Today's Notes 7/15/21: I'm Good... But Not Good Enough To Hang With Diamond Ranked

Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream lead off with Power Rangers: Battle for the Grid, and we started off hot, winning several matches in a row and pushing my rank up to being 678th in the World while being at Platinum League IV. That may not seem impressive, but consider my approach to fighting games is pretty basic and my timing for defense is terrible and I have no hope of escaping juggles... being in the top 1000 is impressive. Granted the team that has gotten me this far is the trio of Ryu, Chun-Li & Lauren (Red Samurai Ranger), as I focus trying to start fast and use the assists as frequently as possible to cause mix-ups... which does leave me open to be slaughtered when things go wrong.

That said, when things did go wrong it was more due to who I was matched up against players who are in the Diamond and Elite Leagues. For those that don't know there are 7 leagues in Battle for the Grid (Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Diamond, Elite, Master) and each league has 5 levels going from V to IV to III to II to I. So at Platinum IV, I'm pretty much right as an average player, I can go head to head pretty evenly with most people in the same tier group... but match me up against those in the three higher tiers, I'm dead in the water. Now normally you wouldn't see those types of match ups happen... but Power Rangers Battle for the Grid doesn't really hide the fact that it does match ups based on who's playing and not their skill or ranked level. This can be very frustrating when I see that I'm matched up against the same dudes (or dudettes) over and over again. Most I could do is make them earn their pretty obvious wins.

Anyway we got some clips from that portion of the stream.

Twitch Clip: Earning a win

Twitch Clip: Opponent Left The Match... WTF Dude!

Twitch Clip: I Just Had My Butt Handed To Me

Twitch Clip: Team Work

Twitch Clip: We Almost Pulled That Off!

At the half way point, action switched over to Tom Clancy's The Division, where it turns out there was a Global Event happening, where we could shock the enemies. It was a pretty cool way to kill some time before Iceman was able to join in and we proceeds to start work on the 'play every mission on hard', but since I set the game at World Tier 1, we were basically tearing through the first half of the map since our in-game characters have some great gear! 

We did knock out one achievement last night:

1. Networking: Complete 20 Missions as part of a group.
   

Here are some clips from the Division half of the stream! 

Twitch Clip: We Ran So Far Away...

Twitch Clip: He Blew Up... In My Face!

Twitch Clip: He was going to go down eventually!

Twitch Clip: They are having a Tough time!

Yesterday we added Champions of Norrath for the PlayStation 2 to the collection, which was a spin off of the EverQuest MMORPG and had some pretty favorable reviews when it was released. What caught my attention was how often it was listed as a game 'trapped on the PS2', as many people have wanted to see a sequel or remake of it.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily work out lasted 28 minutes with an estimated calorie burn of 415 kcal, and needless to say I did feel I needed to do some extra because that seemed pretty lack luster, so my total session went 40 minutes with an estimated calorie burn of 589 kcal. We are now up to 69 (nice) out of 100 for the Evan's Best Friend achievement. If we manage to average 3 points a day for it, we should have that knocked out in 11 days.

UPDATE: Minutes after this blog was posted, my mail arrived, and today we added Capcom vs SNK 2: Mark of the Millennium for the PlayStation 2 to the collection. This game is still available digitally on the PS3 version of the PlayStation Network Store... but a physical copy of does make it a fine addition to the collection.

For tonight's stream, Star Trek Online will lead off as we'll do some things based around the endeavor quests and then we'll switch things over to do some stuff on the PlayStation 2. So similar to last Thursday just with slightly less-older games.

And on that note we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!