I'm in hell and it's awesome

I've been dabbling in and out of doom since I bought it a few weeks back. It's spectacular!

I've played a totally of about 7 hours, which includes a little multiplayer. It's really not a huge amount of game time, but it's been divided between playing World of Warships with mates and quite a busy life at the moment.

The single player is excellent and I've just jumped through the portal to hell and have started killing demons on their own turf!

The graphics are still mind blowing. With my new monitor it's even better and I don't have the settings right up. They're so good I can't really imagine how much better they'd be if the settings were on max!

On a related note, I had a look into the old doom board game by fantasy flight and was excited to see they're bringing out a new version, specially for the revamped doom! I heard the original was very good, so I have high hopes for the new one!

I want to want No Man's Sky

Anyone who's been following new game releases will have probably heard about the disaster that was the release of No Man's Sky. Full of unfulfilled promises and monotonous tedium. In fact, not very full of anything!

I've not played it myself, but the many reviews have painted a very plain picture and I feel a little gutted. I really wanted to play this game! I love the aesthetics of the game, the colours and design of the ships, the slightly garish colour contrast gives it an otherworldly look.

I'm really hoping the developers can get an update out that will pull the game back on track and put the negativity behind them.

Doom is awesome

I got paid on Friday and that meant one thing, I could play the new doom for the first time! I had forgotten how insanely good the game looks. I know graphics shouldn't be the focal point, but I was blown away at the incredible detail and complete lack of any visible pixels, anywhere! On top of this, the game runs so smoothly. It's a technical master piece. And this is before we get to the gameplay.

I've already seen and read numerous reviews raving about how good the campaign is, and they're spot on, the campaign has exactly the same feel of the classic Doom games, but with everything brought up to date - it feels just right. The levels are big, winding mazes with secrets and dead-ends; it's not afraid to have the player back tracking to open doors once they've found the right key card. In combat it's all about moving constantly, dodging and weaving between projectiles and clusters of rampaging hordes of enemies, blasting whatever's in front of you.

The way the monsters move and fight is something I've never seen before in a game, they are so dynamic and fast and almost feel like they are being controlled by another player. I was particularly struck by how the Imps (the classic fire throwing Doom foe) jumped around, climbed walls and pillars and dodged around so quickly, making them a real nuisance! I'm yet to encounter any bigger demons, but the Hell Knights are already giving me a tough time!

I believe the campaign takes over 10 hours to complete and I've dived straight in at the hardest difficulty available to me at the moment, ultra violent, which may have been a mistake, but I'm loving the challenge.

I won't babble on anymore, I just want to play it some more now.

Once I've had a good blast at the campaign I'll check out multiplayer again and the level builder, snapmap.

Time to venture back onto the surface of Mars and blow away some more demons!

I just finished playing Journey

This game was the free game on PlayStation 4 last month, with a few others, and was the game I was most keen to play. I didn't know much about it, but I knew it was an "art" game from an indy developer, thatgamecompany, and involved a journey...

And that is what the game was and it was brilliantly done. Beautiful graphics, great sound track and a fantastic anonymous multiplayer system where the game will know if a player is near and you'll seamlessly enter the same game world.

The actual mechanics of the game are very simple, you move around with the stick, jump with one button and send out a shout with another, and that's it! The game progresses through various levels, which lead onto each other as you go along the journey, each level having some basic puzzle to be solved. It's not a hard game at all, it's more like an interactive film or story; you'll get to the end, but how will you get there, who will you meet on the way and what will you see?

I won't describe any of the levels as that'd spoil it or even what the aim of the game is, needless to say it's to get to your destination, which I wasn't sure of until quite near the end of my play through!

Visually the game is stunning. The landscapes you navigate deform under foot, the weather swirls around you and the lighting illuminates the world in a fairy tale like glow. It's both simple, in styling, and yet so detailed in the overall effect.

The multiplayer works without you even noticing, until you see another player running around in front of you! When I first saw another player I assumed it was a computer control person in my game world, then I realised they were behaving in a non-AI sort of way and was very adept at both finding me, following me and leading me to hidden spots.

