Mission 19: Bouncing Bomb Test Run. We’re out of special bonuses, so we decide it’s time for the test mission. There shouldn’t be any enemy fighters over Cornwall, but because we have a protocol in place, the gunners without ammo feeds still got up just after takeoff and grabbed an extra ammo box each. This turned out to be a great move when Forgetful Biggins routed us to some splashed-down fighter pilots in the Channel. We just had to spot them, which wasn’t too hard, since their fancy pants were so shiny and all. Then we took a detour and photographed some recon sites, because we were feeling a bit fancy, ourselves.
The good news I guess is that the experimental bomb works. The bad news is that it means they’re almost certainly gonna make us use it.
In real life, my experience with fishing began and pretty much ended when I was a kid young enough to be scared by a fish. Which is a perfectly healthy thing to be scared of. When you impale fish on a hook and drag them out of the water, where they frantically thrash and flop their slimy wet bodies and prickly fins, eyes and mouths agape, it’s a horror show. As a kid, I wasn’t sure whether the fish was dying or attacking, but whichever the case, I wanted no part of it. Fish belong in water. “Fish out of water” is an idiom for a reason.
Mission 16: Ammo Dump at Bruges: I have been told that in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war. I suspect this is a small taste of that, since we are going to bomb Bruges again when we just did it not too long ago. Practice must make perfect, though, because it is the smoothest flight we’ve had in days. We even manage to pick up two recon opportunities. That’ll come in handy for our plane upgrades! I suspect the “enemy armor down” and “enemy flak down” that are both in effect for this mission have something to do with this. We also earn an “enemy damage down,” so our next mission will have both enemy armor and damage reduced. It would be great to have these both up for the critical mission, which is Operation Chastise against the Ruhr dams, but I can’t fly that until I fly the test mission to see if the bomb works. Since I have two awesome bonuses in effect, I think we should go for another tough mission. The crew is not of the same opinion, but I’m the boss.
Apple has updated their App Store rules to require the publication of loot box odds in games. Apparently taking a page from China’s regulations for gaming, the App Store guidelines now includes the following:
Apps offering “loot boxes” or other mechanisms that provide randomized virtual items for purchase must disclose the odds of receiving each type of item to customers prior to purchase.
Publishing loot box odds is a good idea regardless of your stance on whether or not the revenue model is gambling or harmful to children. May the odds be ever in your favor!
Mission 12: Operation Hydra (the second critical mission) is the second outright failure of the campaign. We knew something was up when Biggins walked into the briefing hut with a stern look on his face, even though we hadn’t done anything wrong recently. We figured he might cut us some slack for a little longer since we had, you know, just shot down an ace, but all he said was, “Operation Hydra is a critical mission. We need you to knock out these oil farms deep in enemy territory. The enemy is Germany, in case you were confused by the oblique game references to nationalities. Anything else?” We, of course, had nothing else. Turns out we should have been the ones asking him if he had anything else, because halfway into the mission, he comes on the radio and tells us to intercept a V2 rocket while it is taking off, and shoot it down, before continuing with our mission. Of course, that’s impossible, so we don’t do it, and then we try to get fancy and bomb the oil farms from medium altitude to stay above all the flak, but get confused by the cloud cover and hit one out of three. After confirming on all our fingers that “one” is not the same as “three,” we bolt for high altitude and scoot back over the clouds, with some nice dead reckoning by fishpockets getting us most of the way home. We get no money, but do keep our 4500 XP that we got for shooting down a lot of fighters.
Ark: Survival Evolved is now an Xbox Play Anywhere title. The dino-taming survival game has launched on the Windows Store with Xbox cross-play compatibility and is part of the Play Anywhere program. Players that own a digital copy on their Xbox One can also play the game on Windows 10, and vice versa, for free. That’s two times the janky grinding and wood chopping for one price!
Everyone knows the scene in Despicable Me when Agnes sees the stuffed unicorn at the carnival booth. “It’s so fluffy I’m gonna die,” she states simply. So the Steve Carell mad scientist character has to win it for her by blowing up the booth. As they walk away from the smoking ruin, Agnes clutches her newly won unicorn and snarls, “It’s so fluffy!” Her voice has dropped several registers. It is ragged with mad glee at the fluffiness of the unicorn, now locked in her fingers. It is so fluffy.
That’s how I feel about A Hat in Time. Not the precious cuteness of “it’s so fluffy I’m gonna die”. But the ragged mad glee once she gets her hands on it.
Mission 8: Doodlebug Blitz brings us our first outright failure. The mission, as stated by Wing Commander Biggins, was to bomb five V1 rocket launch sites before eight V1 rockets had been launched. He even counted the objectives out on his fingers so we’d get it. Unfortunately, Left_Empty didn’t get it, because he kind of spazzed out as we passed over the second site and dropped a rack of bombs on the AA emplacement just before the launch pad passed into his bombsight. To his credit, he quickly selected another rack and dispatched the launch site anyway, but when he took off his glove to count his fingers, he realized he still had three sites to bomb, but there were only two racks of bombs left. Boy, was Biggins going to let him have it back at the base! He sheepishly turned to Pilot Officer Brooski and told him the bad news, staying off the intercom so that RichVR, who was becoming known on board as kind of the wiseacre of the crew, didn’t make up some awful play on words involving his name. “I guess you sure left that bomb bay empty, eh Left_Empty!” He could at least wait until they got back to the barracks to hear it.
