Wolfenstein: New Order Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Games of the Decade: 2014

December 19, 2019 by Belghast

This evening I am going to go see Star Wars Rise of Skywalker, and I am sure tomorrow I will be posting my thoughts about it. However this morning I am going to continue our journey down memory lane as I talk about the games that were important to me over the last decade. Each time I think I am walking into a slow year… I sift through the titles that released and keep finding things that were extremely important to me. Let’s get started.

Elder Scrolls Online

I am not sure if there are words to express how important this title is to me. I could have in theory included this game on 2013, because it also played heavily into that year for me as I began testing it in February. I’m a member of the Psijic Order, the original team of testers that stayed with the game as it progressed through various phases and I am super proud to have stomped a bunch of bugs… or at least reported them prolifically. This game mattered me to not only because it is Elder Scrolls a setting that I adore, but also that one of my good friends worked on it. While this didn’t turn out to be the “WoW Killer” like I had hoped, it is a game that I keep revisiting to spend time wandering through its amazing storyline. In fact it seems like it might be time to dust off my characters and pay another visit over the holidays.

Transistor

This game was the game that more or less inspired the AggroChat game club concept. It was a title that spontaneously we all happened to be playing at exactly the same time, and then as a result we recorded what felt like three full shows worth of discussion as we dug deep into the title and our feelings about it. We tried to make this function artificially as we constructed the concept of the Game Club, but it never felt quite as fresh or in the moment because there was always a time when more than one of us were never really that into the chosen title. Supergiant Games is a phenomenal studio and I am willing to play pretty much everything they put out. Transistor was this fluid fusion of music, story and interesting ARPG gameplay that created a total package that we all kept returning to over and over. Collectively we deemed this to be the game of 2014, and it still holds up. I would have loved to have played this on the Switch as it is now my modern platform for this type of game.

Wolfenstein: The New Order

I love Wolfenstein as a franchise and I have been a huge fan since I first got my hands on the original Apogee title from a shareware disk sold by the local bookstore. I obsessed with the game and editing new levels for it, and then as each new game has released I have spent time playing it. After Return to Castle Wolfenstein the quality of the games fell off significantly, so I was completely excited to see a brand new game being worked on by Machine Games a Zenimax studio. This game is both a sequel and a re-imagining of the entire experience and I loved every moment of it. The screenshot is from one of my favorite sequences where you are scaling the side of the eponymous Castle Wolfenstein, but the images never quite do it justice. There were so many really cool big set pieces in the game, and it wove with it a really interesting storyline that provided the action I craved and the character development that Kodra craved. It is a magical time when a game is planted firmly in both of our wheelhouses.

Divinity: Original Sin

This game is going on the list for a few reasons, but not because I necessarily played it over and over and managed to find deep revelations in it. The first reason why it is on the list is because it presents something that has never really existed in my memory before this game, a two player classic PC role-playing game experience. You can start the game as either one character with a swappable NPC, or you can have two different players controlling each character that is on screen and as a result end up having competing goals and objectives. The other reason why it deserves to be on the list is the sheer depth that this game has. You will go insane trying to track down every single thread and quite honestly this paralysis lead me to not get terribly far in the game as a whole. When I encountered the first town I effectively spent all of my time doing what seemed to be a near endless number of side quests and completely tilting my way out of the main story. I want to revisit this game but set some guidelines about what sorts of quests I am willing to partake in.

Destiny

Destiny is the reason why I bought a Playstation 4. It was the single game that was willing to sell me on purchasing a console and I did so more or less to play in the Alpha that was exclusive to that platform. I saw in this game so much promise that I absolutely wanted to be in. However the initial game-play experience was a little lacking for me and I bounced out of it only to return when Taken King released. From that point forward however there has never been a time when I have not at least been playing Destiny a little bit, and I never quite realized just how much this franchise would come to dominate my game time. I love everything about this world and its rich lore… and the subtle mechanical differences between each weapon that make them all feel so unique to me. I view Destiny and Destiny 2 as a continuum and together they are probably my favorite game of this decade.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2014

It was a really interesting year because it marked the birth of our weekly podcast AggroChat. It also marks the year that I officially transitioned into management or at least was an official supervisor. Diablo 3 Reaper of Souls also dominated my play time, but since I had already talked about it in 2012 I figured that was probably enough of that. It was a pretty good year and considering we record AggroChat 280 this weekend, we set up a firm foundation that seems to still be working.

Hunting Malboros

July 23, 2014 by Belghast

The Night Before

This mornings post is going to be a little scant on visuals so I am just going to leave you with this amazing cinematic trailer that Riot released yesterday called A New Dawn. You should totally watch it and marvel at just how awesome Graves is. If you watch the making up they talk about the whole video having a meme running through it “Graves is not impressed”. Onwards to the real post. This morning is the beginning of the Mathematics conference, and throughout the day today I will be playing chauffer to a group of folks who need ferried from the airport to the hotel. As a result we spent some time last night cleaning out my wife’s Pontiac Torrent since it has the most comfortable seating for a large number of adults. The thing that makes that vehicle awesome is that it has a sliding bench seat so you can push it back for extra leg room but still have a significant amount of cargo space.

