Doctor Who Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Darker Doctor

August 24, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 19

Last night we recorded the latest episode of AggroChat, and welcomed back Kodra from GenCon. For the most part the AggroChat crew has had their heads firmly planted in Final Fantasy XIV and that much hasn’t changed. Kodra regaled us with the tales of what he did with his time at the convention. LARPs are one of those things I have always been interested in but never really participated in. I did a little bit of a local World of Darkness LARP in High School, but it wasn’t really my scene. As Kodra talks about the ones that happen at GenCon it feels far more like improvisational theater than gaming. In any case it sounds awesome and if I ever make it to GenCon I will totally join in the fun with him.

Additionally we talk a little bit about MMO design and theory and how Final Fantasy XIV has made tweaks to the game in order to support the community aspect. So far it is working because that is the overwhelming thing that I am enjoying the most from our time playing. We also talk a bit about Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition and our upcoming campaign. There has been some talk about maybe streaming it, but I somehow doubt that is actually going to happen. Rae talks at length about her awesome character concept, and I talk a bit about the Grudgebearer Cleric I will be playing as well. This weeks episode had a very non-video gaming feel to it, and it was pretty enjoyable.

A Darker Doctor

Yesterday was the day the world was introduced to the new Peter Capaldi Doctor Who. So as the world was enthralled by the BBC airing of the show and subsequent BBC America rebroadcast… where was I? Well I spent my afternoon shopping with my wife and then my evening recording AggroChat. With all of the weight loss my wife has gone through, she pretty much is in dire straights on trying to find a new wardrobe for the school year. I figured it was far more important to help her find that, than to sit at home and catch Doctor Who as it was originally broadcast. As a result I have just finished watching the show this morning, and I have to say so far I am very pleased. I don’t want to go into any spoilers really, because hopefully you are going to watch it yourself.

First off I have to say I am of mixed opinion on the new Doctor Who intro theme. You can listen to it here as someone has uploaded it to youtube already. It just feels over produced to me… and extremely “muddy” if that makes sense. I can tell that they went went back to the fourth doctor theme and sampled it heavily…. and that aspect I like, but all of the modern crap that they seem to have layered on top of it is frustrating. I would love to see them just make a nice clean Doctor Who opening theme without all of the auditory graffiti. I am sure over time I will get used to it, but right now it is just grating on my nerves. As far as the show itself the production quality was impeccable as always. I always like the episode that happens right after a regeneration because you get to watch the doctor in his most vulnerable state, when he isn’t quite sure of this new body.

With Capaldi it feels like gone is the zany doctor that flails about, and a different form of “Mad Man” has replaced it. I am liking the darker take on the doctor so far, and I am also liking the fact that the series is distancing itself from “companion as love interest”. I am sure to some of the more modern fans this will be a point of frustration, but to someone who has watched a lot of Doctor Who over the years, I prefer the days when the companion was just that… a travelling companion for the adventure. I think the franchise will be in solid hands for awhile now, and I would love to see Capaldi have a run to rival Tom Baker. I am tired of the Doctor changing quite as often as he has been, especially since we have long retconned the original storyline of a limited number of regenerations. Overall I enjoyed it, but I look forward to seeing more episodes to really set my opinion of it in stone.

Return of Ultima Weapon

While waiting on the audio to render last night for AggroChat I got pulled into an 8 man raid with the rest of my Final Fantasy XIV guild on Cactuar. One of the quests that was added to the game post launch in Mor Dhona takes unlocks the Hard Mode version of the Ultima Weapon primal encounter. I won’t go into any of the details surrounding the Ultima Weapon itself because spoilers… but in theory we had heard that everything about the Hard Mode of the encounter is significantly harder than the first few turns of the Bahamats Coil raid. After last night I am guessing that was in fact the case. This fight is absolutely insane, but I am pleased to say after three tries we managed to down it and clear it from all of our quest logs. I returned to my role as a tank, and since at this point I somehow managed to pass Ashgar in gear I ended up starting off the fight and playing the role of Soak of a lot of the bombs that happen during the fight.

What makes the fight so cool is that it is the first tank swap encounter that I have run into here in Final Fantasy XIV. This is a common mechanic in World of Warcraft now as a way of keeping both tanks engaged in the fight, and they seem to do it very well here as well. Now the swaps have to be timed carefully, but since Ash and I have worked together on many occasions this ended up fine. Essentially you have to hit provoke which raises your threat to 1+the highest targets threat, and then start spamming your highest aggro ability to make sure you gain a decent lead. Basically during the swap I would hit provoke and then spam butchers block a few times to make sure I had a nice lead. At this point the target would peel away from Ashgar easily and I would be in control again for another three stacks of the debuff.

Now the coolest aspect of the fight is that we didn’t even realize there were weapons to be gotten. I feel like this fight is worth more than an ilevel 80 item… but in any cases it was one hell of a fun encounter to be done with guildies. As hard as it was, I could totally see myself doing it again because this felt like a true challenge. It required each of us to do something to add to the fight. Towards the end of the fight we had to have a few DPS sacrifice themselves to make sure all of the bombs got blocked, and then we slowed dps allowing the healers to catch up and ressurect them. It was awesome seeing each person fully engaged in what had to be done. I am so proud of my guildies for accomplishing this, and now I have no doubt at all that we will do fine making progress in the Coil.

#DoctorWho #AggroChat #FFXIV

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

Late Night Doctor Who

February 16, 2014 by Belghast

Mad Man with a Box

Since today is Steampowered Sunday, I thought I would do my factoid as a separate post again, simply because if feels really odd to tack on personal bits on the tail end of “feature”. Since I vowed to finish this month with a factoid a day, this seems like the best way of handling that. Anyways… as I have stated before I grew up in a really small town. There are smaller I am sure, but 2500 people is pretty damned small especially for being a county seat. As a result I did not have cable until I went to college. The cable ran to within a quarter mile of my house growing up, but because of that we were limited to six channels. Essentially an NBC affiliate, CBS affiliate, ABC affiliate, Fox, UPN and the local PBS channel.

Since network television has always been crap, I spent a good chunk of my childhood watching Public Broadcasting like Mister Rogers or Nova. Late at night however the PBS channel changed and brought into our living room all these excellent British television shows. They varied over the years from Are You Being Served, Faulty Towers, Monty Python, Keeping Up Appearances, Benny Hill, Blakes 7, The Tripods… but the constant was always Doctor Who. Some of my fondest memories of my father were staying up late to watch Doctor Who.

Late Night Doctor Who

I realize it is not much of a shocker that me… a notorious geek… loves Doctor Who. It goes deeper than that. The first Doctor I can really remember is Jon Pertwee aka the Third Doctor. However to me Doctor Who will always be the fourth doctor, Tom Baker. Seeing that hat and that scarf still gives me warm fuzzies. Doctor Who above all represented what was good and right in the world. The solemn defender that used his mind rather than brute force to solve problems. While I love the modern incarnation of Doctor Who as well, it is simply a different animal. For as crappy as the special effects were, even rewatching the old episodes on netflix, everything from that era felt more fantastical and hopeful.

Doctor Who also gave me and my father a time to bond together. It was not something my mother liked at all, so she gave us the time to hang out together. More or less I was raised by my mother and grandmother, in that they were the people who I spent most of my time with. My dad was almost always working, and when he was off work he was busy with his photography business. So the moments when I got to just hang out with my dad felt few and far between. Even today when we get together, the topic will eventually lead its way back to whatever is happening in the current series with the current doctor.

While there are a lot of things that I am nostalgic about, and am willing to geek out over… Doctor Who just feels more pure. While the show has better special effects and has ratcheted up the horror factor a notch or two… it still feels very much the same show at its core. It will and always has been about a mad man with a box, who deeply loved what he saw special and different in humanity. That gives me hope for us as a species, that this lonely man from Gallifrey could care about us that much. I hope that the series continues on forever, infecting each new generation of viewers with the same spirit of wonder.