Mumbology | Musings from the wacky world of Mumbo

01Jul

All Things Come to an End

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It was a great run but sadly we must say goodbye to the US soccer team in yet another world cup. Nobody believed me when I sad the US and Ghana were going to advance from the group of death. Although Ghana continued to prove how much they hate America by proving me wrong, we were able to make it out of the group. Some people might have been happy with that but they continued to make life wonderful by giving me a reason to sneak out of work early today to watch the game. It all came crashing to an end though by a little country that most people probably couldn’t point out on a globe. Considering how many people in America most likely can’t point to Brazil on a globe, it probably doesn’t mean much.

Now I shall go cry in a corner and drink my sorrows away. But we wont be drinking any of that shitty Budweiser beer since Belgium has gotten their grubby hands all over it. Between stealing our beer and taking over our Street Fighter movie main character, Belgium needs to stop trying to be like the US. Don’t even get me started on what they do to their french fries either. I mean seriously, mayo on a french fry? Everyone knows the only things you ever need to put on fries is Old Bay and Vinegar.

30Jun

Back To Work

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Well it went by faster than I thought it would, but the vacation is over and now we’re back at it once again. Of course now that we’re back we will have to get back into the swing of writing these posts and streaming amazing games and with a short week before the holidays I’m sure we will have loads of fun again. There will be plenty of time to go over all the random interesting things that I see every day so instead of going into that, lets get the quick hits of the vacation out of the way today.

World Cup madness:

Was a great time to take a week off from work since it was smack in the middle of group stages for the World Cup. Tons of great games and a lot of surprising outcomes from the group stages, but getting to go to the bars for the last two USA games against Portugal and Germany were so much fun. I was surprised how hard it was to find sweet USA swag in the stores at the beach, almost like the beach hates America. Since we weren’t able to get stupid crazy with full face paint, dyed hair, and flag capes (had this happened there would have been a picture for you all…Blame America hating beaches); instead we made up for it by getting crazy stupid drunk for the games. The golden rule of not asking the price on the beer special bit us in the ass for one game when we ended up paying way to much for not enough beer, but the 50 jello shooters we had before the Germany game made up for it. Overall loads of fun was had and I’m mostly sure the we remembered the entire game.

Did the dew:

The Dew Tour was in town the week I was down and as much as I didn’t know anything that was going on, it was a lot of fun. Extremely crowded which I don’t care for, but watching all the skaters and bikers going around doing their things was pretty cool. Outside of the actual dew tour action the best part of them being there was probably the beach concerts at night. The music was decent enough but that isn’t really why they were the best. They were the best because they happened late enough that you could enjoy a nice evening at the bar drinking more then you should, and then go hang out on the beach and be stupid with a bunch of other people who are also being stupid while listening to good music. It might not have been the amazing stuff on the stream playlist, but it was good enough to get stupid with.

Do you have an older sister?

I must have ended up saying that more times then I care to think about last week. I don’t know if it was my boyish good looks, my slothy attitude, or my extremely humble personality but there were so many girls coming up to me on the beaches. Normally I’m not one to complain about things like that, but when you are over 10 years older then they are, then it becomes a little strange. I think the saddest part was that no…they did not have an older sister.

The bad stuff:

Like everything not all was great. Nobody likes bad stuff and this is already longer then I wanted so lets just get through this one quick

Why no Nintendo? For all the years that I’ve gone down to our condo, this was the first year that the Nintendo Entertainment System could not be found. Was probably one of the saddest moments of my life when I realized I would have to go a week without any real games.
Waiters blow. Multiple nights when we went out to eat, we ended up waiting over an hour for food. This wouldn’t always be a problem except for the fact that while waiting the waiters did not come check if we needed more drinks which significantly cut back on the drink intake.
Arcades are expensive. It’s been a while since I’ve been to an arcade, but man have they gotten expensive. Everything is pretty much at least a dollar now and outside of better graphics aren’t that much different then they were years ago.

20Jun

Vacation

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Short post with nothing really all that interesting to talk about today. It is however that time of year again when I take my week long vacation to the beach with friends. Tonight will most likely be the last stream until the end of the month. There will be lots of drinking and lots of stupid stuff happening, so I’m sure there will be plenty of amazing stories to talk about when I get back. Be sure to check back as I will still occasionally be posting on here while I’m away. Also don’t forget to follow on twitter to keep up on all the stupid that happens.

Hope to see lots of people as we hang out tonight, and if not I’ll see you all when I get back.

19Jun

The Summer Sale

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The best part of summer started today with the annual Steam Summer Sale. That time of year when gamers everywhere can waste all their money buying games they will never play because they are on big discounts. Or perhaps I am the only person that does that. I’m sure this year will be eve worse since I’ve been pointed out towards the sales tracking over at steamdb.

