September 2014 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Electronic Gaming Monthly

September 30, 2014 by Belghast

Tied to Screens

At least once a week I see a report in the news talking about how we have become too tied to our screens and we have lost social interaction. While I agree that as a culture we are pretty damned addicted to technology, this view point that not interacting face to face is aberrant or strange seems to be a pretty extrovert centric. For the introverts the era of instant non-face to face communication allows us to leave far richer lives than if we were left up to our natural curmudgeon tendencies. I am not one of those people that goes out seeking face to face interactions, and while I can handle it in short doses… it completely drains me and causes me to retreat inside my shell. Whereas digital interaction, doesn’t really cause much stress at all as I can interact when I feel like it, but withdraw just as easily as closing down a chat window.

Dealing with people simply causes a lot of anxiety for me. We have various friends that we will go out with semi-regularly… but even then I struggle. When we make the initial plans it sounds like a great idea, then as it creeps ever closer to the time of the event… I start looking for ways out of it. It goes from something extremely fun, to something I am dreading. Then finally when I force myself to go through with it I have a good time in spite of myself, but this whole rollercoaster I put myself on is something I would rather simply avoid entirely. It takes a lot out of me to go through it each time. So when I see someone complaining that we are losing social interaction, I feel they simply are not taking me into account. Sure there are fewer people for the extroverts to get their warm fuzzies from, but for us extroverts it means we are forced into a lot less awkward interaction as a result. I feel like thanks to the internet I live a far richer and involved life than I ever would have on my own.

Electronic Gaming Monthly

While on an oddly introspective tear this morning, I thought I would talk a bit about a little back and forth I had yesterday about something I miss. In my travels I stumbled onto the Podcast A Life Well Wasted again… which tragically only ever released seven episodes. It is this great This American Life for Video Games feel, and I would love to have more of it. I re-listened to the first episode talking about the death of EGM magazine and was struck with waves of nostalgia for that time in video gaming. Electronic Gaming Monthly at the time was this inch think omnibus devoted to all things video gaming covering arcade, consoles, hand held and even on rare occasion PC gaming. I read the magazine pretty religiously from roughly 1990 to around 1996. It and White Dwarf were the magazines that I waited each month to arrive, and before I actually subscribed I would anxiously watch the news stand at my local grocery store for the next copy.

Back then a lot of my fervor for the magazine centered around them giving me the dirt on the next arcade fighting game. I remember it was the first magazine to post full moves lists for Street Fighter 2, and I memorized them like some arcane text. The arcades were this crazy place where people speculated about potential moves, and by the time Mortal Kombat 2 arrived there were all these unofficial moves sheets floating around the arcades with half of the attacks speculative or complete and total bullshit. EGM was the voice of authority, only publishing things that they had verified as working. At the same time they had this irreverent review style that appealed to me greatly at the time. Gaming was still very much an insider thing, and an excluded subculture… so it just felt awesome to have a magazine talking about the things I actually cared about.

I really don’t know why I stopped reading the magazine, other than maybe the internet got better at reporting the news I cared about… or simply that I got busy and poor in college and could not long shell out the then $7.00 price tag for a magazine each month. Before this episode I was acutely aware that Electronic Gaming Monthly no longer existed, but I never really knew when exactly it happened. In fact the last time I went to a news stand I didn’t see any magazines devoted to video games, so I am guessing that is entirely a bygone era. Once upon a time I used to think that working for EGM would have been the coolest job in the world. There were times I day dreamed about becoming a “video game journalist”. I guess in some way with my blog I have been, or I am at least as legitimate as that term ever really was. I do miss an era when the magazines did not feel beholden to the manufacturers to make sure they got at least a 6 out of 10 score. The aspect of the scoring system that I appreciated the most was that you usually got three different reviewers points of view, instead of just one.

Quite honestly I think a lot of what made that time in gaming history so magical is the actual lack of information we had about anything. Right now we know everything about the games that are being made before they even exist. Hell we obsessed over Titan and all we really knew about it was a name, but still folks managed to dig up little nuggets of information about it. EGM worked, because we were starved for information on our hobby. They were one of the few sources of this information, and while they might only give us 100 words on a single game… that was far more than we were getting anywhere else. The wild speculation, the misinformation, the rampant rumors all got laid low by a single issue of this magazine giving fertile ground for the next crop to spring up until it arrived to quell them again. I miss that era… and I think in a way that’s why the 16-bit games are so important to me… because they are wrapped up in that shroud of mystique. I miss Electronic Gaming Monthly.

