It’s been 84 years.

Not quite 84 years, but if you told me it had been 84 weeks since my last post I would not be surprised, while life has been busy (ok, it is mostly me going squirrel and not staying on track) I have continued to be on top of amiibo releases which sadly, for the time being, appears to have concluded. Perhaps Totaku will fill that void but I am still waiting on figures I pre-ordered 6 months ago to show up at my local store so that has been a frustrating experience.

In my absence from posting, I was busy completely redoing the audio stream server and thankfully it has remained stable for a couple months now. This is currently handled by an audio server-specific distro on the Raspberry PI which was prompted by my interest in using low powered computers as servers instead of the Power Edge servers I had been using previously which generated tons of heat, noise and had high electric consumption.

Similarly, I am using another PI to run both Pi-hole and to seed torrents released by The 16-bit Audiophile Project (which you should check out). I have even moved any locally stored videos we stream via Infuse on our Apple TVs to a hard drive connected to our wireless internet router and surprisingly with the ATV hard-wired (gigabit network) they are able to stream 4K movies as large as 60-80 gigs flawlessly.

On the gaming side of things I am behind on the latest WOW patch, 2 expansions behind on Destiny 2 and still have not completed the current DLC for Forza Horizon 4. Doh… I am however enjoying Dragon Quest XI a lot and just started digging into Animal Crossing New Horizons. There is always way too much to play and not enough time dedicated to actually enjoying them, something I have improved so far this year but I still find myself constantly behind.

In the coming months with our daughter moving off to college, we will be shuffling some rooms around a bit to relocate our game room to a larger room in the house, as that happens I will be posting lots of pictures of the new setup.

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  The Treasure Trove finally released and along with it this nifty golden Shovel Knight!

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  Some of the Shovel Knight DLC characters included in this “collection”.

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  Richter and Dark Samus amiibo, with these being the last two of what has been announced will this be the end of the amiibo series of figures?

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  The latest Animal Crossing, while I have yet to put much time into it it has been amazing fun so far!

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  I have only played DQ so far but I am about 25 hours in, I have not had this much fun with a JRPG in years.

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  A throwback collection for a much-loved series that I somehow managed to never play, I will start this once I finish DQ.

The latest roundup of stuff.

It has been a busy month or two since the last post and Christmas has since come and gone, welcome to 2018!  🙂

The music stream is back up and running after I was able to replace a blown power supply, I am hoping that a failing power supply was the cause behind the server stability issues but if not I will be moving to an altogether new server to fix the issues once and for all. (The current server is quite old)

 

Since my last blog entry, Nintendo released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp and I have been enjoying it quite a bit, and if the Twitter activity I have been seeing is anything to go by so have many others.

 

Blizzard had their yearly Black Friday sales as expected but this year the prices cuts were deeper then we have seen before, plushies were so cheap you could pick some up for as little as $3.50, considering these super low prices I went all in!

A plush and matching in-game pet!

Horde emblem hat for around $4.00, yes thank you…

 

As a coffee drinking household, the below mugs were a must!

 

I have been playing a ton of Destiny 2 in the past month, so far I have completed both the launch campaign the Curse of Osiris expansion and have completed a single clear of the Leviathan raid as of this morning, the game is a lot of fun despite the drama constantly surrounding some of Bungie’s decisions.

I would love to see more focus on group communication especially Clan chat considering this is considered a FPS take on an MMO, doing both voice and text chat via Discord is ok but I would much prefer some basic in-game functionality. That said the game is tons of fun and as you can see by all of the screenshots below it is graphically impressive, you find yourself stopping and staring at the scenery at almost every turn.

 

My local retro gaming shop got in a sealed copy of Axiom Verge for the PC, it was cheap and I still needed the game so went for it.

 

There was a sale on Steam recently where if you bought a copy of Icey for $7.69 you got a free Steam Link, I have yet to use it but I have both a Gigabit Lan and 802.11ac wireless so performance should not be an issue.

 

This too was found on sale for a mere $12.00, my wife will do anything to get me to play board games. 🙂

 

The latest round of Amiibo was released and the pictures do not do them justice, the level of detail has been great on all of the BOTW Amiibo!

 

Last weekend I was able to complete the main story of Mario Odessey and while there are still tons of stars left to collect I can easily say that this is in my top 5 Mario games of all time (Maybe #1), the game is near perfection and excels in every category of gaming… the graphics are great and the soundtrack is so good I have pre-ordered the CD from Japan.

Nintendo also managed to really hit it home with nostalgia, if you are a fan of the original 8-Bit games on up there are shouts out to pretty much every mainstream game in the franchise and fans of each will be happy to experience those moments. Additionally the New Donk City Festival “level” just may be my favorite gaming moment ever, every gaming podcast I listen to has mentioned the level and both the happiness and emotion it inspires in longtime fans of the Mario games.

