Why Multi-Gaming Works

Monday on a Tuesday

I’ve sat here and started this paragraph five times now, and keep backspacing away the results.  The day coming back from a three day weekend is always rough, but this one for whatever reason seems particularly painful.  All in all we had a pretty busy break, and last night we managed to get in a long walk between the thunderstorms.  The rain is needed, since Oklahoma is deep in drought conditions, but it managed to ruin a perfectly good Memorial Day.  For the last several years the weekend has been marked by doing little projects around the house, but this year those projects mostly consisted of cleaning and organization.  As a result our closet is more organized than it has been in years and our dresser drawers are not overflowing with clothing we no longer wear.

While I feel like we had a productive break, I am really wishing I had managed to get more sleep because I feel like that is coming back to haunt me.  For whatever reason I slept roughly this weekend, almost every night.  Each morning I would reach a stalemate where I simply got tired of tossing and turning and was hungry enough to get dressed and go find breakfast.  Here is hoping that tonight my sleep patterns can get back to normal and I will sleep through the entire night.  Last night I was doing mostly well until at some point one of our cats started banging against the closet door.  After that I felt like I never really got to sleep soundly.  God forbid we have a door in the house that is shut when a cat wants to go through it.

All of Your Eggs in One Basket

Lately there has been an undercurrent of folks on twitter talking about planning to leave World of Warcraft when Wildstar launches.  I assumed we would be seeing quite a lot of this, because we saw quite a lot of this when Rift launched and when SWTOR launched.  Both of which are games that directly appeal to the wow playing audience.  I am watching people go through the same agonizing process I did when I got tired of Warcraft shortly after the launch of Cataclysm and devoted myself entirely to Rift.  When you have been playing a game for years, shifting to another game is somewhat like making a religious decision.  One of the things I didn’t expect was just how many social friends I would lose in the process.  There are a lot of people out there that only care about the one game they are playing, and are all too happy to put in blinders to try and blot out any evidence that there are other games.

The problem is, in doing this you are placing your fates in the hands of this one title.  When times are good they are awesome, but when times are bad or decisions are made that you don’t agree with… they can seem so oppressive.  Almost all of the angry rants that I spun up on this blog during the early years were because I felt that Warcraft had somehow betrayed me, by not living up to being the game I wanted it to be.  I am here to tell you that this is just a bad way to think about anything created by someone else and entirely out of your control.  Admittedly when I left WoW I took this same sort of devotion and poured it into Rift, and got the same kind of frustrated when it didn’t quite turn out the way I had hoped it would.  Ultimately games are what they are, and while we the players can provide feedback… there are always decisions behind the scenes that dictate the way the game ends up.

Why Multi-Gaming Works

For me at least the cure for this constant sense of dread and angst over upcoming patches…  is that at some point in the past I just started accepting games for what they are.  Enjoyable but often transitory experiences that will have a beginning a middle and an end as far as your personal enjoyment goes.  I present that World of Warcraft and Everquest before it were anomalies and not the boilerplate that all gaming experiences should follow.  As a result I am no longer looking for the next five year game, I am just looking for a game to enjoy while I enjoy it.  Additionally I am looking to enjoy multiple games at the same time.  While I don’t update it as often as I should…  my games played list is fairly accurate.  I play a lot of MMOs at the same time, because they each scratch some itch that I have inside of me.

When one of them starts to get stale I simply hop into another one and play it for awhile.  While this is greatly booned by the fact that free to play games exist, I still maintain subscriptions to many of the titles that I play.  I realize that is not something that most players can do freely, but I feel like even if you can’t… it is healthy to mix in several single player or free to play games into your mix.  In doing this I am basically protecting myself from the doldrums…. those moments when nothing seems to be moving in the game you wish you were into, and are somehow remaining artificially cheery about.  World of Warcraft for example is notorious for having a massive long slog between the last patch and the next expansion.  If I were ONLY playing WoW right now I would be a ball of anger, pensively hanging on ever word about the potential of getting into Alpha and eventually Beta.

Instead I am happily playing everything that crosses my desk in the meantime knowing that when Warlords of Draenor does launch I will give it the devotion it deserves before booting up something else and enjoying that too.  Elder Scrolls Online has been the proof that this method works for me.  I still very much want to play the game, and I feel like I have only scratched the surface, but I am not forcing myself to play it every night.  In fact this weekend I don’t think I played it any at all other than while we recorded our podcast on Saturday night.  Instead I played a mixture of single player games, namely Transistor and Wolfenstein: New Order and had an absolute blast doing this.  To some extent I think when we pay a subscription we feel like we HAVE to play the game or we are somehow missing out on some value.  I propose that the value is what you make of it, and if you don’t feel like logging in, you are not necessarily losing anything in the process.