Beginning the Real Grind

Last night I accomplished one of the goals I had set out to do Sunday and finally pushed through to level 20 in Destiny. At this point I feel like the real leveling curve begins as I start searching for gear with +light on it. Right now I have managed to find a blue chest piece with 5 light, so I am barely if at all moving in the right direction. Similarly I started working on the Queens Bounty and managed to knock one of them out for killing Fallen Ultras. I am roughly halfway through the 200 headshots one, so hoping I can grind that out in the next couple of days. I am really not sure how many of these I can complete before I actually get to take my swing at the loot piñata. I could really use an upgraded hand cannon as the level 18 green one I have been using feels not quite so epic any longer. I have to say I am really digging Mars so far. I find the Cabal extremely satisfying to kill, like even the relatively weak Legionaires.

At some point around level 18 I got sent to the shipwright again, and she let me pick a new design. I have to say I am digging this one a lot more than I did the collectors edition version. The paint job is okayish, but I am really loving the design of this ship. This is the first design I would have likely picked on my own. I absolutely hate the style of the first ship, and the collectors edition ship still has enough elements that it annoys me. This however is finally a good looking star ship. I think mostly I extremely dislike asymmetrical designs, so as a kid I loved the X-Wing and A-Wing… but the B-Wing and Millennium Falcon frustrated me. I could forgive the Millennium Falcon however since it was essentially cobbled together out of a bunch of other ships… but that B-Wing… man no mercy for that. In any case I am still digging destiny, and it is beginning to remind me more and more of Phantasy Star Online. That was really my first venture into online gaming, so there is a large bit of nostalgia there as well.

#Destiny

Invaders from Mars

September 29, 2014 by Belghast

Weekend Goals

This weekend I set out with a handful of goals, and as always not everything got accomplished. The first goal was to manage to get to 20 in Destiny. Had the servers not gone down last night I might have actually hit it, as I am a little ways into 19 and still have quite a lot of story content t o do. The second goal was to finish my second Animus book, and that one got wrapped up yesterday afternoon without much issue. Sadly I don’t have the “bookrocks” stockpiled to buy another one, but in theory I could hop on the nightly hunt mob train and get there without much issue. The third goal was to cap out my soldiery tomestones, and while I am not quite there I am close enough that tonight’s elite roulette will get me there. Finally I had planned on trying to get to 10 on my Knight in Trove, which I didn’t quite make but I am now level 9 and also have a level 6 gunslinger.

All in all I think I had a pretty productive weekend full of focused faffing. I think the Godmother would be proud of my little checklist of accomplishments… or at least almost accomplished items. This is what keeps me motivated in games, is to have things that I want to tick off a list. I am finding that I am exceedingly good at grinding headlong towards a goal, but when I lose sight of that goal I start to get bored. One of the more interesting side goals of the weekend was to figure out how to configure JoyToKey and in part thanks to this tutorial video from Beau Hindman, I managed to get it running with little issue. So now I am running around in Trove using my Xbox 360 controller and I have to say it works pretty well. There are some wonky issues with occasionally my view drifting off slightly to one side or the other, but I think that is more an issue of the thumb sticks not entirely centering each time. I might see if I can lower the sensitivity at some point to make it less twitchy. The big thing I notice is the amount of time you spend mapping and remapping controls until you find the thing that feels most comfortable.

Invaders from Mars

As always it was the love of loot and the desire to acquire more of it… that ended up lighting a fire under my ass in Destiny. Previously I had been happy to slowly poke my way around the patrol missions, wandering aimlessly through objectives. However due to the various loot issues going on that patch 1.0.2 intends to address, they are basically having a loot giveaway event. As we talked about in the podcast Saturday night, folks are frustrated with the grindy nature of the endgame, and as such they rolled out a limited time event that addresses that at least to some extent. The event that is going on is known simply as The Queen’s Bounty, and through it a series of items appear on the bounty board. Supposedly if you complete a handful of these you end up earning a legendary quality weapon. Basically I want to get in on this loot grab before it goes away.