I went comatose around 10:30 last night, but apparently my wife is having schoolgirl jitters. As a denizen of twitter as well… I guess I would probably be jittery about meeting a bunch of folks all at once from the twitterverse. Granted this is the third running of this conference, but it has never been anywhere near as large as it is this year. We have apparently completely sold out two hotels and they are booking in a third overflow hotel now. To give me fortitude to get through a day of meeting all of these people I don’t know but will be expected to be cordial with… I am leaning on both coffee and a monster ultra. Mostly I just wanted to show off this awesome WW2 Dalek poster coffee mug we found the other day. My wife actually spotted the Doctor Who mugs first, and there were a bunch of designs to choose from… but I have always been partial to the WW2 era propaganda poster from Victory of the Daleks.

So while I conked out completely around 10:30 my wife was apparently up until 1 am. Then when I woke up this morning at 5 to get around and showered, she was awake again and responding to tweets. I think its adorable that she can be all hyped up on nerves and I will likely be the same way when January rolls around and I go to Pax South. I am not sure if have mentioned that on my blog or not yet, but as of right now I have tickets for all three days to Pax South. I may or may not be attending Sunday, but I am definitely going to try and be there for Friday and Saturday. I figure the last day of a con is likely the “anything you missed” day and all the major stuff will likely occur on Friday and Saturday. I might be completely wrong, but that would at least give me Sunday to drive home. If you are also going to Pax South give me a shout, because I would love to arrange some sort of a twitter/blogosphere/whatever meetup.

Attack on Deathshead

I made it a bit further in my play through of Wolfenstein New Order but I am still struggling with crash to desktop issues. I had a spot in the moon base that was doing it, and now am having a spot in Deathshead compound that is kicking me out. Last night I gave it a few attempts but just didn’t have the patience. I think next time I try it I might shut down EVERYTHING, including DXtory that I generally have running so I can take screenshots. I know some games get a little pissy about overlays, or it might simply be that I need to disable the steam overlay. In any case this game is really amazing and it gives me totally unrelated hope. This past weekend at Quakecon, ID Software gave an exclusive peak at Doom 4 that has apparently just be renamed Doom and is somewhat of a reboot. If Machine Games can give us a game as awesome as Wolfenstein… I have high hopes for what Doom has in store for us.

As my friend Kodra has said before, Wolfenstein is very much exactly what games felt and sounded like in the 90s. Everything was industrial metal… and we liked it. I am perfectly fine with this throwback syndrome, because the modern FPS is nowhere near as much fun as the first generation of them used to be. We have come so far in trying to make everything more and more realistic, and I think in that struggle we lost sight on what actually made the games fun. If Wolfenstein and the reboot of Doom herald in an era of interesting level design with secrets and multiple paths to the objective… then hell yes I want to return to the 90s. Right now my goal is to make it through Wolf one way or another by this weekend, so we can potentially talk about the ending on the podcast. We will of course warn people ahead of time before the spoilers start flying.

Hunting Malboros

This is one of those moments when I really wish Hitbox.tv knew what “today” and “tomorrow” actually meant. For the last several days they have said that they would have the export to youtube functionality back up and running today or tomorrow. I realize they are a small company and this is a beta product, but at this point it is seriously making me consider going back to Twitch. I don’t want to, but I also like having the ability to embed video recorded from the night before in my mornings blog post. Complaining aside… one of the things that I have been enjoying since coming back to FFXIV is the hunt system. Each day you can go to a hunt board in your grand company offices and grab a new set of wanted posters. They call them bills… but “handbill” hasn’t really been used popularly in the United States in decades.

I love that the various wanted posters just list a bounty and a basic location for where the mob will spawn. In general I can remember where in each zone that type of mob already exists, and usually the type you need is intermingled within the pack. This system would totally be a quick enjoyable jaunt out into the world if it were not for the two FATE based encounters each day. Here you are either super lucky or have to wait around for hours. Last night I streamed a fairly boring stream, because it was me killing Malboros and Dark Sylphs while waiting on an apparently rare fate to spawn. The positive is this is causing me to actually level my chocobo. As of last night I dinged level 3 on it and made a goodly dent into 4.

The big thing I have noticing is it is super horrible about standing in stuff. Like I had to do all sorts of crazy to try and position the Malboros in such a way as to not let the Daedalus (my chocobo) get breathed upon. Hint… I am pretty horrible at this and probably went through a dozen gysahl greens during the course of the night resummoning him. I find this game extremely relaxing compared to the spastic pace of Wildstar. I have lots of love for that game, but just watching the world absolutely wears me out. Coming back to FFXIV and its more sedate pace felt like crawling into a warm bed. Granted the combat system is still interesting in that I am constantly having to move out of stuff while keeping up my combos, but it is far less button mashy since everything has a sizeable cool down. In any case I am enjoying myself, and at some point I am going to get brave enough to do Duty Roulette for the big prizes.

