Casual Dailies In FFXIV

Good morning everyone,

It's Friday, the weekend is here, but with how climate change has turned up the heat everywhere, I'm hoping everyone is being as cool as possible.

Last night's stream of Final Fantasy XIV was mostly without incident, but I did have a couple of hiccups that saw me booted from the game. Still the stream remained in one piece. One of the highlights was me looking up lyrics to some songs from the animated series Histeria, and mostly doing them right.

PandaSweet joined in for a lot of fun as we tacked a bit of fishing, plus a trip through the various dailies (Expert, Dungeon, Trial, Alliance Raid and Normal Raid). I also did a bit of progress with my role as Dragoon, knocking out the level 40 job quest, plus an extended trip through the Palace of the Dead. So all in all a pretty easy going night.

Twitch Clips

• Duty Complete
• The Invasion Song 
• How did I end up on the opposite side?
• Hi Omega... Bye Omega 
  

For the raid we dropped in on Redneck_23 who was playing America Truck Simulator over at twitch.tv/redneck_23! 

Had a hell of a time trying to get to sleep last night, so I ended up playing some Overwatch matches, and picked up a pair of Plays of the Game as D.va. 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured Biceps Shape Focus Combo, Difficult Challenge Combo #1 and Intermediate Combo #1 for 34 minutes.

During the stream I was asked by LvStkr if I have ever played Fighting History, and the answer at the time was no I haven't. Now I was aware of Fighting History, at it was a game that basically caused Capcom to lose a lawsuit over the entire concept and idea fighting games. Now I did sit down to play it this morning, granted it was the SNES port which is currently apart of the SNES portion of the Nintendo Switch Online feature. Going through the standard arcade mode with Feline, I had a fairly straight forward time getting through it. I actually found Fighting History to be better than Street Fighter II in some regard.

Work was pretty solid yesterday, even if I only got in 80%R of my hours, but I didn't know I had even that until 10 AM.  But I do know I got more hours today so that's good.

What did one wall say to the other? "Meet me at the corner!" 

Found out Ghostbusters: Sanctum of the Slime, Castle of Illusion Starring Mickey Mouse and DuckTales: Remastered are all games that are backwards compatible on the Xbox side of things. We have featured and finished Castle of Illusion and DuckTales via Steam a few years ago, but this gives us a great opportunity to break out my lame platforming skills. 

The Ghostbusters game is a twin-stick shooter, which does have online play as an option, however it appears you have to create a session in advance with other players instead of just starting a session and hope others join in. I have played it before, never really getting to far in the PS3 and Steam versions, but since the lobbies for the Xbox 360 version still work we may give it a whirl. Oh and I did play a bit of Ghostbusters: Sanctum of the Slime, the online lobbies to appear to work as it did recognize both Quick Match and Find Game options. 

Ghostbusters: Sanctum of Slime Achievements

• ROOKIES: Finish the first level.

You know what's also funny, Street Fighter III 3rd Strike Online Edition for the Xbox 360 can still be purchased, and I'm surprised it was pushed into the backwards compatible list of games considering it's reputation. Maybe I should just track down a working 360 on the secondary market to dive into games that are basically locked to that console generation. Where would I put it is a real question.

Thousand Arms was trending lately, as someone review has peaked interest into the Dating Sim / JRPG hybrid from the late 90s. Thankfully I still have my copy of the game

If you're looking for tools to help with streaming or communicating from home with work, check out what Xsplit offers over at Xsplit.com, use the promo code CASDEN to save 10% on your order! If you're looking for just general stuff, of course you can swing over to Amazon using my affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3L8N1Yj.    

Of course for tonight's stream we shall be continuing Persona 5 Strikers, as we'll be getting into the next major part of the story. I was wrong, there are two major jails / palaces left, so I figure we may finish the game within two or three streams. Depends on how much extra stuff I come across doing.

