Finished - Garden Story

 

Garden Story is a fun little indie game where you play as Concord and have to go on an adventure to save the Grove from the Rot. Others have described this as old school Zelda-lite. There aren't too many puzzles to solve, as is standard in a Zelda game, but the combat feels similar. 

The pixel world is cute, and the music is very soothing. I'm glad I picked up this little grape adventure, even though I was expecting more (or any) Harvest Moon mechanics since Concord starts a gardener. I suppose eventually there is some planting, but nothing like the day-to-day in Harvest Moon type games. 

Good bite-sized game, which works well before bed or while on a plane. There are daily quests to upgrade the various villages and this makes for easy quick gameplay while moving the story along when it's convenient for the player. 

Of my personal scoring, I'd give this a solid 8/10.

Also, restarting my game-beat counter... so this is 1.. of 3. 

Game Beats: 1/3

March Gaming Goals

 Whoa, wait, what? Am I writing in this blog, 3 years after the last post?!?! Yes, I am. It was cool to have a record of what I was playing, so going to do that again.

I'm more realistic with my goals now.

March Goals 2021

A brave looking cast

1. Be sad Covid is still a thing, and the office is still closed
2. Finish Bravely Default 2
3. Finish the new game+ playthrough of Atelier Meruru
4. BONUS: Finish Atelier Ayesha

I'm about six hours into BD 2 and I LOVE it! I described it to a friend as a modern classic Final Fantasy game. It's got lots of Final Fantasy classes and spell names, plus crystals! Everyone lots crystals, and warriors of light. Also the voice actors are fantastic.. to the point I'm listening to them speak. I rarely listen to voice actors speak, I just skip past their dialogue after I read it.

Also Bravely Default 2 is the game of the month for The RPG Club. I'm horrible at joining these sorts of communities and actually being involved, but they do have a pretty friendly discord. I've written words there a couple times. (aka no one knows who I am). It's a cool group though and they pick fun games generally. I played Atelier Ryza and Hades because of them, which both are fantastic games. Check them out!

Monday updates? Should that be a thing? Or Tuesday? How about we'll see bwahaha. 

March Gaming Goals

February in Review

My goals were 

Finish FFXV

Finish Dankest Dungeon
Finish one year in Stardew Valley
Keep streaming DragonQuest x1/week
Stream Monster Hunter World to completion 

I didn't finish a single one T.T We almost streamed DragonQuest weekly, but last week throw it off. Oh well.

March Goals

Personal

Finish I Am Setstuna
Do first year of Stardew Valley
Get level 70 on the D3 Wizard for easy game beat

Stream

Progress in DQXI on Stream with Ed
Start playing Rift Primal on Stream

Do a mini painting stream

We'll see how this goes! As a bonus I'd like to get further in BotW and actually start Monster Hunter World. Ni No Kuni 2 comes out this month and I do need to somehow get 3 games beats so I can actually buy it and play it. Hmm... I'll probably have to play something shorter to get that third game beat in. Maybe I can hit level 50 in Rift before then?

Also I'd like to update weekly progress again on the blog as well. Maybe that will help me focus on these goals haha.

Weekly Game Progress #2

Hey it's Tuesday! Time for a blog post :)

Solo

Darkest Dungeon

I was having a really great time playing Darkest Dungeon last week, and then I lost all my weekend progress. I finished all the initial quests and leveled a couple heroes to 4 and 5. On Sunday night I opened my laptop where the game had been suspended since Thursday. That save file overrode my most recent save in the cloud. I tried everything to try and get the weekend progress back, but alas I failed. 

I'll continue to play but losing so much progress has been tragic. I'm going to be a lot more careful with cloud saves going forward.

Streaming

Dragon Quest XI

We streamed more Dragon Quest, but due to a slew of technical errors we only got a good hour in. I don't totally remember what we're doing in the story. Our session was mostly helping our resident prince impress his father so he gives us an item of 7 colors. Hopefully we make more progress on Thursday.

Zelda: BotW

I'm super happy to start Zelda again. I got off the plateau, made it to Kakariko village, did all the side quests I could find and made my way to Hateno. Upgraded our slate as much as I could, got our first pony, who was named after my viewer and mod Metalacil. I'm stoked to continue playing this game and continue exploring this awesome world. 

Check out the stream Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays! This weekend I'll probably be streaming on Sunday instead because Saturday I'll be spending the day at PAX South in San Antonio. Next week I'll update with some pictures from the con. 