#WolfensteinNewOrder #FFXIV

Moon Raider

July 22, 2014 by Belghast

Edition Madness

I feel like the colorful descriptors that companies tack onto iterative versions of games has hit an all time low. Since the 80s we have been forced to play a progressively extreme number of versions of a game. During the 90s the Street Fighter franchise for example proved to us all of the ways it could not actually count to 3. We’ve suffered through Super, Hyper, Ultra, Zero, Alpha, Game of the Year, Ultimate, Legendary and innumerable other hardcore and extreme versions of the games we love. This morning as I idly checked Steam I spotted something that made my eye stop dead over it. We really have a game that is a “Velvet Edition”? What is next suede or cordura?

I keep thinking maybe this is a translation error somehow, but “Samten” doesn’t really sound much better. Maybe it is me, and I just have a negative connotation towards the word velvet, and maybe it is completely normal for someone to use that word in place of say “deluxe”. This is just a first for me, and I think maybe this whole descriptor thing has gone a bit far if we have arrived at fabrics now. I mean even though “game of the year” bundles are completely inappropriately named, considering very few of them have actually won a “game of the year” award… at least for awhile they were something standardized. I personally would rather they go with something like “complete edition” considering that is what we are talking about… the version that includes all the damned DLC in one place. Though I guess game companies would probably frown on admitting they have been rationing game content to us for years.

Moon Raider

We had a few errands to run last night, and by the time I got home I was not sure what exactly to play for the evening. Since this weekends podcast, Kodra has been urging me to finish up Wolfenstein so he could have someone to talk about it with. So I opted to work on that, and while I did not quite make it through the game I figure I am pretty close to the ending. I suffered a series of technical difficulties where I would crash out and have to load back in restarting me at the previous save point. When this happened the last time I figured I would call it a night, as it seemed like I was probably going to have to repeat a significant chunk of the previous level. It seems to be related to when I go into a cutscene and then come back out of it.

It is really hard to find screenshots that I can show off that don’t really give away anything major about the game. Well other than the fact that you get to experience Nazi’s on the moon… but that doesn’t really give much away plot wise. I feel like that is the aspect of the game I enjoy the most is seeing how this alternate reality evolved without the influence of the United States. So much of everything we experience today is because of the global export of American goods and American values. As a culture we have had a death grip on the entertainment industry and the internet as well… and as a result everything that comes from other countries often feels like an odd remix of something we would see in the United States. So to see this reality that evolved entirely in a different direction is interesting to me. I applaud the level designers because all of the little details feel like they come from a completely different place.

This game is definitely going to warrant a second play through, because there is a single decision that you make early on that causes the game to go in different enough directions that from that point on the chapters of the game branch depending on your choice made. It seems that Kodra and I picked completely different routes, and I think it will be interesting to talk about the differences between them. I don’t feel like this is probably a discussion we can really have on AggroChat because it would be impossible to do this in a way that is not spoilerific. I really hope all of you took advantage of the QuakeCon pricing and picked up this awesome game when it was essentially half price. I have a feeling that this game is going to experience quite a bit of third party modding, and I hope that sooner or later they bring out a multiplayer addon. One of the more enjoyable game play and narrative experiences I have had in awhile.

Sparse Next Few Days

The next few days are going to be interesting for me. Today is technically my last day at work this week, but just because I am off does not mean I won’t actually be working harder. My wife is part of a crew putting on a mathematics conference here in town, and I have opted to take off from work to help her with it. I know Wednesday for example I will be operating an impromptu shuttle service, and then the other days I will likely be filling in a tech support role and general “gopher”. With all of these constraints it will be interesting to see what I end up blogging about, as I doubt I will be playing that many games.

That said it sounds like at least one of the conference attendees is a Magic the Gathering fan, so I will be bringing up a box of decks just in case that happens. Speaking of Magic… I really have no clue what Wizards of the Coast was thinking when they came up with the 2015 product designs. Once upon a time the off brand products that you can get in your grocery store that are branded as Always Save or Best Choice or even Sam’s Choice were simply called “Generic”. They featured white labels with start sans-serif writing on them, similar to government commodities. So I cannot look at this magic the gathering set without thinking “oh its generic magic”. I feel like we arrived at this point out of some sort of hipster minimalist design ethic… but yeah it is just not working for me. I guess they have used every other color of the rainbow lately for the primary theme of a set… so sooner or later they were going to get around to white.

It will be interesting to see how the next few days shake out. Likely you will be getting some more personal posts. Right now the plan is to take my laptop and work on editing my NaNoWriMo novel between times I am needed. The only problem with this is that the guest wifi at the school is horrible. My phone will allow me to tether to it, but not sure how much I can do that without AT&T getting pissy with me. We are grandfathered in on one of the unlimited plans, and I don’t really want to do much to jeopardize that. The positive is that the Galaxy S5 shipped with unlocked tethering software, and it is not like I had to do anything to get it up and running. I just expect that all of the websites I would want to look at would be blocked without it.

#Wolfenstein #MagicTheGathering

King of Monsters

May 26, 2014 by Belghast

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

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.

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

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

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