The Best Power Armor in Fallout 76

Power Armor is the poster child of the Fallout series and it's no secret why. It's the must-have suit of armor every player strives for. In earlier games, it was a prize for making it deep into the game, and surviving the many hazards the Wasteland would throw at you...Except Fallout 4, which just gives it to you within the first hour or so into the main storyline. In Fallout 76, common Power Armor is scattered throughout West Virginia, but some models are definitely more valuable than others. They also require more hoops to jump through but what they bring to the table makes it well worth it. Me and Gamers Decide have put together a quick list of the Best Power Armors in Fallout 76, and where you can get them.

Click Me: Fallout 76 Best Power Armors (and How to get them)

Top 10 Best Builds in Fallout 76

What is a Build, you might be asking? In video games, it's not about putting up walls or construction. It's about the skills and abilities you choose to loadout your character for the adventures ahead. A build differentiates yourself from the others in the game. It makes you unique and allows you to overcome obstacles in a way that caters to your preferred playstyle. But not all Builds are designed equally, and there is no such thing as Jack of All, Master of All. Me and Gamers Decide has put together a little list to help those struggling with their perk cards to get the most bang out of Fallout 76. Here is, the Top 10 Builds you can use in Fallout 76.

Click Me: Top 10 Best Builds in Fallout 76

Top 10 Best Camp Locations in Fallout 76

Home is where the heart is, and in Fallout 76 home is as realistic, functional, or outlandish as you want it to be. It's also hard to find that one spot to call home in that wacky, dangerous Wasteland. Me and Gamer Decide have been traveling these roads a while to find some good locations for you to set up camp in Fallout 76, be it a permanent homestead, or a location to pitch a tent for the time being. This is the Top 10 Best Camp Locations in Fallout 76.

Click Me: Top 10 Best Camp Locations in Fallout 76

Top 10 Best Mutations in Fallout 76

Mutations in Fallout 76 are a unique system that garners unique perks to the player, while also slapping them with an equally unique penalty on top of it. You take the good, you take the bad and make of it what you will. From blowing yourself and everyone else around you sky high, to being able to leap over gas stations in a single bound, me and Gamers Decide have put together a list of the Top 10 Best and Useful Mutations in Fallout 76.

Click Me: Top 10 Best Mutations in Fallout 76

Top 10 Best Armors in Fallout 76

At the start of a player's journey in Fallout 76, Armor is Armor. Once you get into the thick of it, later on, you will realize that no, Armor is not just armor. With the help of Gamers Decide, I was put together a comprehensive list of some of the best armors in Fallout 76 to help keep you alive out in hostile Appalachia.

Click Me: Top 10 Best Armors in Fallout 76

Top Ten Best Weapons in Fallout 76

In Fallout 76, not all weapons are created equally...You can't just pick up any weapon you find and expect it to carry you the distance. I have joined forces with Gamers Decide and combed through several sources to bring you, a list of the Top 10 Weapons in Fallout 76 that you should consider adding to your personal arsenal. Happy hunting, Wastelander.

Click Me: The Top 10 Best Weapons in Fallout 76

The Outer Worlds: Future Imperfect

Todays Blog:
"Future Imperfect"

The Outer Worlds

Consider me surprised that at the time of this writing it's just after midnight and I finished the credits to Obsidian's latest offering, The Outer Worlds, 48 hours after putting down my money for it, binging it over the course of my days off. That's right, I binged it. I smashed it. I sat down to it and didn't put it down unless I had do, or I needed a moment to recover from the phenomenon that some refer to as "office chair butt". 

The concept, without spoilers, is pretty basic and throws you into the heart of the action. During an early foray into colonizing the stars, you were part of a crew aboard a ship called the Hope. At some point everyone was put into cryo-stasis for the journey and things...went wrong. In this case the ships FTL drive took a tumble, and the Hope was left adrift. Rather than mount a rescue mission, for sixty or so years you were left to sleep in icy comfort by the corporate overlords that lord over the Halcyon system of worlds. It was just not feasible to come and rescue everyone. One madcap scientist takes offense to this, and you awaken with a mission briefing and not even enough time to take that piss you've been holding for decades- Get help.