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

Oh so that's the new Battle Boost gimmick In Chrono Cross

Good morning everyone,

Well last night's stream certainly saw me start off pissed off with everything involving the Supreme Court of the United States and the stupidity of overturning Roe V. Wade. As I said before, conservatives want to 'save lives' only to use those lives for their own benefits eighteen years later. The entire rant will be included in the archive VOD on my YouTube channel when it appears on Monday.

Anyway, as far the game play of Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers edition, I realized that pressing R3 enables a battle boost to give full use of the elemental grid at the start and apparently provides enemies with a high chance of missing not just physical attacks, but elemental attacks as well. This became really useful in terms of dealing some bad match ups (the Giant Starky fight, where I took Harle and Zappa) as well as dealing with the Grand Slam portion aboard the S.S. Zelbess. Funny enough we ignored checking out the Grand Slam in last year's play through of the original version of Chrono Cross, so it was nice to recruit Janice. We also ended the stream at the perfect spot, where we reached the entrance to the Dead Sea, but realize we need to go to the Isle of the Damned first, which means Monday's stream will have a lot of action in it.  

On a side note it does appear some of the major slow down in frames during battle occurs on if the enemy is huge or overly complex.This is really down to bad Quality Assurance testing done by the development team of this version of the game.

Chrono Cross: The Radical Dreamers Edition Achievements

• Grand Champion: Complete the Grand Slam.

Twitch Clips

• Sprigg Getting The Last Hit 
• They Be Mooniful... yes that's a word
• Finally knocked it out! 
  

For the raid we dropped in on Redneck_23 while they were playing American Truck Simulator! 

Work yesterday ended on a positive note continue the struggles to get anything done with the current assignment. On a side note, people who answer phones for businesses need to stop assuming someone is not going to do something on their behalf.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured Body Uppercut Combo, Body Hook Combo and Triple Combo #1. Never seen that combination of exercises put together before, as they were all 8 minute routines, making this one of the shortest daily sessions ever that wasn't set for 20 minutes.

More progress towards 100% completion of Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle was done following last night's stream. Got to appreciate those YouTube channels that are still posting solutions for the Daily Death for this game. 

Friday the 13th: Killer Puzzle Achievements

• Golden Throne: Acquired the golden throne.
• Return to Crystal Lake: Completed every puzzle level of Return to Crystal Lake.

My fantasy baseball team was let down by the Yankees not having LeMahieu in the starting line up against the Blue Jays yesterday. That was just rude! Also the rain out of the Guardians-Padres and the Tigers-Pirates games took Straw and Hosmer out of faction for me as well And of course the Phillies lost to the Rangers last night as well...  ugh.

Twitch added more options for the Predictions feature... I really do have have to come up with some content to take advantage of it.

For tonight's stream we're back to playing Fallout 76, as I'll try and knock out some solo quests before maybe we're joined by Iceman to continue the joint quests we were messing with last week!

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

Persona 5 Royal Does Take Your Time

Good morning everyone,

Persona 5 Royal has this little loading icon thing that says 'take your time'... and boy does that perfectly describe how I just sink so much time into it on Friday nights. Last night stream went 10 hours, and had one hiccup when the stream went a little wonky at the 9 hour mark. This was not planned, but the stuff with Futaba was just so good and I wanted to see how the story arc wrapped up, everything leading into the Beach day and end of the Summer vacation was just great.

That said, I did as much as I could to make up for the fact that I screwed some things up at different points, so we took a trip into Mementos (and nearly ran into the Reaper), did a lot of time spending with different confidants and managed to max out four of them, and I no longer have to have a Lovers or Chariot persona on hand as a result. 

One would think I would have a lot more to say about last night's stream, but it was after 4 AM when we rapped up and I was warped out of my mind. In the YouTube archives, the stream will be divided into three parts, two 4.5 hour long VODs, and one 1 hour long VOD.

Persona 5 Royal Trophies

• True Confidence: Maxed out one of your Confidants.
• Trash Into Treasure: Sold old clothing at Furugi no Neuchi.
• Pyramid of Wrath: Plundered: Completed the pyramid Palace.

