Unlocked The Mistletoe

Good afternoon everyone,

The final week of the 2021 is here, and that means we are going to start looking ahead to 2022, and getting next year's gaming tour off on the good foot.

But first let's talk about last night's stream of Overwatch, and I don't know what it was with a lot of the people I was playing with but I've never seen the high level of stupidity I witness last night. I  actually played with people who got off the payload right when it was reaching check points on Havanna as I was delaying the opposing team.I would blame it on 'new players', but everyone I was teamed with have had at least 100 hours of game time in. 

Anyway, I got in matches as D.va, Moira, Tracer and Mei, and did some switch offs to Anna and Brigitte in one match. Big thanks to PandaSweet for being apart of the fun in the final hour! we may have ended on a 3 and 5 stretch, but we had fun! Also unlocked all the Mistletoe Symmetra rewards as well, so there's another positive!

After the stream we sent the fun over to Helramma who was also playing Overwatch over at twitch.tv/helramma!  

Twitch Clip Links

• Just Another Epic Dva Bomb
• Ha HA! 
• The Cold Never Bother Me Anyway
  

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured Weaving Combo #1, Intermediate Combo 32 and Advanced Combo #1 for a duration of 31 minutes with an estimated calorie burn of 487 kcal. Here is the update on the my current goals in Fitness Boxing 2... aka, the EX Achievements.

• 45/50 Hours Trained with Karen for Karen's Champion 
• 381/400 Acquired Stamps for Honored Stamper
• 520,115/540,000 total punch count of HITs for Immortal Weight Puncher
• 84/100 Percent of EX Achievements Acquired for King EX Fighter
  

To keep my X-Box achievement streak going, I re-installed 1979 Revolution: Black Friday and was able to knock off a lot of achievements really quick. I know there are associated with two full game play sessions based on choices, I didn't think it applied to the collectables as these all popped on the first set of things I encounters for each category.

1979 Revolution: Black Friday Achievements

1. Shekamu: The Foodie: Unlock all stories about Iranian food and drink.
2. Jaasoos: The Spy: Unlock all stories relating to the secret police and secret operations.
3. Taghooti: The Royalist: Unlock all stories relating to the Shah and the royal family.
4. Enghelabi: The Revolutionary: Unlock all stories relating to revolutionaries or revolutionary activity.
5. Ostad: Story Master: Unlock all stories in 1979 Revolution: Black Friday
6. Akaas: The Photographer: Unlock all photo stories by taking every possible photo.
7. Heepster: The Hipster: Unlock all pop culture related exploration points.
8. Roshanfekr: The Intellectual: Unlock all political exploration points.
9. Hajji: The Pilgrim: Unlock all stories relating to religion or clerical leaders
10. Jam Konandeh: The Collector: Collect all the Khomeini tapes.

I did try to go for the facing Akuma achievement in the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection... it didn't work out as I feel I must've done something wrong in regards to beating Sagat in Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Still I managed to at least knock that game off the list... too bad it wasn't on stream. Oh well.

Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection Achievements

1. Go "Turbo": Beat Super Street Fighter II Turbo. 
   

My off-stream Final Fantasy XIV progress was focused on wrapping up the 5.1 content, which starts to see some of the ground work for Endwalker fall into place as well as leaving the World of the First in a much better state than it was found it, by establishing leaders and taking care of various quests. The Akadaemia Anyder dungeon was a nice little adventure and fairly relaxing to go through when I put it in comparison to the Alliance Raids I saw for the first time over the last couple of days.

For tonight's stream we will be getting back to business with the big games, as we will be resuming Fist of the North Star: Lost Paradise!

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

Highlights for the week of 2/21/21

Here are highlights from my twitch channel (http://twitch.tv/fredcasden) for the week of February 21, 2021, which included Overwatch, 1979 Revolution Black Friday, Fitness Boxing 2 Rhythm & Music, Super Mario Bros 35, Tom Clancy's The Division 2, ESPN Major League Baseball, Star Trek Online, Hades, Super Smash Bros Ultimate, Smite, Paladins, Power Rangers: Battle For The Grid and Zero Escape Virtue's Last Reward! 

Today's Notes 2/23/21

Good morning everybody,

Well last night's stream was rather odd, as the game audio was so loud that even while making adjustments I could barely be heard, even when bringing my microphone closer. The good news is everybody got to experience the game audio in its full glory, but my commentary and riffs were barely heard. It is weird that happened, considering the day started with audio lagging behind the video. Now I think I fixed it both issues, one by making a few adjustments in OBS by listing my Elgato HD60S as a mic/auxiliary and also by boosting the gain of my microphone to being double standard. Did a test recording using Super Mario Bros 35 this morning and it seems to have solved things.

Now last night's stream which started with 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, and it's always a fascinating game to play from a historical narrative perspective, since it's trying to convey everything that lead into Iran's major shift in the early 80s in a 3 hour interactive experience. You could see a lot of parallels between the events this game was based on and modern day events which makes it very surreal when one considers how close we came to that back on January 6.

We also did some Paladins last night, and yes I'll admit I totally threw one match early going. You see Paladins is cross-platform, and when I was playing using the Xbox  One version with a team that players using the PC version, the one teammate in the role of 'Support / Healer' basically said he was not going to heal the tank, and since I was the lone tank on the team, I checked out of the match. Bad enough dealing with people who jump country servers which reduces latency for everyone, but to see someone say they are not going to assist the one person who was going to be on the front line was enough to grind me gears. 

