January 2014 - Page 2 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Stalwart Ebonheart

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 by Belghast

Small World After All

Yesterday I had a pretty interesting chain of events happen, that have left me all warm and fuzzy. At some point yesterday I tweeted a general complaint about how steam seems to be incapable of flagging on a machine level that we have already installed the various pre-requisites like DirectX. This tweet seemed to develop a life of it’s own as it got re-tweeted around a bit and favorited. Most of the people were extremely familiar to me, but one of the folks retweeting was completely new. In my current mode of trying to reach out more to help foster the community I followed Maevrim.

It turns out the two of us have been running in the same circles for years spanning two different games and two different servers. For the bulk of her time playing World of Warcraft, it seems as though she was in the guild Gnomes Will Eat You on Argent Dawn… a guild House Stalwart folk are very familiar with. During the old days our two guilds did quite a bit together, and these days my raid has the very amazing Frosti… that has a sort of dual citizenship with characters in both House Stalwart and Gnomes Will Eat You. Turns out she also plays on Faeblight where the House Stalwart Rift branch is located.

To make things even more awesome, she is looking for a new guild home. Of course my guildmasterly ninja instincts started kicking in and I have been trying to welcome her into the Stalwart fold. Its true… we are kind of like a cult but I promise that our koolaid isn’t poisoned much. Scan a few hours later, turns out she was on a podcast and I somehow got mentioned. Now I seem to have missed the reference or it was said before or after the started recording. But all of this makes me realize just how small and relatively tight knit a community we have. Like I said the other day, it is all a matter of perspective. We might think we are alone in the void, but then something happens to make us realize just how connected we are as a whole.

Stalwart Ebonheart

Since April 4th 2014 will be here before we know it, I figure it is time to start planning for the House Stalwart Ebonheart Pact branch in Elder Scrolls Online. For some time I have known that I would be playing this game at release, and my hope is to successfully weave in time of both it and World of Warcraft. The goal is to play a few nights a week, because really I am a sucker for anything Elder Scrolls… and you would have to cause a real cataclysm to keep me away from it. For a long time I have also known I would be aligning with the Ebonheart Pact, in part because my three favorite races are the Nord, Dunmer and Argonians. After an impromptu poll of the folks who signed up on the brief Tamriel Foundry site we had… it seems like that is the case for most of the guild.

Since House Stalwart has always been a social guild… and more family than anything else… I thought I would open things up this time to my blogger family as well. I know Maric and some of the Mercy Corps folks will be joining Stalwart in this endeavor, and my hope is to gather up as many good people as I can before the launch. I am sure a good chunk of the current and former Stalwart members will be joining us as well. Basically all sociable folks are welcome spending they are agreeable to the standard House Stalwart Three Tenets. While I founded House Stalwart in World of Warcraft, the ethos that I helped foster has spanned so many games and will likely move into even more in the future. My hope is that we will keep creating a connection that transcends the games we happen to be playing at the time.

If this type of environment sounds like a good fit for you, then please follow this link to our forums. I created a brand new forum thread this morning, trying to gauge how many people we will have at launch. If you have any issues setting up a forum account either drop me a line here, or ping me over twitter and I will see what I can do to assist you. Also of note, we are primarily a Eastern Standard/Central Standard time zone guild, but have members with a pretty wide variety of playtimes.

Nightblade Finishing School

This weekend I also dipped my feet back into Rift spending a bit of time Saturday and Sunday working on my Nightblade. I am not sure if I will ever make a third level 60, but I really do want to finish my rogue off who is currently sitting and 70% through 58. While I enjoy the Storm Legion content on one level, on another it feels extremely grindy. As such during the course of leveling Belghast to 60 I stalled out no less than four times. Similarly Belgrave has stalled out quite a few in the process of getting this far along. Maybe I am just spoiled by the brisk pace of leveling in games like World of Warcraft or even Final Fantasty XIV… but getting through Storm Legion feels like an absolute chore. I do however really want to spend some time pushing through it.

This weekend I spent quite a bit of time doing Instant Adventures and they made the process feel a little less painful. At some point I also want to spend some time in dungeons… but for whatever reason I seem to always get Stormbreaker Protocol… which for those not familiar with it is the Rift version of Oculus. Essentially it is that one dungeon that makes almost the entire party disappear. I feel like I really need to get adjusted to the Rift controls a bit more before stepping foot into a dungeon, though honestly I was killing things in Argent Domain last night as efficiently as I ever was. More than anything with the impending release of 2.6, I want to dust off my Rift account and finally push the Nightblade across the finish line.

