Cirsova Publishing appeared on Rollin' Bones to talk LitRPG. This is the flipside of "Gaming is not a Narrative medium."
First, this is a good podcast episode. Starting with BROZER as a way to ground a podcast built around Tabletop Adventure Games before transitioning out of gaming to talk about genre fiction (and thus getting over to LitRPG) was a smart move.
A lot of the discussion about LitRPG and how it affects Tabletop Adventure Games (and, at some remove, videogames) would get lost without that grounding in the present moment, then backing up to Appendix N, before moving forward again to first Pink Slime Fantasy and then to LitRPG.
And yes, I definitely see that the core issue is incursive spiraling of self-referentiality. I take my own experiences as a Boy Scout, and my observations of the experiences of others--military, paramilitary, etc.--whom I've been able to read or listen to. It's telling that someone's writing stories about this stuff when they lack either first-hand experience or have done extensive research or reviewed the foundational texts on the matter; it's just most obvious with Pink Slime Fantasy because too many people think All Fantasy Is The Same and thus treat it like they're filling outa Mad Lib template.
One thing that I would like to add: having real-life experiences that are analogous to what goes on in Tabletop Adventure Games makes both the design and the play of same a lot better for all concerned, just as having real life experiences makes writing fiction better. It's just more difficult these days because almost all of the experiences are locked down with non-disclosure agreements, Court-ordered sealing of files, or National Security sealing of the same.
Which leads me to my core point: just as Gaming is not literature (Ludology is not Narrative), the reverse is also true. "Storygaming" reveals the former error, and LitRPG the latter. It works only in a few corner cases, exceptions that most do not comprehend and thus prove the rule's validity by their incompetence because Cargo Cult Gotta Cult.
Gaming is not Narrative. The two media have very different and antithetical incentives because they work towards entirely antithetical purposes. Stop trying to ram square pegs into round holes.
The youngest of the Scions, Alphinaud Levelleur, decided that the Scions--being about seven people--are too little to be the rapid-reaction force needed to stomp out the Primal threat and assist the city-states in maintaining order in the realm. What does our genius decide to do? Form a private military company of his own. Not just some handful of mercenaries, oh no, but a full Grand Company--a standing army--whose only loyalty is to the Scions.
The only naivete more shocking than this was the reactions of the city-states' respective Heads of State. Granted, all three are allies of the Scions and rely on them to do what they cannot (because they are too weak-willed to do the needed work themselves) so they can--and do--convince themselves to go along with it out of necessity, but the gangsters of Ul'dah--the Syndicate--rightly see this as a direct threat and immediately get to work sabotaging it.
They do it by making a mockery of the funding rules--funneling money through a myriad of weak front companies--and putting a man they own on top as the company's field marshal, the second-in-command after Boy Wonder himself.
They put their man to the task of setting up the Scions for getting framed for the murder of their immediate cockblock to Real Ultimate Power, the Sultana of Ul'dah and her attack dog Raubaun, CO of the Grand Company the Immortal Flames. They do this by having their man lead a real and successful counterintelligence operation to expose a Garlean spy in the Flames, making Raubaun look like a fucking idiot and damaging his credibility (and by proxy the Sultana). They do this while keeping up the lawfare pressure on Her Grace to act as they dictate and not as she wishes.
As a second plot thread, they funnel reagents needed for summoning to an Ishgardian heretical cult knowing this would keep the player--you--busy being God-Killer while they turned the Scions' PMC into their pet wetwork team. It worked. The Scions take the fall for the Sultana's murder--yes, folks, I know about HW's changes to this--and all but the player, Alphin, and Tataru Taru (the receptionist) escape to take refuge in Ishgard. Thus is HW set up.
I could not help but find this satisfying. The heroes and their allies got got and they deserved it. They refused to do what must be done to permanently end the Primal threat. They refused to do what must be done to end the political instability of the city-states. They refused to do what must be done put down the Imperial threat in Eorzea. Their enemies, sensing weakness, pounced on them and punished them savagely for refusing to finish the job when they had the chance. This rout--and it was a rout--was entirely of their own making, and to the writers' credit Alphinaud has a serious change of character going forward because of this. Dead predators can't predate, morons.
