jdodson1

Joined 01/23/2012
  Admin

I'm an Engineer and built the video game community Cheerful Ghost and text based mini-MMO Tale of the White Wyvern.

2759 Posts

Cygnus Destroyer Looks Back At The Wii U
"The Nintendo Switch is currently flying off store shelves across the globe, but the Switch wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the Wii U. Released in November 2012, the commercially failed successor to the massively popular Wii may have produced less than 200 games during its brief run, but there was a lot of gold to be found among that paltry library. Join me on a journey to pay tribute to the severely underrated black sheep of the eighth console generation!"

If I was pressed to buy a console from the PS4, XBox One and Wii U generation I would have picked up the Wii U. As a PC gamer I feel the games we get fill in the gaps that console exclusives often leave open except with Nintendo games. There is nothing like Mario Maker, Mario Kart 8 and Zelda being made by other companies right now and I honestly believe that Nintendo offers a different game experience than most companies. That said, I didn't get a Wii U but really respect it even if it didn't have the largest game library or a very long lifespan. As the Nintendo Switch is now launched Cygnus Destroyer takes a look at the Wii U and some of his most favorite games on the console. As Nintendo launches it's last game on the Wii U in Breath of the Wild I see the Wii U maintaining a long lifespan well beyond it's years in the retro and collector communities.

Metal Jesus & Kelsey Break Down The VirtualBoy and All Of It's Nintendo Fueled Greatness
Some people cite the short lifespan of Nintendo's recent Wii U as proof it's biggest failure Nintendo has ever had. As popular as that meme is right now the shortest lifespan of a Nintendo console was a year and it was for the VirtualBoy. The VirtualBoy is a Nintendo console that was launched in 1995 with VR that only allowed games two use colors in red and black. The tech was pretty cool and I remember being impressed with it playing it in the stores but none of the games seemed so great I just had to have one and then it was off the market. The VirtualBoy is the perfect system for collectors as it can live on and be a unique footnote in gaming history.

Nintendo Switch & Breath of the Wild Are Out And The Game Kart Tastes Terrible?
The Nintendo Switch & Zelda Breath of the Wild are now safely launched and not only does the Switch seem to be getting good reviews but it seems Breath of The Wild might be one of the best games of all time... already? Breath of the Wild is only few days old but is already getting crazy high reviews like a 98% Metacritic, 10/10 IGN, 10/10 Trusted Reviews, 10/10 Polygon and the like seem to be implying this latest Zelda game might be the pinnacle of the series. Even after the hype train and recent launch to crazy acclaim my plan for picking up a Switch by years end i'm sticking with. I have yet to finish up Ocarina 3D and after that I want to play Link Between Worlds so I have plenty of Zelda for the time being.

Switch Carts Taste Terrible Because... We Need To Eat Them?

Many news sites are reporting that the new Switch game carts taste absolutely terrible, which is something i'd honestly never thought i'd type in a sentence. That said, as Nintendo game carts are now quite small I imagine Nintendo didn't want kids eating them so making the label taste awful would make it so tiny humans don't swallow them which is actually a nice feature now that my house is occupied by a very explorative 9 month old.

That said, if any Cheerful Ghosters have Breath of the Wild on Switch can you lick the games sticker and report back? I'm curious what your thoughts are and what it tastes like. You know, for science. Also, if you are playing Breath of the Wild i'd love for you to post your thoughts on the game so far and keep us updated as you keep playing it.

Stardew Valley Celebrates It's First Year Anniversary
http://stardewvalley.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/1_y_a.png
Back in 2013 I wrote about a game in early development called Stardew Valley. It was a one man project that looked like the PC Harvest Moon game we always wanted and we followed it over the years until its launch in 2016. We were so excited about the game that WhiteboySlim, Scrypt and I interviewed the developer of the game, something you should check out below.

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/1005/interview-w-eric-barone-creator-of-stardew-valley

Recently Stardew Valley celebrated it's one year anniversary and developer ConcernedApe wrote about that and the games long journey to launch. It's a really interesting read and something I recommend you check out.

"Today marks the 1-year anniversary of the release of Stardew Valley.