Far Cry 3

January 26, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #3

I guess at this point Steampowered Sunday is a real thing now. I have friends nudging me in certain directions towards games I have in my steam list that I have yet to play. Today I intended to play one game, but wound up playing another as I didn’t really plan ahead and pre-emptively install it. So instead I decided to choose a game I did install over the Christmas break but never got around to playing. One of my good friends snagged Far Cry 3 from my Steam wish list and gifted it to me during the insane Christmas sale. I had always heard really amazing things about the game, so it sounded like something I would enjoy.

Already Installed DirectX Checkbox

Be warned today’s post is going to be far more about the frustrations of trying to play a game… than actually playing one. I had installed Far Cry 3 beforehand, but never actually fired it up. So of course when I went to launch the game I had to suffer through the usual steam bullshit that involves installing every driver and redistributable known to man. You would think that by now steam would have figured out a way to set a machine level flag that says “we’ve made this sucker install directx over 10 times, surely we can take it easy on him now”. On top of the normal bullshit… I had to deal with something I had never seen before called UPlay.

I guess this means that I have never actually played a Ubisoft game on the PC, since this seems to be required to play any of them. For starters it took a truly silly amount of time to download and install, and then it prompted me for a login. Since I didn’t think I had an account, I stubbed out the normal “Belghast” login, only to be told that it already existed. At this point I scratch my head because maybe at some point in the past I did in fact set up UPlay. I notice there is a handy reset password option, so I went through the steps to reset it to my email address.

At no point did it say “dumbass you don’t have an account”, it just said it would be sending an email to reset my password. I waited a truly silly amount of time, refreshing the email window, and apparently locked my account out in the process. However no emails actually arrived even after scanning the bowels of my gmail account, and sifting through half a dozen broken english versions of “your battle.net account is being banned” phishing attempts. Turns out I am guessing I really do not have a UPlay account, either that or it was somehow set up on the PS3 and seemingly irrelevant to my PC. So either this happened or there really are more Belghasts out in the world, as a result I had to set up my account on an old username that used for years.

Gameplaying Time?

So finally I am able to log into the game and launch it. I am greeted by the usual cinematic that I ignore and keep pressing the escape key trying to skip out of as soon as possible. It appears that I am a rich d-bag, and have equally rich and d-bag friends that are amped about spending my trust fund on an island vacation. Apparently also at some point we think it is a great idea to skydive onto a pirate held island… because you know the Pirates of the Caribbean ride at Disney never harmed us… so surely the real thing will just give us candy or something. Color me surprised when we manage to get kidnapped and held for ransom so our equally rich and d-bag parents to pay.

At this point after spending the first hour of the morning trying to get into the game due to the frustration that is UPlay… I am wanting to slaughter everything in sight. Just give me a gun, point me in the direction of a slaver and I will go Rambo on their asses and save the day. Conveniently for me, every single bad guy in the game seems to be wearing the same red shirt and red hat… making it super handy for drawing crosshairs down on them. I love it when bad guys shop at the same place, because I can’t be bothered to think before blowing them away.

But Wait… Stealth Time

There are few things I hate more in the world, than having to sneak around and be stealthy in video games. So when I finally get control of my character what do I get to do? Sneak around and avoid being seen as I play through a super on-rails cinematic. This is one of the things that frustrates me the most about modern games… namely those that started their life originally as a console game. They seem to relish the concept of making you play through a bunch of shit before actually letting you play the game. If I have to follow a predetermined path, while doing a sequence of events that are unchangeable… it is a cinematic. Letting me control my character as I go through the cinematic just makes it all the more unhinging.

For me the ideal intro to a game like this is the Elder Scrolls style… you arrive as a prisoner, someone breaks out out and then bam you are on your merry way causing mayhem. I guess the more I think about it… Oblivion and Skyrim both had some pretty frustrating “follow the dumbass npc” sequences early on… but they felt brief enough and in both cases you got to diverge from the script heavily if you desired. This on the other hand was sneaking about following a path set aside by your macho army brother… all the while you have nothing that you can really do other than throwing some rocks. Man I am a badass at throwing rocks… let me tell you.

Can It Be Fun Time?