The shout command is a single expression which makes for an interesting communication system. I met players who'd be frequently giving out short shouts, as a sort of, "over here", expression, and others who'd stay silent until they let out a single long shout, by holding the button down for longer.

Every player, including yourself, has a unique symbol, which is shone above you head when you shout. When I'd love a companion I'd soon myself encountering another, with a different symbol, and sometimes I'd bump into the same people! Until you complete your journey you have no idea who the people are you meet, all you know is that they are other players. You can only have 1 other player in your world and I think that's perfect as it makes the relationship between the strangers more intimate.

Overall, I felt entirely captivated by the game. Most of all I loved the interaction with strangers and the sense of camaraderie that developed when my travelling companion stayed with me for a while.

I bought Doom!

As per a previous post, as I now have a job I have allowed myself to buy Doom! Technically I'm supposed to wait for my first pay check, but as it was 50% off it seemed daft to miss out on the offer. Soooo... I've agreed not to play it till I get paid. It's going to be so hard to resist!

In other gaming news, my prison in Prison Architect is madness. Gangs are killing each other the shower is more like a death pit and even the emergency riot police are not up to the job of taming my inmates sometimes.

Doom.

Prison Architect

For those who like emergent gameplay in a sand box, building/managing simulator, this is one to keep an eye on.

I've recently become quite hooked into building simulators and it's all one of my friend's fault. He introduced me to Planetbase and I surprised myself by really enjoying it. From there I've now got Prison Architect and Banished and am enjoying the both immensely! I have typically not been drawn to games like this as they tend to be too slow paced for me.

Prison Architect is a tongue in cheek prison building and managing simulator. Once you have built a few necessary rooms and a small prison wing, prisoners will be delivered to you and you'll need to start paying attention to their needs. If you mistreat them too much or don't manage their regime well enough they'll be rioting and killing before you know it!

For a general introduction to the game I'd strongly recommend watching Sips on YouTube. I watched a bunch of his Summer Slam Prison Architect series and it really sold the game to me.

Having started my new job I'm finding the game perfect to just relax at the end of the day, have some laughs at the chaos in my prison and play around with expanding my facilities. Trying to reform my prisoners is always a lot of fun to as they tend to enjoy killing the poor teachers off...

Also, it's cheap!

I'll have Doom soon!

I have a job!!!! It's been over a year now without work. I've applied for a million jobs and I actually got accepted for a job a couple of months back, which was due to start sometime in October. I didn't want to do that one though as it's over 33 miles away. However, while waiting for it to start I received a call from an agency and they put me forward for a position at a company near by, I went to the interview, got invited back for a second interview and now I start work on Monday, 26th!

So, as I promised myself, once I get my first pay check I'll buy Doom and probably retreat from the world, surrounding myself in the hellish glory that is Doom.

There are many other games to talk about. I've obviously been super inactive on here this year, but that's mainly due to lack of work and not really having the motivation to do a huge amount other than look for work.

I'm mega excited to start working, earning cash-money and hopefully building a bit more of a life again! My woman has been awesome through all this and we've actually been doing things all this year, despite me not earning. Anyway, I'm not going to get all gushy.

Rawesome!

Been a while now. I'm still looking for work.

I can't believe 3 months has gone past since I last posted. I said to myself that I'd post once I get a job and I've been applying but having no luck, so far. An interview I had a couple of weeks ago is still looking promising though. It's been so long though that I thought I'd poke my head onto the blog and just give an update.

I've been doing some gaming, World of Warships has died off a bit, but I am really enjoying Planetside 2. I even got invited into an outfit, The Boneheaded Overlords. They're quite a large outfit and I was probably invited en masse, but getting stuck into the combined operations of a large number of players is a lot of fun!

My friend and I have also started to explore Space Engineers, which is essentially mine craft in space. We've only been dabbling in creative mode but plan to have a go at survival once we figure out what the hell is going on!! We're really impressed with the building mechanics though and creating a functioning ship is tricky.

That's all for today. I've said to myself that I won't buy Doom until I have a job and I've been sticking to it. Very hard to restrain myself though!

