Just googled it, and KSP was released in 2011.
So that’s 8 years ago. If he’s in 3rd year university, plus 4 years of high school, it must only have been the last year of elementary school. Unless he fast-tracked at some point.
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Hmm. Wikipedia says “The game was released out of beta on 27 April 2015”, so I read it as 2015+11 = 2026. But I see it was early-access and pre-released before that back to 2011.
Probably a difference in school terms. In mine, 8 years to go from 4th grade to 3rd year of university would involve skipping a few grades. After elementary, there were 8 more years of middle school, junior high, and high school; adding 3 years of university would give 11, so even 2011 + 11 = 2022. But different places structure school differently, so probably a mistranslation on my part.
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Wow. I decided to take a break from housework and started up Shadow of Death, and…
For the first time, I beat the Raid Boss.
She’s an incredibly tough two-headed monster, and I usually die really quickly against her. But with my second-highest-level fighter (ranged mage, looks like Raven from Teen Titans) and a metric 
ton of health potions, I lasted long enough to grind her down.
(Despite the name, the Raid Boss is you against the monster, with no help from other players.)
Of course, this is only at Normal difficulty. There’s Normal, then Hard, then Hell, then Insane. So I’ve got a way to go yet… 
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Now running around in a Catapult set up as a long range missile troll build. Four LRM launchers set up to chain fire allows me to keep a constant stream of missiles landing on the head of anyone within a kilometre.
Apparently it’s rather hard to concentrate on your aim when your cockpit is constantly shaking from missile impacts. It’s quite good at motivating the opposition to run for cover. 
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Warning: lengthy Shadow of Death post ahead. Probably better to skip it. 
I’m still playing, though all of my characters have progressed far enough where they have to grind in Adventure mode (characters vs. monsters, in Hell difficulty) for progress, so it’s slow and kinda frustrating. But I’m still improving and finding new tricks, so it’s good.
Three of my four characters have beaten the Raid Boss, and one of those is two wins away from qualifying for weekly bonuses. The fourth, the one I’m having some trouble with, is my melee tank. It’s easy to level up his Attack and Defense, but like so many tank builds, he’s kind of a glass cannon… his Hit Points are difficult to raise. Fortunately, my last free daily gift was a Legendary Accessory that brought him above 40,000, and it helps.
Arena is Arena. The random matching still results in uneven fights, but it’s a little better than it was. I’m improving my stats and strategies, so it’s not quite the inevitable curbstomping it used to be. (In fact, I’m no longer intimidated by seeing the same old names that used to fill me with dread… these days I’m beating most of them more often than not. Karma is sweet. ) Plus the game allows you to look at your opponent’s stats after a match, and that’s taught me a lot. My characters (all above Level 60) have a real shot against, say, a player in the 80s, or even low 90s, if my Mastery score is higher. (Mastery is where you put Runes into increasing your stats.) Some low-90s levels players still don’t know this; their Mastery is zero. Please don’t tell them…
One of my characters has been really killing it in the Arena-- my somewhat-squishy ranged mage. She has no melee attacks at all, so her strategy is run-and-gun: race to one side of the arena, blast away with her magic missiles until the opponent is close, then hit with a Special Attack and run to the other side (hopefully while they waste a Special where she just was.) One of her Specials is a portal that’s perfect for a clean getaway, plus it explodes to do damage once she’s gone. It’s a cowardly strategy, but if she lives long enough, it works. It works so well that she’s the first character of mine to hit top level in Diamond League. (Leagues progress from Bronze 
Silver Gold Platinum Diamond Champion, with Divisions from 5 [lowest] to 1 [highest] in all but Champion, which has three divisions.) Except reaching Diamond 1 means she’s occasionally playing against Champions… cue the curbstomping again. The game seems to address this by giving me a free boost before the match starts, but it isn’t much good. To give you some idea what I’m up against: two of my three Champion challengers had HP above 100,000. My Lyrica’s current HP: 47,924. That alone makes winning almost impossible, though I did manage to chew one of them down to around 20% life before dying, so that’s something. None of my characters are ready for Champion yet, and they clearly won’t be any time soon. Oh well. More fun for later, I guess. 
In fact, resource management is a huge part of the game. Sure, you’ve killed monsters and won Soul (the lesser in-game currency.) How do you spend it? Buy armor or weapon upgrades? Grab some consumable boosts from the Street Vendor? Or you can combine it with Runes to raise Mastery. And then there’s Crystals, usually earned by leveling up or meeting challenges. They can buy other items, or be converted into Soul. Runes do different things, depending on whether or not you bind them into different types of equipment, or use them for Mastery… this is why I gave up on trying to write a game guide for this site. It’s too complex! And there isn’t a lot of info around the Web, so some of it is trial and error. (Note: when your Inventory is full, don’t sell Ancient items. They can be combined to raise stats. Guess who found that out late? 
Armor is a safer choice to sell, but once you level up a piece of armor enough, that can combine to Enhance too… if you have enough Soul to pay for it. Cue more grinding.)
It would be so much easier if I spent some real-life money, which the game encourages, often. (Well, most games do. ) And someday I might throw the developers some money-- they’ve earned it-- but I’m stubborn, and cheap. So for now it’s a little grinding every day, until I give in or lose interest. Which isn’t happening yet.
Okay, rant’s over now. Back to the regularly scheduled topic.
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Still having fun with MWO, and I just had my best game so far:
Completely emptied my missile racks onto a bunch of largely defenceless targets (not a lot of cover on the polar highlands map…) and then helped to finish off the survivors with my pulse lasers.
Although the controls for the game may appear intimidating at first…
…it really isn’t that complicated. Mostly, it’s just WASD to move and the mouse for looking around and shooting. A four-button mouse is useful if you’ve got a lot of different weapon systems, but it isn’t compulsory.
