27 Sept 2011

Starcraft, Day 9, and some other thoughts

Today I don't feel like post a new Minecraft daily, in fact yesterday morning I saw one of the most inspiring videos of my entire gaming life. Yea, it's Day9's daily #100, when he spent 2 hours of his life to talk about his personal experience through starcraft.
I mean, beside the fact that having all the support from your family is one of the most important things, whatever you're up to, I learnt that if you really want to do something, you can do it just by practicing.
You just have to keep your goal sticked in your head and go on, even in the worst case ever that may occur.

Talking now, about my Starcraft II life, I decided that I am definitely going to be promoted in gold league (yea, I'm an high rated silver and I'm not proud at all), today I played several games with people fairly better than me, which means that I'm actually somewhat ready to the promotion, but damn, it isn't coming.
Said this, just to introduce an idea that I just got, I'm thinking to open a brand new blog only about my Starcraft II games, thoughts, rages (a lot of them :P) and so on.
Not because I'm sure that someone will follow it, but mainly because I really like to write down my real feelings, that makes me feel better, i guess
Will think about it :)

25 Sept 2011

Strongholdz! Daily #4

Heya followers,
Today I'm going to spend some minutes of my life to talk about STRONGHOLDS! but still I'm going to bring these sort of informations as one of my Minecraft dailies. Many of you may already know that in every new generated world there will be only three strongholds, also all of them will appear near your spawnpoint, with "near" I mean that you can actually reach them without wasting hours of your precious life. Of course many of them are underground, that means that you need a tool in order to find them which is this one: Official Minecraftforum thread, and if you are too lazy to click on that link just click on the play button down here ;)


Guess it's time to start:
In the afternoon Dartino said that he had found a stronghold which was not that far from my home, we didn't care about the approaching night, and our journey started. The darkness began to eat us alive when we reached the coordinates, there was nothing out there so we decided to dig all the way down hoping to find it.


After a while we started to think that the stronghold wasn't even there till I found this:


even though the flowing lava caught my eyes I also recognized unusual stone blocks down there, HOORAY! the stronghold was lying there! We went down as fast as we could and started to explore thousand rooms, we encountered even silverfish, it didn't look as deadly as we thought but I anyways killed him before getting a hit.


(yeah, silverfishes look like some dust lol)
We continued to climb stairs, push buttons, fight zombies and skeletons but every damn place of was equal to each other, till we found nothing but a fountain, there were three more ways to explore.


All of them were as scary as this one: (zombie noises coming out of nowere didn't help to keep calm)


In the end, we found it! the last iron door was sitting in front or us right after it there was the dusty library, sadly, we were expecting to find a pretty great treasure in there but there wasn't. There was just a chest with some paper and a few books, but hey, the adventure was anyways worth it!




So this was my daily #4, hope you liked it :)

22 Sept 2011

Diablo III beta commented by Day 9

As I said at the beginning, I'm not going to cover only indie games in here, this is the right time to talk a little bit about Diablo 3. The beta keys are getting distributed only in the US as far as I know (hoping to get one as soon as the beta becomes available in Europe).
Day 9 made an entire walktrough in one of his recent streams, two days ago, to be more precise, and I feel like sharing this with you all readers.
CHECK OUT THIS AWESOMENESS:







Shared this mostly because I'm a huge Day9's fan, top player in Starcraft 2 and famous commentator.
If you care to see more about him check his youtube channel : Day9ty.
As you can see, Diablo III is going to be a huge success and after years of rumors it's becoming reality and I personally can't wait anymore!

Cheers ;)

20 Sept 2011

SMP for the win!: Daily #3

Hello hello,
I'm coming up with my third Minecraft daily bringing you a lot of news, as you can see, I mentioned SMP (for those who don't know what's that, it stands for Survival MultiPlayer), yeah! me and some friends started to play on a server. We actually bought it here: www.multiplaygameservers.com this site gives out servers at an incredible low price, with low latency for a really smooth gaming experience.

