Highlights for the week of February 28, 2021

 Here are the best moments from my streams over on http://twitch.tv/fredcasden for the week of February 28, 2021! This week we featured Overwatch (both on PC and Nintendo Switch), Dragon Age Inquisition, Fitness Boxing 2 Rhythm and Music, Super Mario Bros 35, ESPN Major League Baseball, Star Trek Online, Hades and Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward!

Today's Notes 3/6/21

Good evening everybody,

What is it about Saturdays that make me want to sleep in till 2 PM? Maybe it's because I know I don't have anything pressing to do in the afternoon so I don't feel like getting out of bed. Yeah that has to be it.

Anyway last night's stream ended up featuring Hades once again, and guess what? We made it through completely for the first time! Yes I have god mode enable, yes I was lucky with getting some of the best boons and power-ups possible at the right time. Yes everything ended up being down right perfect, but damn it, we made it through! Because of that I am counting Hades as a game 'beaten' since the point is to get Zagreus out of the underworld to see his mother Persephone. Yes there is more to be done as far as the story goes because the fact is this story is a Greek tragedy in many ways, and if we managed to get through Hades 9 more times on stream, we'll change the 'beaten' date to reflect that.

Tonight's stream will see us going back to Zero Escape Virtue's Last Reward as we'll be jumping back to an early AB-game decision point to select betray. Way I figure we'll probably need this week and next week to finish the game based on the number of paths left to go down and how heavy this game gets regarding details on what's really going.

For today's Fitness Boxing 2 session, we had a long 47 minute workout today (55 minutes when you count the stretching). We reached a new milestone by unlocking the Cruiser-weight Puncher Lv. 1 achievement which required to have a total punch count of 112,500, with my exact total being 113,621 punches thrown. I didn't do anything extra today because of the daily workout being one my longer sessions for the week.

Managed to get the Serene Painting in Animal Crossing New Horizons, and I really wish Jolly Redd's Treasure Boat had a more routine schedule so I could get all the art pieces faster.

This week's Real Ghostbusters Episode 'Troll Bridge' sees a troll wander away from his pack to become a party animal because Time Square in the 80s was a hot spot to be. The designs for the various trolls seen in the episode all have unique designs, as does the leader's huge monster-truck style vehicle. A minor detail of note, is that the police officer on horseback leading the NYPD's efforts against the trolls is a woman, which I believe is one of the very few times in the Real Ghostbusters series where an authority figure is female.  

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

 

 

Today's Notes 3/5/21

Good morning everybody,

Last night's stream of Star Trek Online certainly was one that exposed a lot of flaws with STO in terms of content, particularly when it comes to non-episodic content, in that the Task Force Operations and Patrols are very easily things to lose interest in which makes the grinding needed for Reputaitons all the more tedious. It's why I still haven't done everything needed for my Gamma Recruit from a few years ago and have not gone all in with my Klingon recruit this year. 

That said we did have fun, but we did ran into a fuck ton of bugs in the mission "The Measure of Morality (Part 1)", in which Seven of Nine is supposed to be apart of the four person team that includes the player, a bridge officer, Burnham (From Discovery), but for whatever reason Seven does not spawn in, thus making the mission much more difficult than it needed to be even on a normal difficult setting. It certainly lead to a lot of unnecessary re-spawning. On the positive side, I did learn the mission did have an optional battle against a shape-shifter depending on the choices made regarding Noye.

Today I weight in at about 252 lbs... well my scale was fluttering between the hash-marks for 250 and 252, but I went with the higher figure just in case. Funny thing is, I was told by a family member who went to the doctor's a few times recently that one of their digital scales said they weight one amount, but then when they went to a different doctor, another digital scale said they weight nearly twenty pound more. This was like within a week's time frame, which just tells me that some medical practices need to make sure their scales are properly zeroing out and balanced.