For the first time in a long time, loaded up Power Rangers Battle for the Grid as apart of last night's stream, and finally got a chance to play as Scorpina, and safe to say the excuse that the developers wouldn't including villains that had 'human faces' was thrown right out the window because Scorpina's design and facial animations were gorgeous. That said, it did take me a while to get use to the controls again, and the game certainly felt slower than the last time I played it, which was about a 10 months ago.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was alright, with some very questionable misses do to the left joy-con de-syncing (basically whenever one moves it, it vibrates heavily as if trying to reconnect), which is of course weird since at this time I'm standing less than 5 feet away from where the Switch is docked. That said, we did reach two milestone achievements today, one's called Lin's Buddy which was to perform 10 free exercises (non-daily) with Lin as the trainer, and the other was Lin's Best Friend which I guess is done by doing 10 free exercises and 10 daily workouts with her as the trainer. Which means at this point 60% of the Fitness Boxing 2's in-game achievements have been unlocked... and I'll be switching trainers. 

Tonight's stream will be split between The Division 2 and something else, not quite sure what will be in the lead off slot, as this will be a double header stream. The reason The Division 2 is getting attention tonight is because of the Hollywood event, which as I mentioned before was something Iceman and PowerThumbz hyped up a lot. 

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

Today's Notes 2/22/21

Good afternoon everybody,

Last night's stream of Overwatch was a lot of fun, and big thanks to PandaSweet for being apart of the fun as we each got the wins needed to get Reaper's new Lunar New Year event skin. We each had a few plays of the game, with mine being two for McCree and two for Torbjörn. It is funny that for so long of just being in the tank and support roles, but when saying 'fuck it', I'm going to play damage, I've developed some quirks that allow me to be very effective. Must be because I've seen so many other people play the damage role and not being involved in the front line battle.On a side note, I did get the Anger Management achievement which was to damage six enemies during a single use of Winston's Primal Rage in Quick or Competitive Play. Since I normally don't play Winston out of Mayhem matches, to actually get it was pretty cool.

This week's Real Ghsotbuster's episode was Mrs. Roger's Neighborhood, again a super creepy episode when you get into the designs of 'What' and it's Bird sidekick, but also the possessed Peter Venkman late in the episode. Some thing stood out to me was that in this episode, upon escaping the haunted house, the Ghostbusters have to deal with two lion statues that are actually blue and white ghosts, and in the Ghostbusters video game, you end up dealing with a pair of ghosts that were within the statues in front of the New York Public Library. It's an odd connection, but let's face it, it is a connection most people won't realize.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, going 44 minutes (52 with stretching), and we reached a new milestone achievement with Super Middleweight Puncher Lv. 3 which was to have a total punch count of 96,000, with my exact total being 96,244. But since today's session was stream we did have to do deal with figuring out audio for the stream and for me to hear, which lead to some lag in what was coming through the speakers for me at first. I think I managed to get it set back up to how it was on the previous computer.

Over in Animal Crossing New Horizons, Ozzie will be leaving my island in a couple of days, the big reason why I'm letting him go is because his personality is way to similar to Sherb and Raddle's. Also finally caught a Oarfish. which made me want to catch more fish

We did do two runs of Super Mario Bros 35, and the audio lag I mention earlier was really noticeable, making it very challenging to time out certain things, particularly when having the Star invincibility power up. Didn't get a top three finish this time in either run.

Later today we'll be back on with the Xbox One version of 1979 Revolution Black Friday. and I'm not what we'll pair that up with to make sure the stream fills out to four hours, but I'll think of something.

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

Today's Notes 2/21/21

Good afternoon everybody,

Last night's stream of Zero Escape Virtue's Last Reward was really productive in terms of reaching major story points, as we unlocked the achievement called 'I Can't Believe It's No Murder' for being able to prove that Alice wasn't killed due to one of the effects of Radical-6 being suicide, in addition to getting the character endings for Tenmyouji (In Root Beer Veritas) and Clover (Secret Agent Woman), with the obvious details being revealed that Tnmyouji is indeed Junpei and he never was able to find Akane/June after the events of 999 but he adopted Quark, while Clover along with Snake ended up working with Alice who seen in the post credits scene of the first game. The thing that most people will find odd is the age difference between the two, as for Clover and Alice it's only been a year since the end of 999, but for Tnmyouji it's been way longer. The reason for that gets explained.... much later on.

This week The Division 2 is having it's Hollywood event, which means Tuesday night will be dedicated to checking that out since Iceman and PowerThumbz talked so much about it and how the rag doll effects are turned way up. Which means I won't be starting a major game this week, instead Monday night we're going to open with 1979 Revolution: Black Friday on the Xbox One, because I've already played the Steam version, so we can get some easy achievements to boost my gamer score. We'll probably pair it up with something else because it's not a particularly long game.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was solid, but a little 'weave heavy' which lead to so misses, which is odd because since I'm moving back to doing doing the workouts towards the right side of my desk, one would think I wouldn't be missing anything because I'm standing much closer to where the Switch is docked at. But yup, misses still happen. When I do Fitness Boxing 2 sessions for a stream, you won't see any step movements because I don't quite have the good enough angle to be able to perform those without hitting something solid. Also tossed in an extra set, so my daily exercise totals seen in the screen shot is actually lower than what I actually did.

Tonight's stream will be focused on Overwatch in my pursuit of Reaper's skin that corresponds with the Lunar New Year event, as we need to reach a total of 9 wins for the week. Because of the computer fiasco this week, and with Overwatch being one of the first things installed on the new rig, I already have a few wins, so the pressure isn't too intense to try and get them all in one night.

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