After that the game spirals into a Space Western of marvelous adventure, in a universe where corporate life seeps into everything, from the way people live their lives, right down to the enforcement of the law. It is a tale of a rebellion against The Man, and the one unaccounted variable that fell from the sky. You.

And before you know, it's over, and the dust is settling and you are watching the final outcome of all the decisions you made over the course of one wild ride...Roll credits, back to the start screen.

The Fallout Comparison:

Many have compared this game to Obsidians stab at Bethesda's take on the Fallout franchise, and in many ways I found myself wondering if they just put the New Vegas game under a new graphics engine and UI and made it into a space game. You would not be faulted for thinking that, this game drips with influence from the Fallout series, namely New Vegas and perhaps some Fallout's 1 and 2, with the way your skills interweave in conversations and can steer the direction of a mission at any given time. What you know dictates what you can do. There is even a version of the VATS system integrated into the game explained as a bizarre side effect of being haphazardly awoken out of cry-sleep by a scientist who only half knew what he was doing. 

Over Before You Know It:

Ever walked into a movie theater for the latest summer blockbuster and next thing you know you're walking out all giddy about what you saw, and it passed like a dream? That is fairly what this game feels like by the time you reach the ending. It feels like you just started the game, but you know you have done everything from rescuing colonists from their own self destruction, to helping a wilderness survivalist come to terms with her dead team mates, and even starred in a low budget film. 

Misleading Galaxy Map:

Many will point out that you do not visit all of the worlds that are listed on the galactic map, which is a point of contention. I can only fathom that they will be utilized for the inevitable DLC (the game is doing very well in the reviews department, Obsidian would be a fool not to pull the golden DLC train). To be honest you only visit a handful of the worlds on the map, various locations opening up on a single world for you to land on for various missions. You will spend 50% of the game going between two points on the galactic map rather often, namely you will be calling the world of Monarch home for the bulk of the game, as it is undeniably the largest world you will visit and has the most quests associated with it to my count. This in no way hurts the game majorly but it does leave you wanting more out of some worlds than others.

You Can Go Back...But Why?:

You're free to go where you will. There's no one stopping you from revisiting a particular settlement you grew fond of. However, you will find that once you have concluded the missions available in an area that there is very little to do in these places, rather than walk around and feel good or bad about what transpired there. There are even beds to use, but these are only really important or serve any function at all in Supernova difficulty. I found myself using a bed, just to say I did. This sort of progression and lack of side distractions serves, perhaps, to help drive the player to stay on task and move forward in the story. It just would have been nice to have something else to do with the factions we've chosen to ingratiate ourselves.

Overwhelming Inventory:

You will find items strewn everywhere that will leave you scratching your head and wondering why you picked it up. Food, booze, oils and creams and pastes, all with minor boosts and buffs for a variety of situations. I never used them. I never felt I had to, at least on the Normal difficulty. It doesn't help that using them is slightly convoluted and is not wholly explained, unless I was not paying attention to a very brief notification in the early stages of the game. While the game does not appear to support any sort of Hardcore Survival Mode like Fallout New Vegas, they certain have enough Rizzo Company Purpleberry Crunch cereal laying around to insinuate that they were thinking about it. 

Speech Solves Everything:

Put enough points into Speech, and you will be able to settle most matters that didn't already begin in violence without wasting a single bullet or energy cell. Persuasion and Lying skills opens doors, especially if caught sneaking around areas you have no business in. It helps unlock venues you normally wouldn't have considered and can shift the situation heavily in your favor. 

Should you buy this game? If you have a love of science fiction adventure and a fondness for Obsidian's take on Fallout, you will enjoy The Outer Worlds immensely. In some places it leaves you wanting for more. If you're patient, you could wait a while, for it to go on sale for the holidays, or for the DLC to emerge eventually as we all know it will. But chances are if you have an interest, you will get it, and binge it hard and fast like I did.

I liked it. I want more.

