:

twitter
Twitter conversation with Dragon Age
Continue reading “Back to Dragon Age: Inquisition – Speedrun”