Achievements.

At the time of this post, I’ve been playing a whole lot of Insurgency. Though there are a lot of boosters for the new Day of Infamy mod from the community, I’m staying close to the base game for the fact I spent over 800 hours to get to this very moment. The very moment: “Bodycount X (Co-op) – Kill 100, 000 enemies.”

In many games now, there are accolades for accumulated kills. Like many games, they award in increments. In Insurgency as the X suggests, it’s the tenth one in the line of Bodycount achievements. As much as I dislike games with an achievement grind, this one I cannot ignore. I want to have it because I’ve spent so much time invested into the game to not complete all the co-op achieves.

I can’t help relating to my predicament to reality. Achievements in life, especially recognized by others, are the hardest to receive. Hardest are for those who seek them rather than doing what they’re doing. When I first starting playing Insurgency, I thought I would give up around hour 250. I’m now coming close to 850 hours and the last couple years feel like nothing. I would say it’s a blur since I’ve been playing the same maps and the same game modes repetitively. I’ve been more or less racking in about an hour or two a day and only recently I’ve been pushing it to gain more kills. Much to my surprise in the past week, I’ve inched closer and closer. Start of 2016, I needed about 20k kills; I’m now almost halfway with a an estimate of a month to finish. After that, I’m not sure if I would play PvP to complete all the achievements.

Much in life, you have to keep doing what you love and your will be rewarded with something meaningful.

Open To Play

So here’s what’s going on for the end of the month on my YouTube channel.

With my Cities: Skylines gameplay, I think I’m getting close to finishing most of the game. There are unlockable building that require me to do a few things which I will try my best to get some of them. I want to aim for hard finish at the end of May so likely I might get 2 or 3 “monuments” before we finish as well as a cramped cities with suburbs dotting the edges. At the moment, it would be satisfying to finish the game once I’ve filled out the city. Perhaps one day I could revisit and try out mods or asset from the Steam workshop. For now I want to to be done by the end of May.

Recently I’ve been cleaning out my Steam wishlist and I’ve shortened the list to under 30 game at the moment, only 2 of those games to me are ones I would like to play. Newly added to the list is Elite: Dangerous, an indie successor to the retro classic space shooter funded by Kickstarter. Second being a sandbox survival and building game called Empyrion. Either are pretty good game and I want to go back to some indie games; preferably in the FPS, sandbox or survival genres. At the moment, I’m short on funds so this summer (thus a hiatus off WordPress and YouTube) I will be away working nonstop until early August. After that I’m planning on getting one game. Okay I’m going to be an addict and say I want two but I want to get at most two games year unless it’s free or gifted to me.

Now the start of my return from work, I am not sure what to do. At first I wanted to play the new game I would buy but I also have a bit of a backlog of games I would like to have a gameplay series. Here’s a few ideas I’ve been working with since I started playing since last year:

Replay Skyrim (Arrows to the knees, why not?)
Replay Fallout New Vegas (Knee capping because why not?)
Play Space Engineers regardless how immersion breaking the survival is at the moment
Elite: Dangerous for the cool factor

Yeah, it’s a short list but at the moment this is all the ideas I have for the near future.

As for Pulsar: Lost Colony and Interstellar Marines, I will try and inject some gameplay here and there. As I am writing this, there isn’t much going on with both games so in Pulsar: Lost Colony, I might want to try and find the last ship on our kill card until pre-beta comes out. As for Interstellar Marines, same situation. There hasn’t been a lot of update and no new maps have been released so it’s a choice of playing for co-op or playing single player in a very expansive map with aimbot-y AI hunting me down in the dark. Definitely if I die, it wouldn’t make good content; unless it’s a death montage. Definitely the end of this month if I have time, I’ll publish something beside Cities: Skylines to round of all the videos before my first hiatus.

I guess that is it for updates on my channel. As for my blog, I’m trying to write some creative ideas and setting them to publish during the summer until I return. So far I have two of the 7-8 weeks covered. So 6 more articles and I’m in the clear. I have to admit, I’m not a very forward thinking person so having even this might foresight is unprecedented. I like to wait and see, but with my job and this summer coming up it’s about pre-planning and making commitments stick. Even if they are voluntary commitments like this humble blog, I don’t let it go until it’s over.

Until next time and next week, let’s all prepare for an excellent summer!

Into Indies

At the moment on my YouTube channel, I have played a couple indie games but I never really just picked something up to just display it. Recently, I thought I would use IndieDB to help me find some games to make short playthroughs. As a starter, I have downloaded TubeStar.

TubeStar is a parody to making videos on YouTube and “simulates” being a YouTuber. I wouldn’t be so sure what that would actually be like but I thought I would give it a shot. Though there is a bunch of games out there so why would I pick something so obscure? Simply, I picked one at random I can download and gave it a shot. From the recorded gameplay footage, I somewhat regret my decision. It was very dull to say the least and the gameplay was not compelling.

Lessons learned from this little let’s play recording session? First would be to read about the game, then download it to play a bit to see if it’s compelling or has something worth showing. Secondly, compelling gameplay; honestly I got kind fo bored halfway through the game. Most definitely trust my ADHD-meter for interesting games. Last point to make would be pick from genres I would enjoy and not through a mystery bag system.

So the first indie lets play on my channel is a semi-success, but I’ll let the viewer make that count. Until then, I’m sticking to my laggy playthrough of The Dead Linger.