It’s strictly an online multiplayer jobbie; there is no single player mode except for the rather limited tutorials.
But the online community is unusually friendly; in all the time I’ve been playing, there has only been one instance of someone being obnoxious in the chat, and (a) the other players immediately told them to cut it out, (b) muting them is just a single mouse click, and © reporting misbehaviour is equally simple.
It’s a team game, and the player base is unusual in the extent to which people actually do work together as teams. Apart from an occasional bit of accidental friendly fire (inevitable when there’s a chaotic melee going on), I’ve never seen an instance of team-killing behaviour, either.
Once you get over the initial learning curve, there is a lot of fun and variety to be had, and although you can spend huge amounts of money if you choose to, it’s absolutely not necessary. It’s perfectly possible to have fun without spending a cent.
Recommended for anyone who has any interest in tactical wargaming or big stompy mechs. If you want to have a look before trying, Baradul’s channel provides excellent content:
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So my current waste time game on my phone is of the shoot balls at the bricks and watch all the balls bounce around until they return to the bottom of the screen genre.
Mindless with little strategy beyond trying to get some good bank shots in.
I keep wishing though that I could get an after game .csv detailing how many bricks did each ball hit. Which round removed the most blocks. How much better do I do with power upgrade x over upgrade y.
The whole meta-game schtick.
Is this how baseball statistics started?
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So Zachtronics released a new game today:
And somehow I missed another game of theirs:
This one looks a bit different than their usual fare. It’s a visual novel rather than a puzzle game.
I look forward to trying both of them out.
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Dang, and I still need to find the time to finish Infinifactory and Shenzhen I/O.
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CONFIRMED!!!
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Been playing Dawn of Man for the last few days. By the people who brought us Planetbase.
It’s a city builder, but you start with cave people. Build your society up through primitive ages.
Really good game if you like this sort of thing.
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I’ve gone back to play Quantum Conundrum for the last few days (which is currently on sale for less than $1)… fun physics puzzle game, often gets compared to Portal just due to the physics puzzles and the general humor. The controls can be a little floaty at times, but it’s not too bad. And John de Lancie as a slightly nutty mad scientist is always fun.
I’ve played through the game before, but haven’t yet played the additional DLC. I’m playing back through to remind myself how the game works, and having a bit of fun trying to spot all the spoof book titles they’ve scattered through it:
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Well, time to update that. I breezed through the original story in the last three days or so, didn’t get all the perfect scores but had a fun time, with a few head-scratching moments from time to time but everything felt fair and satisfying once the answer was found.
Then I started into the first level of the first DLC, “The Desmond Debacle”…
Uh… I don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into here. No voice acting, which is mostly fine, but the first level killed me over. and over. and over. and… [etc], and all in silence, which was a bit of a sudden change after having ‘Q’ nattering on while playing.
… I finally got through it, but now I’m scratching my head over the second level, and I’ve pretty much given up on getting the achievements for playing the levels efficiently. It seems like they took onboard the criticisms that the original game was too easy, and then corrected hard in the other direction.
It’s still fun to figure out the solutions, mind you, and I’m sure I’ll keep poking at it out of hard-headedness. It just feels like the DLC puzzles rely quite a bit more on the sometimes fiddly controls and physics luck. The puzzles not really being integrated into the game proper also hurts the continuity a bit.
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They also share a director in common:
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No major Shadow of Death updates, just a funny thing.
I’ve suspected for a while now that the game’s server “borrows” player characters for combatants in the Arena when there aren’t a lot of actual players around. Well, I had to get my ranged-mage build through 15 bouts for a Daily Quest challenge, and look who I came across:
Hey, isn’t that my melee tank?
Yup, it’s mine. It’s a perfect match. And, to add insult to the injury, let’s look at the History screen:
You’ll notice that Raventhorn’s background is dark, unlike the other characters… indictating I lost that match.
Yes, folks, the game managed to beat me with my own character build.
(It’s a pretty good build tho, if I say so myself. )
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More Shadow of Death… it looks like the grinding is starting to pay off. Last night’s gaming session was wildly successful. My melee tank got defeated in the Arena after a winning streak of 23 rounds, which I think is my longest streak yet. My hybrid melee/ranged mage fighter battled her way up to Diamond 1 in Arena, which she’s never hit before, and is my first character to reach Level 80 in Adventure mode. She’s got a nifty new Skill attack now (what I was calling Special Attacks), which should make fights a little easier. And, for the very first time ever, I beat a Champion-level player in the Arena.
Yup, my semi-squishy ranged-mage, she of the cowardly run-and-gun, catch-me-if-you-can strategy, took down a Champion, not once, but twice. Stats-wise, it makes no sense-- she’s got way less power than that opponent. But it happened. And then I got creamed by the next Champion, but it was close. That player had a Skill attack that regenerated health when used, and I still brought them down to about 5% before they got me. It was a good fight, even if I lost. 
And to think-- I used to complain about “all these fighters are stronger than me, is this really fair?” I just have to laugh at myself for that attitude. These days I’m taking down players twenty levels higher than me fairly regularly. Numbers are important, sure, but sneakiness and stubborn persistence help too.
Edited to add:
That’s my Lyrica at 21, Raventhorn at 38, and Nocturne at 39! Three of my four in the League Top 50!
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Currently downloading the new stompy game:
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Interesting note:
One of the early campaign missions in Mechwarrior 5 involves the player being hired by a militant union to blow up some corporate facilities in order to force the employer to the negotiating table. Industrial terrorism, basically.
The name of the mission? “A Noble Cause”…
I think the politics of the devs are showing a bit.
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Currently 40% off:
Highly rated on BGG, but I can’t find much on solitaire suitability:
Rulebook here:
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