That sinking feeling about The Sinking City

Frogwares The Sinking City is the type of game you don't see much anymore outside of the occasional release from the Sherlock Holmes series every so often. Detective Games are very niche and can often be criticized as being excruciatingly slow paced and merely one step above pixel hunting in old point-and-click adventure games. All the same, I love this type of game to death. They make me feel clever.
The Sinking City is a love letter to the Lovecraft mythos, and ties in many things from Lovecraft lore. I often spy signs for Whateley Fishing, a reference to The Dunwich Horror. A group of people you meet, the Innsmouthers, tell their tale much akin to a direct sequel to the story Shadow Over Innsmouth. Wrap that all up with strange abominations crawling out of the sea to eat your face, and the threat of a cosmic horror from the deep and conspiracies and cults on top of a Sanity Mechanic, and you have all the bulletpoints for a solid story worthy of the mythos.
If you look up articles on the game, most everyone is pointing out the use of Lovecrafts own particular brand of racism. I love Lovecraft and his work, but the guy was also a huge racist. The game tells you outright they included measures of racism and social injustice, as they were products of the time the game takes place in, and that ignoring them would be like saying such things didn't exist. I can respect this, even if the subject matter makes me uncomfortable. But this isn't a game you play to feel cozy and give good vibes. That's not the name of the game. We're about to embark on a journey into madness.

Story-wise, stop me if you heard this one. You play as Charles Reed, ex-navy diver turned Private Eye after an incident gave you Psuedo Assassins Creed Eagle Vision senses. You've been having dreams about an impending apocalypse scenario involving a city sinking below the waves and something bad waking up. Following the clues you windup in Oakmont, a sketchy city cut off from the rest of the world after a freak flood where the residents are about as welcoming as you'd expect. You're an Outsider, after all. You don't know their ways, their traditions, or their ways of life. They don't want you here and they'll tell you as such. But you're not here by choice. You have a job to do, investigating the visions you, and many other people have been having that all have them eventually arriving in Oakmont.
Your first contact on your mission has you working for a local pillar of the community, Robert Throgmorton. This is where we realize that Reed has probably seen enough by now that he's not shaken by the unconventional. Throgmorton appears at first glance to be an ape in a nice suit. You can ask him about this, to which we learn at some point in his ancestry, his family married into a "prestigious royal line" that gifted them their unique appearance. I asked myself the question, and chances are so will you...And spoiler alert, yes, it turns out Roberts father banged a monkey while on expedition in Africa.
Does Reed freak out about this? Does he freak out about anything? Hell no. He's already plagued with visions and hallucinations as is. People like Throgmorton and the Innsmouthers with their fish-like countenances are perhaps the sanest things that Reed has gazed upon. Reed is rarely visibly shaken by anything. He seems like the sort of guy who uses sarcasm as a coping mechanism. That's pretty hardboiled if you asked me. 
This is where the game's sanity mechanic comes in. Observing or investigating certain things, or being in the presence of creatures trying to eat your scrotum can take a toll on the blue meter by our health. When it drops to about 75%, you're going to start seeing things, ranging from drippy ink people, esoteric letters crawling all over the wall textures, to phantoms coming at you. Occasionally I'd see the common crab spider enemy skittering at me before vanishing, but more often than not I'll see a vision of what appears to be a doctor with bloody empty eye sockets coming at me like I owe him three fifty.
We can say Reed has his hands full here.

