khazrakh

[khazrakh]

Have You Played Across The Obelisk?

I usually prefer to make "Have you played" articles about games that I already finished or at least have played for a prolonged time. Today, I'm going to make a little exception as I've stumbled across a what I think is a pretty exceptional early access title - Across the Obelisk. To tell the truth, I've never heard about it before but randomly stumbled across it the day it was released. It seemed pretty interesting at first glance and I decided to give it a shot. Almost 15 hours played in a mere 5 days later, I'm quite confident to say that this is one of the best card battlers I've played since Slay the Spire!

   Source

  To get an idea of what Across the Obelisk is, simply imagine that Slay the Spire and Darkest Dungeon would have a child of love and you should get pretty close to the real deal! In essence, the game is a classical deck builder just like Slay the Spire. You start with a deck of basic cards and slowly improve that as you play your run. The key difference is that the combat is closer to Darkest Dungeon than it is to Slay the Spire. That's because you not only control one but four heroes at the same time. Consequentially, combat follows the classical 4 vs. 4 rules that made Darkest Dungeon so enjoyable. Each of these heroes has its own deck complete with a different focus and playstyle and each with its full list of unique cards.

In total, the game will feature 16 different heroes of which 10 are already playable in the current early access build. That's quite an impressive number considering that each hero focuses on different effects and allows for several unique builds. There are tanks, bowmen, wizards, healer, and a lot more. Basically everything you'd expect from a good RPG. I was quite impressed with the amount of cards already available but at the same time the balance already seems to be pretty good. For the starting heroes, there are several possible builds and after having played some runs, I can say that each of them has it advantages and disadvantages, but all seem to be rather viable.

    Image taken from Steam

  The game basically offers everything you'd expect from it. You explore several maps made up of individual nodes. While you can only move from left to right, you get to choose which part to follow and you will know in advance what to expect from each tile. There are fights, events (that might very well lead to fights), shops, altars, and a multitude of other options to explore. The game also has a quest system where one node will send you to a different node (possibly even on a later map) to defeat a certain enemy or collect a specific item.

Across the Obelisk is a roguelite and as such, you should expect to die a lot, especially in the beginning. This just might be my one gripe with the game as well - during your first few runs, your chances of making it past the first boss are really slim, so the game might feel a bit repetitive as you fight through the same encounters several times in a row just to die pretty soon after. Your heroes gain perk points after each run you used them in and this in turn allows you to permanently increase their stats, enables you to bring more gold in the next round, and so on. At the same time, each run starts in a town which can be upgraded as well. There you can craft new cards, buy items, and upgrade or remove cards from your deck. All this helps to give the game a nice sense of progression. Even if you fail to beat the boss this time, you'll still have something to show for and will start your next run just a little bit stronger.

    Image taken from Steam

  What's interesting as well is that new heroes, items, and cards need to be unlocked first. So when you start the game for the first time, you only have access to a handful of cards for each hero. But with each run, you'll learn about more cards, find more items, and so on. This will allow for more and more customization of your starting party while at the same time ensures that you won't be overwhelmed initially. The game certainly feels like its devs put a lot of thought into putting all the pieces together. There also is a four player cooperative mode where each player gets to play one hero. I have to admit that I didn't try that part of the game and I probably won't. I really don't want to wait for three other people to take their turns in a round based card battler but that might just be me, to others this could very well be a very interesting feature.

All things considered, Across the Obelisk is one of the most polished and feature rich early access titles that I've played. This is really quite the feat, as it hasn't even been released for a week and I did play quite some early access titles over the years. Thank's to the huge progression system, I see myself spending countless hours unlocking new cards, leveling my heroes, and trying my hand on the various hard modes the game offers. Right now, the game is sold at 12.74€ which should be somewhere around 15$. That's quite the steal considering that you might very well spend 50-100 hours playing this game. If you enjoy roguelite deck builders, I'd say this is an absolute must buy, it's without doubt one of the most enjoyable games in recent years to me. It has a good 91% positive rating on Steam so far, so it seems people are mostly in agreement with me!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Have You Played Dorfromantik?

As you might have realized by now, I mostly enjoy card based games and strategy games of all kinds. I love to take my time, go through all the options and possible outcomes, and make the ideal play whenever I can. Every now and then, though, I enjoy playing a more relaxed game as well. For a long time, this has mostly been Stardew Valley. The main issue there was that you only got to save your progress during the night, so I needed at least 30 minutes of uninterrupted playing time to get anything out of it. Some time ago, Steam presented me with another great option for my more relaxed gaming sessions - Dorfromantik. I liked the look of it right away and so I bought it without giving it a second thought. Luckily, it did not disappoint at all!

Source

Dorfromantik is a laid back city and landscape builder. You start the game with a single hexagonal tile already placed and you then start placing additional tiles one by one next to the already existing ones. New tiles come from your stack and you can always see the next few tiles coming up. Each tile consists of 6 parts, one for each side of the hexagon, and always contains exactly one type of landscape for each part. That could be trees, houses, rivers, fields, and so on. Once you run out of tiles, it's game over. To prevent that, some of the tiles come with quests that you need to fulfill. These usually are either "connect at least XXX trees" or "have exactly yy houses". Every time you finish a quest, a few new tiles are added to the bottom of your stack.

