Beowulf

Beowulf is a classic of western literature. Dating back to 975-1000 AD, it was written by an anonymous writer. The translation I read had the Old English on the left pages and a modern English translation on the right side of the pages. The work is some 3,000 lines of verse. 

Beowulf is also a Scandinavian epic about a great warrior, who stands up to save people from this monster, Grendel. Grendel rips apart humans and eats them raw and bloody. Beowulf, the brave hero, takes him down, then kills his mother, Grendel's mother seeking revenge. In old age, Beowulf is a King. But a dragon has attacked, so he goes to arms. He kills the dragon with his most trusted soldier but likewise the dragon lands a killing blow on him. The tale ends with Beowulf's grand funeral, cremated with hero's rites. 

The action flows along with the poetic style. When Grendel attacks it's menacing. When Grendel's mother vows revenge, things get psychological. When Beowulf fights the dragon it's the first time he's ever scared. 

The narrative tropes appear in other literature throughout time. The translation is a little bare at times, but there are also lots of archaic sayings at work. Meaning you might have to look up certain words or just read slowly for better comprehension. You have to read this one slow in order to fully understand. Thankfully Beowulf is pretty short. I was able to finish reading it in two sessions. 

I was holding off on reading Beowulf for a long time because I wasn't sure if I would truly be into epics, poetry, mythology. But it turns out that I'm really into it. So far I've read Paradise Lost, Dante's Inferno, the Odyssey, the Iliad, Beowulf, and now I'm currently reading Virgil's Aeneid. This is a big departure from my usual science fiction reading sprees. At first, it took a while to get into all these epics. You get a taste then you're hooked. 

Skyrim anyone? 

Grimoire: Manastorm is a fun spellcasting Unreal Tournament

So I was looking around on the free to play game section on Steam and I found this game called Grimoire: Manastorm. This is an fps (first person shooter) game made by Omniconnection where you play as wizards and cast spells to kill your enemies. Pretty great idea already. Replace guns with a bunch of spellcasters and you have a super fun experience. The game is in early access on Steam.

From my initial experience and only having played the game for maybe twenty minutes I can say this is one of the most fun free to plays I've tried out on Steam. I haven't had this much fun on a free to play on Steam since Nosgoth was out.

The game's free version only comes with the fire and earth spellcasters. The fire mage is freakin' amazing. They give you one of the coolest mages ever for free which is pretty awesome. When you burn people as a fire mage it is so satisfying watching their hp drop. It makes me feel like the pyro from Team Fortress. I love it.

The other class you get free is the earth mage. His regular attack speed is super fast but weaker than the fire mage but he can heal himself I noticed. You can cast a spell that creates a tree and when you stand near it your hp recovers at a moderate speed. He's definitely a support mage. This game has supports like in Team Fortress or Overwatch.

The game features abilities like a moba (like Heroes of the Storm) and all the different mages' abilities can be countered so its possible to survive any situation theoretically and given the proper skill and effort. One thing to note is that you can teleport too. This makes the game crazy fast a la Unreal Tournament and Quake, great games to be inspired by. It brings the Skyrim (the first person view of the mage with the fireball or manacrystals in their hands look exactly like Skyrim) style mage into the twitch shooter environment. Its the best idea I've seen in a game in a super long time. The fact that this game puts together ideas and is inspired by so many other games is probably what makes it so fun. Add to that the unique idea of shooting spells instead of guns. How clever and unique.

The one thing that could be better is the graphics. However, you don't need high end graphics in a twitch shooter. As long as the environments are creative enough and fun to play on everything's cool. I'm going to keep playing this game. I'm interested in seeing how big the community becomes for it and how long the player base will keep on it. I think the game has a lot of potential especially if they create more interesting spellcasters.

King Arthur Legend of the Sword

I figured I'd do a write up of this movie because it was so shockingly awful that it deserved to be written about in a negative way. The only thing worse than paying for this movie is getting in for free and finding that a whole two hours of your life was just wasted, vanished right before your very eyes. I'm gonna give you the good, the bad, and the mostly terrible.

First, what's good about this movie? Not much to be frank. However, if I could give this movie some compliments I would say that Mordred the evil wizard ends up turning into a cool demonic looking creature. He sacrifices the lives of his daughters and these snake women give him this incredible power. He becomes this giant monster with a scythe but that's not all. He can also shoot fireballs a la Skyrim mage. When Mordred and King Arthur were fighting at the end it was awesome seeing how powerful Mordred was physically as well as magically with his fireballs. Super cool villain.

The other cool thing about this movie is the actual sword that King Arthur pulls out of the stone. It turns out the sword is enchanted with magical powers but when Arthur uses it, it sort of just evaporates people into dust magically and can create tornadoes and stuff. It doesn't make any sense but its cool that they gave the sword some action packed fantasy elements rather than just "oh, here's a regular sword". The coolness of the movie ends with these two points.

The movie is mostly terrible. The plot-line goes nowhere and nothing makes sense. It seemed like the whole movie is just one scene to another scene with no thought put into what follows or what comes before. This is a 250 million dollar flop of a movie. If they can't even get the scenes to flow in good sequence what chance could they have for a great action flick? The other problem is that the movie is carried by action scenes. There's tons of destruction, action, fighting, kicking, arrows being shot, etc but its all wasted on a movie with a story line that ultimately doesn't matter because you stop caring about what's happening somewhere near the beginning of the film. The film ceases to be interesting after Arthur's grown up and we see him as a rugged man. Once he takes out the sword from the stone the movie just goes south.

I could see what they were trying to do here but they failed hardcore. They were trying to do a fantasy movie based on King Arthur and set it up for Game of Thrones and action flick crowd. Unfortunately you have to really know what you're doing to make that kind of movie and get people to actually like it. It seems like they just threw together this movie in a backhanded way. Also, the best actor in the movie was a guy who was actually from Game of Thrones. Props to that guy. I think his name is Little Finger.

