Lost in Maguuma

Wanderlust

starwarslego_atap Yesterday was a bit of a busy day for many reasons.  Firstly getting home super late Saturday night, and then recording AggroChat extremely late, meant that more or less I just straight up crashed instead of editing the recording.  This meant first thing yesterday morning I had to edit the podcast and post it.  After that I of course still had a blog to write, and needed to spend some time working on another article as well.  Throughout all of this there were two problems.  Firstly I had a splitting headache the likes of which I have not seen in almost a year.  Secondly it was absolutely gorgeous outside, with the temperatures rising up to roughly 80* F yesterday.  So my wife and I hemmed and hawed as to whether or not we would actually go do anything.  Finally around 3pm yesterday afternoon we decided to get outside and go wandering about.

I’ve talked about the fact that any town of a decent size around me has a Wal-mart.  It has always been this way, because quite honestly I live in the Wal-mart heartland, with Bentonville the home office only about two hours away.  The first first Wal-mart supercenter in existence is about 30 minutes away in the town of Wagoner for example.  Big Wal-mart stores are boring, utilitarian and predictable… but going to smaller less shopped stores often provides this strange melange of products that they still have on the shelf.  Each store has a certain amount of discretion as to what they can clearance, so this means that shopping multiple stores might yield completely different results.  As such a few times of the year it is prime territory for hunting down clearance Legos.

We set forth on an adventure that took us through three very small locations, and while my wife found more interesting stuff than I did, at the second store…  a store I had good luck with last year…  I managed to pick up a couple of really cool Star Wars sets at a deep discount.  First up I found the Lego AT-AP walker which was originally $60 for the much more reasonable price of $30.  Then at a considerably worse deal I picked up the originally $25 General Grievous Wheel Bike set for $19… which admittedly I only jumped at because the General Grievous figure is just so badass looking.  This season honestly has been pretty slim pickings, largely because Wal-mart has started doing this annoying thing.  They will throw something on clearance… and change the sticker color to red…  but have the item marked at its normal price.  Essentially I look up each Lego set and if the savings is not 50% off I generally don’t jump at it.  This has netted me some pretty cool finds like the SWTOR Sith Fury for $60 but in order to find them… you have to be diligent, and for me the fun is more about the hunt than the finding.

Lost In Maguuma

Gw2 2015-02-09 06-06-51-36 One of the other things of note that happened yesterday while watching the return of Walking Dead is that I managed to hit level 60 on my Warrior in Guild Wars 2.  I am still knee deep in the Maguuma jungle region and right now I find myself shifting between Sparkfly Fens and Bloodtide Coast, largely be cause the Fens simply got too “big” for me as I kept wandering into level 62 areas and having to deal with constant glancing blows.  This leaves me 20 levels to go before I hit the Guild Wars 2 endgame, whatever that might be.  One of the things that has always bothered me about this game is that I never managed to max a character out.  Eighty levels is a rather daunting task, especially when you don’t find yourself really enjoying the game play.  That said I am generally known for having multiple max level characters in any game I play, so it felt like a weak spot in my armor that I could not stomach the grind in this one game.

Maguuma region is a bit of a slog, which has me concerned for the Heart of Thorns expansion.  I really do not like Jungle or Swamp regions in video games.  I was having a blast so long as I stuck to the snowy peaks of the Norn regions, but once I wandered into the swampy zombie filled wasteland…  the fun factor of the game went down significantly.  Here is hoping that I can stomach it just enough to graduate into the higher zones.  All of the guides I have read say that I should really be doing dungeons to level…  but I am admittedly scared of them.  The shitty dungeon experience was what ended up killing the game for me the first time.  Right now I am enjoying the soloing over world gameplay style, and I am afraid if I go into the dungeons again… and they end up still being the chaotic and exploitative mess that they were originally… that it will enrage me enough to halt my journey.

