Quick blog post, seriously guys.
I've been an Amazon Associate, which means I have a referral code for Amazon that gets me referral fees for people I send there to buy stuff. I've been a member for about a year, and I've been having a ton of problems with it. I know tons of people don't have any issues with it, but naturally I seem to have run into all of them, hah.
Anyway, the first five orders, from the first month or so I became an associate went through fine, but since then, I've had something like 60 orders made with my ID and not a single one has been credited to me, and I'm fed up with it.
I e-mailed Amazon, and the response they gave back to me said they checked and all the orders they looked at are ineligible, and probably all of them in total are ineligible, but they can't look at all of them or provide me any information as to why. They also said basically the only reason someone should be using your code is if they came across it at random and wanted to use it out of curiosity.
Basically what they're going for is a way to weasel out of giving me something like 3-5% of the profit they make off a single item. You're Amazon.com! FFS, cut a guy some slack! You rake in BILLIONS of dollars a year and you can't give me 3% back on not even 10 of those sales?
I'm writing this to say that I'm going to be removing the Amazon links from this blog, my twitch channel and my YouTube page, and referring you guys elsewhere when applicable from now on. You can't even close your associates ID yourself, you have to talk to Amazon about it. I'll be happy to send someone a bunch of capital letters at this point. It'll be swell.
Wednesday, October 29, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
NYCC '14 Pictures
This year's NYCC was actually kind of slow. This was the first year that I ever finished doing everything I wanted to do before the show was over, so there was no rushing, pretty much at all. Liz and Kenbei and I actually just sat around and talked for a couple hours on Saturday and Sunday... I didn't take that many pictures, but I figured I would share with you guys what I did take! We're going to have a video up on my channel this Sunday about our NYCC experiences, so I'm not going to blog very much about that, but I wanted to share with you some pictures I took! I spent most of my time with Liz and Kenbei, as James(GrimJak) and Dan(The Laundry King) were off doing other stuff, so we all probably have different pictures. I know this year everyone took pictures of what they wanted to see, as opposed to everyone taking the same pictures.
WITHOUT FURTHER ADO, ENJOY! (You can click any of the pictures for a full-size edition)
The largest booth, WETA, had a sleepy Smaug!
The Teen Titans in their Go! incarnation were blown up outside for the whole weekend
Mega Bloks had a huge display this year, they had a Mechwarrior and an Assassin from AC.
Scale model of Serenity
Dat Aqualad tho
Last year was Supes' 75th anniversary, this year was Bats'.
You can't really see it, but she had these terrifyingly blue contacts on... Definitely the best lasso I saw though.
This assassin had his poses down-pat
While not specifically related to NYCC, there was a Walker hand counting down to the return of TWD. Lost a finger each day until Sunday-- REALLY COOL
The only new Casey Jones we saw, and I don't think anyone could have topped this! Kid's a genius-- and a really nice person too.
Kenbei spent the entire weekend trying to find a Vegeta. Followed these guys around for like an hour until we could get a photo op, hah.
Tuesday, October 7, 2014
Trap Team Impressions
This won't be a review, since I'm only halfway done with the story, or, at least, thereabouts, but I'd just like to say some stuff that's been on my mind.
I went to midnight launch with Liz for Skylanders trap team and we got quite a haul, which you can view here. That video was about the toys, so now let's talk about the game itself!
First of all, WELCOME BACK Toys for Bob! It's good to have you guys back. That being said, this game, pretty much right off the bat, feels like it should have been the sequel to Giants. Although there are characters from Swap Force, it feels like the old Skylanders games did, and IMHO, that's a great thing. I don't think it's as hard as Giants was (IMO, Giants is the toughest game in the series), but it's still leagues away from Swap Force's difficulty.
The backgrounds and the setting are all completely fleshed out, which is something I'm glad about. They've FINALLY allowed us to choose to jump off cliffs, and this even sometimes leads to hidden areas. You'd think I was suicidal the way I leap off cliffs now! It doesn't even do damage to you, which makes me feel a bit sad about it. If you're in an arena match and you get knocked off it will deal damage, however.
Unlike Swap Force, the Giants have a purpose again, they can do basically everything that they could in Giants, though their jobs are less frequent. They can once again lift giant boulders and break bomb doors without a bomb. The best part about the giants in Trap Team is that THEY ACTUALLY FIT ON THE STAGE AGAIN. The new team, the Trap Masters, are about 3/4 the size of the Giants so it makes sense. It seems like they actually playtested them before they released the game, unlike Swap Force, where the giants served really no purpose at all and often caused the game to wig out since they didn't really fit anywhere. They had giant chests though, which have been replaced in Trap Team by villain chests, but they're basically exactly the same except for the symbol on the front. In Swap Force it was Tree Rex and now it's Kaos.
