Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2021-02-16

Hi, everybody, this is Shane R. Monroe, you're in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is Tuesday, February 16 2021. And I am out running a couple of quick errands. So I thought for a few minutes, I would hop on chat a little bit. And I don't I mean, I have a backlog of things to talk about, but very few things I'm gonna be able to fit into the timeframe. I'm going to swing by and get a drink at Sonic. But other than that, I'm sticking my throat there. Good lord. I'm in a terrible way to start the day. Yeah, so we just came off a three day weekend, Texas is frozen over. I thought 2021 was going to be a better start to things but so far not so good. Anyhow, for those of you who noticed the picture, I decided to go all in and get my first actual tattoo. Now, we all know that my other tattoo was sort of a tentative plunge, if you will, a one line art of an hourglass which those of you who know my background in history and longtime listeners of the show know exactly what the hourglass means to me. But I decided to go all in and so I went with a witcher tattoo the gray wolf himself, actually not him, but rather the Witcher symbol. This is from the video game, of course, not the TV show. Trust me, no one will care about the TV show in 10 years, they'll still be playing Witcher three in 10 years. I guarantee it. That's the funny part about this whole thing is it's amazing what makes things work. But anyway. I mean, I could be wrong, of course, but hang on a second traffic, you know? Yeah, so I got a witcher tattoo. It's about five inches, it's on my arm on my right upper arm. And it is the The Witcher wolf head. And it is surrounded by the five signs of Agni, you know the whole bit all of the different spell rooms that he casts. So it's pretty cool. I really wanted to make sure it was colorful. So each of the rooms is its own proper color. And they all sort of have this dispersing color around them. It's really it's really cool. So it took about two hours for those who are interested. And honestly, you know, the first tattoo I wasn't, I really wasn't sure. I was gonna be down for another one. But my wife is a tattoo freak now. And so she just went in yesterday and got like four more on her arm. Little ones. So yeah, anyway, and so I need to start keeping up. Yeah, and listen, I figure it's been, what, 10 years now. And I'm still is as deep into Witcher three as humanly possible. So I figured, listen, it looks great. It means something to me. So let's, um, let's go ahead and do that. And it turned out, turned out fantastic. turned out great. So I have been, I'll spend the rest of my time probably talking about this Val Haim, you've probably been hearing about it, it's been getting a lot of press lately. This just hit early access within the last couple of weeks. And this is a new survival game. In the vein of a little bit of forest. A lot of say portal nights very similar to Conan, for those of you who've played that, it's all about well, it's not all about survival, there's a lot of exploration, there are bosses to face. And there are challenges, it's lightly procedurally generated. Meaning when I say that, I mean that it's there, the map is randomly generated, but the points of interest share themselves amongst the maps. So you could generate 100 different worlds and you would recognize parts of the world right, you would recognize the sacred stones you would recognize the altar for you know, the elk, you know, elk carrier, or whatever the hell that first bosses guy is you'd recognize a lot of the, you'd recognize a lot of the the building structures. Again, it's it's pseudo pseudo procedurally generated, which is cool, because exploration is part of the fun. And so there's really not much of a story here. Valhalla Odin, you're fighting and that's it. I mean, you really don't need a whole lot of story here. You're dropped into this world, it's third person, and it is partial controller support. And when I say partial, I mean like 95% controller support, although they've chose some weird shit to to to map the controls to. So a lot of people are going to be frustrated with it up front. Unless you go remap it yourself, I don't even know if you can remap it. I've just gotten used to it over time. But essentially, it's the standard deal, right? You start off at near death, you'll probably you could be killed once or twice, before you even become you know, self providing you got to deal with hunger, cold rain or you know, being wet. You have, in some of the some of the processes are remarkably, listen, there's a lot of detail in this game that does not make itself readily apparent. There's an interesting food stacking system to to handle your stamina and your hunger. There are interesting, interesting, like status effects that can that can affect you. For example, if you start a fire in a