Why This Makes your Blog a Mess

I realize I am somewhat rambly this morning, but I am going to blame the lack of solid sleep… and am just hoping that at least some of my message gets through.  For the last year I have purposefully and unapologetically played whatever game happened to catch my fancy even if for a single weekend.  As a result my overall happiness has been improved by not feeling like my fates are hanging on the whims of a group of developers.  As a blogger however this is not necessarily a great thing.  People love to be able to classify you as this thing or that thing.  If you are super into World of Warcraft, they like to be able to classify you as not only a “WoW Blog” but also as a “Warrior” blog or a “Tank” blog or even a “Raid Leadership” blog.  When you play so many things at the same time you become classified as “other” and this makes it hard for people to grasp quickly what your blog is about.

I am sure my constant wanderlust has cost me more than a few readers, because I did not live up to their expectations for what a blog they want to read should be.  My hope is that I can show just enough of myself in whatever I happen to write that folks will stick around for the long haul because I am trying my best to be genuine.  There was a time when I tried to pigeon hole people into neatly organized categories in my blogroll, and I simply stopped trying to connect a specific person to a specific game.  Now I simply having one big “Gaming” section and another big “Geekdom” section for things I am interested in that are not necessarily game blogs.  After a point I find I care far more about the person on the other side of the screen than what they happen to be saying on a given basis.  I just hope folks get to the point of caring about me, and not necessarily caring that I am cycling through a long list of games at the same time.

King of Monsters

An Odd Day

Sometimes on the weekends you have days that feel like they last significantly longer than they should, and then you have days like yesterday that feel like they are over in a blink of an eye.  I guess in theory what made yesterday feel so odd is because the entire day was planned around hanging out with some friends and meeting them for lunch at 1:30.  So by the time I got up, grabbed breakfast, wrote a blog post… it was pretty much time to shower and get ready to go out.  None of this is to say that yesterday was not a really fun day, but it was just over in a flash.

We ate lunch at a trendy restaurant downtown called the Rusty Crane… which for as trendy as it is, was extremely reasonably priced.  My wife and I ate for $16, but then again we ate off the brunch menu.  I had this weird breakfast enchilada thing, that while tasty is not likely something I would order again.  It was a tortilla filled with egg, sausage, avocado and what was billed as grilled onions and peppers.  So that to me made it sound like they would be nice and soft and caramelized, but in reality they were mostly raw and maybe spent a few minutes on the grill lightly singing the edges.  Had they been like the veggies inside of a Chimichanga it would have been awesome…  but me and crunchy veggies tend to disagree.

But the food overall was tasty and cheap… and the company was the important part.  We had not seen our friends in several months, and normally we like to see them at least once a month to hang out and get dinner and a movie or something of the sort.  The hard part about being non-parents is finding other couples that don’t have kids in tow to go out and do things with.  As a result we tend to hang out with a lot of older couples, and this pair is a really odd situation.  He is the very first “pimp” I had, aka the guy who first recruited me into the dark art of consulting.  She is a teacher at the same school as my wife.  We only realized the connection one year at a back to school barbeque, and ever since we’ve kind of integrated into each others families.

King of Monsters

godzilla-trailer-header-image After we ate we decided to go see a movie.  Since my wife and the other two had not seen all of the X-Men films leading up to Days of Future Past, they opted against that one.  In reality right now there just isn’t much on at the theatre that is not a comic book-y type film.  In the end we decided to go see the new Godzilla film as it aligned up time wise better than almost anything else.  Just a heads up…  I am not sure you can call them spoilers, but be warned this section is going to have something vaguely resembling them.  If you want to be surprised when you see the new Godzilla… feel free to skip ahead, but unfortunately if you have seen ANY Godzilla movie, you have also seen this one which is part of the problem I have.

I am not sure exactly what I was expecting, but this movie literally plays out like every Godzilla movie… or in truth damned near every Anime story as well.  Mankind does something stupid > Horrible Monster is spawned > Hero (Godzilla) shows up and is misunderstood and attacked by mankind > Sage/Elder/Scientist explains something about nature balancing itself > We put our fate in the Hero (Godzilla) > Hero gets its ass kicked royally and is defeated > Just when all hope seems lost the Hero rises again using last ounce of strength to defeat the Monster.  That is pretty much the template for half of the anime I have seen, not to mention every single Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Power Ranger or anything else in the same “big things battle other big things” genre.

