The Child Grows

Each and every day I see the child grows more and more and it absolutely fascinates me seeing it all happen.

Now for those of you who don't know, I'm a first-time parents and so if any of you already have children of your own or don't have children at all, then you may not know what I'm talking about. For everybody else out there reading this, as my dear Isabelle gets ever closer to being two years old, she's learning so much so quickly it's absolutely amazing to see.

Just yesterday I very clearly heard her saying the words "brush teeth" together even though she wouldn't say it upon request in front of Carley, BUT I KNOW SHE DID! Currently she is able to repeat almost anything said as the last word in a sentence and I think she's JUST starting reeeeeally put two words together as she says more and more words on her own without any prompting. She's got a few opposites such as up and down confused sometimes, but other than that her language seems to be right on the edge of starting to say whole phrases at one time. Just a few days ago I got her saying "Oh man". (She's really good at that one.)

I imagine life is a bit difficult for her at this time with trying to learn so many things all at one time. She's been constantly learning new language skills as well as learning to climb and colour and trying to learn to use the potty. We've also started using a consistent timeout method with her which seems to have her all rattled now that mom and dad are both on the same page with not letting her get away with things... even if mom doesn't like it so much.

At this point, with her birthday being only a little over a week away, I'm looking forward to seeing all the possible new changes that are coming over the next year to see where things go from here... hopefully with more cuddles in the future as well.


~ Kyle Welykholowa

=== Mobile Game Review -- Hustle Castle - Management - 7.5/10 ===

I started playing Hustle Castle some time ago and couldn't have been happier at the time when I first started because everything was so similar to Fallout Shelter. Hustle Castle really had a similar vibe right off the bat, but I did enjoy the different style of combat which gave me more of a "tactical" feeling about the game that I didn't get from Fallout Shelter.

At first, I thought Hustle Castle had a better combat system... but as I've played more and more, I've slowly realized that it just doesn't hold up that well. The combat slowly turns into more and more of "who has the better items of the single best strategy" sort of thing. In a perfect world, without a way to outplay an opponent with skill, there needs to be a way to counter each strategy... but that just isn't the case with this game. Quite simply, if you try to do more fun things and change up your build, you'll just lose to whatever the strongest strategy is, which is usually some sort of silly continuously resurrecting some really powerful tanks. The only way I've found to reliably counter strategies is to just be stronger than your opponent and/or have better items.

There is a little bit more which can be done with the combat in Hustle Castle which MAY be able to sway thing in your favour by upgrading spells and bringing them into combat with you. There is a selection of spells including one to damage a random enemy, one to heal your most damaged character, and one to increase the damage of all your troops for a few seconds. These spells can be very powerful when used properly, though I still tend to find that the combat relies much more on how powerful your units are rather than any sort of strategy involved.

Of course any time you leave the game for a while and then come back to it you'll get a lovely update on any attacks which have been done against your castle and the result of them whether it was a win or a loss and you can even watch the combat replay if you want to see exactly how the fight went.

All of these combats are found through the world map which allows the player to continue along the "campaign" trail with each area unlocked having a selection of opponents who can be battled whenever you wish. Once you defeat another player on the map one time, their castle will disappear and be replaced some time later with a new one from another player. After some time, an option will appear which will allow an opponent to be "re-rolled" with another player who may be at a higher/lower/equal level.

Besides the campaign and battling other players there are a couple other options available to keep you busy in the game including a portal which opens up every once in a while which gives increasingly difficult levels of battles that can be done to gain more soul shards which can then be traded in for rewards such as epic items and resources. I have personally found the portal to be quite fun while it's open and then the game slows down a lot with not as much to do while it is closed.

If not busy doing portal fights there is an arena system which lets you put your best combinations of troops up against those of other players in a tournament-style system where you earn more points depending on who you choose to fight and win against. So far I have only managed to be in tournaments where I can perform reasonably average, but I've never been able to win because there's always another few players who have really powerful combinations of units or who are at a much higher level.

Winning one of these tournaments rewards the player with a chest which would have....... I'm not really sure, seeing as I've never won, but I assume there are some pretty good rewards in these things. However, competing in these tournaments does provide another type of resource which can be traded in for more epic and unique items.

Speaking of chests, there are a bunch of different chests which can be earned in Hustle Castle which have varying types of rewards inside of them including resources and items which can them be used to equip your characters whether that is for fighting or for making more resources faster.

