Lilith - Darkstalkers Resurrection

Lilith, the little boobless version of Morrigan which you should totally buy as a print by the way.

So I moved into my brothers place this time last week. I'm house sitting for 5 months while he goes off and does stuff with the airforce. The cat is half feral, the fridge is full of Bourbon, and the sound system is constantly pumping my Soundcloud favourites list.

Pretty good so far. This is the first time I've technically lived out of home, not including the year I spent living out of a single bag (the year I started this blog actually.)

I've got Becky here as well and we're getting used to the whole "I want to sleep/I want to watch movies till well past midnight is that ok?" thing.

This morning we flooded the Laundry. Becky noticed that there was a wet spot on the carpet before she noticed that the laundry sink was overflowing with tons of water. Oops.

Felicia - Darkstalkers

Darkstalkers has some fun characters, they aren't afraid to be weird with the designs.

While researching Felicia I bumped into the official Deviantart of the guy who did the art for Revelations. Turns out I was already following artgerm anyway.

I found this curiosity below that I thought I'd share with you. The censored and uncensored versions of her official art. I'm not sure in what context each is used (whether one's for japan and the other is for the prudish west) or what. But putting a pussy in front of a butt has always been a recipe for fun times, so here we go.

As we all know it's a well known fact that underboob is more offensive than pretty much any other kind of boob.

Konoko - Oni

Thanks for suggesting this one Dave! Can I call you Dave, David?

This is Konoko, the protagonist of the 2001 Playstation 2 game (PC & Mac) Oni.

Back in the 1991 the Bungie game studio was born. They made a bunch of games and after the success of one called Myth (not to be confused with Myst). With this success they started Bungie West in 1997. They went on to make Oni, a game noteworthy for breaking new ground in terms of blending hand to hand combat with 3rd person shooting. Also it'll always be remembered as that game that was way too heavily influenced by Ghost in the Shell.

On Konoko's design Lorraine McLees, Bungie artist had this to say "Their vision of (Konoko) was more overtly -blam!- than ours. We specifically didn't want her to be just another Lara Croft, so we'd go back and forth with the California office. They'd send Konoko designs back with a bare midriff and the bottom of her breasts exposed, and we'd go back and re-clothe her. The funny thing is that the more we tried to de--blam!-ize her, the more sexy she became.'"

Lorraine came late in the process however, and fans digging through the art archives have placed the credit of Konokos character design on Alex Okita, a 3D artist who also seemed to do all the early art for the game.

In 2000 Bungie got a lucrative deal and got bought out by Microsoft. With this came the dissolving of the Bungie West offices and the scattering of its team members. A few of them went on to help develop Halo, a game that still blows minds to this day.

While Bungie West may be gone, you can still take the tour of the place while it was still going strong.

How long does it take to get every Heroes of the Storm Hero?

Befoer we get down to brass tacks, Valla from Diablo, and now Heroes of the Storm.

Some people aren't happy that you don't immediately get characters in Heroes of the Storm as you do in other games. Personally I find unlocking the characters more rewarding than just being handed them. You will eventually get to play them all eventually for free through the rotation system you can go ahead and unlock them in the store using the currency you earn from completing quests and just playing the game.

It's been described as a pitiful amount to receive, but let's break it down and figure out exactly how long it would take to buy all the characters without spending real money.

Note that I'm working off the Beta version (34053), Mid February 2015. The Lost Vikings have just been released.

The Total cost of all the Characters

234,000 gold. First off we have the total cost, you can see the entire store of characters in the screenshots below. There's always a character that's 50% off, so this number may vary by a couple thousand. Apparently sales don't apply to Gold, thanks assburgersareokay if that is your real name.

How much do you earn per match?

You earn 30 gold for a basic Death Match. 10 for winning, 20 for participating. Co-Op games yield just 10 for wining with no participation bonus. This is pretty paltry.

How Much From Dailies?

Daily quests can tip between 200 to 800 gold. You can see a complete breakdown of the different dailies here. Assuming you have an equal chance of receiving any of these dailies, you can expect to average 355 gold a day from dailies.

If we include the games you have to play to complete these quests on a basic Co-Op game you are guaranteed an average of 32 gold a day.

So from doing non competitive Co-Op, with no extra games per day you can earn 387 gold. Not looking as shit hot as I had hoped it would look.

What about Player progression rewards?

Ok, so from leveling your profile you can earn a one off of 6,000 gold. That's not a bad little sum and gets you most of the way towards an expensive character. Let's assume you earn that passively while trooping along.

So How long Will It Take?

You can expect to earn 2709 gold per week comfortably. At that rate it would take you 86.3 weeks to afford every character. knock off the 6000 from player progression and it's down to about 84 weeks. In other words almost two years (of playing 3 games a day to complete the dailies) on the current characters alone. No doubt there will be tons more in two years time.

