It was fun while it lasted, but sadly our Seasonal Vacation must come to an end. With the aid of our superflame, we make short work of our adversaries and tie up all of our pending loose ends.
And once all pending tasks have been cleared, we’ll be free to relax and soak up a few rays at Dragon Shores. Spyro’s been dying to go their since the start of the trip, and it’s about time we indulged our little dragon pal.
As I said on stream, I had been thinking about Ripto as a villain for this game, and specifically what he’s done. Obviously he’s a bad person and a massive jerk, but when I took a moment to look at the actual list of misdeeds to his name, I had to pause.
Because, at the end of the day, Ripto didn’t actually do a whole lot that warranted the response from Elora, Hunter, and the Professor that he got. His list of “crimes” include:
Squatting in three occupied castles
Stealing the power crystal
Retaliating after Elora and co, and Spyro, attacked him
Unlike the other two Spyro games, none of the local problems are caused by Ripto or his forces. He’s not even shown interacting much with the denizens of Avalar one way or the other. In other words, they are local problems that would have existed whether or not he came to Avalar in the first place.
I’m not saying this in some silly attempt to claim he’s not a villain. However, I will say that the game could have done a better job selling his villainy and what exactly he was doing to cause damage/trouble. This is even weirder when one considers that he’s become the “rival” villain for Spyro, with the most returning appearances with Enter the Dragonfly and the Crash Purple/Spyro Orange crossover games. Gnasty Gnorc probably deserves that distinction, and yet Ripto is the one people think about.
But I suppose that has more to do with the games than the characters. And on the subject of games, we’ll keep on the old PS1 platformer nostalgia train next week with Crash 2: Cortex Strikes Back.
As someone with next to no interest in League of Legends, and someone who has been following newsregardingRiot over the past few years, I was originally going to pass on Legends of Runeterra.
But as people I knew started playing it, and talking positively about it as a game, beyond being a good League of Legends tie-in, I grew intrigued. Now that I’ve tried the game myself, I’ve been having such a good time that I wanted to talk about it.
Overall, Legends of Runeterra feels like a healthy mix of the concepts of Magic the Gathering and Hearthstone, with a few unique twists thrown in to give it a flavor all its own. Like Hearthstone, there’s no need to play mana-generating land cards, players just receive a full refill of their mana each turn, increasing the maximum mana by 1, and capping at 10, completely preventing the problem Magic can often have where players can get “mana screwed/flooded” by having too many/few land cards to effectively play.
Hearthstone keeps this in check by forcing players to only use neutral cards and cards within the same class, forcing them to stick with a pre-allocated subset of cards within the pool of all available cards. To impose some restriction, while still allowing for flexible and creative deck building choices, Legends of Runeterra assigns each card to one of the game’s 6 nations, and players may use a combination of any 2 of those nations when building their deck. In addition, only 3 copies of a given card may exist in a deck, only 6 Champion cards maximum (representing characters from League of Legends), and 40 cards total, no more or less.
This is a smart compromise on their part, because it allows them to still impose the kind of restrictions on the card pool that are necessary in the absence of a colored mana system. However, those same limitations are loose enough that a high degree of customization and creative thinking can still occur within them. And though metas are always subject to change, I’m seeing a healthy mix of combinations of nations that Riot seems to have done a decent job giving each nation it’s own unique set of powerful tools.
And within the game, the flow is significantly different than I’m used to from all of my days playing card games, such that it’s very refreshing. Like all collectible card games, Runeterra has a concept of spell speed. Slow spells and creature cards can only be played by the person who has priority. Fast spells may be played in response to other cards, and to combat. And lastly, Burst spells can be played whenever a Fast spell can, except the opponent isn’t allowed to play anything in response.
However, priority works different in Runeterra than it does in pretty much any game I have ever played. The only difference between one player’s turn and other is who has the ability to declare attacks, indicated by whoever owns the Attack Coin, and who gets first priority. On priority, players may cast creatures, slow spells or attack if they possess the Attack Coin. The opponent then gets the chance to respond, and then whether they do or not priority passes so that they too can play a creature or a slow spell.
This means that there’s almost never a turn where players aren’t making proactive moves in order to advance their board state. In a traditional model, whenever it’s “not that player’s turn”, they can only play fast spells, but that isn’t the case here. While it’s still necessary to have fast and burst spells in the deck to respond to big threats, this approach allows for an overall faster pace to the game. It’s difficult to explain, but easy to understand once you’ve played/watched a few matches.
