February 2014 - Page 4 of 9 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Belghast and The Ark

February 17, 2014 by Belghast

Horribly Sidetracked

Saturday when I wrote my little impressions piece on the Elder Scrolls Online, I managed to get horribly sidetracked in the process of explaining the questing section. At one point I said “Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes” but only actually managed to give you a single purpose. I managed to get myself on a tangent and forget what I was saying. So let me take another stab at explaining the questing system. Generally speaking when you go into an area there is a critical path that you can take to go through it with the least number of quests. If you want to piddle around and carve your own path this is a good thing.

For example in Stros M’Kai the Daggerfall Covenant starter zone, you are asked to find one of three crew members before continuing on. You can literally just find one crew member and be just fine, and the game will allow you to continue forward. However you can find all of the crew members, and each one will do something for you in the final quest before leaving the desert island. Additionally your choices matter going forward. If you choose to kill someone, or fail to save someone… they won’t be there later on at a critical time when you could use your assistance.

That is one of the things I like most about the questing system. It works much like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, in that you get introduced to a character that keeps popping back up in later quests and even later zones. Failing to save a character, means they will no longer exist in the later stages. Occasionally the game will force you to make a hard choice, between two sets of NPCs. When this happens one of those paths will forever be sealed from you. I you choose to help this person, the other person will either die or be so infuriated that they will never help you again.

Basically your decisions matter, and they matter a lot. So while it might not seem that the immediate consequences are all that bad, they will have future ramifications. So while the first purpose of side quests is to get gear, the second purpose is to unlock future story points. You never know when a person you have helped will show back up and lend assistance later. Often times this is in the form of making a future quest a little easier as they lend some unique ability to the fight. However in a few cases this means you may have missed out on a really cool quest chain because the NPC was not there to give it.

Turret Orchestra

After my little write up yesterday about Portal 2… I got a whole lot of responses that amounted to “no wait, you haven’t even gotten to the good part”. Then that they apparently couldn’t tell me about the good part without massive spoilers. Sure enough I managed to play through to the beginning of chapter 5, and the game has changed once again ever so slightly. Now I think I want to know what is going to happen enough to continue playing. I have my assumptions of the end result, but who knows they might be completely wrong. For the most part I have managed to stay blissfully unaware about the ending of the game to this point.

There were a few really annoying levels, but now I am in a part that is more freeform. The coolest thing I have seen to date is the Turret Orchestra. While roaming around in this new free form area, I kept hearing this music playing that sounded kind of like a bunch of accordions. Finally I was able to see what it was, and it was several of the turrets playing in unison. I have a feeling that I will somehow be freeing the various robots under the control of GlaDOS, or at least that seems like a potential subtheme for the game.

Like I said right now I have no real idea where exactly I am heading apart from following what seems like an obvious path carved out for me. I am sure at this point I will plan the game to its conclusion, so it managed to get its hooks into me. While I am not sure if I would call it a truly great game yet, it is enjoyable. I am sure there is some grand reveal to happen down the road, that will make me shift my opinion again. However I stand by my original assessment. Fun game with a cool gimmick.

Belghast and The Ark

It will come as no real surprise to anyone who has ever followed me on the various social media platforms that I use… that I am a pet person. That said there are probably few people who really know how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. As it stands right now, neither my wife nor I plan on having children. My wife swears that teaching high school is the strongest form of birth control known to man. This is not to say we don’t have children, they just happen to be covered in fur. I personally have always had a close affinity with pets, and even if it is something I would not want for myself… I seem to be able to befriend animals quickly. While I would never have a bird, each time I went over to a friends house one of his birds would hop up on my shoulder and stay there until I finally placed him back on his perch.

kitties_sunning Currently we have three cats, all of which are pictured above sunning themselves in the afternoon light of our stairwell. On the left is the mammoth monster cat Chloe, in the back is our mostly black Calico Allie, and if you have been reading these factoids you have already met little shit. Each of them is a rescue, because I believe all animals deserve a second chance at a great home. Each rescue especially has its own personality, and comes with its own quirks. These “quirks” can be frustrating at times, but they make up the complex personality of each animal… so even the annoyances you come to love. Chloe for example obsessively licks anything and everything… which can be sweet at times until she hops up in bed with you at 3 am and licks your arm. Seriously there is nothing freakier than waking up to that. She however is the most amazing snuggler, when you can succeed at the complex game of keeping your arms and hands away from her mouth.