Doom...

DOOM

Doom is one of the greatest game franchises ever. Doom 1 and 2 are two of my favourite games ever. I spent an entire summer playing through both games while between years at university. Doom 3 then came along, it had more focus of being a horror game, but still kept the great gunplay, demons and hellish environments.

I really loved Doom 3 and I respected the fact it was a long game which took a certain amount of dedication to complete; the story didn't really kick in until over 10 hours in and after a long sequence of level after level, wading through UAC's Mars installation. The drawn out nature of the middle of the game worked brilliantly to setup the end, as the whole story unveils itself before you and the horrific nature of the Mars installation comes to light. I thought it was genius. I don't remember exactly, but I think it was a good 20 hour game.

Now we have Doom, not Doom 4, just Doom. Not sure why they shied away from putting a 4 on the end, as everyone will call it Doom 4 (a bit like Rancid's second self-titled album becoming known as Rancid 2000 - the year it was released). The multiplayer beta was out over the last weekend and ended on Monday and luckily I jumped in straight away. And I loved it! I've been watching YouTube videos and reviews and there are so many negative views, but I'm already getting withdrawal from the beta! The negativity seems to revolve around the style of the multiplayer, it's not fast enough or not competitive enough, but I don't really care, I haven't had so much fun in a FPS in years!

Visually the game is stunning, mind-blowingly stunning. I haven't seen graphics like this before. The gunplay is slick and feels great, as every Id Studios title always does. The setting is everything Doom should be, hellish and filled with blood. The music sounds like it's been copied straight out of the original games, and done really well. The trailers for the single player look amazing and I can't wait to get my teeth into it.

I want to pre-order the game but I can't justify £40 for a game until I get a job. As soon as I start earning, I'll buy Doom. I need it!

A little pre-occupied at the moment

Sorry I've not been posting much in the last couple of weeks, I'm really getting down to hunting and applying for jobs at the moment. I'm quite keen to find employment in the next couple of months. This isn't to say I haven't been looking for job until this period, but I'm making a much bigger effort now.

I'm still playing a couple of games with friends a couple of times a week, normally. World of Warships being our staple at the moment, but I also have the odd game of Company of Heroes too.

I'm also doing a lot of thinking about game design again; trying to figure out ways to get ideas into something more tangible is always surprisingly tricky, but I keep my note pad near by and try to scrawl things in there when I can. I have a couple of solitaire games, which I quite fancy having a go at putting down; one is a space game and the other a tongue-in-cheek sports manager game. I've had some new ideas for Wastelands too and a simple monster building game. I'm not going to go into anymore detail here, but hopefully I'll get some inspiration to push one or some of these forward.

My brewing friend and I haven't had a chance to meet up for a while, sadly. He said recently that he probably wouldn't be free to brew until late April. This does mean we can get some serious planning in before hand. I finally bought a brewing book with guides to various types of beer brewing and some recipes to try out, so I think we'll probably try something out of here first, before we delve into developing our own recipes.

FTL: advanced edition

A few years back I wrote about a little game called FTL. Well, a year or so ago they put out a free update, which added a whole load more encounters, weapons, equipment, ship rooms and other stuff too. I hadn't played the updated version much due to the fact that I played the classic version a lot (a crazy amount, in fact!).

Recently, one of my good friends finally got into the game and had been telling me a little here and there about his adventures and it started to re-ignite my enthusiasm for the game. After just a few games I feel like I'm completely hooked again!! Annoyingly I have to start from scratch because I now have FTL in steam and on a new computer, so I have none of my unlocks from the previous time I played.

The game is fundamentally the same as it has even been and if you want to know what that is, then follow the link I put in the first sentence of this post. If you can't be bothered then essentially the game involves you managing a space ship, fleeing from a rebel fleet across numerous procedurally generated space system. There is no load facility so if you die that's it, you can't reload from an early point. It's a desperate dash involving a certain amount of luck on what you find on your journey and decision making, with frantic real time space battles. At first the game can seem completely luck based and out to beat you into a pulp on every attempt, but as you become more familiar with it you become savvy to it's tricks and learn how to manage your resources and make better decisions. Each run through takes up to an hour and a half tops, but normally averages about the hour mark. It's a glorious game.