Gameplay wise, the primary focus of the game is solving mysteries and investigating. You're new to town so naturally you don't know where anything is, and while there is a compass waypoint mechanic help you navigate around, you have to place these markers yourself. See they incorporated finding locations into the investigation. Say I find a clue that tells me a persons last known residence is at the corner of Here and There. Okay, I need to get to Here and There. I have to locate it on my map and place the ticker in the area I'm certain the spot will be. Then we hoof it and see what we find. But what if I didn't find an address? Well they thought of that too. I may not always come out with a name and an address, but maybe I picked up some other details I can look up. You can use the city services like the hospital and the police station to browse the archives and link information to get a clue you're looking for. You have to enter three topics of search criteria to maybe get what you're looking for and I often found myself scratching my brain which specific criteria the game was asking me for. For a particular case, I know I need to find where an old glass manufacturer is in town, which means I need to get to city hall and look up city plans and businesses.
This is where we reach my first minor gripe about the game. I might be clear across town to where I need to get to, and I can't always walk because the town is flooded and derelict. A lot of roads are underwater, which forces me to take a boat. If I swim, I'll eventually get nibbled to death by an unseen something, not fun. This can lead to a lock of quickly tabbing to the map to get your heading, and usually more than one boat trip across town. Sure there is a fast travel mechanic, but you can only use these after you've found them, naturally, and at the nodes themselves between them. This might be me personally, but I spend a lot of time in this game trying to calculate the path of least resistance between two points. Even with that I'm still stuck hoofing it most places. It makes the game feel padded because the city is indeed massive, but you do need these long stretches in between because they give you time to scavenge for supplies. There's no stores in town, the economy has gone to hell since the flood so you need to dumpster dive for stuff. Especially for health kits and ammo. For a game that makes me have to consult public records for my next clue, I'm surprised the game didn't force me to hunt down a workbench to craft ammunition. It makes me question the quality of Reeds ammo, because as a person who likes to hit a range now and again to burn ammo, I once had a box of ammo that kept firing dead. Curiously, I took one of the rounds and was able to screw off the bullet from the casing, and inside was...Well, I don't know the exact amount of gunpowder needed to make the bang happen, but I'm fairly certain this wasn't nearly enough. Then again, Reed was in the navy, and probably knows way more than me.
Now that I've touched on that, how's the combat? It's...There. It exists. I'm not terribly sure how much better to explain it. You have perhaps the stiffest melee attack, and I can never get a good look at it, but it looks like Reed pulls a shovel out of his ass and smacks whatever is in front of him. What helps with melee is if an enemy jukes you to the side, and they will, turning with them into the swing will still land the hit. But this is not a game where combat is the focus. You're not a warrior. Gun play is a little more viable because you really don't want most of these things getting too close, but you have to watch your ammo. Bullet casings and gunpowder are the best things to find. You start with a pistol that kinda gets the job done, but eventually you'll upgrade your arsenal as the case develops. Getting a little too crazy? Find a safe spot and jam a needle of anti-psychotics. Low on health? Find a safe spot and jam yourself with a needle of...Okay Reed what is in that syringe? I know healing in video games can be a little hand-wavy, but I really want to know whats in a syringe that going to heal bites and lacerations. I think if anything it's something to stave off infection.

Overall, that's the game. There isn't a whole lot of case files in the game, but each case is in and of itself a journey into a city of broken minds and shattered dreams. Once case will probably run you two hours, maybe more, depending on what's on the agenda. This is also because of all the running around you have to do. I want to call it padding it out, and it is, but it wouldn't be so bad if there were distractions from the case files and the occasional side objective. Oakmont is huge and sprawling. The streets are alive with activity, but there is nothing else to do or immerse yourself in other than the tasks at hand. I suppose in a way this makes sense. Reed isn't here on vacation. He's on the clock to find out why people are going insane, including himself. He doesn't have time to stop and smell the roses. When it comes to open world games, you need to have at least something going on other than the main storyline. But when you're a detective/survival horror game, I can understand how that might detract from the atmosphere. Something would seem off if they pulled like Red Dead 2 if you took a break from your investigations for a spot of poker at a bar somewhere. The town is going to get eaten by an underwater chaos being, after all.

Should you play it?
If you like mystery games, film noir styles, and lovecraftian mythos, I'd say give it a go. It'll keep you busy for a while, but I'd probably wait for it to go on sale or reduce in price, as fresh on the shelf price like I paid is a bit too much for what you get. This is a 39$ grade title, not a 59$.

Is Today a Good Day to Go Live?

Most content creators don't blow up overnight. When you first set out on that journey, it's the equivalent to a bright eyed bumpkin from Ohio getting off at the bus stop in Hollywood with nothing but a suitcase, 20$ in their pocket, and a dream. You start with nothing, doing what you can with what you got. Small gigs, testing the water. It's a lot of finding what works and what doesn't, and a lot of playing to an empty house. It's frustrating and you'll be left with a feeling of existential dread that maybe you weren't cut out for this kind of thing. You invest what you can, new microphone, audio equipment, sound boards all that. But all that means nothing if you don't put in the work.

