GFMSL #14

The developers gave me a copy of Loot Hero DX to write this article.


Loot Hero DX is a game made by VaragtP, the same minds who brought you Tap Heroes, Cooking Witch and Plantera. The game revolves around a knight who plows (literally) through enemies to save miners who then work for him by mining.

The gameplay itself is pretty dry and just makes you run through enemies in the form of levels. You can stop by upgrade stations (seven in each level). At the end there is a boss but every ten levels a dragon appears. If you defeat the dragon you rescue a miner who then works for you at your mine. 



The mine can be used to collect gold which can then be used to buy upgrades like speed or damage.

Loot Hero DX is repetitive at best and feels like a game that was purely made for farming achievements. For this I couldn't recommend it.

I would just like to point out that the devs (varagtP) have made other games like Plantera and Tap Heroes which are great games I highly recommend checking out.

GFMSL #13

This week I've been playing some Postal 2 with a friend via the co op mod and it's been great. Never have I ever played a game that takes the **** as much as postal does.

Before I start this I would like to point out that Postal 2 is a very offensive game and I highly recommend not reading this article if you are under 18 years of age.

Postal puts you in the role of the Postal dude, an everyday citizen of Paradise, a town in Arizona. Complete everyday tasks like getting milk or vote for the new mayor. Alongside this you have free reign across the town doing whatever you please. 

The first thing I noticed is that this game is completely random. 1 minute you could be getting Gary Coleman's autograph and the next your defending a church from Al Qaeda. It's never a serious game and I've got to give RWS credit for that. Somehow they managed to make the most offensive game in 2004 and have it still played today. The game gets updated nearly every month!

In Postal you have access to some normal weapons like the pistol and shotgun but then you have the ones like the protest sign and throwable scissors. Unzipping your pants and pissing on people is hands down the best feature of people. The reactions you get from the NPC's are priceless. Women will comment on the size and police will tell you to put your dick away.

The map is a reasonable size and with the workshop containing new missions, maps, weapons, characters and power ups Postal 2 is a masterpiece.

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Half Life 3 Writer Makes Fanfic

These days Half Life 3 has become nothing but a meme however on this week Marc Laidlaw has released a story which is supposedly the ending to the highly anticipated Half Life franchise.

While Laidlaw says this story is '0% official' most fans believe this is what Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would have looked like.

You can check out the 'leak' here.

Inside the World of Achievement Hunting

Have you ever watched Achievement Hunter and thought I want to do that? Well if you own a Steam account and have Discord then you're in luck. 

Most Steam games come with achievements that you can unlock and just like Xbox and PlayStation you can show them off on your profile but there is a group of people who take it one step further.

Meet the 100Pals, A group of devoted hunters who aim to 100% every game they can. The discord server is where they chat, show off their achievements and catch up on the latest in gaming.This article will take you through what it takes to become an achievement hunter and some tips from the top hunter in the US. 

First off you'll need:
A Steam account (with some games on it)

Discord

Got them? Ok, now it's time to start hunting. Pick your game (I'll use GTA V as an example) and start playing. Check your achievements list on Steam by pressing shift+tab. Most achievements will tell you what is required to get them but not all are straightforward but that's where guides come in! Whether it be on Steam itself or on the internet there's always people who will be able to help you with them secret cheevos (that's what 100Pals call achievements).

You've finished GTA and unlocked all of the achievements? Brilliant! With your first game under your belt you're an achievement hunter! Now is probably the best time to join the 100Pals Discord server if you haven't already. The server has eleven text channels each dedicated to a certain topic:

cheevo-chat - The general chat where everybody talks + show off your completed games

steam-feed - Posts about any changes relating to achievements across all of the Steam platform

achievements-trackers - Talk about the tracker websites

retro-achievements - A chat talk about retro games

off-topic - A chat to talk about anything that's not cheevo hunting

coop-search - Find people to play games with

life-achievements - Talk about anything related to life in general

keys-bundles-trades - Keys up for trade, giveaways or just straight up talking!

bot-stuff - A chat to mess around with bots

nsfw-nsfl - 18+ chat

announcements - Moderators post competition announcements here

first-timers-read-this - A welcome chat with info

Now that you're familiar with the chats you'll be able to forge relationships or get help from other hunters. 100Pals is one of the friendliest servers I've been on.