The new gimmick for this game is the traps, and while I love that they've come up with the idea to reverse the formula, where you capture the characters and then play with them, some of them appear to be a little lackluster. Not all of the trappable villains have three attacks (actually, I think that most of them have 2), and some really don't make all that much sense to me in their elements. There's also not the same amount of villains for each element. The fact that they talk to you and comment on what's going on from inside their traps (The speaker in the portal, actually), is a really nice touch that helps with the immersion.
I said in the video that minis/sidekicks have no special purpose, but there is actually a section in the Academy (your new hub world) with tiny paths just for them. I'm not sure if it happens anywhere else, but on the Mystic Mill stage, one of the villains, the Shrednaught, has areas that only he can access in his evolved form, which is actually a really nice touch, it makes it seem like the villains have some purpose once they're with you, besides dealing TONS of damage. The cores themselves don't seem to have any sort of special purpose anymore though, since elemental gates can now only be opened by Trap Masters. Everyone else has something special to do though.
The minigames now have some meat to them as well, there's a new version of Skystones, that sort of functions like somewhat of a mash up of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon cards, and it usually turns out to be really fun. The more villains you trap, the more cards you get for the game, so capturing villains serves more than one purpose. The Skaletones showdown is a kind of... Rock Band-lite rhythm game that is personalized to your skylander OR villain, where they sing along to music of varying styles with another NPC singing lead. The four difficulty levels mean that everyone has a chance to try this out. The expert levels are actually REALLY challenging and remind me of Amplitude/FreQuency on the PS2.
The traps are actually really interesting themselves, since there are all different sculpts, but it's not really necessary to have more than one of any element's traps, beyond the sake of having them. I also learned that the 'evolved' status of a villain is held on the trap itself, not by the game, so you'll have to do the villain quests over and over if you intend to buy more traps, which is kind of unfortunate... You might be wondering what villain quests are? Well, they're what replaced the missing heroic quests. Each villain has a quest somewhere on a stage, that can range from just talking to an NPC to playing Angry Birds with a sheep cannon. I heard a lot of players whining that there are no more heroic challenges for them to help up the stats of skylanders they like, but I don't have a problem with this. There also appear to be more traps than there should be, since there are 5 or 6 sculpts for each element, but some elements *cough* MAGIC *cough* only have three trappable villains.
The Arena is back, but each set of 3 waves has a different goal, and none of them are just "HIT THESE GUYS HARD." You don't have to follow the gimmick of the map, as it won't kill you outright if you ignore it, but you needn't usually rely on the gimmick of the map to get by. Player vs Player though, is completely gone and sort-of replaced with the Kaos Doom Challenge, which is sort of like if Skylanders was played like Dungeon Defenders. You can build towers and you have a box to protect. While I miss SkyGoals a lot, since it wasn't even in Swap Force, there are allusions to it in the arena challenges. One of the 3 round matches involves you carrying the ball from SkyGoals and it powering you, or any other carrier up.
The co-op is actually the only real problem I've had. The tether keeping you and your partner together is REALLY short this time around, and it leads to some unfortunate respawn chains, especially when a bounce pad is involved. The game itself seems to be more glitchy than ever before. I've been stuck in the floor multiple times, my cutscenes often hang for absurd amounts of time, and there's even a weird glitch that happens in co-op every once in a while where none of your buttons do anything. You cannot attack, but you can walk, while the other player has no issues. I've also noticed that about 20% of the time I move something off the portal, the game does not recognize that anything has been moved for a minute or so. Unfortunately, it seems like the portal is just slower to recognize and activate items in general this time around. Some of the items have had their effects changed, so maybe it's trying to figure that kind of stuff out?
I think that's about it for my impressions, this post is long enough already!
I went to midnight launch with Liz for Skylanders trap team and we got quite a haul, which you can view here. That video was about the toys, so now let's talk about the game itself!
First of all, WELCOME BACK Toys for Bob! It's good to have you guys back. That being said, this game, pretty much right off the bat, feels like it should have been the sequel to Giants. Although there are characters from Swap Force, it feels like the old Skylanders games did, and IMHO, that's a great thing. I don't think it's as hard as Giants was (IMO, Giants is the toughest game in the series), but it's still leagues away from Swap Force's difficulty.
The backgrounds and the setting are all completely fleshed out, which is something I'm glad about. They've FINALLY allowed us to choose to jump off cliffs, and this even sometimes leads to hidden areas. You'd think I was suicidal the way I leap off cliffs now! It doesn't even do damage to you, which makes me feel a bit sad about it. If you're in an arena match and you get knocked off it will deal damage, however.
