It seems like everything has a board game these days. I wouldn't think that a license like Dark Souls or Bloodborne would warrant a board / card game adaptation, but apparently, I'm just not creative enough. The kickstarted Dark Souls board game is shaping up to be something similar to Descent, and is slated for release later this year. Bloodborne, on the other hand, already has a card game sitting on the shelf of a hobby store near you since last year. A copy of the game showed up under my Christmas tree this year.

Bloodborne: the Card Game Is very easy to learn, and it plays very fast and smooth! This is good, since most of my games are epic-length, 4-plus-hour games that we rarely have time to play. So it's always good to find a new game that people like and which can be played in an hour or less. Our first learning game of Bloodborne (including reading the rules) took about an hour and a half. We had planned on playing a sample round to learn the rules and then doing a mulligan on the game, but we didn't even need to because the game process is so simple that we all grasped the basic mechanics pretty much immediately.

"Selfish Phlebotomy": A game of kill-stealing

The game is a competitive card drafting game in which players sort-of cooperate to defeat a series of monsters, but compete against each other to score the most points. It's basically a Bloodborne-themed reskin of Cutthroat Caverns. Thematically, each player takes on the role of a hunter, the group fights a series of monsters in a Chalice Dungeon, and the hunters acquire Blood Echoes (points) by fighting and killing the monsters. Blood Echoes are directly earned by damaging a monster with a weapon attack. Each player who deals damage to a monster in the round in which the monster is killed also gains one or more trophies (based on the strength of the monster), which are converted to Blood Echoes at the end of the game for scoring.

You're playing for Blood Echoes, which are lost if you die - unless you bank them in the Hunter's Dream.

The major mechanical gimmick of this game (and the one that is most inspired by the source material, and which most separates it from Cutthroat Caverns) is that when a player's character dies, that character loses all of his or her collected Blood Echoes, and then resurrects to fight again the next round. However, a player can use an action during the round to return to the Hunter's Dream and bank their collected Blood Echoes so that they cannot be lost. While in the Hunter's Dream, a player can also select new cards to add to his or her hand, and going to the Hunter's Dream is the only way to cycle your previously-played cards back into your hand. The drawback, of course, is that you can't participate in the fight and gain more blood. It's a risk / reward mechanic, and it works very well.

It's tax season, which is not something that I ever write about on this blog. But this year, I had a very irregular experience. It wasn't with my taxes; rather, it was with my dad's attempts to use this year's TurboTax software. He'd been using TurboTax for years with no problem, but this year, the program wouldn't install. He's not exactly tech-savvy, so he had to call me to help him troubleshoot.

TurboTax fails to install due to some unspecified issue with the .NET Framework.

Upon attempting to install the program, he gets a very un-descriptive error message that simply states there was a problem installing TurboTax. Then a dialogue pops up stating that TurboTax is attempting to fix the problem by checking the file system, registry, and .Net framework. It's the .Net Framework step where TurboTax fails with yet another very un-specific error.

We tried updating Windows, disabling anti-virus software, and even opened up the registry to make sure that all the requisite versions of .Net Framework were installed. No luck.

Unable to resolve the problem itself, TurboTax referred us to a troubleshooting web page.

TurboTax referred us to this troubleshooting page, which includes instructions for downloading and running various .Net Framework repair tools and other system file integrity tools. In my dad's case, none of this stuff worked. As a last resort, the troubleshooting guide referred me to a blog post by Microsoft developer Aaron Stebner, who wrote about a .Net Framework cleanup tool that could potentially be used to resolve the issue...

Before we get very far into this, I want to acknowledge a point that you might be thinking right now: "But MegaBearsFan, Yorshka tells us who her parents are!" Or at least, she tells us that her father is Gwyn and her sister is Gwynevere and her "brother" is Gwyndolin. Seems pretty cut-and-dry right? OK, blog post over. If I keep writing on topics like this, I'm going to become very prolific!

... Well, maybe it's not quite that simple. This all seems rather fishy, and I'm not so sure if I'm willing to take Yorshka's words at face value. We still have the Ringed City DLC coming out for Dark Souls III at the end of this month, so it's entirely possible that DLC will settle the questions raised in this post. But until then, please humor me as I take a dive down a bit of a rabbit hole.

Yorshka directly states that Dark Sun Gwyndolin is her brother.

Before we go any further, let's take a look at what Yorshka actually says - her full dialogue can be conveniently read on fextralife (among other Souls wikis). When you meet Yorshka and perform the Darkmoon loyalty, she mentions:

"If thou shalt swear by the Covenant, to become a shadow of Father Gwyn and Sister Gwynevere,
A blade that shall hunt the foes of our lords;
Then I place thee under the aegis, and the power, of the Darkmoon."