Final_Four_Jaegers I blame Pacific Rim for giving me hope, that a tired old movie construct like Godzilla could have new and interesting life breathed into it.  I love everything about the concept of monsters battling monsters, or giant robots saving the day…  it fills my inner thirteen year old with glee.  The problem is the 37 year old brain is still there and unable to be detached.  There were so many things in the movie that seem to have no explanation and made zero sense.  There is a scene where a coal fired train is travelling across the country to deliver a payload of nuclear warheads.  It is super foggy, and a bunch of the troops are sent ahead to scout the track to see if it is safe.  Next thing we know the train is on fire and coming out of the fog.  How exactly did that train catch fire?  Sure it looks cool as a special effect but it makes zero sense because the monster attacking doesn’t breathe fire or anything.  The train just apparently spontaneously combusted while it was coming across the tracks.

The biggest problem I had with Godzilla is that the movie just felt like it was going through the motions.  They so closely followed the template of what a Godzilla movie has to be, that the character actors that participated in the movie just felt like window dressing.  There was never a single moment in the movie that I did not feel like I knew the next three scenes that were about to happen.  Obviously going into it we know that Godzilla is going to win the day…  but if we have that as a fixed ending… sure you can do something to mix up the space between the beginning of the movie and the end.  So as much as I am railing on the movie, I do have to give it credit that the monster battles looked good.  The monsters were well animated and you can tell they spent large amounts of money trying to make Godzilla feel like the original “man in suit” version without making it look cheesy as hell.  If you love the original Godzilla movies and can suspend disbelief and ignore the fact that it is following a very tired template…  you might just enjoy this movie.

Right in the Feels

Transistor 2014-05-20 17-51-41-79 Now for a game that I will not give any spoilers for…  because it really is worthy of cherishing.  Last night when we finished with our festivities, I went upstairs, threw my headphones on and sat down with the purpose of getting through Transistor.  When we recorded the podcast both Kodra and Ashgar had beaten the game, and I had heard that the ending is really heart wrenching.  They were correct…  the game got me right in the feels and I think maybe I even bled a little.  Everything about this game is wonderful, and if they do not win awards with it… it is a major fucking tragedy.  Basically Supergiant Games has a loyal customer now, after loving Bastion and seeing how much more intricate this game is…  I have a feeling that anything they could create would turn out phenomenal.

My only disappointment is how generally short the game is.  It took me roughly three hours of game play to beat and is the equivalent of I think four areas that you traverse, maybe five.  Now one cool thing that happens is when you defeat the game you can play a “recursion” that allows you to play through a second time with all the abilities that you earned the first time… and everything becomes more difficult as well.  So instead of Creep 2.0 you start seeing Creep 3.0 etc.  I love the way this game embraces code lingo to produce a world that is both Tron and French Noir at the same time.  I would love to see a movie made from this game… would be absolutely phenominal.  I have to admit as cool as the gameplay is… I mostly wanted to play through this game for the story.  I wanted to know what happened and why things were the way they are.  The problem is after completing the game it feels like I have more questions than answers.

Beer and Pizza Action

WolfNewOrder_x64 2014-05-20 19-51-03-03 After the emotional rollercoaster that was Transistor, I felt like i needed to play something far more run and gun.  So I picked back up on Wolfenstein: New Order, and at the point in which I went to sleep I was roughly three hours into the storyline.  There is something compelling about the game, but at the same time something that leaves me completely uneasy about the potential of a fascist future.  So far I am loving the game and look forward to playing some more.  Oddly enough this game seems to be able to get me to stealth around.  There is a sequence where you sneak into a prison, and I loved lurking about and sneaking up on mobs and taking them out with the knife.  Normally I do not do stealth at all, but for whatever reason it felt as though I HAD to use stealth.  If you fire a gun anywhere near an officer they will sound the alarm and bring on all sorts of really bad shit like these flying robot things that are damned near impossible to take out with anything other than the shotgun.  The game is action packed and focused, and precisely what I needed to recover from the case of the feels.