But Gameplay
Levels 40-50 is when your character's gameplay really takes off. You get the rest of your Job's skills, the rotations start feeling like you're always doing something during a fight, and when you hit the arc between 2.0 and HW--the aforementioned Wonder Boy Fuckup--you get to test that skillset against a much-expanded array of dungeons, trials, and raids as you play through the various episodes of the 2.0-to-HW interval. Much of the narrative you experience here is foreshadowing for later expansions (e.g. Crystal Tower for Shadowbringers), but the type of content you first experience here will become more frequent later on; getting introduced here is useful, therefore, for multiple reasons.
You are also introduced to a taste of endgame with the access to ARR's endgame gearing being unlocked, and I am still using some of that gear well into HW, so go ahead and snag some of that. (Start with your weapon and pick up others as you wish.) Exactly what currencies you will use will vary with expansion, but the overall structure remains the same: get widgets, find trader NPC, trade for gear, done.
My experience at this point was that I really began to enjoy the gameplay by this point, having passed the early game hump and now needing to go into the UI customization to mess around with keybinds to make it easier to execute the Bard rotation and be an asset to my group. (This paid off; got plenty of player commendations.) I also began digging into some side activites, as I knew that if I were to level another Class or Job I'd want to have those activites available to me to make that easier to accomplish since I had not the MSQ to easymode my XP gains.
My complaint at this point is that, while other players are frequently friendly to new players, they are not communicative. They do not tell you things you need to know about boss mechanics, so you can and will get murked by something out of nowhere and no one will say anything unless it's a wipe and you have to restart the encounter entirely. This is the case even when you specfically ask for that information. Veteran players vastly overestimate what is common knowledge and then wonder why the new guy eats floor.
The game itself is fine. The side activities are plenty capable of delivering depth and breadth, but if you just want to play the MSQ you can and no one will care. Sub for a month, play the story, unsub- it's fine. Which leads me to the biggest selling point for FF14: the game and the audience respects your time. There is no "falling behind", there is no "dead content", none of the stupidity that afflicts WOW or other MMOs like it. Is it for everyone? No, thank God. Is it for people who want some multiplayer in their single-player? You bet. For people who want to be social while playing for an hour or so at a time? Sure. For people who dream of a crafting or gathering system as detailed as fighting is? Hell yes, you're golden. For PVP? Nope, PVP is an afterthought in FF14, and will be for some time.
It is for me, so soon I'll convert from a Trial to a Regular account, and come January I'll leave WOW behind for good.
Between Levels 15-20 the game opens up both in scope and in scale. You are sent, via a quest chain, to the other two city-states to acquaint yourself therein before returning to complete your mission: to launch a realm-wide public relations campaign meant to counter the plumetting morale of the city-states' population, whose despair opens them to corruption and subversion by hostile parties. It is also during this time that you get your first mount--a chocobo, fittingly--and thus transportation other than by teleportation and taxi is now unlocked for you.
Accordingly, so does the scope and scale of the adventures now open to you. It is during this period, when the concept of what a "Primal" is gets explained to you, that you first fight one; it is also the first time that you do instanced content for more than four players. These are called "Trials", and they are arena fights against a single boss. In Story Mode, they are very basic fights and hard to screw up for anyone with prior experience with raiding in World of Warcraft or anything like that. There are harder modes, which are unlocked later; some are not part of the MSQ and so you unlock as a sidequest.
Finally, as you go from Level 20 to 30, you complete the last round of Class quests (ending their stories) and get set up for the transition from Class to Job. During this time you will fight more Primals, unlock more difficult dungeons, and the narrative establishes you as the new Warrior of Light and a Hero of Eorzea for facing down such threats and winning. What makes these feats worthy of fame is the threat: getting mind-controlled by the Primal, called "Tempering", which--at this time--is irreversible and turns victims into fanatic cultists of said being.