So there we go!
We got our little shelter during the first day, and with our poor, or nonexistent gear, everything looked so cool


Although some more came in, now we are 6 active people if I remember correctly.
Anyways Tehnooberer took a plain spot on a swamp biome the rest of us decided to feel a little bit safer and build our home on some peaks not that far away from him, and we started to work hard, at aleast, them. I realized that I'm not one of those creative minds, and I always end up by building something technical and useful instead of  creating some hard concepts. This was some of the first results:


And during our first lonely night:






Heres another, let's say, funny fact about our server, difficulty was set as VERY HARD (yea you can't even play in this mode without some server commands) mobs beat you, hunger KILLS and because of this I created a little wheat farm on top of my mountain!


Right before than leaving you, look what I saw when I woke up :P


Me:"hello there mate!"
Creeper:"fffshhhhhhhhhhh"
R.I.P.

I'm done here, in the next update we are going to see  some action in the nether (hopefully) and how to create a slime farm in order to get a lot of slimeballs, but I'm not going to spoil anything else.
See you.

18 Sept 2011

Bastion



So hello guys!
Today I'm going to spend some time to talk about Bastion, a dynamical role-playing game, where you impersonate a kid, that has to build a safe spot called, in fact, the bastion, by collecting objects around the dying world of Caelondia.
Supergiantgames, an indie developement team, has brought to us a phenomenal game and I want to remember that you can get it on Steam at the price of 13,99€, for the greedy ones, theres a free demo that will convince almost everyone.

But let's go a little bit deeper in the gameplay with a list of what I liked when I tried Bastion:

-Dual weapon system: There is plenty of choice of weapons each one with a different powerful secret skill. In addition you will be always able to shield yourself from various enemy attacks.

-Upgrades and proving grounds: You can improve you weapons by using items that you will find while playing, but, also as rewards of the so called "proving grounds" where you have to achieve different goals using a weapon, this is an example that I found


-The storyteller: The dynamic storytelling is just amazing, you should try the game just because of this.

Of course there is much more that I could say, but I would ruin the whole game experience for some of you, I leave you here for today, good luck on saving the world of Caelondia!

15 Sept 2011

1.8 came out! Digging in the darkness, Daily #2

Yep! Minecraft 1.8 version got released yesterday, I thought that I could anyways keep these dailies up, even because I enjoy writing them.
Anyways after having realized that my blog was turning into a "minecraft exclusive" one, I already announce that my next update is going to cover Bastion, an indie game recently released even on Steam.

But! here's the story:


After a nightmare I managed to sleep, when I woke up, I just started to look around around the lake I found. Not even a minute was passed when I found this, a good looking deep hole in the ground with a funny zombie on fire. This inspired me to dig till down there hoping to find something rare, or at least having a nice time by exploring that place.


 And from my safe gravel block and with my iron sword in the right hand I started to see what was really going on there, it appeared a bigger place than the thought. Carefully i created some stairs that led me down, walled off the hole and everything looked so, scary.




Encountered some creepers, almost had a heart attack, fought some skeletons and zombies but my lighting up process finally was done, except for a strange light beside me. I fastly turned and I saw nothing but lava! looked pretty strange at this height.


Right after this discovery, I literally got attacked by 3 spiders came out of nowhere, fortunately my iron sword was strong enough to kill them landing also a lot of critical hits by jumping then hitting (couldn't manage to get a screenshot of the sparkles that come out after a critical, sadly). Actually I was pretty lucky, they dropped a string each so I could make a bow. With the new weapon I decided to explore the last tunnel left, which looked like this



(damn that, the zombie staring at me in the shadows it's hard to see in this small version of the picture, I suggest to click it to see it clearly :P)
Fought some other zombies and achieved almost a stack of iron blocks in total, nothing more but suddently hunger became unbearable, ran till my safe spot and decided to eat some rotten flash, a new item that gets dropped by zombies. Look what happened:


The food counter became greeny!
although nothing else happened, I'm still wondering what could that be, anyways after having waited for the morning I easily reached the surface, and my home with a new bow and a lot of iron in my backpack!

My second daily ends up here, I hope you've enjoyed it, see you!

