When it comes to card games, I tend to latch heavily onto Constructed formats, where players can build decks out of a specific pool of cards designated by the format in question. It suits my style better, allowing me to take the time to do research on what the most popular decks are and either netdeck or use them as inspiration to create my own recipes. It brings me a certain joy to analyze the trends and see how decks new and old fair as cards are brought in or removed from legal play.

But any card game player knows that Constructed formats are only one way to engage, the other being Limited formats. Rather than come into a game with a deck build ahead of time, Limited formats require players to improvise and built decks based on what they pick from a random or semi-random selection of cards. Drafting is one of the most common variants, opening a pack, picking one card from it, and passing it to the next player in rotation so that they can make their own pick.

So instead of coming at you with another set of decks to try, this time I thought it might be fun to check out Legends of Runeterra’s equivalent of a booster draft, called Expeditions. Let’s build our own deck and see how well it holds up.

While I’ve drafted in other card games like Magic, and participated in Sealed Pre-Release Events before Covid put an end to any such large gatherings for the time being, I’ve never had any luck with those formats before. So when I did my first Expedition early on, just to see what it was about, and managed to make it to the very end and win my final match the first time, it came as quite a surprise.

A large contributing factor, if I had to make an educated guess, on my improved success here compared to other limited events, is that Expeditions does just make players select from a single card at a time. Rather, we select individual “kits” of cards that belong to a common theme. Since our first choice also comes with a Champion appropriate to that theme, we start off with a solid framework from which to build the rest of the deck.

And to smooth out any rough edges, we’re also able to trade out cards and make further modifications to the deck as we play matches with it. While there’s still a large degree of randomness inherent to any Limited format, these slight changes allow players to better control for it for the sake of a stronger, more synergistic deck than would be otherwise possible.

This way, even someone as unlucky as me can create a decent deck, making up for any deficiencies by playing it to the best of my abilities.

The race for the Index/Icon has officially begun, as Humanity and the Covenant compete over the fate of the next Halo ring. Both factions understand that the fate of what is likely the entire universe is at stake, but only one of them has full knowledge of the situation.

Let’s find out what happens when their champions meet for the first time, real life sickness be damned.

So first off, as of the time of writing, my condition is improving. By the time this goes live, I will most likely be fully recovered. That being said…

I couldn’t help but suffer flashbacks to that massive section with the Flood in Halo 1 when playing through the first part of this episode with The Arbiter. Thankfully, it doesn’t last nearly as long before being broken up by more fights between The Flood and 343’s robot drones. In both cases, there’s a core root problem of going through many cycles of the same-looking rooms against the same enemy groups and formations, which makes it difficult to gauge whether or not any tangible progress is being made.

In addition to that, the Flood aren’t terribly fun to fight. Their major gimmick is that they’re easy to kill, but make up for that weakness by being swarm fodder. Unfortunately, Halo 2 is already lethal in terms of combat, so their reduced stamina doesn’t make an appreciable difference when fighting them here. The increased numbers also make it hard to find good spots for cover, and while cloaking helps it doesn’t stop a single lucky hit from stray fire from deactivating it and making us vulnerable again.

Once that was done, I was glad to go back to fighting the Covenant again.

Our fight continues, as the Master Chief and the Arbiter both continue their respective campaigns, each doing what they believe to be best from their perspective. The war between Humanity and the Covenant rages around them.

With a new Halo ring in play, how will both champions of their people react to the efforts of the other.

See, I told you I would hijack that damn Wraith, and how.

We spoke a little bit about it in the last update, but I like getting this glimpse of Covenant culture through the lens of a secondary protagonist. Additionally, it’s a smart move to avoid framing them as if they are evil, seeking to destroy humanity just because it would be fun. They have their own reasons, goals, and purpose, and as far as they’re concerned we’re the monsters and the aggressors out for their blood.

I don’t intend to say “It makes me think” because:

1. I’m super late to this party and that’s probably an ice cold take even by my standards.
2. By this point in my life, I’ve already played Spec Ops: The Line, Undertale, and so many other games the lampshade the senseless violence in video games to death. I’ve heard it all before.
3. It wasn’t exactly genius or highbrow even back at the time.

