2015 – Page 3 – Welshtroll

What July?

Well I’ve finally reached the far side of the chaotic patterns at work thankfully.

So I’m trying to get my brain into blogging once more. It’s weird when I think that this time last year I was gearing up for Blaugust.
I’ve had such a busy 3 months my blogging hasn’t really started in earnest this year despite my best intentions.

I am in need of a rest, to recharge my batteries and thankfully I’ll soon be heading for sunny Yorkshire to unwind.

Surprisingly my move into line management this haven’t been as awful as I’d thought, despite there being a poor structure and no programme in place to help new managers. Performance reviews are very different on the other side of the table.

Currently I’ve been having some time away from games and just chilling out with some dvd boxsets. It’s quite therapeutic to be honest.

The pharma’s in his den

Well the madness continues on the work front, to the point that of the 2 days I had off this week, I spend a large portion on my laptop and/or conference call. Typical.

All of that aside on wednesday it was my birthday and I had a stack of lovely gifts, many board game related of course. May have to extend the house just for our board games now 🙂

Thursday the 4th, Big Pharma went into pre-order with beta access which i have been watching for some time now.
The game is being published by Positech who you may know from other titles.

BigPharmalogo The brilliant thing about purchasing direct from the developer/publisher is that you know more money goes straight to developer, plus with Positech they reward this at point of sale.
So when you go to purchase the game you can purchase additional copies at half price which is what I did when I bought Red Shirt and as Rachy was interested in Big Pharma I also did it with this title. Certainly worth it if you are buying for family and friends.

As promised I spent a good few hours streaming the game and may have clocked in about 12 hours gameplay on the first day, quite an addictive game I can’t wait to see how the game evolves in the next few months.

But so far it’s be well worth the money and I can’t see me putting it down any time soon.

Storming

I’ve finally jumped back into Heroes of the Storm with my clan mates, the first time in quite a while and of course since the game launched on Monday.

There are mixed feelings about the game with many seeing it as a ‘easy mode’ MOBA, that said Blizzard are keen to retain the Hero Brawler tag in an effort to separate in from others in the field. For me the easy and time scales are more inline with my needs and ultimately that is what drives my gaming choices now-a-days.

I play support mostly as usual, I also think that the map variation and interactive events are key to retaining my interest.

In which I dust off my blog

The last three months have been very busy on the work front with a very tight deadline project that has been rather taxing, plus on call has been manic in May. Also I was diverting a lot of energy into driving lessons, theory and practical test preparations but happily I sat my driving test and passed on the second attempt.
Awesomely my father in law donated his car to me which was great and saved me quite a bit of hassle finding a car.

So after spending my annual bonus on car insurance and tax we undertook an adventure to Bluestone with family and friends. Of course every holiday experience has to start with hiccup and this one was no different with a bolt that holds the gear pivot shearing off and me having to call out the Breakdown service, thankfully it was repairable.

After 1 month driving I still dislike it, but do enjoy the hour or so I have reclaimed on my daily commute.

Games

I haven’t really been playing much in the way of social games recently, my Game List in the sidebar is likely very out of date.

Battlefield 4 – After the worst start in FPS history I decided that my trigger finger was wasting away. I have been playing a few nights a week as a drop in game.
Dreamfall Chapters – Man this game is so detailed at times, a great follow up the previous games in the series.
Always Sometimes Monsters – Part of me thinks this game is an old school masterpiece reskinned, but maybe not. Very good and harrowing story.
Space Run – A fun tower defense game that seeing you having to adapt mid level to counter opposing forces.
Kentucky Route Zero – I’ve only just started making my way through this interesting story.

Board Games

We headed down to Rules of Play in Cardiff twice in the last 2 months, damn that shop has alot of choice and it maybe a few pound more than Amazon but supporting a “local” business is more important, plus you get to browse.
In the digital age I buy my Computer games and Music via download outlets but with physical copies of tabletop games it’s nice to read the blurbs and ask a real person about a game rather that taking those Amazon feedback scores as gospel.

This last month we have obtained:

Zombies!!!
Love Letter
Race to Adventure
The Cave
Bucket of Doom
Zombie Dice 3
Tsuro of the Seas
plus our wedding anniversary gifts
Hobbit Love Letter
Machi Koro

We’ve had a great time playing through them all recently and some of our existing games too.

All things me

Here is my obligatory sorry I haven’t blogged anything for weeks post, hopefully to be more consistent from now on.
To recap here is a short trip through my last month.

Work

Yay I managed to get the piece of work out of the door that I was working on, to say I underestimated the size of the task is an understatement. Plus the overall impact on my other workload didn’t really rear it’s head until I was completing the task.
In other work related new the company I work for has almost completed its sale to another party, we aren’t expected a massive change to the way we work, but still it will be a shock to the system after starting as such a small company.

Driving

At the moment I’ve gone back to learning to drive, which in all honesty feels much more comfortable in my mid thirties than it did the previous times at 17 or 22. So as you can imagine much of my time at the moment has been used up with revision for my theory test and actually doing my driving lessons.

Gaming

My adventures in gaming have been quite varied at the moment.

No thanks to DokChaos I’m back playing EVE Online although this time being a little more adventurous in our ambitions.
Darkest Dungeon is really good fun, I’ve set so many adventurers to their demise. I’d like to see it make a jump to tablet format as I feel it would work quite well.
Smite during the beta of the game I bought the Ultimate god pack as it was a pretty good price, plus it means that I don’t really have to worry about unlocking heroes. I then completely ignored the game for 2 years
I’ve been watching a clan friend of mine streaming Heroes of the Storm recently and given my recent fondness towards MOBAs I got myself a key and joined in the fun.

Too much work

Well my blogging has taken a big hit as I’ve been a little overwealmed with a project at work that is creeping into my free time a little. When that happens my blogging schedule is usually the first victim.
Outside of the out of hours support that I usually do, I’m certainly not in favour of donating my free time to work, but I think this one has a little more pride on the line than usual.
Normalish service will resume soon.