Bad Warlock

Vampire Wife

bloodspatter For awhile I have talked about my rockstar teacher of a wife and the forensics class she is pioneering with another teacher this year.  Yesterday I got drafted into helping her make various kinds of fake blood.  Essentially we needed to find a ready simulacrum for the real thing, that could be produced cheaply and efficiently.  So for awhile yesterday I kitchen turned a little horror show.  I was employed in the mixing part, since I could shake the bottles fast enough to get them to mix.  This is my preferred way of mixing almost anything, including the constant flow of cherry pomegranate drink mix that I imbibe.  Some of the mixtures were winners and some were very much not.

Of the various recipes available we tried three primarily.  The first one I had experience with in the past, and I didn’t think it would be the kind of blood she was wanting.  I used to work in a fundraiser haunted house and we mixed buckets of water, karo syrup and red food coloring to make gore to slop on everything.  This of course is way thicker than human blood and as a result doesn’t perform in any way similar.  Next we tried a mixture of sweet condensed milk, and red food coloring.  This was a little better but still way too thick, but it was a big grizzly to watch my wife eat spoonfuls of the red ichor.  Apparently she thought it tasted good.

The final winner was evaporated milk and red food coloring.  Granted all of these produced pinkish blood but apparently adding a little bit of green will correct the color.  She tested the products against a vial of simulated lab blood that she got from a forensics supply house and the evaporated milk performed similarly.  Today over lunch  I have an errand to go pick up a pint of fake blood from a local party store.  We had tried this earlier but the only place that had it was in gallon size… and extremely expensive.  We wanted to test it out before committing to buying it in bulk.  My hope is that the premade stuff will be best so we don’t have to mix anymore at home.  But at the very least it lead to an interesting evening.

Bad Warlock

Wow-64 2014-02-24 06-17-22-04 Among other things, lately I have been poking my head onto my little Dwarven Warlock a bit.  I am still phenomenally bad at playing casters, and the warlock is no exception.  However having a Felguard makes up for a lot of my own mistakes.  He just quietly kicks everything’s ass while I flail around trying to mash the correct buttons.  Something I find interesting, is that in the past I have tried my best to skip outlands entirely… I am actually enjoying the content.  Maybe it is the idea that I know I will be revisiting everything in Warlords, but the entire expansion somehow feels fresher.  I have a feeling with this guy that it will be Wrath that becomes pure skull drudgery.

I am not really sure I landed on this character to level, after all I have both a Discipline Priest and a Hunter within striking distance of 90.  Ultimately I would still like to get everything up to 90 before Warlords but my Mage.  The mage is my intended boost target, because while I struggle playing a Warlock, I would be an absolute disaster playing a Mage.  Characters that can be described as “glass cannons” have never appealed to me in the least.  However I hear that frost provides a much sturdier alternative, given that they now have a permanent pet to watch after them.  To say the least I have been enjoying being bad at warlocking.

Interesting Changes a Brewing

eso 2014-02-23 12-41-25-63 I am honestly not sure how much of this I can talk about, so I will have to get some clarification on the NDA I am presently under before delving into it too deeply.  However I will say that there are some significant changes in the starter experience in the works that will hopefully make a lot of people happy.  One of the big complaints from the various test weekends is that it feels too on rails for too long.  While I said you can hop off the rails at any point you like and level away.  I have done a fair bit of my leveling by just killing random mobs out in the world and mostly ignoring the quests, it still feels like you are lead down a slowly widening tunnel until finally at some point you get dumped into what is the “real” game for the rest of the 50 levels.  One thing I have to say is that overall… the Zenimax folks have been extremely responsive to feedback.

That is one of the aspects of this testing process that most people just won’t understand.  The game has changed a lot over the last year, and for the better.  While there are features missing that I would have liked to see, almost all of those are User Interface based and have been successfully added back into the game with addons.  The core game itself is extremely clean, and if you play the game on a server that is not screaming because they are purposefully stressing it to the maximum… the game performs admirably and combat feels great.  The negative is a lot of the clunky combat comments that people have are during weekends where they are purposefully trying to break the systems, and combat fluidity decreases under extremely stressed situations.

