=== Mobile Game Review -- I Monster - RPG Adventure - 6/10 ===

What Are We Reviewing?
Today we have I Monster by DreamSky.

Last Updated: December 20, 2019
Price: FREE
Genre: RPG / Adventure
Rating: Teen

I Monster is available on Google Play and currently has over 100,000 downloads. I'm having a bit of a hard time with this one because I both love it and hate it at the same time. There are good things about it, and there are bad things bad things about it the rest is rather... meh. I do enjoy RPG-type games because it's fun to progress into a powerful super-being and this definitely is one of those games... though I think maybe the balance is off somehow because something just doesn't feel right about it. Let me explain...

Gameplay:
Beginning from what I would call the hub we can see an ominous tower in the distance which is where we will be doing our adventuring. Nearby is a large rock upon which sits a bird with a diamond. This rock seems to deliver quests to complete with each adventure while the bird gives advertisements and pays for your time with diamonds.

Before heading off on our adventure we'll check out the Equipment Store for possible new equipment and of course be sure to keep anything of importance in the Warehouse... which I suppose is just a different way of describing a chest. There's also a village area nearby where more services can be given, though at this early point in the game we have only unlocked the blacksmith who is able to upgrade equipment to be stronger.

We begin what is for us yet another adventure into the tower starting from the first level. At this point it is quite easy to complete these early levels of the tower thanks to some equipment which is quite strong for the early spaces as well as having at this point reached level 7 in experience.

Each battle is rather simply done by tapping on a target which causes our character to approach and fight said target. Longer fights are somewhat more interesting by being more back and forth trading blows as well as giving opportunities to use abilities. In our case we've chosen a lightning strike ability which of course uses some mana to do so.

That... is really it. I'm not sure if this game is supposed to get more interesting as the game goes on, but it seems to just be a simple kind of RPG game. Movement is done on a grid and not everything must be fought, only what is in the way or what is required due to being a boss. So I mean, the thing about this game is that I wouldn't say there's anything wrong with the gameplay... it's just... not all that interesting.

I Monster works as a game in that there seems to be a goal and a progression into a more powerful state as there should be in an RPG, but I just don't feel like what's happening in this game is good enough to keep my attention. I'm not driven to want to explore more into this game than I have at this point. Watching advertisements gives Diamonds which can be used to reset the equipment shop as well as unlock more backpack pages. But really it feels more to me like it only wastes time and interrupts gameplay.

Graphics / Sound:

Sort of a cartoony type of style. I really like the hub screen and the menus are nice to look at, but maybe it's because of the combat being so fast... or maybe it's because of the advertisements interrupting gameplay (because we all know getting as much of that special currency is highly important in any free game)... but in any case, there just isn't anything all that special to note. The graphics are nice, no glitches, nothing to complain about; just really nothing special.

The sound is a similar situation where there isn't truly anything special about it, but I have noticed that there is a sound or two "borrowed" from Diablo II when using a health or mana shrine.

Replayability:

Well, I suppose as long as you enjoy exploring the same sort of thing with different layouts over and over again... this can be replayed forever and ever and ever. So far as I've been able to experience, the only thing stopping a player from continuing to continue forever would be the boredom of experiencing the same thing with little to no difference.

SUMMARY:

I don't know, maybe I'm being a little harsh on this game. It seriously isn't a bad game, I just find it doesn't have much special going for it and that really is a bit of a drawback these days. I suppose I'll give it a bit more go and see how I feel about it from there. But at this point my feeling is that the score I'm giving will be 6/10.

Points would be lost for sound being taken from another WELL KNOWN game as well as gameplay not being all too interesting. All in all, I would still recommend this game to try out if you're looking for something ENGAGING; bonus points for not having the entire game be played by turning off the game as many other free games tend to do. I suppose I would say I Monster is average with a recommendation to at least give it a try, which is why I've decided upon this score.

~ DaemonVirus

Sick News!