So despite your best attempts at avoiding being seen… your dumbass brother runs right into the pistol of the big baddy that you met earlier in the cage. So you get to play a fun game of trying to mash your space bar hard enough to keep your brother from bleeding out. Guess what… he bleeds out regardless of how hard you play whack a mole with your keyboard. In a strange turn of events… instead of just shooting you in the back like you would think the big ultimate bad guy would do…. he decides to release you out into the jungle. So once again I am thinking to myself… man can I finally have control of my character? Can I finally play this game and do shit at my own pace? NOPE!!!

What you get to do now is have a weird sequence as you run through the jungle avoiding bears and helicopters flying over, flashing the tree line with spotlights and trying to shoot you. During this odd sequence you are once again following a predetermined path, and you seem to be able to take damage but never actually die. At one point it told me to bandage myself, which I did… but it really did not seem to have much to do with success or fail. Eventually I followed the path, went out onto a rope bridge… I lost a fight with a helicopter and just like baby Moses got tossed into a river only to get found by a seemingly friendly stranger.

Thanks Three Dog

While he sounds absolutely nothing like him… this dude for some reason reminds me of Three Dog from Fallout 3. So I completely missed his name, because in my head he will forever be Three Dog. Basically he saved you because you have the heart of a warrior… which if funny because up until this point all your character has done is whine constantly about being in the jungle. I seriously expected him to break out the Dante from Clerks “I’m not even supposed to be here today”. Essentially he sets up the premise of the story. The pirate slavers are taking over the island and these mystical tattoo warriors are fighting back. Since you escaped the camp alive, you are going to be their great white hope to save the day. You will learn powers that somehow show up on your tattoo because… magic reasons.

So at this point… I am finally starting to wonder if I get to play the game yet or not. Three Dog gives you some cash and lets you go shopping for a weapon… which basically means you get to buy a pistol… because all you can afford is a pistol. Now he sends you out into the jungle on a few missions… the first of them is to destroy a jammer on a near by radio tower. All in all this goes pretty safely other than the fact there is a static spawn snake that just sits there are the base of the tower. A bullet to the head and you are up the tower and mapping the world. It seems that as you open up the towers you allow the vendors to get new and spiffier stuff.

Capture Objectives

Once the actual game started after wading through what felt like three hours of bullshit… it was pretty fun. Essentially the game play is a lot like Just Cause 2, where you move around the map weakening the presence of the enemy forces in your area. Unlike Just Cause however you actually capture the elements for your blue team. Unlocking new stuff gives you new power-ups in the form of magical tattoo powers, and unlocks new weapons. Additionally in each outpost you capture there is a mission board that gives you hunting and kill missions. Hunting seems extremely important in the game as it allows you to upgrade your backpack… allowing you to carry more weapons and equipment.

The kill missions however seem extremely frustrating. I took the first one, and like always I paid little attention to the mission introduction. Look I am a big dumb monkey, give me a gun and point me in the direction of the enemies and I will destroy them. I however rapidly failed the mission because guess what they wanted me to do… that’s right sneak around and do some ninja stuff, using the nifty new takedown move that Three Dog just taught me. I have a feeling that if this is the case… I will likely avoid these entirely because like I said before… stealth is not a thing that Belghasts do best.

Will It Blend?

All in all the game really is pretty fun, once they actually let you play it. This game would have been so much better had they just created a simple reason for you to escape and let you pick up from the moment you get rescued by Three Dog without having to suffer through the horrible on-rails pseudo game play. Hell I feel like it would have been better had your parachute just landed you in the middle of the native camp, and they simply told you that your family was captured. Bam instant call to action, and instant adventure time. If you can suffer through two hours of crap, then the game is pretty fun, or maybe you don’t dislike the modern on-rails psuedo-cinematic as much as I do.

In either case it is worth a play through, so long as you don’t end up paying much for the game. This is definitely not going to be in the same league for me as Skyrim, Bioshock, Dishonored or even Just Cause 2. However it is still pretty fun and I like the map control aspect of the gameplay. I just wish there was more direct action early on that let me run amok and cause mayhem. Granted you have to understand that I have not played Far Cry 2 either, I have only actually played the first one. In that game you pretty much dropped straight into the action, and I was expecting the same from Far Cry 3. I figured sooner or later I would give a review that I didn’t just absolutely gush over the game like I did about Hammerwatch and to a lesser extent Steamworld Dig. I give Far Cry 3… 3 Mehs out of Meh.

