Monthly Archives: February 2016

Ninjustin Streams On Twitch Now!

Hey everybody, Ninjustin here. Huh. Does everything look a bit different or is it just me? Oh yeah, this is my first time posting since we un-crashed the site! Sorry for my inactivity. Stuff’s been happening in my life. Also depression and anxiety. You know how it goes.

Anyway, in order to make regular content again, and because I like streaming games and don’t know why I stopped: I’m now streaming games on my personal Twitch channel, Wooogles! If you check my channel’s profile you can watch past broadcasts, of which I’ve streamed 1001 Spikes, Helldivers, and ye olde Ninja Gaiden and Castlevania.

I do plan to get back to making written content, but in the meantime, I’ll be streaming several times a week, in the early afternoon or evening (American time). I don’t have a set schedule for streaming yet, but I’ll be working on that. Follow my channel if you want to be notified of when I’m streaming. If I have any stream plans that I deem “important,” I’ll try to announce the stream time and date here in advance, so keep an eye out!

Also, if you haven’t heard, Helldivers is an awesome co-op game on PS4 and PC. Play that shit, and put [NinBlu] in front of your Steam name if you want to represent.

Surprise! I thought of a better mouse-over joke at the last second. These bits are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules.

Jarenth Plays XCOM 2 — Episode 1: Rude Awakening

In the last episode of Jarenth Plays XCOM 2, I… just woke up! Apparently I was kidnapped by alien forces somewhere between the end of the previous Let’s Play and this one. Emphasis on ‘napped’: as far as we can tell, the aliens just made me sleep a whole damn bunch. But how long exactly have they put in their stasis tank?

After the break: I find out just how long I’ve been under. It’s… longer than I expected.

Ranonauts – The Game Is Messing With Me

YouTube Link

Androns are surprisingly tricky robot jerks, they really have a talent for hiding in areas of the map that they have absolutely no business in. Seriously why were those guys in the very corner of the map? To mess with me. I know that the Community Edition of Xenonauts is meant to boost the AI in some ways, I am curious if this sneakiness is included in that better AI.

The Hunter Car is victim/benefactor of Xenonauts strangely inconsistent strategy of handing me awesome gear for simply completing some research projects. I have no idea exactly when I was able to replace the rocket launcher with a plasma bolt launcher, but it is easily the most powerful weapon I can take into combat with me, I am almost annoyed that this upgrade had to be manually triggered rather than just happening automatically like it did with my base facilities and defenses.

The Ranonauts Project would like to offer it’s congratulations to:

  • Caldazar for taking down 4 of the enemy soldiers before succumbing to his wounds.
  • RebelliousUno and Kate for taking out 3 Androns each
  • Oceane and Paul for killing 3 Ceasans on their first outing

The Ranonauts would like to offer its condolences to the families of the following officers:

  • Rageaholic
  • Lauren Butler

To date Ranonauts has:

  • defended the earth for 3 months and 16 days
  • lost 34 soldiers
  • killed 198 aliens in 23 ground battles
  • captured 28 aliens
  • shot down 26 alien spacecraft
  • had 1 aircraft shot down
  • received $8,092,621 in funding

Ranonauts is in desperate need for new recruits after recent… incidents, if you or a friend would like to become a soldier in the Ranonauts project please leave a comment or fill in your information here, the next set of new soldiers will arrive in episode twenty-three.

Torment Thursday – The Resonance Chamber

YouTube Link

Finally we are done with character creation… or are we? In Numenera and other Cypher system games you are always a ______ _______ who ______, or a Descripter Type who Focuses. The first scene in character creation lets us pick a Descriptor, the second sequence currently ends in a temporary completely out of character choice of Type but we haven’t chosen a focus. I am not sure if this is because focuses are not yet implemented or if our focus is already fixed by the plot. For example, we could be a Slick Nano who is Attuned to the Blue Tide, or maybe a Slick Nano who was Castoff By the Changing God.

Regardless it feels good to get out of our own head and into the world itself, I am really looking forward to exploring the exotic science fantasy setting that Numenera offers, to talk to NPCs and actually get things done. Of course the first area is literally the same one we got to explore in Alpha Systems Test 2, but things are interesting enough that I will avoid trying to rush through the older stuff to get to the new content.

Ranonauts – Called It

YouTube Link

Even with the save issue marring the start, it felt really good when my call was vindicated, I picked up the signals the game was putting out and it paid off. If I hadn’t left the crew of Charlie One back, things would have gone really poorly for the Soviet Europe base. I don’t think 2 people would have had much chance of holding out against the combined Sebillian and Reaper attack force. By keeping my best troops home I was able to benefit from the much more experienced troops in the Soviet Europe base. They have seen much more combat and are much better prepared for the absurd hitpoints of our lizard friends.

The Ranonauts Project would like to offer it’s congratulations to:

  • Caldazar for taking down 4 of the enemy soldiers before succumbing to his wounds.

