I absolutely love the new Hearthstone animated short. Blizzard is on point.

I'm a little late to the viewing party for this trailer, but I finally found a few spare minutes to give it my full attention, and wow. I was already quite excited for this game but after watching the latest trailer for Star Wars Battlefront II, I definitely can't wait to get my hands on it. The amount of detail and the quality of the environments and gameplay is incredible. One thing I did learn in from the trailer was that the single-player campaign was going to help bridge the gap between Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens.

I also completely forgot about the beta which I should be getting access to since I put in a pre-order for the Elite Trooper Deluxe Edition. I believe I read that the beta was going to happen on October 4, which is next Wednesday. I'll have to re-up my Xbox Live Gold subscription, but I think it'll be well worth it! I'll definitely be streaming the beta as well as the final game when it comes out!

For whatever reason the other afternoon I thought it would be a good idea to dust off my Nintendo 3DS and finish up one of the games I had started many months ago. I finished up the game, but then I started poking around a little and started to look into updating the custom firmware I had installed. It looked like it was going to be a pretty quick update, however, that's never the case with my stuff. After doing a little bit Googling, I found this issue on GitHub. Same problem I was having. I then learned that I was pretty much light years behind on updates and I would need to do some extensive manual updating to get things going again.

Thankfully some wonderful folks have put together some really awesome guides which walked me through the whole thing. When I did get stuck, which was inevitable, I used their advertised Discord server to seek additional assistance. Within an hour or so I was back up and running on the latest version of the Luma3DS custom firmware.

I'm still working on understanding how all this works. Basically what I've been able to determine and what I believe on how this works is there's a bootloader that you must have installed. This allows for unsigned applications or code to run. During the boot process, you go from the bootloader, then to your custom firmware, which in my case is boot9strap as the bootloader, then into Luma3DS. Once you're in Luma3DS you can launch "homebrew" applications along with 3DS games. I could be completely wrong about that process, so feel free to leave a comment to correct me.

Unfortunately, since I was relying on EmuNAND and Menuhax I still have EmuNAND and that's where my games live. Fortunately, there's a guide available which walks you through the steps of moving over from EmuNAND to SysNAND (which is what the 3DS boots into by default. I'll be giving that a shot tonight likely. This way, I won't need to hold down the L button every time I boot up my 3DS.

Fingers crossed that process goes without issue!

Resources

• 3DS.guide
• Homebrew Launcher (Alternatives)
• Move Emunand
• Nintendo Homebrew on Discord
• GitHub - AuroraWright/Luma3DS

Howdy partners!

The closed alpha of one of my highly anticipated games of the year finally dropped over the weekend. While I've only spent about an hours worth of time in the game, I believe that's about all the time one can really sink into the game at the moment. I've been invited into many alphas and betas before, and Wild West Online does not even feel like an alpha at this point. I would not hesitate to call it a pre-alpha. It's extremely unfinished and needs a lot of work before it gets into a beta state. The game is missing many components, and while this is completely understandable, there should have been one of two things done before they released it into a closed alpha.

1. They could have much better set the expectations of what folks could and couldn't do in the closed alpha. Very little can actually be done in the world, before you simply get bored and log out. OR
2. Polish it up a little more, and add in a short in-game tutorial on basic mechanics and add 1-3 quests so there was something to do besides wandering around aimlessly.

The world has little to no NPCs, very little environment to interact with, the environment that does exist has some untextured items (mostly found in houses), very little audio (they just barely add footstep sounds), somewhat forgettable control schemes, and lots of bugs (which are definitely to be expected). I also couldn't find anywhere to see how much money I have, I figured hitting the 'I' key which is noted as the inventory would do this, but hitting the key yield nothing.

Bugs I found include:

1. There is a messed up horse in the starting area. I've found out that she's now known as Broke Neck Sally.
2. You can just walk through certain doors.
3. Calling for your horse can spawn him/her hundreds of meters away.
4. You can get stuck on random and sometimes unseen objects, requiring you to log out and log back in.
5. Walking on what appears to be dry land gives off the sound of walking in the water.
6. Amount of money your characters has appears to change between logins (for example, one login I couldn't afford a drink at the bar, but could during another login)
7. Lots of missing text in many of the menus.

I do however have hopes for the game and I very much wish that it will be a successful title. It's still very early in the development process, but I think a holiday 2017 delivery date is not achievable at this point. At least not for the depth and quality of a game I would expect. I really hope they take their time and do this right. The game has a lot of potential, though if all else fails it'll keep me occupied until Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out.

• Wild West Online - Alpha - Part I
• Wild West Online - Alpha - Part II

I want the new 2018 Ford Mustang GT Premium instead!

Even if it's been 12 years in the making, I am very excited for Kingdom Hearts III. I even put in my pre-order with Amazon last month (having forgot about it since it's been so long). Hearing and seeing Toy Story in Japanese was quite interesting.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing a little World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King this evening. I had been meaning to log on to have a little fun, but hadn't been able to find the time. I quite enjoy being able to run my own World of Warcraft realms. If anyone ever wants to play some with me, let me know!

How badass is this?!?

I have absolutely no idea how I managed to do this. It was a lot of fun, and if I thought the beginning's of the matches were anxiety inducing, I guess I had no real idea. The last 5 minutes are crazy. I have no idea where the guy was who got me in this match, but it was a lot of fun!

Check out the full match gameplay here.

I've had this game on pre-order for about a month now. After seeing this I can't wait for the alpha and beta testing to begin. It should hold me over uner Red Dead Redemption 2 comes out!

Over the last few months, I've been participating in the closed beta's for the new game, LawBreakers. For those unaware, this is CliffyB's new game out of his new development studio, Boss Key Productions. Given his success with the Gears of War series, I was pretty sure his next title would be a big hit as well. Unfortunatley, that doesn't seem to be the case.

I will admit, I've been out of the PC game "world" for a while now. Haing moved over to macOS means most of my gaming is done on consoles. LawBreakers is one of the first games I've played since getting back into PC gaming. The controls are a bit confusing and they don't feel good. I believe this could be remidied by mapping some the Q and E and maybe F keys to my mouse, but it's not something I've tried yet. The game itself feels like a clone of Overwatch which in itself gets boring relatively quickly. The modes aren't really anything new or imaginative. The character designs are neat but in my opinion, nothing special.

I'm not sure what this game is trying to accomplish or do, but it doesn't bring any sort of enjoyment when playing. If the game is free, I would certinly continue to give it a shot, but at what I assume will be a $60 price tag, it's something I'll definitely skip out on. I'm grateful to have been apart of the betas so I could see what it was all about, but it's not my cup of tea.