It is during this time that you are brought into the Scions of the Seventh Dawn--a small group dedicated to realm-wide threats, focused on Primals--and the reason for your power is revealed: the Echo. The leader of the Scions also has it, and by means thereof do you get a lot of information dumped on you while plot threads play out. Your rise becomes theirs, and soon you're The Man and everyone knows your name and face.
This nicely segues into the Class-Job transition. Jobs in FF14 are specific professions, each of which builds around something called a "soul crystal"--"Soul of the Bard", etc.--and without it equipped you are locked out of Job abilities (and there are no more Class abilities). Each Job in ARR--with one exception, Blue Mage--builds off a Class; I began as an Archer, so I transitioned into a Bard. Each Job class explains the lore behind the abilities you pick up, even if most of them are easy quests to do, promoting emotional investment into the game's narrative and immersion into its setting.
By the time you finish your transition into your Job and you're well on your way through the midpoint of ARR, the MSQ will have you running here and there to smite Primals, put down dungeon threats, open relations with friendly aliens (which will lead to Beast Tribe reputation sidequests), and putting a big target on your back for the predators within the realm as well as without to zero in on. You--the player--will become aware of the internal threat of Ul'dah's Syndicate well as an increasing resurgance of the Garlean presence in the realm.
The capstone to this mid-point is your travel into Coerthas, the borderlands of isolated Ishgard, to recover Cid's airship in order to face the Primal known as Garuda. This will become foreshadowing for Heavensward, but for now its your time and deeds here that prompt (a) those aforementioned predators to move against you and (b) one of your own allies gets the "brilliant" idea that makes those predators' aims viable to pull off.
But that moves into ARR's final act, and for that I'll have you pray return to the blog tomorrow.
I repeat what I said yesterday: FF14 is a Final Fantasy game first and a MMORPG second.
This means that the game presumes that you have never played a MMORPG before, as many Final Fantasy fans did not. It also presumes that you do not have a problem with JRPGs, so the first 15 levels are not only a tutorial of both core gameplay conceits but also of foundational world-building. In order to merge both narrative and gameplay together, the game uses a gatekeeping scheme to lock features and content away until your narrative progress reaches a given point.
This is the Main Scenario Quest system ("MSQ"), and in the default User Interface it will always appear in the upper left corner of your screen. Similar to this is the current Class or Job quest, which will appear underneath the MSQ, and these gatekeep key Class or Job abilities away until completed. Do these first and foremost, and focusing on these will be plenty sufficient to get to the level cap.
You will find the content unlock schedule for ARR here. You will also find that some side content is locked away by sidequests. You do not need to do sidequests at all on your first time through, so avoid them unless strictly necessary. As the ARR schedule reveals, some dungeons--and some higher-difficulty versions thereof--are so locked away. If you want a video guide, Work To Game has a series of them by level band; 1-15 is here, and you can find the rest on WTG's channel.
During this early phase, you will find your gameplay to be very slow in combat because the Global Cooldown (GCD) is at 2.5 seconds and you have few abilities to work with, all of them being on the GCD. My experience at this point is that I was glad to be playing an Archer so I could just kite my target around with auto-attacks instead of having to stutter-step due to cast times or play race-to-bottom with my target due to being in melee. This starts to fade at Level 15, when my later Archer abilities start to appear; other Classes will have similar breakpoints around this level, all due to off-GCD (OGCD) abilities appearing and thus giving you something to weave between GCD abilities.
At level 10 you will unlock access to the random group finder tool, the Duty Finder, with the unlocking of Guildheists; at Level 15, with unlocking the first dungeon, you will be directed to the Hall of the Novice.
The Hall is a basic training course in group play, focused on the group role that your Class has in dungeon or raid gameplay; I recommend that you do this even if you have extensive experience for two reasons. The first is that you get very good gear for the level out of it, including a ring that grants +30% XP up to Level 30. The second is to become familar with common mechanic conventions in group content, something that will be expected of you as you level up.
The MSQ will direct you through some very basic dungeons. The hostile NPCs have few, if any mechanics, and the gameplay flow is very linear. However, it is also at this point that another feature of the game first appears: Level Synch. Higher-level characters, often via random Duty Roulettes, will queue into your group and will have plenty of experience in running these dungeons. If you are polite, and you say you are new and don't know what to do, most veterans will tell you what you need to know. Keep that up as you level up; the later dungeons, raids, etc. get increasingly complex so you can get lost without a heads-up.