Hey everyone, I have sick news! Carley isn't sick today! :D

Okay, now I don't want to make this into too big of a deal too soon, but we MAY be over the hump of sickness!!!

You seriously have no idea just how big of a deal this is for us to be at a point like this even for only one day because Carley hasn't had a single day of not being sick since like back in August when she first got pregnant. We tried all sorts of different options including Diclectin / Gravol, sleeping in all day, getting up at the crack of dawn, eating, not eating, and so much more! The result? Nothing worked. Only sick sick sick was found each and every day and it was weighing down upon her beginning to cause depression and anxiety.

The past couple days though... has been a miracle. See, Carley recently took herself into the hospital because she didn't know what else to do. She was feeling so sick and depressed that she felt she needed their help and was admitted into the mental health ward for assistance. The service there was absolutely fantastic, they listened to her and sought out a medication which would be safe for pregnancy which would help out with her depression and anxiety. She wasn't sure about taking any kind of medication but having trouble sleeping during the night drove her to try the suggested medication as it was supposed to help with sleeping at night as well.

This choice led Carley to waking up the following morning in the hospital with less than 8 hours of sleep, but feeling well-rested, mentally better.... and NOT SICK! Crazy, right? Now we won't know FOR SURE if this is a miracle solution until more time passes, but I'm pretty sure if this is still working after a month from now, we're probably in the clear. I know so far she's super happy even to have just a couple days of peace from puking and let me tell you I've seen such an improvement over only two days of happiness that I'm so hopeful for her to continue to feel amazing because I've missed seeing such a big smile on her face.

What have your experiences been like with pregnancy? Good? Bad? Share with me your stories and solutions of pregnancy and parenthood!

~ Kyle Welykholowa

What A Trooper

Back to Family / Life

First Day of Spring 2019

Hey everyone!

In case you didn't know, today is the first day of Spring in 2019. I can absolutely say that I'm super happy for Spring to finally be here with all the warming up and melting that comes with it. I have great hopes of getting out more this year with the family; especially the dogs who didn't get out too much over the Winter. Really the whole family deserves to be able to get outside more and enjoy the nice weather. I'm hoping for much more trips to the park, the beach, and perhaps we'll be able to find some time to get out on some adventures to other places as well.

Don't get me wrong, Winter is great, and the coming warmer weather wouldn't be as awesome without the long drawn-out cold to really make you miss how nice it is to be able to go outside in shorts and a t-shirt. Without this warming and cooling cycle throughout the year, I absolutely wouldn't appreciate the changes in weather as much as I do now. I do enjoy going out for walks in the cold weather when the snow is out, but now that the temperatures are rising... though I'm not looking forward to all the mud that comes with it, I'm super excited to be able to get outside with a dog or two in the evening for a walk or a run 

For me, Spring is the real beginning of the year with new growth and warm weather. I'm thinking now is a great time to start a new thing of updating my goals with each season and I'll try to give a summary of how I feel I did at the end of the season.

SPRING GOALS

Family - I want to spend more time with my family doing engaging things together. I'm getting rather tired of TV and movies, so I'm wanting to play more games together whether that's board games, video games, or outside activities.

Health - Enough is enough! Time to get into shape and be more healthy than I have been in the past. My chosen type of work often has me sitting anywhere from 4 - 12 hours on a work day, so I definitely need to be doing some sort of extra type of activities to keep myself in good health. What a great excuse to get one or both of the dogs out for a walk as often as possible. Perhaps I should also mention that I have a brand new bicycle to get a ton of use out of this year; maybe I can even work on building some muscle this year as well, wouldn't that be great?

Work - I hate to say it, but money is an important factor this season. My goal will be a little bit mixed I think. Right now I'm quite happy with my job and it definitely has a lot of potential room for making extra money and even advancing through the system, but now that I'm done with my Office Administration Certificate, I may want to start looking for a higher-grade job.