You can rotate any tile as often as you want until it fits with the already existing landscape. For every matching type of landscape, you are awarded with points. At the same time, there are different goals to follow which will award you with new tiles or a new biome for your next playthrough. At first glance, the game seems pretty simplistic and you can get away with just randomly throwing tiles together for quite a while. The more tiles you place, though, the harder the quests get and if you don't plan ahead, you'll eventually be unable to fulfill them in time. Once you get a better understanding for how things are working, you should be able to place hundreds if not thousands of tiles before finally running out of steam. Looking at the high scores, some players probably are even able to play the game endlessly, although I haven't managed that yet.

Source

So as you can see, the game itself is pretty easy to learn but it takes quite a while to master it. What makes it so enjoyable to me, is that there's no rush at all for doing anything. You can look around the map for as long as you want, rotate your next tile and see where it fits. You can save&quit any time, so it's the perfect game if you just have 10 minutes to kill and want to lay down some tiles before moving on to something else again. At the same time it does get quite addicting, I've played for almost 4 hours straight the first time I launched it. Especially in the beginning, there's a great positive feedback loop where you do run out of tiles but know exactly what went wrong and what you could have done better.

The artwork is pretty adorable and with time, you'll create a beautiful landscape of forests, villages and extensive farms. There are a lot of moving parts on the map as well, trains driving around on your railways, boats shipping up a river. It's really relaxing to just look at what you've built and pause a moment before placing the next tile. The music and ambient sound ties in perfectly as well, making the whole game very enjoyable and relaxing at the same time.

Thanks to the different unlocks, there's always a reason to start another game and start hunting another high score. The game is surprisingly replayable as well. Depending on your early tiles, your world will shape up completely different each time. Sometimes it will be full of rivers and railways, dividing your villages from each other. Another time you'll have that huge forest spanning half of the map. Nevertheless, don't expect it to be a game you are constantly playing. To me, it's best to play it in short sessions in between doing other things. Once you get a hang of it, you'll end up with a game that you can play for several hours and I really enjoy getting back into my already built up world every once in a while.

Take note that the game is still in Early Access, so there are going to be a lot of things added to it eventually. That said, it's already really polished and feels like a fully released game. There's nothing missing, or at least it doesn't feel like it. Looking at their roadmap, most of the points there will only add to the existing gameplay loop, so don't expect any major changes to come to the game later on. The game is sold at 8.99€ (so about 10$) on Steam and I feel like that's an extremely fair price for the entertainment you'll get out of it. It's sitting at an overwhelmingly positive rating with 97% positive votes out of 2,850 votes cast right now. Dorfromantik is the perfect game whenever you just want to relax a bit but still be challenged and presented with goals to accomplish. I wholeheartedly recommend getting it!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Are Your Summoners Prepared For Chaos Legion?

About a week ago, I've made an article detailing why I believe Splinterlands Untamed edition cards to be one of the hottest investment opportunities right now. I've got a lot reactions and questions on all channels that I released it to. Most commentators seemed to be in agreement with me, but there were also some misunderstanding and uncertainty regarding how things will move forward with the release of Chaos Legion. So in today's article, I'm doing a follow up on last week's article, explain what's going to happen in greater detail, and give some additional advise on how to best prepare for Splinterlands next set.

   Let's first talk about the big plan for ranked structure after Chaos Legion is released. Keep in mind that everything below is just work in progress and any of it could be completely changed at any moment. I'm also not a member of the team nor do I have any insider information. It's all pieced together from reading the articles they put out and listening in on their weekly AMA. So what's going to happen? When Chaos Legion gets released, there are plans to create a second ranked queue which I'll dub modern for now. In modern, only the two most recent sets will be playable along with at least the Dice set and reward cards from the Untamed era. I'm not sure about the Orb set yet, I'll try to ask about it during one of the next AMAs. At the same time, the old ranked format, let's call it classic, will be carried on just as we are used to simply now also allowing for Chaos Legion cards to be played.

There are 2 important reasons for that step:

With more and more sets coming to the game, deciding what card to use will get harder and harder within the short time frame and especially new(er) players would have an extremely hard time deciding what monsters to field

The cost of entry would escalate more and more. Right now, you need a deck worth several thousand dollars to compete for the top spots in Champion and things would only get worse with yet another set.

The important thing to understand here is that non of this will make your old cards unusable in any way. The classic format will still be around, you will still be able to play all your cards there. The modern ranked format will also not take away from classic in any way. It will be a second ranked format with its own DEC price pool. So if anything, owning these old cards will allow you to compete for two price pools instead of one. Nevertheless, the modern format is where most of the action is going to be eventually as it's where most new players will gravitate to. That's not to say that some of them won't try their luck in classic as well, but modern is most likely going to be the most important format moving forward. So what does that mean for us?

   Most importantly, we won't be able to use the summoners above in modern. The general consensus seems to be that Alpha/Beta summoners are stronger than Untamed summoners, at least on average. Once modern starts, we'll only be able to use the rare and legendary summoners from Untamed, the rare summoners from Dice, possibly some of the reward summoners, and finally the yet to be released new summoners from Chaos Legion. So if you have been mostly relying on Alpha and Beta summoners - like a lot of us probably have - you'll need to get new summoners for the modern format.