The Real Game

Albion-Online 2015-01-29 23-14-44-84 One of the biggest frustrations for me when it comes to online games is when a massive shift in the way the game feels happens.  Most games have this highly tailored starter experience to ease players into the game, and then something happens as though the really polished section of the game flew away.  Sometimes this transition is gradual, and other times it is quite literally like having the bottom dropped out from under you.  I’ve not written much about Albion Online because to some extent I fell off that rather steep cliff.  The first two tiers of content felt really fun and natural as I wandered around the world collecting resources to be able to craft nifty things.  Then I reached tier 3… and the fun drained away quickly.  The game up until that point had been around gathering materials and lugging them back to town so that you could use the crafting machines and fashion them into whatever you might like.  When you hit Tier 3, the crafting machines start charging you a fee to use them.  This is the equivalent of having to pay every time you need to use the anvil in a World of Warcraft town.

The problem with this is that there really aren’t that many gold fountains that I have seen so far, but the machine problem ends up to be a rather massive gold sink.  Granted at this point I don’t even know if there is such a thing as gold in the game… because I have only managed to gather up a few silver to my name.  Admittedly this is their pricing scheme… to get players to purchase gold, to ease the process of playing the game.  According to the pricing listed on the founders pack information, it looks like $20 would get you 4500 gold, and $50 would get you 12,000 gold.  Not that either of these is an absolutely insane price for what seems to be the purchasing power that gets you, but I have essentially stopped playing because I quickly realized this game was unsustainable without either grinding bandits for days…  or plunking down some cold hard cash for a game that was only mildly enjoyable in the first place.  This is a bit of a shame, because really Albion does have some really interesting ideas at work.  I might piddle with it off and on still to see just how deep  the money chasm is, but if nothing else for the time being it has most definitely halted my forward momentum.

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

Baby’s First Diablo

LMO 2014-06-20 06-09-20-013 It is no real secret that I love Lego, as I sit in an office full of sets waiting to be built and have an army of minifigures decorating my cube at work.  So when I first heard that Funcom, the makers of my beloved Secret World were working on a brand new game revolving around the random minifigures bags that I already buy way too often…  I figured I would be throwing money at the screen.  A good friend of mine managed to get into the alpha and without saying much about it specifically she said it was extremely cute and charming.  That about sums it up perfectly…  oh and you might throw in adorable.  I love the whole “toy store come to life” vibe that you get while playing the first level.  You start off with one of three sets of minifigures, I ended up going for the roman soldier, because he is already one of the favorite minifigures I own.

I am not sure who exactly coined the phrase, but so far “Baby’s First Diablo” has stuck, and that is not to diminish anything about the game.  It feels very much like a diablo style version of the various “Lego” franchise branded video games.  You break up blocks to get resources and stars in this case instead of coins.  Then you use special “builder” type minifigures to construct objectives.  You can have three minifigures equipped at a time, and right now my team consists of the Roman Soldier that has a charge and a melee swing, the Fortune Teller who is one of those special builder types, and the Bee Girl that drops adorable honey bombs and attacks enemy legos with swarms of bee ranged attacks.

It seems like the game is going to use a model similar to league of legends in that you buy champions in the form of minifigures packs.  The only gotcha is that I assume they will be just as random as the actual in store variety is.  So if I had to guess you can probably end up with duplicates, but I have no clue at all how that will work.  Will you be able to trade your dupes with other players, or will they have some sort of a deconstruction ability to turn them into resources…  or are they just going to go with “smart random” in that you never have the chance of getting a minifigure you already have.  In that case it would mean you would simply need to buy 16 packs of each type and would eventually get the full set.  This is definitely going to be a game I watch as the open beta continues.

Rocket Powered Hoverboard

WildStar64 2014-06-20 06-18-05-408 Just like Griff Tannen in Back to the Future… my hoverboard’s got power.  Last night I dinged 25 and was finally able to claim both the preorder hoverboard and the deluxe edition hoverboard.  Surprisingly I think I like the deluxe edition quite a bit better.  Originally I upgraded to deluxe when I thought I would be sticking around for awhile, and I guess I am happy I did so.  On the chua it seems so much cooler looking than the original human preview picture did.  I guess the difference is that the preview shots didn’t really have actual in game lighting applied to them, so they made everything look that much more gold and gaudy.  In game it looks pretty cool and as short and fat as my chua is… the regular hoverboard just looks too small for him.