It is after this point, between 15 and 20, that both the ARR narrative and the gameplay experience begin to pick up the pace and become more engaging. The key element connecting this is that you get involved in slaying a false god with brainfucking powers called a "Primal" by your allies and "eikons" by the Evil Empire, which puts you on the map and thus to the attention of the power-players of the three city-states as well as your chief allies: The Scions of the Seventh Dawn ("Scions" hence).
This is my review of Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn. ("FF14" and "ARR", respectively.) It does not cover any of the expansions, as those will be reviewed seperately at a later date. Analysis of the game's narrative is covered seperately at my writing blog, the Study, called "A Narrative Reborn"; the narratives of the expansions is likewise not covered and will also be done seperately.
Here on the main blog I will talk about the design of the game, the mechanics of the game, my experiences therein, and only at the end will I address things like the Free Trial and recommend resources and channels for more information. There will be no spoiler protection. All content here is older than six months and therefore long past any need for such consideration; this is your notice.
If you do not care about the narrative other than how it effects gameplay, this post series is what you want to read. Vice-versa, the Study's parallel series. However, FF14 is a rare gem that successfully and competently incorporates a narrative into the gameplay and thus you must not skip it on a first-time playthrough or you lose context for your actions and future events get confusing for you.
Disclosure: I was not compensated for my time playing the game. I played on the Free Trial, did not use any recruitment codes, and I played on PC (but playing on Playstation 4 or 5 will be no different save for control schemes). I have no ties whatsoever to Square Enix or to any of their competitors. I am not being compensated for my writing of this review series or the narrative review series.
Introduction
Square Enix attempted to produce a second MMORPG for their Final Fantasy franchise. It didn't go so well, and in a rare show of prudence they pulled the plug on it. The final moments of the original version have become memorable in their own right. Square Enix would then put a new man in charge and relaunch the game. That relaunch in 2013 had a fantastic start and only got better from there, such that today it is threatening to dethrone World of Warcraft at long last and become the undisputed master of the genre.
The relaunch, labelled as "2.0", got subtitled "A Realm Reborn" and users logging into the game--either returnees from 1.0 or new users to this day--are greeted by this screen.
It took a while, but here's episode 3. Have a good weekend, folks.
Here's a takeaway: Gibson writes a lot of these stories as crime stories where the bad guys win on the first draft. Then in the rewrite he inserts The Shadow to ruin their day at critical moments. Remember that he's writing two novels a month, so we're talking levels of Pulp Speed most people today can't even fathom to exist. It's a hell of a way to figure out how to structure your writing process for maximum efficiency; Gibson had a background covering real crime stories, in addition to his stage magician history, so using the mindset of the latter to inform the narrative work of the former had to come naturally.
This, folks, is "Write what you know" done right. He took what knew in terms of subject matter (crime) and acumen (magic), applied his technical skills (writing), and churned out one satisfying thriller after the next for years on end- two a month! And he did it on a manual typewriter, in a day when "doing research" meant hoofing it to wherever that information rested- libraries, archives, subjects, etc. when you couldn't get someone on an analog landline phonecall to do it for you.
Think on that, fellow writers. Think on that prepare-to-write structure, especially if you aspire to Pulp Speed.
The Excellence of Elocution finally makes a new episode of Rageaholic Cinema. This episode? Predator 2.
YouTube censored the video within minutes of Razorfist uploading it there, so you get the Bitchute version today. I expect this to happen more often as YouTube continues to push down the path of becoming the dying media it formerly fought hard to fork and replace. YouTube's rejection is Bitchute's gain, and the follow-up is tonight's livestream which is all about Alien vs. Predator.
So your pal E;R is in the sights of the SJWs. I wonder what could have set them off? Maybe this three-part evisceration of Netflix's adaptation of Death Note
If that's not enough, go watch him tear apart Mouse Wars and other bad movies formerly from fun franchises. They're all fun, with just the right flavor of naughty, and that's why the SJWs hate this man and want to run him through a woodchipper.