#Godzilla #PacificRim #Transistor #Wolfenstein #NewOrder

Transistor Gushes

Good Bye Old Man

smokeyYesterday was a rough day for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had to bury my old man ferret Smokey.  In 2009 we got a pair of brothers from a ferret rescue, and at that point they were several years old already.  Bandit passed away several years ago from Insulinoma, and it was one of the hardest things I had been through.  I feel like maybe him passing quickly was a godsend.  For the last several months Smokey had been deteriorating of old age, and it was hard to watch him go through it.  For the last couple of months we had kept him in a separate cage in our bedroom, where he could have easy access to food and water since he was not moving around very well at all.  His hind legs simply did not obey him any longer and he had developed cataracts in both eyes.

Our goal was to try and keep him as comfortable as we could until he passed.  The old man had some fight in him because there were several nights that we were certain he would not make it through til morning.  When morning came it was still friendly and very much alive.  When we got up yesterday morning we did our normal “check to see if he made it through the night”, and he seemed about as normal as he ever does.  Raised his head, sniffed my hand and went back to sleep.  While we were out running errands yesterday it seems like he passed in his sleep because he was curled up in the same little ball he always was.

I am thankful at least that it seems as though he went peaceful.  He was a good boy and a friendly ferret, even though he never did bond as tightly to us as his brother did.  The above photo is of him in much better days, snuggled up with one of our girls Shiloh in the hammock.  Bandits passing was so sudden and jarring, but with Smokey we have had months to get used to the idea and just tried to make him as comfortable as we could.  So while part of me is definitely sad that he is gone, another part of me is relieved that he no longer has to struggle.

The Big Clean

Pet funeral aside, yesterday was a good but very tiring day.  If it tells you anything I managed to hit 10,000 steps on my fitbit before we actually went for our evening walk.  As I said before the house needed cleaning badly, and I got up and around yesterday morning and picked most of it up.  However there are still a few deep cleaning projects that need to happen.  We needed to run to the bank, so we got out and about and did some shopping.  The shirts I had been wearing were getting huge on me, and my wife would visibly sigh each time I wore one of them that now hung from my shoulders like a drape.  JC Penny was running a door buster sale that we just happened to luck into without really meaning to.  I picked up a bunch of new and better fitting shirts and this prompted me to remove a ton of older shirts from the closet.

Similarly both myself and my wife needed new bathing suits.  I found a nice pair of trunks that are far more colorful than anything I have ever bought in the past, and she found a nice one-piece at Old Navy.  All of the shopping inspired her to come home and tear apart the closet both figuratively and quite literally.  The bedroom for several hours yesterday was a warzone, and among other projects we cleaned out the catch all corner that had jewelry, perfume and lotions on what used to be a typewriter desk.  For some time I have been hauling around a cabinet to go into that corner that we picked up on craigslist, but simply lacked the time to do the necessary cleaning to make room for it.  It fit in nicely, and honestly could have been a bit bigger.

Similarly she tore apart the bathroom that joins to our bedroom and set up one of those wire divider shelves underneath to segment what is normally just one big space.  My biggest contribution was culling my wardrobe by literally half and folding it neatly for a garage sale.  As mentioned yesterday in a few weeks we are getting pulled into a garage sale, and I am wondering exactly what else I will be selling.  I have tons of compact discs in my office, that I simply never listen to anymore.  The idea of listening to a CD just feels foreign, since I stream almost everything thanks to Google Music. I don’t feel the need to own music any longer, I just want access to said music when I want it.  As a result I am probably going to get rid of my entire collection, but I seriously doubt any of the regular garage sale fare will want the type of stuff I listen to.  Not a single CD could you really classify as “pop”.

Transistor Gushes

aggrochat_bubbles_trans Finally last night we recorded our seventh episode of Aggrochat.  Once again Rae was travelling, so since Dallian has been so gracious to be a kind of unofficial fifth member of the cast, he stepped in at literally ten minutes notice.  I called the episode “Transistor Gushes” because quite literally… that game has hijacked the podcast.  For those who don’t know we keep a running shared Google document for the show notes, and during the week we jot down ideas, and recycle ones that we didn’t get to from previous weeks.  This week the only thing mentioned is Transistor written in 72 point font, with a much smaller blurb below it that says “things that are not Transistor”.