If you level up in the covenant, she'll go on to talk about her relation to Dark Sun Gwyndolin:

"The Darkmoon Knights were once led by my elder brother, the Dark Sun Gwyndolin.
But he was stricken by illness, and leadership of the knights fell to me.
Then Sulyvahn wrongfully proclaimed himself Pontiff, and took me prisoner.
Oh where could my dear brother be?"

If you take this all at face value, then it seems pretty cut-and-dry, but take another look at the actual subtitle text. When she talks about Gwyn and Gwynevere, she uses the words "Father" and "Sister" (respectively), implying that Yorshka may be the daughter of Gwyn and blood sister to both Gwynevere and Gwyndolin. However, notice that, unlike when speaking of her brother, the words "Father" and "Sister" are capitalized, as if they are proper nouns or - more likely - titles...

"If you own a PS4, and you aren't playing Bloodborne, then you are using your PS4 wrong!" That was the final line of my Bloodborne review. PS4 exclusives have been generally better than XBoxOne exclusives, but I haven't been particularly impressed yet. Until Dawn showed some promise and might be the only other PS4 exclusive that I'd even consider recommending. I gave up on Gran Turismo when GT4 started to turn into more of a car-collecting game rather than a racing game (I describe it as "Pokemon for cars"), and I've long since burnt out of the Uncharted games. I heard good things about the Ratchet & Clank reboot, but mascot platformers aren't really my thing, so I passed on that one. And I haven't gotten to play Horizon Zero Dawn yet.

Nioh has fast, dodge-heavy combat, in which each weapon had multiple move-sets.

Well now there's a new PS4-exclusive on the market, and it's supposed to be competition for the Souls-Borne series. Nioh definitely shares a lot of superficial design elements with Dark Souls, and its fast, dodge-heavy combat using weapons that have multiple movesets seems thoroughly inspired by Bloodborne. But Nioh is also heavily inspired by Ninja Gaiden, and the game feel is very close to the classic Onimusha games. Although the original Ninja Gaiden was a good game for its time (and some of the sequels have been good too), it's these Ninja Gaiden influences that start to hamper the experience for me.

A random loot-dropping quarter-muncher

Nioh really started to lose me with its second true boss fight: Hino-Enma, a flying vampire and/or succubus who deals paralysis. The problem was that most damage just seemed unavoidable. All her attacks dealt damage through my blocks, which meant that dodging was the only way to keep alive. But she has a cheap spinning attack that (as far as I could tell) could not be dodged if you are in melee range when she starts the attack. All of her attacks felt considerably overpowered considering the limited (if present at all) wind-ups and cool-downs for them, especially the frustrating paralysis-inducing attacks. Even when she left openings, my attacks didn't stagger her, so she often countered with her own combo when I was in the middle of an attack, which just leeched precious more health. She just kept chipping away at my health like an arcade quarter-muncher, making the fight feel less about skill and more about just being efficient enough to defeat her before I ran out of elixirs. The only way to get more elixirs was to backtrack through the level and grind for them.

Bosses feel severely overpowered for their missions, and are tedious and uninteresting to boot.

After using a Travel Amulet to pick up my lost Amarita and return to the shrine, I power-leveled to 10 levels over the mission recommendation. This finally allowed me to beat Hino-Enma, but left me severely over-leveled for the next mission, which I cleared with absolutely no trouble at all. But then I got to that mission's boss (a lightning-spewing dog name Nue), and got repeatedly pulverized again. Even after grinding through some of the nearby Yokai (which posed virtually no threat to me at my level) to accumulate extra elixirs, I still didn't have enough to get through this boss's mile-long health bar. I don't mind being stonewalled occasionally, and I don't mind bosses being hard, but I expect the challenge to be more evenly-distributed. Am I missing some simple technique for dealing with bosses? Are the missions leading up to bosses supposed to be so trivial to deal with?...

Jay Cutler is out, and former Buccaneer Mike Glennon is in.

The Chicago Bears have wasted no time in making major roster shake-ups in the 2017 off season. In a long-overdue move, Chicago finally released quarterback Jay Cutler. He was still under contract, so the Bears will suffer a salary cap hit, but it shouldn't hurt their ability to sign players at needed positions.

Hoyer and Barkley will still
be teammates in San Fran.

To replace Cutler, the Bears signed two-year Tampa Bay backup quarterback Mike Glennon to a 3-year contract worth roughly $45 million. It's a high price to pay for an unproven player who's already been benched in his career. Glennon has been praised for his arm strength and intelligence, but he hasn't handled pressure very well and his accuracy is questionable. Pressure will be a problem too, as the Bears have been in the bottom half of the league in sacks allowed for quite a few years now. Though at least some of those sacks can probably be attributed to Jay Cutler holding onto the ball too long. But Glennon is young and has plenty of room to develop; whereas, Cutler has been a pretty known quantity for quite some time now

The Bears also lost backups Bryan Hoyer and Matt Barkley to the 49ers, leaving Connor Shaw (who was injured last preseason) as the only current backup going into the NFL Draft in April...