Twitch Clip Links

• There we go 
• Are they siblings?
• He knew?! 
• Wow... she's... here.... WOW! She walked! 
• How did she figure that out?!
  

During the stream we had two raids, the first by x9abenonymous9x who was playing State of Decay 2 over at twitch.tv/x9abenonymous9x and the other by Redneck_23 who was playing American Truck Simulator over at twitch.tv/redneck_23! 

For the raid, we dropped in on Felkimchi as they were playing Mafia III over at twitch.tv/felkimchi! 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily workout featured Front Back Step Combo, Hook Combo #2 and Beginner Combo #1. We did this workout at 6 AM before I went to sleep.

Fitness Boxing 2 Stats For April 17 to 23, 2022

• Punches Thrown: 8, 785
  
• Estimated Calorie Burn: 3488.15 kcal.
  
• 24 of 30 hours trained for Bernardo's Contender EX Achievement
  

I will not be surprised if Disney shuts down Disney World or goes about relocating it to another location in the United States due to the stupidity that is going on in the state of Florida because of Trump like stupidity from Ron DeSantis and the rest of his ilk. 

The first full week of Fantasy Baseball has two days left in it, today and tomorrow, and I'm only leading in two out of nine categories against my opponent. My squad has knocked in 17 RBI and has batted .273. The struggles of Anthony Rendon, Chris Taylor and Corey Seager has been bothersome, not to mention the roster moves I've had to make.

If you're looking for tools to help with streaming or communicating from home with work, check out what Xsplit offers over at Xsplit.com, use the promo code CASDEN to save 10% on your order! If you're looking for just general stuff, of course you can swing over to Amazon using my affiliate link: https://amzn.to/3L8N1Yj.

For tonight's stream we're just going to take it easy and mess around with something random, total chill stream. 

So on that note I'm going to bed we'll see you later over on twitch.tv/fredcasden!

A Night of Metroids, Plumbers, Apes and Boxers

 Good afternoon everyone,

Last night's stream heavily featured the original Metroid, along with three other games from the Nintendo's NES era of the 1980s.

We'll talk about Metroid first, since it was the one game I certainly wanted to feature, and I can safely say this: anyone who finished it without using any of the password / cheat codes, kudos to you, because it was a reminder as to why I normally don't stick with Metroidvania games for more than a night or two. The controls are real easy to learn, and they are responsive to the inputs of the controller (at least the emulated version of Metroid is that is available through the Nintendo Switch's Online NES collection.

My biggest issues with Metroid is there really is no clear cut indication of where to go, the seemingly  randomness of the enemy movement patterns and some of the leaps of logic one must take to figure out how to reacher new areas. Let's address the first issue first, I totally get it that Samus has to find the gear and search all over the place first for the best gear to get the job done, the issue is actually figuring out where to go as the game is set up to make one feel like they are running in circles... and certainly this had me looking for an online guide to cover that. The second issue is randomness of enemy movement patterns, there are numerous instances where the pattern of the enemies changes, making quite a few things impossible to predict, which certainly cost me some time. The final issue relates to some of the games 'puzzles', such as having to go up through a ceiling or down through a floor, there is no way to tell difference as all the textures look the same.

Thankfully I found the guides over on GameFAQs to be rather helpful, but more importantly a map which actually gave me a idea of how to get to the mini-bosses and then to Morther Brain. And I'll straight up admit, we used the NARPASSWORD password / cheat code to push through. Even with these tool it did take me over three over to get though the game. We are counting it for this years tour, which means 54 games have been finished on stream.

Now we didn't end there, we messed around with three other classic Nintendo games: Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong and Punch Out. Of the three... only Super Mario Bros I had some experience with, but that didn't show as I made numerous careless mistakes. Donkey Kong took some time to figure out but we managed to clear all three of it's stages to get a feel for it, Punch-Out I have played only a handful of times back in the early 90s... and well I'm so bad at that game Glass Joe can knock me down!

