May 2013 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Best Fantasy Ever

May 31, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I just said “fuck it” and hit the snooze button. This is not a practice I normally do, since I usually end up feeling far more tired after doing so… but today is Friday… and last night was another one of our Oklahoma “watch the skies” nights. I feel like as a whole today may just be a “fuck it” day in general. I feel like I don’t have much of anything to really talk about, but by god I am going to do it anyway.

Chaos Reigns

Last night I started the evening attempting to play some Star Wars the Old Republic. However ultimately the constant distraction of the tornado cells coming through our area lead to nothing but me getting killed over and over by afking in the wrong place. Basically I needed to play something with a pause button last night, and that ruled out all of my MMOs. Last week a discussion with Syl about Jesters ended up bringing up one of my favorite video game villains of all time… Kefka. She mentioned that her favorite rendition was in the game Dissidia… and I thought to myself… man I wonder why I never played that?

Sometimes you see a game so often, that you develop this picture in your head of what the game will be like to play. For the case of Dissidia, I had built up this image in my head of a this massive fan service JRPG that comes up with a loose excuse to involve all your favorite characters from vastly different final fantasy games. So while the fan service part was definitely correct, the rest of the game resembles almost nothing of a traditional Japanese RPG game.

The game as a whole is about Chaos over throwing Order… and that is precisely what playing it felt like to me. It works absolutely nothing like I expected. Essentially you pick one of the cast of characters, the engage in a series of game boards… that you have to move across by clearing obstacles in your way. When you encounter an obstacle… you have to fight them in this truly bizarre behind the back view fighting game. All of the fights so far have been repetitive and essentially a time waster, but I have this feeling that when I actually encounter a boss fight it will be like the floor dropping out from under me.

Essentially it feels like an extremely flimsy excuse to pack a game with a bunch of cinematic of characters you know and love interacting together. Each time you clear one of these game board, you are treated to a 3D cut scene of your character doing whatever they do best… usually brooding. Along the way you pick up gear that slightly improves your ability to knock down these straw men villains that get put in your path. I am sure on the boss fights you will have to have the best of all possible gear to make it through them.

There is some kind of weird mini-game involving a chocobo and carrots that I have not quite figured out what is going on with it. I am sure it is important, but I have yet to notice anything happening other than every so often a pixelated chocobo shows up on screen and eats a carrot. Additionally there is an absolutely insane unlock system that allows you to play as other characters, unlock other costumes and even character voices. The most confusing of these is what looks almost like a cash shop… but I don’t see any RMT hooks in the game at all.

Basically after playing Dissidia for 2 hours… I am still not really sure if I like the game or not. There is so much of it that is the epitome of repetitive gameplay, however I found myself continuing to play it in spite of this. I made it through the tutorial… that didn’t really teach me anything… and a few game boards into the Cloud storyline before I decided to give up. This is definitely going to be a game I return to, because it is like this super confusing puzzle that is going to annoy me until I solve it. There is so much going on in this game, and it has such a devoted following that I feel like I have to figure out why.

Best Fantasy Ever

Another title I had dug up for the PSP was the Super Nintendo turned Gameboy Advance turned Playstation turned PSP remake of my favorite of all JRPGs… Final Fantasy VI… or as I played it originally Final Fantasy III. I was really late getting turned onto this game, it was not until Christmas break that I ended up giving this game a spin. I rented it from the local video store… and then when it came time to turn it in… tried valiantly to purchase the cart from them so I could maintain my game saves. I gathered up all the cash I had gotten over Christmas, and picked up the game at Toys R Us… then spent what felt like the next 4 months playing it.

There was just so much going on in this game. It had a great cast of characters, awesome steampunk meets magic theme… and for the time the graphics were truly amazing. This to me is the pinnacle of the Final Fantasy experience, and everything since has been a downhill ride for me. Much like me being able to replay Symphony of the Night over and over… this is on the same list… but I have never really done so. I’ve never been that big into the various mobile gaming systems post green and black gameboy. So I have essentially be relegated to playing this title on emulators for the last decade.

