Moving to Facebook

OHAI there! Well as you can see, I've pretty much abandoned the blogger blog. Actually, for the past six months I've pretty much abandoned blogging altogether. Why? Honestly just too busy playing games and making them to spend a lot of time writing about them. And when I do have time to write, I've been more interested in writing speculative fiction than game blogs.

But that's how people are, people's desires, tastes, and interests change all the time. And what I find compelling right now may not interest me in the slightest tomorrow.

However though, for the last six months I have still been really active in sharing my gaming activity - I just to it largely through social media now, rather than formal written blogs. So Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have become my vehicles of choice. Not Google Plus - that platform I think is not long for this world, and I have certainly left it behind.

But I am still sharing, mostly on twitter, and somewhat on Facebook. But there have been a few recent changes in the industry of late that have sort of sparked my interest in using Facebook as a social gaming platform. So to that effect, I've created a new Facebook Gaming Page. It's called, imaginatively enough - Gaming with Dusty. And I am going to experiment with using that as sort of my central repository for sharing al things gaming and game development. And maybe even speculative fiction as well.

So if you're search has landed you here, and you're thinking "Well crap.. another dead blog.." well you're right. But if you still want to engage, please follow me over to FB and/or twitter, and engage away! I look forward to seeing you!

Here are the deets.

The FB page can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/DustyGames/

And of course, you can always find me on twitter.

https://twitter.com/dusty_Monk

Cheers, and see you soon!

Story in The Division

Haven't blogged in awhile, but if you follow me on Twitter, then you know I've been pretty much playing Tom Clancy's The Division since it launched. I've finished the main story, reached the max level, and only have a single zone of collectibles left to gather. Now that I'm just sort of doing the daily gear progression thing, I wanted to take a bit and talk about the story of The Division - what I think worked, and what could have been better. I haven't seen a whole lot of commentary on The Division's story, but what I have seen has been mostly negative. And I wanted to talk about that, because I'm not entirely sure the game is getting credit where credit may be due.

Spoiler Warning
Let's get this out of the way right up front - I'm assuming that if you're reading this, you've finished the main story, and have completed all of the story missions. There will be spoilers for that content ahead, so if you're worried about reveals, please come back when you're at the end.

Blade and Soul - Ups and Downs

I've never been very good at spending my free time on more than one general activity at a time. Whether it be working on a game development project, playing my MMO de jour, or something that's caught my eye on the console, typically I tend to only focus on one thing, though I have been known to shift about pretty quickly.  And if you follow me on twitter at all, you know that for me, for the last several weeks, that's been Blade and Soul. So what's keeping me in the game?

Blade and Soul Beginners Guide - an Overview

So I started the new year off saying I'd try to deliver more video content for Of Course I'll Play It, and here it is practically the end of January, and I haven't done a thing yet. Well part of the reason for that is I've been spending just about all of my free time playing Blade and Soul! I'm having a blast of a time in the game, and I've had more than a few people ask me what I thought and if I thought they'd like it. So in answering that question, as well as talking about Blade & Soul's sort of base mechanics, I thought I'd put together a general sort of beginner's guide. This will hopefully answer most of the questions I know I had when I first started the game, as well as help you decide if you think the game is something you would enjoy.

So check the video below, enjoy the guide, and please let me know in the comments if I should do more videos like this, or just stick to the written word and pretty pictures.

New Year's Resolutions!

Hello and welcome to the first post of the new year! I thought I'd kick off this year in Blog Posts in classic style - with some new year's resolutions.  Little known fact about me, I love new year's resolutions. I know, most people by now are pretty jaded and cynical when it comes to setting goals for the new year - but for me, it represents a chance to change, and a change to grow, and blah blah mostly I just like making them and seeing where I end up at the end of the year. So now, without further adieu, let's look at what we're going to try to get done in 2016 (oh man it sounds weird saying that!)

Dipping our Devilish Toes into Devilian

That's a lot of alliteration, Al! 

For the most part, I'm actually pretty good these days at resisting Hype, with a capital H. Devilian's been bouncing around my social media circles for some time now as it rolled through one beta after a next, and I looked at it long enough to say "Oh, a Diablo Knockoff", and that was pretty much it. But Monday it popped up on the radar again being just a few days from their official launch, and I gave it a bit more consideration. First, I'm a huge fan of the South Korean MMO art style it uses, heavily reminiscent of games like Tera, Blade & Soul, and Aion.  In fact, Bluehole Ginno, the south korean developers, are also the developers of Tera. So that should tell you something about what you can expect in terms of art style. And more to the point - the level of dress, or undress, as it were, you can expect to find most of the female models. Second, it's being published here in the West by Trion Worlds, a publisher I have a fair amount of respect for. Rift is a fine MMO, and I've spent plenty of hours in Defiance. And third, the early access founder's pack was at a very reasonable $20.00 US. So I shelled out a Jackson, patched up my Glyph launcher, and started the download. And so far, I'm quite glad I did. Now, a few days later, here's what I've learned about Devilian.

Unity3D At Home Project Day 13 - Pushing On!

So just have a bit of time this morning before work, but wanted to get some thoughts down. And mostly, those thoughts are around carrying on the fight, and deciding where to go next. Let's get to it shall we?