I think a lot of people are going to be happy with the proposed changes.  I however have been in the minority and felt that the starter island experience for each of the races was an extremely good experience.  Each of the islands, and I use that term loosely since each faction starts slightly differently…  is chock full of interesting things to find and quests that you would not receive if you did not go out and explore off the beaten path.  I still cannot say with any certainty that I have ever gotten 100% of the content on any one of the islands, let alone all of them.  But I can understand the complaint that it just doesn’t feel Elder Scrollsy to exit the prison sequence and be dumped into another controlled setting.  Cold Harbor does a good job of teaching you the basics, and a prison intro is one of the key requirements of “being an Elder Scrolls Game”.

Belghast the Band Geek

The title pretty much says it all, I was a band geek.  For those not familiar with the American education system, the term Middle School refers generally to grades six through eight, and is some what of a transition period to get students used to having specific classes with different teachers, rather than a single teacher doing everything.  As part of this time period we were essentially funneled towards various electives.  During that sixth grade year we had to take a number of elective classes including vocal and instrumental music.  While I did manage to get a lead role in one of the musicals… which I did horribly at, I was far more comfortable behind an instrument in a much larger group.

trombone I began my musical career, if you can call it that.. playing the trombone, because face it… trombones are cool.  I did well enough to be second chair, and I was fine there… good enough to be recognized as being decent, without having to deal with the pressure of leading the section.  This was fine and good until I had a major sinus surgery in seventh grade, and buzzing sound needed to play trombone was something the doctor said would be extremely painful for me for quite some time.  As a result I ended up transitioning to the percussion section.  To be honest… I had always wanted to be a drummer, but my mother played percussion in high school and told me that by far the short end of the stick as far as band goes.  I should have listened, but of course I was smarter and knew better.

marchingcymbals She was absolutely right…  when you march a several mile parade route with a woodwind or a brass instrument you spend most of the time carrying it by your side.  If you march as a drummer, you end up playing a cadence non-stop the entire route.  Being a big guy, I somehow ended up being picked to play the cymbals during parades.  Sure you are thinking… cymbals are a joke of an instrument…  but imagine marching for miles while carrying a 20 pound cymbal in each hand… attached by a leather thong that makes it impossible to get a good grip on it.  Then having to bang them together… all the while not dropping the beat of the cadence.  It was absolute hell, and by the end of a parade route like that I literally could not feel my arms for hours.

Timpani Luckily however parade routes like that were few and far between, and namely during the Christmas season only.  After coming back from Christmas break I finally got to have some fun.  It began concert season and somehow I managed to get picked to play the Timpani drums.  I loved the sound of them, and it felt so primal to bang on them with my tiny felt donut covered sticks.  This was the part of band that I really enjoyed.  I finally felt like I had a real purpose.  I got good at tuning the Timpani drum, and as we did the various contests that came with concert season I became a critical part of the setup crew.  Some kids are truly gifted in band, but I did just good enough to be respectable without ever really shining.  I managed to make all district several times, but never really pushed hard enough to make all state.  While I played drums for a few bands, I never really kept with it… apart from occasionally drumming on my steering wheel while driving.

Eternal Pessimist

The Sick Kid

Growing up I was that kid that was sick all of the time.  During my elementary School Years it was a rarity that I was not in the doctors office at least once a week with something.  In part this was completely legitimate, because I was born without a fully functioning immune system.  Basically to put it simply I have a “lazy immune system” meaning that it takes a really long time before my body reacts to things it should be reacting to.  It is like that kid that hosts a party, then realizes way too late that shit is going to get out of control.  Then at that point, he can’t kick everyone out without calling the cops.  In this analogy the cops are antibiotics, of which I know by name and color and even oddly enough I associate some of them with their taste.