You may have noticed that members might be mentioning sites like Astats or Completionist.me. These are sites that can track your achievements in a more advanced way. Below are the sites:

Astats

Completionist.me

Meta Gamer Score

Personally Completionist.me is the one that works for me but a popular choice is Astats.

And to finish off this article I spoke to the founder of 100Pals and one of the top achievement hunters in North America, Xeinok:

Q: When did you start achievement hunting?

A: I've always been the type to try and 100% games I play - I have a vivid childhood memories of doing everything I could and finding all the secrets in Ultima games, gridning for all of Poo's weapons in Earthbound, collecting everything in Banjo Kazooie and such, haha. My first 100% game on Steam was Deus Ex: HR in 2011 - I was actively looking for games on Steam to hundo since then and have also hunted on World of Warcraft and put some efforts into Diablo 3 and RetroAchievements a bit. 

Q: Is there a minimum number of completed games to become a hunter?

A: There is no minimum hundo count to be an achievement hunter - we certainly welcome all levels and types of hunters on 100Pals. There are many leader board metrics to compete across for achievement hunting: total rarity points, total hundos, total number of cheevos, hunting the hardest cheevos, hunting obscure games, hunting your favorite games, speedrunning hundos, building your AGC (average game completion score), etc. We all started with 0 games complete.

Q: What's a good tip for newcomers?

A: The best tip for people interested in hunting achievements is to join the official community on the 100Pals Discord because there is a LOT to learn, and to get your profiles bookmarked on the "achievement tracker" websites we all use. These tracker sites, such as: completionist.me, AStats, MetaGamerScore and SteamHunters provide hunters with a more organized and usable way to view their achievement-related data. Even if you aren't a very serious hunter, these trackers showcase a ton of interesting data and graphs relating to your gaming history. After that, my recommendation is to focus on 100%ing some games you love first.

Xeinok makes videos and guides to help fellow hunters; you can check out all his stuff here

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Brink is now Free to Play

Yesterday Flying Wild Hog announced Shadow warrior is free to keep but you can only get it until today at 10AM Pacific. 

Now Brink has be re released as a free to play model; What's going on?

Brink came out in 2011 and sold 2.5 million copies in the first year of release but over the year the game lost its player-base and had only 4 players playing yesterday! 

The game has no paywalls and has not been modified in any way to grab cash from players which is something I respect as most who make their game ftp after a failure would try to milk more money out of it (looking at you Battleborn and Awsomenauts).

Brink is available to download here.

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Jurassic World Evolution Coming 2018

Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis was a good game. It allowed you to build your own park just like in the movies and it was great. It was revealed yesterday that Frontier Developments (Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster) announced that they are working on a new game called Jurassic World Evolution. The game is set to be a park builder just like Genesis and will let players return to Isla Nublar. 

Jurassic Park Evolution is set for a release window of summer 2018.

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5 Crossout Tips for New Players

Crossout is a pretty fun game but the more you progress the better you have to be. Here's 5 tips for beginners.

1. Use a Fuel Barrel

This is a pretty simple tip but something I don't see that much even in higher levels. A fuel barrel can get you 5 fuel every time you survive and win a match. The fuel can then be used for raids or sold for profit.

2. Don't use Two Fuel Barrels

Speaking of fuel there's a myth doing the rounds that each fuel barrel gives you five fuel but this is not true. No matter how many barrels you place it won't change from five. The only way to collect more is to purchase (or craft) the fuel tank. This means you will collect an extra 10 fuel every round bringing your total to 15.

