Endwalker, Hivebusters & Horizons

Good morning everyone,

Well, taking advantage of some misfortune to get other things done, and in this case, I finished up Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker yesterday evening before last night's stream. I thought the final dungeon and trial took full advantage of my struggles with being able to back out of AOE areas, and so I got wrecked... a lot.As far as the battle one on one against Zenos goes... well, thankfully since I play Bard, it meant all of his heavy damaging attacks were nearly all close range and there was enough of a tell to keep me from getting downed at all. 

As far as the aftermath goes, I rather liked the post-Zenos battle stuff, with the 'disbanding' of the Scions and everyone going their separate ways knowing that at some point they will be brought back together. I'm going to suspect there will be a time-jump at some point for the next major expansion to have new looks for various characters. I am also looking forward to the first Post-Endwalker content, as it's clear Elidibs' younger-self will be involved in someway.

Overall, I've very much enjoyed Final Fantasy XIV, from when I started playing it back in October, and it took me 377 hours to reach this point... and there is still so much more to do, with all the general side quests I haven't doe yet. I will say I am surprised that Endwalker's story is shorter than the other expansions (not counting post-content), really seems like there was a lot of padding and probably stuff got cut due to COVID. Still we'll be featuring FF14 as back-up content and / or having it have it's own night on stream!

Speaking of streams, last night's stream lead off with Forza Horizon 4, mostly I was grinding for various achievements on things like Speed Traps, Danger Signs and other stuff before finally making my way to Fortune Island which looks like is going to be a fun area to do things in.

The stream also included Gear 5, as Striker and Iceman joined in to finish up Hivebusters, where we got all the collectables, all the item upgrades and got achievements for various other things. Hivebusters is a nice little story that actually explains the whole 'Hivebusters' concept of why the COG is letting themselves get captured in the multi-player mode. Rather surprised Lahni was almost the focus of Hivebusters considering how much lore she has to spout, which kind of made her a bland character. With this done, the plan will be to do chapter jumping to get collectables missed in the campaign.

For the raid we dropped in on Kalenal who was playing Final Fantasy XIV over at twitch.tv/kalenal! 

Gears 5 Achievements

• Electroblade: Killed 50 enemies using Lahni's Electroblade Ability in the Hivebuster Campaign Expansion as Lahni
• A Breath of Fresh Air: Saved Hana from the Snatcher
• The Spirit Walk: Opened up the Spirit Walk on Pahanu
• Renewed, Not Consumed: Found all Character Ability upgrades in the Hivebusters DLC
• Searching for Answers: Collected all Campaign Collectibles in the Hivebusters DLC
• Face the Creature: Defeated the Wakaatu
• Enter Hivebusters: Completed all Chapters of the Hivebusters DLC (any difficulty)
• Operation: Ride the Snatcher: Completed the Hivebusters DLC in 3-Player Co-Op (Scorpio squad, dupes not allowed)

Forza Horizon 4 Achievements

• I Feel the Need: Reach Speed Trap Hero level 10.
• Apex Predator: Reach Speed Zone Hero level 10.
• Pilot’s Licence: Reach Danger Sign Hero level 10.
• Whatever Next?: Complete every Showcase Event.
• Welcome to Fortune Island: Set up the Horizon Festival on Fortune Island.
• Hunter Gatherer: Find/Smash your first Treasure Chest.

Twitch Clip Links

1. A New Personal Best and the Achievement!
2. No wonder I didn't see it... 
3. Shoot him in the face!
4. Electroblade! 
5. Vomiting On Me Is So Wrong!
   

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 stream featured a 31 minute workout that involved Weaving Combo #2, Beginner Combo #2 and Straight Combo #1. The estimated calorie burn was 482 kcal.

Probably the biggest news for me personally out of yesterday's Nintendo Direct was the announcement that Chrono Cross is getting a remastered release on multiple consoles (Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, Steam, PlayStation 4 & 5), that is coming out in early April. Needless to say despite how dodging some of the upscale renders look, and knowing the legal nightmare that held up Chrono Cross from being re-released after the SquareSoft to Square-Enix relabeling of the Greatest Hits release, I'm just glad it's coming. Plus that means achievements! 

I'm also intrigued by Mario Strikers, as I have had fun with Mario Golf Super Rush, so this could be worth looking at. Then there is Disney Speedstorm... and what is basically a Mario Kart clone which I have to chuckle at how long Disney held off on diving into using their vast library of characters in a combat racer. I'm expecting some sort of Smash clone from Disney in the next year or so based on this.

For tonight's stream we'll be playing Final Fantasy XIV, mostly side-quests and things!

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

Today's Notes 2/26/21

Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream started with Star Trek Online, but it wasn't totally dedicated to it as only got around to a couple of my characters because the game were having server issues and had to perform some sort of emergency restart. Now every time I've seen that happened it meant the servers would be done anywhere from 15-30 minutes... so we had to switch things up.