Similarly we also have three ferrets, and they are some of the most adorable animals you could ever have. Here they are snuggled together under a blanket in their playpen. At this point I have woken two of them… and moments later they will be bouncing around the cage like mad. This is the problem with ferret photography… you get one chance to take a shot before they go super sonic. From the left we have our old man… Smokey that came to us as part of a rescue pair of littermates. His sibling Bandit passed away some time ago, and he himself is nearing the end of his journey as well… but we are trying to make him as comfortable and happy as we can while we have him. Next to him is Shiloh, that was a returned to a local pet store and put back up for adoption. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever return her because she is so adorable, and has a little badger face. Finally we have miss “Bella” which is short for Bellatrix, the name her original mommy gave her. She had a much older ferret named Judah that Bela apparently upset regularly, so it was with many tears that she gave her over to us.

Over the years we’ve had lots more animals, including a hamster, a guinea pig, and a pair of sugar gliders. All of them have been our babies while they have been with us, and we have sought to give them the best home we can. Often times it is these little guys that are the reason for me getting a slightly later start than normal. When one is begging for attention… and they are damned good at giving you a guilt trip… how can you possibly say no? The best at begging has to be Bela. She will run over to the edge of the playpen and press her body against the ground sticking out her snout in his pouting “poor pittiful me” look. You would think she NEVER got played with ever. The moment I reach down into the playpen she will bolt over to me and wait to be picked up. All she really seems to want is to be picked up and carried around for a bit before finally going back into the playpen and snuggling up for a nap.

Late Night Doctor Who

February 16, 2014 by Belghast

Mad Man with a Box

Since today is Steampowered Sunday, I thought I would do my factoid as a separate post again, simply because if feels really odd to tack on personal bits on the tail end of “feature”. Since I vowed to finish this month with a factoid a day, this seems like the best way of handling that. Anyways… as I have stated before I grew up in a really small town. There are smaller I am sure, but 2500 people is pretty damned small especially for being a county seat. As a result I did not have cable until I went to college. The cable ran to within a quarter mile of my house growing up, but because of that we were limited to six channels. Essentially an NBC affiliate, CBS affiliate, ABC affiliate, Fox, UPN and the local PBS channel.

Since network television has always been crap, I spent a good chunk of my childhood watching Public Broadcasting like Mister Rogers or Nova. Late at night however the PBS channel changed and brought into our living room all these excellent British television shows. They varied over the years from Are You Being Served, Faulty Towers, Monty Python, Keeping Up Appearances, Benny Hill, Blakes 7, The Tripods… but the constant was always Doctor Who. Some of my fondest memories of my father were staying up late to watch Doctor Who.

Late Night Doctor Who

I realize it is not much of a shocker that me… a notorious geek… loves Doctor Who. It goes deeper than that. The first Doctor I can really remember is Jon Pertwee aka the Third Doctor. However to me Doctor Who will always be the fourth doctor, Tom Baker. Seeing that hat and that scarf still gives me warm fuzzies. Doctor Who above all represented what was good and right in the world. The solemn defender that used his mind rather than brute force to solve problems. While I love the modern incarnation of Doctor Who as well, it is simply a different animal. For as crappy as the special effects were, even rewatching the old episodes on netflix, everything from that era felt more fantastical and hopeful.

Doctor Who also gave me and my father a time to bond together. It was not something my mother liked at all, so she gave us the time to hang out together. More or less I was raised by my mother and grandmother, in that they were the people who I spent most of my time with. My dad was almost always working, and when he was off work he was busy with his photography business. So the moments when I got to just hang out with my dad felt few and far between. Even today when we get together, the topic will eventually lead its way back to whatever is happening in the current series with the current doctor.

While there are a lot of things that I am nostalgic about, and am willing to geek out over… Doctor Who just feels more pure. While the show has better special effects and has ratcheted up the horror factor a notch or two… it still feels very much the same show at its core. It will and always has been about a mad man with a box, who deeply loved what he saw special and different in humanity. That gives me hope for us as a species, that this lonely man from Gallifrey could care about us that much. I hope that the series continues on forever, infecting each new generation of viewers with the same spirit of wonder.