WildStar64 2014-06-20 06-42-26-568 So far moving out of Auroria has breathed new life into the game because I did not really understand at the time just how bored with that zone I was.  It’s weird because I absolutely loved Deredune but couldn’t be bothered to care about Auoria at all.  Now I am in something much more my style the traditional “snowy” zone.  For whatever reason I seem to have an affinity for the snow  zones in games be it Iron Pine Peaks or Winterspring… that usually ends up as my favorite leveling destination.  Additionally I’ve installed a number of mods that make following the quest chains a bit easier so I expect that I will stay on track a little better rather than endlessly chasing rabbit trails.  I am still firmly in the middle of the pack level wise, but there are several that are now into their 30s, so I keep feeling the need to “catch up”.

Battlefield Hardline

Game trailers are pretty much all lies, but even knowing that this one gave me hope that we might see an interesting shooter to play.  You have to understand that my ideal shooter is one of the Enemy Territory series games, where you have real “objectives” that have to be completed in order to progress the map.  Based on this footage and folks using the term objective based shooter… I had hopes that this might be a return to that gameplay style.  So I applied for the beta and got accepted to play it on the Playstation 4.  Within a few minutes of gameplay all of those hopes were dashed.  This game is pretty much exactly like every single Battlefield or Call of Duty game… except this time you get to play cops and robbers.  For some that will be a good thing, if you like Battlefield and Call of Duty…  but for me it is a pretty damning indictment.

The objectives in Hardline are basically “capture the flag” by another name.  Instead of creating a series of complicated objectives that the team has to work together to achieve, it simply creates temporary choke points where death-matching occurs.  On top of this… the game just does not feel like a next generation shooter.  Everything feels extremely low resolution as compared to say Destiny, in fact I wouldn’t even say those two games are anywhere near the same league as far as look and feel.  Everything about this game feels like a “B Team” effort, and I think that is pretty much what players have come to expect out of “off year” titles in the big shooter franchises.  Basically if you just want Battlefield 4 with a few changes, then you might enjoy it.  If you were like me and hoping for something more…  keep looking elsewhere.  After all Destiny is just around the corner.

#LegoMinifigures #Wildstar #Hoverboard #BattlefieldHardline

Garuda Sucks

Casey Jones?

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I was extremely slow starting this morning, continuing to fall back asleep from 7 am til roughly 9 am.  When I finally got up and around I did what I do every morning, and ran off to forage for food.  Generally I run to QuikTrip for sausage rolls, which is a gas station chain based in Tulsa.  If you do not have the miracle that is QuikTrip… you won’t really understand how gas station food can be that amazing.  On the way back into the neighborhood I saw two young boys, one chasing the other.  I could see he had something in his hands, and as I drove closer I noticed it was a rubber katana and a golf club.  My immediate thought was… whoa is that kid playing Casey Jones?

I think of the Turtles as being a figment of my childhood, as I can remember buying the original indie black and white comics, and the first series of playmates toys where all the turtles had trademarked red bandanas.  But the longer I thought about it… the more I realized that sure enough that kid COULD be playing Casey Jones.  The TMNT franchise has been rebooted every few years to a point where kids of almost any age could easily recognize everyone’s OTHER favorite psychopath with a hockey mask. 

As a tween I thought Casey Jones was the coolest, some kind of cross between a ninja and the punisher (another favorite character of mine).  Likely the two boys were just fighting with whatever they happened to have their hands on.  I remember my friend and I used to sword fight with baseball bats.  That was when I learned that a wooden bat can pretty much cleave an aluminum bat in two…. but that is a tale for another day.  Seeing the two kids running around like that made me super nostalgic.  I remember my cousin and I went through a phase where we went NOWHERE AT ALL without a slingshot and a bag of rocks.  Granted I grew up in the country… so that was entirely reasonable given that I have used said slingshot to thump a bull and get him to go the other way.