And that speed persists in Runeterra’s combat. It’s similar to Magic in that the attacking player declares their attacks, and then the defending player gets to assign blockers. However, not only is the Hearthstone concept of persistent damage in full effect here, but players are only allowed to assign a single blocker to each attacking creature. Both of these changes combined can make combat a much more interesting puzzle to solve and navigate, and that’s before fast and burst spells come in to start turning the tide.
The sum total of all of these differences between Runeterra and the games I’m used to playing give it a whole new flavor that I’m still both coming to grips with and appreciating for the breath of fresh air it’s injected into the genre.
On top of that, it’s financial model is also a lot less predatory than I am used to, which has garnered some respect from me for Riot despite all of the horror stories I hear from that studio. Unlike other games in the genre, it is impossible to directly purchase booster packs. They can be earned in game through regular play, but they cannot be bought with real money.
However, players are allowed to buy a certain number of wildcards per rarity each week, and those wildcards can be spent on cards of the same rarity level from any nation. Additionally, they may collect shards through obtain duplicates out of packs, or again through regular play, which may be used to craft cards they desire depending on card rarity. Not only do players not have the ability to spend tons of money rolling the booster pack roulette wheel, but there is a built-in limit on how much they can spend on cards. That said, Riot will let you spend as much as you want on cosmetics without limit, but that still means that players aren’t priced out of a strong deck, and nor will they either need to or be able to spend large amounts of money to stay competitive.
In it’s totally, this means that Runeterra is a direct response to better much everything that I active despise about my favorite genre, while keeping and perserving all of the aspects that drew me in. While I had no interest in League of Legends lore prior, and still don’t wish to play the game itself, I might start finding myself knee-deep in wikis reading up on the “story” of League at this rate.
Once more, we find ourselves venturing into Magic: Arena, this time with a deck I’ve fallen in love with for Theros standard. People who know me know that one of my favorite color combinations in Grixis, and we have a concoction that best shows off what it can do: Grixis Discard.
I can’t claim credit for the deck though. The idea came from Dev from Strictly Better MTG, whose deck tech you can check out here.
My formula for this list is only slightly different from his, but it’s still mostly the same deck. You can find my list here.
(I was today years old when I realized Dream Trawler has to tap to give itself hexproof.)
Our primary strategy is to take advantage of a synergy between Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger and Lazav, the Multifarious. Kroxa is a 2 mana 6/6 than forces our opponent to discard a card from their on either attack or ETB. However, if we cast him for his normal cost instead of his Escape cost, we must sacrifice him after he enters, dumping him into the graveyard to be escaped later….
…Or, once he’s there, we can play Lazav and use an additional 2 mana to turn him into a copy of Kroxa, which dodges the ETB trigger entirely, allowing us to swing in without having to escape our titan. And to further work with the shapeshifter, Thief of Sanity is another attack that, grants us additional card advantage in the form of our opponent’s cards if we connect with him, along with another transformation target if one of them every hits the graveyard (and they will).
Beyond that, we’re basically a control deck, with the aim to wear down our opponent’s resources, accumulate our own, and finish them off once they’re exhausted. And to that end, the deck packs a ton of removal to take care of threats as they appear, and most of it consists of cards we’re already familiar with from both Ravnica and Eldraine standards.
Thought Erasure is one of the cards we hope we draw into early, because we can use it to surgically extract important threats in our opponent’s hand. In addition, being able to look at their hand gives us valuable information on how we might be able to best play against them. And our spot removal consists of Angrath’s Rampage, Murderous Rider, and Bedevil. Tyrant’s Scorn exists not just as a removal piece, but also to potentially bounce one of our creatures if our opponent attempts to kill them with their own removal.
Disinformation Campaign allows us to take advantage of the Surveil abilities from both Thought Erasure and Lazav (which can additionally fuel a Kroxa escape attempt), and provide us additional card draw while further squeezing our opponent. And if our opponent wastes removal on it, all the better. Dev puts Atris, Oracle of Half-Truths in this slot, but I like the synergies with Disinformation Campaign a bit more. In addition, we run Ritual of Soot to act as board clears when going up against aggressive decks.
