Category Archives: Funny stuff

Starbound and the Hopeless Quest for Space

So I recently started playing Starbound and it is worlds and galaxies better than expected. I made some bad beginner experiences with Terraria in the past which almost cured me off 2D ant farm builders for good. I’m glad, I gave Starbound another shot though – it’s quite the wonderful space odyssey with vast and very satisfying exploration! The graphics are much cuter than Terraria’s too and there’s the whole Firefly space hub theme which is obviously awesome. Oh and you can play instruments in a band and collect pets and fossils, so what’s not to love?

Naturally, Starbound also comes with complex crafting and progression as well as free creative building, with a million fun deco items to collect. Instantly, the building and decorating fever caught me the way it has done before in Minecraft, Landmark or Portal Knights. And in very much the same way did I find myself in desperate need for more and more SPACE before long!

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Playing the guitar in my own spaceship is pretty stellar!

It makes me laugh how all these building sandboxes follow the exact same script from initial delight to panicky overwhelmification, or at least that’s how it always goes for me. Every single time, I find myself in the same psychological spiral plummeting towards deep frustration with my very imperfect build. The same old inner monologue ensues –

“Oh wow this world is awesome, I need to create my hub asap and collect all the things!”

/builds small hut with door, roof, windows.

“OMG there are so many different blocks and plants and crafting items – I NEED MORE SPACE!”

/expands house with second level and basement.

“I carry too many items!!! I need more chests to organize all these materials that I need to keep forever!”

/creates 20 chests for different mats. Also expands basement.

“Where did I put the wool?? I can’t find ANYTHING in this mess! Need better organization!”

/expands all rooms, builds different storage with labels.

“I found this lovely new wallpaper and ornate wood blocks! These will look so much nicer!”

/starts redoing entire house structure, swap materials, add little details.

“My house looks so cool now but I still have so much more furniture to place and all these ugly storage chests everywhere! I really need MORE SPACE but there’s this horrible mountain to my left now and I already hit the vast body of water to my right. This is hopeless, I can’t work like that – I NEED TO START OVER ENTIRELY, ARGH!”

/frustrated noises.

….

You might argue I know better by now; that I don’t need to create a definite hub right away, or hang on to every and all materials – or alternatively, I could just build with a lot more foresight and planning.

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So…much….vexing….chaos.

Well, I don’t! I do try but I am always overwhelmed by micro-management halfway through and my inner perfectionist hates how shabby things start looking further down the line, once you discovered the fancier building blocks and items. Starbound has some fine tools to help with re-decoration and item management too (the pixel printer gotta be the greatest idea in the world of builders ever, but I don’t have it yet!) but it’s not gonna save me from the hopeless mix and match or storage hell I’ve already gotten myself into.

So, I guess I’ll start looking for an entirely new location to build from scratch again soon and transfer all my preciousss belongings…it’s a daunting prospect already but of course I’ll do it anyway, because I’m crazy like that! Prepare for that interstellar burnout!

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Tomorrow is a new dawn with so much to organize!

For National Poetry Day: To Steam

To Steam

“When in disgrace with gaming and press hypes,
I all alone peruse thy endless list of tags
And trouble aging friends with early access gripes
And look upon my log and curse my slack,
Wishing me back to days of simpler choice,
Of fewer desires and more fulfilling quests,
Desiring this game’s art and that game’s poise,
With what I most enjoy presented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
I ponder rows of boxes, broken dreams
Acquired dearly (with no hopes arising
For fixes or for more connected means).
– Such sweet, convenient comforts well recalled
I loathe to change my state for days of old!”

(Based on Sonnet #29.)

The Guy that wins the Internet..

…or maybe just Black Desert Online alright, but this bloke standing around in Heidel really made my day:

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Hilarious lols

The infamous pay-2-win, shop-only ghillie suit dyed pink and turquoise made me laugh hysterically at the irony of it all. Probably no intentional meta-mockery, it displays perfectly what goes wrong in so many debates around specific cash shop items in MMOs: your pay-2-win item is my convenience item is his cosmetic item.

Priceless.

