Games of the Decade: 2013

Final Fantasy XIV – A Realm Reborn

This morning we continue the series that involves me looking back at the games released in the past decade. When you look at 2013, there were an awful lot of good and interesting games released, but again we are focused on the games that were specifically important to me. You are probably going to have your own list and there are going to be titles that I exclude that were absolutely bedrock to your gaming experience. Lets dig in because I dredged up four games from my memories and want to talk about them.

Marvel Heroes

Marvel Heroes – PC

Every so often there is a game that comes along that you don’t fully appreciate until it is gone. You will know my love of Diablo style games if you have read this blog for any length of time. Marvel Heroes was an extremely solid entry into that genre, and instead of slaying demons you focused on playing one of the Marvel Super heroes and taking down the traditional baddies of that genre. This is a game that was probably well before its time, and had it been released with the full support of Disney it could have possibly ended up differently.

I mained Captain America because at the end of the day he has consistently been one of my favorite heroes. The only one of my friends who was also super into this game was Thalen, and as a result I spent quite a bit of time running amok with him and clearing content. When I look back this is one of the games that I find I miss the most and wish I had a modern equivalent. There is Marvel Future Fight on the handhelds but it is a little too “free to play” for my tastes. This game had quite possibly the best starting experience because you could effectively play any hero to level 10 before choosing which one you wanted to unlock all of the way. There were also plenty of options for unlocking random heroes withing paying cash shop currency. Will always miss this game and unfortunately it never seemed popular enough for us to be able to get an emulator server.

State of Decay

State of Decay – Xbox 360

I love this game, and I am not entirely certain if I can fully explain why. Firstly I am a huge fan of the zombie apocalypse genre, and I still to this day watch Walking Dead and its spin off Fear religiously when the season is going on. Both shows have sorta jumped the shark but I can’t seem to pull myself away from them. I also love games that let me explore and loot areas freely, and State of Decay is a bit of an amalgam of what I think of as the Fallout experience with the Zombie Apocalypse genre. The game also has a heavy emphasis on base building and recruiting new survivor groups to help you out.

The original game was released in June on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360, and I think I bought multiple copies of the game when it came out on Steam to gift to friends. This is just one of those games that I keep going back, especially once the YOSE or Year One Survivor Edition came out adding in all of the DLC content. The big innovation that this game provided that I loved, was the ability to board up windows to buy yourself more time to safely look a location as rummaging tends to attract zombies. Still well worth playing especially as cheap as the YOSE package tends to be these days.

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn – PC

I figured if I was going to talk about Final Fantasy XIV I should dig out some of my older screenshots. This is your reminder that I started the game as a Highlander. My true enjoyment finally came when I decided to Fantasia my way into Lalafellian adorableness, but my first experiences were as the angriest Bel ever. This game is still to this day one of the best roleplaying game experiences I have ever played. While I keep finding myself falling out of sync with its long term gameplay, I can always return and gobble up new story content and get back into the swing of things.

A Realm Reborn is a feat that should be celebrated, of a game company doubling down on a game that failed spectacularly and then managed to transform that lump of coal into a diamond. This is the “Rudy” sports movie metaphor for the video game world, and we all sorta love that it happened. When you see a bad launch you need this in the back of your head of a time when it did work out, and secretly hope that the company has the fortitude to pull something of this scale off (I am looking at you Anthem). I just heard some news yesterday that Final Fantasy XIV has passed into the 18 million active accounts territory, and that is phenomenal. If you’ve never played this game you should absolutely pick up a copy and try it out. Cactuar is by far the best server and if you can’t stand its radiance… then at least land on the Aether data center.

Pokemon X and Y

Pokemon X and Y – Nintendo 3DS

This game gets special recognition largely because this is the first time I allowed myself to get caught up in PokeMania. This is the first Pokemon experience I have ever played at launch, and honestly the first time I have really experienced the ins and outs of the game at all. I played Pokemon Blue a bit with an emulator, but I was a College Junior when the original games came out and had long since moved beyond caring about my Gameboy. I had a lot of fun getting caught up in the magic of a Pokemon launch and have since participated in other games including the most recent Sword and Shield. I am still not great at playing this sort of game but I do find them enjoyable. I however care way more about collecting all of the Pokemon than I do about battling, and more or less find battling to be a necessary evil to accomplish the first goal.

