Latest Max Magellan Covers & New Home Campaign!

First things first: my talented daughter has created three new covers for the RPG game we play with our friends in the west end of the city.

It's Family Day today, which made it a perfect time to launch our own Marvel Saga RPG. Hubby was the Game Master and wife, son, and daughter played the heroes on their inaugural adventure. Set at a fictional university, the protagonists had to battle Circuit Breaker, a power-hungry villain greedy for energy. The new team consists of:

• Miss Myst, a prank-loving student with the ability to become invisible and intangible
• Velocity, a physics professor with super speed
• Putty, a quiet janitor who possesses stretching elasticity powers

We had a great time playing together and look forward to playing more frequently, since we live together, making coordinating the games much easier! Our resident artist has agreed to create covers for this new campaign and we've had fun brainstorming the name of the new team.

Analysis of a Rage Quit

I have taken a break from Left4Dead because during one particularly heated game, I "rage-quit". According to Urban Dictionary, rage quitting is:

To stop playing a game out of an anger towards an event that transpired within the game 

 The four of us (husband, wife, son, daughter) were playing a scenario (my girl thinks it was "No Mercy", the hospital mission) and I kept failing at my task. After I was resurrected, again, I whipped off my headphones and declared, "That's it. I'm DONE." I quit Steam and left the other players to finish the game one person short.

Later that night, I thought long and hard about what had occurred. Was it really just anger? It turns out that there were a lot more feelings behind my rage-quit. It took distance from the event and some time for me to reflect before I realized what I was experiencing.

• I felt helpless and useless (because I believed the team was doing poorly because of me).
• I felt frustrated (because I knew what I had to do but I couldn't figure out how to do it successfully).
• I felt disappointed (because despite all the suggestions yelled during the heat of battle, I couldn't change things).

No one wants to feel useless and frustrated. Games are supposed to be challenging enough to be difficult yet still fun, and I wasn't feeling the fun. Since my self-imposed exile, the family has moved on from Easy Mode to Normal Mode and been quite successful. They occasionally mention that it would be enjoyable to have me play again, but until I can reconcile those other-than-anger negative emotions, it won't be good. 

Left for Dead - A New Stage for Our Family

I checked this blog, and back in 2011, my kids used to watch my husband play Left for Dead. Fast forward to now, 2015. The kids are now 15 and 12 and as a belated Christmas present, my husband bought all of us Left for Dead for our various computers and laptops so we could play together. This has been quite the experience. Here are a few observations of mine.

1) I stink at this!

On our four-person team, I am definitely the weakest chain in the link. The actual photo of the screen below is proof. I think my problem is that I have visual-spatial issues. I hate climbing ladders or maneuvering through doors. I'm always walking into things or getting stuck. Despite my poor performance, my family still likes playing with me.

Mrs Peeps died thrice

2) We all have our favourite characters to play.

In Left for Dead, I'm Louis, hubby is Bill, daughter is Zoey and son is Francis. In Left for Dead 2, I'm Ellis, hubby is Coach, daughter is Rochelle and son is Nick. Why do we always pick the same ones? My girl says she likes to use the female characters. My husband likes the dialogue from his characters - when he used to play with his friends, he'd use Nick. I tend to take whoever is left but I'm used to seeing and following the others, so it's become habit.

I'm dead and watching son & daughter play

Me, still dead. Father and son planning their attack.

3) We work well as a team - sometimes.

We talk to each other while in-game using our headphones. Hubby tends to be our de facto leader, since he's played the game before. We've gotten a lot better at not hurting each other. (The only stat that I can regularly claim to have the best results is "least amount of friendly fire attacks".) However, there are times where hubby gets really frustrated with us. The worst scenarios are the ones where we have to collect items, like filling a vehicle with a certain amount of cans of fuel before we can escape. We won that one just once, by the skin of our teeth, after three attempts. Other scenarios have ended with "let's just not do this one, otherwise we are all going to be very grumpy".

We learned to use melee weapons around things that explode.

4) We feel successful, even when not all of us survive until the end.

Most of the times I play, I do not live to see the end. However, there's a real sense of accomplishment when we finish the adventure and at least one of us makes it out alive. Here's a photo example below where only hubby survived, but we still ended with smiles on our faces.

How can one survivor be considered good? When it's L4D

The nicest thing happened last night, when it was just the three of them playing. (I had too much school work to do.) It turns out that they were supposed to get on a helicopter at the end of the adventure to escape and my son actually sacrificed himself and jumped out of the safety of the helicopter to be with his sister, even though it meant his character didn't live at the end. That level of empathy and compassion makes my mommy heart swell with pride and happiness.

Gaming Projects - RPG Covers 8-10

This is an Edited Cross-Post from Monday Molly Musings (January 5, 2015) about Christmas Vacation Projects

Project #3 = Daughter's Superhero RPG Covers

About once a month or so, we play a role-playing game with the Peer family at their house. I've written about it a lot more on my Family Gaming blog. Because it's a super-hero game, my artistic daughter had the brilliant idea to immortalize each of the RPG adventures in a pretend comic book cover recap. She pencils and I ink and then colour a scanned reproduction. I have to say that it's very relaxing to trace lines and colour pictures. These three covers took about two evenings to complete. You can see the other seven "issues" here and here.