Celebrity Lookalikes in Black Desert: I am Scared

Since the character creator for Black Desert Online is such a powerful tool, the community has naturally started to create all sorts of lookalikes of famous and not-so famous people. The recently recovered BDO Templates page (which was hacked because someone always needs to ruin the fun for others) has a dedicated section just for this purpose, although results vary greatly in quality. Still, some of the templates bear a striking resemblance to the original –

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From left to right: Michael Jackson, Kate Beckinsale, Sean Bean

While I don’t expect a great number of these to be adopted for real when the game comes out, it scares me a little to think I might meet Donald Trump (ew) or Michael Jackson in a dark alley. I would also rather not be joined by Jessica Rabbit and Miley Cyrus while hunting trolls in the field. How is that for immersion? Bizarre.

P.S. I tried to create Arya Stark for myself last night, it’s not quite simple!

Meeting our MMO Doppelgangers

Custom character creation is one of the most defining aspects of the MMORPG genre. Stuck with alter egos longterm, players may spend more or less time initially creating their character’s looks but almost everyone agrees that it’s important not everybody look the same in massively multiplayer games. As a non-alt player who cares about customization a great deal, I have high expectations of character creation screens. But whether a game makes it easy or very hard to create a more unique avatar, adventuring alongside thousands of other players means that one day it is inevitably going to happen: you meet your doppelganger online.

My human priest in WoW was far from a popular model in an MMO that has always offered very little in terms of individualism. While scores of white- and violet-haired nightelf twins were running around everywhere in vanilla WoW, it took months before I encountered “myself” in Azeroth. I still remember how weird this felt – in fact, I remember being mildly annoyed about it. Wearing the same gear was obviously inevitable in early WoW but looking the exact same all the way down to the bend of your nose was a big no-no in my book. Whenever I re-encountered that player in Ironforge, I would rush in and out of the auction house quickly. Go away, imposter!

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This is an intervention! (forum.square-enix.com)

I never even thought about this issue until I encountered the above tweet the other day. It certainly didn’t occur to me that there could be such approval for MMO doppelgangers. I guess encountering someone with the same taste as you is some kind of confirmation but I still can’t feel positive about it. Maybe it’s a matter of being too immersed in your online self (there’s no identical me in real life…I think), in a way it takes away from the whole illusion created by virtual worlds. It’s probably a little silly of me too, but…..don’t copy my character design, okay??

Happy Friday to all the unique butterflies out there!

[FFXIV] Manderville Dancing all Night long! [#Blaugust 14]

This morning when I got up and went to the bathroom, I stepped right into a tack. Foot bleeding and howling, I groggily stumbled towards the kitchen for disinfectant, only to step into cat puke with my other foot. This is a true story. Some days we need to fight with all we’ve got.

Lucky for me, I have the Manderville to do just that – and now you’ve got it too! Happy frivolous Friday everybody, enjoy the weekend and don’t forget your next Blaugust post!

*dance*

The Great Videogame Chibi Challenge! (Win three Steam games!)

UPDATE: This quiz has already been solved! If you wish to take it anyway, don’t read the comments!

So maybe you know that I do quizzes on MMO Gypsy from time to time, from MMO rebuses to poetry scrabble, and every time my audience was way too fast to guess the correct answers. That’s cool though because this time around, there shall be little help from my side!

Maybe some of you remember too, that I had some fun creating blogosphere avatars a while back with this chibi maker. Well, I didn’t just make avatars, I also tried to recreate some of my most beloved videogame characters of all time, along with some new faces from popular games.

That’s where a new quiz comes in!

The Great Videogame Chibi Challenge!

The rules are simple: Below you’ll find an expandable image with a lucky number of 13 videogame-related chibis I myself created (one or two may not be strictly originating from a game but have definitely starred in one or several). They are in a set order. You will also find a cryptic string of numbers belonging to each chibi. And that’s almost all I am going to give you, besides two more things –

  • The correct answer is a sentence (or quote) delivered in the comment section of this thread. Do not post incomplete or dubious answers unless you wish to help someone else win the prize. The sentence is of course in English.
  • In case you might feel you actually know the answer halfway through the riddling and skip figuring out the rest: don’t.

First correct answer obviously takes home fame, glory and a wicked prize!

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Guess THIS! (click to expand)

The Prize!

The winner of this illustrious challenge shall not win just one but three randomly selected steam games (that they do not own yet) from my ever growing key library! You’re bound to love something and/or expand your backlog! (So yeah, you require a steam account.)

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The game starts now. Good luck!

(P.S. If you really like any of the chibis, feel free to use it for whatever.)