In some ways, it’s hard to believe that an entire year has already gone by since launch. Yet, at the same time, it’s been the longest year of my life. It’s felt long because I’ve done so much in the last 12 months:

-Game came out
-Released many patches to fix bugs and tweak gameplay
-Dozens of interviews
-Answered thousands of messages/emails
-Provided personal troubleshooting and technical support
-Made many Business/Merchandise deals
-Developed and released the 1.1 update
-Exhibited at PAX and met many fans
-Met Mr. Yasuhiro Wada, the creator of Harvest Moon
-Flew to the UK to visit Chucklefish and collect an industry award
-Built a decent computer and got a nice big desk (No more HP Pavilion propped on a Wii U box)
-Worked with Chucklefish to make the Console ports and localizations happen"

http://stardewvalley.net/stardew-valley-1-year-anniversary/

Journey to Un'Goro Is The All New Hearthstone Expansion To Launch In April
I am woefully late to the reporting party to let you know that the upcoming Hearthstone expansion Journey to Un'Goro has been announced and will launch in April. The announcement video by Ben Brode is well worth watching even if you're not a Hearthstone super fan. Un'Gogo will feature a couple awesome things including Dinosaurs, the new Elemental type and card quests. Card Quests cost one mana and will always show up in your opening hand and if you complete them will award you a crazy legendary like the Priest legendary Amara that's an 8/8 for 5 that sets your players health to 40! Blizzard will start the trickle of new card reveals on March 15th and continue the pace until the set launches in April. There have been some reports that the run up to the release of Un'Goro will contain special login bonuses but nothing official has been announced yet. So far i've saved up 5,000+ gold for Un'Goro and should be able to collect even more for the pack opening when then set hits in April.

Season 11 of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Hits Netflix April 14th!
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C5T30hYVYAAHKQC.jpg
In the not too distant future the brand new Mystery Science Theater 3000 season will drop on Netflix bringing this classic show back to the fans and an entirely new audience. It will release on Netflix and to Kickstarter backers on April 14th, which is a bit odd as I thought Kickstarter backers would get a few days lead time but at least this way everyone can see it at the same time. Joel also released the new cast photo above featuring the new star of the show Jonah Ray playing Johan Heston, Felicia Day as Kinga Forrester, Patton Oswalt as Son of TV's Frank, Hampton Yount as Crow and Baron Vaugn as Tom Servo. There has been a lot of secrecy around the new episodes so much so that the list of movies they are riffing isn't even known yet. As more information surfaces i'll drop it here but until then we can just relax because April 14th isn't that far away.

https://twitter.com/MST3K/status/834564430406963200

Even More Incredible AGDQ Speedruns!
As I finish up watching all the Awesome Games Done Quick speedruns from 2016 I missed watching live I wanted to share a few more you might find enjoy. The above Borderlands 2 co-op run is great as they beat the game in 1:44:50 which is an impressive feat considering it's a run that takes two people to pull off. It uses some fun weapon switching dupe bug glitches as well as some interesting speed bugs that make progressing through areas incredibly fast and interesting to watch.

The final run you should watch is of the Action 52 NES Classic Cheetahmen and if you know of the game and it's epic terribleness you also know the game is very hard. The runner huey beats the game handily in four minutes making the game much more interesting to watch than it is to play.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3XOd3oSsjk

Blizzard Dropping XP and Vista Support
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In a move that shouldn't be too shocking to anyone Blizzard will drop support for Windows XP and Vista in World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. Windows XP was a staple of Desktop computing for years but has been very unsupported by Microsoft since 2014. If you are on XP or Vista I seriously recommend you upgrade to 7, 8 or 10 as those offer you security updates and a more streamlined experience. With that, I imagine many people own old hardware that a modern OS just won't run on and if that's the case then i'd consider those machines a sort of retro game PC. Lots of older Blizzard games on CD will still work on XP as well as anything released from that era you have kicking around on physical media.

Curious if this change will cause any of you to lose access to any of the mentioned Blizzard games? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

"Starting later this year, we will begin the process of ending support for Windows XP and Windows Vista in World of Warcraft, StarCraft II, Diablo III, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm. Microsoft ceased mainstream support for these versions of Windows in 2009 and 2012, respectively, but since a decent portion of our audience was still using them at the time, we continued supporting them. However, there have been three major Windows releases since Vista, and at this point, the vast majority of our audience has upgraded to one of the newer versions.

After these older operating systems are no longer supported, the games will not run on them, so we encourage any players who are still using one of the older OSes to upgrade to a newer version. We’ll be rolling out this change on a staggered schedule, and will post further notices as we get closer to making the change for each game."

