So then this happened…

You might have noticed that it’s been a few days since my last post.  That’s because I’ve started playing Torchlight II, which my friend A gave me a couple weeks ago, upon noting that he didn’t have enough other people to play with and that the game was on sale and on my wishlist.  I’ve yet to play a multiplayer game (I’m still getting the hang of my engineer– my mother would be so proud!), but I’ve racked up a few badges, and I’ll slowly get around to talking about them all.

Most recently, this happened.  I’ve moved from the first main city in the game to the second.  Much like in Diablo 2, I now find myself in the desert, although the maps are more complex in Torchlight II than they ever were in Diablo, which pretty much drew boxes for each area and then filled them in with stuff.  While wandering around randomly (questlines– who needs ‘em!), I found a dungeon and went in, and there was a manticore, who didn’t really look like what I would call a manticore.  I don’t mean to be nit-picky, but when I hear “Manticore,” I think of something like this traditional version:

 

Or the widely-popularized 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons Monstrous Manual version:

 

But Torchlight II’s version is much more like this, which is very pretty and all, but kind of strays a little from what I was expecting.  I mean, what’s with those horns?  What’s with the walking upright on two feet?

Really, this isn’t what I meant for this entry to be about at all, but there you have it.  The point was that I accidentally found this guy, who wasn’t too much of a challenge, even though the levels on the instance are 22-26, and I was 21 (but I’ve been hitting all of them at a level or 2 under the suggested minimum without any problems).  The kicker is that halfway through the battle– I think when you reduce him to half health– he summons his mate.  Maybe she just shows up, having heard him screeching in pain, only to find him being wailed on by some geek surrounded in a couple blue bubbles.  At any rate, I kept wailing on him, and then turned my attention to his mate, and got these for my efforts:

 

Also, keep in mind that the Manticore won’t trigger until you’ve walked near the big totem thing in the middle of the map… and that once you’ve knocked them out a la LL Cool J, there’ll be gold absolutely all over the map, and hey, free gold!  You may as well go pick it all up… and check out the ginormous chest while you’re at it.  You should get a couple uniques from the Manticore himself, one of which is his eye, which, when added to a weapon, will give a 20% bonus to critical hits, which is useful if you’re going after that “get a bazillion critical hits” badge.

Take that, lamewads!

Okay, so perhaps the title of this post is a little aggressive, but it’s about getting some of the M:tG Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 could this name be any longer to type online badges, which meant *gasp* having to play with other people, something that I’ve worked very hard to avoid ever since I quit playing WoW because of all the idiots, um,  jackasses, er… delightful younger players who were considerate and fun to play with sexist dickheads who probably hadn’t made it all the way through puberty yet.

Anyhow, I figured, hey, may as well knock out some online badges, because they’re pretty easy, and then I would have fuel for another blog, which I’m sure that you’ve been waiting to read.  I opted for a two-headed giant game, which is where there are two people to a team, and they each play their hands at the same time (except that the game can only handle doing one thing at a time and because it’s slow, sometimes that means you’re just waiting for it to go through the process of moving the card, making it shiny, and lying it down on the battleground).

So I log into the first game, and I end up with a partner with a green deck (it’s not that I don’t like green decks, but… there’s just something about the people who regularly play them… all those squirrels and elves and plants and… meh.  Too many bad memories of being overrun by an army of squirrels and dealing with bad players.)  Okay, so that in and of itself wasn’t bad.  The problem was that he consistently misclicked and ended up killing my creatures.  Or killing creatures that I’d already made useless via enchantments when there were other creatures available.  It’s like… wake up and smell the burning forest already, am I right?

Anyhow, after this guy eventually just times out (yay)… I got another game, with a partner with a green deck, except this one actually knew how to play it, and we mopped the floor with the competition, which were playing blue and black (I think– I don’t really remember, as it was over fairly quickly).  I used my soldier deck and my partner made sure that they couldn’t take out any of my little dudes– a very nice combo indeed.