Precious Underwear

January 25, 2014 by Belghast

Spicy Chicken and Tots

During the school year I am pretty much the cook, the maid, the laundry service, and of course the pet care. My wife is extremely hardcore about her job, and as an educator spends a good 70-80 hours a week doing work for the classroom. I have far more disposable time so as a result I pick up 99% of the household chores. I am not saying I am Martha Stewart and keep a perfect household, but the shit that has to get done gets done. Any time I don’t have to worry about one of those chores I am ecstatic. Last night my loving wife went to meet some friends at a local chain called Ron’s. While there she picked me up a takeout order of one of my favorite meals ever… spicy chicken and cheese tots.

I bragged on her on both G+ and Twitter last night, but it means a lot to me… so I am leading off tonight’s blog post as well. While it drove me into a food coma and I was pretty much useless for the tail end of the raid last night… it was absolutely amazing. Additionally it gave me a much appreciated break from trying to figure out what in the hell we were going to have that night for dinner. More than anything I think that is what is worth raving about. The figuring out things and being a responsible adult all the time… wears you down. As she commented her “credit card cooks well”.

The Wi-Fi MIracle Redux

Speaking of last nights raid… leading off with a really cool screenshot we took all decked out in our Sky Golem mounts. I had no clue that damned near all of the raid had one. Granted this section really has nothing to do with the raid, but it is entirely too cool of a screenshot not to use it. Today was a weird day, as I said over twitter I did not go through my normal morning routine and as a result you are getting a post a lot closer to 8 pm than early morning like normal. Essentially last week I mentioned that we had promised to come up this weekend and attempt to fixorate my mother-in-laws Wi-Fi connection and install the printer we got her for Christmas. So with these things looming on the horizon the goal was to get up there and get them done as early in the day as possible.

Over the week I ordered a Cisco RE1000 Wireless repeater thinking it would do the trick to help piggy back the signal across the large gap between the two houses. In theory yes it does in fact work, and I was able to get the wireless printer configured as a result. In practice however it is so insanely slow I am not sure anyone will be able to tolerate it. On the positive side we have gotten her in the practice of surfing on the laptop out in the addon with a straighter shot to the original wifi access point. Out there the speed doesn’t seem half bad, in the rest of the house it is slower than dial-up. I went to download a printer driver and it was going to take over three hours for a 100 mb file.

Precious Underwear

My hope is that once we get electric run to the RV pad we have placed between the two houses, I can install an additional repeater in our RV, which will hopefully complete the piggyback chain, or at least speed it up. For the meantime however she can check her ever so important facebook, and she seemed mostly happy. We ate lunch and then wandered along our way to run more errands. My wife this year is teaching a forensics class along with a science teacher. Like always we end up footing the bill for most of the materials for the various labs that she leads. One of the things that she will be doing a lot of in the forensics class is finger printing, which requires a really fine brush.

During the 80s there was this magical device called the Static Duster. For the most part microfiber has replaced it, but somewhere along the line my wife found a very small one, about the size of a makeup brush. Now we both know we have seen a place that sold them recently in a dollar section. So today we spent most of the day running to every dollar store we could think of. We sadly came up completely empty, but when we went to Family Dollar we saw a truly bizarre sight that made the trip worth while. Down the men’s underwear isle, every single package of briefs and socks had antitheft devices attached to them. Do people really steal that many pairs of underwear to warrant this? If you notice, it is not just on the package but also there is one attached to each pair in the pack. They apparently take their underwear security seriously.

Da na na na na na na na na na na na na…

So here we are in the same place as we were this morning… with only one of these magical static brushes, and ten lab groups that need them. The last place we can really think to look is the Wal-mart dollar section, but quite frankly after all the running around today neither one of us really had the stomach for a trip there. There is no such thing as a quick trip to Wal-mart, and just in setting foot there you have to deal with so many frustrating people. I may be a good guy and run out there tomorrow while she is working on lesson plans. Hopefully she won’t hold her breath, because that is a serious act of commitment… however she did bring me spicy chicken.

If you recall back to the junking episodes over Christmas break, one of the things I had been looking for were some awesome coffee mugs… more importantly awesomely geeky ones. The last place we went tonight before picking up some food and heading home was Ross. A few weeks ago my wife had found a pair of pants there… and for whatever reason she did not pick them up. So of course when we went tonight they were nowhere to be found. I have to get her in the habit of buying the thing she wants when she sees it instead of waiting around.

