On Luck and Catching

Just now, I saw a wild Hariyama. It was just sitting there, minding its own business, being a Pokemon and chilling out. Because I have a Hariyama I want to power up, I decided I was going to catch this wild Hariyama. Now, Hariyama is a big Pokemon. It’s big and wide. That means that it’s easy to get Excellent Throws on it. This Hariyama though refused to catch. I threw multiple Excellent Throws at this Hariyama, but it did not want to catch. It wasn’t even a particularly high CP either, so this was quite frustration. Until, that was,… [Continue Reading]

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Thoughts on Lucky Trades

Pokemon GO is a bit weird when it comes to trades. Most of the main Pokemon games let you trade whatever you want. Pokemon Home also allows you to trade what you like. But Pokemon GO only allows for a Pokemon to be traded once, and treats Pokemon in a very different way, rerolling a Pokemon’s stats after the trade. This reroll means that you can, by sheer chance, get a Pokemon in return that has way better stats than it started with. The stat reroll is mostly completely random, and goes across a certain range. As you become better… [Continue Reading]

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Dice Throne

The other day, I played a board game called Dice Throne. The campaign was a simple one. Gather the dice shards from across the map, kill enemies and then kick the ass of a boss character. It’s a pretty fun game, but it is also pretty damn strange. The first thing that is strange is that there is no board. Instead, we have several scenarios, and we build a map using various cards of various difficulties. Each map has a portal card from which you start, various cards of locations with varying difficulties, and finally a boss tile where you… [Continue Reading]

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A 2% Drop Chance

Volt rolled all four of his neural sensors as a text message came in. After waiting until the various spam and trading messages stopped coming, Volt picked a gold message at the top of the pile and began to read it. “Hello, can you help me with something?” With an organic snort, Volt picked up his little keyboard and started typing back. “Hi, Wukong, what’s up?” Volt had known Wukong for quite a long time. In fact, Volt had been the one to help train Wukong as he slowly climbed levels of mastery. Both Volt and Wukong had ended up… [Continue Reading]

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The Lords of Brewer’s Grove – A Pathfinder Campaign

Hi, there! I’m the temp writer and sibling of the almighty blog overlord; you can call me Skully. I’m currently running a 5th edition Pathfinder campaign with Medic, our brother and my boyfriend and I’m going to share a rough synopsis of our current predicament. First of all, let me introduce everyone. Medic is playing Rhyn’Go AmWoluff, a timid but spiritual Kitsune Druid with a wolf companion named Floof Greymayne. While she may be rather quiet and new to roleplaying, her character is quickly blooming. Our brother is the valiant Dwarf Barbarian who goes by the name SkullDave IronClaw; a… [Continue Reading]

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A Rant about Loot Boxes

Loot boxes. They’re fucking everywhere. They’re in Dota 2, they’re in Destiny 2, they’re in PAYDAY 2, they’re in Team Fortress 2, they’re everywhere. They’re swarming everything. Almost every free to play game has a loot box system, and pay to play games are doing the same thing as well. Thing is, a loot box system is fine in a free to play game, assuming you can get them just by playing the game, and assuming it’s just cosmetics and maybe experience boosters and fun things like that. F2P games NEED some sort of other revenue, and often just selling… [Continue Reading]

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The Isaacing of Binds

I’m a royal pain in the ass when it comes to trying out new games. It’s very easy for them to annoy me and for me to stop playing, assuming I even get started. Elder Scrolls Online for example pissed me off early on by making lockpicking, stealth and archery all a real pain in the backside. No, I wasn’t expecting Skyrim Online, but I expected, I don’t know, something better, especially since it costs so much just to play the base game, and they had subscriptions and now they have an in-game shop. The Binding of Isaac though is… [Continue Reading]

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Mod Showcase: Randomizer

Welcome back to Mod Showcase. Brickinator here. Today’s article is about Randomizer-  a plugin that combines the carefully crafted and immensely intricate balance system of Team Fortress 2 and defecates all over it. Any sort of tactics or strategy you had for each class has now gone out of the window because, in a Randomizer match, everything is down to chance. Using the word ‘chance’ to describe core multiplayer gameplay is like using the words ‘bloody and viscous’ to describe a urine sample, but Randomizer manages to pull it off. The first thing you need to realise with Randomizer is… [Continue Reading]

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