This conversation branches off into a lot of different directions but today I want to talk to you about the topic...Is today a good day?
How's your day going? How are you feeling? Have you been keeping up on your obligations? Bills paid, errands run, all that?
Chances are you're like me and you work a full time job with maybe a decent chunk of the day to maybe sit down and get some streaming in. But...you're stressed out, things aren't going so well in your personal life, work's being a hassle all the time, and maybe you're not feeling good. Headache, bathroom related problems...How warm's your forehead? These can all come together and really put a hindrance on your motivation to get online and entertain people. It's like the last thing you want to do, but you know the golden rule- You gotta put in the work.

But. BUT...Just because you're walking the path of a Content Creator doesn't mean you're immune to life's little inconveniences and ups and downs. You're not a machine. It doesn't matter if you make Cosplay, paintings, gaming videos, or whatever, you HAVE to take care of yourself. And that sometimes means you have to tell yourself, sometimes a little firmly...Maybe today's not a good day for it.
And there's gonna be this little voice in the back of your head that will try and egg you on. What if today is the day we hit the mark? What if this is the stream/photo set/video that marks our break out, it says. You have to be firm with yourself, that day will come, and it won't come in one day. You're not going to fall off the face of the earth into the void of internet obscurity because you took a day or two to get yourself together, get some things done you've been ignoring because of the computer or the crafting table. Work/Life balance applies to being a Content Creator about as much as having a mundane job. And when you have both going on side by side, self-care is almost a mandatory. You gotta take care of yourself, or all the stress of work and the grind on the internet will build up inside you like a warm soda bottle in July dropped on the curb.
But just because you take a day off doesn't mean you can't still work on your growth. Growth is all on you and how you market yourself online, you know. No program or website is going to do that for you. Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook...We have so many tools now for us to interact with people. Post something funny. Maybe you get an idea and wanna blast it on social media. That's still attention to your brand. And your followers will appreciate the occasional off-time candor. Best of all it takes what, fifteen seconds to mash out a Tweet?

If you're a gaming streamer: When was the last time you played a game just because you wanted to play it? When was the last time you enjoyed a single player game? Gamer's game, and sometimes switching off the camera just to enjoy a little personal time in a favorite can do a lot for your morale and mindset. Maybe you got a backlog of games you haven't gotten around to finishing because they don't really hold Stream value?

If you're a cosplayer/model: I'm a guy and I'm nearly attractive enough a one to tell people who put their everything online what to do with their time. I follow enough on social media to understand that it's no less stressful, which makes sense because they're using their whole being to create their craft. Arranging photo shoots, making the costumes, making sure everything fits, posing all pretty or handsome for the camera, looking through results to see what passes, traveling to locations for shoots. It's a lot. My only advice I can give them is put the phone camera down and maybe enjoy a hot cup of cocoa once in a while and some Netflix. Wear the baggy sweats and splay out like you own the couch. Enjoy not being focused on. 

More generally, when I get stressed about life, I go out to eat by myself. I find a crowded restaurant and have a meal by myself and soak in the chatty atmosphere. It helps bring me down from whatever's bothering me and put me in the moment. It's refreshing.
Go out for a walk, breathe in some fresh air and soak in some sunshine. Get away from the computer for a while and enjoy a little nothing. When you're a kid, you always want to do something. But as an adult and our livelihood is always doing something, there is nothing more relaxing, than a nice bit of nothing at all.

The best part of doing these little things, is you're not focused on The Work, and you can let your mind wander, and when you do that, ideas can come. You'll be minding your own business, and boom, the lightening happens, and you get that surge of energy back that you've maybe been missing for a couple days. Now you got a little more direction, and all it took was a little bit of doing you, as nature intended.

So...Next time you wake up and go "Ugh, I really should get a Stream/costume/whatever done today", do a little check. Is today a good day?