As for how we clear up, our big win cons once we’ve established control are Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God and Ashiok, Nightmare Muse. Both planeswalkers are extremely powerful, and by the time they touch down our foe should be running critically low of options. If Kroxa/Lazav swings don’t turn the tide, those two certainly will. Part of what attracted me to this deck was being able to play Nicol Bolas again. He’s a terrible villain, but his cards are usually really cool.
Thanks to Dev once more for building this incredible cool shell. It’s been my go-to deck in Arena for a while, and odds are I’ll still be jamming games with it until the next set.
Despite the serenity of the home world we now reside in, not all is well within the world of Avalar. Even discounting Ripto’s machinations, there’s plenty of trouble brewing between the local residents of each world. And we’re just the right shade of purple dragon to deal with their problems.
Or at least play them off each other enough to make a profit.
Something I mentioned in my first Spyro 2 stream, but didn’t mention in the post for it is that many of the levels have links between them. Some of them are less obvious, like the people of Colossus and Idol Springs being the same. Others are more overt, like the war between the residents of Breeze Harbor and Zephyr.
Before I say anything more, I want to point out that I was not involved in designing Spyro 2. Nor do I know anyone who has. I am speaking purely as a fan when I say that it feels like it seems like they were trying to do something my linking different worlds together. That said, I can’t be sure what that is.
These links do create a more coherent vision of the world in question here. The fact that people from one level will talk about and reference other areas goes a way towards strengthening the sense of cohesion.
Next time, we can get into some of the more interesting lore and design details of Ripto’s Rage, with an upcoming boss fight and journey into the cold Winter Tundra.
Theros: Beyond Death has finally arrive to Magic: Arena, and with it a whole host of new and returning cards and mechanics. One of those mechanics is Devotion, and no card is more representative of Devotion’s power than one of the MTG communities old favorites: Gary Asphodel.
And with Gary back in Standard, it’s only natural that mono-black devotion is one of the most commonly built decks in the new format. Like many others, I was also eager to hop onto the Gary train.
I took the decklist I was using from here, but it appears to have been modified in the time since.
At its core, the deck’s primary goal is to increase our devotion to black high enough to swing the game with single successful cast of Gary. It is difficult to overstate how powerful Gary is despite being only a 2/4 for 5-mana, largely due to his enter the battlefield trigger. I have had games where I have won simply by using it when my devotion to black was over 10, meaning my opponent lost that much life in a single shot, and I gained it all back.
To facilitate this, we will favor cards that have as many black symbols in their mana costs as possible. Thankfully, we don’t have to sacrifice any value for this. Mono-black has many strong tools at their disposal, the trick is to find the best ones for our job.
Yarok’s Fenlurker is a fine example of one of those tools. Both of it’s 2-mana cost are in the form of black symbols, meaning it adds 2 to our devotion just by being on board. But beyond that, it forces our opponent to exile a card from their hand. Even if it gets removed later on, it’s done its job just hitting the table.
Ayara, First of Locthwain is another strong card that contributes heavily to our devotion by costing specifically 3 black mana. She gives us extra value and life for every single creature we play, and if one of them is the target of a spell, or if we need the gas, we can use her to sacrifice a creature for some extra card draw.
Nightmare Shepherd and Erebos, Black-Hearted serve similar purposes, protecting our board from the threat of board wipes. The Nightmare does so by allowing us to turn them into 1/1 tokens, and Erebos by giving us the chance to draw cards off their demise, for the low price of 2 life per card.
Tymaret, Chosen from Death serves two purposes beyond boosting our devotion. The first is as a resilient blocker that can gum up the works when our opponents try to swing at us. More importantly, he’s a way to extract problem cards from their graveyards, like the dreaded Cat/Oven combo. Erebos’s Intervention fulfills that second task as well, while also acting as a removal piece if need be. Our other removal options are Eat to Extinction, which is valuable exile piece, and Murderous Rider, which can also be played as a creature to increase our devotion.
And while you’re likely familiar with pieces like Knight of the Ebon Legion, Order of Midnight and Cavalier of Night, you probably haven’t seen much of Bolas’s Citadel before. If it successfully resolves, the card advantage we’ll accrue off of it is more valuable than any amount of life we’ll spend. Combined with a good Gary, there’s little our opponent can do to stop us if we reach this point.