The Father of Battleboars saw the new Halloween, and he has one of hell of a discussion with co-host Dorrinal about it and its context in the wider world of horror films. Well worth the time spent listening to it, or watching us in the chat.
I'll let Daddy Warpig speak for himself on how good (or not) this film is, because it's a nuanced view, but it's got a fatal flaw that marrs its potential to become a classic. There some Pedowood bullshit that taints the film, and some writing flaws that damage the narrative, but it seems to be worthwhile to Warpig if you're into horror films. Good to hear; horror may be cheap to make, but it's notoriously hard to do well because producers and other parties dismiss horror as a cheap cash-grab genre.
On a side note for the tabletop RPG fans: Palladium's offering their annual Christmas Grab Bags again, which you can order here. It's one of the best deals available for buying Palladium's products brand-new in print, and if you like any of their stuff this is a great way to get it. This includes both of Palladium's horror RPGs: Beyond The Supernatural (which you use for Halloween) and Dead Reign (for all things Zombie).
Today's Geek Gab is a good one, folks. We're talking (well, Warpig rants about) A Wrinkle in Time and you want to make time for this episode.
I am not at all surprised that Oprah fucked up the book to serve the SJW Death Cult narrative. When NBC Nightly News gives your film air time to shill for you, that's a tell of how horrible your film actually is and that's one of the reasons you should not go see this bullshit waste of celluloid.
Fortunately the review of Slay The Spire and the developments in game design that lead to its creation are enough of an antidote to allow you to avoid reaching for the bottle that Oprah's poz-prompted pomposity would otherwise inflict upon reasonable people. And it looks like The Hurricane Heist is a solid Redbox Rental.
I've come to look forward to the Gab on Saturdays now, and I see that we've got a reliable regular turnout. That's a great thing to see, as it means that the Gab has a solid core audience now willing and able to tune in when the show it live, but now that chat is a persistent thing (which YouTube copied from Twitch, for a good reason) folks who watch after the fact can now also see what they had previously missed: the live chat. That should go some ways to further expanding the audience that can't be there live, as what's in the chat is often as entertaining and interesting as what Daddy Warpig and Dorrinal go on about.
As a bonus, here's Raging Golden Eagle talking about the success of Kingdom Come: Deliverance and why it shows that SJWs are really a toothless tiger that gamer and developers should never take seriously- and instead shun, shame, and shut out utterly.
It's Monday again, so I think it's time for something fun to be spotlit here. This time, it's a YouTube channel: The Templin Institute.
As the video below shows, this channel focuses on Executive Summaries of factions within well-known media SF properties. They have an ongoing affiliation with another channel I enjoy (Spacedock), and are part of a cluster of channels that deal in worldbuilding and fictional lore as a topic of interest.
Besides being entertaining in their own right, Templin's videos are good examples of how to present information. This is the sort of information presentation--documentary style--that one expects out of a historical archive agency, public or private, introducing some other group before launching into a detail report and analysis. You can easily imagine Templin being a private spin-off from one or more Intelligence agencies, through which covert operations and non-official cover identities can be had. For you gamers and writers out there, this channel just handed you a ready-to-go drop-in-and-play organization that's all about facilitating the sort of thing you love to do with RPGs and fiction: have exciting adventures in fantastic places doing fantastic things with fantastic people.
Subscribe to this channel (and to Spacedock). You'll be glad you did. If you want a taste, here's a video to give it a try.
With the bad news about Justice League coming out over the weekend (taking in only $94M when it needed twice that to have a shot at breaking even, and needing to hit $1B domestic to be profitable), you know it's going to mean bad reactions from all of the trustworthy folks. Midnight's Edge had their say the other day. Today it's time for the World Class Bullshitters.
In short, their take is that this clusterfuck production resulted in a flawed film- but one where, like the Star Wars Prequels, you can see the good movie buried beneath the crap. This is a spoiler-filled review of the film, with plenty of ranty bits that give Daddy Warpig a run for his money. If you want to know why and how this film fell into the ditch and never got out, here you go.
