Mamoulian War

Goal nr. 9/2024 finished October 5, 15:30 – I have decided to relax a little bit with Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate on my PS4 again, and started the Aftermath story added to the game as a DLC. It started immediately after the events of the original story and brought back to life few old characters. It was 2 hours shorter than the original story and this time, you are also playing as members of the evil entourage. At the grand finale I have picked Liu Kang’s ending.

To not break the narrative, I have defeated two more bosses in the Iron Keep in DS2 NG+ 😛 Smelter Demon was interesting one. Somehow, I managed to get to the boss without a single death, and also defeated him on the first try. I was really surprised how that went 😄 After that I went to save/reload farm the one very rare item dropping by the roaming souls in Belfry Sol, and then I went towards Iron King. And of course my clumsiness finally jumped in and my ass has been kicked a lot of times, which cost me again around 100k souls 😄 After some time, I have arrived at the Iron King, and again, I did some stupid missclick, and had probably the fastest ever wipe on this boss 😄 Seriously. One of the easiest bosses in game, and I still managed to wipe in less than two seconds 😄 I am planning to spend some time on DS2 again tomorrow, as I am a little bit tired of all of that MK11, which I have experienced since I booted that up for the first time, since I have purchased it 😛

IMHO, 40EUR price tag in the era of full games costing way over 100 EUR is most likely scapegoat as well. 🤷‍♂️

Another giveaway on GOG. https://www.gog.com/en/game/whispering_willows

They blame both of these things combined with failure in the Sony marketing department. 🤷‍♂️ You just can not compete in one of the most oversaturated genres offering least aesthetically pleasing assets to the target audience which mainly consists of teenage males 🤷‍♂️

I wish some of the racing game developers would care as much about physics as the people behind Stellar Blade 🤷‍♂️ https://nichegamer.com/stellar-blade-update-1-007-adds-visual-and-qol-improvements/

Goal nr. 8/2024 achieved October 1, 19:15 – After I spent way to much time fighting in Towers of Time to unlock Klassic MKII Skarlet skin (successfully, ranked in top 2.9% of PvE Tower of Time players last "week" 😛), I have took today a more chilling approach to my PS4 version of Mortal Kombat 11 Ultimate and replayed last three chapters needed for completing the Story Mode on 100%.

Are you by any chance one of the 20 people who bought Concord?

4 more bosses DS2 NG+ down since my last post. First was Lost Sinner. And again to my surprise, the fight was much easier with melee than with sorcerer in my previous playthrough. I needed few attempts to adjust to the two red phantoms joining the fight, but it took not to long. The worst part was the gauntlet again... FromSoft really drop the ball here, and put everything to make your corpserunning as complicated as possible. Cost me almost 100k souls 😄 Next one was Scorpioness Najka. Again, fine with melee build. Only 1 attempt needed. And again, the issue was to get to her, through the "ghosts", although not as big as to Lost Sinner. Thankfully the mask from the DLC helped a lot to counter Curse. I had to play a little bit backup and reload, due to the Golden Lion, which drops two unique items not respawning. After 15 minutes or so, I got his helmet. Will still need to do the same in NG+2 for his red cloak Third one was Prowling Magus with the Congregation. As always, whenever I underestimate something due to not wiping for a long time, the cheapest mob finishes me off 😄 That's why it took me two tries to get this one. Nothing special. Just need to watch out for his AoE attack, which finished me off at first attempt 😄 And the last one was The Duke's Dear Freja. So far the longest fight in NG+. It challenged my patience a lot as a melee, now that I am attempting all bosses without summons. Thankfully few Great Lightning Bolts helped a little bit with the fight. But i had to save all the smaller ones for the spider spawns. After that, I got completely engulfed with the Mortal Kombat 11 and Towers of Time. I have found out, that I can get two super rare Classic MKII skins for Skarlet and Johnny Cage as the battle announcer, if I gather enough points to rank in top 5% PvE Tower players. I am now in top 3.5% after 36 towers cleared, but there is still one day until the end of the challenge. So, I have to be prepared to run few towers tomorrow after work again.

