First Podcast!

Podcast is up on Soundcloud! If you love hearing about Destiny, Pokemon GO, No Man's Sky, and many other topics be sure to check it out. I want to give a special thanks to our two guests this week, Geoff and Keshav. They really helped keep the talking going and contributing their thoughts to the discussions. Leave comments with your thoughts! I will be posting an iTunes link as soon as I get it up.

Soundcloud link below:
Podcast

ThreePlusOne Gaming Pilot Podcast Coming Soon!

Hey anyone that actually reads this! It's been longer between posts than I would like, but I've been pretty busy. I'm going to save any thoughts I have on the current gaming world until later this week, due to the fact that I am planning on recording our podcast pilot this weekend! We will be talking about a plethora of topics, not just gaming related, so be sure to check it out. I will make a new post with the link to the podcast hosting site when we are up and running. Feel free to leave comments with suggestions of conversation topics, but be warned that anything I find rude or inappropriate will be removed. I'm going to leave our guest a surprise for now, you'll have to listen to find out!

See you soon,
Ian

K/D is useless, and other musings of the forever challenged

Hey all! Time for our first guest author. He is a great friend of mine, a fantastic writer, and plays as many games as I do. I'll leave it at that. Just look below and marvel at his post.

Have fun,
Ian

I’ll be honest. Of all the esteemed humans who’d ever post on this blog, I am most assuredly the last person anyone should ever ask for video game advice. I proudly underperform on any game I play. Now, this doesn’t stem from apathy, I have just never had the best response times. When Ian, Julian, and I play the Battlefields  (pronounced buhr-tur-furds) I tend to get cut down before I even know what happened. Similarly, when we play Destiny I usually whip out that sweet sweet Telesto. Besides being the best gun in the game, I use it specifically because when you unload five purple orbs in a wide spread the chance you might hit something goes way up.

I’ve finally gotten around to Minecraft and may have found a game where I am evenly matched with everyone else. But, with all others, I am predestined to a life of being overshadowed. So, are you feeling my pain? Are you curious why I even pick up a controller at all? Both are fair and understandable. Let me tell you.

In my mind the Playstation 4 is a huge, very expensive, VoIP phone that also displays pretty pictures. When you’re friends are spread all over like mine (we’re usually at least a thousand miles or more away from each other) one has to find a way to keep up with everyone. I am not much for texting – just ask either of the other contributors to this blog and they’ll tell you the chance of receiving a return text from me is slim at best. So, to adopt the language of the youths, the PS4 is my late night phone call to my besties shrouded in a veil of masculinity and purpose.

All of you who have K/D’s well below 1.0 and have unlocked three out of fifty achievements – I’m here for you. Keep on plugging away friends. Also, if you need to be carried through the Destiny raid, leave a comment on this blog. I know some guys that can hook you up.

Forever mashing,

Grayson

Destiny: The Game That Stole My Life

I have spent many hours in a ton of different games. For example, I have 386 hours in The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. If I convert that many hours to days it comes out to a bit over 16 days. Now I know that isn't a huge number of hours compared to some people, but I rarely spend much time on a single game, so kind of a big deal for me. TES: Skyrim was released on November 11th, 2011. I can't believe that it has been out for almost 5 years! So over the span of 5 years, I have put 386 hours into that one game, keep that number in mind. As I mentioned in my last post, this past September I bought myself a PS4 with Destiny. That game has been one of my favorites of all time, and my play hours show it. I've had my PS4 for a bit over 10 months and I've played Destiny ever since I got the console. So in just 10 months I've put 307 hours in the game. That's about 14 days! Almost as many hours in Destiny as I have in Skyrim in 1/5th the amount of time. Now, why the hell have I put so much time into this game?  That is not an easy question to answer, mostly because there are so many reasons I keep going back to it. Destiny started off as just a game to play with my friend Julian while we were across state from each other. We played through all of The Taken King expansion story line together, played Strikes together, did as much as we could single player wise without doing the raid. We stayed away from the raid for one main reason, we didn't know anyone else that played. Eventually we had to suck in up though and make a Looking For Group post. We got a group together and went through our first ever raid in Destiny. It was so much fun! Even failing at the different puzzles was fun just because of all the spectacular ways we would screw up. Ever since that first raid, I've been going back to the game almost everyday. Destiny does a fantastic job of rewarding you for beating bosses in the raid. After every major boss, you get some new gear that you can only get in the raid. Great thing about the raid gear is that recently the creators of Destiny, Bungie, reworked the loot system so that all loot you get from the raid bosses can only be as good as, or better, than the gear you already have. So you are guaranteed to get at least one thing better than what you had. Destiny raids are just shooting the bosses until the die, which is a nice change. There are jumping puzzles, switch activation puzzles, and different things you have to do during the fights to actually be able to do damage to the bosses. That's just a brief over view of how the raiding aspect of Destiny kept me coming back to it.