I think we got a problem

It hasn’t even been 6 hours yet and I’ve already bought 31 games. The saddest part is that I probably wont even play half of those games but I had to get them because thanks to steamdb, I was able to find them on the cheap. Really though, can you even call it buying a game if they are only $0.50? It’t basically a free game at that point. So some might say that I’ve hardly bought any games at all.

18Jun

Amazons New Phone

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Amazon finally made the announcement for the worst kept is Amazon releasing a phone secret ever. With their announcement they also answered the very important question, how many camera does a phone need to be cool? If you’re like me and thought 1, then you obviously are not hip and need to learn the way of the selfie. If you thought 2 then you must be enjoying your outdated phones and be looking to upgrade. As Amazon showed today, to be cool you must have 6 cameras on your phone to be cool. Hopefully on the Fire Phone 2 all 6 cameras will be able to take pictures so that you can save so much time by taking 5 selfies at once while also taking a picture of the weird guy standing in front of you.

Yes it has the 3D technology that everyone was talking about before the announcement. It seemed ok, but I still think overall it’s more of a gimmick then a selling point. The coolest thing announced with the phone has to be Firefly. I like that it can call numbers for you from posters you scan, or other cool text parsing in images. Thats all well and good, but the best use for it will be finding items in the Amazon store after taking a picture of them. Now you don’t even need a third party app to go into Best Buy to window shop before making your final purchase on Amazon. Retail stores I’m sure must not be very excited about that prospect.

While reading about the phone, I was super excited. I’m probably as big of a Amazon homer as you can get. Been a prime member for years, have the credit card, buy everything on Amazon, and own 2 Kindles. I was super excited when reading the live updates during the announcement. I was even throwing my money at my monitor trying to get the site to take my money for the phone, but then they had to go and ruin everything. I don’t like AT&T. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences in the past with them on both their customer support and service coverage. When Amazon announced that it was going to be an AT&T exclusive, I immediately lost all interest in owning the phone. Hopefully with the Fire Phone 2 that will for sure be released next year, Amazon will come to their senses and release it on Verizon.

17Jun

The Hangover Moment

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If you’ve been around the stream before you’ve probably heard my talking about my life goal of having a bachelors party in vegas to recreate all the best moments from The Hangover. Who wouldn’t want to wake up one day after a long night of partying to find a tiger in the bathroom anyway? Today I found a backup plan just in case I am unable to make it to Vegas.

Turns out this other group of guys went camping for their bachelors party. Not quite the big spenders that Vegas would be, but who doesn’t like going into the woods with a ton of alcohol and adventuring around. I can only assume that while they were running away from some wild animal that they poked when they shouldn’t have that one of them tripped over something in the sand. That had to be the point when they see a giant face staring up at them and they realize they found something kind of interesting. The next part is what I actually found most interesting in the story. After they found the head they went and called the experts to come out and take a look to see what they found to later find out that it was a couple million year old stegomastodon fossil.

They did what now?

Yep, you heard it correctly. At a bachelors party in the woods, after finding something strange they call the experts? Maybe it’s just me but if I was at a bachelors party and found something strange, the last thing on my mind would be to leave it alone. I would have probably tried to dig it up, wear it as a hat, and then eventually strategically place it somewhere in the camp site to scare the shit out of my friends the next morning. Maybe it was one of those new bachelor parties I’ve been hearing so much about where they go to a pancake house for breakfast instead of doing anything fun.

16Jun

The $750,000 Collection

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Over at Game Gavel the owner of the largest video game collection in the world recently put that collection for sale. It is quite an impressive collection featuring over 11,000 different video games. I knew it was going to sell for more than the couple hundred thousand that I originally thought of, but I didn’t think it was going to make it up to $750k. Of course it contains many games from the systems you would expect including: Atari, Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and Dreamcast. But it also contains many games from systems that you might not expect to see like: Tomy Tutor, V Flash, and Leap Frog Leapster.

How was this guy able to get his hands on all these games you might ask? Well it’s pretty easy when you manage a chain of retail gaming stores. Even with that being able to get this many games and resist tearing into them to have week long gaming marathons is pretty impressive. It might sound like a collection that he will never be able to come close to acquiring again, but it’s not the first time he has sold his massive collections. Hopefully by selling this collection he will be able to give the help his family needs. Maybe with all the new found space, he can turn his home into the best house ever.

15Jun

Enemy Front – Impressions

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It used to be that you would hear about a new WWII fps game coming out every other week. For the last couple years though most companies seemed to have stopped living in the past and now cant stop looking into the future. That’s why I actually found it somewhat refreshing to see a new fps game that goes back and give a new entry into the WWII genre with Enemy Front.