Borderlands 2 and why I never played it twice

Lately my brother has been replaying Borderlands 2 again in preparation for the proper third installment in the franchise, using this new mod setup that changes up how the item spawns operate and the quirks and loadouts one can achieve. He's also been hinting that I should give it a go as well, but I have a hard time expressing how long ago that train left the station.
At some point in my gaming hobby, I started to drift away from games where the core meat of the enjoyment was unloading insane amounts of ordinance upon mentally and morally questionable degenerate psychopaths and fine tuning a character loadout to achieve something akin to a ballistic lovecraftian monstrosity, leaving nothing but Armageddon in my wake. Couple this with a story narrative so grim and edgy, and mixed with a dark sense of humor messed up enough to make the writers for late night Cartoon Network wonder what they were on, I bottom line do not find it to be a 100% satisfactory experience. I played through it once, I played through the DLC once, many many years ago. I've had my fill.
With Borderlands 3 looming on the horizon, Borderlands 2 has become a hot topic in streaming circles for content creators cashing in on the hype. They are playing through it multiple times, to get that higher difficulty and play it "as it was meant to be played". I never understood this mindset, submitting myself to repeating the same trodden path again and again to achieve some altered state for maximum enjoyment.
I say this, and as I was typing it, I called myself out as a hypocrite. I play MMO's dominantly these days due to my love of open world exploration and roleplaying. Essentially every character you make, with simply different combat abilities, you are retreading the same steps, the same zones and encounters again and again, to achieve some altered state for maximum enjoyment.
This said, what is the difference? Is it the setting? The story? Am I just so sick and tired of Handsome Jack having been hashed and rehashed as this tragic villain twice now (the Tell Tale game and the Pre-Sequel), that his very name makes me convulse? Maybe it's because I find the characters so grossly unlikable. Most of them are criminals who've done things that make Handsome Jack really seem like the valiant hero and savior he makes himself out to be ad nauseum throughout the game.

Ah yes, that's it. I never found a character I could honestly connect with. All of the characters are strange parodies of tropes, coupled with an almost forced attempt by the games writers to make them repugnant, but also endearing.
Borderlands, the original, kept it simple. These characters you played as were blank slates, with a character in the beginning giving a brief blurb to their background and motivations. But also, I could embody them mentally as I saw fit, that Roleplayer inside me kicking in, much in the same way why Link and Gordon Freeman are strictly silent protagonists; It makes it easier and more enjoyable for the player to inflect themselves upon them, become them, in a sense.
Borderlands 2 throws this concept out the window. Now everyone has a backstory to explore and a voice. It's less intimate, less personal. And I honestly wish Lilith would shut the hell up. They took characters I moderately liked in the original, and turned them all into renegade bullshit munching robin-hood wannabes.
But no one plays these games for the character dynamics and chemistry, or the narrative. That's all secondary and serves as a reason to explore more dangerous environments and obtain bigger and more volatile weaponry. It's not about saving Pandora, or seeking the secrets of the Vaults. It's about the sound a gun makes when you pull the trigger and watching your enemies whittle away to nothing in a hailstorm of bullets and explosions. Everything else, like Moxxie's provocative appearance (of which I am a fan, by the way), is simply decoration.

At least that's how I feel about it.

Red Dead Redemption 2: The Horsening

For the past few months I have been playing copious amounts of Red Dead Redemption 2, sequel to the much acclaimed Red Dead Redemption, spiritual sequel to the lackluster Red Dead Revolver. Does anyone even remember Red Dead Revolver? I know I don't, except for a multiplayer deathmatch mode where each kill counted towards cards in a poker hand, and you were trying to somehow make a winning hand.
RDR2, which I constantly have to correct from R2D2, is a prequel more than an actual sequel, and tells the story of what the fuck happened to John Marston and his gang to cause the first game to happen in the first place. This time you play as Arthur Morgan, a member of the Van Der Linde gang along a younger John and their leader Dutch and company. You're all on the run from The Man after a botched robbery, leaving you all stranded in a cold frozen hell that acts as the games tutorial phase. From there the gang ventures out to try and rebuild and recoup their losses while plotting and scheming to get rich, and get back the nest egg they were forced to abandon in Blackwater, an area where you are permanently wanted by The Man, aka The Pinkerton Detective Agency, the black suit wearing douchebags from the first game who had no qualms about kidnapping a wife and child and holding them hostage to get a saddle weary cowboy to do their dirty work for them. It was a more sensible time in American history.
Gameplay wise, there's a lot in this game, far too much to cobble together coherently so I will regale you with some tidbits from my time in RDR2...