Big thanks to Foxy_Melly for re-subscribing to the channel for 22 months in a row! Foxy is also a streamer, broadcasting from the UK and was most recently featuring Destiny 2! You can check out their streamers over a twitch.tv/foxy_melly! 

Following the stream we sent the fun over to DaWorstGamerEver25 (twitch.tv/daworstgamerever25) who was playing American Truck Simulator! I've known him since high school and he's a really good dude! Hope you check him out when you get a chance!

Twitch Clip Links

• The First Of Many Deaths 
• Hey We Found A Thing! 
• Oh Wonderful... What Is This?!
• I want the thing!
• Hey we found another thing!
• We are so screwed...
• Damn it all!
• Ay Dios mio!
• Hey we made it!
• Down Goes Donkey Kong!
• I'm so bad Glass Joe can knock me down! 
• We're dead 

Twitch continues to have issues porting things over to YouTube, in the mean time I am highlighting key things from each stream to be archived at a later date. Hopefully Twitch can fix their issues as soon as possible. I will try to do full downloads and uploads of things featured on stream, but that's a long ass process.

While I was doing my laundry after last night's stream, I sat down to bang out (HA!) the commissioned fic featuring the RWBY characters of Pyrrha, Jaune and Cardin. It's up now over on HF under my DiceCasden pen name.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 daily work out lasted 31 minutes with the following exercises: advanced Combo #2, Double Combo #2 and Left-Right Step Combo. Total estimated calorie burn was 563 kcal.  We also did an additional 11 minutes with Uppercut Combo #2 and Beginner Combo #1 as well for an added estimated calorie burn of 174 kcal. So the compete totals for today were 43 minutes with an estimate calorie burn of 738

At this exact moment I'm not completely sure what's on the agenda for tonight's stream, we could dedicate it to Final Fantasy XIV or maybe start The Walking Dead Season 2? I'll make up my mind by this evening that's for sure!

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

A Night of Road Rash & A Morning Of Smule

 Good afternoon everybody,

Last night the plan was to feature the Road Rash Trilogy of Games on the original PlayStation, which includes Road Rash, Road Rash 3D and Road Rash Jailbreak... things didn't totally go as planned. 

Anyway, we lead of with Road Rash, a game I have played before on an IBM PC back in the 90s that used Windows 95. Needless to say I have fond memories of that version of the game, in fact I still have the CD-Rom for that version! Anyway, playing it's PlayStation cousin was really cool, in fact it felt natural to play in terms of what buttons did what, and nothing felt over thought out. The biggest gripe I have with it is how loud the engine sound effects are, and the general lack of audio settings in the game's option menu. It was great seeing the different FMVs for when you win, lose or wreck your bike, as they really strike a great done. 

This game certainly holds up very well for being over 25 years old, but it did take some adjustment getting use to seeing when objects would appear ahead of you so that they could be avoided. It's not much of a problem on the Thrash Level 1 or Level 2, but one Level 5 when using the fastest bikes in the game it's real noticeable at how little time you have to recognize realize and react. I wouldn't mind seeing a remaster or remake of it, hell all Electronic Arts would have to do is look at what they did with it and duplicate it with some nice 3D models

Then we went to play Road Rash 3D... and it didn't work. It would load up, show the PlayStation Logo and get to the menus to navigate. But when going to do an actual race, it would not work, it got stuck on an infinite loading screen with no clear indication it was going to actually load the race I intended to play! I tired it on both my PlayStation 2 and PlayStation 3, and no dice. I would have tried in a PlayStation One, but I need to find the correct power cable for it, So disappointed that we couldn't check Road Rash 3D out, but that's  the risk of old games, sometimes they work, sometimes they don;t... but from what I saw from the controls, it looks like EA was over thinking how to use every button.

However, I couldn't leave this alone, and since I needed an excuse to test a PSOne Slim I recently acquired to possibly handle games that are region locked to outside North America, I hooked it up and guess what... it was able to fully play Road Rash 3D. So at some point we'll do a PSOne night and will featured this particular game.