Risk of Rain

Risk of Rain – PC

This is the game that made me realize that I actually do like Rogue Likes. I would probably not have realized this however without the help of Ashgar who spent time playing the game with me. I want to do this again at some point with Risk of Rain 2 and see how well the experience translates to 3D. This is a game that absolutely overwhelms the player, but over time you start to learn the rules of the road and figure out which power-ups you should be focused on. I enjoy the game way more when playing with other people, but I have found myself revisiting from time to time on my own and trying out new classes that I have unlocked. The difficulty scales as you go making it extremely frenetic as you near the end of a level. If you’ve never checked out this game, I am sure you can pick it up these days for next to nothing.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2013

I have to say that 2013 was a bit of a renaissance year for me. It was the year that I began my three plus year long adventure of blogging every single day. This taught me a lot about myself and also showed me the therapeutic benefit of sitting down every morning and dumping my thoughts and feelings out onto the written page. Because of this event so many other things happened like AggroChat my weekly podcast and the whole Blaugust thing and the community that has developed around it. It was a great year.

Raining With Friends

Good Morning 4 am

At this point it is actually 5 am, but who is counting?  My body decided it had enough sleep at roughly 4:40.  I had planned on getting up at 5 anyways to get up and around early so I would have to deal with less traffic on the drive in.  The greater Tulsa area is still very much under a blanket of ice and snow, and we really did not manage to get too much melt yesterday.  I am hoping that once I get out of my immediate neighborhood that the roads will be clear, otherwise this is going to be an extremely frustrating trip into work.  I wanted to give myself as much time as I could to get in, before the madhouse that is winter driving starts.  As a result this mornings blog post is likely going to be somewhat abbreviated.

Raining With Friends

Risk of Rain 2014-03-03 20-32-07-42 When I started down the road with Risk of Rain last Sunday, my feelings about the game have evolved into something much more nuanced.  The friend that originally suggested that I play the game, had told me for some time that it was a much different experience multiplayer.  Once again Ashgar was not wrong.  We planned on meeting up last night and getting in on some epic tiny pixel multiplayer action.  Firstly with two people and attempting to follow each other around somewhat, the various encounters become easier.  There are many types of mobs that you can burn down well before it actually reaches you.  Additionally when you get power-ups you can filter them towards the person who can most benefit from each type.

Risk of Rain 2014-03-03 20-08-01-15One of the things the game does that is pretty cool is show you an indicator of where your friend is at all times.  So if they are up and to the left of you, you see their character moving along the very top left edge of the screen.  We got split up often, but having this indicator allowed me to find my way back to Ashgar.  I think on our first playing, with me as the default character we managed to get three worlds in before destructing horribly.  On the second play through I changed things up to one of the characters I had just unlocked… the Enforcer.  At face value he seems like I character I would like, with his shotgun and its pushback ability.  However playing as him felt extremely sluggish, and once a mob managed to get right up on me… there was really no way to get out of there.  Poor Ashgar carried me through at least two levels where I died and he finished up the map without me.

Risk of Rain 2014-03-03 20-53-40-85 Finally on play three I think I found “my” character.  The bandit has a super long rifle shot with a small amount of pushback, a sniper rifle shot, a dynamite throw and the ability to fire a smoke bomb and go invulnerable for a short period of time… just long enough to get the hell out of a bad fight.  During this play through we each focused on our strengths, with me building everything ranged combat and Ash building everything melee combat.  We managed to get through to world five, which involves staying alive for 40 minutes as everything tries to destroy you.  At this point I had an absolutely insane drone army of 5 machine gun drones and a flamethrower drone.  Stuff attacking us would just disintegrate as it got near.  With 60 seconds to go… something catastrophic happened.

There seemed to be a hiccup in Cox communications the local cable provider, because at exactly the same time I disconnected from the Risk of Rain co-op session and Rae disconnected from Diablo 3.  I think the game was just pissed at me, because Ash and I had managed to accumulate enough power-ups during that play through that we would have had the 40 minute timer without any issue at all.  I think that is what makes this game so enjoyable, the absolute silly number of power-ups you can get.  In a way it reminds me of R-Type or Gradius…. without a cap on the total number of abilities you can get.  So towards the end I had 6 drones, the ability to fire anime sidewinder missles, the ability to proc mortar fire, as well as the occasional grenade.  On top of all of this every shot slowed the enemies, I had insanely boosted crit damage… and a short term usage jet pack.  I can now say without a doubt, that I love this game.

Whirlwind of Doom

In addition to all the Risk of Rain, I am still playing a silly amount of Diablo 3.  It is funny how one patch can completely change my perspective on the game.  Previously there were things I liked about it, but it felt extremely tedious to level through… knowing there was not much of a chance of getting something truly nice.  However I think the change for me goes deeper than that.  I love having a Clan.  I love seeing across /clan when someone gets something cool, and the obligatory chorus of gratz when someone gets a really interesting legendary drop.  I also love not feeling completely alone in the game.  Granted right now I am mostly playing solo to catch up my Barbarian, but I like feeling that while I am doing my own thing… I am not completely alone in doing it.  This is the problem I tend to have with most single player games… I just don’t feel connected to anyone else while experiencing them.

As of last night I have managed to catch my Barbarian up to level 45, and have grown into the really nice axe my monk used for awhile that summons the ghostly protector.  At this point I am still using cleave as my main attack, but as of last night I switched it up a bit from a rend that heals, to the whirlwind that sucks mobs in.  So far I am really liking the change as it lets me set mobs up for my freezequake attack.  As of last night I was up to the realm of shadows step in the Zultan Kulle quest chain.  We have decided that “Hard” is the new “Normal” mode since pretty much none of us play anything less than that when we are soloing.  Normal just seems too easy now, and the xp and drops seem much better on Hard.  Even at that, Hard is not all that Hard… in that I have to be not paying attention at all to actually die.

Diablo III 2014-03-03 16-37-20-32 Granted I have done than more than a few times, but with my paladin healbot I can pretty much run around doing bad things.  Right now through the release of Reaver of Souls, there is a “community event” going on that buffs experience gained by 50%.  So my hope is to soak up as much of this goodness as I can.  Once I finish pushing my Barbarian to 60 I plan on shifting back to the monk for a bit and working on paragon levels.  We have quite a few people playing right now, so it is pretty easy to get a torment game going.  I am not sure how amped I am with the key farming madness, but right now my key priority is getting the last two items to make a Whimsyshire staff.  I want to go kill rainbows and ponies… for science.  I am sad that I was not on mumble when Warenwolf took Rae to Whimsy for the first time.  I am not sure if she recoiled in horror, from having to kill her beloved ponies… or if she squealed in glee.  Diablo 3 seems to do the same thing League of Legends does…  bring out her murderous side.

Snow Day Project

The very last cool thing I did yesterday while snowed in, was take a moment to organize my video game screenshots.  For most people this is not a big deal, but since my blog very much relies on access to decent screenshots…  it is slightly more important.  For some time I had standardized on using a “GameShots” directory and using Fraps to take them so that everything dumped into one directory per machine.  The problem is that each directory was getting unwieldy quickly.  So as I tried to look a picture up, it would take forever for livewriter to list the newest files.  What I opted for is a directory on my 4 terabyte network attached storage, with sub directories for each game.  After setting up that structure I proceeded to sift through three different machines worth of screenshot directories and file them away in the right places.

That in itself would have been a huge positive, but I decided to go one step further.  I installed Picasa on my secondary machine and am now synchronizing each of these game directories with google plus photos.  Now if I am away from my machine, I still have access to my screenshots if I feel like I need to cobble together a quick post on something.  My hope is this will make blogging from the lake this summer a bit easier, as there is no way I could have access to my entire archive of screenshots remotely otherwise.  So far it seems to be working well, the only negative is that each time I add a new game directory I have to manually log into the machine running Picasa and configure it to sync.  The next project will likely to to merge in a bunch of the screenshot directories I already have on google plus into the newly created ones.

The Anchors Fall

Snowbound

Tulsa once again is buried under a thick coat of ice, with a dusting of snow on top.  Luckily we were prepared for it, and I did the traditional grocery store run Friday afternoon before the madness really started.  Saturday we got out early in the morning and ran the few errands we had to run, and made it in well before the crap started that evening.  It was predicted that the ice would begin around 6pm but it started considerably later.  Thankfully it was just sleet, and not freezing rain or we would have been in trouble.  When we got up yesterday morning it really did not look like we had much accumulation, and as a result my wife was convinced that they would be having school today.

However over the course of the morning, it started in hard and heavy with the ice and didn’t let up until late last night.  While we only got roughly 3 inches of accumulation, almost all of that was ice in one form or another.  One of the more interesting things is we had what they call “Thunder Sleet” and “Thunder Snow”.  Essentially it sounded like a rain storm with lightning and thunder, but as the precipitation fell it turns into sleet on the way down.  After a day of this I texted my boss about 9pm saying that I was not even going to try getting out this morning.  At that point I was apparently the third person to say the same thing, and he was not sure if he was going to try and make it or not.

I am really questioning if my wife will be having school tomorrow either.  At some point today I need to go out and try and clear the vehicles, as I am sure tomorrow morning I will be driving into work.  Honestly when a day like today happens work pretty much shuts completely down, and it is their own damned fault.  Once upon a time we would work remotely during a snowstorm, and things would continue moving forward.  However the current management made a point of stating that there was no official working from home policy, and as a result we all take vacation days and ignore email.  I think they were far better off the other way around, because at this point… it damned well better be a crisis for me to deal with it when I have spent a vacation day.

The Anchors Fall

eso 2014-03-02 18-47-32-30 I spent I would say the majority of the weekend in Tamriel.  Not that I really felt the rush to play, since I have been part of the private testing group for roughly a year now, but I did want to get to hang out with my friends as they played.  By the end of the weekend I think we had 35 members or so in House Stalwart, and for the most part everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves.  There were a few people who simply could not get used to the “action mmo” perma-mouselook interface but overall I think we are going to have a large and bustling guild for launch.  Really that is the most I could hope for.  I entered the weekend with grand ideas of getting to the 15-18 range of Spindleclutch… the first dungeon in Daggerfall.  However i didn’t even get close, ending the weekend around 9.5.

I am really bad at leveling in Elder Scrolls.  There is always this cool thing over here to look at and explore, or this camp of baddies to clean out…  or this bit of ore to mine.  The Elder Scrolls Online is distraction city, and I am a willful participant.  In World of Warcraft, I have learned to “quest grind” and push my way through content extremely quickly.  However in the much more immersive world of ESO I tend to stop and smell the roses quite a bit.  One of the interesting things about the game is that I actually somewhat pride myself on making my own gear.  So the tail end of the night since I was roughly half a level from 10… I was in a mad rush to gather iron ore.  Up to this point I have tried to have a full set of the next level of gear ready to go for when I ding.

I realize I don’t NEED to do this, as you can pretty much get by fine in several levels old gear.  However I like the concept of making my own stuff.  Firstly it levels blacksmithing, but more importantly I always know where my next upgrade is coming from.  Granted it usually means I am well over level since wandering around mining ore, tends to mean you are also killing a ton of bad guys and soaking up extra experience.  Right now I am just ready for this to launch.  It feels like I have been waiting for this to happen for so long, and now we have a month left before go time.  I am ready for my characters to finally be permanent and my choices to matter for longer than a weekend.  Since I didn’t explain it… the above image is of a Dolmen moments before a Dark Anchor is about to fall.  If you see this scene… go somewhere else… because if the anchor falls on you… you end up taking massive damage.

Not on Easy Mode

Risk of Rain 2014-03-02 13-38-59-06 After my little Steampowered Sunday write up, my friend Ashgar informed me that even though it says “very easy” in the upper right corner… that is apparently a lie.  He said he could tell from the things on screen that I was not in “easy” mode, and that I should try that setting.  So sure enough I fired up the game a bit later in the day and noticed that I was not in fact on easy mode.  In fact when I DID set it to easy, I managed to get through the first level just fine.  Well “just fine” being relative, because the game is still maddening at times.  However after a few deaths I managed to progress to stage two “Sky Meadow”.

There I proceeded to die rather spectacularly over and over.  So while the game is a BIT less abusive on “easy”, it is still maddening.  I am probably going to fire this up every now and then, just because at this point I really want to see more of it.  I don’t know why I do… but I do.  This is like a puzzle that I want to crack, and I don’t understand WHY I want to open it…  but I really do.  Ash says this is one of his more played steam games, and I can see why.  There is just something about it that gets under your skin and makes you want to play more.  It is so brutally unapologetic in the way it kills you, that you want to keep getting back up just to try and piss the game off.