This is going to shake up the meta by quite a lot. Looking at the Water splinter for example, a lot of the current strategies revolve around heavy magic damage burst. All summoners providing an increase in magic damage are coming from the older sets, though, so this won't be possible any longer. All of the Untamed and Dice Water summoners are arguably a lot more situational than that:

   To compete in the new format, you will need summoners of a matching level for your league. If you have been relying on Alpha/Beta summoners so far, this means you can either get new summoners now or wait and hope for good new summoners in Chaos Legion. The issue at hand is that a lot of the currently active players probably have not realized that yet. Once Chaos Legion hits, there's most likely going to be a major run for summoners, both from Untamed/Dice and Chaos Legion which should bring their price up quite a bit. We don't know anything about the new cards or how many copies will be needed to level a card, but it's quite likely that the price for summoners is going to explode when Chaos Legion gets released.

As I personally like to be prepared, I'm buying my missing summoners now. Best case, I'll end up with summoners I'll be using heavily for the foreseeable future. Worst case, I'll have some max level summoners that I don't really use but that will most likely appreciate in price nevertheless. Again looking at the water splinter, non of the above strike me as great in all formats. So if there's a better summoner in Chaos Legion, everybody will want to get their hands on it, driving the price crazy at least initially. So I went ahead and bought a max level Bortus now while the prices are still somewhat reasonable.

Personally, I'm really looking forward to Chaos Legion and all the changes it's going to bring with it to the Splinterlands. Without knowing an exact date, the new set is still some months away, so we still have some time to prepare for it. My personal goal for the time being is to first prepare all my summoners for Champion League play in the modern format and then accumulate as many Untamed cards as I can.

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Have You Played Loop Hero?

When I swipe through the games Steam is recommending me, I can usually tell in an instant if a game is interesting to me or not. Does it have cards? Does it have a hex grid? Does it even remotely look like a strategy game? I'll probably like it. Is it an AAA shooter? Does it have Japanese/Asian art style? I'll pass, thank you. But occasionally, there are games where I just think to myself "what the hell is that meant to be!?". One of these games was Loop Hero, a recently released strategy roguelite game made by Four Quarters.

   All images taken from Steam

  At first glance, Loop Hero is your standard roguelite game. Your hero moves around the countryside, battles monsters, finds loot, levels up, faces the boss... and eventually dies. When he does, he'll leave behind some resources which are meant to help you with your next run. What's making Loop Hero so special is the fact that you don't control the hero, like at all. Instead, you control the environment the hero is moving through. Every new run consists of a randomly generated loop that your hero will follow. Every time he meets a monster on the path, a separate window will open, showing the fully automated battle. The rest of the map is completely blank in the beginning and it's up to you to change that. Monsters that your hero kills will occasionally drop new tiles to add to the world. What tiles can be dropped is decided by you as well, but more on that later.

These tiles can either be simple landscape elements like hills, mountains, or meadows, or they can be dangerous places spawning new monsters for you hero to fight. What might sound a bit confusing at first really works out pretty well. Each tile has a different effect like increasing your champions hit points by a certain amount or spawning a Vampire every time your hero fights close to the tile. Your hero will also find a lot of different items to equip and will eventually level up, granting you additional passive effects to choose from. The game mostly revolves around making the best out of the tiles and items you are given. You have to place the tiles in a way that will allow your hero to kill as many monsters as possible without dying himself.

By combining different tiles, you can create new elements providing new effects. If you combine 3x3 rocks and mountains together, you will create a mountain peak for example. This will provide a hefty bonus to your hero's hit points but it will also spawn a strong enemy he has to fight every few days. As indicated before, you decide yourself what tiles to bring to a round and as you progress through the game, more and more tiles are unlocked allowing for many different strategies. Considering the fact that you don't control your hero in any way, you still have a lot of decisions to make. If you just mindlessly place the tiles you find, your hero will either die early or be way too weak once he has to face the level boss.

   Between runs, you can build up your camp with the resources you've found on your adventures. There's a lot to be discovered there. A lot of different buildings can be constructed and upgraded, all providing additional effects, boons, and even new classes. You can also find a lot of different items during your runs which can then be equipped in the village, providing you with additional effects. All this allows for a lot of customization and obviously adds a lot of replayability to the game. There's always something to finish next, an item to test, a building to upgrade. A normal run takes between 20 and 40 minutes, so the game can be played in shorter intervals if time is a problem.

What I really don't like about the game, though, is its art. That's also the main reason I really wasn't sure what I was looking at when I first found it. To tell the truth, the game looks like it was made in 1990... by somebody not very good at making stuff like that. I really don't mind the pixelated art style that many of these indie games have. Actually, if done right, it can look really awesome. For my taste, Loop Hero is taking things a bit too far here, though. It really really isn't a good looking game.