On top of this I also have pretty severe asthma, but I grew up in a household where no bruise was just a bruise…  it might after all be the early stages of Necrotizing fasciitis.  My mother tends to be quite a bit of a hypochondriac, and as such passed along some of those traits to me.  My wife finds it funny, because I always go into a situation expecting the worse.  The problem is…  because I grew up in a doctors office, I have developed a severe hatred of going to the doctor.  So instead I deal with it until I absolutely cannot any longer, in part because I always fear it is going to be worse than it actually is.  In the end I am always relieved when I am not really dying of some dread disease… but getting me to actually go to the doctor to get that relief is extremely difficult.

Eternal Pessimist

Part of asthma is knowing when it medicate yourself to stave off things from getting worse.  I have a full arsenal of tools at my disposal to keep my lungs from going into a complete state of lockdown.  The problem is, I try and apply this same logic to everything else.  I always keep an arsenal of over the counter medications at my disposal and there rarely is a day where I am not taking something.  So I am an odd mix of actually being sick, but also making it far worse than it actually is.  For the most part on a day to day basis I am fairly healthy, but I am always looking for the next illness waiting around the corner.  I guess as a eternal pessimist I am always looking for the worst thing to happen, and then confused when it didn’t.

As a programmer expecting the worst is a really useful survival trait.  It means I always have a backup plan for when the shit hits the fan.  So this instinct of expecting the worst has been a really successful trait in my day to day working life.  The problem is in my personal life and my health especially it is not the best thing.  I am thankful I have a wife that calls me out on my shit, more often than not.  The only problem is, since I cry wolf so often…  it can be hard to get the severity of something across.  When I had my bathroom bleed out moment… since she is so used to me cutting myself on this thing or the other… she didn’t grasp the severity immediately as I stood there blood spilling out on the bathroom floor.  I am working on trying to freak out less about non-consequential things… so that the big ones actually are meaningful.  I am pretty prone to panic attacks, but they are getting better… as I learn to calm the hell down.

Farcry 3: BLood Dragon

Steampowered Sunday #6

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-10-19-77 A few weeks back I did Steampowered Sunday over Far Cry 3, and thanks to the frustrations of dealing with UPlay I didn’t really give it that stellar of a rating.  The forced stealth play just was not my thing, but one resounding chorus from folks responding to the post was…  play Blood Dragon instead.  From the moment I saw the artwork for the title… I knew I would love it, because I am an unrepentant child of the 80s.  Everything about the game artwork alone screams 1980’s arcade cabinet artwork.  Hand drawn polygon landscapes were a thing that became insanely popular in the post War Games sequence of games.  We all wanted to be part of cyberspace in one way or another… even though at the time this was a largely fictional destination.  Which leads to the question…  did William Gibson predict the future in Neuromancer… or did we just build his future because of our love for it.  That however is a topic for a completely different day.

All the Movies Rolled Into One

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-08-52-77 This game is in every way a love song for not only the video games of the 1980s but the movies as well.  You start off with a minigun raid on a base form a Helicopter, while Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” plays on the stereo… a song that featured heavily in the pinnacle of 80s scifi action movies… Predator.  It just keeps getting better from there.  If you took Robocop, Universal Soldier, Ultraforce, and dumped them in a blender with Bad Dudes, Shinobi, and Duke Nukem…  you might come close to creating a game like this.  The visuals seem like a 1980s movie arcade scene vomited its magenta and red neon all over your screen.  I could pick apart the picture above and name a dozen different movie and video game references in this one shot alone.

The Music is So Authentic

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-35-53-80 The visuals would not be enough to deliver the feeling of travelling back in time… but the music is really where the game scores 110%.  Listening to the insane synths gave me flash backs of so many separate movies at once.  I mean you could take this game as making fun of all the absolutely over the topness that was the 1980s, but instead they chose to make it some sort of a time capsule.  For someone who lived through all of this, it is like a really crazy trip down memory lane.  I had moments where I remembered the first time I watched Terminator, the first time I caught Highlander on HBO, the first time I watched Big Trouble In Little China… and Escape from New York.  While none of it really is some kind of clone of the original tracks that obviously inspired it… it has the same feeling of sonic dissonance, driving drum machines and power chords.