Opening chests is also a very simple and kind of fun process of hitting the next open button which continues to open more chests as long as you have another chest to open. I don't know what it is about opening chests of random rewards that's so much fun even when 90% of them don't have anything useful in them.

Moving away from the combat system, there is some castle management which needs to be done while you're not out fighting monsters or other players. In this game, that comes down to building what rooms are available and upgrading them whenever possible. The castle rooms produce resources as time goes on which can be used to construct more rooms or upgrade existing ones depending on what is available at your current player level. One one hand, this is nice because there is a clear build path, but on the other hand I don't like it because there's no customization or learning curve to it besides "I better make this because it's available to me." Definitely ups and down on the castle management depending on how much customization and learning you like in your games.

My personal thoughts on Hustle Castle are quite mixed. I really like how well made the game is and how fluid the combat system is as well as the simplicity of the castle management. As far as a long-term game goes... this one falls flat just like all the other idle-simulation type games out there. Once you get far enough into the game you start having to save up so much resources that the player loses interest in waiting before being able to do things again. There's a great start to this game which really gets you into it, but with the usual idle-roadblocks I found myself losing interest. Granted, usually I lose interest because the wait is too long and there isn't really anything to progress to after a while... only this time my loss of interest wasn't because I didn't have anything to progress to; I lost interest because I hit a wall where the only solution was either to spend real money, or to wait days or weeks before being able to upgrade enough to make any real progress.


Summary

Gameplay: Being the most important part of a GAME, I thought the actual gameplay was quite fun right off the bat up until I wasn't able to progress any further without waiting for really long times due to needing resources and upgrades and training times before being strong enough to get past certain areas and boss fights.

Sound: There's not much of note to the sound design to this game. All the noises fit well without being annoying and the music is nice to listen to, but playing the game without any sound doesn't really make any difference to the enjoyability especially when only logging in momentarity to collect resources and then turn off the game.

Replayability: As the game went on, my interest in continuing to open the game went down and down with the increased upgrade and resource colletion times.

Bonus: If you enjoyed Fallout Shelter, this game has some similar aspects which will feel familiar and fun.

SCORE: I'm giving Hustle Castle 7.5/10. It's better than many other idle-type games out there with having more to do and being more interactive. The biggest downside for me is that it continues to suffer from the same problem as all the others where wait times get way too long without spending real money which I feel with this type of game would just go to waste.

MAR1O Day

For anybody who may not be aware, today is MAR1O Day.

Now I'm not the biggest Mario fan, however being a gamer I feel it necessary to at least acknowledge the day for myself and for my wife (who LOVES Mario games), I'll definitely have to mention it. With so many other games in our house to play, I don't imagine we'll take the time to do anything special for it, but then again... we are starting to celebrate new and fun things for various occasions... who who knows?

Maybe we'll play this tonight:

Or this:

Or maybe this:

(Yes these are all games that we own... hard to take pictures of a digital copy game though)

Or maybe I'll get real nostalgic and play one of these:

Yeah, that's right... I still have a good old N64 which still runs to this day. Might need to get it checked out and cleaned sometime though. Also may want to get some new controller bits to get everything working up to par once again. But this was seriously my childhood. When my brother and sister were out with their friends, mom and dad were at work or doing things around the house, and I was left to my devices: you could find me in the basement playing games on the N64.

So maybe that's what I'll do tonight. Perhaps I'll pull out the Super Mario 64 and spend some time being all nostalgic.


What are you doing to celebrate MAR1O Day?

~ Kyle Welykholowa

Google+ Shut Down - Let's Start Something New

Have you heard Google+ is shut down? Crazy, I know. I've been using Google+ for quite a while now to help with posting my links to blog posts, YouTube videos, and Twitch streams; now I find myself needing other places to post these things. I found that a lot of the viewership on my blog came from posting links to groups on Google+, but instead I've just finished searching for Facebook groups to share my work with. Because Facebook is so usable and widely used by so many people, I'm hoping that I may not only find new places to share things, but also might find new things to look at myself as well as the possibility of making new friends.

With everything that has been going on in the past few months I've really let myself go. I mean in terms of my content production not only of blog posts, but in everything else as well. I haven't done any recordings or streams or posted much of anything really in the last little while. With this new month and with things going so well at home I'm hoping that the end of Winter will signify the start of something new for me. I'm looking to drive new traffic to the site and have much more entertainment for all of you. Sure I keep saying it, but I can feel it coming down the pipeline this time; this first post is the start of it all.