   The sound isn't that awesome either, it basically just consists of random noises. The music at least is pretty decent although I wished there would be some more variation to it, as it get's old rather fast. Nevertheless, if you can look behind these issues, you'll be rewarded with an extremely entertaining and surprisingly deep strategy game. The first stage is pretty easy but once you move on to the second level, things really heat up a lot. With all the different stats, attributes, items, buildings, tiles, classes, and what not, there's an extraordinary amount of different combinations to try. It's also really cool that you have to experiment with the different tiles yourself. More than once, I've accidentally found a new combination that killed my hero in the process but allowed me a whole new approach for my next attempt.

The game is sold at 14.99€ (which should be something like 17$) on Steam and I feel like that's a very reasonable price for what you get out of it. So far, I've played almost 25 hours and while I'm not firing it up every day, I still enjoy doing the occasional run every now and then. If you play it from start to finish, you can expect to get about 30 to 40 hours of entertainment out of it. If you want to finish all constructions and unlock all items and classes this should probably be doubled. Either way, you'll get a lot of entertainment for your money. The game is comfortably sitting at 94% positive reviews on Steam right now and I feel like that's well deserved. It's not among the best games I've ever played, but it's fresh and entertaining. A full recommendation in my book!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Doctor Who Worlds Apart Is Looking More And More Like A Cash Grab

Doctor Who Worlds Apart is one of the projects I was most hopeful for in 2021. They have a strong franchise behind them, they have the backing of the BBC, and their first edition cards were looking quite interesting and diverse in terms of design and effects. In short, this could very well turn into a hit trading card game. I've already done several articles about the game and I've also been promoting my ref-link heavily. So far, I've managed to acquire 185 cards (which equals a total value of 185$) without spending any real money on it. So things should be really looking great. Sadly, that's not exactly the case. The more I follow the project, the more it seems like a pure cash grab to me!

   In Doctor Who Worlds Apart, rarity is not only determined by the rarity of the card itself but also by the card frame it has. While the rarity of the card itself is completely randomized across all packs, certain card frames can only be found in certain boosters. I've already made an article on the concept some weeks ago, coming to the conclusion that the whole system feels unnecessary complex. Yet, I was more or less okay with it. It has no effect on gameplay, so if people want to spend their money on a different card frame I don't have any objections. Since then, though, 2 new types of booster packs where introduced to the market offering yet another exclusive, never to be found again card frame.

These new card packs are the "Timelord President Pack" and the "Machines of War Pack" and honestly, they are sold at ridiculous prices again:

   If I counted right, this brings the number of different card frames in the game to something like 19 variations. This all is happening while there are no news on the game itself, it's still scheduled for a release into testing in Q4 of 2021. I really don't mind some exclusive pre sale stuff, but this is getting more and more ridiculous. To me, it feels like they are just trying to milk the show's fans as much as possible. When the initial pre sale happened, there also was no indication that these packs would get released in such a short order, making it look like the card frames available back then truly were the only exclusive ones to be had. Obviously, you don't need any of these special card frames to play the game and because of that, I've always only been buying the Core Pack. Nevertheless, there are a lot of people interested in exclusive card frames and Doctor Who Worlds Apart seems to be doing all it can in order to milk them as much as possible.

That's not all, though. They've also launched their market place and it's now possible to trade these cards with other players. Well, at least that sounds cool right? It's a blockchain game after all, true ownership of assets, time to make some money! Well, it's not that easy. Their market is not really running on chain. Fun enough, the cards aren't on chain either. You'd have to pay the ETH fee (which they set to 55$/card) to get them there first. Things are even worse than they sound, though. Their market place only accepts a singular currency - vUSD. Haven't heard of that token yet? Well, that's because it isn't a token. It's just the name of their store currency. And there's only one way to get it - buy it from Doctor Who Worlds Apart:

   Now the crazy thing is that you can buy vUSD from the game, but you can't sell it back to the game. Yes, you've read that right. There's only a way in but no way out. All money spent on buying vUSD will stay with the game, you can't exchange vUSD back to regular USD. So in essence, this market has nothing to do with how things should work in a blockchain game. There's no cashing out, any money you spend will stay within the game. Now the guys that designed that whole process are either completely ignorant of blockchain principles or they are just greedy and want to suck as much money out of people as possible. Honestly, I'm not even sure which of the two options would be worse. Either way, this is completely unacceptable to me.

With all this stuff going on in Doctor Who Worlds Apart, I sadly can't recommend the game any longer. I'll still collect the 10 free Panadalks by logging in daily, but I won't promote it any longer. I'd also strongly advise against spending any more real money on it for the moment. They are officially backed by the BBC, so the possibility of this being an exit scam or something are really slim. Nevertheless, it seems like they are only trying to use the blockchain/NFT craze in order to collect as much money as possible. They do have their ETH bridge and there are signs of this thing being a blockchain game after all. But with all their recent decisions, it seems more like this is going to become a conventional digital trading card game where money is only flowing in but never out.