Goal nr. 7/2024 achieved. September 28, 22:30 – I took a small break from DS2 NG+ and played through the original story of Mortal Kombat 11: Ultimate Edition on PS4. This unlock Frost and two arenas. It took me about 4 and half hours and if I remember it correctly, I enjoyed the story mode more than in Mortal Kombat X and 2011. I will need to replay three chapters where you had to pick the fighter, and the last fight to see all the content and finish it on 100%. I took a small break from DS2 NG+ and

Two more days of Dark Souls II behind me. During the first one, I had decided to go to Earthen Peak. It started fine, the DLC Poisonbite Ring+1 helped a lot to make this area more bearable. The fun thing was, the Artificial Undead ambush in a small one way room, where now even red phantom variant was present 😆 I am still wondering how I was able to survive that 😃 But the room design is pretty favourable to kiting the mobs. Soon afterwards, I have joined the Heirs of the Sun Covenant again, and without much hesitation, I went directly to Covetous Demon, which was defeated promptly on first try. The way deeper into the Peak went smooth as well. But then after one stupid hickup, I have lost a little bit of concentration and the Manikins with claws started to tear me apart pretty frequently. Their damage output in NG+ is pretty high, when using my item grinding set. I was still missing few items from them, so I had pretty low AC. Sigh 😔. After few more ****-ups, when I missed a jump now and there, I went finally for Mytha. The first attempt was almost perfect for my clumsy standards, but then, when she was under a 1% of HP, she has thrown her explosive head, and me, thinking that I was at safe distance from the blast, went for the final hit. Well, her final hit went off sooner 🤣 The next try, I was still angry, so it went downhill pretty fast, but the third one, despite some stupid moves by me, was successful and I got new shiny Silver Covetous Ring+2 as a reward. Unfortunately, I became so exhausted because of the Manikin quickness, that I have decided to quit DS2 for the day. During DS2 play, I have noticed, that Sony is running free Multiplayer Weekend, so I dusted off my Mortal Kombat 11 and went for 3 out of 5 online only trophies, for which I still had enough time before midnight. In the end, I have ended up almost three hours watching AI matches of my toons, and reading some news 😁 This gave me two Trophies. And then, I went watching while reading King of the Hill battles for one more hour to get one more online exclusive trophy 😂

A story behind it. not really, just corruption during the procurement of the materials used to build the site. “Unexpectedly” 🤷‍♂️

Oh, and I have completely forgotten the first Sunday boss, the Pursuer 😁Now I definitely can say, that it is much much easier to fight him as melee compared to caster. As a caster I had a lot of trouble to be able to fight him and all other Pursuer mobs most of the time. Now I can defeat them, unless I missclick something on hot bar, on first try. So now I have also unlocked the McDuff infusing services 😁

Played little bit today again. Well more than little bit. I had a lot of time today, due to my wife being at work 😁 Unfortunately most of this time was eaten up with the stupid gauntlet towards Executioner’s Chariot 😩 Anyway. The way to Skeletal Lords has been fine today. I have cleaned up most of the mobs with no wipes, and I was even lucky with some rare drops, which I was still missing. Then I jumped off the cliff by mistake 😁 Then the fight with Skeletal Lords went awesome as well. A lot of help was Yearn sorcery, which attracted all spawned skeletons, which I have been slowly defeating. Few minutes later, soul and new ring have been in my possession. Then, I have decided to go grind for the Lizard Staff… My oh my, From Soft has made this one pretty annoying to get. They definitely hate the completionists 😄 To make it short, I made a lot of silly and stupid thing in the arena, so I have been gangbanged few times by the skeletons there, while trying to get the drop out of necromancers. Then I had to run through the stupid gauntlet again. And on the end of the gauntlet, there was red phantom as a bonus encounter. Worst encounter of NG+ so far. His sword has some homing “magic” programmed to it, so whenever I have rolled next to it, he changed his trajectory mid-swing and hit me hard when I was standing up out of that roll 😩 Probably 100k lost souls due to this clown… Bleh… Anyway after I have found a pretty good strategy against the skeletons, and purchased one more Yearn Sorcery, I did not needed to run so many times through that gauntlet as before. Still the redphantom clownshoe ended few of them anyway… In the end, I got from the Necromancers the Lizard Staff and their armor pieces so I could finally attempt the boss. Unfortunatelly all this running around through the gauntlet and grind for the loot has made me pretty tired, so I have wiped few times on the boss as well 😄 So one of the easiest bosses in the game made me the most trouble in NG+ so far 🙈