Anyway, we were able to play Road Rash: Jail Break, and boy is this an ugly game to look at with muddied visuals that really makes it hard to see what's coming. The controls are very similar to Road Rash, and the game-play handles pretty well. But there is no stand alone Race Mode, it's all tied to the game's campaigns. There are time trials which are kind of fun, but wanting to just play a racing game without having to worry about story progression or stat keeping is annoying. Still I probably had more fun seeing all the different ways I could crash as some of the rag doll physics were incredible to look at

Twitch Clip Links

• Groovy... A Winner Is You
• We should be closing in on the end 
  
• He clearly did not want to live!
• We gotta.... DUUUUUUUUUUUUDE!!!!!!
• Hell of a crash... 
• Who is leaving this stuff in the middle of the road?!
• We finished The Race
• WHYYYYY!!!
• The Hype Is Real! 
• The Return Of The Bunny
• Can we make it to first.... NO NO NO NO!!!! 
• Can we get there?! 
• Cut across shorty cut across
• DudedudedudedudeDOOTDOOTDOOT!

 Following the Stream we sent everyone over to DaWorstGamerEver 25 (twitch.tv/DaWorstGamerEver25) who was playing American Truck Simulator. I've known him since High School, he's a real good guy and I hope you'll check his streams out when he's live! 

We have a new art piece from DaemonsW0lf (www.darkwolfcreative.com / twitch.tv/daemonsw0lf), and all the instruction I gave was for them to have fun and surprise me. What they came up with was an incredible portrait of The Bunny looking bad ass and geared up to be in Tom Clancy's The Division.

We added another Funko figure to the collection, from the My Little Pony Vinyl Collectable Series, Dr. Whooves, who was basically an in-joke of working in the 10th Doctor into My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic without having to go through the BBC. It's a nice little figure that goes with with the similar Rainbow Dash figure I have in terms of book-ending Funko Row on my desk shelving. 

Picked up two Custom Game Cases for South Park: Chef's Luv Shack and WCW Vs The World from www.customegamecases.com because I really really hate having loose games. If I can get a proper case for them I shall pursue that. 

We have six new additions to the collection. Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne and Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga II, which complete the collection of games from that series for the PlayStation 2. For the PlaySation 4 we've added ZOne of The Enders: The Second Runner - Mars, Tales of Berseria, Tales of Vesperia: Definitive Edition,and Tales of Zestiria. Am somewhat kicking myself, because we added Tales of Berseria a few months ago... oh well, guess the 2nd one will remained sealed! We also have Tales of Vesperia for the Switch, so that will remained sealed as well. `

Finally caved in and messed around with Smule this morning because breaking out The Bunny last night for a few minutes was a reminder of how much I enjoy Twitch Sings. Now Smule may have a huge song library, but there appears a lot of alternate arrangements for everything. The biggest gripe I have is that since Smule is only for mobile devices, it makes it really awkward to hold my phone to balance the camera and sing at the same time. Anyway here are the links to some stuff I did this morning.

Smule Recordings

• As Tears Go By (Solo) 
• As Tears Go By (Duet)
• The Longest Time (Duet) 
  
• Sweet Home Chicago (Duet)  
• Fly Me To The Moon (Duet)  
• Can't Help Falling In Love (Duet)
  

Now this does raise some questions... how come the RIAA has no issues with Smule but had major issues with Twitch Sings?! Is it because some of the leadership at the RIAA have ties to Donald Trump who was trying to use the office of the President of the United States to target Jeff Bezos? All signs point to yes that was indeed the case. 

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 Daily workout lasted 31 minutes with an estimated calorie burn of 491 kcal. The exercise sets for today were Weaving Combo #1, Intermediate Combo #2 and Advance Combo #1.

For tonight's stream we are continuing Pokemon: Let's Go Eevee.. we have eight gym badges and our next destination is Victory Road. Could we possibly finish this game tonight? We shall see!

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