That's not to say that you won't be able to make money with it nevertheless. I've earned thousands of dollars playing Hex TCG which wasn't a blockchain game at all. If trading is possible in a game, people will find a way to convert cards to real money. But Hex launched in 2014 and now it's 2021. There are a lot of promising trading card games out there and they are actually running on the blockchain, allowing me to buy and sell my assets just as I please. I might be wrong about the whole thing, maybe they'll get things right eventually. But at the same time, this could be a hint of what's going to happen in the future. Mainstream developers certainly don't want to share their revenue with us and creating pseudo blockchain titles that only pretend to offer real ownership of assets might be a trend we'll see more of pretty soon. As always, it's best to stay vigilant and always research new projects before spending any money on them.

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Have You Seen BoJack Horseman?

There are movie shows that only require a couple of words to explain. They perfectly fit into a single genre and they just do exactly what you'd expect them to do. Others are a little more complex, they play with different genres, have a more complex plot, and you just feel like you need to give a little more detail to really explain what the show is all about. Well, and then there's BoJack Horseman. A genre defying, animated show about a talking horse during its midlife crisis. No matter how much you try to make sense out of it in a single sentence, it won't work. And no matter what you expect when you start watching the show, you'll be proven wrong more than once. To move the conclusion to the front, BoJack Horseman might be the most brilliant TV show I've ever seen and is nothing less than a modern masterpiece. As always, there will be some spoilers for early episodes but nothing you won't see in your first sitting.

  Source

  But let's take one step at a time and look at the key facts first:

Number of seasons: 6 Number of episodes: 77 Originally Aired: 2014 - 2020

So let's try and do the impossible: Explain what BoJack Horseman exactly is. At heart, it could best be explained as a tragic sitcom, cleverly combining both comedy and tragedy and creating an unbelievable deep mix of both. It's animated in an what some would call rather simplistic drawing style and yes, there are speaking animals in the show. The name-giving main character, BoJack Horseman, is a speaking horse after all. Many will come to the show expecting rather absurd comedy because of that. There certainly is a lot of that, but it's just one of its many facets. In the world of BoJack Horseman, both humans and humanoid animals live side-by-side. The fact itself is never a topic of discussion, it's just what it is. The setup is mostly used for some absurd along the line jokes and play on words, but it's also sometimes the focus of a whole episode. Nevertheless, ultimately the show would work just as well if all characters were human. The whole humanoid animals setting is just used on top of that, making it even more interesting.

Our protagonist is a mediocre actor in its midlife crisis. He's had one great hit show back in the day called Horsin' Around. It's portrayed as a classical 80s/90s sitcom with mild humor and a lot of senseless feel-good nonsense. Ever since, he didn't get to play any major roles. He still earned more than enough to make a comfortable live, though, and this really is how the whole show gets going. BoJack still believes that he would be able to play a lot bigger roles. At the same time, he's drowning in his own misery, unable to escape from alcoholism, drug abuse, and the whole palette of a dark human (or horse?) mind.

  Source

  The first episodes are starting rather slow and you get the feeling that you are watching a more or less standard, although at times hilarious, comedy show. Each episode has its own issue of the week, although there are already some connecting arks throughout these early stories. As the first season progresses, you start to realize more and more that there's something more to the whole show. BoJack Horseman is amazingly different than any of its peers. It's hilariously funny in one second just to turn to pure agony and deepest depression in the next. It's not always enjoyable to watch in a sense that you are just sitting there, having a good time. But it's always worthwhile to do so. Often times, when you finish an episode you'll just sit there, thinking about what the hell just happened.

That's the real beauty of it all, It's entertaining, fun, hilarious, but it's so much more as well. I've never seen topics like depression, drug addiction, or alcoholism portrayed in a way that even comes close to what BoJack Horseman manages to do. It's close up, unfiltered, and it feels so real that it's going to touch your heart if you let it. The show made me cry several times during its run. I rarely cry about anything, but an animated, speaking horse managed to do so on several occasions - tells you a lot about the quality of the whole show.

  Source

  One of the central topics of the show is that there's no redemption for your past deeds. There's no way to change what you did or what happened in the past. All you can do is learn to live with it, forgive yourself for what you've done and learn to make the most of your life yourself. It's dark from the beginning and it only gets darker from there. Watching BoJack loose control over his life bit by bit is hilarious and frightening at the same time. I've never related to characters and their actions as much as I did in this show. I believe that there's a lot of BoJack Horseman in all of us. Some are able to cope with it better than others, but deep down, we all know the feelings he's dealing with it. That's probably what makes the show seem so realistic. At times, it doesn't matter at all that you are watching at speaking animals, they are more real persons than what you'll see in almost any other TV show!

Each season has it's own central story with a build up and a conclusion towards the end. At the same time, there's a season spanning story arc that more or less is built from the first to the last episode of the whole show. I won't give away anything, but the ending of each season as well as the whole show always feels deeply rewarding and well thought out. At the same time, it always opens up new questions, new things to ponder about. The 11th episode (15th for the last season which had more episodes) is always something special. The whole show is awesome but the episodes before the season finale might be the most brilliant pieces of art I've ever seen on television.

   Taken from IMDB

  Yes, that's a 9.9 with 11,240 people voting on IMDB and it's well deserved. These episodes are so different from what you are used to on TV, so drastic, so scary, you'll have to see for yourself to really understand.