Anyway, back to the updated version of the game and what it changes. Well, as I said at the beginning of this post it just adds in a whole bunch of new options and potential encounters, sounds nice and just more of the same, no? Well, I don't think it is anymore. Because there more ways to do things and more ways for your enemy to end your desperate journey, I think it changes a lot more than just the new alternatives. This new update makes the game significantly harder because you have to guard against so much more. In the old game you could pump your shields and engines up and you'd be pretty much golden, but now your crew members might be mind controlled, or your shields might be hacked and taken down completely at a stroke! Also, the game isn't any longer and due to there being so many more variations, if you see something you want the chances of it appearing again in another system are next to nil, so you have to grab it when you can!

I must admit I didn't like the added complexity when it first came out, which is why I've not played it since the update. I thought that it diluted the game too much, took away the simple charm of the original version. I think it is because my friend has got into the game that I now feel I've seen it in a new light and really do appreciate it again.

This game will run on the most basic of laptops, there's even an iPad version. The graphics and music are beautifully "retro" and the gameplay is excellent. If you like a game with a short run through that is highly replayable, possibly endlessly replayable, then invest a few quid in this absolute gem of a game.

The second brew is a great success!

I cracked open a couple of bottles from the second brew, which was bottled up exactly 5 weeks ago. I tried one with the added "herb" and then had one of the "control" bottles, which was just the hopped malt extract, unaltered.

The first bottle, with the added herb, had a distinctive aroma (I thought it was a bit like elderflower), which was maybe a little overpowering, but if brought down a little, would be an excellent addiction to a summer or heather ale.

The flavour in both bottles was an IPA, although a little darker than I'd have expected. IPAs are not really my cup of tea, but it was ok.

The most impressive point of this brew was how well the bottles had conditioned! My co-brewer had opened a bottle after only 2 weeks of being bottled and he'd said it was ok. Being 5 weeks after bottling I did expect these to be good but I was very pleasantly surprised to see how much fizz, head and flavour there was.

Once again, my friend's attention to detail and cleanliness has led to another faultless beer and I'm champing at the bit now to get onto our next brew!

World of Warships - the yank ships aren't so bad

I've been a little reinvigorated to play world of warships in the last few days. A bit like World of Tanks, I think it is one of those games where it's easy to come and go, try playing a certain line of ships/tanks, get bored with them, then give it a rest and come back to it later to try a different line.

Whether it's battleships, destroyers, heavy tanks or artillery, both games offer a large selection of hardware to run out in. As I've said previously though, the lack of context bothers me in the long run, but as a free-to-play game they are wonderfully designed with, what I think is a fantastic pay model; you really don't have to put money into the game, but if you enjoy a particular part or fancy having a little more, then there are good products that allow you to get more from the game, and most importantly, do not give you an edge in the actual gameplay!

With World of Tanks I think I put in between £15-£20, but considering how much I played the game I consider this to be an absolute steal! I take my hat off to Wargaming.net, their game design and payment model is excellent.

So, getting back to the title, a couple of weeks back I expressed my view that I didn't enjoy the American ships so much, I felt they were all a little generic and lacked character. I think, in the last couple of weeks, having got in touch with an old friend, who to my surprised was a world of warships addict, he's brought the joy of brawling in an American battleship or charging around in my Clemson class destroyer. The latter ship, my Clemson destroyer, has been a joy to play with and made me consider that destroyer play may be my strongest ship class in the game!

I've been meaning to write a review of World of Warships, so maybe I'll run down some points now.