-While just out for a ride on my horse, purchased for a whole 15$, which is a lot of money by 1899 money, I didn't see a short cliff and sent me and my pricey pony sailing off the ledge. I survived, but ol' Gluestick was dying, and it was a little heartbreaking. Especially when it gave me the prompt to put him out of his misery. I couldn't do it, and I had no Horse Revive on me at the time, so I just walked away...forcing me to walk an in-game day to the nearest train station back to the major town of Valentine to get a new one. Thankfully, my saddle game-magic'd it's way back to the horse merchant. Because I hadn't taken my saddle...I had been forced to walk, without my rifles, because they all go into your horse saddle. Keep this in mind, it's a major gameplay feature.

-Poker and other table games make a return, and they feel immersive and lively as in the first game, to the point I was down 50$ at 5$ a buy in...because I am really bad at poker.

-One of the early missions had me tracking down renowned gunfighters to get quotes from them regarding a book some city fellow was writing. Naturally all but one thought I needed more lead in my blood. One in particular I met on a train, and he took off running, assuming I was some government bounty hunter. Our chase led to the top of the train where we had our expected gun duel. After which I noticed that the train by now was very far from my original destination, and still running. So I figured I could ride it to the end, and then noticed my horse was still keeping pace with the train. I saw the prompt to leap from the train to my horse, but apparently my input was off timing-wise, and I leapt off the train and landed just short of my horse, face down in a muddy bog. Arthur lay there for a moment, as though contemplating his life choices before getting up. We proceeded to ride the rest of the way to the biggest city in the game, San Denis.

-San Denis is a playground if you have money to spare. On top of actual vaudevillian acts you can take in for cheap, there are saloons, stores, and other distractions to separate you from your ill-gotten gains, it is also where you can get the most fetching of wild west clothing. One such instance was a man selling me a book on how to get rich quick...for a whole 50$. What I had bought turned out to be a wordy and lengthy reference to modern get rich quick E-books that can be summarized as "you got scammed, you bitch", though I have no doubt this book actually existed.
San Denis is also where I learned that people will get annoyed if you are walking directly behind them for too long. And by too long, I mean longer than five seconds. The city is dense and the streets are crowded, so this will happen a lot, with you using the context sensitive prompt to apologize and try and wiggle past the crowds, or get rowdy, or risk getting rowdy, just trying to get to the barber...

-A mission concluded with me out in the middle of nowhere with my horse too far away to hear my sirens whistle call to beckon it to me, forcing me to hoof it to the nearest train station once more to get back. I was bitten by a snake in the brush.

-I came across an oddity in the road, it turned out to be a dead eagle. Thinking it might be worth something to the Poacher, I tossed it on my saddle and proceeded to hoof it. On the way to the Poachers camp, the Eagles remains started to decay, which unfortunately ruined it's value to the poacher.

-I happened upon a bandit riding off with a woman as his hostage, so I gave chase. I managed to shoot the bandit dead off his horse, but the horse kept riding with the woman in tow. I never saw her again. I can only hope she and the horse, made it out okay, and lived happily ever after.

-After a pivotal story mission, the Van Der Linde gang had a hootenany, aka a party. This culminated in everyone singing a song that was about anal sex.

-There are hookers, but you can't acquire their services, much like in the first game. You can however take a bath a hotel should you and your clothes get filthy, and employ the aid of a comely lass to assist you, which it does appear she gives you a handy.

-The story mission A Quiet Drink is perhaps the funniest damn thing you will ever see in your life.