BoJack Horseman dares to be different in basically every single aspect. It gets away with doing things that simply shouldn't work because of that. There's an episode where not a single word is spoken until the last seconds of the show. There's an episode that completely consists of BoJack giving a speech, the screen only showing him standing there, talking the whole time. This should be boring, it shouldn't work, yet it had me sit there just staring at the screen, absorbing everything he was talking about.

The whole show is brilliant through and through. Yet, it isn't for everybody. I've told a lot of people about the show and they either ended up loving it or hating it. Those that loved it watched it all through the end, those that hated it quit after the first few episodes. Not everybody will be able to look behind the silliness, the simplistic animations, the fact that you are following a speaking horse. But if you can, you will be rewarded with what is the best animated TV show of all times and maybe the best show I've ever seen in my whole life. BoJack Horseman is something that had never been done before and that probably will never be done again. If you haven't seen it - go watch it on Netflix, it's well worth your time!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Have You Played Monster Train?

Card games have been my favorite genre both in the real world and in the gaming world for as long as I can remember. When I was 10 years old, one of my classmates approached me with a game called Magic the Gathering and ever since, I was in love with games revolving around cards. Trading Card Games, Deck Builders, Engine Builders, no matter, as long as it has cards and is well crafted, I'm very likely to enjoy it. For a long time, though, card games on PC were somewhat of a niche. In recent years, this has changed a lot, both thanks to Hearthstone for the trading card genre and thanks to Slay the Spire for the (rogue-lite) deck builder genre.

Ever since the enormous success of Slay the Spire, dozens of (carbon) copies of the game have seen their release on Steam. Most of them aren't even that bad, but they simply never were as good as Slay the Spire. It's hard to be better than the game you try to copy without innovating on the genre after all. One of the few gems that stood out to me is Monster Train. A game that took the proven formula of Slay the Spire and iterated on it enough to be its own amazing game.

   Just like in the Slay the Spire, you start each run with a small deck of basic cards that you will improve during each playthrough. To do so, you will add new cards to your deck, remove existing cards, and improve the cards you have. A typical game of Monster Train will usually take between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on how quick you play and, obviously, the difficulty level you chose.

The game's story is somewhat absurd but fitting. Hell has been conquered by the forces of heaven and is now frozen over. There's only one train remaining that still has the burning ember of hell aboard and that is hell's only chance to reignite the ever burning fires. You are the acting leader of the scattered forces of hell and you have to fight through the seven seals heaven put in place to stop you. For each seal, there's a battle taking place on your train where the forces of heaven try to stop your advance. The opposing units enter the train at the bottom floor and try to work their way up to the top where your pyre is still burning. You use your cards to either summon monsters into one of the three floors or to play spells that will either buff your own or hurt your enemy.

   After each battle, you will earn additional cards, artifacts, and gold. You then get to visit several locations in between the seals where you can improve your deck further, heal your pyre, upgrade cards, and so on. Being the rouge-lite it is, you start each run from scratch again, although there is some progression in the form of additional card unlocks and new artifacts you can find in your next run.

In total, there are 6 different clans of hell to choose from and you always pick a primary and a secondary tribe for each of your runs. All clans come with unique cards and monsters. Their skill sets and strategies vary drastically and something that will work perfectly with one faction will get you killed fast with another one. By combining the different tribes, you can try to either balance out their respective strengths and weaknesses or you can fully focus on a single strategy, neglecting everything else in the process. Each clan also has two different champions, each with different abilities and a core card that will be added to your deck. Thanks to these many different options, the game offers a huge replay value as there are dozens of possible combinations to explore.

   In terms of difficulty, the game is nicely balanced and after some rounds any experienced card game player shouldn't have any issues beating it at normal difficulty. That's where the covenant ranks come into effect. There are a total of 25 covenant ranks and each can be unlocked by beating the prior one. Each of these ranks will add one additional mutator to the game, making it harder and harder to beat the forces of heaven. At covenant rank 25, you will start at a hefty disadvantage, yet the game never feels unfair. Even at the highest levels, it's almost always beatable and if you loose, you mostly have your own decisions to blame.

The game itself is rather fast paced for a round based strategy game. There's always a clear indication of what's going to happen once you pass your turn so there's so unnecessary guessing. At the same time, coming up with the perfect play every turn is a lot harder than it might seem at first. You have to balance keeping your monsters alive, stopping the advancing forces before they reach the pyre, but also build your position to deal with the level boss. All decisions you make during the game are meaningful and neither can you just spam monsters and spells nor can you just randomly add cards and artifacts to your deck. At least not if you want to have any hope of winning the round. Monster Train is your classical deck builder where you carefully have to weigh your options and come up with the best build possible from the options you are presented with.

   Another aspect about Monster Train I really enjoy is its art style and general presentation. A lot of these deck builder card games provide only minimal graphics. It's not that I really care about that in general. Slay the Spire may look awful, but it's still an amazing game. Having a game that is awesome to play and looking great at the same time, though, makes things just a lot more enjoyable. The whole game is really polished, with soundeffects, music, and graphics all doing what they are supposed to be doing. The clean presentation also helps to make it so much easier to follow what's happening and what's about to happen next.