I've decided that something I will be changing with the way that I do things is that I'm going to finish more things before moving on to new ones. What I mean by this is that I have many Age of Wonders videos that I haven't yet posted even though they're from many months ago... I have at least 10 extra games and apps on my phone right now that I haven't yet reviewed before moving on to new games... and worst of all is that I have so many pictures and videos from so long ago that I haven't yet done anything with and now I'm running out of space on my phone to store it all. So with this planned change of pace, the way I make my new content will change as well as the way I do some things around the house with trying to finish more things before starting new ones.

If anybody has any suggestions on more places to post my works of creativity or any other wonderful suggestions to help me out, I would be greatly appreciative of any and all assistance on ways I can improve and get more interest out there. I've got a lot of upcoming plans not only for gaming content but also for spending time with my fam jam which I hope will come up with some wonderful stories for you all in the future.

Keeping Up With Life Is Hard

I've kinda posted about this sort of thing before, but it's honestly quite hard to keep up with life sometimes.

There's so much I want to do and I always feel like I just don't have enough time to do it all. Yeah, a bunch of it is things like blogging and streaming which most people I know would probably think is a silly thing to want to do all the time, but for me it's a fun thing I like to do that makes me happy. There are other things I would like to do as well including reading, drawing, writing, and getting back into playing my violin.

The worrying part is when I feel so apathetic that I don't feel like doing any of these things, especially when I don't even feel like playing games which is normally a very fun thing for me to do. Lately I've found it very hard to get up enough willpower to do any of these things which is actually rather concerning to me now that I think about it. Besides being always tired, I find myself not really wanting to do anything and only really able to get up and be energetic for the purpose of working.

I have great plans for so many things I want to do and how I want to be great and energetic and happy and be so much fun, and then I find I'm fighting with myself to do anything else but sleep in my spare time. I find it very frustrating to feel like this, but at least I know I'm in a pretty good spot to deal with this sort of thing right now with my family close by me and a comfortable place to feel safe and able to handle my problems.

As always, look forward for more awesome things happening in the future. I may try to mix things up with a few longer and shorter posts just to keep things rolling every now and then even when I'm not totally feeling it.


Have a great day everybody! ^_^

~ Kyle Welykholowa

What Happened Last Month

I find myself sitting here, wondering to myself... what happened last month? I'm really not going to go into the entire detail of what caused what and who did this and that. I think there's much more important lessons to learn from the events that transpired over the past month.

For anybody who doesn't know, my wife moved out for about one month and is now back home where she belongs. There are underlying issues which I believe this has brought forth and from this point things can go one of two ways: either we learn from this and become a stronger couple who work together, or we learn absolutely nothing at all except that perhaps we just don't work out as a couple. I like to think we have taken the first path of learning to be better together where rather than avoiding each other we take the time to talk and work through our issues.

My personal learning from this event has brought me to the conclusion that staying up all night long isn't the way to go, because it only makes me tired the next day and unable to function properly. As it turns out, sleeping at night definitely makes me more motivated and able to do things during the day. I suppose the fact that I start work most days by 7:00 am helps me be tired by the time it starts getting late at night... it also helps that I'm pretty much forced to get up at 6:30 or earlier every day (including days off) either because of the dogs going mental at stupid times of the night / morning, or because our DEAR SWEET baby girl now wakes up most days no later than 6:30 in the morning because she often goes to daycare before I start work... which also means I have to be up even earlier than usual.

I suppose I've also learned that I need to pay more attention to both Carley's an my own needs and emotions and we need to work at talking together instead of brushing things off and hoping that's the end of it; emotions are important and valid, even when they seem stupid. Though someone else's problems may not make sense and may seem insignificant to you, those problems may be much more meaningful to them.

On that note, I've learned things about myself as well; such as that I am important, and I can do things for myself as well as others. I still don't like going out of the house very much, but I am feeling much better about myself. The most troubling thing I'm currently dealing with is finding the motivation to get things done while I'm not on working time or taking care of Isabelle... instead of sleeping. I seriously hate sleep; I wish I never had to sleep ever again... but it feels soooooooooooooo goooooooooooooooooood to sleep and / or nap.

