I enjoyed Faeria up until a point. The last time I played I was working on my dailies, but I got blocked. I think I might not be high enough in levels to complete some of them. The only thing I could actually do required me to play against other people. That's what made me quit. Still, it's a good game and I recommend it for those that like such games. For people like me, it's good and fun, until you're forced to play against others (which I really despise). That said, congrats to Faeria on 1.0!!

Travis, I strongly recommend checking out the Faeria YouTube channel. They usually have good videos, such as how to build decks. I liked the yellow elemental cards, I think that kind of deck is usually referred to as a rush deck. It is pretty fun to rush at your opponent and beat them quickly, granted I mostly played against the AI.

Sweet, Vinny got an Ocarina for Christmas.

Looks like this month (and maybe next) we're both playing Bioware games. I'm working my way through the Dragon Age series. I intend to get the Mass Effect series eventually since it comes with a lot of strong recommendations (from friends). I'll probably wait for a sale though.

That sucks that I missed it. I do intend to buy them on Origin, since Steam's ME collection is limited. Steam doesn't even have ME3.

Nice review, Travis. Seems more fair and balanced than others I've read. Andromeda was high on my anticipated games list for this year. While I haven't played yet, I did watch gameplay of the first hour, after reading some reviews, and decided I should probably rent this first. I'm at 57% completion on Horizon Zero Dawn, and the complaints I see about Andromeda are handled with absolute style and grace in Horizon. I've heard other reviewers complain mostly about the writing in Andromeda, and from what little I've watched, I can see what they mean. Bioware games are typically synonymous with rich story. The beginning of Andromeda is more like cheap fiction. More Starship Troopers than Star Trek. Which is okay, I guess, if that's what you're looking for. To be fair, though, I'll give it a rent and see what else is there.

Okay, I'm a little over 10 hours into Andromeda now. All of the complaints seem justified, or at the very least understandable, from what I've played. Animations are not what you would expect from AAA studios in 2017, but for a Mass Effect game, they aren't awful, which isn't a great thing. It would be like saying the Wii U was amazing for implementing HD graphics, when everyone else had been doing it for a decade. It's progress for them, but a slow train moving for the industry. Voice acting in Andromeda is decent, mostly. What those voices say, however, can be cringe inducing at times. It's less horrible than some have made it out to be, but it's indeed jarring. The combination of poor dialog segments attached to unpolished facial animations is where I find the game most disappointing. These are the vessels that are telling the story. It's hard to take them seriously when they all look like they had their eyelids removed before cryo-sleep.

Shepherd's saga left large shoes to fill, and, smartly, Bioware has thrown them away altogether and are trying something mostly fresh, but safely familiar. Its a good idea, but I find the execution so far is boring. Rather than explore options in this new galaxy, you're immediately presented with ad nauseam justifications, from almost every speaking character, as to why this game had to have combat mechanics. I get that the story is about immature explorers making bold choices and finding their way, but that doesn't mean the story itself has to be immature. The overall design of story, levels, and characters feels sloppy. This could be something that improves as the game progresses, but it needs to be there at the beginning, and certainly within the first 10 hours.

UI is painful. Combat is painful (AI especially. Again, maybe better for ME, but way below average). Environment scanning is painful as well (I know you like it, Travis, but it takes me out of the game. I'll take NMS existing scanner any day. An improvement would have been to make an omni visor, or something so it could actually be a vision mode, ala the Arkham games, especially being a 3rd person game. As it is, you're constantly pulling out the scanner, because you don't want to miss anything. At least in NMS, when you do scan, it seems out of purpose rather than paranoia.). In fact, that's what I keep coming back to with my game play: an unnecessarily painful experience. And I'm super bummed about that.

The best thing I saw, so far, happened in the first 20 min or so: The "cinematic" when your shuttle is en route to Habitat 7. For a moment, it felt like a Mass Effect game. The rest of the time if felt more like "Uncharted Jr. in Space" Effect. I want to say that I'd come back to it at some point, to see how it plays out (maybe the real meat is at the 20 hour mark! I've heard that Final Fantasy XIII is like that.), but I don't see anything in there that would pull me back in.

Total sudoku! I mean it's nice to see an attempt at fresh puzzle mechanics, but it's literally sudoku with glyphs.

I think you might be on to something with the pacing of the 10 hour demo. It's so - and I hate to keep using this word, but it fits so well - painful. The pacing of the combat is intended to be flinchingly fast, and they've done well in that regard. But everything outside of that slows to a crawl, to the point where I feel like I need to take a day just to figure out the mod/inventory system. There is a reason that Call of Duty doesn't have 10 layers of character modification and nuanced weapon crafting. I don't know. I feel like you should pick one or the other, or simmer the whole thing down to a happy medium. Does the happy medium come after 10 hours?

Crafting materials not taking up inventory space is sweet! This update sounds good, but not something that makes me want to jump back in the game right now. I'm looking forward to the Necromancer. I like that there's still so much in the game that I haven't even touched. I've hardly done anything in Adventure mode, though I did try it out a few times.

I'd like to see another expansion for this game, but I won't be disappointed if it doesn't get one. I don't see the need to "wrap up" the whole Leia thing. I guess I just didn't feel that it was lacking closure.

I blame my error on Jon, he wrote "Leia" and so I wrote it that way, too. Infectious, Jon, you see your error is infectious. LOL

Updated Necromancer video, the "Melee-nancer." It looks pretty cool. I'm really intrigued by what they said at the end, that this could be a real expansion, possibly with a new Act, not just a simple character class addition. They also said that while there is still no release date, the Necromancer will be joining the PTR "soon." I'm going to take a guess and (hope) that this will be out by summer time. Anyway, the video is short, but worth watching!! https://youtu.be/v8Kc8vNap-E

Thanks, Jon! It sounds like what I expected it to be originally. The only part I'm not too fond of is the last sentence, "second half of 2017," as I expected this to come out during the first half. I'm still ok with that though. I have other games to play and there are also other games I'm waiting on (like Terraria: Otherworld).

I loved playing Ducktales on my Gameboy back in the day. I don't know if I ever played it on the NES, but I at least saw images of it. It looks just the same, but with color. I did find the new "remastered" version for free on Amazon's Underground or whatever they call their gaming collection. I was disappointed with it, perhaps it was the controls on the Kindle that I wasn't fond of. It looks so different. Maybe I should try the PC version.

As for the others, I don't think I played them, but I promise you I watched all of those cartoons. Darkwing Duck is absolutely my favorite! I loved that show so very much! I even had a book of stickers I collected, many of them from "Double D." Even now, almost 40 years old, I'm interested in watching "Double D."

That seems like it'd be cool to watch, except for the spoilers. Although I think I'd forget about them by the time I get around to playing it. I'm thinking of playing it this summer while Vinny's not here.

I watched the videos and they were good. These and some others I've shared came with warnings that they "may contain spoilers," but it doesn't look to me like any of them contain any spoilers. So, if you're holding out on watching this video because of spoilerphobia (I created that word!), then don't. Watch the videos, they're good.