Mario Odessey is a 10 out of 10 as almost all reviews have claimed, gaming perfection.

 

A Cappy hat!

 

A pre-order bonus coin when purchasing Mario Odessey through Best Buy.

 

The Yoshi hat below was found at a store in Japan at Disney’s Epcot, an awesome store with something for everyone that is a fan of Japanese culture.

 

My local retro gaming shop had this for a few dollars, with official game soundtracks being so rare and just starting to become available digitally via iTunes and the like I figured I would go for it.

 

A couple retro games on my wanted list, I have no idea how I never managed to own a copy of the classic Rygar.

 

Disney Infinity figures are starting to become impossible to find, so when you come upon some on clearance for $1.00…

 

Another local retro gaming shop find, sealed and for a good price!

 

Its Sonic, don’t judge me. ^_^

 

My iPhone 6 Plus was starting to show its age after roughly 3 years of use so I upgraded to the iPhone 10, it is hands down the best iPhone I have owned and Face ID is a joy to use.

The month of the ghouls…

October is almost over and with it Halloween one of my favorite holidays is near. We have celebrated the month by watching movies that fit the mood including a handful that I had somehow never seen before such as The Shining, The Addams Family, and Hocus Pocus. We even watched some Halloween themed movies such as Tales of Halloween for a good laugh.

My pickups for the month include the SNES Classic Edition which I picked up via the Amazon Treasure Truck, along with it came a Legend of Zelda collectors poster and a Nintendo Switch as part of the random swag they gave out.

 

I also picked up Super Mario Odyssey and am about 15 hours into it so far, this is hands down one of the most fun games I have ever played and proof that Nintendo can still absolutely nail the genre. The game takes all of the best aspects of Mario 64, Sunshine and Galaxy and improves upon them in every way, even the collecting aspect has been improved because this time around you want to collect that much more just to open up the various outfits that Mario can wear.

If you have been waiting to get a Switch now is the time to pick one up, this game deserves all of the hype it has been getting.

 

The Mario Odyssey amiibo are fantastic!

 

Look at the Goomba doing his cranky best and the Koopa Troop strutting his stuff.  🙂

 

Tiki and Chrom from Fire Emblem, a series I am still warming up to… no pun intended.

 

I got a new computer monitor upgrade as they were on sale at a deep discount, an LG IPS 29″ Ultra Wide 21:9 display. This isn’t 4k  as my plan is to wait until my next video card upgrade but at a resolution of 2560×1080 the slightly higher than 2k resolution provides a beautiful image and I found myself turning down some of the anti-aliasing features in games as the higher settings were simply not needed.

Additionally, I wanted to go with an ultra wide to provide better immersion and field of view when playing MMO’s and the occasional FPS. So far it has been great in the games I typically play on the PC which generally includes the below titles in no particular order, as shown in the screenshot I also picked up the PC release of Destiny 2 and got suckered into the Digital Deluxe Edition to ensure I got cheaper access to the 2 planned expansions as they come out.

• World of Warcraft
• Star Trek Online
• Guild Wars 2
• Everquest 2
• Rift
• Secret World Legends
• Project Gorgon
• Overwatch
• Destiny 2

 

CupHead was picked up for the Xbox One and included a Windows copy, I was able to get the digital code from Amazon and took advantage of a $10.00 credit for signing up for a trial of Amazon Music. I have yet to play it due to the sad state of my pile of shame but it has all the markings of being a game I would love, Gunstar Heroes, for example, is an all-time favorite and I give it a play through roughly twice a year.

 

Another 4K BluRay release to sit alongside Logan, my plan with physical is to just get my absolute favorite movies on disc (with digital) and everything else I will just go digital. With the addition of Disney’s “Movies Anywhere” and the major feature of it tying in all of your digital purchases across multiple digital retailers I am now ok with the non physical approach as I do not feel my movies are locked in and segregated, I now have my movies shared across Movies Anywhere, Vudu, Google Play, iTunes and Amazon.

 

And finally I also purchased the 4K AppleTV, I love the Apple ecosystem and own the previous generation of the streaming box. While there have been some issues out of the gate related to the HRD10/DolbyVision iterations of HDR recent Apple tvOS beta patch notes indicate that this is being taken care of in a future update.

This combined with Android TV on my 4K television assures that I can happily stream my digital libraries moving forward and I have the Xbox One S for 4K BluRay playback when image quality is an absolute must for my favorite movies.

July continued.

July continued with the release of Splatoon 2 and numerous Amiibo, I have spent tons of time in Splatoon 2. Such a great spin on the FPS shooter genre!