Tokyo Game Show and FFXIV

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This week the Tokyo Game Show has been going on, and unlike the various western game conferences it has been pretty closed door to the public… or at least closed door to anyone who does not have a fluent understanding of Japanese.  Luckily Dual Shockers has posted a pretty good write up of the various 2.1 announcements for Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn.  The awesome part is… there is a TON of content expected to release for the first patch.  So far the items that have been confirmed…  Good King Moogle Mog primal fight.  New extreme modes for Ifrit, Titan and Garuda…  and after doing normal mode Garuda last night, I don’t want to see what Hard mode looks like… let alone Extreme mode.

Additionally they are adding player housing for each of the three grand companies, daily beast quests, and treasure hunting mode…  neither of those two I understand but they both sound extremely enticing.  Additionally they are adding a pvp arena system at Wolfs Den, one completely new dungeon, and two new hardmode dungeons with new boss strategies.  They also announced that there would be limited time free transfers to a server of your choice in October, to help join together the various people that were split up by the server caps.  Finally later this year they announced that there would be cross over events with Dragon Quest X and Final Fantasy XI both of which appear to reward unique pets for FFXIV.

That is a lot of goodness, but I have not heard a timeframe for 2.1.  Considering I have yet to cap out, and I have an army of alternate specs to level…  I am sure I can hold on the current content for awhile.  I have always loved the art style of the Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest games… so I am looking forward to collecting the cute little golem pet.  Here is hoping they do this as a duty… and not some random spawning fate.  The whole random drop pet/mount thing has not really worked out too well for any of us in Rift, and most of us have not collected more than one color of Hellbug.

Garuda Sucks

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Both Ifrit and Titan were extremely enjoyable encounters.  They introduced us to the concept of a primal fight, and I believe eased us into the difficulty of the encounters.  In both cases there was this one thing you had to watch, and if you did it… you pretty much won.  As various guild members have gotten up in level I have looked forward to tanking or dpsing these encounters to get them through.  They are both extremely fun fights to participate in.  Last night we took on Garuda… the third primal encounter… and I have to say no one will be looking forward to repeating this one.

The problem is… I am trying to think of ways to explain how big of an increase in difficulty the fight was from the other two without really spoiling the fight OR the other two.  We have tried really hard to go into every fight cold and figure things out on our own.  This of course has meant a lot of deaths as we figured out just what the mechanics were doing.  I think we had somewhere less than ten deaths last night… but not sure just how far from that number we were.  We latched onto one of the central concepts of the fight extremely fast.  As Tam said… this is not our first rodeo… so if a fight gives you a thing to hide behind… chances are they want you to hide behind it at some point.

The big problem that I saw was the sheer amount of damage I was taking as the tank.  The various people in the know have all said that they wait until they have completed their 45 class quest to do this fight, since that fight rewards you every piece of an armor set but the chest piece.  Additionally I could have outfitted myself in at least a full set of the level 45 heavy mithril armor set… which self buffed gives me about 300 more hitpoints from what I did the encounter with. 

Being the stubborn bastards that we are, we pulled and pushed and prodded on the encounter until we finally beat it.  I just have to say though… this is the hardest fight to date… filled with “all manner of fuckery” as Tam commented last night.  I have so much fear and loathing about what the various hard mode version of the primal fights could bring, especially considering how close a call making it through normal Garuda was for us.

Wrapping Up

Well time for me to finish this up and get on with the day.  I am sure I will be logging into FFXIV to hang out with the guild, maybe even venturing into Rift to try and finish up 58.  Yesterday we did a lot of running around town, so I think today for the most part will be a stay at home day.  We have to go out this afternoon to meet someone to buy my wife another Miche shell.  For those not familiar with this concept… it is a weird purse with changeable appearances.  My wife has suddenly become enthralled by them… and since she is always so damned good about my Lego expenditures… I figure it is only fair that I am cool about her growing collection of purses.