Neon Archery Should Be A Thing

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-55-33-41 The weapons not only look great, but they are really functional.  There is a sequence not far from the start of the game where like every 80s movie… you are captured and stripped of all of your weapons.  Your fearless hero that has named Captain Rex Colt Power…  has to get by with nothing but a bow and the ability to use the environmental behemoths… the Blood Dragons to take down a base.  Sure the Blood Dragons do a lot of heavy lifting, but I feel like some sort of Neon Green Arrow as I headshot the guards with a bow.  Firstly…  I would wonder how the hell I could sneak around with glowing arms, and massively glowing weapons.  However since everything in this world seems to glow… I am guessing also glowing is a form of camouflage?   Whatever the reasoning behind it, things look badass.  I mean as a child of the 80s… making something glow neon and putting skulls and spikes on it… is the absolute guarantee for making something awesome.

The Stealth Did Not Piss Me Off

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-10-47-01 Normally I hate stealth in games, but there is something about this game that simply changing the skins and color palettes immediately makes the default Far Cry 3 engine feel so much better.  I think in part it is because I know that if I perform a take down, I get to see the awesome glowing blue wakizashi slice through the enemy and spill light blue glowing cyber fluid.  Additionally there is a completely broken and overpowered ability to chain a bunch of take downs together by pressing your movement keys in the direction of the next mob in sequence.  So far I have managed to take down 4 at once, but I imagine in later levels this becomes completely ludicrous.  I think mostly my problem with stealth in games is the whole idea of a “bloodless” victory.  I play these games to kill everything that stands, and when a storyline impedes me from doing this… my brain rebels.

The Cut Scenes are Amazing

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 11-00-25-95 Normally I also hate cut scenes of pretty much any kind.  However apparently if you take those cut scenes… make them infused with the spirit of the 80s… and hand drawn…  apparently I love them?  The combination of the arcade game style pixel artwork and cheesy action movie dialog makes the whole experience enjoyable for me.  That seems to really be an undercurrent of this game, “taking things Bel hates and making them enjoyable.”  One of the more humorous moments is when your stereotypical mouthy partner initiates a tutorial sequence moments after dropping you on the island as a way of screwing with you.  So you are forced there to sit through a sequence of tutorial commands… all the while you are yelling at your partner for making you do them.  This is an awesome and irreverent way of making you play through the basic commands so that you know how the game controls.

The Game Is Still Farcry 3

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-58-28-51 Everything about the game is still very much Farcry 3.  You move around the world capturing back positions… but instead of doing so from generic badguys that happen to all wear red bandanas… you are doing it from the Omega Force androids.  I guess at the end of the day it is all about the packaging.  If you have played Farcry 3, you know how the gameplay works.  Capture a base, which opens up side missions, which then leads to the next base to capture.  The key difference everything from Farcry has been taken to eleven.  One of my favorite things is capturing cyber hearts and then using it to lure the Blood Dragons to bases and make them do your work for you.  I mean what is cooler than than giant dinosaurs with glowing neon stripes… that have a plasma cannon breath attack?  While I gave Farcry 3, a colossal score of 3 Mehs out of Meh…  I have to give the Blood Dragon counterpart 5 Kick Asses out of Fucking Awesome.

fc3_blooddragon_d3d11 2014-02-23 10-47-07-97 While I have not really made it terribly far into the game at this point, I know this will be one that I return to and play again quite often.  It is the sort of game you need to be in the mood for mindless carnage to be able to enjoy.  At this point I have secured the first base, and started working on some of the side missions.  Every now and then I come home from work, and just need to kill something.  This is the ideal game to reach for, because the objectives pretty much are all “kill all the things”.  There is zero subtlety here, but I am not really that subtle of a person, so it works for me.  Since this is such a nostalgic ride for me, I find it odd how popular it has been among generations of folks who did not live this experience the first time.  Maybe the camp of the 80s is universal and will always appeal.  God save us all.

