The Mind Of OverlordTomala
Gaming

I Regret Nothing

This is turning into one of those games that can’t be easily put down. I played for a couple hours last night, and then I woke up and played a bit in bed. It helped my computer generate some heat to keep the bedroom warm, handy when you wake up to cold weather. I’ve continued playing it through the evening and so far I’ve been enjoying it. I’m playing on Human difficulty and it feels a little too easy though compared to the older games. I’m thinking when I do my second playthrough I’ll bump up the difficulty, and even install some mods. The Nexus already has a few things that have piqued my interest.

So far I’ve played as Nero, V and Dante. V seems easier to play compared to Dante or Nero, but still takes some getting used to since his fighting style is quite a bit different. Instead of fighting straight on you wear your enemies down using your familiars, and then once the enemies turn purple you can successfully go in for the kill with your cane. There is a sort of yin and yang at play here, because your demon pets can’t finish off an enemy, and you can’t wear them down like Nero or Dante. I’m not sure if I have a favorite between the three; they’re all fun and they all compliment each other in fighting styles. I especially enjoy the arsenal of arms or “Devil Breakers” Nero has to choose from throughout the game.

There is a healthy selection of Devil Breakers that you’ll find throughout the game that grant you different abilities, some are insanely powerful and others exist mainly to make you question why; aside from the pic above there’s a Breaker designed with your girlfriend in mind… and no it isn’t a dildo, but may as well be. :v:

The graphics for the PC version are nicely optimized. Everything runs butter smooth on ultra, even when playing in 4K downscaled. I may have to install this on the laptop for those special days at work. :zorak:

Food/Drink

Some Food To Break The Silence

It’s my Mother’s birthday today, and since she’s working late I not only made a hot pot of homemade chicken and brown rice soup with black beans, corn, tomatoes and chiles. Something that will be easy to heat back up, and gets more and more flavorful as it sits. I mixed in some smoky chipotle salsa to give it a nice deep flavor.

It might seem weird to server garlic bread on the side, but it actually tastes pretty good when dipped. I bought a couple artisan loaves of garlic bread (with full garlic cloves baked in) and made my own garlic butter to spread on it. I also made a cake for the occasion:

I don’t do cakes too often, so I’m surprised it turned out as well as it did. This is a chocolate cake with a peanut butter cream cheese frosting. I can’t wait to try it tomorrow! I wanted to find some small Reeses to chop up and spread all over the cake but I could only find the big ones, and the consistency just wouldn’t be the same.

Again, work has been keeping me pretty busy this week. I’m expecting the last of my packages tomorrow, so hopefully this will be the weekend where I can finally ship them off to their respected locations. There will also be a video dropping tomorrow, and if I’m lucky some form of livestream this weekend. I also bought the DMC5 Deluxe Bundle during the Steam Winter Sale, and want to have a go at that this weekend. Not to stream, but just to check out. Probably gonna get my ass kicked, but as long as I get to slice and shoot things I’ll be ok. I’m thinking of buying a few other games too, after all I do have until January 2nd to make my decisions.

Gaming / Open Threads

How a week can fly by

You’ll have to excuse the lack of posts; last week killed me with extreme prejudice with Thursday leaving me want to carve someone’s guts out. Lots of drama, and the holiday hustle and bustle gets harder and harder to keep up with. I have a few late packages that haven’t arrived in the mail, but I did get what I do currently have on hand wrapped up and ready. Other than that I spent the whole weekend staying cozy, there’s something about cold weather and sore muscles that make blankets and controllers more inviting. I played a little bit of the Bioshock Remaster with a tweaked Steam Controller config, and I did pretty well. I’ve been wanting to stream that game, in fact I wanted to stream some Serious Sam Christmas mods the other night, but ran into issues across different Serious Sam versions (3 or 4 different versions that didn’t want to cooperate) and while they worked fine in single player I wanted to play with a friend. We could have played split screen, but I was pissed off enough from not being able to play that we just ended up fucking around on an asteroid for about an hour.

Yutram and I found out that if you die prematurely before a survival round starts your time score will be in the negatives. Other than that we had fun killing aliens in space, a therapeutic ending to what was essentially a stressful week.

All in an Overlord's day / Hobbies / Open Threads

Evening Open Thread

I’ve been doing a good job of wearing myself out these last couple of days. Instead of writing something here I was focusing on writing an ending for one of my upcoming videos with the help of Yutram and inspiration from a couple other things. You can also expect a Skyrim video this weekend, full of animated craziness. The New Year’s video is almost done too, just need to put a finishing touch on it before the final export.

My Christmas shopping is pretty much done for the most part. I’m at the point where I’m waiting for a couple items to show up, and then I can wrap things up and send them out… hopefully this weekend if the planets align in my favor.

Open Thread!

 

 

Gaming

The Christmas Game Hop

Well, we’re in the official holiday season. A time to enjoy warm beverages, holiday sweets, getting close with friends and family, and murder sprees!

I kicked off the weekend by playing a custom Left 4 Dead campaign with Yutram the other night, and wow…

Dick in a concrete drum

I’m pretty sure this was a troll campaign from start to finish. We didn’t get any good weapons until the end, and what really amused me aside from the 50 tanks hidden throughout the campaign was there actually being ammo in certain places, which we couldn’t use because we had only pistols… then when we got half way through the campaign we did finally get some Tier 1 weaponry, but suddenly ammo was scarce.

Derp

I also decided to tackle the holiday DLC for Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, and all I got was this lousy hat. Actually this was just a map that already existed in the game, but was redecorated and released as free DLC for the holidays. Defeating Satan Claus gets you that hat achievement. That was one of my favorite levels from the regular game, and given that it was free I can’t really argue about it either. It was fun all around.

You shouldn’t have.

I also hopped around different Serious Sam games and found a few mods here and there. I also went around Killing Floor 2 for a bit and got some holiday achievements. It felt therapeutic after a physically and mentally grueling week for quite a few of us at work, and playing these with spiked tea and eggnog was a nice little escape before returning to reality to do it all again.

Gaming / Technology

RIP Serious Sam Dedicated

What a Serious Sam 3 Server looks like.

I went through my normal rounds of checking on and restarting my collection of game servers, and when opening up VM3 I noticed a couple Telnet connections that I didn’t authorize from an IP address in The Netherlands. To people that don’t know, Telnet is often used for checking in on another computer on your own network or over the internet. Apparently Telnet is built into the Serious Sam games and can’t really be shut off with any convar or switch. You can get around this by uninstalling Telnet and doing a few other configurations to the VM, but to me the amount of fuss isn’t worth it for a server that only runs in vanilla mode (for some reason Croteam doesn’t allow dedicated servers for the moddable client). If I want to play Serious Sam with a friend my desktop and laptop PC’s are more than powerful as a listen server.

Oh well, while two servers may have to be put out of my misery I still have servers for Garry’s Mod, TF2, Quake III Arena and one each for L4D1 and 2.  This also leaves me room to experiment with other kinds of servers, when I find the time of course. Or even expand on some of the current ones.

Gaming / Technology

Music to my eyes.

After hearing from so many users about cancelled shipments it was nice to hear that I’ll be getting these; hopefully my co-worker got his too. I told him about the blowout when it happened and he immediately purchased. At that price it was hard not to.

Once these arrive I have some experiments that I’d like to run, see how well two Steam Controllers fare in couch co-op games.