Game of E-Thrones 3: The Painting of Coming in Winter

I have no idea what all of that means as a single title.  And just a forewarning, today's post is going to ramble quite a bit.

E3 starts tomorrow (June 16, 2015), which means if you add all the numbers together you get 3 (6+1+6+2+0+1+5=21=2+1=3), which is the number of topics that I will be rambling about today.  So E3.  Going into E3 week this year, all I knew ahead of time was the handful of announcements from Bethesda: Doom, Fallout 4 and Nintendo: Nintendo World Championship 2015.  That's all I knew about before I woke up this morning and since the waking, I read more Bethesda announcements which include an online TCG from Bethesda called The Elder Scrolls: Legends, which people are saying is akin to Blizzard's Hearthstone, of which I know the name and basic mechanic (there are cards used for fighting) and that's about it.

As for other games, there's a gigantic list here that I will be sorting through as the week goes on.

Hopefully there's some word on last years announced Steamboy, but as their site hasn't been updated since last year, I fear that this project may have fallen through; but I can still have hope.

Lastly, I wanted to talk a little bit about Game of Thrones season 5, part in the season finale that aired last night (6/14/15) and part on the whole season.  First off, I am very happy with how the season finale went as far as story, or as some people have commented, the lack of story and/or character arcs.  Yes, I agree that some characters (Sansa) didn't appear to have done much this season aside from going from one not great situation to an exceedingly worse off situation, but I have learned from this show (as well as other long running shows such as LOST and X-Files that character arcs may last multiple seasons and GoT is a fairly massive show with a massive number of characters and giving important and memorable arcs for even half of the characters every season, I feel would not leave time for the other half to have any on screen time.  Sure this would be great and for the show to follow the books more closely, but people age [especially the youngin's (Bran, Arya, Sansa, Rickon, Tommen, Myrcella)] so obviously things have to be cut out, reduced and characters should be doing things more interesting than their respective characters in the books.

That paragraph/semi-rant boils down to, I will reserve judgement on characters, their motivations, their arcs until the end of the show.  Now that I think about it, I'm sure someone has charted how much time has elapsed during each individual season and the amount of time passed between seasons.  I might just go and look that up.  

And again, I was happy with season 5 as a whole and I look forward to nine months from now when I can binge watch the season all over again, then again with all of the commentaries, because that's the way I like my cake.

Additionally, fan theories (regarding both the books and the TV show) about characters and how people think they should be connected make me almost irrationally irritated.  I always bring it back to fan theories/demand about Will Turner's father in Pirates of the Caribbean. I could lead myself into a long rant that won't get me anywhere except just more worked up and annoyed, so I will stop myself here.

And since we agreed on three topics earlier today, with any luck, I'm going to start painting some Reaper Bones this week for our D&D group.  It's been almost 4 years since I've pointed a paintbrush at some minis, but it's time I got back into the habit.  And with eight minis to paint (and then some), I think I'll have full for the remainder of the week.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Et ca me fait quelque chose.

Monthly Update July

Jimminy Jillickers, another month gone by.  

I've been a bad blogger, and I haven't posted much.  I blame the heat.  It's been hot.  June was a hot month, with many days over one hundred degrees.  I work outdoors and I have no air conditioning.  It tires me out.  On top of that, when it's hot, watering the garden becomes a matter of life or death for your plants.  I do all my watering by hand, so it's a slow process.  

In the heat, my computer has a tendency to just turn itself off when overheated, so sometimes I can't even use the thing until late in the evening.  I could play in the morning before work, but I have been wary of getting involved in anything that might absorb too much of my attention before work. 

On my to-play list is Among the Sleep, Mirror's Edge and now Skyrim!  I'm excited to check out the full game of Among the Sleep,  and I've been fighting with Mirror's Edge for some time now.  The fighting areas are just so dang hard!    Skyrim... well, I think I'll save that for a day when I really want to unplug.  I think maybe tomorrow.  

On other notes, I finished Scalped.  It was pretty good and I recommend it.  I also read Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.  It was also pretty good and I recommend that.  Then I decided to stop reading, and I started watching "True Blood."  

The first season was actually pretty good, much better than I expected.  But after a while, I lost interest.  It just sort of boils down to really attractive people with southern accents, convoluted plots and cliffhangers at the end of ever.single.episode.  It gets pretty tiresome.  The characters are pretty good, but you can get all you need from just one season.  

