Darsch Pugs here with the first of my Atlas journal entries. These will be done in character as I feel it is more fitting since I am playing on a role play server. I will however break character in the journal when needed to explain things or game mechanics.

Journal Entry 1

I am Mirac Pugs, first of my name. With no recollection of my past I woke up on a desert island in a free port, the former crew I sailed with were missing and my memory of all event prior to awakening with them. All I remember is a rowdy drunken night in a tavern and that is it. [this was the very first load into the server after character creation, you load into a free port naked]

I awoke to finding myself with nothing but the shorts I had on and a hangover. I meandered along the paths of the free port and the small outlying area just outside of the port looking for some supplies and that is when I met my friend Ming Tao. Ming was in a similar situation to mine. We made a pact to find our lost memories together, or to make new ones and move on. Together we worked to build a raft and left that island behind in high hopes. My hopes however were soon shattered as I fell sick from what I assume to be a vitamin deficiency and fell overboard. [my vitamin levels dropped to low and I started to die, then my internet connection went out so my limp body fell off the raft and I died]

The current dragged me to a new island with a larger free port and here I stayed for a couple of days resting until I was reunited with Ming. [the role play server did a relaunch after a wipe and so myself and the player of Ming decided to keep our characters rp and this is where I logged into a new free port upon creating my character]

Ming had made contact with a group calling itself the Take and Trade Company, and he happened to be in port looking for new recruits, so naturally I signed up. We travelled to the company’s temporary base of operations to find it over run with large wolves baying at the doors and trying to break in. By the gods I have never seen such large wolves in my life, they were damn near the size of horses and just as quick! My introduction would have to wait as I grabbed a bow and helped to defend against the beasts, we killed 6 in total with four falling to my bow that day.

After the wolves were dealt with I was introduced to Adustus, the company’s admiral, the company’s chef Angel bonny, and another Captain, Ezekiel. All a right friendly and lively lot. Each with their own specialized skill set and desires. I regret I have as of yet to fully get to know anyone outside Ming though. My duties as a seaman kept me busy harvesting resources and fighting off the many beasts I encountered.

The island we were on was full of elephants, wolves, rattlesnakes, giant snakes, giant spiders and scorpions. There were plenty of boar and horses as well as beautiful parrots and sneaky monkeys. It was during one of my many incursions into the forests off the beach the shipyard was set up at was that I encountered both a giant spider and a giant snake. I was quick with my bow and defended myself against the spider, it had trapped me in some webbing and managed to bite me, the giant snake struck me from behind, I could feel both sets of venom coursing through my body sickening me, m,y vision becoming blurry, I barely managed to escape, but I made it back to our base, and then it happened, I was stung by a scorpion on my way into the base, and fainted once I made to where I intended to lie down to rest. I may have a strong bit of fortitude, but even the most hardy of men eventually succumb to enough venom and I was asleep for three days.

I woke to find myself on a raft, our base destroyed, all my gear gone, and a note saying to come to Gorgon’s Haven island, apparently while I still was recovering we relocated to a new island. I immediately went to work harvesting more supplies upon my arrival on Gorgon’s Haven. [I was killed by a wolf through the wall before the relocation started and logged in after the relocation was finished]

After some time, maybe two to three days, Admiral Adustus and myself went on a voyage to hire some more crew, the admiral and other had collected some gold and our new ship was finished, it was a small but fast vessel, and I was overjoyed to man the sails on it. With the admiral at the wheel and me in the cows nest and handling the sails we would soon make it to the free port to hire some crew. We would first though have to brave the dangers of the open sea, we sailed through several hurricanes, dodged and weaved through water spouts, skirted the dangers of ghost ships and made it to port in one piece. We hired a stalwart crew [of the npc kind to man the sails and ship repairs] and made the return trip home. We would never make it home however. Disaster struck, one of the ships of the damned caught wind of us, and their vessel was just to quick for our dear Gorgon’s Whore to outrun. Their cannons made quick work of our ship with their demonic roars and that eerie green smoke trailing behind those hellish balls they fired, and we lost all the new crew we hired as well as all of our gold in just a few cannon salvos from the undead bastards. [Both Adustus and I died to the sharks in the water when we had to abandon ship]

So it is with all these event’s that I decided I should set pen to paper and chronicle my adventures, lest I forget anew what has transpired in my life, and for future generations to know my tale.

We hope you enjoyed Day 1 of Darsch’s player diary of ATLAS, if you want to chat about the game, please join us in Discord and remember Darsch will be joining Katoe sttreaming atlas on Tuesday night’s, 9pm GMT on the station twitch!

Here’s Katoe’s stream from last week [it didn’t go well 😀 ~Lonesamurai]

To celebrate the release of Just Cause 4, Sanitarium.FM’s patrons received exclusive artwork of the games main hero, Rico Rodriguez by our artist in residence, PhaseChan.

Check out the process behind the portrait below:

Love this illustration? Sanitarium.FM patrons get exclusive Game Of The Month artwork every month, support the station today to start receiving your prints

ATLAS: The ultimate survival MMO of unprecedented scale with 40,000+ simultaneous players in the same world. Join an endless adventure of piracy & sailing, exploration & combat, roleplaying & progression, settlement & civilization-building, in one of the largest game worlds ever! Explore, Build, Conquer!

[New reviewer Darsch will be taking on ATLAS, the new MMO from Grapeshot Games, in an ongoing diary of gameplay, join us in Discord if you’re playing and chat about your experiences! ~Lonesamurai]

ATLAS. The pirate survival MMO I never knew I needed, surrounded by controversy over its rough early access launch rendering it unplayable for many players. Then there are game files which are copied from ARK Survival Evolved and its expansions. Many people believed upon this revelation that the game was just an ARK asset flip. Players bemoaned the “launch” saying the game was not ready. More on this in a moment first I want to tackle the ark asset flip accusations.

