Morning Ramble 345: MST3K, Adventure Zone, and The Secret World
Today I ramble about a couple of events I just found out about happening during Comic-Con and I take a look back at The Secret World before I create a new character to explore the current state of the game.
Comic-Con Stuff
I just saw 2 events that look pretty interesting for the week of Comic-Con.
Mystery Science Theater 3000 will have 2 events during Comic-Con week. On Friday July 21 and Saturday July 22, MST3K will be performing at the Balboa Theatre at 7pm. This is pretty interesting since I just ran across their new season release on Netflix this weekend and am looking for a time where I can start watching the episodes. I guess they’re calling the new season…Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Return and it came out in mid April. This season is comprised of 14 episodes and features Felicia Day and Patton Oswalt playing the Mads and Jonah Ray playing Jonah Heston as the captive victim subjected to horrible movies. If the season is anything like the original I’ll be a regular watcher…I loved that show. Now if I can only find the time and $40 to go see them do it live.
The Adventure Zone podcast is hosting a live show on Friday July 21st at 10pm at the Balboa Theatre and if you like Dungeons & Dragons or any pen & paper gaming, this could be a lot of fun. I’ve listened to these guys for a few years now and they never disappoint. Their hilarious D&D gaming sessions are definitely highlights of my weekly listening and I’ve also enjoyed their My Brother, My Brother, and Me show. I only wish I could have run campaigns like they do when I was playing D&D all the time. 10pm might be a bit late for me to be hanging out downtown, but depending on the Saturday morning schedule I may just see about checking these guys out.
The Secret World
TSW was one of the first games I rambled to back when I started this blog, and looking back I see that in May 2012 I was bopping around in the beta as a Templar and enjoying myself. So much so that I bought the game before launch – not a thing I do often. I got into Early Access and created a Dragon to continue my adventures and quickly immersed myself in Kingsmouth and the wonderfully creepy atmosphere of the game. As I thought at the time, TSW is a really unique game and now I am even more surprised to say it still is singular in style. Why hasn’t it proven more successful – I don’t know, but I love the missions, the music, the classless leveling structure, and the setting… so much of it. I suppose the one failing is the combat which is kinda clunky but I’ve played with worse. With that said, I’d almost consider this secondarily a combat game – most of the cool aspects of the game happen outside of combat. The missions require actual thought rather than collecting herbs or delivering mail – instead they make you figure out what symbols mean for a code or ask you to perform some kind of logic puzzle – they’re so much better than in most ‘successful’ MMOs. Perhaps that’s the problem…people just want to mindlessly advance to max level (there really isn’t one in TSW) while hacking and slashing whatever happens to be infront of them – they don’t want to have to think in a video game. Oh well. I enjoy the puzzle tasks and having to actually think about what I’m doing. I also like to read or listen to the stories NPCs pass on – who’d think the NPCs may have information relevant to the game rather than just being props in the towns you visit – so many people complain if they can’t skip over quest text since it’s so irrelevant.
In any case, I started up a new character, now that the game is being ‘updated’ to a single player RPG. I guess the launch date for the Secret World Legends is late June sometime so I figure I’ll refamiliarize myself with Kingsmouth and the early areas and see how far I can travel through the world. Who knows, after SWL launches I may stick around and see how the two games compare.