What did you do today.

[Jye Nicolson]

It begins!

I'm indebted to my friend that suggested Seraphim Sepia is basically a contrast paint.

[The Other Dave]

Ooh, yeah, that's a nice look.

[me_in_japan]

Swoosh!

That's a really effective green on the banshees, Jye. You may receive this official notice of Swoosh from the moderator thereof.

I really need to get back to painting. I've been deep into gaming these past couple months. VR really is a hella lot of fun, and throw No Man's Sky into the mix and, well, real life has started to look a bit lacking in aliens and terraforming, frankly. But the wee voice in the back of my head saying "paaaaaaaiiiint" has not yet been silenced, and I've been working away on a few projects on the side.

But anyway - always an inspiration to see nicely painted eldar. Carry on, sir!

[The Other Dave]

No Man's Sky is so good. If anything could get me to shell out for VR it'd be that, but I have a niggling "what if it makes me motion sick and I waste a whole bunch of money on it?" feeling at the back of my head.

[me_in_japan]

Truthfully, VR has been a game changer to how I see gaming, but NMS was not the catalyst for that. In fact, although I did start playing in VR, I've since switched over to regular pancake mode. It's just a smidge too visual-overload to be playable without eye strain. It is nonetheless, however, immensely satisfying to actually use your hands to open the cockpit of your ship, or to steer it by hand in space.

What does win me over to VR is watching movies/TV shows in a "movie theatre" whilst sitting under a kotatsu drinking beer. That, and Half Life Alyx, which is exactly as good as people keep saying it is. The difference between games designed for VR and games merely ported over is night and day. (Example: in HLA there's a type of alien plant thingy that spawns explosive grenades. But, it has a grabby-hand that closes if you get too close. The solution? You literally have to use one hand to tickle its belly while you grab the 'nade with the other hand. Impossible to replicate without VR. HLA is chocka with stuff like this, which is why it has yet to be beat as the best vr game ever.)

The real issue facing VR gaming (aside from cost of entry) is that it's almost impossible to show someone how cool it is without them actually doing it. Like, showing someone Resident Evil 4 on the Quest casting to your TV just looks like regular resi 4 but with a really shaky camera. in person though, it's incredibly immersive. Same goes for stuff like beat saber (although I favour ragnarock, which is much the same but with vikings and METAL). It looks meh when you see it, but it's just so intuitively playable when you do it for real.

Anyway - vr gaming is super, super fun, and if you enjoy gaming in general, I'd strongly recommend you give it a go.

*Edit* re. Motion sickness - it takes a while to get your vr legs, but honestly it's not necessary to go full motion in most games, and any vr game worth its salt will have techniques in place to minimise its effects. I'm not fully acclimatised yet, but NMS is fine on this front.

[Jye Nicolson]

These guys were weirdly hard to paint and I'm not going to fix them anymore - possibly even Black Legion can't make black *that* easy, possibly I just need to give up on old paint pots sooner.



This guy was super easy, other than the bit where I dropped and broke him, creating the weak points that will surely break again at every game day he shows up to.

[YellowStreak]

No pics to post, but i finally checked out the Deathwatch Grotmas detachment last week. The poor codex and serious nerfing/squatting of Deathwatch had turned me off 40K for a bit, but the new detachment looks good - well at least it looks like it's flavourful and I can field multiple killteams again!
So I pulled out my DW, worked out I needed to finish painting some dudes and should be back to a legal 2000 points soon, so hopefully from April "Xenos beware!" as I try and remember the 40K rules...

[Jye Nicolson]

Some spiders of the Warp variety.

[Jye Nicolson]

Really doubling down on both the warp and spider aspects here.

[The Other Dave]

This weekend I discovered that my PlayStation Plus subscription was still active (I somehow thought I'd canceled it but didn't?), so I said what the heck and started the new Dragon Age game since it's free to play. And man, I'd forgotten how good BioWare is at RPGs. My only complaint is that there seems to be only a small library of conversation poses so everybody ends up with one or both fists on their hips while talking, but that's just me being spoiled by Forbidden West's excellent performance capture technology. Game itself is good fun, even though I have basically zero experience with the franchise.