Hobbies - Other goals while I'm considering what exactly I want to do on the work front include other options such as continuing to work on this here blog and my other content production avenues which may provide a secondary stream of income in the future. Definitely a bit of a dream there, but I wouldn't mind hitting something big one day and making the best of it... though I'm not BANKING on that happening. I'll definitely continue streaming and try to get on top of taking and posting pictures more regularly whenever we do fun things. I also may use some of my time to get back into playing my violin and try to do some writing and drawing as well... I have more than enough materials to work with on all of that. Most of all, I would actually really like to start reading more books again. I have a lot of books I would love to read again and a bunch of new books I would like to start reading as well... I'll work on that.

Projects - My other goals for the season are quite simple: clean up the house, and get some things done. This sort of covers everything because I have a really bad habit of procrastinating on things, but the most important part of this area is that I finally get the house back in order not only upstairs, but also in the porch, out in the backyard, and down in the basement. Things are a mess and there are also many house projects that we've talked about that I would like to finally get done.

So there we go, there's a lot to work on. I think it may be because I'm feeling behind on many things, but that's definitely something that I know I can catch up on... as soon as I stop procrastinating on, like... everything. So with that, wish me luck and let me know about your goals for the Spring season. As always, I'm always accepting of any ideas you guys may have and love hearing from you.

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== Mobile Game Review - Fallout Shelter - City Builder / Base Management - 9/10 =7=

I can't believe I've held off on reviewing this game for so long. I've played Fallout Shelter before, uninstalled it out of frustration, and now here I am playing it once again. It constantly draws me back in no matter how much I try to resist.

Welcome to Fallout Shelter. You are the new overseer of vault *insert number here*. It is now your task to build a shelter and keep an community of people alive and well with everything out there in the wasteland trying to get inside and kill you in some way; or perhaps everything will go down in flames.

Fallout Shelter is a game where you begin with a few dwellers and you are tasked with putting them to work to gain resources and grow your population. To start, you must balance three resources which are power, food, and water. Power is the most important resource because all of your rooms require power to run and they will shut down if you don't have enough. Food is the next resource which is needed to keep your dwellers healthy and to naturally heal their wounds. Then you have water which is needed to keep your people from being irradiated which lowers their maximum health.

Once you have these under control, you can start thinking about expanding your population. For this you need money which is most easily gotten by completing quests and rushing rooms. The downside to rushing rooms is that there is a chance to fail which causes some sort of hazard such as fire or enemies to attack the room. Every time rushing a room succeeds, the chance to fail gets higher... but the rewards increase as well.

Now that you have money and a growing population, you'll need to think about keeping your people healthy and treating the radiation from the enemies that enter the shelter and the wasteland itself. Stim packs are used for healing injured people and are used to fight off radiation poisoning. These are very important as the enemies get stronger and radiation is more common as you explore further into the wasteland.

There's such a balance of resources and actions which must be managed to succeed at this game. And at any point it's so easy to completely forget about that high-level dweller you sent out into the wasteland hours ago and is now dead. You'll lose your most important things by sending out high-value items with a high-level character who'll die because you forgot to bring them back home before you went to sleep for the night. You'll run out of resources and lose your base from expanding too quickly or building your base in such a way that one catastrophe spreads throughout your whole base and kills all your people. This game will frustrate you so much, but for some reason you'll keep coming back to it because you just thought of a different way to do something which might work better than last time.

This game is absolutely addicting. I'm giving it 9/10 for how amazing it is. Sound design is good, art style is fantastic, and gameplay is top-notch. The only thing I'm taking a point away for is the controls. In a crisis situation, it can be VERY difficult to select the correct character and send them to the right spot... so you'll lose characters because you tapped the wrong person or didn't manage to select the right guy in time before he lost his last bit of health. Despite the occasionally frustrating controls, I absolutely recommend this game to everybody. I'm still playing it... again.

