YouTuber Review: Northernlion

I thought I'd review another YouTuber we've been watching a bit lately as a family.  His name is Ryan Letourneau, he lives in Vancouver, and his "YouTube Name" is Northernlion.  His channel features some games you might not want smaller kids to watch (such as The Binding of Isaac) but there's plenty of content that's good for the whole family.  He's very relaxing, I could probably listen to him doing anything, maybe even commentating on watching paint dry.  We will probably never find out if this is true.  But hey.

His language has a little blasphemy (if I'm asterisking vowels again there might be some "*h my G*ds"), but on the whole he's clean.  Which makes me happy.  I don't like swearing even if it's just me watching.  Seems unnecessary...

Northernlion has 817K subscribers and he's been YouTubing since 2006.  He's married to another YouTuber, Kate LovelyMomo.  His most watched videos, with 2.2M and 1.6M views respectively, are episode 1 of "The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth" and episode 1 of "The Binding of Isaac". 

Now as I said earlier, though his presentation may be family friendly, the games he plays are not necessarily family friendly.  So do be careful and think about this when choosing what to watch.  The Binding of Isaac is a 16 rated game for violence and bad language, but that doesn't really give an insight into the generally horrible nature of the thing...

At the moment he's playing Darks Souls II (PEGI-16), Call of Duty: Warzone  (PEGI-18), Super Mega Baseball 3 (PEGI-3), Landlord's Super, Monster Train, Mini Golf Club, The Binding of Isaac Afterbirth+ (PEGI-16) and Geoguessr.  We mainly watch him play Geoguessr, where he chats with his friend Sinvicta whilst playing.  They have played 126 games of Geoguessr against each other..!!  They're not talking about anything in particular, they're just chatting.  :-)

We've watched him play Monster Train too, which is a deck-building game a bit like Slay the Spire.  Dad has started playing this, so I guess it must be fun!  If you like that sort of thing.

We did watch one episode of Landlord's Super, which is one of the most bizarre games I've watched anyone play on YouTube.  Mainly because it's a strange 1980s simulation set in Britain.  Ryan's reading of text written in dialect is pretty hilarious.  But the thing that has been bothering me about it is this phone box.  (Stick with me.)

1980s phonebox?

The KX100 phone box was introduced in 1985 to replace the iconic red phone boxes.  The earliest kiosks had smoked glass and the old "T" logo printed on them, and the door had a coloured moulded plastic panel, bright yellow or bright green for Phonecard variants.  This clearly isn't what we are seeing here.  What we are seeing here is a 1991 revamp of the KX100, with an italicised serif font reading "Telephone" and a red moulded plastic panel and handle.  It seems unlikely that a countryside phone box would have been replaced to a KX100 anyway, I suspect that it would have remained an old style red booth.  So this phone box is WRONG!!!  I'm sure they will correct this terrible error before the game comes out of Early Access.  I certainly hope so!!!!!

Original 1980s phone box and 1991 revamp

Er, hmm, anyway... the inaccuracy of the phone booth used is largely irrelevant here.  You should watch his videos.  He's good.  :-)

Completionist Challenge, update, The Long Dark

It's been a while since my last update on the Completionist Challenge (November, yikes!), but I have gradually been working my way through some old games.  If you didn't know,  I'm trying to finish 10 games I already own before I'm allowed to buy any more.  (It's too easy to succumb to those online sales!)

Stupidly I've picked some vast open worlders that take forever, but hey.  This time I'm not going to talk about those, I'm going to talk about The Long Dark. 

It's had to say whether I have completed The Long Dark, for two reasons.  Reason one is that though I have completed Chapter 3, I haven't totally completed the game because it's not finished (there will be 5 chapters, but 4 and 5 aren't done yet).  Reason two is that the story mode is only one part of the game, with survival mode providing many more hours of tense wilderness adventure.

Finished Chapter 3!

The premise of both story and survival mode is that a weird geomagnetic event happens and your plane falls out of the sky, landing in the Canadian Great White North.  In story mode you have a particular adventure to go on, but in survival you're just basically trying to survive for as long as you can.  (Though there are also challenges you can do - I am nowhere near good enough a survivor to manage those.)

I have completed the first two chapters twice, since by the time Chapter 3 came out Hinterland had redone the first two, so it made sense to do the whole thing again.  It's wasn't exactly a hardship!  The game is immense, suspenseful, terrifying in places.  Beautiful artwork and music.  You can almost feel your toes freezing up as you trudge through the snowy woods and across the frozen lakes, through whiteouts and eerie nights filled with those magical 'northern lights'. It's so well written - I really, really want to find out what happens to Will and Astrid.

Surviving the weather is one thing (getting warm clothes, food, water, and shelter), surviving the wildlife is another thing entirely.  The animals' aggressive behaviour is explained by the weird geomagnetic phenomenon (apparently it has made the wolves angry).  Chapter 3 introduced some HORRIBLE timber wolves that gave me a lot of trouble.  The most annoying bit for me, however, was a set piece thing with a bear, which seemed to be incongruously stuck into the game as a kind of boss fight.

Despite nominally 'completing' the game (in that I completed Chapter 3), I have only managed to get 28% of the original PS trophies and 77% of the Chapter 3 trophies.  If you're interested, the rarest trophy I've managed to get (so far) is this one:

I found a bunch of supply caches, woot!