house without adequate ventilation, you know, you can succumb to carbon monoxide poisoning. You know, it's, it's interesting, just how deep this game kind of goes, when, you know, you wouldn't really don't see that up front. So you start off by, you know, building a couple of items that you can fashion from the crap you get on the ground, you build a workbench, from the workbench, you can improve the workbench, then you can build a forge from the forging and improve the Forge. And as you progress, you'll find more and more things that every time you pick something up, it's sort of unlocks in your memory, a recipe, or some sort of a blueprint, if you will, for helping you, you know, figure out what to build next. And the game is paced in a manner that you get to a point where you start kind of feeling like man, I don't know if I'm, if I have enough to do, I'm starting to run out of things to do. And then all of a sudden, bang, you'll pick something up, or you'll touch something and it'll be like, ah, the next thing is open. Now you know what I mean. So the pacing of it's very, very good. It ramps up in difficulty, and I kind of got to a point to where I am, I may have gotten myself too deep. So I started over again, the game definitely over time, will get more difficult. And if you've spent a lot of time dilly dallying, then let me see here, let me check in for my son and hear my drink. If you dilly dally too much, I got to like day 60 or something for crying out loud. And by day 60, things start to get a little bit more difficult. It's they, they come after you more, the monsters are stronger. There's there's all sorts of ways that it ramps up the difficulty. But it's a fantastic time sink. The there's there's so much to do. There's lots of exploration to do, you'll come up and you'll meet. You'll meet new creatures over time, you'll learn. There's, I mean, there's all sorts of little facets of the game, not just the interest intricacies in building. But you know, you'll also learn, you know how to use sneaking, you'll learn how to better learn how to better facilitate a lot of things in the game over time. Hi. Thank you. Thanks. So anyway, I've had a really, really good time with that as 20 bucks. It's in early access. I haven't seen any game breaking glitches yet. Although I do know that they're constantly adding little improvements to it and little fixes. And I'm assuming over time, I'm sure I'll find something. But I've probably put in 2025 hours somewhere in there, I'd have to look at my Steam accounts to know for sure. But that's pretty good. I mean, that's a buck an hour, right? That's good ROI right there. And it's something you can play alone. Or you can play multiplayer and multiplayer is really cool. Because the server's pretty easy. You can tell that it was sort of an ambulance or something. You can tell that it was built with multiplayer in mind, but it's not. So it's not so pigeon holed into multiplayer that it can't be fun alone. You know what I'm saying? So, the multiplayer is good. You can invite people you can have public servers, private servers, there are you can turn on player versus player damage, it's off by default. And trying to think of what else you can explore the map together, you each get your own map. So it's not shared. And you can have multiple characters in multiple worlds. So you can take your main character in with you to visit somebody if they need a little more muscle to get past something. Or you can just generate a brand new character and oh We'll use that character for multiplayer, for example. So it's, like I said, it's it's remarkably good for early access. And again at 20 bucks, you know, it's, it's pretty straightforward to recommend. I mean, there's there's nothing about it that I find particularly annoying. I mean, the controller support needs a little bit more work. But listen them considering I've seen partial controller support, it's not even half as good as this. I'll take it. There are times when the keyboard and mouse are useful. That is to that is if you're going to manage inventory if you want to split a stack of items. Let's say you have 20 I don't know bone fragments, you want to split it into two sets of 10 and stash one into a chest in case you get killed and you need to be able to build some stuff when you get spawned back then that requires for exam I haven't figured out how to do that with the key the controller you have to use a mouse and keyboard for that for at least a mouse. So you want to have one handy but the majority of the game you can play absolutely perfectly fine without it. So thou Hime you'll hear a lot more about and it's getting a lot of precedent deserves it. So I'm glad it's doing well. Alright, I know this was a short show. But listen, I got a couple things in that's what we were looking for. This is Shane R. Monroe pasture see radio. We'll see you next time. Take care, everybody.