Gallivanting

Ohman… it is morning and I am legitimately typing a blog post like I am supposed to on a weekend!  Apologies again for the huge lag in getting yesterdays post out the door.  Unfortunately from time to time I get busy… and I really don’t like pre-writing a post very much and setting an embargo date.  I tend to keep my blog posts fresh and reactional in that I just blather on about whatever happens to be in my mind at the time.  I can tell that this is not everyone’s cup of tea as my subscriber base has pretty much been stable and unchanging for some time now.

I Love my Grandma

Grandma_Card

The title of this sub-section will make absolutely no sense to anyone…  but I am chuckling immensely.  Dates back to High School Spanish 2… when I kid pestered me for a translation of what was written on the board.  I told him it was “I love my grandma” and I don’t remember what it was honest at this point… only that I told him a completely laughable translation.  Sure enough the little slacker got called on to provide the translation, and he proudly strode to the front of the class with all the cocky confidence you would expect of someone who was dead certain of the answer.  He delivered his response and immediately riotous laughter spread throughout the room.  I just shrugged and said “you should do your own translations from now on, my Spanish is a bit rusty”.

Though I really and truly do love my grandma… and this week was her 84th birthday.  We had all intentions of going up on Wednesday night to see her, but for starters my wife got home extremely late from work that night.  After calling up she was not feeling great after having oral surgery the day before, so we opted just to talk to her for a bit on the phone and come up Saturday to see her.  The above card is me being bored while waiting on my wife and freehanding something with a bunch of sharpies. I thought it turned out fairly well and Grandma seemed to like it.

We went up yesterday and hung out with her for about an hour or so before my parents arrived, which lead us to spend another hour or so catching up with them.  She is looking pretty good and my mother took the opportunity as always to take a large number of photos.  We have finally weaned her off using a standalone point and shoot camera and just taking photos with her Galaxy S4.  Cool thing about that is it let us grab her phone and text the best of them to ourselves.  I have to say they are some of the best family style photos we have had in awhile.  I would post them, but I am not sure if I am quite ready to post photos of myself online.

Gallivanting

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After leaving my grandmothers, we set out on a cross country trip of some hardcore gallivanting.  Essentially from my hometown we went over to Bartlesville first.  Recently all of the stores surrounding us have had some massive clearance sales, which I think are essentially the “lets clear everything out so we can stock up for christmas” sales.  So far we have found all sorts of things, namely school supplies and Legos.  Since we really had no plans yesterday we decided to roam around the surrounding area checking various stores… namely all the different Wal-mart super centers.

SuperGirlFootiePajamasIt has admittedly been a really long time since I have spent much time in a Wal-mart store.  Like I will pop in and get ONE thing at a time, that only they carry… but I have not really spent a ton of time “shopping” in one for some time.  We saw several funny things along the trip yesterday that I just have to share.  Firstly is the image at the beginning of this section.  Apparently you can get a wedding set at Wal-mart for around 10 dollars.  They are as fake as is humanly possible… but at first glance they totally pass as the real thing.  I didn’t even know that was a market, that folks needed cheap fake rings… but apparently like always they are filling a perceived need.

Next up over right justified we have the adult women’s… super girl footie pajamas.  Just not the type of thing I expected to exist at all… let along be proudly displayed for sale at the local Wal-mart.  The funny thing is they come with a little velcro cape that attaches to the back.  The best ones I didn’t see until later in the day at another store, were the batgirl pajamas.  I tried to convince my wife to buy a pair.  I could totally see her loving a pair of footie pajamas… but she thought they would simply be too damned hard to get out of when she needed to pee in the middle of the night.  Probably best to air on the side of caution there.

Half a Tank of Gas

2013-09-15 10_15_15-Nowata, OK to Owasso, OK - Google Maps

The above image is a screen cap of the route we took yesterday.  Nowata to Bartlesville to Muskogee to Wagoner to Pryor to Claremore and finally back to Owasso.  We ended up burning through half a tank of gas, and hit a ton of stops between.  Did we find much of anything in the grand scheme of things?  Not really… but it is mostly the thrill of the hunt.  The entire event started in part because a few weeks back we had found all sorts of cool stuff at the clearance section of the Muskogee Wal-mart.  I had opted not to pick a few things up, as had my wife and we had been kicking ourselves ever since.  So from Bartlesville we decided to head over to Muskogee and see if they still had it. 