However while I roamed aimlessly around the store looking for something to entertain me, I noticed these two coffee mugs. The first is a really awesome classic batman mug, with the symbol on the opposite side, and the other is a really huge mug with a skull on it. Pretty much to me putting a skull on anything makes it awesome. My wife however does not understand this, and keeps balking every time she finds a scarf or other garment of women’s clothing with a skull on it. Quite simply put…. skulls make everything better and this mug is no exception. Now I have six mugs that I like, and will be proud to use. So despite a relatively frustrating day, that involved absolutely nothing I wanted to do in the first place… it ended on a high note that involved geeky mugs and a really amazing smoked chicken salad.

Veritech Pilots Unite!

January 24, 2014 by Belghast

Profundity is Gone

For those that followed me during the recent couple day bump of new readers… I am rarely as cogent or pointed as those topics come off as. Most of the time the Tales the Aggronaut spins are yarns of faffing about and doing scattered things in the games I play. That is not to say that I won’t again be overcome with feels and post something dreadfully important, but most of the time I just ramble on about whatever is in my mind. This is the side effect of my whole “blog every morning” crusade I embarked upon nearly a year ago. So if you have a limited appetite for game ramblings, I apologize ahead of time.

My office right now is like a magma chamber, and I am not really sure how long I can keep up this mornings post before I wither and melt away. The heating and air system in our house is pretty horrific, and for some reason there are two heat vents in my very small office. As much as I have tried to block them off completely… the heat continues to radiate through the wall. So the rushed feeling I am having is likely going to cause this to be one of my extra “special” mornings. Right now all I can say is thank god it is the weekend… and even though I have to pull a wi-fi miracle out of my hat tomorrow… I am ready to be done with work for the week.

Veritech Pilots Unite!

One of the side projects that has been underway for roughly a month is the coordinating of my crafting cooldowns each day in order to eventually produce the amazing Sky Golem mount. I realize I am way behind the times in getting it crafted, but hell it is news to me. Last night I managed to make the last two components and then went on an absolutely giddy flight around the Vale. I loves it so much in all of its mechanical glory. I feel like a Veritech pilot from Macross/Robotech. For the next few weeks every single character of mine will be zipping around on this goblin machination. Then I am sure like always I will get bored and pick a new mount for a few weeks.

I have already set my sights on the next big crafting project. I am a horrible engineer… or at least I have traditionally been a very poor one. I never raised the bankroll to get my chopper back in Wrath, and during the expansions after I simply lost sight on it as a goal. Now my intent is to farm up everything I can farm and then raise the required monetary commitment to craft one of these puppies. Not that I think I will ever actually use it… I have so many cool ground mounts like the Fiery Warhorse’s Reins or Rein’s of the Swift Spectral Tiger that I am always anxious to break out when I am in a flight limited area. I feel like getting a chopper is just one of those things I want to do moreso than really have a reason to do.

Blackwing Descent

Finally on the silly activities front, several of us were hanging out on mumble last night. The question was posed… how many people would it take to clear the old raids, namely Blackwing Descent. I surmised that we could probably limp by on three, 1 tank, 1 healer, 1 dps. Next thing I know we are on our way to blackrock mountain and giving it a try. Thing is… I remember nothing about this raid at all really. Granted while we were doing it several things came back, but I had literally not see any content past the first two bosses. I left WoW shortly after the launch of Cataclysm and at that point we had only managed to down Magmaw and Omnomitron (yes I know that isn’t the name). So for the most part it was a completely new place for me.

We of course entered for the purest of faffing reasons… the druid in our party wanted these shoulders for transmog. I myself would not have minded getting an Ashkandi 2.0 to drop, simply because the fidelity of the weapon is so much higher than the one I keep in my bank for transmoggy goodness. All in all the run went pretty smoothly. We struggled a few times, including several attempts at Chimaeron just trying to figure out how to work the fight mechanics. For whatever reason my purgatory talent seemed to be glitching out the key fight mechanic, so I popped outside real quick and summoned my vendor mount and changed that talent.

The trippy fight honestly was Nefarian because I was the only one to survive the initial flood everything in lava phase. So for the most part I solo’d a good chunk of that fight, namely the swimming around the room in lava killing the guys on the platforms phase. Then the monk healer and I duo’d the final kite him around the room phase. Since it was a 10 man fight, we only had one battle rez, and as such it seemed like a better idea to rez the healer than the druid dps. It was a fun night and I could see myself doing it again. I am really hoping that we can mostly trio the rest of the content. Funny enough we managed to get an achievement during the process without really intending to. I really want to go off and do firelands so I can hopefully get my druid friend his fire kitty.