-RDR2 Online feels more of the same, but now you play as a character of your own creation, centered around you being sent to prison for something you may or may not have done and sprung out by a rich well to do woman hunting down the very people who put you away, and wants your help in settling a score with these choice individuals. It feels almost exactly like GTA 5 Online, but in the wild west, and character creation is honestly horrific. Hilariously horrific.

If you haven't played it, you should. At the time of this writing I haven't completed it and spend most of my time wandering around and messing about. I'm at the point in the story where I have to rescue Micah from jail and to be honest...I know how this story ends. We all know things are going to fall apart which leads to John Marston's one man war against the remnants of the Van Der Linde gang. When last I checked there was no Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 1, which means his story will take a grim turn in the worst of ways, much like John's story ended in a hail of gunfire.
9/10, go play it.

Still playing 76

It's early 2010 and I'm trolling around in the Bethesda Softworks official forums during the hype storm of Fallout: New Vegas. The post that comes to mind today now that we have Fallout 76, is one that begged the question, does the game even need a story? Why not a game where we start on one end of the map and make it our goal to just survive? Well, eight years later they got their wish. And I am certain they are still complaining. Because that is what you do when you're in a gaming fandom- you complain.

Flash forward to today. I'm playing Fallout 76, wandering the zone that encompasses a majority of the beginning content. I call it the Green Zone, sandwiched between Toxic Valley to the north, and the Mole-Person ridden ash pit that makes up the south. I'd been relying on .308 ammo so much that now I was pretty much ammo starved and what ammo I did have I didn't carry that particular weapon. My inventory is almost always 90% full for some reason despite judicious management. Even with all of my weapons, which just get heavier the more you upgrade, that only dropped about maybe 40 to 50 off my weight. That still begs the question what all in my inventory is adding up to 134 pounds on my person unless it was all the crap in my Aid tab. My stash box is very soon to hit the 600 pound limit thanks to missiles and fusion cores eating up a decent chunk of weight.
I'm still enjoying the game, but I also feel I am not progressing, or at least not in the way I feel I should be. I'll be hitting level 50 soon, and level 30 enemies can still give me grief. Some of the quests at this point I can't really do by myself because they usually involve wandering where Satan himself wouldn't stick his pecker.
It hearkens back to my days in City of Heroes, where if by level 20 you weren't running with a couple of friends, you probably weren't going to be getting through the questlines easily. It was going to be a painful slog, but you might get to the end if you're stubborn and tenacious.
For the most part, I wander the realm, poking into ruins and hoping the game doesn't decide to have a Wendigo decide it wants a piece of me. I'm constantly on the search for materials to keep my weapons and armor repaired, because eventually they will break, and normally at the worst possible times, and frequently. I can't really rely on my Luck based perk card that grants a chance for my stuff to repair itself when I really need it to. Hunger and thirst are also an issue, and I'm always keeping an eye out for my next meal, be it a tin of dog food, or blackberries in the bushes to stave off the health damage.
This is my goal. Survive. Not so much hunting nukes or trying to get upgrades or to progress a story. My objective has become to not die and safely return to my camp. Maybe I specced wrong, and some lack of cohesion in my perks has left me squishy and vulnerable. Maybe the games just hard unless you grind out a lot of resources. I tend to favor single shot or semi-automatic weapons over the heavy miniguns and the like because you can make ammo last longer. Usually the Hunting Rifle upgraded and a sniper rifle. A combat rifle also gets the job done. I'm not exactly pulling the levels of damage some of my friends do, but they're already in the higher levels, so that's to be expected.

As an avid roleplayer, I found a community for it. Good people, but even they are slightly frustrated with the game. It's all voice chat, with the lack of a text chat to connect with players in the world. I wonder if this is by design to get players to go to each other and seek each other out. It creates an isolated and at times lonely atmosphere with only your radio to keep you company at the best of times. It fits the game they made.
But through it all, I keep thinking to myself...This could be better. This can be improved. And granted they've cleaned it up a lot since the B.E.T.A. The game doesn't crash when I log out anymore, they expanded the stash box. The usual tweaks and fixes. I see big things on the way