It’s Okay to Not Like Things

WoW Getting a Gatekeeper

Back in the beginning of January I crafted a post talking about how much I enjoyed The Gatekeeper encounter in The Secret World and how I felt it was a good thing to have in a game.  I extrapolated this further and said that World of Warcraft really needed a similar Gatekeeper mechanic.  At the time they had the proving grounds but they were universally ignored by players.  Based on a post from Watcher on the forums… it seems like Blizzard is thinking along these lines as well.  If I had to build a requirement for queuing for random heroics, I would have said that more than likely it would need Silver or better in the proving grounds in a specific role.  Turns out based on that post, it seems Blizzard was thinking the exact same thing.  Will this usher in a new area of better pugging?  Honestly I am not sure.

The biggest thing that I do like from the statement is that the requirement is apparently completely ignored with a prebuilt group.  This means you will still be able to carry your friends through the heroics to help gear them up.  Those friends will just have to meet the proving grounds on their own if they want to be turned loose out into the wild.  In the grand scheme of things this is just raising the bar on the heroics, but not really doing anything to fix the social causes for me not wanting to queue for them randomly.  Without a “social justice” system similar to that of League of Legends or Final Fantasy XIV people will still be as big of dicks as they are today.  It really is a catch 22…  folks complain that no tanks want to run randoms…  but when you do tank a random people generally treat you like shit.  I decided some time ago that it was a package of frustration I could deal without in my life.

Being Neighborly

EverQuestNextLandmark64 2014-02-22 10-08-41-17 I have slowed down greatly in my time spent in Landmark.  I am done with the bulk of the structural work on Belgarde Keep and now have begun some of the fine detail work.  In order to complete this I really need to finish upgrading all of my machines, and that means farming copious amounts of materials.  Namely mind numbingly farming burled wood.  Thankfully since I am on a forest island, I can pretty much just roam around in my “front yard” to find this, but it gets really boring at times.  As a result the bulk of my Landmark playtime is reserved for when I am watching netflix or something similar.  I’ve already begun joining the AoA channel like I talked about yesterday, but for the most part there has been nothing but radio silence.

Last night however I got to meet a person who was new to me.  Zarriya apparently is a longtime member of the Multiplaying community and friends with Zeli, so when she popped on we were both happy to have someone else to talk with as we built away.  Funny thing is, she was not on very long before she wanted to pop by my claim and see the work I had done.  It is wierd how this feels in a game like Landmark.  It almost feels like inviting someone over to your actual house.  I was a good ways off from my homestead so as I ventured back there she started on her way over as well.  This is one of the areas the game really needs improvement.  Firstly the friends list is not working, but even more so… we need an easier way to find each others claims.

I was impressed at how fast she found it off the /loc I gave her, because quite honestly… my brain does not function well on a coordinate grid system.  If I could do like EQ2 and set a waypoint to the coord I would be happy…. actually I don’t know if that is in game or not.  It just feels cool to have visitors in this game, since you have put so much work and effort into building your structures the way you want them.  Right now I am mostly working on the sub basement, which I intend to be a dungeon.  No proper keep can really go without one.  So to start I’ve built a series of equal sized cells.  Now I want to do some more open holding pens, but really to do that I need to gather up a lot of iron.  Still very much enjoying the game, but also really looking forward to having more systems in place.

It’s Okay to Not Like Things

A good friend of mine linked me this video yesterday and it seems relevant lately, with the whole force fed narrative of Wildstar vs Elder Scrolls.  While I like both of the authors of this article, the piece that MMORPG.com ran yesterday just feels like linkbait.  If you are a fan of the MMO genre and want more games to be developed…  we realistically need BOTH to succeed.  There have been so many big name MMO failures over recent years, and even if you do not play the game any longer.. it still hurts to see one close down.  The community is still reeling from the loss of Star Wars Galaxies, and similarly from City of Heroes. Both games had extremely vibrant and devoted communities, and both player bases are still trying to find a new home.