This is definitely a game I'm going to keep going back to.  Survival is compelling, though you spend most of your time looting, hoping for those cardboard matches, or that elusive crowbar.    I also like watching/listening to people playing the game on YouTube, particularly Accurize2, Meatwagon22 and Paul Soares Jr.  Despite the tension of surviving, most of the game is a slow and relaxing trudge around, looting everything within sight - as such it's a restful thing to listen to whilst working from home!

If you haven't played this, try it!  It's only £8.99 on the PlayStation store at the moment.  An absolute bargain.  :-)

So that's game number 3 out of 10 completed!

Terraria Top Trumps (Easy Mode Starter Deck)

This week Seb decided he wanted to make a Top Trumps set for Terraria.  We'd done one before for Slime Rancher, so this isn't our first foray into the world of Top Trumps.  

Our Terraria Easy Mode starter deck

There have to be either 30 or 32 cards in a proper Top Trumps deck, so we needed to make sure we had that number in our starter deck.  Also, you have to have 5 stats on each card.  We picked "number of drops", "HP", "damage", "defence" and "coins" (that last one is how much money they drop on death).

Then we made a spreadsheet of all the enemies in Terraria Easy Mode (not bosses) and copied the five stats from the Terraria wiki.  This ridiculous use of our time resulted in the following:

Easy Mode enemies in Terraria

Seb went through this list and picked the 32 he wanted (the rest might get to be an expansion deck).  These are highlighted in yellow.  Then he got me to draw out the cards and he coloured them in.  We added a little bit in the middle which said what sort of enemy they were and what biome(s) you found them in, which I kind of colour coded.

We made an image for the backs of the cards, using a picture off of the internet and the Terraria font (which is called Andy), and printed off 32 copies.  After gluing them onto the backs of the cards we started laminating!  Then cutting.  And finally - ta da! - the cards are done.

Top Trumps 1-8

Top Trumps 9-16

Top Trumps 17-24

Top Trumps 25-32

We're pretty happy with them.  And it kept us occupied for a bit.  ;-)

Lockdown Life: Terraria, Geoguessr, Board Game Arena

I have lost inspiration for this blog, in the current weirdness, so perhaps I should just start typing and see what comes out.

For what seems like forever, we have all been living in the house together, getting in each other's way, trying to work from home and homeschool and not commit murder.  Going out for our daily exercise.  Sending Dad to forage for food in the supermarkets, queuing up waiting to be let in (reduced numbers allowed inside due to social distancing).  Yes, this is our UK Covid-19 Lockdown. 

It hasn't been forever, though.  Looking at Seb's schoolbook, he's been off school since 23rd March.  And I've been working at home since 19th March.  Seven and a bit weeks, then.  Hmm.  That seems both a very long time and not such a long time, in the grand scheme of things.  It's just hard when you don't know how long it's going to be like this.  Harder than if you had an end date set for everything going back to "normal".  Or the "new normal", whatever that is.

Dad has been a bit sad because he can't play on his PC whenever he wants to, since I'm using it to work remotely.  He was at home a lot because he's a "house husband" or whatever you call them, though he has been studying to be a teaching assistant.  Before Lockdown he had college a few times a week doing English and Maths, but now he's doing that online.  He's using our old Macbook to do that.  The Macbook is too old to play games... 

Seb has been getting more and more obsessed with Terraria (PEGI-12).  It is all he will talk about.  He plays it on the Playstation, or sings the music, or watches YouTube videos, or plays with his playset and figures.  It's driving us all mad but at least he's happy! 

He's been watching quite a lot of this guy on YouTube - Chippy Gaming:

Dad has bought a new headset, and a new flight joystick (for playing Elite).  And me, well, I've been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons a bit, and grinding my way through Far Cry Primal.  I have managed to finish some games, since my last "Completionist Challenge" post, so I will have to talk about that at some point!

Stuck indoors with each other we've been trying to find ways to keep our sanity, and gaming's a big part of that.  Dad and I are introverts, so we don't necessarily find not going out hard (though you miss stuff when you can't do it, I guess).  Personally I'm finding it hard because I'm not getting any time when I am completely alone.  I need alone time to recharge.

We've found a few things to do online that provide social contact.  Seb has been playing Geoguessr with his grandad.  If you haven't played it, it's a brilliant game.  Basically, you get dropped into Google Streetview and you have to figure out where you are.  You can play against friends.  It can be very hard!  I think we need to learn more flags...

I subscribed to Board Game Arena, which lets you play various board games online, either with friends (if you get them to sign up) or with random online people.  So far my favourite game on there is Kingdomino.  You can also play stuff with someone else in your house, sharing the same computer.  There are some fun games on there, so definitely worth a look if you're into that kind of thing.

Dad has been playing various things with his friends online (things like Vermintide, War Thunder and Overwatch).

Seb's been playing some Minecraft online with a daughter of one of my work colleagues.  He's been rabbiting away with his headset on.  At this stage anything that gives him any kind of social contact is to be welcomed.  She's older than his best friend (who also pops up on the PS4 every so often) and far more sensible.  She is a good influence on him! 

That's pretty much it, then.  I work from home, play games in the evenings, try not to be jealous when other people are playing games when I'm trying to work...  I miss cafes.  I need to snack less.  And exercise more.  And maybe one day this will all be over...