I have to say we struck out 110%, because not only did they not have what we were wanting… they had zero signs of ever having this massive clearance section in the first place.  I wandered around the store trying to find any place it could have gone… but I am guessing more than likely after two weeks they had shipped it all off to be written off by Wal-mart… which is essentially how Sooner Surplus gets all its stuff.  While we were in town we ran by there as well, but there was nothing really new to look at, and since we didn’t need mens suit coats or scooters… their newest acquisitions… we went on our merry way.  It was at this point we got the brainstorm to meander our way back to Owasso through all the towns along the way.

What was fueling my wife in this endevour is visions of school supplies dancing in her head.  Friday night we had to run out to the Owasso Wal-mart for something… and back in the home and garden section they had all of their back to school leftovers piled up in a huge heap and discounted down to truly silly prices.  As a result we ended up with 20 index card boxes for 10 cents each, 40 plastic rulers for 10 cents each, 6 packages of her favorite flair clone markers for a quarter a piece, 11 really nice 8 pocket file folders for a quarter a piece, misc notebooks for around a quarter, gluesticks 4 for a quarter, and a really nifty storage ottoman for the loft for 5 bucks.  All told we walked away with a massive amount of stuff for less than 40 bucks.

Quality not Quantity

CheapLegos_09152013 While I did not necessarily find a huge stockpile of stuff in our trip, I did find some definitely awesome items.  Friday night at Target I did one of my routine trips through toys to look for clearance, and found they finally marked down the Fury starfighter from Star Wars the Old Republic.  This is the one that comes with the Darth Malgus mini-figure and is the same star ship that Sith Inquisitors and Warriors pilot in the game.  Of all of the Lego sets that have been on the market, this is hands down the one I have wanted the most.  The problem is it debuted for like $120 and there was no way in hell I would ever purchase that.  However target had it marked down to $60… so I snapped that puppy up.

While on our whirlwind trip of Wal-mart clearance, I did encounter one really nice thing in Wagoner.  When the Hobbit movie sets were released, the on that I knew I immediately had to have was the Unexpected Meeting set that included a model of Bags End.  I have always loved Hobbit architecture and the Baubleshire was hands down my favorite area of Everquest 2.  So since a Hobbit hole existed… I had to have it.  This set originally debuted at around $60, and Wal-mart had it marked down to $25 so it was a completely no brainer to pick it up for that.

So while I did not find a large volume of sets, I got two of the ones that I had been wanting the most, so I call our half tank of gas a complete success.  My wife on the other hand picked up a handful of things, included several scarves that she had been hunting for at the Claremore Wal-mart.  The thing we keep marveling at is just how grossly inefficient the pricing is.  We would see the exact same product on clearance at three stores… and in each case it would be a completely different price.  There were several cases where we might have picked an item up at another store… had it been priced the same way it was at a previous store.  I remember seeing the same action figured priced for $7, $5, and $4 at three different stores in the clearance bin.

I am assuming this is because each store has a certain amount of autonomy in their pricing practices.  However as a consumer, I find it all a frustrating mess.  Granted I am likely exploiting the hell out of these practices by hitting multiple stores in the same day and sampling the best prices at each.  I just find it humorous that I never see this level of chaos at say a Target, where everything is marked down in a neat and orderly fashion based on a specific  patterned schedule.  If you see something for sale at one store, you can go to any store in your area and are almost always going to find it the same price.

Wrapping Up

Even though we did not necessarily find a ton of items, we had a fun time wandering around the state looking for things.  It was a nice drive, we just wish we had brought our cameras for it.  Today on the other hand I hope we pretty much just chill out close to home.  My allergies are still killing me, especially after being exposed to that much “outside” along the tip.  I am just about to get up and take something, and hopefully that will make things better.  I hope you all have had a great weekend and that you have a good start to the work week.