~ Kyle Welykholowa 

=== My Extra Child - An Examination of Carley's Brain ===

     Now that's an interesting title, you must be saying to yourself. What could he possibly mean by that? Today I would like to tell you all about something very important to me. Three years ago when Carley picked me and I decided that she made me a happier person in my time of depression, I couldn't have imagined where it would bring me and what I would have to deal with to keep her in my life. Some people thought I was crazy, but I knew there was a reason why I would be drawn to her and feel a need to help her in her time of need.

     Today I find myself in a family with two adults, one dog, and two children. Those who know me would know at this point that Carley and I have only had one child together. Does that mean I've had another child with someone else previously? No it does not. See, Carley sort of accidentally brought a child of her own into our relationship. I realize this explanation isn't getting any better to understand at this point... it just sounds like one of us has an extra child, which is sort of true. See, Carley doesn't have an official diagnosis for multiple personalities, but I can confidently tell you that she absolutely has a complete additional personality.

     This personality came about when Carley was three years old and her name is Kylie. Currently through a process of having birthday whenever she has felt ready to grow, she identifies as being fifteen years old; though she will always have the characteristics of being three. So in essence, I have an extra child running around here sometimes whom I get to take care of. She's absolutely adorable and I love her in every way. It can be a little bit difficult when I'm exhausted and now I have to care for both Isabelle and Kylie at the same time, but for the most part it's really nothing at all. She started calling Carley and I mommy and daddy recently which is nice because we know she feels loved and cared for, which is something she requires to feel ready to grow as time goes on.

     How could I be so alright with this just... happening? Some may think I would have been alright with this because I was so madly in love with Carley at the time and we knew that she was pregnant, but that actually has nothing to do with it at all; well... I was madly in love with her, so that part is true. The thing is that we had already dealt with this sort of situation before. When Carley and I first met, she started having seizures shortly after getting hit in the head. These seizures left Carley in a bit of a silly state for a long time afterwords which a normal seizure event wouldn't do. We went through a whole process to finally find out that the seizures were psychological which is physically the same as regular seizures, only these tend to have more triggers as they are usually due to some traumatic event(s).

     As this process went on, I learned that she had another personality named Little Carley who was five. At first, she grew whenever she felt like she had completed some sort of milestone such as dressing herself or cooking her first sidekick all on her own, but eventually she realized she didn't really feel like she had grown and we figured out that she needed some sort of birthday celebration to make herself feel older. Yeah, sure this was weird and a bit annoying at first, but Little Carley quickly became a part of our little family and we figured it all out together.

     There was a lot of frustration and anger and many other feelings which were incredibly difficult, but we got through it all. Having someone in your life who has this going on is just... incredible. It's so hard to truly explain just how amazing of a journey this has been for us. I think it's unlikely that Carley will ever get an actual diagnosis for this because I don't think Kylie has any want to come out and introduce herself to the psychiatrist. So if you're needing some sort of documented proof by a medical professional, you're not likely to see one. However, I can tell you that this is incredibly rare and that even the medical professionals don't know very much about this phenomenon. There isn't anywhere readily available online or in easily findable books where you can learn about this. It's just not something that many people have, and I don't think there have been enough cases of this for there to be enough research to really know how this all works and what to do about it. Believe it or not, I think I'm one of the few people in the world who really has a great understanding of this phenomenon.

     As far as I can tell, at this point the psychiatrist believes this is a disassociation thing. I guess multiple personality disorder is not what the diagnosis would be called anymore, but I don't really like the thought of calling this Dissociative Identity Disorder because it's not just her acting differently or watching herself do something without being able to control herself. I can truly say this is a complete additional personality which could take control of Carley at will and has different thoughts and likes than she does. There's so much about this to talk about, but it's too much to let out all at once.

