Post E3-pocalypse

I know, I know…E3-pocalypse isn’t really a thing.  However, two weeks ago marked the time of year when the Electronic Entertainment Expo (appropriately abbreviated as, well, E3) happens.  During that time lots of stuff happens in terms of game announcements, reveals for plans for currently released games, and there has even been a console or two shown off in the past.  It gets everyone who watches it and plays video games a bunch of cool new things to look forward to for about the next year.  I have always enjoyed this time of year and I was even enjoying it more when I would be tasked with covering what I could of it for Inside View Gaming.  It was crazy, both in terms of how busy myself and the rest of the team would be, but also how fun and exciting it was getting to see what all of the awesome game developers were creating for us next.  This year was no different.

I’ll start by briefly saying this might be a semi-lengthy post because I’m going to give you my thoughts on some of the things that I am most excited for that was announced at E3 this year.  I will most likely go in the order of which conference I saw first…sadly skipping EA’s since I didn’t know it was on Saturday…  So essentially I’ll be starting with Microsoft’s, then over to Bethesda’s, then Ubisoft and their shenanigans, finally capping it off with the trailers I saw from Sony because I couldn’t watch their stream.

“What about Nintendo?”

Well, I’m going to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of Nintendo.  I may briefly talk about a few things that have piqued my interest but I will be focusing on mostly what I actually have seen myself and what I am most excited for.  I am also withholding from making a blatantly obvious “Nintedon’t” joke here.  It’s been a while since I have done any sort of long form writing related to E3 and the full day of rapid fire tweets I typically do during each conference don’t count.  This should be fun, so let’s get to it.

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Quit Horsing Around

There is a hilarious back story for the title of this post…or at least it is hilarious to me, but either way I will divulge into the details of it like I always do.  It hasn’t quite been a month since my last post, especially when you consider the fact that we are still in the month of March, but a fair amount of stuff has happened in that time as well.  I’ve picked up two new games, Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Far Cry 5 and have managed to play them both a little.  Last week, some stranger by the name of FranticJ3 decided to show up at my house and stay for a week.  Magic and Borderlands shenanigans happened during this time.  A few other things have happened since my last post where I recount my experiences as a new person in the world of the SCA.  Like the fact I levelled up in real life.

To start, you will most likely see more of my nonsensical (at times) ramblings over here again.  Why is that?  Near the start of the month, the decision was made that Frantic Talks would be shutting down.  I must admit that it is sad to see it go, but the reasoning behind the decision is completely understandable in my mind.  If you do not look forward to doing something that is a hobby, then it is no longer a hobby anymore.  So with that said, any and all thoughts I have on a topic will now be posted here.  This also led me to do some thinking of my own and I have decided that, for a little while at least, I think I am going to just keep my writing to this place.  No, I am not going to be giving it up entirely; I just realized that while having a schedule to keep to for publishing stuff is nice, I enjoy writing at my own free will (obligatory Rush reference goes here) much more than I thought I did.  Plus it allows me to be more relaxed with my style and I can put in subtle (Read: stupid) references like the previous one that is a nod to the band Rush.  I have already started bringing back some of the more serious in tone posts with a topic in regards to my thoughts on homeschooling and I already have a few other things I want to talk about in a more serious manner.  The time I spent doing things for Frantic Talks was definitely fun and I enjoyed it.  It kept my writing skills from getting too rusty and it gave me the opportunity to do something I didn’t think I would ever do, host a podcast.

The Experiences of a New SCAdian

Now that I have fought with autocorrect and have forced it to quit changing “SCAdian” to “Scandinavian”…what exactly does that mysterious sounding word mean?  Before we get into that, I think some backstory is required in case you forgot or don’t follow me on the whole two social media sites I am on to understand exactly what I’m going on about.  In a post entitled “An Agenda” I discussed a few of the plans I have in store for new hobbies or interests I am picking up and a couple of other things to boot.  Near the end of the post I reference how I want to pick up sword fighting / HEMA and start learning how to actually do some of it.  I also mention how I was kicking around the idea of checking out my local group of the SCA.

The Scenic Route: “Glorious Dust Fit For Royalty”

See, didn’t I tell you I’d make sure this series continued on?  I finally got the chance to take some screenshots from Nessus in Destiny 2 a few weeks ago and am just now getting the chance to truly kick off this series.  But first, before I continue and start amazing* you with some cool screenshots, let’s briefly recap a few things.  I’ve been playing some games lately, mostly Skyrim, Destiny 2, and Assassin’s Creed: Origins.  Those have been a ton of fun to play and I’m sure I’ll have some more in-depth thoughts on some of them soon.  I’ve been continuing the writing and co-podcasting for Frantic Talks, this is where I say you should go check out the stuff we have over there…well, you should.  I was also able to finish one of my more serious posts and I’d like to draw your attention to it briefly.  It was about a topic that is “near and dear” to me for many reasons, and I have to admit that I quite enjoyed taking a minute to write about something in a serious tone.  Lastly, there are a few other things that I have hinted at that I plan on enacting upon soon.

