Gaming – Andrew Goldenberg

The Finals, My Favorite New Game

13 Feb

The Finals is a game in the FPS genre that is absolutely free to play and is a cool new concept in FPS games.

From the publisher:

Viewers at home, here’s the news you’ve been waiting to hear: THE FINALS is accepting new contestants, and that means YOU! That’s right, soon the world could be watching YOU tear apart our newest dynamic arenas and seize everlasting fame!

As you know, THE FINALS is the world’s greatest free-to-play combat game show! Our contestants plug in to our virtual world and join teams in escalating tournaments. They fight it out in our beautifully-rendered arenas based on real-world locations that they can alter, exploit, and even destroy.

Sure, you can aim and shoot, but contestants that add our carefully curated virtual environments to their arsenal are more likely to advance, so do anything you can imagine in the name of victory! Burn arenas to the ground! Send wrecking balls crashing into your opponents! Don’t just pull triggers – pull down buildings!

The Finals is a virtual game show where you as the “contestant” along with your team, take on two other teams in an arena based in futuristic maps.

The goal is to collect coin boxes from vaults, and deposit the cash into a deposit box before the other teams destroy you, or steal your deposit.

You are given several options to build your own “Contestant” and make them your own. You can fully customize your player with various hair colors, clothes and equipment, and even outfit your weapons with stickers and charms! There is an insane amount of customization!

There are also three different weight classes for your Contestant. You can choose from Light, Medium, and Heavy builds each with their own drawbacks and benefits.

Light Contestants

Light contestants have a small amount of HP, move quickly, and are super agile. They have a lighter weapon selection and are best for getting in quickly, damaging enemy players, and getting out. They are typically quick to die when faced with heavier builds.

Medium Contestants

Medium contestants are, as the name implies, perfectly average. Average hp, average movement speed, and middle weight weapons such as assault rifles and heavier shotguns. They can take more damage than a light player and are essential in my opinion to a winning team.

Heavy Contestants

Heavy contestants have a ton of HP, move very slowly, and have access to very heavy weapons such as an RPG launcher, a powerul machine gun, and ever a sledge hammer! They are great for getting into the thick of combat and being able to withstand multiple enemies firing on them at the same time.

Destructible Environments

The coolest and most interesting thing that brings a new strategy to the FPS genre is that nearly everything in the arenas is destructible. Think you’re safe because you’re surrounded by concrete walls? Think again! Those walls can be blown apart and suddenly you are completely exposed!

Protecting your cash out from the other team? Don’t be surprised when the floor blows out from under you and the enemy team steals it from you!

Overall I’ve really enjoyed this game, and am still learning how to be “good” at it! But if you’re looking for something different, The Finals is a fresh new take!

It’s been a while friend……………….

17 Jul

Why hello there dear blog!

It’s been quite some time since I last wrote something here about life, love and the pursuit of happiness. I’ve been steadily working on those goals I talked about in one of my previous posts. Mainly the savings, smoking and eating things, since the rest has already kinda worked out and happened for me.

I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a podcast as well, but I still rolling a couple of different ideas around in the old noggin. I’m also considering trying to stream, however I feel like at the moment it would be too loud / disturbing for anyone else in the house trying to sleep.

Anywho that’s about all there is to report at this point in time! Thanks to anyone who reads this little blog of mine! <3

This is What 37 Looks Like

6 Apr

April 3rd 2022 was my 37th birthday and I celebrated with my family not only being a year older, but also a year wiser.

Life has been interesting since the start of the pandemic to today. A lot of things have changed, but more importantly, I am starting to reach some of my adult goals.

Mentally I’ve established a few goals for myself that I have never put on paper or written them down anywhere. I figured with my birthday having just passed, I should write them down and see how far I’ve come in life. There’s a few I’ve managed to cross off the list, and others that are still in the works, so here we go:

Fall in love and get married.
Have a couple of kids and raise them with my wife.
Get into a career that I am happy with.
Make some money and help people.
$100K in savings before 40.
100 Pounds lost this year.
Quit Smoking for Good.
Form better eating habits.

There are a few items above that are still a work in progess however overall, I am quite happy with how far I’ve come!

Looking Ahead to 2022

22 Dec

Let’s face it….. 2021 well… in a word…. SUCKED!

COVID-19 maintaned its stranglehold on our country and it seems like no matter what we do, we can’t get out of this pandemic quite yet.

People are suffering immense losses from businesses, to friends and family. It’s truly tragic to witness.

I personally have been fortunate enough that myself and my family all live under one roof with the exception of my younger brother. Thanks to technology, I have been able to maintain contact with him as well as friends that are all over the country and overseas.