So we powered up the Xbox One just after the Xbox Live servers came back online, because apparently they were down most of the late afternoon and early evening. So luck was on my side, and for the first time in a while we played Smite,with the focus on Arena matches. We got a few wins and took a few losses, but this is why I keep games like this around for when things go wonky with Star Trek Online.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session actually went longer than usual for non-Monday, as I realized the game actually had new DLC, in particular No Mercy / Devil Mode for more characters. Today's work out was very solid from start to finish with very few miss-timed punches and misses... hell if anything, the few misses I had involved my left hand, but unlike most times when there's a miss, I felt like I pulled my punches instead of following through. 

Also loaded up Animal Crossing New Horizons this morning, as Ozzie is leaving my island, Pietro lost a bag and Hopper & Agnes had a little argument that needed a little resolving. Rather busy morning on my island of Ocean View/

Not completely sure what's on the agenda for tonight's stream, as we might end up focusing on things involving the Nintendo Switch, so maybe Hades, Smash Bros Ultimate, Mario Kart 8, etc.... we'll see what ends up coming to mind after I finish work and have dinner.

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

 

Today's Notes 11/26/20

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone,

It's a day many use to say thanks to all thing that were positive in their lives during the year, but 2020 has been on hell of a year so far hasn't it? Personally I'm grateful I have a job that was able to easily switch to having people work remotely, and when this whole Covid-19 thing gets settles I hope my job keeps up the practice as it's proven to get more people onto shifts that they normally wouldn't work (case in point I prefer afternoons but as you all know I've mostly worked evenings forcing a change in the streaming schedule). Also I'm very thankful to everyone who has support my Twitch channel (twitch.tv/fredcasden) this year in different ways, through either subscribing, bits, straight donations, gifted games and so forth. You all make it worth doing!

I will admit I didn't get up till about 1:30 PM today, so yeah, the day is already passed me by for the most part, but we did get in the daily Fitness Boxing session, a nice solid workout that included Beginner Combo #1, Uppercut Combo #1 and Hook Combo #1. Hell at the time I'm writing this I still haven't eaten anything yet! But I will resolve that shortly lol bwahahaha.

Last night's stream was pretty epic, big thanks to Foxy_Melly and Mech3003 for choosing to re-sub to my Twitch Channel using their Twitch Prime subscriptions! And also we had a huge raid from DaemonsW0lf that ended up extending the stream and extra hour which was awesome. Oh in terms of what we did last night, it ended up being a night of variety, featuring Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Paladins &, Nickelodeon Kart Racers 2 Grand Prix. PandaSweet81 also joined in for some of the madness during the Paladins segment, and we were both reminded of just how bad and random people can be in not picking proper team combinations or focusing on the objective at hand.

Tonight we'll be doing a Star Trek Online stream, because of course its Thursday, and I'll probably start way earlier than normal because of it being Thanksgiving, or as I have called it the past few years, Treksgiving. We may end up doing several episodes to try and get my Cardassian in the Klingon Empire closer to catching up to the overall story.

Now if I can be serious for a moment, many of you are unaware of whom I use as an Internet Service Provider, that being Comcast who is rolling out more data caps on customers in 2021 (https://www.xfinity.com/learn/internet-service/data#e7d0f35e-2633-43bb-8248-d820d9ca6b59). Now some markets have already had data caps, and let me tell ya something a cap 1.2 Terabytes is not enough to account for Streamers, not to mention Comcast does not exactly bill its customers at the end of the month, the billing cycles at least for me are towards the middle of the month, meaning it's never an exact time period for these data caps to be calculated. Say for example if I had a big month of data usage in from September 1 to September 30, but my billing cycle is Sept 10 to October 9, and I receive my bill or my account info isn't updated to account for the next bill until October 10, the time frames do not match up. And let's be straight up here folks, Comcast tried to sneak this in for the states they are now putting under data caps by being very sly about things... one they plan on rolling out an Unlimited Data Plan next year as indicated on that page I linked to (indicated by the coming soon image)... but they put the information about the states being added to the Data Cap nonsense in small print, with the hope no one would notice. 

Starting in March 2021, customers not on an unlimited data plan who exceed 1.2 TB in a month will have a one-time courtesy month credit under the plan applied to their accounts, and will be responsible for any data overage changes after that. Blocks of 50 GB will automatically be added to customers' accounts for an additional fee of $10 each plus tax. Charges will not exceed $100 each month, no matter how much data a customer uses. *Includes the states of CT, DE, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, parts of NC, NY, parts of OH, PA, VA, VT, WV, and the District of Columbia.

And on that bombshell, we'll wrap this up here... time for me to go raid the fridge!

Highlights From June 28 to July 4, 2020

Here are highlights from June 28 to July 4, 2020 featuring moments from Overwatch, Mass Effect Andromeda, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, Star Trek Online, Pokemon Shield and Twitch Sings!