Creating your own custom Avatar

Avatars are kind of a big deal to online gaming folk – we use them online and offline, as identities on social media, mascots for our blogs and forum handles. Some players switch avatar for every game, others stick to a random sprite or custom image shaped in their real likeness and never change it. If you’re after your ingame characters, tinkering with either screenshots or other programs such as a WoW model viewer is usually required.

I’ve used my own custom priest avatar in WoW over the years and have made a similar thing for Wildstar; I tend to disregard those MMOs which I don’t foresee staying with for long (which is most of them). On general forums, I’ll use my blog’s mascot most of the time simply because I don’t dig randomly created forum avatars or logos that make it hard to spot your own posts on a thread. Personalized avatars are always nicer.

I’ve been asked a few times how I created my pixel sprite for MMO Gypsy and it’s quite simple: go to VideoGameSprites.net and browse to your heart’s content. Find something you like and change it, mix’n match different characters, add items or change colors – easy enough with some basic Photoshop skills. If you can’t find any game you like, search for old VG sprites on google image search.

Casual fun with Avatar Generators

If you’re not into pixel sprites and unfamiliar with basic image editing, using a free avatar generator is a good option for creating something custom and unique. Popular resources include Nintendo’s Mii Creator or Face Your Manga which still require you to at least know how to take a printscreen and re-size an image. I’ve played around a lot with Nintendo Miis in the past and with some patience, you’ll be able to create quite stunning doppelgangers of virtually anybody!

Another great and very detailed avatar creator I’ve recently come across is this Chibi Maker by gen8, which comes with a ton of fun customization options. After spending the afternoon (I am on sick leave, don’t judge) generating my real-life posse, I set out to try and re-create existing blogger avatars / people in the MMO blogosphere:

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Syl, Liore and Taugrim

From left to right: MMO Gypsy, Herding Cats and Taugrim.com, next to their original blog avatars.

There is some deviation but overall, they are quite adorable to say the least and I love the image quality of this particular program (which is free and downloadable too). This whole avatar creation business sure is addictive – have a go sometime and see for yourself (pro tip: change the background colors to white right away unless you’re looking to have a set background)!

NBI: Join the Poetry Slam!

The MMO blogosphere is a colorful place full of talented people: writers, reviewers, podcasters, machinimists, painters, musicians, scientists, yes even cooks, just to name a few. And then there are the poets: bloggers who enjoy playing with the formal aspects of the written word as much as (and sometimes more than) message and meaning, people who engage in wordplay and subtle witticism to serious or more frivolous effect – quite often just to provoke a smile from their audience. It’s a beautiful thing to be creative in any shape or form and poetry is a way to be creative with language.

My love for languages and poetry is no news to more frequent readers. Every now and then I let it shine through some parts of my more serious posts, even if way too rarely or then I experiment with different writing styles just because. Poetry doesn’t only happen on the surface even if it’s easier to detect via verse, rhyme and other stylistic devices. A well-written piece of prose full of poetic magic feels like molten silver or a warm hand01blanket on the soul. I cheer every time a fellow blogger makes me feel in such a way about games.

Alas, let us shake the bonds of srs blogging bzns this lovely NBI October! Let us engage in some lighthearted forms of lyricism – the spontaneous and experimental, the ironical and conversational or if you so desire, the classics (or a parody thereof)! Too many people shy away from the ivory tower that is poetry but creative writing happens in all shapes and forms and anyone can join in for some fun and experimenting!

Let this second NBI be your opportunity (newcomers and sponsors alike) to contribute to an around-the-MMO-blogosphere poetry slam!

You could, for example, go with something simple: A haiku or limerick about your favorite NPC, your worst dungeon run, your most beloved MMO zone –

Haiku:
Elwynn, my lovely
How I miss your gentle tune
Too long I’ve been gone.”

Limerick:
“I’d rather have epics than gold,
A mantle or sword for the bold.
To tell where I’ve been,
The things that I’ve seen.
No coin tells my stories of old.”

Or, you could always check out examples on other blogs for inspiration, such as –

Any and all NBI poetry slam entries will be rounded-up on MMO Gypsy as well as the official NBI site by the end of October 2013. Feel free to leave me your URL in the comment section or the respective NBI forum thread. Challenge yourself and try something new! There’s no right or wrong ways and no winners – only participation.

And now let loose those creative juices – Happy slamming!