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20753178086

Hearthstone's Year of The Mammoth Standard Shakeup Coming!
When the Whispers of the Old Gods expansion launched the new Standard and wild formats became permanent in Hearthstone creating a yearly migration of older cards to the wild set. The details of the upcoming standard rotation hit today and Blizzard repeated which card sets were rotating out and also a bunch of new information that should shake things up even further.

Firstly the Blackrock Mountain, The Grand Tournament, and League of Explorers cards are rotating to the wild set. This isn't new news but if you've stepped away from Hearthstone for a time you might not know what cards are going to rotate out of standard. On top of that Blizzard is also moving 6 classic cards to a new set they are calling the "Hall of Fame." The Hall of Fame aims to rotate out certain classic cards Blizzard deems to powerful to stay in the standard set because they seem to limit the design space. Whereas I like each card in The Hall of Fame rotating them to wild does make sense. Nearly each of the 6 cards have no equal and it would be really hard to make cards that are better in some way. The cards rotating to the Hall of Fame are Azure Drake, Sylvanas Windrunner, Ragnaros the Firelord, Power Overwhelming, Ice Lance & Conceal. Again, I get why Blizzard is doing this but the top 3 cards rotating to wild is a bit sad to see. That said they are going to refund us the full dust cost of the cards while allowing us to keep them in our wild set collections. Not a bad deal but i'll miss Rag and Sylvanas in standard anyway!

"We wanted to allow players to disenchant Classic cards that are being added to the Hall of Fame set for full dust refunds, but then felt that incentivizing players to dust their cool Wild cards was counter to our goal of making Wild awesome.

So instead, we're just going to give you the dust, and you can keep the cards!

Up to the maximum number of cards you could put in a deck, we will give you the full dust value of any cards you have that are being added to the Hall of Fame set. (Yes, that means if you have at least one Golden Ragnaros, you'll get 3200 dust!) The dust will be automatically awarded upon log-in once the Year of the Mammoth begins."

Originally Blizzard planned on releasing a full expansion, an adventure and another full expansion in 2017 but instead they will release three full expansions.

"Looking back, we learned a lot in 2016 with the introduction of the Year of the Kraken. One of the things we’d like to put additional focus on for the Year of the Mammoth is having additional deck-building options and deck variety in Hearthstone. To help give players additional tools and options to accomplish this, we are changing up the way we handle our release cycle. Previously, a Hearthstone Year alternated between Expansions and Adventures.

For the Year of the Mammoth, our release cycle will include a ~130 card expansion at the start of the year, a ~130 card expansion in the middle of the year, and another ~130 card expansion at the end of the year.

Why the change of release cycle?

At their core, Adventures paint colorful and thematic stories about the Hearthstone universe. Imagine being able to learn about the history and lore behind each of our sets inside the game in a similar way! Defining who the Jade Lotus are through a series of battles between the Mean Streets of Gadgetzan families would have been a great way to supplement the overall Gadgetzan story arc. That concept is something we would like to do more of in future sets: Take the storytelling and cool missions of Adventures, and combine them with the card pools of expansions.

Cards will be acquired via packs like other expansions in the past; additionally, each release will include optional single-player missions that will help develop the expansions’ thematic narratives and offer fun challenges."

Blizzard hasn't let us know when the new expansion drops but when it does it will start off the Year of the Mammoth. Since I love all things Hearthstone i'll let you all know when news of the new expansion hits and I keep with tradition a new pack opening video to celebrate.

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone/en/blog/20475356

The Humble Freedom Bundle Is An Amazing Cause And Pack of Games
The Humble Freedom Bundle launched today bringing one of the most insane game bundle values i've seen in quite some time. At the top of the Bundle it comes packed with The Witness, Stardew Valley, Day of the Tentacle Remastered, Subnautica, Nuclear Throne, Super Meat Boy & The Stanley Parable. This bundle also comes with some Audiobook love in the form of Cory Doctorow's "Information Doesn't Want To be Free" and "Walkaway" plus a ton of more indie games you might not have had a chance yet to play. Since I wanted to pick up The Witness and Stardew Valley I pulled the trigger on this immediately and then chipped in a bit more because it's a great cause.

"Take a stand for freedom. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. – "The New Colossus" by Emma Lazarus, from an engraving on the Statue of Liberty.

We humbly remember that the United States is a nation of immigrants, and we proudly stand with developers, authors, and charities that champion liberty and justice for all.

This special one-week bundle features over $600 in incredible games and books for just $30. 100% of your payments will go to the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Rescue Committee, and Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Humble Bundle will proudly match your contributions up to $300,000."

https://www.humblebundle.com/freedom