Unlike Swap Force, the Giants have a purpose again, they can do basically everything that they could in Giants, though their jobs are less frequent. They can once again lift giant boulders and break bomb doors without a bomb. The best part about the giants in Trap Team is that THEY ACTUALLY FIT ON THE STAGE AGAIN. The new team, the Trap Masters, are about 3/4 the size of the Giants so it makes sense. It seems like they actually playtested them before they released the game, unlike Swap Force, where the giants served really no purpose at all and often caused the game to wig out since they didn't really fit anywhere. They had giant chests though, which have been replaced in Trap Team by villain chests, but they're basically exactly the same except for the symbol on the front. In Swap Force it was Tree Rex and now it's Kaos.
The new gimmick for this game is the traps, and while I love that they've come up with the idea to reverse the formula, where you capture the characters and then play with them, some of them appear to be a little lackluster. Not all of the trappable villains have three attacks (actually, I think that most of them have 2), and some really don't make all that much sense to me in their elements. There's also not the same amount of villains for each element. The fact that they talk to you and comment on what's going on from inside their traps (The speaker in the portal, actually), is a really nice touch that helps with the immersion.
I said in the video that minis/sidekicks have no special purpose, but there is actually a section in the Academy (your new hub world) with tiny paths just for them. I'm not sure if it happens anywhere else, but on the Mystic Mill stage, one of the villains, the Shrednaught, has areas that only he can access in his evolved form, which is actually a really nice touch, it makes it seem like the villains have some purpose once they're with you, besides dealing TONS of damage. The cores themselves don't seem to have any sort of special purpose anymore though, since elemental gates can now only be opened by Trap Masters. Everyone else has something special to do though.
The minigames now have some meat to them as well, there's a new version of Skystones, that sort of functions like somewhat of a mash up of Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokemon cards, and it usually turns out to be really fun. The more villains you trap, the more cards you get for the game, so capturing villains serves more than one purpose. The Skaletones showdown is a kind of... Rock Band-lite rhythm game that is personalized to your skylander OR villain, where they sing along to music of varying styles with another NPC singing lead. The four difficulty levels mean that everyone has a chance to try this out. The expert levels are actually REALLY challenging and remind me of Amplitude/FreQuency on the PS2.
The traps are actually really interesting themselves, since there are all different sculpts, but it's not really necessary to have more than one of any element's traps, beyond the sake of having them. I also learned that the 'evolved' status of a villain is held on the trap itself, not by the game, so you'll have to do the villain quests over and over if you intend to buy more traps, which is kind of unfortunate... You might be wondering what villain quests are? Well, they're what replaced the missing heroic quests. Each villain has a quest somewhere on a stage, that can range from just talking to an NPC to playing Angry Birds with a sheep cannon. I heard a lot of players whining that there are no more heroic challenges for them to help up the stats of skylanders they like, but I don't have a problem with this. There also appear to be more traps than there should be, since there are 5 or 6 sculpts for each element, but some elements *cough* MAGIC *cough* only have three trappable villains.
The Arena is back, but each set of 3 waves has a different goal, and none of them are just "HIT THESE GUYS HARD." You don't have to follow the gimmick of the map, as it won't kill you outright if you ignore it, but you needn't usually rely on the gimmick of the map to get by. Player vs Player though, is completely gone and sort-of replaced with the Kaos Doom Challenge, which is sort of like if Skylanders was played like Dungeon Defenders. You can build towers and you have a box to protect. While I miss SkyGoals a lot, since it wasn't even in Swap Force, there are allusions to it in the arena challenges. One of the 3 round matches involves you carrying the ball from SkyGoals and it powering you, or any other carrier up.
The co-op is actually the only real problem I've had. The tether keeping you and your partner together is REALLY short this time around, and it leads to some unfortunate respawn chains, especially when a bounce pad is involved. The game itself seems to be more glitchy than ever before. I've been stuck in the floor multiple times, my cutscenes often hang for absurd amounts of time, and there's even a weird glitch that happens in co-op every once in a while where none of your buttons do anything. You cannot attack, but you can walk, while the other player has no issues. I've also noticed that about 20% of the time I move something off the portal, the game does not recognize that anything has been moved for a minute or so. Unfortunately, it seems like the portal is just slower to recognize and activate items in general this time around. Some of the items have had their effects changed, so maybe it's trying to figure that kind of stuff out?
I think that's about it for my impressions, this post is long enough already!
DO ANY OF YOU GUYS HAVE ANYTHING TO ADD/ASK?