3. Sell, Sell, Sell

Once you've gained some experience and your moving onto higher levels you'll need to upgrade your runner and there's two ways to do this. Buy the items off the market or craft them from resources. I highly recommend selling your resources on the market. 90% of items available to craft usually cost more if you craft them. For example take the LM-54 Chord; the first machine gun in the game. It costs 300 scrap to make but costs 0.21 coins to produce. Selling 300 scrap would give you 21 coins. That's 20.79 coins you could lose if you crafted it. It's almost always better to sell resources and buy items.

Here's a list of the items that you should sell and the average price you get for selling them:

Scrap - 100x can be sold for 6/7 coins
Wires - 100x can be sold for 8/9 coins
Electronics - 100x can be sold for 8/9
Copper - 100x can be sold for 10/11 coins

This website will show you all the prices for every item in the game and how they've changed in the past.


4. Pick a Faction to Fit Your Playstyle

Once you reach level 10 you are allowed to choose another faction to work with. All the factions have a certain type. For example the lunatics tend to have parts for light, fast vehicles where as the scavengers have tank-like trucks. it's best to pick the faction that fits the way you want to play the game.


5. Aim for the Guns!

This is hands down the most important tip. When engaging an enemy always aim for the weapons. Once you've taken out their guns you can go for the remaining runners knowing that the one you just crippled won't be able to hurt you. It also gives you a massive XP boost as well.



That was our list of the top 5 tips for new Crossout players. Anything we've missed out? let us know in the comments below.




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A Look at Crossout

Recently the Triple Monitors have been playing Crossout, a free to play third person shooter made by Gajin entertainment; the people who brought you War Thunder and Star Conflict. Today we're going to take a look at Crossout and make a verdict on the game in its current state. This is not a review as a review will be published at launch.

The first thing to know about this game is that it's currently in open beta which means bugs and unbalancing galore but in my experience so far I have found no errors which is impressive since the game is just under a month old on Steam. 

I'll start with the main concept of the game. In Crossout you take the role of a scavenger in a post apocalyptic wasteland fighting for survival. Build a vehicle with parts from the old world and fight against other survivors. Align yourself with the factions and get rewarded. 

Every time you boot up the game your given this screen. From here you can enter battle, build a car, test drive a vehicle, test other peoples vehicles, access the market where you can trade, access the shop where you can buy currency or packs, check your daily quests or check your seasonal quests. As you can see there is a lot to do. 

In Crossout there are 4 types of battle modes. PVP pits you against other players in a 7v7 format. The game modes vary from encounter (kill the other players) to capture the area whether it's the enemy base or a base in the middle. It's worth noting that you can choose which rewards you want and with more rewards unlocking as you play:

The next battle is called raids. These are missions that you complete for copper and coupons which can be used to craft items. These missions can be anything from collecting cargo to defending an area or escorting a truck. This mode uses the green currency (fuel) each time. Fuel regenerates every day or you can collect up to 15 at a time if you win a PVP match with a fuel tank installed.

The Brawl modes are limited time game modes which allow you to compete in races, dodge a storm, participate in a free for all or drive a large vehicle. I haven't played any of these but I know the next one unlocks in an hour (at the time of writing) and it pays out a huge reward.






















The last mode is for clans only. Clans cost 500 gold coins and since I haven't got a clan I can't really say much about this game mode.

One of the unique selling points for Crossout is that you build your vehicle. With hundreds of parts to choose from you can truly customize your runner to meet your Mad Max fantasies. The more you progress the more parts you get and the more you can fit onto your car. You can also visit the exhibition center where you can assemble other peoples cars (if you have the parts) or upload your own.

The market is where you can buy/sell parts or resources. The currency (gold coins) can not be earned from playing game modes but instead from selling items/resources to other players. This is where the P2W aspect comes in but I will talk about that later.