Now that I have it on the PSP, I am really looking forward to a proper play through again. I started it back up last night, but only really made it towards the end of Narshe before sleep claimed me. Previously I had been taking my laptop into work, and going upstairs and gaming over my lunch hour. Right now my plan is to just bring my psp in with me, and play it while everyone else is on their laptops. I just wish I had a proper way to take screenshots from my psp… because I would love to be able to chronicle my journey through the game. I might have to research that… since I have custom firmware… wondering if something like that exists.

Wrapping Up

A friend of mine finally got around to using the free game and expansion codes I gave him over in Rift. I told him that he needed to do so soon, because anyone with Storm Legion would get grandfathered into a bunch of stuff when the F2P conversion hits. He said he might be around tonight, so I will be breaking out of of my lowbie characters and hanging out with him. Looking forward to listening to him discover that game as we play together over mumble. Already there have been a bunch of excited IMs traded back and forth… and he has only played the game for about 20 minutes.

This weekend we have a double whammy of my mothers birthday on Saturday, and my wife’s mothers birthday on Sunday. I am sure that will ultimately dictate what our weekend is like. Additionally tonight is supposed to be another bad tornado night… and potentially worse than last. So we will be watching the skies and hoping for the best. I hope you all have much better days than what mine sounds like it is going to be.

Crash of the Titan

May 30, 2013 by Belghast

I am going to try and move quickly through my post this morning, just not sure how successful I will be. I have a super busy day ahead of me. At 8 am I am supposed to be at a development conference here in town, and after the first section… I need to head back to work to try and work out the kinks in a program that has to go live on June 1st. Needless to say I am stressing more than a little bit at the rushed schedule.

Brand Loyalty

To make matters worse I have decided to pick a topic that I have been wanting to write about for a few days, but not really found the time to sit down and put pen to paper… or in my case keyboard to words? On 5/28 it was revealed in a Venture Beat article, that the infamous Project Titan would be delayed until at least 2016. This announcement of course has caused various ripples in the blogosphere and twitterland, most of which relatively negative. This is going to be my attempt to wrap my head around the issue.

WoW is back in a state of decline based on an early May report that they were down another 1.3 million players. I myself have done the resub and cancel dance a few times since the release of Pandaria. Ultimately people play wow not out of a sense of loyalty to the content anymore… people play wow because people play wow. The best thing about wow is also likely the most fleeting. It is the only MMO that has been able to accumulate that many subscribers in one place at one time.

Players need cycling back to WoW in most part as a way to hang out with their WoW friends. For those who are relatively new to the blog I will give a quick bio. In 2004 on launch day I founded a little guild called House Stalwart. At that point we had roughly 50-60 players and over the course of the ebb and flow of expansions, we reached our pinnacle at the launch of Cataclysm… with roughly 800 characters in the guild, divided up by a completely indeterminate number of accounts. At this time we had 4 active raid teams, and more than enough players to do anything with at any time. We have never reached the Alea Iacta Est levels of having 13+ guilds melded together through the use of an addon… but we were fairly large.

The Shedding

Since that time I have seen two things happen over and over. Firstly players got tired of the gameplay and when something they liked better came along… they moved over to that. There were pretty massive exodus points with the launch of Rift and Star Wars the Old Republic… but there have been smaller little conversions going on as well. Secondly I have seen a good number of players simply leaving because of life. They no longer wished to devote the amount of time they were spending on wow to the game, and instead chose to divert that effort into family, careers or other hobbies.

The end result is that we have lost roughly half of the active members that we once had. Instead of four raid teams, they now barely have two… one of which struggles constantly trying to fill any given raid night. On a good night there are around 20 people on at any given time, but there are also large stretches where that number is in the 3-5 range. Essentially our guild has dropped significantly, and this is the tale I have heard over and over from other guild leaders from the early days of WoW.

This is not to say that there have not been an influx of new players coming in to fill the gaps, but in our case and the case of many vanilla guilds… they are shells of what they once were. Remember my statement about “people play wow, because people play wow”… ultimately this attrition will reach a point where there is no longer enough of a critical mass of players people remember… or want to play with… to act as a magnetic core to keep pulling people back. I know in my own case, the number of players that I really want to see dwindles each time I return to the game on one of my “wow whims”.