Jon del Arroz went on 27 Crows Radio to talk with Bre Faucheux about his recent problems with the SJW Death Cult in SF/F, in particular with the President of the cult front known as "The Science Fiction Writers of America". Bre's post at her blog not only has the audio and video links, but also time stamps and key quotes. That woman is thourough.
So go there, listen over your lunch hour, and come back. I can wait.
Folks, this podcast delivers. You want to listen to it. Jon and Bre pull no punches in their conversation regarding the current converged state of traditional publishing and legacy business in science fiction and fantasy, and have no qualms laying out who's doing what to whom in this corrupt cavalcade of crap that is Traditional Publishing.
And from there, they go into how this Mean Girls Mindset is prevalent throughout every single sector wherein the SJW Death Cult gets control. This has been a half-hour well-spent, and you will find yourself nodding in agreement as you listen to these two get deep into the matter of SJW convergence and how it ruins everything it touches. While you're at it, if you're not following Jon or Bre, do that.
Razorfist teased this for the better part of a week before this video dropped. He's doing a franchise retrospective of Mad Max all this month. All of the films, and the games, and so on. Maybe even some Tina Turner commentary. The first video in this series is live, and embedded below for your convenience.
If you think that these films had no influence on Car Wars, you are sadly mistaken. While the game itself is too high-tech by default, the still-missing "Chassis & Crossbows" variant originally published in Dueltrack (along with the rules for gas-powered engines; by default your cars are electric-powered) nails the car-side of these films and lets you recreate (and iterate upon) the classic climax of The Road Warrior (and that other film the usual suspects crow about).
And yes, "V-8 Western" is the perfect summation of the early classic films. (The later ones, and the games? Not really.) His comparison to Eastwood's Spaghetti Western classics is spot-on, and I look forward to seeing him tackle the best movie in the series next week.
Razorfist reviews Tekken 7. The critique of the entire genre of fighting games is merely the byproduct of using Area of Effect attacks on a single target.
I mentioned at PulpRev on Monday of this week the importance of having as large a vocabulary as one can get. I said so in the context of writing, but what our Arizona Annihilator here demonstrates is how important it is for the spoken word media also. (That, and the importance of Charisma; Post-WOTC D&D lied to you, kids- Charisma is NOT a Dump Stat.)
Razorfist knows his audience by now. He knows not only what to say when communicating his opinion on the game, but how to say it--to present it--so that any emotion-based interference is minimized. Yes, folks, that's right: he knows how to use Rhetoric to clear out as much noise for his Dialectic as he can. That's how you maximize your effectiveness in communicating with a mass audience; first you seize the feels, and then you bring the reals.
Failure to comprehend this is why many a would-be influencer utterly fails at their purported goal. Take care to notice, being that he is using a video to do this, how well Razorfist incorporates complimentary video images to punctuate his points- both in what he uses, and how. As with his words, his video and audio clip exploitation is fantastic, such that he can (and does) hammer home a point with the video that his words alone may not quite achieve.
The final part I want you to grasp is the one that SJWs avoid like vampires do the sun: verifiable facts. Sure, he hits you with rapid-fire with a Vulcan cannon of verbiage, but you can jot down each fact used and check it out for yourself. Lesser imitators see this as nothing more than baffle-with-bullshit and try to do just that, but Razorfist sees how potent this really is when you bother to have the truth on your side. (See his video defending Michael Jackson.)
Nevermind his Hugo nominations. Razorfist's continued demonstration of mastery over both verbal and audio-visual language, both usage and vocabulary, is fast approaching the levels where film school hipsters start genuflecting in hopes that Senpai will notice them. (He won't.) He's one of the true successors to the best journalists of previous generations, and not the psuedo-literate corp of cunts in the legacy media and its online counterparts. (READ! ANOTHER! BOOK!) You would benefit a lot from watching,
and studying, his videos no matter what medium you work your own wordsmithing wonders in. John C. Wright admires the man for a reason,
and that's plain when you grasp the matter of language in communication.