New Year Fresh Blog Start

Happy New Year! I'm inspired to start this blog again after reading an article on Kotaku about how many games he played in 2017. I really enjoy keeping a weekly record of the games I've been playing. Shooting for Tuesday updates! Let's make 2018 a great year for games, blogging and streaming!

Played this week

Darkest Dungeon

I've been playing through Darkest Dungeon, it's really fun. I restarted the game last night on the recommendation of playing with Crimson Court disabled. It's the first expansion that adds a new area and a new mechanic that turns your party members in vampires, which is mostly just annoying to manage.


Final Fantasy XIV

I stumbled across a group called the MMO Bookclub a long while ago and thought it was a really cool idea. They vote for a new MMO to play every month as a group. I joined the discord probably 6 months ago but haven't participated that much. This month is FFXIV so I'm trying to jump in again. I transferred my main to their server and reactivated my account. I'm not sure if I want to dedicate the time to an MMO, but we'll see if I click with the group.

Stream plan

Oh hey I started streaming here.

Dragon Quest XI

My friend Ed and I have been streaming Dragon Quest XI in Japanese. It's been really fun! We do so every Thursday at 8pm CST. The game is slated to release in 2018 in the west, but no release date has been announced. We hopefully will finish it before it launches in English.

Zelda Breath of the Wild

This I'm planning on solo streaming. I've played a bit off-stream but my roommate recommended that I start fresh for the sake of the stream, so I'm restarting this game on Saturday!

My stream plan right now is Monday, Thursday, Saturday. I'm looking forward to getting back into it and building a community of friends to enjoy gaming with :D

First day of GDC

I'm in San Francisco whoo! This is my first year attending the Game Developers Conference and it's awesome!

So happy to leave the snow

I brought 3 other software engineers from CU with me. Today we wandered around the Expo hall and went to two panels. The first was a recruitment panel for Playstation.

Playstation panel

Looking forward to applying to their internship program.

We also went to Turning the Tide: Hiring and Retaining Women in the Games Industry.

Women in Games panel

The ladies here are all from awesome companies, like EA and Sqaure Enix. I had the opportunity to chat with them after the panel and got some great leads for jobs! 

Overall the first day of GDC was great, and I'm very grateful for the opportunity to attend such a cool conference. I'm also super eager to go back home and keep working on the game we're developing. Life is good.

After a long break....

Boy it's been a while since I posted in this. But no time like the present!

I think I'll just briefly go over where I'm at right now as far as the Three Game Rule goes. It's bad. I'm in serious game debt right now.

We'll start when I was not in game debt and tally them from there. Keep in mind a game beat counts for +1 a game purchase is -3

11.21.2014 I hit level 100 on my Paladin in WoW. Very exciting. This brought my game beat Game count to 0

12.2.2014 I beat Game of Thrones Episode 1
Game count +1

12.5.2014 I broke down and bought Dragon Age Inquisition for PC. It was short lived fun, as the game crashed repeatedly relatively early on.
Game count -2

12.5.14 - I also bought Pokemon Omega Sapphire, whoops, just can't resist a new Pokemon game
Game count -5

1.3.15 Bought Super Smash, Final Fantasy Explorers, Youkai Watch, Dragon Quest Monsters, and New Super Mario 2 for a Japanese New 3DS (I also bought a Japanese New 3DS)
Game count -10 (I didn't have it in me to count each one of these as -3, so instead I decided they should be -1 each, because learning!)
Game count -10

1.10.15 Beat Pokemon Y, whoo about time
Game count -9

1.12.15 Collected all puzzle pieces in Mii Plaza thing. I've counted this before, but I collected over 1000 pieces, I thought it was worth counting again since they keep adding puzzles
Game count -8

2.5.15 Bought PS4, Dragon Age Inquisition, and Destiny. I was having a bad day and wanted to buy things, so I did. This is why I need someone keeping tabs on my spending habits haha. I also told myself a console would be worth 30 game beats so we'll do -30 for the PS4 purchase and -3 for each game.... ugh
Game count -44

I'm never ever going to catch up. I certainly have 44 games to play (in my Steam library alone...) I might have to toss this whole rule out. Oh well.

Here's a photo of my Japanese games and new 3DS whee!

In closing I'm currently playing Final Fantasy 6 and have a story for that. Also I started collecting Amiibos, and am trying desperately hard to not go overboard in buying them.