Geez, I really don't have much else to say right now.  But I always have something to say, I just can't seem to access it. I guess I'll leave you with 'Game of Thrones if it were on VHS."  Alternative Game of Thrones title sequences are a pretty popular thing now, and some of them are pretty cool.  This one cracked me up.  

The Font, the Headshots (with smiles), the Music.  Pretty good stuff.

-D

Skyrim = Sinkhole of Time

My experience with The Elder Scrolls games has been very limited, so much so that I've only witnessed a former roommate playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.  All I could say about the game was that the guy's character jumped everywhere, occasionally killed a city guard and that it was an FPS-type game.  I wasn't overly impressed.  My own personal experience with first person (POV) hack-and-slash swording fantasy games was limited to an old arcade game that I thought was in a Neo-Geo cabinate, but I can't find anything about it anywhere.  So there's that.

During Steam's most recent Fall/Autumn/Thanksgiving sale, I purchased The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.  I did this for a couple of reasons.  First and foremost, the game was 50% off, which still meant that it was $30.  The second reason comes in three parts, but is part of the larger whole, which is that I'm lacking in fantasy realms to be in.  I'm not a subscriber to HBO so I don't/can't watch Game of Thrones until it's released on DVD and Amazon just gave a release date for season 2 as February 13th, 2013 (assuming the world doesn't end in a few weeks).  I'm also reading Shadow Moon, which to pretty much everyone, is the first book in a trilogy that takes place in the same world as the film Willow.  The third part of the second reason is that I'm eagerly awaiting the release of The Hobbit.  So as you can see, I needed a medieval high-fantasy world to play in.

So yes, Skyrim was purchased.  But that is not the point.  The point is, is that I've only played the game for two days, which were my two days off this week, and I managed to clock in about 13 1/2 hours.  Jump ahead two more days and I've now clocked in just over 19 hours.  Granted probably about 30 minutes of that was just creating my character.  I can also figure out how/why I've been playing for this long.  

I don't know if it's something in current large world RPG's and I know I've seen it in a few other games, but Skyrim allows you to in a sense, warp between locations you've already been to.  The required amount of time will pass during your split second journey as if you actually walked it, but you'll be as fast as it takes for the loading screen to finish loading.  I'm not a fan of this "fast travelling" nonsense, something that I felt plagued Final Fantasy XII, but I'm not getting into FFXII right now.  If I'm going from one village to a cave on the other side of the mountains, by golly, I'm going to have my character run the whole god damn way!

A big (as in fucking huge) part of this game for me, is looking at the environment (pun sort of intended).  Anytime I'm travelling, I'll back the camera out to a 3rd person view so that I can rotate the camera and just watch the gorgeous scenery:

Keep in mind that I'm running this game at about mid-level so there aren't all the textures and layers that could be there if I were running on Alienware or something equivalent.  There are mods available designed to make the game look even better, but I'm not going to touch those, again because I don't have the set up for it.  There is this guy though who apparently has 100+ mods running at any given time for some amazing visuals.

The gist is that I like walking.  I like exploring.  So what if I get sidetracked from the main story line and want to find out what's on the other side of that mountain and end up swimming in a lake.  I love being able to look at a mountain range way off in the distance, run towards it and seeing it get larger and larger until there I am, running up the side of it.  I will admit thought that I have on a couple of occasions "Fast Traveled" to a location, but that was because I was strapped for time and knew I wouldn't be able to make the trek to the city to disenchant my non-usable gear before I had to leave for work.  Because in this world, work comes first.

At the moment, I don't see this game taking as much time as say, Goldeneye 007 took, as that was the only game I played on the N64 for just over six months after I bought it.  Some people will scoff at that satement, but I do plan on playing other games, both on my computer and either on the 3DS or PSP if I'm not playing Skyrim.  And besides, I've still got to get through Penumbra Overture.  You hear that Skyrim, you're  not the only game in the box!

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Now If Only They Would Listen

P.S.  And in case you're wondering, I created a female Wood Elf named Allinesea.  She's based off a character I created for a D&D campaign that I have never run.  I also thought it would be more interesting having the lead character as a woman rather than the stereotypical male fighter character.  Although I've also thought about doing a male character and having him be a mage...... I'm sure I'll come up with something later.

And just because, here's a picture of Barbas the wolf hound photo bombing one of my pictures: