AggroChat #312 – A Whole New World

Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we are back after having a week off due to scheduling.  Bel is super excited to talk about Amazon’s New World, which finally leaves NDA.  He goes into a deep dive of his experiences so far with the assorted systems of the game.  From there we have a reasonable segue into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 and getting used to the WvW pvp system.  We also talk a bit about other games like Final Fantasy XIV and how it handles PVP.  We have a random aside where Bel talks about how he tends to avoid using mounts in Open World games, and finally Ash talks about how he has come to peace with the Blue Mage in FFXIV.

Topics Discussed:

  • Amazon’s New World
    • Deep Dive into Systems
  • Guild Wars 2 WvW System
    • Final Fantasy XIV PVP modes
  • Frog Fractions ???
    • When a DLC is a new game
  • Bel Ignores Mounts in Open World Games
    • Ghosts of Tsushima
    • Horizon Zero Dawn
  • Making Peace with the Blue Mage
    • How Ash Learns to Accept the Systems

Ode to a Smalltown Skater Punk

Tony Hawk in Pretending I’m a Superman

Sometimes you end up with a post stuck in your head that develops a life of its own. Sometimes I veer wildly into territory that I doubt anyone is interested in, and this might go there. The biggest challenge however is I am not even sure how I am going to navigate what I am wanting to talk about. Let’s start with the basics. This weekend I watched an excellent documentary on the making of Tony Hawk Pro Skater called “Pretending I’m a Superman” name from a line in the Goldfinger song Superman. I don’t think it exists on any of the streaming services, and was available for rental for $5 or to purchase for $10 so I just outright purchased it. It was a phenomenal documentary and essentially covers both the evolution of the skate scene and the events that lead to the creation of the Pro Skater franchise, and it’s eventual downfall.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 in all its old-school glory

There are times that I wonder if I am legitimately going through a mid-life crisis. There are times when I get hit so hard by nostalgia that it is almost painful. While I have been messing around with retro consoles lately, this latest venture was triggered by the impending release of a remastered Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. THPS was a very important game for me, but maybe not because of the reasons you might think. I spent a good chunk of my adolescent years as a skater punk, growing up in a very small town without much of a support structure for those sort of en-devours. Thankfully I had a group of about a dozen or so friends who had similar interests at a similar time, but in the pre-internet era we were grossly ignorant about a great many thing.

If not the an exact match, very close in appearance to my first Skateboard

One of the things that you need to be aware of about living in a tiny town prior to the spread of the information super highway is just how small of an existence it was. In a small town in the 80s and early 90s you pretty much had a Dollar General, a Grocery store and if you were exceptionally lucky a Walmart. If something could not be obtained from those locations it was effectively a strange and magical artifact. Weirdly enough my very first skateboard came from the local grocery store and was purchased by me pestering my parents for all of the C&H Greenstamps they had available. I have no clue what the equivalent cost was, but above is an image that if not the same model comes mightily close to my memories of it.

It was not a good skateboard, but then again at that point we had no clue what a good skateboard was. My friends had similarly bad skateboards and we thought we were cool. The board lacked a lot of features that you really need to do much with it… namely it was completely flat and had no concavity at all. Second problem it didn’t really have much of a tail, so you were wildly limited in what you could realistically do with it. However it claimed by be a “Ninja” skateboard, which sounded really cool to us at the time. This was apparently a thing because I remember at least two other friends having one branded this, and a few others riding Nash which were at the time equally horrible. The thing I remember the most about it is just how bad the wheels were. They were an exceptionally squishy urethane that picked up every rock and caused you to come skidding to a halt at random.

Thrasher Magazine, a key lifeline of knowledge

Our primary source of information in these early days were horrible movies like the 1986 Josh Brolin vehicle… Thrashin’. The movie did serve a greater purpose however because it introduced us to the Red Hot Chilli Peppers which is a theme that will resurface later. The grocery store news stand infrequently carried the magazine Thrasher, and it was pretty much a race to see who could purchase it before they would ultimately sell out. I had the good luck of being Catholic and our tradition was to go to the Grocery store immediately following Mass, which was a good two hours before anyone else in town would be there. As a result I managed to pick up most of the issues, because the concept of subscribing to a magazine was wildly foreign to any of us.

Santa Cruz Slime Ball wheels

As we came to realize just how bad our skateboards were, we sought a way to improve our lot in life. The friend who could talk his parents into buying him anything had mail order as an option. The rest of us needed a physical location, and at this point the only place any of us knew was Gadzooks. This was located in a mall roughly an hour and a half from our tiny town, and was effectively a clothing store chain. For some reason unbeknownst to any of us, they carried a small stock of decks and various bits needed to make a proper skateboard. While I did not get my first skateboard there, I did manage to talk my parents into a pair of 65 mm Santa Cruz Slime Ball wheels that were neon pink and neon green. While this was largely a stop gap measure because the board itself was still awful, it did go a long ways to making the experience more manageable.

The Skateboards that I owned throughout the years

My first real skateboard came not long after that, but I remember it being a Christmas present. It was however the sort of Christmas present that you know about because you ended up having to pick it out. By then we had found another option for skate equipment in the form of a ski shop called Think Snow. They didn’t have much in the way of stock, but had access to order pretty much anything we could want and I wanted the Jason Jessee Neptune board. I mean your first skateboard is going to be chosen because it has badass graphics right? I also got to pick out a pair of turquoise gullwing trucks to go with it… which I thought looked cool but in hindsight were really poorly designed and lead me to grinding the bolt off.

I managed to assemble the rogues gallery that were all of the boards I rode over the years. The first one being of course the Jason Jessee. It had a really shallow tail and nose kick, which lead me to grossly over compensate with the Staab Genie, which was a heavy as fuck monstrosity that was designed for ramp skating. This lead me to over compensate again when I got the Natas which had a really short wheelbase and pretty aggressive nose and tail kicks, but was not really comfortable for my already 6’2″ frame. The Danny Way board was a case of finally choosing a board for how it felt rather than how it looked. Jason Lee was another case of me doing this, even though I did really like the Cat in the Hat artwork. Side note this is in fact the same Jason Lee of Television, Movie and now photographic fame.

Footage from Streets on Fire by Santa Cruz

The biggest challenge by far of being a skater from a small town was the general lack of options for where to skate. I grew up in the country, and since skateboards do poorly on dirt… I spent a lot of time without many options. My dad ran a photography business and when he added a studio onto the house, it included a really nice ADA compliant wheelchair ramp. I spent many an hour riding down that ramp and then trying to bail before falling off when I hit the gravel.

The highlight was always when I got to got visit my “city friends” and hang out, but that in itself was its own kind of misery given that our town had an excessive number of brick streets. If you have ever encountered it… apparently at some point in the history of the town we had a famous brick plant and as a result many of our street were never paved over to show this heritage. Given time and as the skateboarding fad spread, we got access to ramps of varying degrees of quality, and I even got a second hand 8 foot tall half pipe which was enjoyable and increased my access to riding more regularly.

Footage from Ban This by Powell Peralta

All of that said there was still a lot of time when riding just wasn’t feasible. At home I had a three-tier giant fingerboard skatepark that I had built out of cardboard, index cards and the barrels of various pens as coping. There were a very small number of Skateboarding games on the NES but between my friends and I we had copies of them all. I spent most of my time playing Skate or Die, but later I got access to the port of Atari’s far superior 720. The other major downtime activity was watching various skate videos that we had somehow acquired.

I say somehow acquired because you have to remember, in a small town that which does not come from Walmart does not exist. That said there was a bit of an underground trade in bootleg copies of things that someone at one point legitimately purchased. Anytime something new would enter the system, there would be a sequence of bad copies of copies until practically everyone had access to whatever it was. One of my happy realizations of late is that a lot of these skate tapes have found their way onto YouTube. So now it is entirely possible for me to watch some of my favorites including Streets on Fire by Santa Cruz, Ban This by Powell Peralta, and I even managed to find a copy of the Vision Street Wear US Championships that I can only assume someone originally taped off cable. Side note… most of us had no access to cable television either.

Small towns don’t really have a proper culture of their own, but instead adopt things through whatever means necessary. We didn’t have peers to look up to and show us the ropes. Instead we relied on these videos and the few magazines we could scrounge together. As a result being the impressionable youths that we were, our identities were very confused mirrors of what we had been seeing. We dressed like the skaters we saw dressed. My artwork at the time was deeply influenced by the artwork that adorned the boards and my best friend and I spent countless hours drawing what our boards would look like… you know when we went pro because that was absolutely a thing that was going to happen.

Of all of the influences, I would say the biggest for me personally was the music. In a small town we had access to two kinds of music… hair metal and even bigger hair country music. I mean I listened to my fair share of Poison and Def Leppard, but craved something more. These skate tapes had these phenomenal soundtracks from band we had never heard of, and had no clue how to even get access to. I remember pausing the credits to Streets on Fire and scribbling down the name of every band that had been featured. Our little tribe made it a mission to spend birthday and allowance money trying to acquire a trove of this magical stuff.

Of course not a damned bit of it was available local, so it would involve frantically scouring the racks of every music store we got access to, but over time through a similar bootleg network we had built up a soundtrack for this shared culture. This lead me down the rabbit hole of labels like SST Records, Epitaph and Sub-Pop and to obscure dives like Mohawk Music that I still miss to this day. This also represents the time when we were heavily listening to bands like Black Flag, DRI, Fugazi, Minutemen, The Descendents and still my favorite of the batch Firehose. Once one person got access to something, it was rapidly spread throughout our burgeoning community, because that is the sort of thing that happens when access to anything “new” is so damned limited.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater Remake

So when I talk about Tony Hawk Pro Skater, it is all of these things that come rushing back to me in their vivid technicolor glory. It has never necessarily been about the specifics of the game, but instead the quirky culture that surrounded my days as a skater. I was never certain what lead me to stop skating, but looking back now I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I spent the majority of my junior year in high school pretty damned ill. I was having black out spells and even managed to very neatly park my car into the ditch during one of them. With this came a fading away from a lot of the people that I had been involved with… I lost my gig as drummer of our band and as that circle of friends made their way into harder and harder drugs I sorta just stayed purposefully distant.

Around this same time circumstances lead to us getting our very first computer, a 25 mhz 386 with two whole megabytes of ram, which we eventually upgraded to four. With this my friend group changed as well, as I shifted from Skateboarding as my primary interest to all the things that had taken a backseat. I delved more deeply into pen and paper roleplay and wargaming. I spent more time playing Super Nintendo and then was completely blown away when I got to play Wolfenstein 3D for the first time on the PC. The underground network of acquirers of things shifted from bootleg music and skate videos to bootleg copies of Civilization or Prince of Persia. I still lived in a tiny town and my access to things was just as impossible given that Walmart didn’t start selling anything PC Gaming related until I was in college.

After that the come the internet and access to all of that knowledge that I had so desperately been wanting all the years trapped within my tiny confines. I commuted back and forth to junior college for two years, and during that time I was introduced to my wife from a mutual friend from Belgium. This acted as a gateway to meet a lot more denizens of Undernet and ultimately influenced which college I went to, leading us to get together as more than just passing friends. My life changed in a lot of ways rapidly as happens when you graduate high school and move on with living.

The truth is I was never a good skater, but I enjoyed it. I could Ollie if somewhat unreliably, and through moments of sheer miracle could occasionally land something like a pop shove it. The truth is among the dozen or so of us in the little tribe… there were maybe three with any real talent that acted as tutors to the rest of us who just enjoyed cruising around and doing simple things like grinding parking blocks. To the best of my knowledge none us actually skated past our senior year. I kept my board in the back of my car for years and through a bit of freak accident wound snapping a truck trying to land a kick flip. I never repaired it after that and as a result it put a somewhat permanent end to my skating days.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater Remake

We are nearing the launch of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 on September 4th, and with it has come this flood of emotions. I have access to the warehouse demo, and it plays just as well as I remember the originals playing. That said none of my feelings are really about the game, and are instead about this fairly important time in my development. Deep inside of me is still buried a little skater punk, and I think this is the era when I developed my deep distrust of authority figures. We went through a period where everyone seemed to be trying to pass ordinances to stop us from having fun, and I got shot at (I think it was just a pellet gun) by a local gas station owner when we rode up to try and buy something out of the pop machine.

Nostalgia is a very powerful drug, one which I seem to be deeply susceptible to. I am thankful to this time and the influences it had on my musical tastes. I still get joy by watching those old skate videos, and from time to time I break out a fingerboard with a strong desire to once again build a completely nonsense skate park. For the time being however I will just look forward to the THPS Career Mode and the ability to build and share sweet park designs with my friends online. Like I said at the beginning of this nonsense, this is a post that I felt like I needed to write. I am writing it in large part for myself, but maybe someone out there will get some enjoyment from it as well. I will close by channeling my preteen self that was listening to way too much Exploited… Fuck the police, Skateboarding is not a crime.

The Good, the Bad and the Ghost

Innocuous Credit Sequence Screenshot from Horizon Zero Dawn

This morning I have a handful of topics to talk about, and none of them really feel like they are big enough to fill an entire post. As a result you are going to get a number of tidbits about each. Starting up with a screenshot from the credit roll sequence of Horizon Zero Dawn that is in no way a spoiler for the game as a whole. This is the second time I have gotten a credit roll for this game as I had originally played it on the PlayStation. Knowing how the game goes does not stop the fact that the ending was still an emotional sucker punch and I did not have dry eyes at several points during it.

The only advice I would give is that it personally felt better to pause the main story at some point and go knock out the DLC content, and that more or less paid off well. I love it when a game gives you a moment to visit with your friends that you met along the way one last time before the looming end battle. Playing through the DLC ahead of this moment meant that elements of the DLC were included which felt really good. I personally paused the main story shortly after getting to the main city of the game and getting the quest directive “Find <character name> at the Excavation Site” and that seemed to be a good place because it was a lull in what was happening.

Yeah Kamala I feel the same way

I feel like I am getting dangerously close to beating a dead horse at this point with this topic. I tweeted my feelings on Friday and spent a good chunk of Saturday’s podcast talking through it as well. Avengers was not a game that I had been following super closely, but I was hoping it would be enjoyable and had been looking forward to it. On Friday’s I have to take a half day furlough and as a result I had planned on spending my afternoon playing the game. I ultimately lasted about two hours before giving up and asking Steam for a refund. I verified this but in the entire history of using steam since September 22nd of 2004… I have asked for two refunds. The first was for Skater XL, because I was hoping for something like Tony Hawk Pro Skater and when I asked if there was a way to configure the game to behave like that the community was toxic as fuck to me. The second game is Avengers, because I feel like the problems I have with this game will not be fixable within the time frame of a September launch.

The sad thing about this is that I really was enjoying the story beats, but the core gameplay loop felt awful. If you have ever played a truly alpha game, there is a phase that sorta happens early on when all of the pieces that make up the combat system are in the game, but nothing has really been tuned to make it feel enjoyable. The characters are making attacks but they don’t really have a solid flow that they feed into. This is what Avengers felt like to me, as I fought with the overly aggressive camera and screen shake and combat that didn’t feel seem to feel like it was actually connected to what my character was doing. The similarly aggressive Quick Time Event system and the fact that sometimes they just wouldn’t fire when you needed one of them to… like swinging over a chasm… got tiring as well.

We are effectively two and a half weeks away from launch, and at this point… I have no faith that the game is going to change in a significant way. Unless they made the stupid decision of having players play through a year or more old demo… the game is effectively where it is going to be when the game launches. Ultimately it came down to the fact that nothing I was doing was really “fun” because I didn’t feel like I was engaged with the world around me. Maybe it feels particularly bad because I have been playing Horizon Zero Dawn and Ghosts of Tsushima… both games with phenomenally engaging combat systems. As it stands it is doing a lot of the things that DC Universe Online did in 2011 but instead gives you less freedom of movement and throws in a bunch of Quick Time Event infused cinematics for you to watch. However I believed the combat in DCUO, which I guess makes it the better game.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2 Warehouse Demo

Another demo that I got to play with this weekend is the Warehouse level from Tony Hawk Pro Skater 1+2. I don’t have a ton to talk about this because I have only played a few sessions, but I know enough now to feel like this is legitimately going to be a good game. I have been playing THPS2 on my RG350 emulator handheld, and I have to say that this essentially checks all of the boxes that the original game did. The only thing that takes a little getting used to is that the game as a whole is considerably faster than the original. The other thing that is a bit weird is that instead of standing up after a wipe, you sorta do this glitchy rewind thing which is stylized… but takes some getting used to. Those things aside… it was after a few minutes that my muscle memory started to come back. I do want to play around a bit with button mappings because as it stands a few of the buttons should be handled better with triggers.

Ghosts of Tsushima on baseline PS4

I spent the majority of Sunday playing Ghosts of Tsushima. I had been wanting to play through HZD before really getting into this game in earnest. I gotta say I am really enjoying myself and the only thing that would have made the experience better is… 1) if it were on a PC and 2) if I was playing with a keyboard and mouse. Essentially controller just isn’t my jam but I suffer through it on occasion for games that I feel are worthy of the frustration. I am still largely in the first area of the game, slowly working my way through the story missions and recruiting help. I am sure I will have more to say in the coming days. I know everyone has been talking about this already for months but it is all new to me.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Hopes

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 releasing September 4, 2020

With the announcement of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 I have high hopes but also some significant concerns due to the recent track record of the series. Yesterday I had a project piece to write, but this morning I cannot get it out of my head. The details so far are that Vicarious Visions is working on the game and it is targeting the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC via the Epic Games Store. It also is coming out fairly soon, with the trailer announcing that it releases on September 4th, which apparently a demo of the Warehouse level coming out before that for anyone who pre-orders the game.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1+2 Collector’s Edition Contents

There are as far as I can tell three main products available, the standard game is roughly $40 regardless of platform. The digital deluxe edition is roughly $50 and adds some retro stuff for create a skater mode, retro costumes for Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen and Steve Caballero, and The Powell-Peralta Ripper visualized as a skater. All of those things really only matter to those of us who are 40 somethings and grew up in the era when Powell-Peralta and the Bones Brigade were kings. Finally you have the physical collectors edition that is roughly $100 and comes with the game, digital deluxe goodies and a legit Birdhouse Skateboard Deck. This is intriguing because in theory the game is $50 and based on my research Birdhouse decks seem to sell for around $60 so you are seemingly getting your moneys worth with the edition. As much as I loathe physical editions of games, it is a temptation just to have it so I can hang the deck on my wall.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Warehouse Level

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a big series for me, and I owned the original on PlayStation, the first sequel on Dreamcast and when the third game came out for PlayStation 2 it was among one of the first titles I purchased. You have to understand I was a little skater punk during my pre-teen years and I even went to see the Bones Brigade when they did an exposition at the fair grounds. I was a horrible skater, but I loved everything about the scene and even patterned a lot of my early musical tastes based on what I was hearing in the background of skate videos. The soundtrack to Streets of Fire is still freaking amazing even though everything else about it is 110% cringe these days.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Schoolyard Level

I grew up playing games like Skate or Die, 720 and T&C Surf Designs which were generally horrible representations of skateboarding as a whole but the best we had access to. So when I got my hands on the first Tony Hawk game I was completely enthralled. I spent countless hours in Free Skate mode just doing random tricks and figuring out lines to take in the timed modes. The Dreamcast version of Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 however elevated everything to a new level, because the graphics at least for the time were completely amazing. I got caught up in create a skater mode as I leveled up and maxed out all of the traits, allowing me to do some silly stuff with the game. The second game even had a create a skate park mode, allowing you to craft levels from a bunch of prefab components. It reminded me of my early years building entire fingerboard skate parks with cardboard and index cards, using bic pen barrels as coping.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater Trailer footage of the Dam Level

I really want the remaster of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 to be amazing. I loved the original games, but I also have to take a moment to express my doubts. Not all of the games have been great, and Activision doesn’t exactly have a great track record with the franchise. In 2012 the released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD which was in theory a remix of the best levels from the first and second game, but fell short on a lot of the mechanic aspects of the game. Everything felt very floaty and the moves seemed to lack the weight that the original console games by Neversoft had. In 2015 they released Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 5 which seemed to take these floaty mechanics and double down on them with moves that felt more like you were ice skating on concrete than actually riding on top of grippy urethane wheels. To make matters worse the game attempted to dip its toes into the games as a service model and required you to connect to lobby servers in order to play.

I hope they do in fact recapture the glory of what made the first few games in the series amazing, and give us a legitimate clean game without the entanglement of always on play and microtransactions. There is already a video that analyzes the game play we have seen so far, and the Youtuber offers concerns that the animations thus far appear to be more akin to what we were seeing in HD than in the first or second game. Ultimately at the end of the day it will come down to how it plays, and we won’t know that until September. I have a lot of hopes though, because I really want this game to be good. The Skateboarding genre evolved after THPS into more simulation games like the Skate series and the indie darling Skater XL. These are absolutely not my jam, because in truth all I really want is the arcade fun that the Tony Hawk series gave me. So here is hoping we can get a return to form for that series.