*Disclaimer: Screenshots may or may not be amazing.  That is up to you to decide.

Alright, so let’s get on to the pretty pictures.  According to the folder I have all of these screenshots saved in, there are currently 49 files in said folder.  That should be enough, right?  When taking these shots, it was a different experience for me while playing Destiny and one I quite enjoyed.  To find the screenshots, I simply turned off the heads up display in the games’ settings menu and just started roaming through the game world.  It was kind of interesting when enemies started attacking me, but luckily I have the habit of always aiming down the sight to shoot at something so it wasn’t terribly difficult to overcome.  Dregs are scary, yo.  As I roamed through the game world, there was a lot more detail that I was noticing that I typically didn’t notice when playing through normally.  Why is that?  I have no idea really, if I had to guess it might be due to the fact that I’m more focused on going from objective to objective that I just simply don’t notice it.  Man, I should take my own advice.  However, that’s sort of the why I started this series; is to showcase some of the art that is present in the games we play on a regular basis but yet don’t notice so much.  Ok, now let’s get into the images.

The Homefront

It has been a while since I have put aside the chatter related to gaming and just simply talked about something…well, not related to gaming.  Of course, that is mainly due to a few reasons with the biggest being that in some of those posts of old I seemed to have come off as an angry person when giving my thoughts.  Instead of coming off as someone who is angry and rants 90% of the time, I decided to put the real world topics away and go back to talking about strictly gaming related topics.  By doing so, I typically couldn’t offend anyone.  Well…I could technically but it would take way more effort than I would have actually cared for.  It has also been a while since I have started a post with “It has been a while”.  Something else I did often in Ye Olden Days.

Anyways, with that introduction done, let me get to an important point before diving into my main point for this.  The first being that, while I know I said that I hate talking about myself in a more recent post (it’s still true for the most part) there is part of me that enjoys sharing more about the person behind the online moniker.  As I mentioned in some post somewhere there are real people behind these names.  So in some weird, mashup of a point of view; I don’t like talking about myself because it makes me feel like a self-centered person.  Yet, at the same time I’m perfectly ok with giving out a few scraps of info on how I think or some sneak peek into my life outside of games. 

An Agenda

Apologies for the lack of a post in over a month, especially after I announced the return of a new series.  Doesn’t look too good for its return, does it?  I promise you though, I still have plans of continuing it.  The month of December was extremely busy with preparing for Christmas and New Year gatherings with family; and all the varying doctor appointments I had during that month.  I’m healthy in case you wondered.  That has prevented me from actually sitting down and taking screenshots from Nessus in Destiny 2, I do plan to fix that hopefully next week sometime and actually get that series going.  It’s a shame Titan didn’t win the poll because I have a bunch from there that are ready to go.

In that time, I really haven’t had the chance to play too many games in general.  I have played a little of Destiny 2 as their winter event, The Dawning, has been active for the past few weeks.  It has been fun giving “gifts” to the various members of the Vanguard and other vendors and whatnot.  It has also been fun throwing snowballs at Dregs…not that I would do that because that is mean.  Dregs are people too…sort of.  It will be ending in a few days and I’m not sure if I’ll get the chance to try out Mayhem or not.  If I don’t, I hope it comes back so I can try it out then.  I thought Mayhem back in D1 was a lot of fun so I’m certain I can assume I would enjoy it in D2 as well.

The Scenic Route: A Reintroduction

Why yes, that is a subtitle after “The Scenic Route“.  That title goes back to this post where I discuss the normal gaming stuff along with sharing some screenshots I had taken at that point and what made me decide to share them.  Starting with my post entitled “The Scenery of Destiny“, I briefly encouraged you to take a minute and just look at the game from a different perspective.  Continuing with that mindset I went into more detail and suggested for you to admire the world.  Bonus points if you catch what I did there.  Anyways, shameful self-promoting aside; I have been wanting to take more screenshots from games and sort of show those games off.  It is something I have always enjoyed doing for as long as I can remember and it was only made easier when I got my HD PVR as the amount of games I could take screenshots from increased greatly.

This new series, that’s right series, is going to help me with that desire to take more screenshots.  A brief tale of the inspiration behind kick starting this series would involve me getting challenged to do that black and white photo thing that has been going around the Booking of the Face variety and my aforementioned urge to take more pictures in games.  Getting back to that photo challenge, I completely forgot about it and as a result never finished it.  In the end I only shared two photos, and I’m pretty sure I poked fun at my poor photography skills in both of those posts.  I’d be lying though if I said I didn’t enjoying taking and sharing those “poor quality” photos.