The good stuff:

• It's free. Honestly, you can play this game quite satisfactorily without parting with a penny! I haven't yet, but I am tempted, because there are some cool premium ships and I may want some extra port slots at some point, but I don't feel pressured and that's the important thing.
• The graphics are good; excellent, I think. The sea looks realistic and the swells and white horses are very convincing. The ships are immaculately designed in fine detail.
• The gameplay, just like with World of Tanks, is easily accessible. The controls are accessible and yet there always seems to be a nuance to be discovered to enhance your gameplay. It makes me feel good to play and learn, without ever making me like a nublet.
• The damage model is impressive. Just like in World of Tanks, the armour, hard points and ships components are represented so well and make accuracy and manoeuvre so important.
• The variety in gameplay is surprisingly good. Aircraft carriers, destroyers, battleships and cruisers all offer very different gameplay experiences, which cross over seamlessly to create a very team focussed battle experience; each player needs to play their role and sometimes do something heroic to win the day!

The bad stuff:

• Lack of context. Random nationalities and ships all bundled together to find another team of randomly assorted ships and nations. There's a certain amount of balancing with ship levels and types, but it's just a play ground for people to enjoy early 20th century warships; not for those who want to re-enact historical engagement or semi-realistic situations.
• Just like with World of Tanks, but less so, the ship level/tier system can be annoying. Some ships, which were known to be very good can end up being in a tier where they're up against ships of a later period and therefore not able to really show their impressive status in the history of warships; similar to how I described the Tiger tank in World of Tanks. However, World of Tanks brings players in almost at the invention of the tank and ends with near modern day tanks, which means the 10 tier systems jumps quite significantly as tanks get better. This speed of development is not as high in shipping; a tier 3 battleship, one of the very early dreadnaughts, will be able to out gun any cruiser, maybe even the very top tier ones, and a tier 10 battleship getting hit by torpedoes from a tier 2 or 3 destroyer is not going to appreciate it.
• Repetition. It's not the kind of game that'll grab me for long periods. I'm fairly certain I'll enjoy it for a long time yet, but in short stints and preferably with friends. Solo play gets tedious fairly quickly.

I'm not going to go into much more as it's a free-to-play game, there's no story to really go into, the game is what it is; if you like early 20th century warships, you'll probably enjoy dabbling in this game. It looks good and runs fairly well even on quite slow systems.

I've probably missed some things, I've written this a bit spontaneously, but I have been thinking about it for a while.

Doing something you don't want to do, so you can do what you want to do

Bit of a long title and it refers to many aspects of life, as any reasonable person will understand. However, in this context it's referring to games mastering role play games. It's something I've never wanted to do, but with so many exciting RPGs out there, in particularly, the Star Wars RPGs coming from Fantasy Flight games, I've been forced to figure out how I can play them.

I haven't done much GMing, as this blog will verify, but I've had a go a few times. I've run the prescribed beginner adventures from 2 of the Star Wars RPG beginner boxes, which are fantastic value for money for anyone interested in Star Wars and RPGing. I've run a couple of other things, but they've never been great. The important thing is that I've learnt a little each time and it's sort of compelled me to keep trying and I've found that I can enjoy the game in a different way. I've also found videos and guides to give me ideas and there are loads of resources out there; the youtube channel Geek and Sundry has just started a series of videos with useful tips for GMs, hosted by Matt Mercer.

As a kid I never wanted to GM games, but my friends and I were interested in RPGs, particularly me, and no-one else would do it. Back then we'd run very free-form games with no particular rules or even die rolls, it was all adlibbed and kept in our heads. I craved a chance to be a player in a game and not have to run it, but it never happened as a kid. Luckily, in recent years I've been able to be a player in Pathfinder and some D&D, which, in a way, brought me round to biting the bullet and trying my hand at GMing a proper RPG.

The title of this blog post also brings me onto the subject of other games too. I'm a big believer of the idea that if you want to play something, sort it out yourself, then find people who want to play. Then, if people get their own stuff, it's because they really want to, not because of any pressure. As a kid I used to try and rope people in, but all I ended up with was a guilty feeling when they didn't enjoy it as much as me.

Games on my mind at the moment

Since moving to Carlisle I've not playing any board games regularly. The only chance I've had is when I've gone south to see friends and family. Because of this I often feeling a longing to sit round a table with mates and enjoy some quality gaming time!