13 Sept 2011

Living in 1.8 prerelease, Daily #1

Recently started to play a new world in Minecraft prerelease (explained everything in the last post) so, today I've guessed that I could share my own adventure day by day here, in order to provide screenshots of the new content, but also making a bit of enteratainment.

So, here we go with the first Daily update:


I spawned right here, there were nothing but trees around me so i picked a random direction and started to walk, after a while I realized that I was already facing a new feature, in fact, after this update we won't see anymore the usual "fast setting change", this means that we will see huge plain areas, mountains or as you can see right down here, deserts.



I decided to turn back just because by that time the only thing I needed to find was coal. Night was approacing and I was lucky enough to literally fall in a hole where I could find a big vein of coal with which i made a lot of torches. The darkness came, so the only thing I had to do, in order to stay alive, was to wall off the entrance and wait there till morning. My first shelter looked like this:


In the morning I was hungry, I had to find some pigs and cows since from now on they drop steaks too. After some hunting without eating i tried out how does starving mean, basically if you run out of food you will lose a half heart each 5 seconds or so, unfortunately I couldn't find my way home and I started to walk through the forest. This was the result, I found some iron on the surface AND! discovered an amazing canyon!



After having enjoyed the view for quite a while I had to find a new spot for my settlement. I chose this one, mainly because of the lack of time.


And in the second night I lived here, yes, it was still a hole but, looked more like a place to call home.


We're done for today, except for an unanswered question that came up in my mind:
Whats the function of that sort of experience bar?

11 Sept 2011

Minecraft: 1.8 prerelease



So here our quick and very first update,
I hope everyone already knows what am I about to say, in particular, the "Adventure update". The upcoming 1.8 version is the one that will change totally minecraft's gaming experience, adding thousand of new features, such as NPCs, rivers, canyons, new monsters to deal with. Anyways if you really dont know anything about this I suggest you to check the official site: http://www.minecraft.net and also the other links that appear in the bottom of the home.

Anyways, assuming that you skipped the first part of this post here's how can try minecraft 1.8, first of all you definitely need:

-A PC.
-A paid version of the game (being a premium user basically)
-And what am I going to link down here

Download the 1.8 minecraft.jar
Once you've downloaded that file place it in the folder called ".minecraft" which is in "C:\WINDOWS\AppData"

And this is pretty much it!

8 Sept 2011

Should be?

I just realized that I didn't talk about the blog's title, I mean, "should be indie".
Well, it's easy, I used "should" just because from time to time I'll also be giving some informations regarding the revolutionary games that are going to be released anytime soon, I'm talking about Diablo 3, Guild Wars 2 and Dota 2. As soon as I'll start playing I may even write about my personal gaming experience, but these are just some ideas that came up randomly.
As a newbie Starcraft 2 player I may also write down how's my ladder games are evolving, and maybe receive even some advices :P

But yeah, I guess, now that everything's explained, I'm ready to start posting some awesome shit

7 Sept 2011

Who am I? and, what am I doing here?

Hello folks, my name is Luca, I live in italy in a town fairly near to Venice, even though in october I'll be living in Udine, a big city at 130 km far from my home. Actually I'm going to attend the economy course there, at the university. So, as you can see, english is not my mother tongue and you will certainly find lots of mistakes around here, so please forgive me.

Let's talk about the other question, "what am i doing here?": well, I'm going to promote as much as I can indie gaming, you may wonder what the hell could that be! Simple, "indie" stands for "indipendent", thats right you got me, this blog is mainly about those games that don't come from the rich companies such as EA or Blizzard or whatever. Most of you may have seen or at least listened about Minecraft, a game basically entirely developed by a guy named Notch. If you don't, well you should search for it, by now, according to his official site "3,376,616 people bought the game" and considering that it's sold at 15€ that made such a tremendous income. What am I trying to say is that, besides Minecraft there are literally MILLIONS of other games entirely developed by just a person or a quite small team and many of them, obviously are at least as cool as minecraft. That's why I'm trying to promote this other aspect of videogaming.