The shop is the place where you can buy packs or gold coins for real life money. It acts as a link to the Gajin website and gives you the option to pay through steam. Prices start 2.99 euros all the way up to 99.99 euros. 

Quests are an important part of Crossout. Every day you will be given a new quest. It will usually be a kill (insert number) players with a (insert gun) in (insert game mode) type but there are some special ones. The quests pay in scrap which can be sold in batches of 100 for 6/7 coins on the market or can be used to craft many things.

There's also a quest every day that requires you to play 2 hours a day to unlock a crate holding many parts rare and common. A 14 hour a week crate is also present.

Alongside daily quests there's seasonal ones as well. Complete eight of any of the faction trees and get rewarded handsomely. 

Be quick though as these quests only last for a week:

Finally factions are the groups that make up the lore behind Crossout. Once you start you will automatically be assigned to Engineers but when you hit level 10 you get to choose from the Nomads, Lunatics or the Scavengers. Theres' also the Steppenwolf but you need to be level 25 with the Engineers to unlock that faction.

With every faction there's four workbenches. The first one is free to use but the last three cost a considerable amount of coins to rent out. Vehicle blueprints are available if you can't design a good car and need inspiration or something to use.

Overall Crossout is worth a download if your into vehicle combat there is one flaw holding the game back:

Pay to win.

Many players argue that Gajin have made it so that paid players have the upper hand but this is not the case. Read our Crossout beginners tricks and tips next week to find out how to make coins easily but for now there's one point I would like to raise. Scrap and fuel can get obtained every battle (fuel being only if you win) and you can sell them to the market. I have played for 20 hours so far and I haven't paid anything into the game (this article isn't even sponsored by Gajin) and i'm enjoying the hell out the game. I've made roughly 600 coins overall which is pretty good and is all you need to progress at my level. Honestly I can't recommend this game enough and I haven't even got into the combat!

Thanks for reading today's article if you enjoyed check out the link below:

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How the Atlas Rises Update Saved No Man's Sky

It's been six days since the 1.3 Atlas Rises update was dropped for No Man's Sky. The update brought much-needed features like procedural quests, 30 more hours of story and even a very basic multiplayer. Sean and his team have obviously been working hard and it's paid off with nearly 20,000 players playing at over the past week.

So does this mean the update has saved No Man's Sky? Join us to find out.


The Build Up

If you've been poking around the No Man's Sky subreddit then you'll know that dedicated fans have been busy decoding messages known as the Walking Titan. This eventually lead to the discovery of an update coming out in August which leads us to Atlas Rises. As we know Hello Games are usually quiet when working on updates thus this was an interesting way to interact with fans.


Quests

One of the biggest complaints about this game was there was nothing to do but in 1.3 Hello games added procedural quests. In every space station there is a now a room that has a quest board where you can take anything from locating a missing person to eliminating an animal species. This is fun but can get wearing after a while as there are only seven types of missions to choose from.

They have also added 30 hours of story content. The Artemis story takes you across the universe looking for an interloper just like you. I won't spoil any of the story but I must say they've done a good job on this one.


Multiplayer?

Another welcoming feature is multiplayer(ish). The game now allows you to see other players in the form of a blue orb and voice chat with them but you can't interact in them in any other way than making a way point commemorating that you met. This is an upgrade from just being able to leave messages and a step in the right direction for full fledged multiplayer. Hello Games says that it's "an important step into the world of synchronous co-op in No Man's Sky".

Conclusion

While No Man's Sky is far from perfect nobody can deny that it's getting better every update (although the glitches in the recent one are noticeable). While it's improved I still wouldn't recommend it for the asking price of £39.99 but it recently was on sale to celebrate the update.


I would also just like to briefly talk about the name change of our blog. If you've been reading our articles for a while then you'll notice it's been just over a year since we started this blog and since then we've had a blast but recently we've merged with a new YouTube channel called Triple Monitor Gaming so we are now called Triple Monitor Gaming News. A new Twitter account has been set up here.