Mercenary Kings

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