All things considered, Monster Train is the best deck builder that I've played since Slay the Spire. Which of the two games ultimately is the better probably comes down to personal taste. So far, I've spent 129 hours playing Monster Train and I don't intend to stop any time soon. The cool thing is that a single run won't ever take more than an hour, so it's the perfect game to pick up after a long day, play your run, and then put it away again until you feel like playing some more. If you plan on picking it up, they just recently released their first DLC and while it's not really needed as a new player, I'd advise on getting it nevertheless, as it adds a lot of replayability to an already highly replayable game! It has 96% positive rating on Steam and that's for a good reason, it's without doubt one of the best games I own on the platform!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Have You Seen Travelers?

It's safe to say that Science Fiction is my favorite genre by far. It has so many different facets, from highly unrealistic utopias to somewhat believable projections of where our society could be standing in a century or hundred centuries. Either way, I love all kinds of science fiction as long as their respective world is properly crafted. One of the more pleasant surprises in terms of SciFi TV-Shows has been Netflix's original series "Travelers". While it was sadly canceled after 3 seasons, there's still a lot to see and love during that time frame.

Before we get into more detail, please be advised that the article will contain heavy spoilers for the first few episodes but I'm not going to spoil anything that you wouldn't see in your first sitting.

   First things first, here are the key facts for the show:

Number of seasons: 3 Number of episodes: 34 Originally Aired: 2016 - 2018

Travelers comes with a somewhat unique twist on an already known setting. Mankind managed to all but destroy planet earth and is now clinging on the verge of total annihilation. The last survivors are living in a huge dome complex and as the present can't be redeemed any longer, they try to change the past instead. So yes, at first glance it's your classical time travel show, but it comes with a nice twist. The people of the future don't have any means to transport themselves back to the past. Instead, they can only send their mind. Because of that, they need a host for themselves in the past. To achieve that, they need a T.E.L.L.. That's short for Time, Elevation, Latitude, and Longitude of a person close to it's historical death. So the first thing they need to do after they travel back to the past is prevent the death of their host. After that, they continue to live their life but also actively work towards changing the future to prevent mankind's certain doom.

Now all of this obviously sounds somewhat crazy (and it is) but it's Science Fiction after all. The cool thing to me is that they don't over-explain all of this. This kind of time travel is possible, they are doing it, and that's all you really need to know. Since they don't bother giving (pseudo-)scientific explanations, it's a lot easier for the viewer to just accept that it's all possible. So instead of trying to make something that's completely implausible look plausible, the show focuses on the implications of said possibilities.

   Source

  The show follows the story of a team of 5 travelers operating in present day America. Especially in the beginning, the show mostly focuses on an issue of the week style where each week there's a new mission the team needs to complete. At the same time, the show starts to build bigger story arks which over time replace the issue of the week style, changing into a more modern story telling. At the same time, the show takes an amazing amount of time to develop it's characters. Yes, they are out to safe the (future) world, but they are also humans living a human life in a past that's oddly alien to them. They have to interact with their hosts life, the people he knew, the decisions he made. This creates an extremely engaging setting and is really beautiful to watch.

There's also a good share of moral dilemmas. The Travelers receive their missions from the Director, who is communicating with them from the future. He usually doesn't explain why something has to be done but instead just orders something to be executed exactly as ordered. This creates a lot of scary situations where the Travelers are asked to kill a minor, blow up a building and much more. Always trusting that the Director has the good of all mankind at heart, they still start to question whether there are better options available to them. This is where the show really shines as it allows the viewer enough time to pause for a second and question what he would do in that situation. That's the beauty of it all really, in these moments you don't care at all that it's totally implausible to have time travel like that, you just accept it and start to ponder the consequences.

   Source

  Obviously, not everything is golden for travelers. There's a reason it was canceled after 3 seasons after all. As the story progresses, there are more and more holes in the whole story. The power and ability of the future seems to vary a lot depending on what serves the current story line best. There's one episode in the second season that portraits the possibilities of the Director as being almost endless and that really kills a lot of the suspense. On top of that, with the ever escalating scenario, the whole world becomes a bit unbelievable towards the end and one can't help but feel like the show wasn't launched with a clear roadmap of what should happen during its run.

This becomes blatantly obvious during the last episodes. There's still a lot of character development which is all made moot by the fact that the show is going to end soon after. It feels like they had still seasons worth of ideas for their characters but they simply lacked the time to finish them. While the shows grand final is satisfying and fitting for the whole show, it leaves you feeling like they could have done more with the whole concept.

Nevertheless, Travelers is an excellent show with a lot of interesting concepts and some of the best moral dilemmas you'll see in any Science Fiction show. It's really cool to watch the show alongside somebody else as there's a lot of room for discussion after every single episode. To me, the first season is close to perfect. Season 2 is decent as well but it's also where the world starts to feel a bit off. Season 3 is really good as well, but you can tell that they were running out of time and in the end only focused on delivering a satisfying ending.

All things considered, I'd rate the show at 7 of 10, with the missing points mostly coming from the fact that the show could have been a lot better with more seasons and less escalation early on. Anyway, if you haven't seen the show and like Science Fiction, I'd say it's a must watch. It certainly is one of the best SciFi shows running on Netflix right now!