What is Atlas? For starters it sure as hell is not ARK. The only thing the same about the two are shared game file names, the survival theme, and game engine. Ark had stat points and engrams which are just blueprints you learned to be able to craft items, Atlas has skill trees that modify everything about your character, unlocks special abilities, teaches you how to make things, and unlocks additional skills lines, while forcing you to specialize. For example my character unlocked the bow skill line as well as the taming skill line from the basic survival skill line. From there I went down the bow skill tree learning how to make fire arrows and zipline arrows and how to do the special attack penetrating shot which penetrates armor and hits all mobs in a straight line. These special abilities are called feats and are something ark does not possess. Atlas is not an asset flip, all the art assets are new, new game mechanics such as managing your vitamin levels, having to catch the wind with your sails at the correct angles to even be able to move your ships and raft are all new, the files sharing the same name as ARK’s I can completely dismiss as Atlas feels so much different.

“Well the game was launched incomplete, broken, buggy, and laggy!” some would say. They are just plain wrong and ignorant of what early access means. So time to get this off my chest, early access is a fucking paid alpha people, its an incomplete game sold at a discount to get money to continue development and test the game! The game has not even officially launched yet, that won’t be for another two years as the devs have said in multiple interviews.

Yes the game’s early access start was terrible with server pings of 250 ms, terrible frame rate , and some game breaking bugs. The devs worked non stop on the game, some putting in 24 hours a day even to get this game playable. The servers have 120 ms ping still on official servers but I have not experienced any more lag or frame drops. Considering everything wrong and that they did numerous patches the first week that we went from version 1.0 to 7.0 and higher now is astonishing and the devs even apologized for the the rough early access start. I have never in all my years been this impressed and humbled by a game dev team, color me impressed. The was playable on the 27th of December 2018. On top of all the hard work they were doing on their own game servers they helped groups like TwitchRP set up and fix their own private servers

The devs have gone above and beyond the call of their duties, worked endlessly on the game, and care about their players and game. They continue to fix things and balance things while trying to give us the best play experience possible for a game still in the development stages and in testing. Also this game is fucking great.

ATLAS is available now in Early Access on STEAM – https://www.playatlas.com/

Keep an eye here for more news and play diary’s as we dive more into the game

~Darsch

To celebrate the release of Fallout 76, Sanitarium.Fm’s patrons received exclusive artwork of the games Scorchbeast boss by our artist in residence, PhaseChan.

Check out the process behind the portrait below:

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Same sick burns, same smoldering attitude, now all scaled up in stunning HD, Spyro is back in the Spyro™ Reignited Trilogy! Rekindle the fire with the original three games, Spyro™ the Dragon, Spyro™ 2: Ripto’s Rage! and Spyro™: Year of the Dragon, all in fully-remastered

To say that I was excited for this release is an understatement – The original Spyro trilogy on the PS1 has held a special place in my heart for the last 20 years, ever since I first played Spyro 1 at a friends house back when I was at school after which I then instantly needed to have my own Playstation and a copy of the game.

After the release of Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy, I couldn’t help but feel hopeful for a Spyro remaster, and since it’s announcement I had been anxious to play it and relive my joyful experiences of obsessing over Gems, collecting the final Dragon or Egg I needed and relive the ‪epic soundtracks‬ of the games. I even booked a day off work to play them on their release day, and to make sure they were installed and ready to go as soon as possible. After what felt like an eternity, the game was finally installed onto my Hard drive after downloading a 40GB update and I was able to play Spyro: Reignited Trilogy. And how blissful it was.

Spyro moves and feels exactly how he did 20 years ago which for someone like myself, was exactly what I wanted. The levels are beautifully redesigned with bright colours, great definition with a wonderfully reimagined cast of characters. Each of the dragons in Spyro 1 has their own defined character and personality when you free them and even though the original script is intact, the new voice actors suit them all well.

The charm about the first game is its simplicity – collecting every last dragon and gem is something of a satisfying obsession whilst you dive into a world of fantasy and magic (although Tree Tops still remains as tricky as I remember!) The second and third games add new abilities including swimming and the ability to hover, which mixes things up and means you can revisit a level once you’re able to access a new section of it.

One thing to remember is that these three games were designed for kids so for any hard core gamer new to the series looking for a challenge, these games may become a little boring or samey after the first few hours, but this is only a minor thing.

Overall, as far as a remaster goes, these games are perfect. The only thing I found slightly frustrating was a small glitch which meant that gems would disappear in a level, even after I had defeated every enemy and visited every section. This was easily rectified if I simply killed myself – this would force any enemy containing a gem I was missing to respawn – in order for me to then defeat them and claim the gem. This only happened twice during the first game and wasn’t that troublesome. I didn’t encounter any other glitches or issues.

If you loved the original games on the PS1, I cannot recommend picking this up enough for not only the nostalgia, but for the fact that it’s just so relaxing to play. You can even switch the Sound in the Pause Menu to play the original soundtrack rather than the reignited version, something I was very happy to see as the soundtracks were one of the best things about the series in my opinion. If you’re looking for a family friendly platformer, I’d say this is also for you!

Spyro: Reignited Trilogy is available now on XBox One and Playstation 4, head over to spyrothedragon.com for more info.

I personally give it a thousand out of ten but that’s so bias as it’s so personal and nostalgic, so 9/10!
~Phasechan