Another Extra Life Marathon completed and behind the Red Sector team, and another amazing time! To recap the absolute basics, as of the end of the marathon Extra-Life 2019 has raised almost $10,000,000 for the year ($9,663,137 to be exact), setting us up to once have another record breaking year! Our own records this year have also been effectively smashed as at $1,584.63, and neither is done yet, as Extra-Life will be taking donations right to the end of the year, so if you haven't gotten involved and helped these kids, there is still time! Our team's page is available by clicking the thermometer next to this post or click here! And thank you!
Furthermore, we have done all this so far despite the dickheads of the web rearing their heads again as there were SEVERAL DDOS attacks on the Extra-Life page throughout the marathon. For those who do not know, a DDOS attack is when someone overloards a server's ability to respond to users, disabling websites (and other applications) in the process. Yep! Assholes are assholes and cost the marathon time which could have brought in even more and yet we STILL did this well! Sometimes, the good guys really do win.
But on top of that, I'm sure you also want a recap of the big event this year as we at the Red Sector celebrated helping kids. Well, step on in.
For The Red Sector, the event actually begins on Friday as we all get ready and head on out to my friend's Max Power's, Trifith's, and BottledOctopi's place where we will play. To this end I broke down my new machine Mercury (she's only 3 months old) for travel, and packed Ophelia (this very laptop I'm typing) for use as a secondary screen and to track the health of the stream. Add to this a little bit of clothing and I was ready to go (since I had already downloaded the games I expected to need). I was ready to have the most casual head-out I've had in a long time, especially as the group expected me late afternoon.
But all was not going to be smooth right away. When I arrived, I believe my presence was scary to the dog Ceres. The theory running is that she smelled Amon on me and decided I was some weird "cat-man" who was much bigger then her and a threat to the entire household now that I was inside. Suffice it to say, I arrived to intense barking, which I did my best to endure as she continued to warn Max of my presence even as he was showing me some youtube videos (including an awesome video about turning Magic: The Gathering into a card-based data manipulating computer). But she would actually relax by the time Friday night wound down as we setup the 5 computers for the 5-man team playing. That's right, Vathon joined us for the festivities this weekend! And with everything setup, we generally called it a night for the big event to begin in earnest in the morning.
With our group having a few real early-birds (ok ok, maybe it's mainly BottledOctopi and I), we decided to start early this year at 7 AM. And we all hit the ground running as the group almost all started with a few rounds of Overwatch. As for me, I would make my first run at Phantasy Star Online for the day... working to push to my first goal of the gaming day: reach level 80. I started at level 77, but only broke one more level before our first group game would begin. It was time to play Dauntless.
To be honest, I haven't played this game in a long time, as I try to keep to a single multi-player and a single single-player game at any given time. And where my time to play doesn't always match to everyone else's I moved on to a game I want to finish: PSO. But I leave the game installed for moments just like this. Since I left off in this game, there have been several changes, including new gauntlet weapons I had to try... but in the end, guns are still my calling... and this game is still a lot of fun.
The team would eventually go on to play World of Warcraft, leaving me back to my own devices, and I took the chance to continue the 7th Guest... and our only major techinical issue of the event. The game played perfectly... for me... and once it actually started (and I will get into that during the review). However, without a place to put the laptop to watch the stream, I had no idea the game chose to NOT show the screen on it, leaving everyone to just listen to the session. Shame too as we got a lot done before moving on to the next game... and arguably the highlight of the marathon to me. Max, Vathon, and I grabbed another friend online and FINALLY got to play Space Hulk: Deathwing.
For those who do not know, Space Hulk: Deathwing is a game in which you can either play a single player adventure where a librarian (you) and two other Space Marines in Terminator armor explore a conglomeration of space-ships meshed together called a space-hulk. You are looking for a ship that belonged to your legion before it went missing to find out what happened as you fight the infestation of genestealers onboard and the situation becomes more dire/escalated. Sadly, its kinda a bad game when played like this however.... and all that changes when you play with friends.
For this game, I still took the roll of a librarian (because I always love playing with the ruinous powers of the warp... it is a GOOD PAIN), but within 5 minutes our asses were handed to us as we vastly underestimated how dangerous separating is. We did manage to take out the first mission before lowering the difficulty (and still dying a lot.. this game is fun but hard as hell). But this is also the team I WANT to play with as for how much we learned to work together, we still wasted no time having to reload multiple times when getting a breath shooting each other in the face (also note... do NOT turn on friendly fire). Around a lunch of Chinese food, we managed to get through 2 missions and go back for relics, vowing to get back into this again before the next year.
This would be followed by my gaming goals as the now night drove on... first finishing the 7th Guest (review to follow) as well as getting to level 80 in PSO and finally finishing episode 2. And then the next real treat as I played "Dead by Daylight" with my team and for my first time. It was a fun time, especially with my group being goofs (BottleOctopi gets special notice for "Where are you Sempai" jokes as she chased us down as Jigsaw) and a great choice as we began reaching into the twilight hours.
But for me, the mainstay of the morning would be a new game I just picked up that week: "Call of Cthulhu" and let me tell you, so far I have LOVED this game. I thought it was made it's chapters really short, but I realized looking at my vlog that this got the literal last 5 and a half hours of the event for me. Im not finished it, but I got to stop at pretty much the perfect point before going to sleep at 7 in the morning.
Walking up a few scant hours later, I didn't waste a lot of time before beginning to deconstruct Mercury again and after helping cleanup, we all moved out to have brakfast (at about 1 in the afternoon) before all rolling off in our separate directions.
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