I had managed to get to level 16 before setting foot on Venus, through just wandering about on the moon doing patrol missions. As such I knew that if I just worked my way up through the backlog of story content I had waiting on me, I would ding 20 without much issue. So yesterday I set forward doing just this. I got to experience Venus and Mars… and so far I have to say I still prefer good old Cosmodrome and the Moon. Venus can be extremely pretty, but everything seems to have this yellow green haze to it. Additionally I have come to realize I am really not a huge fan of fighting the Vex. The fact that I have to shift from aiming for the head to aiming from the yellow glowing spot in their belly can be frustrating at times. Additionally fighting them is a bit like fighting a zombie horde. The Fallen and the Hive had a fair amount of cowardice in their moves. You can push and pull them around the map, but the Vex just keep advancing regardless of what you do like this unrelenting mass of shambling robots.

Once you land on Mars however… the Cabal take heavy metal up to eleven. This is very much the Warhammer 40,000 faction, in that they seem to have a cavalcade of ever more insane mechanized environmental suits to do battle with you. There is this one baddie known as a colossus that has some sort of a chain gun that just pinned me down stunned as it ripped through my shield in a few moments. The Phalanx however were what became super maddening. They are basically a space marine with a giant riot shield. They fire out from around the corner and appear to be deadly accurate regardless of how awkward that position must be. The best tactic seemed to be either to toss a grenade, or try and bait them to move in one direction would looping around behind them. In any case… my sequence of hand cannon one shots pretty much stopped when I reached Mars.

At some point it appears that Destiny reset the player preferences, because apparently my grouping setting got flipped from invite only to allowing anyone to join. In part I am thankful for this because I was joined by Nidrew who basically carried me through a few of the rougher missions, or at the very least kept me from having to start over. So long as one of us stayed alive we could eventually respawn back up. I find that aspect of the game interesting, that when a team mate has fallen, your focus goes from finishing the objective to just staying alive for 25 seconds so that they can revive and get back in the fight. Of course you can go over and rez them youself, but often times they got pinned down in a fire fight and running back in there might end up being suicide. In any case I am very thankful for the help, and when I stopped I was sitting at 19 so hopefully I can push on through to 20 tonight and maybe start working on the bounties.

Book of Deeds

When you see this text pop across your screen it feels extremely epic… until you realize that this was just one of nine books that you have to do… and you have so many left to go. I love the feel of the Relic weapon quests because they still remind me so much of just how difficult it was to get your epic weapon in the original Everquest. The reality is that it is going to take me an insane amount of time to complete it, far longer than is reasonable considering lots of my FC mates are taking the significantly shorter route to a ilevel 110 weapon. I don’t want to call it the easy way, because it is in itself a significant amount of grinding, but with the most recent patch it just got way easier to acquire the necessary bits. In fact since that patch went in I already have everything waiting in my inventory to be able to get my ilevel 110 Axe, I just need a bit more soldiery which I should get Tuesday when the reset happens.

That said I still plan on going through with the Relic quest chain, because man… the Bravura Nexus looks amazing. I borrowed this image from the FFXIV reddit, but man I really want to swing that weapon. Granted the step between where I am currently and where you get that weapon involves months of work, but at some point I will be swinging it happily. Granted by the time that happens they will probably add another tier of progression in there, and it will already be outdated but screw it… it looks awesome. Final Fantasy XIV is really good so far at giving me things that I want to get that require lots of work to get them. I’ve always been extremely luck with drops, so getting that item to drop off a boss seems to be an ineffectual way of keeping me engaged. Giving me something that I have to do every week to slowly inch my way towards victory… that seems to actually work at keeping me around. I love the way that the books work so far in that each one slowly incrementally improves your current weapon. Someday I will get there, I just hope that the rest of the people I am playing with will still be playing when it happens.