We successfully covered both, and we discussed Transistor, Wolfenstein: New Order, the Final Fantasy 5 draft, Watchdogs, Dark Souls II, Comics, and a few other things along the way.  I feel like it was a really good podcast, and while most of the topics only actually engaged 2-3 of us at a time, the mix of which 3 people were talking was pretty evenly distributed.  We plan on having a follow-up show in a few weeks to talk about the actual storyline and elements of Transistor, but for the time being we limited ourselves to just talking about the interesting game play elements.  We will of course start giving a massive spoiler warning when we get into discussion of plot points.  When talking about Wolf, I tried to limit myself to only discussing things that happen as part of the introduction to the game.  Hopefully this works for people, but if not let us know in the comments… hell if it does work let us know… we love feedback.

Farewell to Coldharbor

Cleaning Day

Good morning you happy people…  I am being forcibly cheery because my body doesn’t seem to want to fully function this morning and I am falling back on the whole “fake it until you make it” methodology.  May is a horrible time for me for so many reasons.  Firstly the world seems to come alive and fill the air full of pollen and seed pods and all the wonderful things that make life happen.  As a result my body tries to kill me as my allergies come into full swing.  Additionally with our constant regiment of walking… you would think that at some point I would stop being sore, however that doesn’t seem to be the case.  I hit 10,000 steps again yesterday and this morning it feels like every inch of my body hurts.  Being fat sucks, but at least I am a much healthier fat that I used to be.

One of the other huge negatives about May is the fact that it is also when the end of the school year happens.  Any spouses of educators will agree with me that the two worst times of the year to be their spouse…  is the beginning and end of the school year.  My wife no matter how much I love her… has been an spastic little monkey in a frantic rush to finish all the things that have to be finished.  As a result she is prone to fits of irrationality at 10 pm at night when things are not going like she wants them to, and not much help in taking care of the household chores.  Also as a result, I’ve kind of said screw it myself… and our house is a pit right now.  So today will be devoted to the cleaning of all the things and trying to get more domicile into a more livable state.  Mostly it has been my inner sanctum that has been bothering me…  I have been stepping over Amazon boxes for weeks that need to be broken down and taken to the recycling bin.  We are considering joining in with a neighbor in a few weeks for a garage sale so some consideration needs to be made about what to actually sell.

Farewell to Coldharbor

eso 2014-05-23 18-39-52-795 Last night my wife was working late yet again, which has been a regular occurrence for most of the month on Friday nights.  She had intended to get home earlyish and we had planned to go for our nightly walk and then walk over to Taco Bueno on the way home.  At some point during the evening she messaged me saying that she would be working late and to go ahead and eat without her, but at that point I was so heavily into the storyline of Coldharbor that I figured I would just wait.  I’ve been Veteran Rank 1 for most of a week now, and have simply not spent enough time in game to push through the main storyline in Cold Harbor which supposedly unlocked access to moving into the Aldmeri Dominion content.  Last night I did just that, by finishing not only the end of the main Cold Harbor story but also finishing up the level 50 harborage quest that gets unlocked immediately after that.

eso 2014-05-23 19-34-45-037 I have to say the “end of the game” is equal parts beautiful and epic, and I am trying really hard not to give any unintentional spoilers for those who have not arrived there yet.  I figure Coldharbor screenshots all look blue and brutal, so I am trying to pick ones that don’t exactly give away major plot points.  There are some interesting choices that happen as you play through the zone, and the game seems to revel in making you choose between bad options.  There is a point where you have to pick between a rogues gallery of formerly vanquished enemies, and I am guessing your options are limited if you did not actually finish the quests in the zones they are involved with.  I feel like I made the right choice…  but you never really know.  I still was dealing with a bad bad person, but overall it did not come back to bite me in the butt like I thought it might.

eso 2014-05-23 17-07-31-593 While I have finished the story, I will still be spending quite a bit more time in Coldharbor as I finish the parts of it I skipped while rushing through the storyline.  After a point you get tired of everything being blue, purple and grey.  I needed to have the ability to move on, especially since I wasn’t really seeing much veteran experience before the Craglorn patch.  It seems as though they shifted things around so you could get veteran experience in Coldharbor.  I have technically been to Craglorn, but only long enough to zone in and get the wayshrine.  I saw mostly Veteran Rank 10 players there, so I figure I have a very long time to go before I am adequate to kill much of anything there.  At this point I have a purple VR1 sword and shield, and a full VR1 blue set of armor, so I am doing okay in the Aldmeri Dominion content.  Though even with all of that, getting jumped by too many mobs at once becomes a fight for my life in a way that never happened in Coldharbor.  I approve of the ratcheting up of difficulty, and it should be fun experiencing the Aldmeri content.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #ColdHarbor #Daggerfall #Aldmeri