Despite all that, it is still refreshing to acknowledge that our enemies aren’t mindless monsters. Even if we still need to stop them, and ultimately kill them, they are not acting with malicious intent. Seeing Master Chief being called “The Demon” by the rank and file who only know him through the carnage visited upon them at his hand is a welcome touch. Likewise, seeing the Covenant’s religious fanaticism being manipulated by forces outside their control adds that extra level of sympathy that humanizes them, especially since I accidentally did a genocide at 343 Guilty Spark’s behest and got a non-standard game over in the process last game.

For someone like me, who only knows Halo lore in the abstract, it was quite a pleasant surprise.

One of the simple pleasures that has been denied by the Covid-19 pandemic has been that of getting a group of friends together to play a board game. Obviously, there is no proper substitute for in-person play with friends and family. That said, apps like Tabletop Simulator do a good job satisfying that itch as best as can be.

Another potential salve are virtual board games that invoke the feeling of tabletop, while still leveraging the medium to do things that are extremely difficult, if not impossible, to pull off in a pure tabletop setting. Alongside my old friend Chris, we play one such board game: Armello.

The king has fallen to rot and corruption, and his days are numbered. We can’t save him, nor would we want to. Instead, it’s time to see who will fill the vacuum of power, ascending to the throne.

To be honest, it was oddly relaxing to just sit with Chris and a couple of randos and just play a board game for a while. I’ve been looking for an excuse to launch and play this game for a while now, and when our initial plan fell though, this became an excellent backup.

For those not aware, this game was a Kickstarter-supported project back in 2014, when there the likes of Pillars of Eternity and what would go on to become Broken Age started the trend of independent developers turning to crowd funding as a way to avoid groveling at the feet of large AAA publishing houses. 

And while that’s an interesting backstory in its own right, the other fascinating aspect of it is that become they made significant headway on the version we played, there was a physical prototype that served as a proof of concept for the underlying structure and gameplay systems. I remember when I played this game for the first time. My immediate thought was that I liked the way it felt like playing a good old fashioned board game, and it would be easy to translate these systems to tabletop.

But the devil in the details. Keeping track of perils, modifiers, stats, quests & quest progress, and all of the many things we can take for granted because a computer is handling the heavy lifting is difficult work. To do all of it real time required two human game masters, separate from all the other players, to handle that workload, according to the dev team.

This complexity is part of why there’s just a high layer of strategy to the game. There are many paths to success, and while luck does play a significant factor, players who know what they’re doing and tip the odds in their favor with skilled play and careful consideration of the board state.

At the same time, the big criticism I have of the game is that there is often, but not always the “Monopoly Moment”. As I pointed out in that same with the random other players, Barnaby had pretty much closed locked down the board. If he just sat there, there nothing the rest of us could have done to win…

…except we still have to keep playing because there’s still a chance he makes a crucial mistake, which he did, allowing the Zosha player to snipe victory from him at the last possible second. Most of the time, such grand mistakes won’t happen, but we all have to keep playing despite the fact the winner is obvious because that slim hope that he can be disposed as surely as The King himself exists. In that moment, Zosha knew exactly what she needed to do in order to secure her victory.

It’s a fun game that I wish I had more people to play with.

After a hard fought campaign against the forces of the Covenant, the Flood that our conflict had unwittingly unleashed, and the mechanical guardians created to genocide all organic life, we managed to escape alongside the Master Chief.

Now, our brief reprieve in the small, scenic town of Little Hope has come to end, and it’s time we returned to the frontlines of battle. Earth, and humanity, are once again under attack, and once again the Master Chief stands as a bulwark again the incoming threat.

Welcome to Halo 2.

Both in terms of Bungie’s original jump from Halo: Combat Evolved and in 343’s ability to remaster games, judging by the leap in quality from their remaster of that game, Halo 2 is a triumph. The sheer amount of work both teams must have put in during their respective dev cycles cannot be overstated.