Here’s what I walked away with:

I’m not really sure why there are different badges for Last Mage Standing and Two-Headed Giant, but, in short, being on the team that wins a single Two-Headed Giant game will score you these three badges.  Now I should be able to go back to playing with myself for a while.  Wait.  That doesn’t sound right.

Steam doesn’t have the only badges in town…

Periodically, I get distracted from the bigger games, and I want to kill 5-10 minutes playing something that I don’t have to get too invested in.  Often, this is because I know that once I start a new game, it’s going to be an epic time sink, and so I avoid it and stick to wracking up new badges on Kongregate, instead.

Today’s guilty pleasure came in the form of a new Flipline Studios game– those dastardly makers of the Pappa’s series of games.  Seriously, this guy has everything– a wing place, a taco stand, a burger shop, and, of course, a pizzeria. (they also have a blacksmithy, but I’ll get to that in a future post, once I’ve gotten the last of the badges for it).  I have assorted badges among all the games, some of which are stupid endurance badges for people with way more patience than any sane person has… but I digress.

Kongregate just added two badges for the newest game, Pappa’s Hot Doggeria (no, that’s not a real thing), which takes place in a ball park and has baseball-related mini-games between each level– er, day.  Like several of the other Pappa’s games, you can win decorations for your restaurant by playing the mini-games (you can also buy them from the shop, but really… why?), but unlike the others, you can now match decoration themes to get theme bonuses.  Your decorations also have “points” and “freshness,” both of which seem a little silly for a casual little flash game.

The two badges available for this game are both easy and straight-forward to get.  For the first, just serve 10 hot dogs.  This should happen on either the second or third day (I think it’s the third).  For the second, get to level 9.  Just keep playing until you get there– it’s somewhere in the ballpark of day 13, I believe.  For your trouble, you’ll get 15 Kongregate points, which are good for a whole lot o’ nothin’, and the knowledge that you’ve now mastered something that… well, that pretty much anyone could do.  But at least you had fun, right?

Do you believe in Magic?

Oops.  I was supposed to post this before the other M:tG post ever made it out into space, but then life happened and other posts got written instead, and oops, now things are out of order.  If you’re reading these in order, I guess you’ll just have to deal with a lack of continuity, and if not, then I guess you can pretend that this never happened.

After nabbing my first two M:tG Planeswalkers 2013 badges for doing absolutely nothing, I decided that I would actually play a game or two, which brings us to this post.  The first opponent in the game will, upon victory, give you a blue deck (your first) and this achievement:

 

After you’ve beaten him and gotten a shiny new blue deck (which is not nearly as useful against the next opponent as the starter red deck, but probably better than the starter green), you’ll move on to the idiot with the owl deck.  Can I reiterate that all this moron has in his deck are 1/1 owls?  If you have a deck that doesn’t completely and totally suck (which you do by this point in the game), then your first “encounter” will be a piece of cake.  Don’t ask me why they’re called different things– opponents and encounters– because I have no idea.  Maybe they’re trying to make the campaign seem more campaign-y?  Like you’re doing something other than beating a variety of opponents at card games?

Anyhow, I killed the owl deck with such vehemence that I ended up with two badges afterwards (you don’t get the deck for winning encounters, but trust me– you don’t want this one).  The first badge was for simply winning the encounter, and the other was for being so annoyed about the stupid little owls that I made sure that none of them were around to annoy me at the end of the game.  Ta da!

Two more badges for the price of one!

As I finished up a game against the second opponent in M:tG Planeswalkers 2013 (seriously, guys, get a shorter title), and I pulled up the Steam screen to see the badges that I’d just gotten, it occured to me that it would be really, really easy to nab a couple more… if only I played one more game.

This, of course, was shortly after I opened the game to play “one game” at 1am, with the intent of going to bed an hour later, but it was probably right around 1:59 that I realized that if I played just one more game, I could nab another two badges… the one for winning a game with 10 creatures on the board, and the one for making the opponent run out of cards (which is really an endurance badge, in this case, more than anything else).