#FFXIV #Destiny

Mercenary Kings

September 28, 2014 by Belghast

Dinklebot is a Great Name

It was not until last nights stream that I had heard anyone refer to the Ghost in Destiny as the “Dinklebot”. Kodra credits Matt Lees as originating the term, but whoever did it… it is absolutely priceless. Not only does it clearly identify that the ghost is voiced by Peter Dinklage but it also adquately sums up just how useless the Ghost as a whole feels in the storyline. Last night once again we recorded AggroChat, and this week we had our regular cast of hosts Ashgar, Rae, Kodra and Tam. Destiny has caused so much angst that we started talking about it even before we went on air, and finally I had to say “guys, we should save this for the show”. This week a letter from the producer came out as well as some patch notes talking about upcoming changes to gameplay. We lead off the podcast by talking about these changes and how they personally effect us and our gameplay. I somehow doubt that any of us in particular will be mourning the loss of the loot cave.

From there I think we dove into Kodra and his morning stream of Hatoful Boyfriend. I tuned in when he met a bird that is totally reminiscent of the vespa riding mad woman from FLCL… except she drives REALLY slowly. Carve it into your soul! The game feels like it is complete madness… and also created using lots of clip art… and Christmas tunes. I commented in the stream that I think the game probably cost about $50 in shutterstock credit to make. The storyline is absolutely insane, so it is totally worth a watch. From there we dive into Trove and the Closed Beta gameplay that just started. Rae and I have been playing a ton of it, and we even managed to get Tam and Ash to try it out. Then things turn to our present obsession with Fallen London. I think everyone but Rae is currently madly playing this game.

Finally I give over the floor and let Tam, Rae, Ash and Kodra verbally faff about what is going on with League of Legends Worlds. At this point my eyes glaze over as while I enjoy playing League of Legends… I do not grasp the concept of watching other people play it yet. It was a good show that ran a bit longer than we had intended… but oh well. In a rush to tie things up, I totally forgot to do the where you could find us bit… so instead I recorded a snippet later telling folks to please leave comments either on our AggroChat Nook or the @Aggrochat twitter account. We apparently have some loyal listeners out there, and would love to hear from them. By the time I record the show and post it Saturday night, to the moment I get around advertising it Sunday morning… we generally have a couple dozen listeners. That seems like dedication to me.

Steampowered That Wasn’t

This morning I had every intent to play Witcher 2, as I have had many people in my thread talking about how much they love this series. I have tried multiple times to play Witcher 1… and the controls on that game feel like absolute shit. I will boot it up, and the last time I didn’t even make it through the first action sequence before tossing it aside. It might have the best storyline ever, but if the controls are horrible… I cannot bring myself to suffer through it. Maybe at some point I will see if there is a lets play series where I can watch someone else play the game… or at very least all of the cut scenes edited together. Since folks had been talking up this game again in anticipation of Witcher 3… I figured I would play it for Steampowered Sunday. Apparently I figured wrong.

I have had this installed on my machine for some time, and when I went to launch it this morning nothing happened. After digging through the forums it seems to just not work for some users. There were a bunch of red herrings that I chased down, but none of them ever caused the game to launch correctly. The only thing I didn’t try was downgrading it to run under XP Compatibility mode… because honestly I just thought about it this very moment. In any case it does not seem to like Windows 8.1 64 bit, or at least my machine. There are numerous supposed problems that it runs into with virus scanners… but given my frustration with the first game… there is a plateau to just how much bullshit I am willing to go through for this game. Maybe at some point I will pick up a console version of it, because at this point I am done with the franchise on the PC.

Mercenary Kings

Instead I fell back on a game I have also had installed for awhile but never gotten around to playing. Mercenary Kings is a Metal Slug like shooter from Tribute Games with the amazing animator Paul Robertson. I was originally made aware of him several years ago when I watched the video Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006. The animation is in fact as insane as the title might suggest. Later on he went to animate the amazing Scott Pilgrim vs The World console game, so quite frankly I picked this up because of him. This morning… I flat out sucked at playing a side scrolling Contra/Metal Slug style shooter. Maybe it was my frustration after trying to deal with Witcher 2, maybe it was the controller…. or maybe I just flat out suck. In any case I died a lot, and die in some pretty silly ways. I think I died to a kitten at one point.