I do have a lot of plans on the go right now though: Dates with Carley, playing with and teaching Isabelle, cleaning and organizing the house so that we can actually find things and not feel like it (the basement) is cluttered, making blog posts and videos, and somehow finding all the time to do all of this and keep going without running out of energy! ........ Oh... I also want to get into a regular habit of taking the dogs for a walk, and playing games with friends (most importantly my wife), and drawing / doodling, maybe taking the time to colour, read some books, get into biking once the weather clears up... there's so much I want to do and so little time to do it all.

Every day is a learning experience, but we'll get there... together.

~ Kyle Welykholowa ^_^

=== Mobile Game Review -- Car Merger - Idle Clicker - 2 / 10 ===

Games where you progress while you are offline are some of the easiest games to play on a phone. Car merger is one such game where you perform activities online to then make more money while you are offline.

The gameplay of car merger is quite simple really: starting from the beginning you would purchase one car of level 1 and set it to work racing around a track which earns money over time both while you are playing the game and while you have the game closed. Once enough money has been earned, you will then be able to purchase a second car of level 1. At this point you have two choices: the first would be to put both cars to work racing around the track earning money over time. The second would be to move one of these cars on top of the other of these cars which would create one car of level 2.

As the levels of the cars racing around the track increase, they earn more money. A big component of a game with an idle progression element is making more money... Which means anytime you can make more money that's usually the correct choice. Really, the only time you would want to not level up your car might be if you want to have the maximum number of cars on the track at one time. In most cases you straight up make more money by merging cars together to make a higher level car... But occasionally if you don't have enough money to purchase the car you need and are about to go offline, having the maximum number of cars on the track earns you an additional 10% income.

Someone may at first think this is a great bit of strategy to the game! Unfortunately, the payoff is just wasn't big enough to really care whether or not I bothered filling out my race track. Despite this, I still tried to have a good time... which was a little difficult... because half of the game was spent watching advertisements. At some point in the game an option unlocks which allows you to purchase cars of a higher starting level than level 1; but the bad part about this option is that nearly every time you open up the tab... You also open up an advertisement. Oh, and of course there's an option to WILLINGLY watch ANOTHER advertisement to get a car (which already doesn't cost very much compared to what you're making) FOR FREE! Most of these advertisements are pretty easy to skip, but I really don't want to be spending most of my game time closing advertisements. I may as well just be browsing the internet or watching television.

My final gripe about this game is quite simply... this:

I mean... hey, I get it, you have to show advertisements to make money otherwise you'll only lose money by providing a free game without anything worth purchasing inside the game. The problem with this I have is WHY give me the option to download the game and NOT consent to the terms... if you're then not going to let me close the window after changing the option? I'd much rather receive a notification that says "Look, this is how it works and you using the app means you consent to the terms." Don't give me the OPTION then tell me it's the wrong choice.

Verdict

Gameplay: Simple concept, easy to figure out. Controls are sometimes a little unresponsive while merging cars. Nice to make progress while not playing the game, but not really much to do once you've merged a bunch of cars. You just keep... merging more cars and waiting for longer and longer periods of time as the costs get higher.

Sound: Lots of cute fun sounds. Doesn't get annoying. Nothing special to talk about.

Replayability: Easy concept to jump in and out of. Nothing to work towards other than more money. Constantly getting interrupted by advertisements is no fun. Once you've merged one car, you've merged them all. Nothing changes other than how fast you make money as you merge more and more cars to race around the track.

SCORE: Unfortunately I just don't have all that much to say about this game. It works, that's about it. There isn't very far to go into this game before you run out of new content, there are way too many ads, and it feels like the game is teasing you when it gives the option of not consenting to the use of data and advertisements.

+ It's a working game
+ Easy to get into
+ Sounds are nice and don't get annoying

- Seriously NOT a deep game
- Once you've merged one car, there's nothing new besides changing advertisements
- There's way too many forced advertisements followed by options to watch MORE advertisements for "rewards"
- There is an option to not have to watch advertisements... but it's just a huge tease which doesn't let you play the game if you turn it off

Car Merger gets a score of 2 / 10 from me; after a short time into the game, it becomes very dry and repetitive with no new content to look forward to. AND STOP WITH THE ADVERTISEMENTS ALREADY!!!


~ Kyle Welykholowa