There are a couple of games in particular that are looking tempting to me at the moment, due to being easy to pick up and play and hopefully to be playable with people who are not into games or big game fans.

King of Tokyo/New York - King of Tokyo has been around for a few years now and looks like a great, very simple dice game where each player takes a monster and tries to terrorise Toyko. King of New York came out more recently and has a slightly more in depth gaming experience, but is supposedly still very easy to play.

Sentinels of the Multiverse - I think I've mentioned this one in the past (quite a long time ago actually), but I like the look of this game's simple card game mechanics and interesting use of different decks, which is something I quite like using in my own games. I've heard some compelling criticism for the game, which fundamentally states that the game doesn't have enough interaction between players to be properly co-operative and it can get overwhelmingly complex with different damage types and amounts all piling up,but I'm still intrigued by it...


[ edit - corrected the name of Sentinels! I always make this error... ]

The Great War - youtube channel

Just a quick post to highlight a youtube channel I've been really enjoying recently. I wouldn't normally do something like this here, but I also wanted to have a note of it just in case I forget about it, as it's a long term project.

https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGreatWar

This channel is following WW1 week by week from start to finish, exactly 100 years after the event. So, those of you with their heads screwed on will realise that it has been running since 2014; consequently, there are many episodes to catch up on!

The channel also does special episodes about the various people, places and ideas of the time and also short and very interesting Q&A episodes.

What is very appealing about the channel is that episodes are short, about 10 minutes an episode. So, for those of you with short attention spans, like myself, it's perfect for getting a tasty dose of knowledge between doing other things.

Huzzah!

Helldivers - another gem from Arrowhead

For xmas I was given Helldivers for the PS4 and I've been playing it for the last month, when I can get a chance with my girlfriend playing Fallout 4 endlessly!

Helldivers is set in the future where Earth is now Super Earth and you play a Helldiver, one of the mighty defenders of Super Earth desperately fighting back against their 3 hated enemies; the heavily armoured and tanked up Cyborgs, the hordes of the spikey limbed Bugs and the high tech, mind altering Illuminates. The game is presented in a tongue-in-cheek style, very similar to the film Star Ship Troopers.

It's a top down shooter with a whole lot more stuff than your average top down shooter. The game revolves around multiplayer with up to 4 players working through missions together to bring glory to Super Earth. There is full friendly fire and a vast array of weapons, military hardware and strategems to choose from.

Each mission requires the players to try and achieve several objectives, which could be rescuing stranded troops to pushing in codes to activate surface to air missile launchers. Players are constantly kept on their toes as the enemy will be patrolling the map, and if they see you and you don't take them out quickly, then the alarm will be raised and more heavily armed and armoured enemies will drop from the sky, or come out of the ground, or teleport in, all depending on which foe you are coming up against. So teams end up in a desperate battle where at least one of them will need to be focussing on tapping in lines of up, down, left, right arrow combinations at a computer terminal, while his squad mates blaze gun fire, anti-tank rockets and call in airstrikes on the ever increasing hordes of enemies.

It has a similar look to other Arrowhead studio's games, Gauntlet and Magicka; an isometricky-top-downy sort of view where all the players share the same screen space, which gets really annoying when players drag their feet and end up splitting players between the very edges of the screen! The graphics look excellent, with great weather effects and nice details, like leaving footprints in certain ground types, which can be useful for tracking patrols. Explosions, gun fire and flame effects are also exquisitely shown.

The sound design is also very nice, particularly the gun sounds. Guns, artillery and general hardware noises are so satisfying! Firing that 90mm cannon attached to the side of your mech will make you feel like a god of war or opening up, full auto, with a heavy machinegun is joyous, particularly when you see the enemy exploding into a fine red mist in front of you. This might sound mildly disturbing, but I can't deny it. I can only assume the developers have a genuine love for real gun sounds. The music and voices are ok fit the feel of the games overly dramatic, tongue-in-cheek style.