Crash of the Titan

One of the things that has universally been held off in the distance as a beacon of hope by the true believers, is that Blizzard was working on a new MMO… that this would be the one to cure all the ills. The problem is right now they have been given the knowledge that this promised land will not be coming for at least another three years. That means three more years of the status quo. Sure there will be another expansion in there, that will raise the level cap and provide another dose of very similar raid encounters… but ultimately there will be nothing truly new for three long years.

As a former dedicated warrior blogger, I still have a ton of friends and online acquaintances that actively play World of Warcraft. The problem is, on any given day… I can watch my twitter feed for thirty minutes and see several posts of subtle frustration about the game. Maybe I just notice these more than most people, since I am been in a not so subtle state of disappointment with the game for a long time. I still find it extremely fun at times, so long as I “don’t think about it”. It has become the ultimate junk food gaming experience, that I can really enjoy so long as I don’t think about what I just consumed.

Ultimately I know that sooner or later WoW will suffer the same fate that all aging MMOs have to this point. Players will abandon it for the new shiny on the horizon. Warcraft has had a longer than normal shelf life, but when I have had my little whims, the game play experience and client already feel extremely dated. Essentially there will be a point, and I am not sure what that number is… where there is just not enough of a critical mass of players to glue the other players together. Because a large chunk of the players still actively playing wow, are the ones that derive their gaming enjoyment from playing with other players.

Tomorrrow-morrow-land

The big thing that the Titan announcement has done is said to those players that there is no real future in this game. When Everquest was declining in numbers, leading to the launch of World of Warcraft… they had a new and shiny game in Everquest 2 waiting in the wings and currently fairly publicly beta testing. Blizzard has come out and said that they essentially has nothing up their sleeves. Once that has happened, there is no “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain”… we all know the wizard doesn’t actually exist.

Granted I get the reboot, and I get the reluctance to announce anything at all. Essentially Blizzard hit one out of the park on a fluke swing, and based on the way they have mismanaged World of Warcraft over the years… I know for certain they have no clue what magic they cast to get the initial success. They know that whatever they come out with has to be bigger and better than WoW… or it will likely be not just the end of the franchise… but also potentially the end of their company. They have also seen that anyone who has come up against their own monster creation has fallen grossly short of all possible sales and subscribership goals.

I sincerely think they have no clue at all right now of how to create a new IP that players will love as much as their very fabled Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo product families. All of which were allowed to start with extremely humble roots… and were allowed to be grown up through the very supportive and nurturing PC gaming cocoon of the 90s. They basically have to birth a fully formed and ready to run adult franchise, with all the characters and branding that we the consumer will immediately latch onto and love like no other.

Screwed

In a word, they are screwed. Building new IP is not the strong point of the juggernaut that is Blizzard. I remember when they were talking about World of Warcraft… being completely shocked. Up until Warcraft 3… the games basically had just enough storyline to keep the gameplay from absolutely falling on their face. I had no clue how they would build a fully fleshed out and three dimensional world out of that type of writing. But they managed to do so, but did it by drawing upon characters and settings that had already been created.

I have no idea how they are going to create this fully fleshed out reality that is deep enough for us to care about it immediately. Especially when it has to be amazing enough to keep players from getting drawn into other truly epic IP that it will be competing with. Namely I am talking about Elder Scrolls Online, and the mouth watering prospect of being able to play through all of Tamriel in the same game. You have to realize we have never seen more than a small corner of that world in any of the modern games, and each of them is just mind numbingly huge.

How can Blizzard come up with anything that will trump a world that has been built over the course of almost 20 years and 5 blockbuster games set in the same world. While I have friends that work for Blizzard, and I wish them the absolute best… I question as to whether or not they can roll out this new IP and hit the ground running with enough momentum to trump a setting like that. I feel like ESO is the first game to come along that really has a chance in hell of toppling the WoW Juggernaut, only because of the landmark success of its previous incarnations. Skyrim for example sold seven million units in the very first week and in my Raptr users group, a large number of those players have put in 300-500 hours playing this “single player” game.

The Paradox

Ultimately… people play wow because people play wow. The only thing that will pull players away from wow permanently, is enough of a mass of players playing something else. I feel that both Wildstar and Elder Scrolls Online have the potential to do this over the coming year. Combine this with the fact that there is nothing coming down the pipe from Blizzard to compete with this… and you have a recipe for change. This is going to happen sooner or later, this is a certainty… WoW will wither… all MMO titles wither given time. It is exceedingly hard to actually kill an MMO, as evidenced by the fact that both Everquest and Dark Age of Camelot are themselves going relatively strong… just in a greatly diminished capacity.