The only thing we got out of this mission was 2000 experience points, which was enough to level RichVR up on his pilot secondary skill and teach him how to Corkscrew. He’ll probably be bragging about that back at the barracks as well. Continue reading →
You can find a gun in Grand Theft Auto V’s GTA Online mode right now that can be unlocked for use in Red Dead Redemption 2. The golden Double-Action Revolver is up for grabs somewhere in the countryside of Los Santos. Players interested in the bounty need only answer the new message on the in-game smartphone and begin a multi-part scavenger hunt. Once you have the revolver, if you want to see it in Red Dead Redemption 2 on Xbox One or PlayStation 4, you need to complete the headshot challenge. After all that, you’ll have your gun in the upcoming game, assuming the game releases while you’re still alive.
Mission 1: Motor Factory at Zeebrugge. This almost ends in disaster as both the electrical and hydraulic systems go out pretty much on takeoff, then I get so absorbed in fixing them that I tag the first wave of fighters late, and then I compound it by not getting Left_Empty into the bombardier’s station fast enough to open the bomb bay doors in time to hit the target on the first pass. Plus, the port outboard engine gets set on fire. Fortunately, I get things together fast enough to swing back and hit the target, and RichVR does stellar work fixing the engine once the fire dies down and makes the engine kaput (shown). But we don’t get the optional recon photo, which I think is essential to building up your bomber quickly. I satisfy myself with woolen gloves and leather boots for everybody. I also protect everyone by buying Armored Fuselage 1 for the whole plane, because I’m a mensch.
One trick is to select each gunner (tail gunner, mid-upper turret, and nose gunner) and hit “R” right as you are taking off from England, as this will immediately send them to the ammo bay to get an extra ammo box while you’re still over Wessex. Er, Sussex? Whatevs. Continue reading →
Microsoft is bundling PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds with the Xbox One X. The hot as fire battle royale multiplayer game just launched as an Xbox exclusive and racked up over 1 million players in 48 hours. That’s a million players without a demo version. To celebrate, Microsoft is offering the game as a free bonus to all Xbox One X buyers until the end of the year.
Despite some widely reported technical issues, it appears Battlegrounds will be as big of a hit on consoles as it is on the PC. That’s a lot of chicken dinners.
Beyond Skyline is a fitting sequel to Skyline in that the only interesting thing that happens happens at the end. I don’t mean the last part of the movie. I mean the end of the movie. The very very end. The moment when it’s over. In the case of the first Skyline, there was a body-swapping twist that made no sense, but was at least an intriguing premise. But then the credits rolled. Something similar happens with Beyond Skyline. By the time it’s over, it would have you believe you just watched the origin story for a Terminator style resistance to the alien invasion. The John Connor character is someone I would like to see in action. She reminds me of what brothers Kiah and Tristan Roache-Turner did in Wyrmwood: Road of the Damned. Bianca Bradey goes from a damsel in distress to unique zombie warrior. Is that what’s going to happen to the magical superbaby in Beyond Skyline?
Who knows, because now the credits are rolling and there was never any of the Aussie ingenuity, sass, and glee that made Wyrmwood so good. Instead, there was a blue blur of unimpressive special effects, some awkward practical monster costumes, a misguided attempt to science the shit out of the alien invasion, and a painfully generic raucous rock track with the lyric “I’m a fuckin’ American!” or something that sounds like that. The first movie mainly took place in someone’s apartment on Wilshire Boulevard, because shooting out on Los Angeles locations is expensive. The sequel would have you think it’s going to splurge on downtown Los Angeles locations, but then it literally crashes onto an Indonesian fight movie, complete with the guy from the Raid movies. So it turns into that, with lots of fight scenes for no good reason. Beyond Skyline even decides to do a little kaiju in the ruins because the ruins are here, so why not? Frank Grillo is gamely on board as leading man. Betty Gabriel, the mesmerizingly mesmerized maid from Get Out, has a thankless role, once again literally losing her mind. A cool Australian actor named Callan Mulvey plays Dennis Hopper from Apocalypse Now. There are also some other people in the movie.
The best part of Beyond Skyline is the handful of outtakes that play over the credits. When one of the stuntmen in an alien suit can’t quite finesse what he’s supposed to be doing with his dumb alien claw gloves and an alien plasma bomb, Frank Grillo affectionately teases the poor guy. “You’re the stupidest fucking monster I’ve ever seen in my life,” he says, laughing. “I’m just saying, you’re gonna blow us all up.” Grillo turns to the camera, grinning, holding a fake baby in one arm because there’s a plastic alien battle doo-dad attached to his other arm. He’s having the time of his life and for the briefest of moments, I’m glad I’ve seen Beyond Skyline.
The Avro Lancaster had seven crew. The Boeing B-17 had ten. Keep this in mind when anticipating the price point of the inevitable B-17 DLC or standalone expansion. Since I’m flying this crate, I am the pilot (Brooski), but that leaves me with six crewmembers to assign. I am going to randomly choose names from the Quarter to Three thread about the game, entitled “Bomber Crew – FTL + WWII,” even though it is totally not like FTL in any way except that in both games you are running from the Galactic Federation. RichVR was kind enough to gift me the game, so he gets to be the next crew member on the list, which is the engineer. Going down the list of crew members from there, we get fishpockets as the navigator, Eric_Majkut as my radioman, Mr_Bismarck as the tail gunner, Dan_Theman as the top turret gunner, and Left_Empty as the bombardier. Crewmembers who don’t, er… progress through a mission will be, um…subbed for by another random selection from the thread.
That’s the Predator in Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. The Predator special event kicks off today and runs through early January. Like the Day of Skulls or El Yeti events, the Predator missions feature some light scavenger hunting and a battle with a boss enemy, in this case, the movie monster with the dreadlocks. Track and kill the baddie in solo or co-op modes and you’ll unlock a nifty mask with Predator-vision. If you want to hunt in style, there will also be a DLC pack to purchase that will give players movie-themed weapons, cosmetic bits, and the deadly wrist-blades. Sorry, match-up fans. There’s no sign of the xenomorphs from Aliens yet.