Something that was sorely lacking in the original Halo: Combat Evolved, was anything resembling lore and world-building, to give players something to sink their teeth into. The plot was bare-bones, giving us just enough to justify gunning down a bunch of mooks. Here, we begin to learn a lot about the Covenant, their culture and what drives them. And for that reason, the role of the Arbiter is a crucial one.

The updated cut scenes provided by 343 also go a long way to improving the presentation of these details. I’m thankful that the ability to hotswap between the old and new graphics style extend to the cutscenes in Halo 2, because otherwise I would never be able to appreciate just the amount of work that must have gone into this complete recreation. Rather than just upscale the graphics and call it a day, they put in the extra effort to create all new, high resolution models and texture work, and restage everything with a more cinematic flare, incorporating shot composition and re-scripting entire scenes for improved legibility. I don’t say this to disparage Bungie’s work, because they did an excellent job with the resources they were given. Rather, this is intended to acknowledge and respect the extra effort put in by the mastering team.

And it’s equally impressive how much better the game plays compared to its contemporaries. The game may be more lethal, but that just makes duel-wielding SMGs or Needlers that much more gratifying. Sure, I can’t melee or grenade anybody unless I’m willing to ditch the weapon in my left hand, but that’s okay because more bullets is better for me. That’s all before we even get into the changes made to make driving vehicles in this game a lot more bearable than it was in Halo 1. We can even steal them from out enemies now.

On that subject: I promise you, I will jack the Wraith if it’s the last thing I do.

It is often lamented that the state of the game industry at large tends to crowd out the kind of low-budget, mid-tier platformers that were commonplace in the PlayStation 1 era. For every Crash Bandicoot or Spyro the Dragon, there was a Jersey Devil or some other such game that, while not the pinnacle of its genre, was entertaining enough to hold its own in the annals of gaming history.

As it so happens, I was in the mood for one such game when my good friend Chris, of the Marvelous/Dark Duo fame, gave me a copy of Pumpkin Jack. I was intrigued enough by it that I wanted to show it off for a bit on my Wednesday stream.

It’s exactly what I was hoping for. Not perfect, but good enough to satisfy the itching I had for a mid-tier platforming game.

From what I gather, Pumpkin Jack was mostly the pet project of a single man: Nicolas Meyssonnier, with some aid in the OST and UI departments. And as a product of a small team, I must say I’m impressed with what I’ve seen.

All of the bones of a solid platformer are here. Movement is fluid and the controller are smooth enough that I never feel like the game is fighting me. Even the gimmick sections have very responsive controls that do exactly what I want them to do. Part of that may be due to the simplicity of said controls, but I can hardly complain if the game doesn’t feel the need to bog itself down in overly complex mechanics.

The art style is charming and in way that harkens back to my beloved Medievil. It plays in the classic tropes of horror and Halloween while being delightfully approachable for players of all ages. And it’s back by an OST that doesn’t exactly what it needs to do in setting the tone without standing out. That might sound like a complaint, but sometimes the best soundtracks are the ones that fade in into the background to compliment the work that they’re being used in. There’s also enough personality in the characters that they get to play off of each other in lovably affable ways.

Most of the complaints I could level at Pumpkin Jack feel petty. The game feels easy, even for a platformer meant for kids. As you can see in the VOD, I came close to being defeated in combat a number of times, but that’s mostly because I wasn’t focusing on it and taking more hits than I realistically should have if I was more seriously playing it. Even the platforming feels like it could stand to be less forgiving than it is in order to impose more challenge. There’s some escalation later on, but I have died significantly less than I have in most other games in the genre.

Additionally, it feels like the different weapons are mostly cosmetic, not adding a whole lot of meaningful change to the gameplay structure. It would have been nice to see new mechanics added to the kit as our inventory expands. I am largely doing the same thing at the point of the game I’m playing now that I did when I was streaming this as of the time of writing, and while level design can certainly alleviate a lot of that (which it has in fairness), there could be a Metroid-esque accumulation of abilities.

But overall, this is a fun game that I’m hope gets a few more eyeballs on it as a result of I and other people spreading the word. There’s solid work put into this game that I would like to be rewarded.