Many of my deaths could have been avoided to be honest if I had just read the tutorial level. Me being my normal self… wanted to simply rush head long into fate and totally missed the fact that I could do things like proactively reload my weapon for example. No matter however as bad as I played I still had quite a bit of fun. The game is not really your traditional Metal Slug or Contra clone, in that the game map can be traversed in many different paths. One of the missions involved me hunting down and taking out 8 snipers, and as such this involved me covering the entire game map multiple times looking for the last sniper I had missed. A lot of the terrain is gated by obstacles that you cannot cross in a specific direction, so many times you have to go a different way to get where you were hoping to get. The game has a checkpointing system of huts that allow you to respawn in various points in the map… and I respawned over and over and over.

I saw this screen an awful lot during the time I played the game. You have two meters for failure of a mission. Either you run out of fixed number of lives, or you run out of time. I believe the initial timer is set to 20:00 and I mistakenly took this as having plenty of time to poke around the map. If you know what you are doing I am sure this is more than enough time to find your objective and move along. For me… I ran out of time several times. The game play is not the stage after stage progression that I was expecting. Instead you have a village full of members of your team, each of them interacting with you in different ways. There is a village store, someone that will allow you to toggle on internet play, the general that will allow you to pick your missions and the chopper pilot that will drop you off as well as a few other characters that I didn’t really interact much with. The game is at times reminiscent of a lot of classic arcade games, but it ends up being a really unique mash of of them.

You can check out my entire horrible play of the game in the above embedded Hitbox video. It is still making its way to Youtube, but if you would rather wait for that copy you can check it out here. I think I was mostly just having a bad morning. I woke up late and am still in a state of stupor, and then combined with the frustrations with Witcher 2… that I has psyched myself up to play… I was maybe not in the best place to do a recording. In any case I had enough fun that I will be playing it some more. It falls in a camp of being frustrating, but just frustrating enough to make you learn how to do things better. In the little bit I had played I had already improved quite a bit. When I got rushed however I would still make really dumb mistakes. There are some enemies I could avoid, and others I couldn’t. Quite frankly at this point I am really not that great at side scrolling platformers, even thought I continue to try and play them mostly in part to a huge sense of nostalgia for that genre.

On a positive note I did manage to actually complete one of the missions. The find the snipers mission, mostly was about exploring the level and not so much about rushing towards a final objective. As such it seemed to fit my playstyle a bit better. I got the first 7 snipers pretty easily, but it took me forever to find that 8th one. It ended up being back near the start of the mission… which Ashgar kept trying to tell me… but unfortunately I was not watching my stream chat. I didn’t advertise this one so I didn’t expect anyone to actually be tuned it. I just fine the process of streaming a considerably easier way to get a video up onto youtube than through actually uploading it myself. If you like Metal Slug, Contra, Gunstar Heroes, or any of those style of games I suggest you give it a shot. I might end up repurchasing this at some point on a PS4 because after getting used to that controller… I have to say the Xbox 360 that previously had been my controller of choice felt really really odd. I am wondering if I can hook up a PS4 controller to my PC… but I guess that is a mission for another day.

#AggroChat #Witcher2 #MercenaryKings

A Proper Paladin

September 27, 2014 by Belghast

Capitalism Ho!

This morning I am getting around a bit later than normal. I am not sure why exactly I slept in so late. I got up to go to the restroom at 6 am, and then next thing I know my wife is getting up at 8:30 telling me that her tummy is grumbling. I apparently took from 8:30 until 9 to actually raise myself from the stupor. I showered and got dressed and wandered out like usual to find some breakfast. When I got to the QuikTrip just down the street from my house it was absolutely packed with people. When I exited the car I immediately realized why. Across the street is the high school and I was confronted with a barrage of the sound of that can only come from a dozen marching bands warming and tuning.

Since there were band parents and potential competitors wandering in and out of the store, I half expected that everything would be picked over. However it seems like they were prepared and pretty much everything you could want was in stock. I ended up getting my traditional Jalapeño Sausage Cheese Roll, and for my wife a chocolate long john. For the moment life is good as I have consumed my breakfast and am now writing for you lovely readers. It was around this point that I remembered that my friend Kodra and fellow host of AggroChat was planning a stream this morning. If you catch this post early enough you should totally tune into his Hitbox stream and watch him attempt to date birds. We have been joking for a few weeks that he needed to play this game… and the subsection title comes from a comment he just made over the stream when he was offered to get a job.