In the game you play as a resistance fighter in France. Although the developers went back to a classic setting for an fps game, they did bring some of the newer features from games into the mix. There is more stealth available in the game then in most shooters that I’ve played recently although it was kind of hit and miss in the execution during the levels. Most of the time I found it easier to just run forward and kill everything then it was to try to sneak around. Additionally, when you end up with a sniper rifle in your hands, once in a while the camera will follow a bullet as it travels to its eventual target similar to what is found in the Sniper Elite series.

It wouldn’t be a shooter if it didn’t include multiplayer and Enemy Front provides the basics that you would expect in any shooter. You wont find the leveling or cover systems that most games have and instead just tried to focus on giving a classic multiplayer shooter experience. You can choose a primary and secondary weapon as a way to customize your guy. I can’t really say too much more about the multiplayer since every time I tried to play it, I was unable to connect to any servers. From the little bit I did get to play, it seemed like the gameplay although pretty basic would provide an ok experience.

What I liked:

Price. Although the game doesn’t give all the bells and whistles that you might expect from a new fps game these days, at $30 you get an ok game that has all the basics.
Graphics. Graphics normally aren’t that important to me, but the game does look really nice if you are able to turn the settings up

What I didn’t like:

The difficulty. Even when playing on the hardest setting, the game just isn’t very hard.
The AI. They aren’t the brightest bunch of soldiers you will run into on a battlefield.
The Multiplayer didn’t work very well. Like I said earlier, I was only able to connect to a server a couple times, and when I did it was a very laggy experience.

14Jun

Gamin With Mumbo: The Beginnings

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Not too long ago I listed the reasons why I took a break from streaming. So today I figured it would be fitting to answer another question that I used to get asked all the time; why I ever started streaming. Now that everyone and their mother seems to be streaming, most people probably don’t care, but back when I started in in July 2011, it was a very popular question. The reasons I started back then, are also the reasons I have recently gotten back into streaming again.

Forever alone no more

Before I started streaming I was in a transition period in my gaming life. Most of the people I was gaming with at the time were losing interest or not having time anymore and I ended up spending more and more time playing games solo. Streaming gave a new way to find new people who had not only the same interest I had in loving games, but also liked the same games I liked. Some of the people that I still play a lot of games with to this day are people that I met through streaming.

Even when I am not able to play games with the viewers who come into the channel, I am still able pass the time by just hanging out with them and the various conversations that occur. It can be difficult to follow the conversations sometimes while trying to play the game, but that can also provide some of the fun when I read half of what someone says and make up the rest as I go. This has turned into one of the things that I look forward to the most whenever I turn my stream on nowadays.

Single player with a group

As much as I like single player games, historically they have been nothing but a waste of money for me. I’ll bu them when they come out and then play them once or twice for a couple hours never to play them again. It’s not because they are bad games, but because I get bored when I’m playing games by myself. Although I still spend the majority of my time playing multiplayer games, streaming has turned single player games into a group activity for me. People can come and laugh at how I get lost in the most linear games possible, rage at puzzles that a five year old could solve faster than I do, or fail at the same point in a level for the thousandth time.

Even the trolls can teach

The competitive side of me always makes me strive to get better at any of the games I play. Streaming has opened the flood gates by letting anyone come in and be a backseat gamer. Whether a person is actually trying to be helpful or just trying to troll the channel, the advice is always welcome. Additionally, just like how explaining a process to another person can help yourself find problems, explaining why I do something or what I was thinking can help find problems in my play.

13Jun

Wrong Game Noob

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Thanks to the wonderful viewers at my stream for telling me about this story. Apparently the other day a couple people broke into a persons house to steal some guns and other stuff. Something that happens so often, it’s easy to forgive you if you don’t really care. This time it was different though. You see this time they ended up breaking into someones house, while they were in the middle of streaming their Dota 2 game. Watching the video you can see someone walk past the webcam a few times with a gun in his hand. Eventually the lights get turned off, and at the end it looks like they steal the webcam itself.

Why’d they do it:

I’m sure there are plenty of theories on why they broke into this house, but I’m going to give you my theory on why they decided to pick that house and at that time. Since from what I’ve heard the streamer was a relatively popular place to hang out, the people the broke in were problably viewers who were frustrated that she wasn’t playing the game they wanted to see, PayDay 2. Instead of going to a different stream that probably had maybe two viewers, they thought it would be better to just reenact the game themselves. So they grab some guns, use their hacking skills they picked up playing Watch Dogs to find out where she lived, and play PayDay 2 with her being one of the hostages.

One of them must not have played the game very much though, since he hung around the place too long until the police showed up and caught him. It you look closely at the video below, you can also see that they forgot to grab their masks. Lets how he spent some time playing Prison Break so he will know what to do when he is convicted.

All jokes aside, it’s good to know that nobody was hurt and I hope that they are able to get their stuff back soon.