Like moths to the flame, Acharky and I return to the horrors of Little Hope to unravel the mysteries at the heart of a town seeped in tragedy and sin. Are we doomed to forever live and relive the haunted past, or can we finally let the dearly departed rest in peace?

We all have our demons. And if we don’t confront them, we risk losing ourselves to them.

I’ll be honest. I did not expect that plot twist coming, even if I should have. It doesn’t come out of nowhere, and the seeds were all established in the story beforehand. If anything, knowing what I know now makes a repeat playthrough all the more appealing. It would interesting to see how scenes change with the added context, and what other possible endings there could be.

I also wonder if this signals a trend we can expect to see in the rest of The Dark Pictures Anthology. In both Man of Medan and Little Hope, the monsters and horrors our protagonists go up against all have rational, logical explanations for their existence. Part of both games is uncovering the truth and using that to dispel or otherwise neutralize them, conquering them in turn.

If that through line continues, then is it natural to suspect that even the Curator/Grim Reaper himself also has a logical explanation? As unlikely as it seems, he himself is the one who keeps insisting that “things are not always as they appear to be”.

Either way, I had a blast playing this, and I eagerly look forward to seeing what they do next year.

Though I don’t purchase, or even necessarily like, all of their games, I always have my eye on Klei Entertainment. They have a unique affinity for looking at a genre, taking the core aspects of it, and refining it to something that is both extremely approachable and mechanically deep. From the excellent stealth game Mark of the Ninja to the survival-based Don’t Starve (Together), and turn-based Invisible Inc, all of them are completely distinct from one another, but they all carved their niches out in their respective genres.

So when I heard they were making a deck-building roguelike… Well, I was intrigued.

What intrigues me most about Griftlands is that there appears to be two completely separate modes of combat, with their own separate resources and decks to wield in that aspect of the game. There is the obvious physical combat, and the negotiation game, trading barbs instead of blades. It’s a good solution to the problem many RPGs that play like this have, where speech checks can completely negate player engagement by letting them completely bypass a section of the game. Players have to choose their approach, weighing the consequences both short and long-term.

That aside, I like seeing the dev team take from other genre contemporaries to further refine their own mechanics. Most obviously, there’s a lot of DNA from Slay the Spire in Griftlands, from the intent system to the way each encounter gives players a card to add to their deck. Even the fact that it’s a card-based deck-building game where cards can be upgraded lends some credit to that game. And yet, the differences are significant here. For one, all it takes to upgrade a card is frequent use, so any pet cards that we use religiously are bound to be upgraded once after enough time passes. Additionally, the choice in how they grow stronger gives us yet another layer of customization and decision making.

I’m also curious as to what impact the roguelike elements will have for Griftlands. Most runs I have in typical roguelikes last about an hour or less, so if I die I don’t lose so much progress that it feels like I wasted my time. While I’ve not played more than what I did on stream as of the time of writing, the impression I have is that I was just getting started with Sal’s campaign. In the event I get 5 or more hours in and die to some random bandit, having to start all over from the very beginning is going to be brutal, to the point where it would be very discouraging. I can only hope Klei took that into account when designed the overall flow of the game.

It feels like they’re intention is to have an entire 8-10 hour campaign. If that’s the case, then I don’t know if this is a game I can stay with for the long haul, especially if the choices I make 3-4 hours ago are what do me in way later on. But I’m willing to give it a try, my curiosity demands that much.

Eventually, after so long without streaming any card games, the itch eventually needs to be scratched, at least for someone like me. And there’s no better time than now to return to the world of Runeterra, which the latest update providing new cards, champions, and strategies to experiment with.

On top of that, there appears to be a new event on offer with regards to a pop stars in the League of Legends lore that I have absolutely no familiarity with whatsoever. I’ve sure someone will explain it to me at some point.