The Ranonauts would like to offer its condolences to the families of the following officers:

  • Caldazar

To date Ranonauts has:

  • defended the earth for 3 months and 15 days
  • lost 32 soldiers
  • killed 181 aliens in 21 ground battles
  • captured 26 aliens
  • shot down 26 alien spacecraft
  • had 1 aircraft shot down
  • received $8,092,621 in funding

Ranonauts is in desperate need for new recruits after recent… incidents, if you or a friend would like to become a soldier in the Ranonauts project please leave a comment or fill in your information here, the next set of new soldiers will arrive in episode twenty-three.

Surprise! I thought of a better mouse-over joke at the last second. These bits are guidelines, not hard-and-fast rules.

Jarenth Plays XCOM 2 — Introduction

Hey, remember that whole war I fought against an escalating alien invasion? While tough, brutal, and at times incredibly unfair, The XCOM Project managed to — in the end — fend off the invading aliens forces, defeat the Uber Ethereal spearheading the assault, and save the world.

And sure, we knew that that probably wasn’t the end of it. Even with their leader dead and their forces scattered, there were still more than enough alien soldiers and bases and craft to threaten global peace and stability for decades. But… at the same time, that was all it was ever going to be, right? The vague possibility of a threat. The occasional attack here or there, some abductions, some explosions. Maybe another Chryssalid outbreak, if fate was particularly down on us. But in the grand scheme of things, all this was only ever going to amount to cleanup. We win, game over; time to grab our ball and go home.

We didn’t know anything.

After the break: this particular story starts with me waking up. I promise it’s not going to be a high school anime, though.

Ranneko Plays Kumoon Ballistic Physics Puzzle

YouTube Link

I ran across Kumoon as part of the Distribute() weekly mailing list, the title immediately caught my eye. Ballistic Physics Puzzle. I like shooting things, I like things having physics and I even like solving puzzles occasionally, it seemed like it was worth a shot. It turns out that Kumoon is a game of few surprises. You shoot balls, you knock around boxes and you try to work out how to get as many points as possible. It is a fairly small self-contained experience but an unfortunately limited one. I was hoping that the later puzzles would introduce new mechanics, even just some variation in ball and cube sizes, surfaces with different properties, but unfortunately what you see in the first set of levels is pretty much what you get for the entire game. They just raise the number of points that you have to score per box.

It is only £/$5 on steam though so if it looked interesting to you, and especially I suspect if you have a VR headset around as it may be a more interesting experience with the presence that could provide.

Indie Wondernews

Hey readers!

It’s one of those bad news-good news mixed-bag situations over at Ninja Blues today. As I’m sure you’re noticing, there’s no Indie Wonderland today. That’s the bad news. Sorry!

Now, I would tell you that I missed my weekly deadline because I’ve been sick, or because I’ve been busy with work, or because I had a boatload of social obligations. These things are all true… but you know me, would I let that sort of stuff get in-between us? No, the real reason there’s no Indie Wonderland this week is because I spent all the free time I could have spent playing and reviewing an indie game, on writing something else instead.

Something else? Yes, something else. Something else. Something that, deo volente, you’ll be able to read on this very Ninja Blues pretty soon. How soon? As soon as next Tuesday, i.e. tomorrow, and then every Tuesday and Saturday after that…

Indie Wonderland: Crashlands

Butterscotch Shenanigans got me interested in their latest release, Crashlands, through the clever campaign idea of ‘talking about it on social media’. I don’t even actively remember signing up for their launch-day email list? But sign up I did, received an email I have, and bought, downloaded, and played Crashlands for review, I…

I guess I’m doing that right now, actually!

(Spoiler levels: Narrative, low. Mechanical, high, but mostly by way of comparison.)

(Game source: Patreon.)

After the break: Crashlands. It’s a good thing it doesn’t read ‘Crash lands’, or I’d be in for a real rough plane ride, ha ha!

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Ranonauts – A Shockingly Good Time

YouTube Link

We finally have electroshock grenades, I heard that they are a much better alternative to gas grenades. More enemies are susceptible to them, they still allow for alien capture but they are also doubly effective at simply taking out mechanical foes. Even more convenient for us, the very next ground battle we fight turns out to be against Androns. Given that we never have to spend time or effort building grenades after our research is completed this seems pretty much like a match made in heaven, we no longer have to worry quite so much about the relative weakness of our conventional weapons, just the accuracy of our soldier’s throwing arms. And the toughness of their throwing bodies as Andrey demonstrated neatly with the C4… mishap.

The Ranonauts Project would like to offer it’s congratulations to:

  • Olav for his expert electro grenadier skills
  • Other Dave for threading the needle with his rocket launcher
  • Andrey for demonstrating how to use the same block of C4 twice.
  • Alma for shooting over a dozen reflex shots and not hitting one.
  • Team America for sending in 6 inexperienced soldiers into battle and only losing 1 to alien fire

The Ranonauts project would like to offer it’s condolences to the family and friends of Inga Andropova.

To date Ranonauts has:

  • defended the earth for 3 months and 11 days
  • lost 31 soldiers
  • killed 169 aliens in 20 ground battles
  • captured 26 aliens
  • shot down 24 alien spacecraft
  • had 1 aircraft shot down
  • received $8,092,621 in funding

Ranonauts is in desperate need for new recruits after recent… incidents, if you or a friend would like to become a soldier in the Ranonauts project please leave a comment or fill in your information here, the next set of new soldiers will arrive in episode twenty-three.