The trailer for this movie was a little misleading. I thought it would be much better than that. I went in to the movie tired and by the end I was even more tired. I was mortified of the thought that I had just wasted two hours with my friends at the movies seeing a movie that was probably worse than watching a dog drop a turd on your front lawn. Do yourself a favor, don't go see King Arthur. Wait for it to come out on DVD, watch it, and then you'll see why this movie was so bad.

Look at the top, there's a cute Charmander mage!

Blackened Saturday, Cyber Monday Awaits

So the sales got to me and I ended up spending more of my hard earned cash money. I ended up looking up sales online for Gamestop and I found out Fallout 4 was only $10 for pc! Great deal man. I hopped the bus and trekked out there to get it. I also ended up getting a sweet Darksiders 2 shirt for $2 at Goodwill. Talk about awesome!

A few days before I got Doom and an Xbox 1 controller. I've been putting in work in Doom and Fallout 4 as well as playing Metal Gear Solid V The Phantom Pain on my Xbox 1.

Doom is not for pussies that's for sure. The game is graphic as all hell (literally) and has so much blood, it's pretty intense. The heavy metal soundtrack makes for hectic combat against demons from the pits of hell. Great game. I'm currently on the third level. They just introduced these stronger demons called hell knights that are tough. Sometimes it'll take me 5 shotgun shots to take them out. I gotta figure out a faster way to kill them as they are becoming more troublesome and numerous.

Fallout 4 is even better though. Both games are made by Bethesda and this is probably my favorite gaming company other than Blizzard. I'm a big Skyrim fan but I never made it too far in the series. After playing Doom and Fallout 4 I'm definitely going to go back and finish Skyrim-with mods. The mods for Fallout 4 are fantastic. There's literally so much you can do to change and/or break the game in ways devs never intended. The base game is great too. I'm only in the beginning of the game but I can tell that it's something that I'm going to put some time into. Super fun. It's much better than New Vegas, which was my only previous Fallout experience.

I'm definitely adding more single player immersion into my gaming experiences at the moment. At first I was a multiplayer only type of gamer but now I find myself wanting to relax and enjoy a story without playing with a bunch of randos (randoms in pubs-public games, as I mostly solo queue). It's good to enjoy something by yourself and enjoy the depth within the game.

Cyber Monday is today. Lots of people are going to be buying things online. Not me though. I ended my Amazon Prime sub because I didn't think it was worth the $100 a year and things just aren't that interesting on that site.

However, I am still interested in buying more games!

:D 

I might pick up Warhammer Vermintide because its only $15 on Steam. I'm also still interested in Battlefield 1 but I think I should wait on that. Even if the sale on Origin ends soon it will probably go back to $40 for Christmas sales or maybe even less by then, who knows.

Hope you all got something cool for yourselves. If you haven't get something nice today. You've earned it sport!

'Tis the season

Coolest games from E3

So E3 just happened recently and it turned out to be a great time with wonderful new games. Lets talk about some of the cool games that we can look forward to in the near future. 

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: It feels like the same old Zelda we're used to but its a huge open world design that most modern games feature. There's some sandbox elements like cutting down trees to get through paths. The graphics are cell-shady which reminds me of the Wind Waker, another great Zelda title. Can't wait to see the bosses. Time to start playing that Wii U again!

Telltales Batman: Its character driven and story-driven and its made with a new engine. Its going to feature a lot more Bruce Wayne than we're used to in Batman games. Time to put on my suit and look fancy!

Titanfall 2: The grappling hook looks great. It seems like the grappling hook idea that they had in Team Fortress 2 except way better. There's going to be a story-mode too which the first one lacked. Also, they're going to give everyone the dlc for free so that the community doesn't get divided. I've met a developer who works at Respawn and I told him how awesome the trailer looked. I also mentioned how the free dlc is a great way to keep the community together.

Horizon Zero Dawn: This is a cool action style game with a bit of Far Cry, Assassin's Creed, and Zelda. The game pits you as a primitive warrior type fighting against robotic dinosaurs and such. Domo arigato Mr. Roboto.

God of War 4: The game is still brutal and visceral and the graphics are gorgeous. An interesting new story will be a big part of it.

Battlefield 1: All the old technology used in World War I plays out well in the 64-player multiplayer mode.   

Gears of War 4: Time to get into cover!

Bloodstained:Ritual of the Night: The new Castlevania style game.

Batman Arkam VR: All about puzzles and being a detective.

Games I'm personally excited about the most.

Skyrim Special Edition: I really love Skyrim although I've never gotten that far in the game. However, I'd be down to buy the special edition because the times I've played have been so fun that I feel like I'd need it. I would definitely be down to finally finish the campaign with a special edition that includes better graphics and mod support.

Fallout 4 dlc: I haven't played Fallout 4 but the more dlc comes out, the more I want to play it. I really like Bethesda games because they are super fun single player experiences where normally I'm not a single player guy. However, all of Bethesda's games are worth playing even if you don't enjoy the single player experience as much as multiplayer.

Quake Champions: The trailer has a cool blue-haired vixen and the characters look like futuristic bad-asses. It looks especially cool because I just got into fps games competitively.

Doom dlc: So the news of more Doom dlc sounds great. Makes the game look more appealing even though I haven't bought a new game since Overwatch came out. Might want to pick this up in the future.

This year's E3 was a blast and it was cool watching the press conferences on YouTube. This year so far has already given us great titles. The most interesting game at the moment to me is the new Zelda. It will be good to see another great title on the Wii U because good titles on that console have been severely lacking as of late. The future of gaming looks brighter with each passing day. A bright sunshiny day.