As always, the deck lists I play with come courtesy of Mobalytics. The decklist import codes are:

• Warmother:
• CICACAYFAIBAGAICAYBQCBIBDUUAKAIBBQLSCJZJAEBQCBIPDE3ACAIBAE2A
• Lee Targon:
• CIBQEAICBEYQGAQCAMDASBQDBENSGKJTLRRAGAICAIEACAYCCQAQGCKVAEAQEAQF

Warmother’s Call has been around since I first started playing the game. While it’s a powerful effect, it’s very seen much use because it’s high cost means players would need to have at least 9 normal mana (and an additional 3 spell mana) to play it. Ramp never had the tools to succeed, which prevented it from seeing any major play. The card that finally solved that problem was, oddly enough, Trundle.

Since the two big ramp pieces, Wyrding Stones and Catalyst of Aeons, can both be played on turn three, it is common for this deck to have five mana available on turn four, allowing Trundle to sequence nicely after ramping. With both above average stats and regeneration, he can both a strong attacker and blocker to keep pressure on the opponent while we continue to expand our mana pool. And if that wasn’t enough, his signature spell is a strong board clear that can debilitate boards that have over-committed to the board in the meantime. He has everything that the archetype was missing, slotting nicely into the build.

The Lee Targon deck, on the other hand, involves setting up a combo that can quickly obliterate an opponent once it’s been established. First order of business is to draw into one of our copies of Lee Sin, and cast enough spells to level him up. This is why most of the spells in this deck draw a card once we’ve cast them, and most of the minions in our deck create cheap Gems that we can use to pad out our spell count and protect Lee Sin with the barriers he creates for himself.

Once we have achieved these conditions, we use Zenith Blade on him to grant him overwhelm. If leveled up, Lee Sin will use Dragon’s Rage on any unit he challenges. This will slam them into the enemy nexus to inflict damage and kill them. Normally, this would mean we don’t get to attack in because Lee Sin was blocked. However, because Zenith Blade gives him overwhelm, he can then swing in for full damage. To protect our combo, we have a couple of disruption spells in the form of Nopeify! and Deny to keep our enemy away from their removal.

It’s fun to come back and see a whole new meta working it’s magic. Thanks to Runeterra’s economy, it didn’t take long for me to catch up with everyone else since I already had enough shards and wildcards to construct the decks I wanted to try out.

If only more digital card games were so generous.

The spooky times are upon us once more, and there’s no better time for a big frighten than now. Supermassive Games, creators of both Until Dawn and last year’s The Dark Pictures Anthology: Man of Medan have taken it upon themselves to release a new chapter in their ongoing series. The Curator has returned with a new story that we are to conduct.

Welcome to Little Hope. Joining me as he did in our last outing at the Man of Medan is my old friend Acharky. The Dark Duo is back, and this time it appears that the mystery is not as cut and dry our seafaring adventure prior.

While Little Hope plays largely the same as Man of Medan did, they are definitely areas of improvement in the way the game presents itself. The one that immediately comes to mind for me is that prompts overtly signal when they lead to progress, so that players know what to avoid doing if they want to take the time to explore the area for secrets or extra dialogue, solving the problem where we would painstakingly try to guess with choice is the “right one” so we could put it off for last before missing out on something we wanted to see.

Another noticeable UI change is that there’s a visual indicator before we’re expected to perform a QTE like tossing a rock or navigating down a precarious path, or keeping quiet. It’s a nice touch to avoid blindsiding players who are otherwise engrossed in the story, buying them that extra second to scramble for the controls before they’re asked to use them. There is the odd side effect of me failing pretty much every “keep quiet” scene because I’m so used to immediately having to react, but this is an impulse that can be unlearned in time, after enough exposure.

There’s also the changes to character stats. In contrast to Man of Medan, where there was a single bar denoting how two character mutually feel about each other, each character’s opinion of the others are tracked separately in Little Hope. Just because John has a favorable opinion of Taylor does not mean that the reverse is true. And with certain personality traits being locked, the cast is more strongly defined on a mechanic level than that of Man of Medan, and even Until Dawn. While the writing has always been good, this allows the calculations under the hood to better keep up with it. All of these are small changes, but together they significantly refine the formula Supermassive has been working with for all of these games.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give Little Hope is that I barely even noticed the time ticking by as Chris and I played it together. And in the first two hours, it made us go from completely hating several of the character based on first impressions, to being solidly in their camp. And that, above all else, is the sign of a good video game.