That's a lot of my life...

An average match is meant to take around 20 minutes. That's about an hour every day. Admittedly you can stack up to 3 daily quests and complete them all at the same time, but I can't be bothered doing the maths for that. At this rate it will take you 588 hours to earn enough gold to get every character.

Fuck it, What if I just play Death Match hard out?

Ok, so you're gonna spend more than an hour everyday playing, and your going to be getting that extra gold for playing more matches (as well as your daily reward). Blizzard wants to balance the game so you'd be winning 50% of the time, so your average income from a match would be 25 gold.

A reasonable 4 hour session a day would take you 363 days.

You can work out how long you'd need to play by checking out this handy graph that Matt kindly whipped up for me. Cheers. (Note: change 60x to 75x in the calculation.) The horizontal is hours spent each day, while the vertical is the days. Obviously only numbers of hours between 1 and 24 make sense.

I'm going pro, Playing this game is my job.

An 8 hour session would take you 263 days, which is 3 days more than a regular working year. People with real jobs would be able to afford the characters faster than you.

What if I just use real money?

The minimum wage in New Zealand is $14.25 an hour. If you decide to work instead of playing HotS you could earn 8379 real monies.

Doing some fast dirty sums here (because I wanna go watch Captain America) all the heroes cost 269 real dollars in total. This isn't taking into account 50% discounts that are always going and hero bundle packs.

So if you wanted to reward Blizzard for their evil ways you can afford to get all the characters in 11.8 hours which is a lot less than two years.

Once you collect all the characters you will be suddenly filled with an amazing sense of accomplishment and your life will suddenly know a peace it's never felt before. This is of course priceless.

Note that it gets a little screwy with conversion rates from NZD to USD and I didn't account for that. I also didn't account for gold rewards for leveling your characters. But for all I know you'd be spamming one character anyway.

Why Heroes of the Storm is better than your MOBA

I'm sorry about the inflammatory title. It should really be "Why Heroes of the Storm is better than your MOBA for me."

Jaina has been one of my favourite characters so far. I've only played Heroes of the Storm for two weeks so I haven't seen the entire rotation yet. Tassadar and Zagara have been fun to play!

I played through the tutorials and then jumped straight into the public death matches, to which I immediately got abused for being a shit player. This being my first solid effort at a MOBA I was in no doubt of my "shitness" however without any proper feedback I was unable to correct my behavior. In the end someone said I should play Co-op, which I did. I immediately enjoyed it. The pressure was immediatly off and the mood in the intermittent chat was positive. It's bots VS humans for anyone who hasn't played DOTA2 or League of Legends.

P.S. no ingame screenshots just yet, maybe in a later post.

Now, why am I playing this unbalanced beta by Blizzard and not a well established solid game like LoL? I mean they're just as free, maybe even more so, but what's drawn me to this game?

MOBA for people who don't like MOBA's

I feel like Blizzard sat a bunch of non-MOBA gamers down and asked them why they didn't play it, even if they liked RTS games. Then they scuttled off and made HotS, a MOBA that will no doubt act as a gateway drug into the scene.

Low Barrier to Entry

This is both my first and last point in this list. Having a smaller pool (currently) of characters to choose from each week makes choices easier to make in terms of who I want to play as. It also forces me to try new characters and experiment.
Note that I didn't say that the game was actually easier, just less intimidating at first, as I mentioned, people can still tell if you aren't very good, meaning there's still skill involved (or not involved in my case.)

Permanent player progression

Ingame XP used for temporary ingame leveling is kept for after the match, and levels your character forever. Early on this unlocks new abilities to choose from next time you level ingame, and later on earns you gold and new skins to choose from.
This clever mechanic also feeds into the low barrier to entry, as my brain isn't exploding trying to figure out what abilities to give to my characters the first couple times I play them.
Also your overall player profile levels as well, earning you more rotation slots (more free characters to choose from each week.)

Map Variety

I hated the idea of playing the same map over and over again. I wouldn't do that on Battlefield, why would I do it on anything else? Each map has it's own little quirks that makes it varied and interesting. I hate the Garden one. I don't want to pick up seeds while killing plant monsters.

Legit Rape of IP

Blizzard has created some unique and iconic IP's during it's lifetime, and it's kind of fun being familiar with them all. "Ah Diablo, I've called you 7 times in your own game! What makes you think you'll fair any better here?"

Daily Quests

Ah, they have learnt every addictive trick in the book. The daily quests earn you gold to buy permanent heroes, it gives you a purpose and a reason to turn the game on every day, and the quests are easy enough to finish in one sitting, no insane quests that need you to play for 24 hours straight or anything. Also it's a good carrot to make you play a class you wouldn't normally play as. It's the only way they'd ever get me playing a melee bruiser.