This specific version of the deck might not be that powerful, but I look forward to seeing how it develops as Theros Standard continues.
As the winter chill sets in, and snow starts to fall on the ground, what better time to continue our Seasonal Vacation in the realm of Avalar with our good buddies Spyro the Dragon and Sparx the Dragonfly.
With the permanent superflame, we’re sure to have a significantly easier time helping the various citizens we encounter along the way.
As you may remember from the last stream, we were contemplating whether or not we should continue with the superflame power up I earned through getting 100% on my own time, or if I should reset the game, redo the progress from the previous stream, and proceed with a normal playthrough. Ultimately, I decided to keep the current run and continue to use my “New Game+” benefit. I could say that it’s because we couldn’t completely recreate the save since we abused superflame a few times, but truth is I just want to have fun with it.
But even discounting our little bonus, there’s still plenty to soak in when playing through Spyro 2. Having reached Autumn Plains, I can finally talk about just how much I love that home world. Out of all the hub worlds from the original trilogy, Autumn Plains was always my favorite. Most people would choose to spend time off at a tropical beach or resort town, but I’ve always had a natural inclination to the mild temperatures and warm colors of Autumn. I’d glad choose to spend time resting in a place of perpetual Fall.
The background music for Spyro 2’s home worlds adds to that feeling. When combined with the lack of enemies or obstacles and the overall atmosphere, this level always makes me feel at peace when I’m navigating in. The palace section also feels like the kind of place one could take a tour of or display a gallery of artwork or historical artifacts, which only furthers that sense of tone. Hearing the rustling of the wind at the top of the tower, overlooking the whole map and drinking it all in is the image that comes to mind the instant I think of this game, so it was a treat seeing it redone in HD.
Which brings us to the fun fact that was discussed in this episode. It’s obvious that all 3 home worlds in this game are themed after seasons: Summer Forest, Autumn Plains, and Winter Tundra. For this reason, it was always assumed that there was a fourth planned home world that never made it into the game. The other “supporting evidence” for this theory was that there were 4 speedways, Autumn Plains getting two of them, with the assumption being that one of them was to be used for this “cut” 4th hub. In a twitch stream of Spyro 3: Year of the Dragon, it was confirmed by the dev team that this “cut world” never existed in the first place. The plan was always to be 3.
This hasn’t stopped fans for continue to spread the rumor, of course. Last I heard, there was even a fan project to create this “Spring Savannah”, but the most recent video I could find on this subject was from March 2018, so I don’t know what happened to it: Whether it released or the team had to discontinue the project for some reason.
And lastly, as promised, here’s a clip of the original Turtle Soup challenge from the original PlayStation version of the game. As you can see, the top down perspective can make it difficult to line up the charge so the turtles move away from the pot. The new perspective, combined with our permanent superflame ability, makes this challenge significantly easier in the Reignited Trilogy, something I’ll be silently thankful for.
But I’m also grateful for all of you, who read these posts and watch my videos and streams, because you decided to spend your time with me instead all of the other distractions competing for your attention. Thank you so much, and I hope to see you as we continue our adventures with the original PlayStation’s unofficial mascots.
With the impending release of Theros block in Magic: The Gathering, and having heard a lot about how the game has changed since I last played, I figured now was a good time to dive back into Supergiant Games’s latest work, still currently in Early Access: Hades.
Like Elspeth and so many, many characters in Greek myth, let us attempt to escape the underworld.
I have adored every release Supergiant Games has put out since Bastion, and Hades is no exception to that rule. Even though it’s still being developed, it felt feature complete even on release, and as time goes on it’s only gotten more refined.
Hades’s also makes excellent use of it’s source material, creating compelling characters and relationships between members of the Greek pantheon that most of us are familiar with. That moment on stream where Orpheus retells his story for Zagreus off screen genuinely made me laugh because it signaled that the developers knew exactly what they were doing. Similarly, I loved seeing Theseus and Asterius fighting side by side in a tag-team boss fight at the fields of Elysium.
I also can’t help but notice that the team retooled a couple of old ideas so that they would have more impact during a given run. When I last touched the game, Heat was a resource one could acquire, similar to Darkness. Except, when Darkness is used for character upgrades, Heat would add addition challenge modifiers to each run. Since then, it’s been folded into a new bounty system, where players can agree to tougher conditions in the hope of getting higher rewards. And seeing that on top of new systems like the renovations makes me all the more eager to dive in once more.
