I read on MassivelyOP that Shroud of the Avatar was having a free trial “test” (whatever that is) so I downloaded the game and tried it out last weekend. I’ve seen increasing buzz about the game and I was curious to see if there was anything to it. I only played for about an hour, and while I can’t say I was dying to play more, I did find it interesting enough to leave it on my games to continue watching. (1012 words.)

I’m now 56 days into my Navezgane 7 Days To Die game. I’ve built a forge and a workbench and a cement mixer and my base is getting upgraded to concrete and reinforced steel. Just in time for the bigger zombies like policemen, soldiers, and weird alien “feral” zombies. I also found some iron veins to mine. I had a hard time finding them because I kept hearing that you’re supposed to dig where you find gravel but it’s not actually “gravel” that comes out of the ground, it’s sand and stone (which combine to make gravel). (1208 words.)

Yes, that's a miniature panda on my head. Last night I took a look at Revelation Online for the first time. I played for about 45 minutes. I don’t have much to say about it, except I didn’t particularly care for it. It’s a solidly average anime-style MMORPG that takes no chances. It’s an Asian version of a WoW-clone. (A Lineage-clone?) I saw nothing that advanced the MMORPG genre in any way. (692 words.)

From a draft written somewhere around October 2016… I finally got around to watching Amazon’s teaser video, thinking that it would erase my earlier skepticism and soften my opinion about their upcoming games, and maybe even start to get excited about the possibilities. Unfortunately it only pushed my skeptical buttons even harder. “What if a game was built for Twitch,” wonders a voiceover 12 seconds into the video. Instant buzzkill. The video goes on to mention Twitch about five times in the first 60 seconds, before anything about games. (317 words.)

Another post rescued from my drafts… Book 14 begins with Laerdan preparing for a journey south. He asked me to collect a bunch of gear for him that he left strewn around Eriador, because the hero’s journey always involves fetching stuff. It was a lengthy, boring scavenger hunt. When I returned to Rivendell, Laerdan was gone. In a note, he said he sent me away so I wouldn’t interfere. I spent all that time collecting his gear for nothing. (628 words.)

It's a heart. Valentine's Day? February? A perfectly logical picture for this post. Games played in February, according to ManicTime. A pretty strong survival game theme here. :) 7 Days To Die - 67 hours Conan Exiles - 62 hours* Rise of the Tomb Raider - 9 hours ARK - 4 hours The Secret World - 2 hours ESO - 2 hours * Conan Exiles approximated since ManicTime counted every new version as a different game. (76 words.)

Bust of Janus, from Wikimedia Commons. Get it? Janus? January? Hey any picture is better than nothing. Better late than never, here are the games I played in January, according to ManicTime: Final Fantasy XIV <td> 76 hrs </td> Elder Scrolls Online <td> 15 hrs </td> Lord of the Rings Online <td> 12 hrs </td> Morrowind <td> 7 hrs </td> Novus Inceptio <td> 2 hrs </td> Star Wars: The Old Republic <td> 2 hrs </td> (Only games played 2 hours or more shown. (117 words.)

Rescued from the drafts folder… Blatantly stolen from therepopulation.com because I don’t have any screenshots. I was initially glad to hear that The Repopulation will be coming back. I splurged in a moment of weakness and bought it for $20 on Steam back in February 2015. I don’t remember why I bought it. I think I had heard some positive feedback about it, and I had heard also it described as being heavily inspired by Star Wars Galaxies, and I was curious to see what a SWG-like game looked like. (465 words.)

So I’m going to write some more about 7 Days To Die since it’s all I’ve been playing lately, and there’s this weird expectation that bloggers are supposed to post things occasionally. I gave up on Conan Exiles because I already feel like I’ve done everything in the game, or I should say I’ve seen all the game mechanics that are in the game. Those mechanics are: Gather stuff, build stuff, and kill stuff. (1387 words.)

Stolen from their web site because I don't have any pictures for a post about this game. As I was catching up on MMORPG news story titles in my feed reader, I noticed that Revelation Online had started Early Access on February 27. For all intents and purposes, this is what we would normally call a game launch. You have to buy a Founder’s Pack to access the game “early,” but supposedly there will be no more character wipes, which sounds a lot like a launch to me. (360 words.)

I played a large amount of 7 Days To Die this weekend. I finally discovered some things to make the game more enjoyable beyond the 7th day. A trip to the market. I bought 7DTD way back in February 2015 for $25. That must have been before my $10 rule or a random exception, because I don’t think I’d heard about the game beforehand. I didn’t play it very much in 2015 because it was still early, but it was fun, and I liked what they were doing with it. (3025 words.)

You might be wondering why I’m still talking about Conan Exiles after trashing it for two posts in a row. Welllllll, see, it’s still kind of fun. :) Some random shrine of some random priest. It has that same sort of addictive crafting progression treadmill that ARK has: I want to see everything you can craft, so I have to keep leveling up and unlocking new recipes and finding more and more resources. (851 words.)

My recent test drive of Conan Exiles and a comment from Jeromai reminded me of a topic I once started writing about but never finished, which I will now take up again: What makes a good survival game? What defines a survival game? The Forest (way back in 2015) What prompted me to visit this topic was a comment from Jeromai: That he became more interested in Conan Exiles after hearing you could play it solo. (1275 words.)

For some weird reason I’m still playing Conan Exiles. Probably some misguided need to get my money’s worth out of it. Also it’s a fairly relaxing game world to be inside right now. I can safely ignore everything in the real world while I’m breaking rocks. (And that is a big chunk of what you do-everything requires tons of stone.) However, I will continue to list everything that’s wrong with the game, hopefully to shame Funcom into feeling bad about releasing their game too early. (1367 words.)

I wasn’t going to buy Conan Exiles right away, because I could tell from the streams and the early gameplay videos that it wasn’t ready yet, but I bought it anyway because I just didn’t feel like playing FFXIV. $30 isn’t too much to waste on a game, right? Eventually they’ll fix it up into a finished game, surely? To nobody’s surprise, I should have waited for a sale. Let’s start with the bad stuff. (785 words.)