2nd screen with Wiki open Unnecessary

Once again, low barrier of entry stuff here. I always hated DOTA cause I'd have to run back to a shop and sit there going "I really don't know which dress I look better in." And if you muck it up then you have a nerfed character.
HotS drops the item shop completely and replaces it with just skills you improve or add as your character levels ingame. This means you're in the fight the entire time, but still allows you to build your character in a bunch of different directions

Not the Best, Not For Everyone, But Good For Me

Now I'm not expecting this to be a DOTA killer or anything. I'm not expecting LoL players to suddenly decide to play HotS. You guys have invested hundreds of hours into those games, it'd be insane to switch. I also realise I'm a noob who doesn't see the entire meta picture yet. But for me this game is perfect.

Journey - 8Bit

This is one of those games that every single person needs to play. I'd recommend doing it when you're not going to be distracted by kids or dishwashers or something. Set aside the entire afternoon. You can finish it in one sitting, and I think that's the way it should be done.
Put this game alongside Shadow of the Colossus and you've got a pretty solid reason to invest in an old PS3.

But wait? Is that Journey character even a girl? There's a lot of debate swirling around the sex of this character that was obviously created to be ambiguous. During the testing of the game male players would refer to the character as "he" while female testers refered to the creature as "she".

The critters aren't born in a regular sense either, being born of the life force or whatever of the mountain. So the need for genitalia doesn't seem all that important.

Either way I've decided that to exclude this character from the pantheon would be doing everyone a great disservice. If you have any thoughts or opinions on this feel free to drop me a line.

Blobby: Thoughts of Working

16/20 I suspect the last 4 will be "world buildy" type strips since the last 16 have been very focused on relationship stuff. This one was originally written about someone else, but it could probably easily be about me at the moment.
I got Deus Ex for 4 bucks and I'm waiting for it to finish downloading. In the meantime I was giving Theme Hospital a crack because Origin was giving it away as part of some system to try and make people actually use Origin.
Origin is like the Pepsi to Steams Coke. There's nothing inherently bad about it other than it tastes gross and isn't coke.

Only If - Screenshots

I got around to playing Only If, a free game made by some dude on Unity. it'll take you about 45 minutes to get through. Although there were parts of the game I didn't see, I presume it was to do with an early choice. It was originally made for Game Jolt Contest 10 and suffers a little under what must have been a tight turnaround, but for what I payed, and for the amount of time it took of my life I enjoyed it. I needed the escape. I wouldn't be nearly as harsh on it as Gamespot was, but then again, this guy has expectations.

Katarina Alves - Tekken 7

Katarina's the newly announced Tekken 7 character from Brazil(?). Talking about new the official site is now up. We're currently seeing a distinct lack of Nina and other stalwarts at the moment. Now this leads me to something I've been thinking about for a wee while now.

The Predictable Surprise Release Cycle

First of all before I get into the nitty gritty, if they left out Nina where would all the cosplayers giving themselves uncomfortable wedgies be? Where would they be Namco? It's up to you.

Secondly, we've seen this a million times in fighting games, releasing new characters to get the gaming news sites excited, while leaving out fan favourites to troll the existing fanbase into a frenzy wondering whether their Mains are going to be included. Eventually you end up with tragic bits of information like Kasumi's arm being "revealed" via twitter (scroll down till you see the blue hand.) Why would they not include Kasumi? Do fans believe that Tecmo hates money?

I do realize that I'm talking right now with 20/20 hindsight. But I'm also gonna bet on the fact that both Nina AND Bob will be in Tekken 7. It's on the record. She's been in absolutely every Tekken so far, and was the poster girl for most of it. And Bob? I just think he's unpopular and underdog enough to prove my point.

Kingsman: The Secret Service Review

Releasing on the 5th, this is a movie not to be missed. I have honestly not had this much fun watching a movie in a long time. Even movies that were touted as being "fun and dumb" like Pacific Rim have nothing on this smartly packaged spy film.

It breaks away from the somberness of most spy movies, and doesn't mind being crass, violent, and even funny. There were more than just a few laugh out loud moments in the movie to relieve all the stabbings.

There's hyperviolence, lots of it. Although that's to be expected of Matthew Vaughn, the director who helped bring Kickass and X-Men: First Class into this world. The camera style is one that almost seems to be strapped to the flying fists, bits of broken wood, shards of glass and bullets that eviscerate pretty much everyone.
And strangely enough, amongst all this, it manages to remain classy somehow even going so far as to sneak in mens fashion tips "Oxfords, not brogues". Perhaps it's Colin Firth's swanning around being a quiet bad ass.

Either way, this is a fun movie, that's aware of every other spy film that's come before it. It even goes so far as to straight up talk about them and then getting onto the business of either stomping on a trope or doing it with deft skill that makes it fresh again.
Now the question is, should I read the comics now?

Oh one other thing. Mark Hamill/Luke Skywalker is in the movie and you won't even recognize him.