Portal 2

February 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #5

Okay here it comes… huge confession time. Prior to today I had never actually played Portal 2. I have owned it for ages, and picked it up when it was damned near free on a steam sale. I always meant to play it, but something… namely an MMO usually happened instead. Here goes confession number two while we are at it. I didn’t think Portal was that amazing of a game. I know shock and confusion all around… but it fell into the “cute and cleaver” games category. The whole portal gun thing was brilliant, but the concept of essentially a “puzzle shooter” was fun for a bit but I quickly got tired of it.

To be truthful I am not sure if I would have owned the original portal were it not for the orange box. I got it as part of that, and even then it was probably a year before I fired it up and played it. I mostly got the orange box for Half Life 2 and Team Fortress 2, and Portal for me was a bit of a footnote. Based on the copious amount of cosplay and fan art out there… I can tell that the Portal franchise is a life changing thing for some people. I was just not one of them. For ages my friends have pestered me for owning Portal 2 but never actually playing it. In a way I made a promise to redress that wrong during my Steampowered Sunday series. Things happened… and I am finally getting down to playing it today for what would be week 6 if I had not skipped a week.

We Weren’t Even Testing That

For the last hour and a half I have been sitting here playing Portal 2. While I still for the most part consider this game to be a novelty, so much about it has improved. Namely the setting seems more enjoyable to me. The sterile environment of the first lab was interesting, but watching the place fall down around me is far more enjoyable. It has a Portal meets Fallout feel that I really enjoy. Additionally the characters are so much more interesting this time around. GlaDOS was a really cool character in the first game, but now that the gloves are off her lines are that much more enjoyable. Then we add in Wheatley, which near the beginning of chapter three I have not seen a ton of since the first chapter, but I am figuring that will change soon.

The game setting is absolutely gorgeous and they have managed to pull off “believable decay”. Things are broken and out of whack and it feels like they are legitimately so. Like they used to work at one point and then just collapsed. So often in a game when the world is disintegrated, you cannot piece it back together in your mind to see what it looked like before the fall. Here the rooms seem to have all the right number of bits laying around to have been a whole unit at one point. I am not really sure why this is important to me, but in the games where it is not this way there is a nagging feeling that something is just plain off. Even in my beloved fallout series there are plenty of locations that have a chunk of the building broken off, but nowhere near enough debris to account for it.

There are two really cool stories going on at the same time, that are what if anything would keep me playing through the rest of the game. The first is… GlaDOS seems to think you are the same person who destroyed her in game one. If that is the case… how did you end up back in stasis. The other thing going on that I want to know more about are the weird messages that get left to you through the chambers. These are almost always well hidden, in a chamber behind an angled panel or something of the sort… just a bit off the planned path. I’ve snapped a few of these so far but I imagine that when taken together they will make some additional story.

I’ve really let the place go since you killed me

I have no idea how long the game is, but at this point I saved out and gave up on the first of the light bridge puzzles in chapter 3. This seemed like a good stopping point since it was the first time I had actually died. I feel that maybe the puzzles are easier this time around, either that or I was simply lucky. I was able to breeze through most of them to that point. Since the first game was so popular I wonder if maybe they watered down the difficulty level a bit for mainstream success. Not saying that is a bad thing necessarily, but it does give the game a feeling that it is just easier. I remember in the first one I was having to retry levels pretty early on at least by the time I reached room 10. It feels like I am further into the game right now than that. Maybe the “real” game didn’t actually start until Chapter 2, and I am just counting all the training stuff at the beginning to make it feel longer.

The rooms I always do badly at are the ones that involve going out over massive pits of water. I don’t handle platforming over open air that well, never really have in any game. Those levels add extra anxiety to my movement and I think I screw up more often. Namely on the light bridge I just could not see the hook point for a portal where I needed one. I figure that room is one I will have to die a bunch on to be able to find the “secret”. Generally speaking the key to every room is this one little nugget of information that you either see immediately or it takes a truly silly number of tries to finally find it. I am by no means an observational genius, in fact I am usually good at overlooking the painfully obvious… so I am sure it is just a case of that at work again.