See you next time,
Ian


P.S.
If any readers have any interest in seeing what a Destiny raid is like, leave a comment! I stream Destiny raids on Twitch sometimes and would be more than happy to see some readers in the stream chat. https://www.twitch.tv/pastalover1113

Gaming: Making New Internet Friends

Playing video games is my absolute favorite thing to do. I legitimately don't have any other hobbies, all I do during my down time away from work is play video games. I used to only play single player games with no interaction with other people. I enjoyed that for many years, and still do, but sometimes you crave talking with other people who are playing the same game as you. If you are playing a social game, you can be pretty damn sure there will always be something to talk about with the other players in the game. Typically you and the other players will just talk about the actual game but as you continue to talk with those same people for months after months after months, you start to really talk about your lives and other interests. That's when you know you've made a true friend. Best part about that process is when you make a great friend without ever actually meeting them. Isn't that just amazing? Even more amazing than that is when you finally get to meet these friends in real life, and they are exactly the same as when you are talking in the game. I'll give you all an example of this happening to me. This past year, September 2015 to be exact, I bought myself a PS4 with all of the game Destiny bundled in. The whole deal, base game plus all the expansions including The Taken King. I have a friend that I meet in high school and kept in touch with after we graduated who I knew had the game, so naturally we started playing together. We got through the main story together, did way more Strikes than I care to count, and finally got good enough gear to run the raid, King's Fall. We ran it a few time in PUGs, but really hated having to find new people every time. Eventually we got good enough at the raid, that we started teaching other people how to run it. The first group I helped through were my first real friends that I had meet strictly through a game. They are a great group of people, but as with all games, eventually a few of them stopped playing. Luckily for the ones that remained we found some more people to raid with. Interestingly enough, they were real life friends with the two people that stopped playing. We ran that raid so many fucking times, I don't even want to look at my player card to see the actual count. After we got good enough at the Normal Mode difficulty, we bumped it up to Hard Mode to get better loot. Sure, it was more stressful for all of us, but we were all friends at that point so no one got too shitty. Fast forward a few months and I'm planning my yearly family vacation out to Virginia to see some extended family. Guess who else lives out in VA? That's right, some of my raid group. Never meet them before in the 9 months I've talked with them, but they drove two hours to my extended family's place just so we could have a couple beers together and talk in person for a few hours. How cool is that? Best part about it all, it felt like I was meeting up with old friends that I hadn't seen in awhile. There was no awkwardness when talking, it was just like when we talked through our headsets almost 600 miles away. That one experience pretty much sums up why I love social video games over almost anything else. I hope that with this blog I can encourage my readers to reach out and make new friends through the immense fun that is playing video games.

Keep laughing and playing games,
Ian

Inaugural Post

As I sit here watching old Achievement Hunter Minecraft Let's Plays, I start to think about how many years I've been watching these guys bring me joy and laughter through videos of video games. After over 8 years of watching them, I've decided I want to give it a shot. Instead of making videos, like they do, I'm going to be writing this blog. In addition to the blog, I am planning on starting up a podcast in late August or early September. The blog will mostly be written by myself, and be about console gaming. That being said, the podcast will be a whole different beast. The great group of people that will be on there with me will include two of my lifelong friends, and one rotating guest (hence the name ThreePlusOne). Both the blog and podcast will mostly be about different games and the gaming culture that is constantly changing, but will also feature stories from our personal lives, anything news related, and just comedic content in general. We play a plethora of games, so there will be something for everyone. We are not a serious group of people and hope to bring you on a fun and laughter filled journey with us.

I've always been fascinated by the social aspects of different games. I love making new friends in video games and meeting them in real life. I personally live in the Midwest and have friends all over the country that I've meet through the game Destiny. They are my raiding group and love games as much as I do. I hope that as I continue to write this blog and make our podcast I can connect with more game loving people and make you laugh along with us. I will be making my first actual post about gaming tonight.

Hope to see you soon,
Ian