I realize that players have predicted the doom of Warcraft, over and over… and each of them… myself included have been wrong. It feels like this announcement about Titan is the beginning of something… what that something is quite honestly is undetermined yet. Blizzard may retreat into its juggernaut and produce a golden age of content… or they may devote seasoned resources away from it to build their new planned kingdom. But in either case, I think Titan being pushed back and rebooted entirely has been a massive blow to player confidence. I think it is this blow that will ultimately have major repercussions.

Wrapping Up

I need to wrap this up, I could rattle on at length about this for a few more pages… but I feel like I have essentially said what I set out to say. I need to print off my ticket for the dev conference… go get some breakfast and get on my way. I hope you all have a great day… and this little doom and gloom treatise has not diminished that. I still like World of Warcraft as a concept, I have just been very disappointed in the overall experience for several years now.

Fatman Blues

May 29, 2013 by Belghast

Another morning, another day closer to the weekend. Yesterday I was just absolutely struggling to exist in the world. I felt like I was walking around in a daze all day long, and nothing ever quite snapped me out of it. I took that long nap on Sunday afternoon, and ever since my schedule had been somewhat out of whack. I am convinced my body and mind goes to shit if I get too much sleep. So long as I get 4-6 hours I seem to be able to functional like a normal human being, but when I get over that… my body goes haywire.

Restless Gaming

As a result of this haze, I was super restless last night. I flitted from activity to activity never really finding much traction in any of them. I managed to hook up with my friend Del over in SWTOR at one point in the evening, and he made me a bunch of moddables so that I could outfit a set of orange gear I had my eyes on. I am hoping that if I now start always choosing commendations… I will be able to keep up with keeping the suit of armor outfitted.

I am now on the last section of Dromund Kaas on my Sith Warrior, and I pushed through a good chunk of it… but seemed to lack the focus to actually finish. When I would attempt to quest, I would find myself super sleepy and almost unable to keep my eyes open. Unfortunately last night my wife washed the bed sheets, so we had to wait for the current load to finish drying, and then for them to finish as well. This gave me no real option of just going to bed early. So I wandered about the house like a zombie, looking for something to occupy my time.

Fatman Blues

I finally settled back down in my office upstairs, and set to trying to unravel a mystery. The goal of this search was to be able to find a way to upgrade my PSP to firmware 6.60… aka the latest revision and the one required to couple your device with your ps3. There is more to the tale than this however, as there always is in a mystery. It is a tale of intrigue and suspense… stay awhile and listen!

Back in 2007 I picked up a used PSP 1000 model, aka the “Fat” design as the modding community calls it. It was just the latest device in my eternal search for way to play retro console emulators on a mobile device. Turns out through a truly arcane process, you could install a custom firmware, that would allow you to boot emulators from the memory stick. When I say arcane, I am not being facetious… you literally had to have just this one right version of the original release of the grand theft auto UMD to be able to execute the firmware loader.

I jumped through all the hoops with the constant fear of “bricking” my device all for the glory of being able to play all my favorite Nintendo, Super Nintendo and Genesis games on the go. Thing is it worked, and worked amazingly well. I could boot into an emulator, but also be able to play just about any UMD based game I came across. Additionally through dark science, I was able to take my Castlevania Symphony of the Night playstation disc and rip it into a format capable of running on the device. So quickly this became my favorite toy. Not only could I play Super Metroid, but I could also play SOTN… my favorite game of all time.

The only problem with this notion is that the world evolved around me… and I was essentially stuck on this custom flavor of firmware 3.01. I can remember that the Final Fantasy II remake was the first game I purchased, but was unable to play on my psp. With the realization that I was stuck on this firmware, with no real upgrade path… and no real time to research said upgrade path… my device became something I only really broke out on road trips. Since I tend to be the one driving… it didn’t even make it off the shelf that often.