Similarly a certain segment of the population was being happily served by Warhammer Online, and Vanguard will have a similar player base abandoned when it closes down this year.  Losing ANY game is a horrible experience.  I will be honest… I like both Wildstar and The Elder Scrolls Online.  I think they are both interesting games.  The problem is I know for certain that I like one of them enough to pay a subscription fee, and the other one… I am not quite sure about.  As a huge supported of Elder Scrolls, it feels like around every corner is another person trying to… pardon the colloquialism “piss in my cheerios”.  So I do at times get defensive of ESO, because I think it is a really fun game.  That is not to say that that I don’t also begrudgingly enjoy Wildstar quite a bit.

Personally I would love to see both games do well and find their own little niche.  We need successful MMOs that are not named World of Warcraft.  If we don’t then this might be the last round of AAA MMOs we so for awhile, or at least ones that were designed without having a massive cash shop component in them from day one.  I still think the free to play MMO is alive and kicking, but the ones designed from day one to be free to play… feel money grubbing.  They feel like they want to nickel and dime you to death each time you play it.  SWTOR is one of those game I would love to be able to play periodically, but I just cannot stand playing it in their free to play mode.

I just wish I could get players past the tribalism of red versus blue.  I am a carebear at heart, and I just want us all to get along.  After all each of these games is a niche within a niche within a niche.  Gaming as a whole is still a relatively small community, and when we attack each other we only serve to alienate people who might be waiting in the wings considering joining in.  Right now the real decision if I play Wildstar will be based on launch timing.  Right now we have Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls coming out in March, and Elder Scrolls Online in April both of which I am deeply committed to.  I assume Warlords of Draenor will be a Christmas 2014 release since no word of the Friends and Family Alpha has leaked yet.  So if Wilstar releases during one of the lapses… I might give it a shot.

Not So Neighborly Bel

There is a bit of brutal irony in me talking about it feeling good to have a virtual neighborhood in Landmark.  We have lived in the same place for over sixteen years, and at this point we know exactly two neighbors.  I consider myself “on waving terms” with several more, but really we know the family to the south of us, and the family that has been mentioned so many times in other posts that previously lived across the street from us, but now lives about five houses down the block.  For the most part I like it this way.  While it may not come across as such in my posts, I am pretty deeply introverted, so after spending the day dealing with people… I just want to shut the doors and see no one by my wife until the next day.

The funny thing about it is… apparently I am known by my neighbors but not my wife.  In part this comes down to the fact that I get home about 4:30 when lots of other people are pulling into their houses, whereas my wife often times works late and doesn’t get home until 8ish some nights.  A few months back we had a few fires in our neighborhood.  Due to the extreme effect smoke has on me, my wife went out to investigate.  Upon meeting some of our neighbors they asked her if she was “new in the neighborhood”.  They apparently had never seen her and didn’t know she existed.  Maybe it is not normal to live somewhere as long as we have and not know the ins and outs of everyone in the neighborhood.  Thankfully the neighbor I write about so often… keeps track of everything going on and can keep us up to date on the intra-neighborhood politics.  For the most part where we live is a pretty quiet place made up of a mix of aging folks that bought the homes during the 80s, and working class families with young kids.

My brother in law used to have these massive impromptu block parties in his neighborhood, and while it was nice that he knew every single person…  it also felt fairly claustrophobic to me.  For me going to work each day and “acting normal” is extremely draining.  By the time I get home, I simply don’t want to have to care about the other people living around me.  Its awesome that they are there, and  are all relatively nice… but I don’t need to have any more people in my life that I have to interact with regularly.  I am more than happy to cocoon up on the couch with my laptop and a game and forget the people outside my door exist.  The irony is… that I end up playing multiplayer games.  I think the key there is that the interaction with other people is on my terms, and in the quantity that I desire when I desire it.  When someone rings our doorbell, or calls on the phone… it always feels like a horrible invasion of my personal space.  I guess I am just wired oddly.