(Shoutout to his partner, Terran Gell; Razorfist couldn't be who he is now without Gell being Kato to his Green Hornet.)
Bellular Gaming did a video about the upcoming, and imminent, in-game event that will precede the launch of World of Warcraft: Legion. This event will come with the pre-expansion patch to the game that will bring all of the new and revised game mechanics, content, etc. into the game (and then lock most of it behind the paywall that Legion's purchase actually is).
The takeaway from this video is that, if you were intrigued enough by Legion to buy into the game or return to the game, this is when you should hand over the sheckles and play. In addition to the gear, which is reason enough for those who otherwise would be farming Tanaan Jungle for a few more weeks, this is the time because it gives you a few weeks to get acquainted with the new state of the game and decide which character you want to take first into Legion's new content in the Broken Isles. Your fellow players will thank you for knowing how to play your character competently, so seize this opportunity to git gud.
Expect this testing on the Beta realms to do much of the heavy lifting, and then get on the Public Test Realm for a bigger test to ensure that stuff works as intended under the huge stress of player populations before finally going live. If you have multiple character at the current cap, then this will keep you busy until Demon Hunter Early Access hits (assuming that you bought in). Follow channels like Bellular's if you want more good stuff like this.
You don't see pump-action rifles much these days. They were once a popular repeating action choice in the late 19th and early 20th century, but as the bolt-action and semi-automatic actions achieved dominance (for superior utility over the pump-action) they went away. Now, aside from those made to make a mockery of stupid anti-gun regulations, you only see them in replicas. This Henry model is in that replica mode of recreation of an otherwise obsolete technology.
Sootch here gives a full review of Henry's offering, with his commentary on his experience with it. What he emphasizes here is not only the quality of the construction, but also the sheer fun of having this chambered in the classic critter-gitter .22 Long Rifle cartridge. If you're in a place that fucks with your ability to get or keep a semi-auto like the Marlin 795 or the Ruger 10/22, you value aesthetics, and you don't want a bolt-action or lever-action, consider ones of these for your collection. Hell, I have a Marlin 925 and I want one of these. An afternoon with my friends punching holes in paper or ringing steel with rimfire rifles is great social time.
(If you enjoy the last few days' postings, don't worry. Some bonehead will say or do something to merit my commentary soon enough.)
World of Warcraft: Legion makes major changes to the game's mechanics, changes that any player currently playing or returning from a break ought to know and know in-depth. Being properly informed means that you can make the decisions you need to make to maximize your enjoyment of the upcoming expansion. (Yes, including not playing at all.)
This is where the community comes in, specifically the people who take the time to dig deep into the mechanics and see how they work in actual play. I'm embedding one video by Finalboss as an example of this sort of information being made available. Preach Gaming, Belluar Gaming, Fatboss, and others like them are also contributing guides and reviews of what content and mechanics is new.
It's your entertainment time, so I would hope that you respect yourself enough to want to take the time to investigate what is available and discern what--if anything--you want to do with it. Furthermore, I would hope that you respect yourself and your fellow players enough to know what you want to Git Gud at playing. World of Warcraft, especially at endgame, is very much group-focused and team-focused, so being able to play competently will only lead to superior entertainment value for both you and them.
I am grateful to community people like Finalboss and others like him, not all of whom stream or maintain a site or 'blog, for taking the time to dig through all this data and process it into something comprehensible for the rest of us. You guys are the real MVPs.
SocJus, this is the future you chose. Now that you've revealed yourselves to be Fake Gamers and Fake Geeks, wholly incompetent to handle the matter properly, of course game-makers are cutting you off from that sweet swag gravy train- including review copies.
This is a welcome development. Also welcome is that prominent people in the community found their balls and begin calling the cultists out on on their bullshit. If Penny Arcade doesn't cave, and instead does something like the Dickwolves strip again, then others will follow that lead and PAX--the premiere gaming con--will start to suck less (i.e. the Code of Conduct getting shit-canned, and more), which will mean other cons will do likewise in due course.
The worm turns, and this is no simple worm, but Shai-Halud come to swallow whole those who wish to be Harkonnen but lack the ability.