Which brings me to this mornings Fitness Boxing 2 session, which was another short session based on the exercises involved, which meant I had an easy excuse to do a little extra. All in all a good workout to get the day going, even if I did have a brain-fart and spaced on one easy combo. Hey it happens from time to time. 

Not completely sure what I'll be streaming tonight, obviously I could do Hades or do something else just to change things up a bit. We'll see what I come up with.

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

Today's Notes 3/4/21

Good morning everyone,

Last night's stream of ESPN Major League Baseball saw six games being played featuring my 2004 Philadelphia Phillies, first was a four-game sweep of the Atlanta Braves which did unfortunately involved Tomas Perez getting injured. Instead of bringing up someone from the minors, I found Jay Bell on the free-agent market, which is actually an upgrade in terms of having a utility infielder that actually is good at three positions. The final two games a loss and a win against the Chicago White Sox to begin the inter-league portion of the season. Because it takes about an hour for each game, there was no way I was gonna get through a seventh game last night night. Still we basically covered a week of the season, so that's good.

Finally finished a fan-fic based on elements of Zero Escape: The Nonary Games last night, and it's posted in the usual places where I would post such things. It's a good thing I did wait in regards to finishing it because details that I learned from last Saturday's stream of Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Rewards proved helpful in adding references and spoilers to what was basically a five-page ship-fest.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session was actually short, clocking in at about 30 minutes minus the stretching, because there was not any lower-body workouts or stretching involved. I did do a little extra to not only put progress in on the free-exercise achievement for Janice, plus it does bother me when I see the estimated calorie burn count for the daily session to be so low. I must be developing an ego when it comes to that.

Popped into Animal Crossing New Horizon's this morning, and it turns out Ozzie's replacement is going to be Boris, which means I'll have two cranky residents on my island, with Hopper being the one already there.

Tonight's stream will feature Star Trek Online and we'll be bouncing from character to character doing various things, and we will finish what we started last week involving my Discovery-era character that was interrupted because of the game's server issues. Hopefully that will not be a problem this week.

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

Today's Notes 3/3/21

 Good morning everybody, 

Last night's stream of Dragon Age Inquisition certainly ran longer than what's expected from one of my streams as of late on a weeknight, but I chalk this up to a few things: one I actually ran into battles where I was completely under-powered, namely when it came to dealing with the Rifts. Now this is either because at a certain point, the difficult spikes because of Main Quests or I somehow wandered into spots that were meant for later in the game, but since I'm still in the Hinterlands I'm curious to how things scale in this game. That said, we did clear out a lot of things, and ended up opening up other areas meant for later on. So all in all a fun night.

Tonight's stream will focus on ESPN Major League Baseball, and I believe my 2004 Philadelphia Phillies will be opening with a 4-game set against the Atlanta Braves, and if we push it we might be able to include the 2-game set against the Chicago White Sox, which will start the Interleague part of the season.

This week on the Official Ghostbusters YouTube channel, they added the Extreme Ghostbusters episode Fear Itself, and it is an episode that does two things, one it gives Garrett some redemption considering his 'old friends' as seen in the previous episode, while also giving him, Eduardo, Kylie and Roland some extra character depth as it dives into the fears. This episode does get a little weird because outside of Garrett, no one really battle's their fear as they trade off on battling each other's fears, Kylie going after Zombie Eduardo for example. Still it's a fun, creepy story.

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session felt a bit off, mostly because sway-backs from the south-paw stance proved to be a problem, so to compensate in addition to the daily exercise, I did one free-exercise setto make up for what was lost. So the screen shot of today's stats only counts what was done for the daily, not the extra. Besides what makes the extra worth doing is the achievement to go with it... plus i had the extra time to do it, which made it even more justified. That's the rough part about working mid-days, but you got to do what you got to do.