It's not all gravy though. After a month of playing I have to admit the game is quite repetitive. Missions are procedurally generated, so you will never ever play the same mission twice, but that doesn't stop them feeling very much like doing the same thing over and over. There are only so many different combinations of landscapes and objectives (although there are quite a few, to be fair) and the fact the map shape and features are in different places and the objectives are also in different places, doesn't change that really. In this way it's similar to Gauntlet, but I'd say Helldivers has more variation and is on the whole a significantly deeper game.

So Helldivers is a game really enjoyed with friends, although I've been really surprised at how cooperative the random people dropping into my missions have been. If you can form a tight team with different players specialising in different aspects of the mission, anyone who loves a big change and a healthy dose of pure gun violence and games that need teamwork will love this game!

Oh, and it's really hard!

And lastly, it is now out on PC and I feel very reluctant to buy it twice, but I know some of my PC mates would love this one... arg!

What have I been doing recently?

It's 2016 and January's almost gone already!

This year is becoming a bit of a blur already. Looking for work up in Cumbria is trickier than I'd hoped and I may have to look at restarting some sort of education to make good use of my time up here.

The Yuletide was the best it's been for many years though, with some good gaming with friends and family. And with a good friend of mine in Southampton getting more to grips with his new PC, we've been starting to expand our game base; enjoying Dawn of War 2, Homeworld remastered and trying some other games too.

So, the last few weeks, in the land of gaming, have mostly been taken up with Company of Heroes 2. I'm going to write a lot more about this game in another post, but it's a difficult game to like at first sight, but once you get into it, it's a great RTS and is also working to inflate a thought of getting back into table top war gaming by investing time and money in a WW2 British force! Curse you, brothers of mine!!

I've not been so keen to play much World of Warships, I'm really waiting for some more interesting ships to come along. The Americans are a bit boring and generic and it's hard to relate to the Japanese, although I do enjoy their ships more than the Americans. And playing my German cruisers over and over again is burning out the enjoyment a bit. But, after saying all this, I do enjoy a few games with mates, a few times a week.

Plans going forward are:

1. Figure out what I'm doing with jobs/education.
2. Get back into creative mode; Wastelands is begging for an update.
3. If I can earn a few coins, then think about how to approach building a small British WW2 force. Warlord games have some fantastic deals of building small armies.
4. Find/develop a recipe for my first all grain beer brew.
5. Play guitar and watch hockey with a friend in Newport.
6. Learn more Swedish and maybe plan a mission over there for later this year.
7. Find friends in Carlisle... I'm such a loner.

Results of the first brew - it's quite good!

Thought I'd quickly write about the first batch of beer I brewed, back in September '15, because we had originally thought it was a little flat due to a mistake in the bottling process. Well I'd like to say that the beer is very drinkable! I think our unconventional bottling process meant the beer needed a little extra time to mature.

I should explain, due to me not being able to get up to Edinburgh around when the first batch of beer had finished secondary fermentation and my friend up there not having much time, he syphoned all the beer into a keg, with the bottling sugar and left it there, sealed, until we had time to bottle it. If we had just left it in the keg from then on, this would have been fine, but this would have only been useable if we were going to take the keg to a party or something as it would have gone off quite quickly. So, a few weeks after this, when we had time, I came up to Edinburgh and we bottled the beer. This seemed to have the effect that even after a month of further maturation the beer was a little flat and we thought.

This latest batch we've done has been more strictly processed and in a month we hope these bottles should be ready to go. For now though I am enjoying drinking my way through our first batch.

Beer update - 4 demijohns bottled up!

Last weekend I drove up to my brewing buddy's place in Edinburgh and we bottled up the 4 demijohns of our latest brew, which we setup 3 weeks ago.

We didn't do the brew entirely properly, we used a hopped malt extract as the base, then added additional hops to 2 of them and a Lebanese herb to 2 of them. The 4 varieties were: one with just the malt extract, one with added hops, one with added herb and one with added hops and herb.

When bottling we could make out the subtle differences in the smell between the brews with the herb, but it was harder to smell the added hops. The bottles are all labelled appropriately though, so we'll see how they taste in a month.

For our next brew we are planning to do it from scratch and I've been tasked with finding a suitable recipe, so I'll be looking for something dark and malty...

I can't wait!