And that's all from me for today, thank you all for reading and see you next time!

[khazrakh]

Noise.cash Is About To Drastically Change Free Tips!

Yesterday, the official noise.cash account made a lengthy post providing a lot of detail on where the platform is standing right now, what issues they are facing and how they want to move forward from there. If you haven't read it yet, you want to check that post first as I'm not going to rephrase the whole article and instead mostly focus on one aspect. First and foremost, they are obviously still having a lot of issues with Spam on their platform. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anybody even remotely active on the site, but the numbers they provided are pretty drastic nevertheless.

  Source

  Without giving an exact definition, they consider 96% of all posts as either spammy or low quality! 96%! That means that only 1 in 25 posts is of at least acceptable quality. Again, this was to be expected. Whenever there's free money on the line, people will come and try to abuse the system. For Noise.cash growth was probably always more important than quality. It seems like this is finally going to change, though. Moving forward, only users providing quality content will receive free tips while everybody else is still free to use the platform but won't receive any tips to give out in the process. To do that, they will constantly monitor the content created by users and classify them as either eligible or not eligible for free tips. New users won't receive any free tips until they have been reviewed, so you can't just create a new account every time you don't receive any more tips.

Here's the extensive list of content they consider to be low quality:

All kinds of giveaways (if like to give away money, sure, but give your own)

Subscription/tip exchanges

Replies like "done", "wow", "nice", "great", "thank you for the information"

Image posts with a smiley,

Image posts with a short phrase "London" or "Tree" (or slightly longer "A woman standing near a tree")

Quotes

Anything that has been copied from the Internet,

"Good evening", "hello" posts and replies,

"Time for a dinner", "here is my dinner", "I just ate dinner", "did you eat your dinner?", "what did you eat for dinner?"

"My click" (random photo that you took with a phone without anything interesting about it, like a story or something)

"Thank you XX for tipping me" ... and more ...

Taking these measures was long overdue in my opinion and it certainly is a step in the right direction. I agree with all the points given above, although I don't mind stuff like people sharing their dinner. I mean I'm not too interested in that kind of content, but it's something a lot of people seem to do on Twitter or Instagram as well, so I wouldn't consider it an issue. Nevertheless, these changes should reduce the amount of people that still receive free tips dramatically. Assuming that the total amount of tips given out will not be reduced, this is great news for all users actively engaging with the platform. Sadly, there's that "...and more..." at the end. There's one change I don't really get and that is directed at the very platform you are reading this on right now:

There is one more thing that we will probably stop sponsoring in the future - that is promotion of competing sites (Leo, Hive, Peakd, Steem, etc...) and competing cryptocurrencies (i.e. anything except for Bitcoin Cash).

Now I'm not a fan of that decision and I honestly think it's a huge mistake to do so. There are several reasons for that:

Hive/Leo aren't competing sites!

To tell the truth, I don't really understand why noise.cash would consider Hive/Leo to be a cometing site in the first place. The former is focused on microblogging and thus super short content while the latter is focused on fully fledged articles, often times consisting of 1000 words or more. I don't think anybody would start writing full articles on [noise.cash] nor would anybody start to post 10 word posts on LeoFinance. Now I would get if it was about Project Blank, but the examples given above are basically just other parts of the blockchain ecosystem. They don't compete, they profit from each other! That directly ties in to my next point:

Hive/Leo is bringing users to noise.cash!

I mean seriously, when noise.cash took off you couldn't throw a stone around here without hitting an article about the platform! Consequentially, a ton of people from Hive and its tribes signed up for noise.cash. At the same time, a lot of people probably learned about Hive through posts on noise.cash. It's not like the two services are taking away from each other. On the contrary, they both help each other to grow!

The Hive crowd probably delivers the highest quality content on the whole platform!

This is the most important reason in my opinion. If you look around noise.cash, you'll notice that a lot of the best quality content is coming from people active on Hive! Yes, we obviously link to our articles back here, but we also produce a lot more content exclusively targeted at noise.cash. If you take away their free tips, chances are they will stop producing content altogether and the platform would loose a lot of its quality content overnight.

The truth is, noise.cash would hurt itself immensely by seeing through with this measure. Project Blank is taking a lot longer than we all had anticipated and honestly, by now I wasn't sure how easy it would be to convince people to leave noise.cash behind and get involved with Project Blank. But by making these changes, the platform will essentially scare off the whole Hive community and while we obviously aren't the only ones producing quality content there, we are playing a huge role in those 4% good quality posts.

So what's going to happen now? For the moment, most users will probably just continue what they are doing and just post what they did before. It will take some days before the changes really come into effect. When they do and if people find themselves to no longer be eligible for free tips, they will probably just leave the site behind. It certainly is what I'll be doing. Fun enough, I'm among the first accounts that they linked to, stating that I produce good content:

    So there might be hope that things won't be as dramatic as they sound. Nevertheless, not all people will be as patient. According to some other posts I've read, there are already some users that did leave the platform for good after the announcement was made. So the damage is done either way and we'll just have to wait and see how severe it will be in the end. At the very least, though, it once more illustrates why Project Blank is so badly needed!

And that's all from me for today. Thank you all for reading and see you next time!