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

 

Today's Notes 3/2/21

Good morning everybody,

Last night we started up Dragon Age Inquisition on the Xbox One, and I have to say I do like the character creator and how it was just detailed enough to give me options to create the Inquisitor Evelyn the way I wanted to with spur of the moment decisions. The biggest lacking detail is of course hair coloring options, but that's been an issue with me regarding BioWare games for a while. As far as the game play goes, much like with Mass Effect it was very easy to get caught up doing side-quests, and I was quickly reminded at how large the scope of the land is when one has to walk everywhere. The combat system, much like with Dragon Age Origins and Star Wars KOTOR I and II with its real time strategy is something I'm not a fan of, so my goal is to basically level up as fast as possible to basically brute force my way through everything.

Of course we will be continuing Dragon Age Inquisition tonight, and I will of course name tonight's stream after a line from The Inquisition song from Mel Brooks' History of the World Part I. Speaking of which if I could have figured out a female variant of the name Torquemada I would've named my character that! 

I really need to sit down to fitness the fan fic I started regarding Zero Escape 999, granted I already have the intro and set-up finished, just need to outline the rest.

I went to commission a new art piece from DaemonsWolf (www.darkwolfcreative.com) and they have started work on what will be the next start screen for my Twitch channel which will feature characters from Kingdom Hearts, Hades and Zero Escape Virtues Last Rewards. I've already seen the early draft of it, and I love the placement of everyone. Can't wait to see the finished results!

Today's Fitness Boxing 2 session felt very off, as I didn't quite get my legs under myself the way I like when it came to doing dodges and blocks, don't get me wrong I worked up a good sweat, and even did an extra set, but this totally felt like an off-day overall when. Did get a new milestone achievement with Light Heavyweight Puncher Lv. 3, which was to have a total punch count of 108,000, with my exact total being 108,430.

Popped into Animal Crossing New Horizons this morning as well, and while I have seen my island residents looking for certain items, I have not once, prior to today seen one ask for a certain insect to be caught, in this cause Agnus wasn't a Tiger Butterfly While easily accomplished, it does serve as a reminder that sometimes jumping into Animal Crossing can easily take up more time than one would expect. 

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

. 

Today's Notes 3/1/21

Good afternoon everybody,

You know when surprising things happen it always means it's a good day? Well I got a $25 Amazon Gift Card from my day job, apparently there was some contest going on that I wasn't aware of, so... yay! 

Anyway last night's stream of Overwatch was nothing but Mayhem matches, we got on such a good roll that we ended up winning 9 out of the last 10 matches played! And when you factor in, these were Mayhem matches, winning can be very difficult, and we had a fairly good mix of attack and defense objectives. Big thanks to PandaSweet and Kalenal for joining in on the fun!

A lot of folks were curious about where I Raynhardt skin I've been using for Reinhardt as of late, because apparently they were not aware of the Blizzard Anniversary bundle, which will be around till September of this year. It is account wide, so even if you get the Bundle on PC, you will have the skin available on other platforms.

Staying on Overwatch, as part of the Monday bonus stream, I did feature the Nintendo Switch version of of Overwatch, winning two matches and using Moira and Lucio. There are some big differences with the console versions of the game as some things that are left click with a mouse on the PC version are right trigger with a game controller. I do wonder how Overwatch plays when the Switch is not docked.

Anyway, Today's Fitness Boxing 2 Session was obviously done on stream being a fairly long work out, with over 2000 punches thrown. We reached a new achievement goal with the Supreme Stamper Lv. 1 achievement which was to acquire 80 stamps or basically do 80 daily exercise sessions. 

We also featured Super Mario Bros 35, which closes down on March 31, and I had some... not so good runs, as my timing with some jumps were way off, and I ended up plummeting to my death. Still as filler goes, Mario 35 proved to be a nice little game to have around for extra streams!

Tonight more than likely we'll be starting up Dragon Age Inquisition, playing the Xbox One version... and I think for each stream I do of the game I'm going to use lines from History of The World Part I, in particularly the lyrics from The Inquisition.

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