My opponent was the second of the game– an annoyingly simple owl deck that could take down the starter green deck that I had if it didn’t come out fast enough but simply didn’t have a chance against a red deck.  Behold the rock-em-sock-em action of red on owl-white:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Basically, all this guy has is a ridiculous number of 1/1 owls, which burn up pretty quickly with a couple distributed fire spells and the card that you can tap and do 1 damage to a player or creature.  He also won’t attack if you’ve got a way to defend against him, and since I got my opponent down to 1 life in the first few rounds and then just sat there, bringing out more creatures and b-b-q-ing his creatures whenever I had the chance, it was just a matter of time.

End result?  I got my badges (after waiting what seemed like an eternity for the super-slow gameplay of M:tG to allow me to the point where this guy finally ran out of cards).  Seriously, there needs to be a way to speed up the action in this game, because we don’t all need seven years to choose what we want to do or every bit of an opponent’s action to be carefully spelled out.  At any rate, here they are.  The badge for having more than 10 creatures out (which you can see in the picture above), and the one for getting this guy to finally be unable to draw a card:

 

 

 

Whoa-ho, it’s Magic!

I’ll confess that I have a guilty pleasure.  Just one, you ask?  Okay, so there are lots of them.  But the one that I talk about the least is my occasional playing of Magic: the Gathering, which isn’t really a problem since I don’t have any actual physical cards (anymore).  Actually, that’s not true.  I have one, but it’s complete happenstance that I have it, because I found a black zombie card when I was in Rome last week.  It’s seen better days, but hey– free Magic card!

Don’t judge me.

Anyway, this post isn’t about my inherent geekitude.  It’s about the fact that Wizards of the Coast, who wasted many hours of my time earlier this year with M:tG Planeswalkers 2012 have recently released the 2013 version, complete with new badges to unlock.  Those bastards.  The badges, coupled with my glee at making men cry when I play against them (seriously, it’s better than poker for crushing the chauvinist spirit) and a decent Steam sale, meant that I could play another bout of games for just 5 bucks… so here we are, talking about all the new badges that I’ve managed to unlock.

I’m not sure how, but when I started M:tG, I had a deck completely unlocked already (maybe this had something to do with playing before, but I’m not sure).  All I know is that not everyone gets this– otherwise 100% of players on Steam would have it– but that I did.  So that means that I got this bad boy:

So… that’s nice, I guess.  I figured that since I was getting badges for doing absolutely nothing, I might as well go for the ever-so-difficult-you-have-to-be-pretty-special-not-to-have-this-one “Enter the Deck Manager” badge.  To get it, I… well, I clicked on the button that said “Deck Manager”.  I know, right?  Anyway, the shiny badge for that looks like this:

Yeah.  Two badges in the first minute of logging into the game.  So… that was special.

Wtf just happened?

In fairness, my lack of updates the last several days has come from the fact that I simply haven’t gotten any badges (nevermind that I still have about 20 skyrim badges to blog about– I’ll get there later).  I’ve been playing Dungeons of Dredmor, trying to get more badges, but because of my determination to play with a random skills build, I’ve basically just died.  A lot.  Yeah, okay, that’s normal for a rogue-like, but it’s still getting a little old.

Anyway, I finally played a game that lasted for a while.  To level 15 (16 is still my max, I believe).  This time, I was playing with Smithing, Tinkering, Rogue Scientist, and Clockwork Knight, which made for one of those obnoxious combinations that uses up all of my inventory slots.  That’s why I never play with these builds.  Anyhow.

So I managed to get the Rogue Scientist tree maxed.  I have to say, I actually really like that tree– there’s plenty of really nice attacks, and only one uses any mana– the rest are on a cool-down, which isn’t really so bad.  All the single-opponent attacks have knock-back, which is also *really* nice when you’re facing bosses.  Here’s my shiny new achievement:

 

 

 

Now it’s time to start over… again.  *sigh*