I don’t know how many future runs will be capture on stream, but know that I’ll be playing this way more than I used to.
Despite a few delays, my good friend Acharky and I would never miss out on an opportunity to be Marvelous, and this latest update to Ultimate Alliance 3 allowed us to do just that.
Join us as we talk about comics and media while taking on newcomers Iceman, Gambit, Cable, and Phoenix. And then, we take the Danger Room for a spin and do some Infinity Challenges.
As we both said during the stream, neither one of us are fans of the concept of the Phoenix Force. Personally, I don’t find it interesting, but that’s only as a casual observer of comic book lore. My only real experience with it is as an evil entity that just possesses people to destroy the universe… or something.
That said, it makes sense to include her in the roster of playable heroes, along with the rest of this update. It’s good to see the X-Men finally get some much needed love after being snubbed for years due to the movie rights being owned by Fox, and Disney unwilling to provide the free advertising to a competitor. I only wish this didn’t come at the cost of the Disney monopoly acquiring even more intellectual property to be sealed up, forever out of reach.
And it’s nice to see Ultimate Alliance 3 getting updating so long after launch, even if there’s only one more planned update remaining. My complaints with it aside, I still want it to succeed. While a lot of my problems, like the fact each character is leveled separately, will never be fixed, I can at least recognize that new features make leveling under-developed characters easier.
It’s always good to come back, and I can’t wait to return for another stint with the next update.
We might have played this deck type once before, but I can’t deny how fun it is to win by repeatedly throwing that cat into the oven.
As far as the decklist goes, the core of the previous version of it is all there. The real changes are in the removal suit. Rather than running Casualties of War, we’re using cheaper removal in the form of cards like Thrashing Brontodon, which also serves as a strong creature and a potential sacrifice trigger even if we don’t have any specific targets in mind. That said, the strategy is basically the same as it was last time.
What I find most interesting about this deck is that despite being built around the cat/oven synergy, there’s a lot of resilience on display, and ways to win even if neither card, or only one, of the two pieces hits our hand. While slower, we can still use Trail of Crumbs and Gilded Goose to generate food tokens that we can cash in either for Mayhem Devil or Korvold triggers. And if we do have our combo established, all of these pieces only work to push our advantage further to secure the win.
The plan after finishing Crash was to run the new Marvel Ultimate Alliance 3 content with Chris, but I foolishly forgot that I had uninstalled the game some time ago.
So instead I decided to start playing Spyro 2: Ripto’s Rage. Welcome to the magical world of Avalar, where we’ve been summoned to toast a new threat. And naturally, with new challenges comes and expanded arsenal.
First off, apologies once more for the audio balancing. It will be fixed in the next recording.
In the original version of Spyro 2, when a player achieves 100%, they unlock a version of the superflame power up that already exists in the game, except that it is a permanent upgrade. This benefit extends to all future runs as long as the 100% save game data exists. Naturally, this was carried over into the remake. I was hesitant to keep going with it for the sake of showing off the game better, but I ultimately think it’s okay play with superflame, since I can talk about what is made easier with that ability.
The glitch I was talking about in this episode was the Double Jump Glitch, which I was able to find references to on the Spyro wiki. I never knew its name growing up, just that it helped me complete challenges and find secrets that I clearly wasn’t supposed to be able to find without abilities I didn’t have. I’ll miss it, but I understand why they didn’t bother trying to bring it over in the Reignited Trilogy.
Aside from that, I want to call attention to the scene with Elora after beating Glimmer. Comparing the scene in the original version below to the reignited version(timestamp), there’s no change in lines. The key difference is in the delivery. There’s a slight bite to the original that conveys that both Spyro and Elora are still not quite friends since they only just met. This edge is softened in the new performances, which give off an impression that they immediately hit it off. Neither interpretation is bad, but one of those extremely slight details that I can’t help but pick up on since I’ve played this game so many times.
Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t also point out how much better the intro cutscene looks in the new remake when compared to the original below, since the animators, modelers, and actors have much more to work with. But it’s not just in higher quality models, either. The use of cinematography and camera work adds so much more to the reignited version of the scene than there was in the original.
All criticisms aside, Toys for Bob did excellent work in re-imagining both the Spyro and Crash trilogies, and they should be commended for that.