Back to DS2:SotFS. Two more bosses down. The no phantom attempts work so far. I have started out with Belfry Gargoyles. The interesting thing, I have found out, that summoned phantoms boost up elemental resistances more, than I have expected. In NG, the lightning bolt did almost insignificant damage to them, so I have tried to go full melee on them in my first failed attempt. Unfortunately the only non-infused weapon, which I had was Grand Lance+10, which was not the best choice for the encounter, so in the second one, I have tried lightning spells again. And to my surprise, two casts of great one and one cast of basic one were enough to defeat single Gargoyle. I have used that to my advantage and won the second attempt. Now that I got Covetous Gold Serpent Ring+2 from them, I went to Forest of the Fallen Giants, so I tried my luck again with a rare Hollow Soldier Shield drop. Aaand I got two of them 😁 In the meanwhile, I have visited the Last Giant as well. The next goal is to get to Mytha as soon as possible, to get the Covetous Silver Serpent Ring+2 from her. So I will have to get through Skeletal Lords and one Red Phantom with rare drop, which I would love to have as well. Probably, I will have to grind a little bit for the rare Lizard Staff in Chariot arena as well.

Hmm, strange, I like DS2 controls more than DS1 and Demon’s Souls PS3 🤷‍♂️ The only thing I “hate” about DS2 is trashmob placement and aggro range in some areas. Insee everything else as an improvement over the previous games 🤷‍♂️

Currently on business trip again, but before departing I had a little bit of time to wander around NG+ Lost Bastille. I have defeated all of the local Pursuers, and then I have went for the Ruin Sentinels. I have used Lightning Mace+10 with Sunlight Blade buff. It has dealt massive damage against them. The funny thing is, that due to that, I became to reckless and triggerhappy, which almost cost me the attempt, but after jumping down, I have normalized a little bit and started to be more cautious, becuase I needed to find an opening to chug an Estus 🙈 Luckily, I have found one, and hit by hit defeated the remaining two Sentinels and harvested their soul 😁

Minor investor from Slovakia is challenging CEO of Ubisoft and Tencent after the latest underperformance of their games, preparing to file a lawsuit as well, due to the lowest share prices in the last 10 years. https://nichegamer.com/ubisoft-investor-demands-ceo-change-amidst-underperforming-star-wars-outlaws-launch/

I had a little bit of time today again before the sleep, so I have run inside No-Man’s Wharf and cleared the area, including the Flexile Sentry boss. I needed 3 attempts, as the NG+ adds joined the fight almost imediately, so my first attempt ended after 5 seconds 🙈 (In PS3 vanilla, there as enough time to shoot one Shadow Assassin down with a spell after entering the fog gate). Almost got him on 2nd try, but I started to be to greedy, when the water level started to rise up to my hips, so I have run out of stamina in moddle of his combo.

After few grinding sessions, I have started NG+ in DS2:SotFS. I went right away into the Heide's Tower and defeated Old Dragonslayer and later Dragonrider as well. Both on first try. This time, without phantoms. The plans is to not use them if possible. We'll see how far I will be able to get before I get into first trouble. For now, I am again enjoying the game, as I have mostly forgotten the placing of Red Phantoms, which pretty much kick my ass now and then 😄 It makes the experience fresh, and make me do hilarious things as soon, as I get surprised by few of them 😄 Anyway, sooner or later, I will have to go back to grind again, at the Falconers for their medals. The plan is to clear the Lost Bastille for Gold Covetous Ring+2 and then go back to them, to see, if they can drop anything for me.

I have defeated Ancient Dragon and Vendrick today. Ancient dragon was interesting. I have postponed to go and fight against him for a very long time, as he was definitely the hardest boss for me in Vanilla game. I spent more than 150 attempts in total in all encounters with him O.o To my surprise, I have defeated him today on my first try O.o I still can't believe it. TBH I have to say, the Fire Resistance items from DLCs definitely helped me to survive his dragon breath. Vendrick on the other had, I have thought, would be easier form these two. But of course I got few time completely destroyed, before I have relearned his moves and attacks. Then, on my 4th or 5th try, I have defeated him without being hit 😄 The funniest thing about it was, that the previous attempt, I was not able even to touch him, as he destroyed me in less than 5 seconds after entering the fog gate, as I have forgotten, that his attacks drain like whole stamina when blocking, and I was stunned with his first attack, and then promptly finished with two more swings 😄 Next in line, before entering the NG+, just a little bit of grinding for missing items.

Harebrained Schemes are working on Survival Horror RPG. On their FB Page few days ago, they have also mentioned, that they were not able to secure Shadowrun, nor Battletech licences for the foreseeable future.

According to US, they ruled out UA air defense as a culprit. They are saying it was either a pilot error or plane malfunction.

Yeah, I know about the Bonfire Ascetic solution to the problem. I still have to go through NG+ and NG+2 to get all the spells required for trophies, so there is no Issue with Aldia not spawning for now. I am just angry, that my memory failed 😂