Resurrection Game

With my resurgence in console gaming, I had noticed there were all these games I had sitting on my PS3 harddrive that claimed to be capable of copying to the psp. I had a renewed fire to try and figure out a way to get my 3.01 OE-A firmware device up to 6.60 the latest revision and the one required to connect to the playstation network. While waiting on the cable guy last Thursday I had nothing better to do than research how to fix the problem. The problem with an underground community… most of the information listed is speculation and mythos.

After following down several rabbit trails to find nothing, I finally found a tool that would supposedly allow me to restore my firmware back to a stable version. The highest I could get with the tool was 6.20, which was technically high enough to run almost anything… just not enough to connect to the PSN. I executed the process and sure enough it worked restoring my device back to 6.20. The only problem is… it worked with an Asterisk.

Apparently in the process of restoring the device it somehow corrupted something known as “IDStorage”. Anytime I attempted to patch up to 6.60 from there I got a pretty arcane error message with an error code of “drnffffffd7”. Seems as though the root of it is, that my physical hardware and my firmware version do not match exactly based on this region code chart. The latest versions of the official firmware check this before applying the update, and as a result I am pretty much hung once more on an older version of the firmware.

Pandorica Opens

There is a fix, but it involves something called a Pandora Battery. The further and further I get into this process, the more and more it sounds like an episode of Doctor Who. Turns out “Pandora Battery” is just the publicly traded name for a special device called a “Service Mode” battery. Apparently this was device that was handed out to PSP service centers, that allows the technicians to essentially flip your device into a kind of debug mode so that they can fix various bits of software and load new firmwares without software protections.

This is apparently paired with something called a “Magic Memory Stick” which also seems to tie its roots back to the official service centers. Both of which are apparently created through using a certain tool on your device. Ironically… in order to run that tool… I have to apply a custom firmware patch again. So last night I went through the process to turn my 6.20 official into 6.20PRO-C2. Unfortunately the aftermarket batteries that I picked up do not have the required eprom needed to convert them into pandora batteries.

After some digging online I found a place that sells the Pandora battery for roughly 10 bucks after shipping. The only problem… it is coming from china, and as a result will take between 17 and 24 days to get here based on Amazon estimates. So for the time being I have a custom firmware psp that can run pretty much any game on the market, but just not be able to connect to the playstation network… and let me copy games from my ps3 to it. I guess while I wait I will enjoy the concept of playing emulators on a mobile device again.

The Takeaway

The moral of the story is… do not venture down the custom firmware path unless you want it to forever dominate your future. From what I understand… I would have had issues going from 3.01 official to 6.60 official anyway. But that would have just meant downloading a bunch of intermediary firmware’s and stepping through the process. However these firmware are only really available on the mod community sites, so I would have been traipsing down a lot of the same alleyways. From my understanding, a good chunk of what made my transition so hard is the fact that I applied a custom firmware back when they had not quite figured out how the device worked.

Anyways… I thought someone might at least find the tale entertaining. I have a Pandora Battery on the way, have made a Magic Memory Stick… and in a months time when it finally arrives I will attempt the IDStorage fix and see if I can go all the way to 6.60. Basically throughout this entire process you walk a super fine line of trying not to “brick” your device. I hope you all have a great day… and don’t venture down any trails that lead to dead ends. Each day brings us closer to the weekend!

The Cat Sith

May 28, 2013 by Belghast

This morning is the first workday morning of summer break, and as a result everything in the world feels completely “off”. I am very much a slave to routine, which is likely why I have been able to keep posting every morning. The routine is that my wife gets up first and the noise of her getting ready wakes me up enough to be ready to hop into the shower as soon as she gets out. But with her being a teacher and now no longer reporting every day due to summer vacation… the whole world feels wrong.

Is This Working?

The only good thing is that now I no longer have to make two coffees and start her vehicle before heading upstairs. Not that this was really much of a times saving… also somehow I managed to take just as long as normal… even though I got about a 15 minute head start. I blame the fact that I am juggling a herd of angry acts, that are wanting food and water. My wife is taking one of the cats into the vet this morning, so as a result we had to pull both food and water at midnight last night. It is hard to reason with a cat as to why their bowl is empty.