…there’s nothing to stop us from testing for the rest of your life

I have to give my friends credit in that Portal 2 is a much better game than the original. However that said I still do not see it as this life affirming phenomena that everyone else seems to. It is a good game, and has some interesting characters and an even more interesting setting. The gameplay is novel, but there is a point where I feel like I am just done with it for a a sitting. I am not sure if I will go back and finish playing through it. The best thing about the Portal experience is that for the most part you can play a single level at a time without feeling like you are missing something. I know I played through the first one over the course of about 12 gameplays. When I couldn’t really play anything else that was too involved, like when I was waiting on something to cook… I would fire it up and figure out a level, constantly inching closer to the finale.

I have a feeling Portal 2 may just claim this slot for me, that game I play when I don’t have time to play something more detailed. At the very least it did not instill in me that feeling of “omg I have to finish this”., I am happy to eventually beat it, but I am also equally happy not to. The game however is really well done, and I can at least see why so many people love it. I think I am just wired wrong for this sort of single player experience. At some point I would like to check out the multiplayer game, as I have heard that it is a completely different animal. I would imagine it plays a lot like forced where you can royally screw up your friends by not doing the right thing at exactly the right time. For now at least I have to say it was an hour and a half well spent.

Belghast Hates Crowds

February 15, 2014 by Belghast

Mixed Up Day

This has been a really odd day. I am doing a second post today so that I can do my factoid. I didn’t really want to include it as part of the previous one… because the previous one was pretty epic. I woke this morning to find that the NDA had lifted for Elder Scrolls Online. I have seriously been waiting for this day for so long, but oddly enough I was relatively unprepared. I didn’t have all my ducks in a row, and tons of material ready to post once the embargo had dropped. I guess it makes sense, as winging it is more my style. Hopefully over the coming weeks until the release I will keep posting little tidbits. The NDA lift was only relating to the beta weekend content, namely the first 3-4 zones for each faction. As a result there are still a few things I can’t really talk about fully yet.

Nothing at all really went as planned today. Originally we were going to get up and around, and I was to take my wife to meet a friend. Then they were going to my mother-in-laws to pick up a baby goat. Yes that does sound strange I know… but it was a thing that was happening. Basically the goat would go to our friends house and be able to roam freely on what is ending up as being a pseudo livestock sanctuary. Things happened however and we wound up spending the entire time killing time… only to find out about 4 pm that it was not going to happen at all today. Had I know all of this to start off, I would have blogged in the morning.

Belghast Hates Crowds

It was an absolutely lovely day, so while we were stuck in a holding pattern… we at least got to run most of the errands that had been stacking up. Since it has been below freezing for what feels like a month, everyone was out and about with the same basic idea we had. The problem with this is the fact that every single place we went was crowded. Crowds are something that causes extreme anxiety in me. If people are packed in too tightly in too small of a space, I get this severe fight or flight instinct.

Earlier in the day my wife wanted to run by our local Goodwill, which is a pretty small store in the first place. To make things worse they were apparently having some insane half off sale or something. The result was that you could barely move around the store. I had run over to the convenience store to get us drinks for the road, and thankfully by the time I fought my way inside she was ready to go. The moment I stepped inside this massive panic set over me, and as I pushed through to where she was it was like my skin was crawling. In most times by sheer power of will I can reset the desire to run screaming away. That is not to say that the instinct is not there and is not strong.

This seems to be something I inherited from my father, and his father before him and so on down our family line. I grew up in a town of 2500, and my grandfather refused to go to the grocery store, or to the sonic drive in… because there were too many people there. My father, cannot make it for more than a few minutes in most stores without having to return to the car and wait for my mother. The fact that I can exist in society and live a pretty normal life is a real boon. The older I get however, the worse it seems to get. The place that it bothers me the most is a crowded elevator. Being a big guy already, trying to squeeze into a standing room only metal box is something I can barely handle. There was a time at which I could go to concerts, but now that many people assembled in one place just is an impassible barrier.

For the most part I have found ways to mitigate my anxiety. Movie theaters are a huge problem, with people crammed in tightly. So to get past that I tend to go to matinees where there are simply not that many people. If I can get an entire row by myself I can normally make it through the experience just fine. For example this past Friday I got out to see the Lego Movie at the 4:15 showing… giving me pretty much free reign of the place. So knowing that the instincts will set in, I can just avoid situations that will make me try and climb the walls.