     Why am I revealing this to you? We have decided this is something we want to do for two reasons. The first is that this is a huge part of our lives and there are some situations where this can become a little bit strange. Obviously Carley and I go out places sometimes, but I also go out places with Kylie at times so some people do potentially see Carley acting in two different ways and they may have questions about this. Now, we really don't need to explain ourselves and if you don't believe us or if this makes you uncomfortable, then that's your problem; we're still going to go about our lives whether or not people support us. The second reason I feel it necessary to reveal this information is because mental health is a very difficult topic to discuss. There's so much more going on and mental health issues are so much more prevalent than anybody really knows, but we're all so afraid to talk about it out of fear that we will no longer be normal or we'll be judged so heavily if there's something wrong with us. This is the sort of thing we need to start talking about so that more people are comfortable coming forward with this valuable information.

     If anybody has any questions, feel free to comment on here, on Facebook, on Twitter, or anywhere else you might find this post. You're even welcome to email me directly with any questions at Kyle.Welykholowa@gmail.com. I'll get back to you as soon as I can.

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== A Neglectful Owner ===

     With being so busy over the past month of June with work and school and everything else, I've been a pretty neglectful owner to my blog. I'm definitely super happy to be done being so super busy all the time; finally I can actually sit down and think about things other than what work I have to get done at all points in time.

     Of course I'm still super busy these days. I have quite a bit of work to keep track of and a few projects I'd like to work on including finally getting my garden ready to grow something.... probably for next year at this rate. Obviously I really want to get my blog back up and running as well. There's so much I want to write about, but I just haven't had enough time recently. I wish I had just a few more hours each day... maybe if I didn't have to sleep all the time....

     Realistically though, I think I just need to work on having a better diet. I think most of my lost energy is actually because I don't really eat very well. I do have a habit of only regularly eating one meal per day. I guess that makes me a bit of a neglectful owner of myself. I really don't get plenty of exercise either; some days I only have the time to sit in the car, sit at work, and sit at home.

     This clearly says to me that I need to work on quite a few things. I need to work on my health, my time management, and I need to work on getting back on track to my goals of content production and successful productive use of time. Even taking the time to think about what I want to type next but not putting anything down makes me feel silly for wasting time.

I might have a bit of a time-problem. ^_^

~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== Long Weekend Ahead! ===

(Posting this on April 14th, wrote this on April 12th)

     I can't tell you enough just how excited I am for the coming long weekend. I would like to say I'm going to catch up on sleep, but instead I'll likely be keeping myself busy with all my media, our baby, and preparing for my next round of classes coming up. This semester wasn't so bad, but I'm thinking I'll change a little bit of how I've been studying. I obviously haven't been able to work on my classes quite as well as I would have liked due to having our baby recently, but I also think I haven't been focusing very well on the work I've been trying to learn.

     I've noticed that even though it takes a little bit longer to get through any textbook reading and things of that nature, I retain and understand the work much better when I type it out. I tried writing out my work once upon a time, but that's a little bit TOO slow. Typing on the other hand, does two things for me. It excercises by brain by making my hands work and learn to type better and more consistently with greater accuracy, and it allows me to focus better on the words in front of my face rather than skimming through everything to find anything that pops out at me.

     As fun as it is to save time and cut corners, I think there's a healthy balance to doing some things a little bit slower rather than trying to get everything done as fast as possible. I think learning something slowly than speeding up as you get better at something is a much better way to go until you're able to do a task or activity quickly without having to give it much thought. The first semester, I took things a little slowly and I think I did well; the second semester, I tried to cut a lot of corners an messed a few things up which may mean I'll have to retake a class at a later time. This coming third semester, I'll be going for a middle-ground sort of approach where I will take things slowly as necessary, and hope to pick up speed as things go on.

     So besides thinking so much about school and my finals which are happening tomorrow, I'm looking forward to having the next three days off followed by a calm Sunday of work. Maybe Carley and I will get ourselves some fresh air and perhaps I'll use the time to make more posts or upload more videos. I love having time to work on hobbies and things.

Have a wonderful day everybody! ^_^

~ Kyle Welykholowa