All Grown Up

Yesterday I was feeling absolutely like crap. I woke up and it felt like someone had filled my head with concrete over the night, and took after my throat with some sandpaper. I struggled around yesterday morning trying to get psyched for work, and it just wasn’t working. I texted one of my co-workers to make sure he was in the office, and that things were going smoothly. After reporting back in that all was well I decided to just stay home. I stayed remoted into work most of the day, working on this and that but took breaks to work on leveling my paladin. Considering I technically took a sick day, I didn’t feel bad at all about doing this. They were essentially getting free work from me as it was, and I was mostly just dealing with little issues as they came up, and responding to email.

After doing my daily low level dungeon roulette and getting Haukke yet again… I decided to pull everything in the zone and skip nothing. The boost of XP managed to take me through the rest of 48 and halfway through 49. I didn’t really feel like tanking another low level dungeon considering my precious bonus was gone, so instead I went out to Mor Dhona and worked on some leves. It is almost as though they had intended folks to do just this because all but one of the Leves spawn in exactly the same corner of the zone. So I could run to the vendor get four quests, complete all four and just say no to the free teleport between them. It took a couple of rounds of this to get close, but what actually dinged me was completely the “do 5 different types of leves” challenge log entry. Those things are worth a truly prodigious amount of experience.

The awesome thing about having so much Syrcus tower and Weathered gear, is that all of it is dual class for both Warriors and Paladins. This means the second I dinged 50, and bought 3 pieces of ilevel 90 gear from the hunt master… I was sitting at I think ilevel 89. My weapon and shield being the only thing dragging down my overall score. The problem is I had glamoured most of the hideous looking Syrcus tower gear to look like the default warrior set, and class specific glamours won’t show up when you equip it as another class. Instead I opted to go for a mix of the chain tunic I loved so much, and some of the heavy allagan bits I had managed to connect. For the paladin I keep the golden crown, and for warrior I use the bunny samurai hat. So far I am digging the look.

A Proper Paladin

Yesterday afternoon and into the night, my mission was to push through the Relic Reborn quest line and become a proper Curtana wielding paladin. One of the unintended consequences of the Nexus relic system, is that folks tend to be ONLY farming whatever happens to be the dungeon or trial that gives bonus light. Players have figured out there is the equivalent of the “Hot Zone” that Everquest and Everquest II used to have. Where if you run that one thing, you get a significantly boosted amount of nexus light. The result is that it took absolutely forever to get most of my primals done. I think at this point folks are still busy farming nexus light, and not working on alts… which I think is what keeps the group steps for the relic moving along quickly. You would figure as a tank I would get damned near instant queues… but unfortunately that was not the case.

I spent large blocks of time dancing in various places. Here I am dancing for two NPCs in Uldah… both of which seem thoroughly unimpressed by my skills. I think a rundown of the waits looked a little something like this… Chimera took around 45 minutes to finally pop and when it did I was the most seasoned tank so ended up tanking it. Hydra on the other hand took only about 25 minutes… and the other tank a Cat Girl in a Bikini wielding a huge axe rushed in and tanked it. For Ifrit it was more like a 15 minute wait, and oddly enough once again a Cat Girl in a Bikini tanked it, but from what I can tell it was a different one. Finally we come around to Garuda and it was almost instant pop. It turns out that I lucked out and hit a spot where Garuda was the Hot Zone… and as such it was the fastest Garuda run I have ever experienced. Folks were ignoring all of the mechanics and pretty much just burning her.

That just left Titan, and after another fifteen minute run I was volunteered to be the primary tank. This is fine because really as far as fights go Titan is one of the easiest fights to tank. For the most part you just stand in one spot occasionally shifting slightly to either be next to the red line or to avoid a bomb. Like every titan I have seemed to be in ever… it took a couple of wipes and echo stacks before we finally pushed through. On the time we won we were down to a single Scholar healer and a few dps and me. This seems to honestly be easier than trying to keep alive eight people on this fight. Sure it was a pain in the ass and took a really long time, but you reach a point where the healing and movement is manageable and you just keep repeating the same loop. With that I had my Curtana and shield. Moments later I had upgraded it to Zenith level and finally felt like a real paladin tank. This makes level 50 job number four and my fourth Relic Zenith.

#FFXIV #Paladin