Project #4 = Son's Minecraft Book Trailer

My children received some nice presents for Christmas, including some Minecraft mini-figures as well as the novel Descent into Overworld  by Liam O'Donnell. This book is special to us because we had a chance to be "beta-readers" before it was published. My son and I decided to make a mini-video promoting the book using our iPad's StoMo software. It took a bit longer than usual because we accidentally filmed upside down and used Windows Movie Maker instead of iMovie to assemble the final product. It took a half-day to finish.

(The embedded video was in the last post from January 2, 2015)

Our Holiday Game Project

Thank you Liam O'Donnell for giving us this awesome book for Christmas. This tiny promotional video is our way of showing our appreciation (and gives us a chance to play with the Minecraft mini-figures some of us got as presents)!

Marvel Super Heroes - New Covers

We continue to play our RPG in the west-end of the city and my talented daughter continues to make comic book covers for each adventure. Here are Issues # 6 & 7.

Liam O'Donnell Owes Me $30 Monthly (Nearly)

Now that The Boy has a regular writing gig on the GamingEdus website and The Girl composes on her Deviant Art page, this blog has quieted down a bit. However, there's still a lot going on with gaming and our family.

For instance, this summer, my daughter read Ganked, by Liam O'Donnell. I had an autographed copy because I was one of Liam's Beta-readers. The Girl read it quickly and really enjoyed the story. Then she announced to the household that she was inspired by the book to play World of Warcraft. Even though the MMO described in Ganked is a fictional one (Kingdom of Strife, or KoS), it captured the feel of MMOs like WoW perfectly. Liam's cast of characters defied gamer stereotypes and the game play that occurred as part of the plot was very appealing.

Even though WoW is still one of the largest MMOs in the world, it has lost a few players since its heyday, so now it is free to play a character up to level 20. Here's The Girl's account of her WoW experience:

Mom wanted me to describe my WoW characters in a couple of sentences, so I'll introduce you to my cast of characters:
My first character was Vestelle, a night elf druid. I played her when I was first getting the feel of the game and didn't really know what I was doing. I've gotten her up to about level nine, but I don't play her much anymore. As I'm thinking of one day composing a story about the group of characters, I like to think that Vestelle would be the clumsy newbie of the group who can't really catch up to the other high level characters.
Then we have my favourite character, Corrinthe, a blood elf hunter. She's really fun to play and I've gotten pretty decent at her. She has a pet Dragonhawk named Talon who accompanies her pretty much everywhere and does some tanking while she shoots arrows from afar. She's level eighteen and I pretend that she's the strategist of the group who gets really mad when nobody sticks to her carefully thought out plans.
Nyamo is my Pandarin mage, who I named after a character from a manga I read, since Pandarin are the fake Asian type race and have anime-esque hairstyle options for females. She's level thirteen and  I plan on making her an Alliance-allied Panda when I finish that quest line. Nyamo is the girly girl of the group and is a bit squishy, play wise, but has some pretty awesome spells that make her worth keeping around.
Nerissea is an undead warlock, whose familiars are an Imp called Gakpep and a Void Walker called Thultaz. She's level sixteen, my second highest character, and kind of interesting to play, since she's super evil compared to my other characters. She's, personality wise, meant to be a little misanthropic and cynical, but is a good leader for the team.
My fifth character is Jiira, a goblin shaman who I last left off at level twelve. She's really fun to play, even though I can never get past this one boss in her story line. Like all goblins, Jiira is superficial and enjoys the thought of being rich. She's a little bossy, but she's very devoted to her guild.
Lastly, I have Dionnae, my Draenei paladin. She's only level seven, since she was made very recently, but she's still an important part of my six man band. She's very different than most of my characters, since the rest of my group are ranged character classes, but I'm getting the hang of her thanks to my brother's expertise on melee characters. She's a gentle giant and very friendly, in my mind, and is often the one to break up the frequent conflicts in the group.
I like WoW for a lot of reasons. I enjoy exploring the world and seeing what there is to see out there in all the zones, even though I get killed by more powerful monsters than I can take on when I do so. I also really like the story and lore of the game, the interactions between different races and the history of the world. I enjoy the type of fantasy that this game has (with the elves and dwarves and such) and I think it was these qualities that I noticed prominently in the game depicted in Ganked, as well as why it drew me to WoW.

While The Girl was playing, The Boy saw this and was equally captivated. He had watched his dad play when he was younger, but now he felt he was able to play on his own, so he tried it too. Here's The Boy's account of his WoW time:

I have a dwarf paladin and his name is Amefist. He is based on my Cube World dwarf character, who is also named Amefist. He is pretty powerful. Amefist has a minor in Engineering. He has a pet bunny. I have not played recently but I think he is level 15-16. The most fun thing I did in WoW as Amefist was getting my pet rabbit.

I think it's neat that one media text can inspire another, and vice verse, although it had the potential to get a bit costly. The beginning of school and screen time limitations mean that both kids had other things to preoccupy them. There's also been this tendency with the younger members of our family that once we purchase an online membership, interest in the game immediately dries up. Still, this may be an ideal Christmas gift for either or both of them, and the interest is due to a well-written novel.