So please indulge me in my need for validation, but one of the things I have been wondering is whether or not this morning posting thing is actually providing material that people are interesting in reading. This morning will be the 32nd of these daily posts, and while I continue to still find material to ramble on about… I wonder if any of my rambling is actually worth reading. They have strayed pretty wildly from the initial design of… blog about what happened game wise last night. Over time they have become more and more personal, and it is this part that I am the most self conscious about. Do people really care about what is happening to me in real life?

I might just be going through a needlessly introspective spell, but I have wondered if this was a worthy endeavor to undertake each morning. Maybe it just seems questionable of late since my busy schedule has left me with less and less gaming material to report on. I keep hoping that life will stabilize a bit, and that I will be able to get back into a routine. As much as I might have rebelled against raiding on a schedule, I really miss that kind of group based activity. Right now I feel like I can never commit to doing something, for fear I will be needed elsewhere… or something will interrupt my playtime.

Many Faces of Lux

One of my good friends has over time become completely obsessed with League of Legends. This may or may not be my fault, because I was the one that showed the game to her. I totally blame Tam though, because I never would have played this game were it not for his constant nudging. As a result, ever since this started Rae has been madly sketching Chibi League characters in the corner of her notepad. I suggested she work up a few of them and post them, because ultimately the folks who do artwork for League started off as fans.

One of Rae’s favorite characters is Lux, and as a result she has been creating various versions of her re-imagined through different skins. Above are her renditions of “Pep Squad Lux” and “Changeling Lux”, with the later existing because she wanted to try and do a “dark” skin for that character. I think they both turned out pretty well. To connect the dots, Rae is also the creator of the wonderful Belghast Chibi that adorns the header of this website. She has started accumulating some of this material with backstories on her new blog.

The Cat Sith

I spent a good deal of yesterday relaxing on the sofa playing some SWTOR. I continued the adventures of my Thundercat Sith… Belgrenth, and at this point am almost through with Dromund Kaas. I have to give a huge thank you to my friend Del. He read my footnote in my blog yesterday about potentially only using vibroblades with this character… and in my mailbox was sitting a moddable vibroblade that is usable at level 20. I am loving this concept of the cat sith that chooses to only use vibroswords.

I really like the Korriban and Dromund Kaas quests, but I am ultimately fearing when I transition into Balmorra. That planet is what kills almost all of my Sith characters. For whatever reason I do not mind Taris at all, but Balmorra just feels like a complete drag. My hope is that since I am enjoying this kitty sith trope so much that I will be able to push through relatively easily. If not I can always flip over and play my Chiss Scoundrel that I never managed to make it off Coruscant with.

I am by no means done with Rift, or am I ever really done with any game… but right now this current whim has been rather enjoyable. There are a lot of things that Star Wars the Old Republic does really well. The questing and story are superb, and the combat is extremely fun. Where the game failed me is the whole “things I want to do at level 50” area, but I am so far from hitting that wall that everything feels fresh and new. I am actually looking forward to getting off Balmorra with some character, because I have never seen anything past there Imperial side.

A Hollow Community

Free to play has been both good and bad for this game. The huge negative is that public chat channels are worse than the worst barrens chat. Most nights feel like I am wading through a sea of 13 year olds amped on sugar and caffeine. Additionally there is another disturbing trend… the Subscribers treat free to play characters like complete and total crap. I have seen more haughty elitism than I care to recall in the last few days of playing. I literally saw someone say “lets all pick on the free to play trash” when finding out a player was restricted from sending tells… and it isn’t that they just said that, but players literally did start to belittle the target player.

The funny thing is, I never saw this in the extreme that I have in SWTOR playing other Free to Play conversions. Over in Lord of the Rings Online, players generally treat each other pretty equitably it feels. While I tiptoe back and forth on the concept that if you are not paying for a game you are actively hurting it… I don’t ever want to single out a player and make them feel bad. I feel like turning off general chat is the wrong answer to these issues, and I have found myself trying to help the players that are getting picked on and not allowed to “join in any Reindeer Games”.

Wrapping Up

Well I have spent another morning drinking coffee and blogging to you all. Like I said above I would be interested in knowing how well you guys are enjoying these posts. I am sure I will have a busy week ahead of me, since starting the week on a Tuesday… tends to just mean you have both Monday and Tuesday compressed into one mega painful day. I hope you all survive the day and have a good one. I hope it is not a bad omen that I have not made it to work, and am already looking forward to leaving it for the day.