For those of you who can’t see friends and family during the holidays I really feel for you. Those of you who can be with friends and family during the holidays, cherish the time you have. There are a lot of people who can’t.

To those of you who are struggling and need someone to talk to, please reach out. I am happy to hear you out and offer some advice, or just an ear to hear your story and offer some kind encouragement to stay here. You are loved, you are appreciated, and god damn it, you are worth it.

There’s a few things that I would like to do in 2022 and try my hand at.

My kids have recently expressed interest in making video content on YouTube and sharing their gaming experiences on their ipads. Personally this is something I have thought about doing for quite a while. I’ve tried my hand at streaming on Twitch, as well as making a YouTube video here and there. Ideally I would like to get more consistent and experienced with the tools such as Adobe Premiere, OBS Studio, green screens, and everything else that goes along with video production. In 2022, no more excuses. I have the tech, I have the patience, and everything I need to know can be learned. So in 2022 I want to put together a consistent content schedule, and keep things up to date while improving my skill set when it comes to creative work. If you have any great tips or tutorials, I would love for you to leave me a comment and let me know.

In 2022 I’d also get back to a regular schedule of gaming. Whether it’s playing a game with my kids, or Fornite or Counter-Strike, or something on my Nintendo switch. I’d like to get back to spending more time on it like I used to as a kid / teenager. I made a lot of amazing friends, and relationships from the games I played back then and would like to experience that some more in 2022.

The last thing I would like to do a lot more of in 2022 is take more time for my family. My mother, my brothers, my wife, my kids, and friends that are like family. I want to spend more time with them and less time focused on work.

Hopefully 2022 will be less of a disaster than 2021 has proven to be, and I am looking forward to seeing you all in a better place next year.

Avoid PlayOJO Like the Plague!

11 Nov

Many of you may know that I generally like gambling and find it to be a fun passtime if you can afford it.

That being said, it’s incredibly difficult to find an “honest” casino much like it’s hard to find a reasonably priced lawyer. Almost every online casino boasts some kind of rediculous RTP or “Return to Player”. This is the amount of funds returned to the playerbase by the casino. The problem with that is it is incredibly untruthful.

Let me explain.

A lot of casinos will show the RTP of a given slot machine as being 96-97%. Meaning 97 cents of every dollar gambled is rewarded back to the player base. What they generally don’t explain is the percentage is based on millions if not billions of slot bets.

So lets say over the course of a year you gamble $1,000 in theory $960 of that is returned to the player base however, what it really means is you lost a grand and at some point they will give that $960 to someone else. RTP is not based on a single player but rather the whole playerbase. This means an online casino can suck millions of dollars out of its player base, and then reward a couple players with $100K and keep the rest of the balance while remaining true to their RTP. In other words, it’s a load of bull shit!

One of the most egregious offenders is PlayOJO.com. If you have a look on TrustPilot.com PlayOJO has one of the worst ratings possible. The reason for this is a couple of things.

Their support staff are incompetent for the most part.
They are completely unaware of how Interac works while still offering it as a deposit and withdrawal mechanism.
They advertise themselves as the worlds “fairest” casino which is an outright lie.
Their games payout very infrequently. I will say I have one a large sum here once but that was over the course of 3 years gambling on this one specific site.
Bonus games never pay and usually pay out the pitty amount.

Specifically with item #5 a lot of the games have bonus games triggered by three scatter icons on the slot reels. Generally these bonus games will have a pitty payment (a minimum it’ll pay out regardless of the result of the bonus game). This is generally the only amount you’re going to see which is typically 10x your bet. So a bet of $1 would yield $10 IF you hit an extremely rare bonus as they come up very infrequently.

Some games allow you to buy the bonus game at a rate of 100x your bet level. If you want a $5 bonus, it’ll cost you $500 and likely pay you $50. So the game providers value the bonus at 100x and very seldom will ever pay more than 10x. PlayOJO is one of the worst offenders of this. The games on their site very rarely, if ever go above that pitty pay of 10x your bet and in the course of playing $100 you would be very lucky to see a single bonus game.

If you’re looking for an online casino to try out, let me recommend Wildz.com. While they also do not pay out all the time, they frequently hit bonuses that pay at least over the 10x multiple so you don’t feel like you got robbed when you played $200 worth and then land a bonus for $20.

As always, only gamble what you can afford to loose, and if you need a resource or help with a gambling problem, please reach out to BeGambleAware.

Gambling is something to do for fun once in a while and you will never break even or even come close, so please only every gamble what you can afford to loose, and don’t ever try and win it back once you’ve lost it. If you feel the need to, you’ve gambled too much and should seek help at BeGambleAware.