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.

Frying Pans and Nora Braves

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Over the last few days I have had a hankering to play some State of Decay.  This was a game that I originally started playing on the Xbox 360, then picked up when it was eventually released on the PC.  When the Year One Survivor Edition came out I picked that up too…  as well as buying it for a friend that I thought would enjoy it.  Since I had not actually tried streaming from my Xbox One, I decided to pick the game up on that platform and give it a go.  Basically Undead Labs is an awesome developer and I have no problem supporting them by picking it up on multiple platforms.  We don’t officially have a release date for State of Decay 2…  but based on the trickle of activity I am hoping we get some more news soon.  My hope is the sequel takes everything that worked well about the first game, but adds in the ability to hang out and explore the zombie filled landscape with friends.

Watch Hanging out playing some State of Decay YOSE on Xbox One from Belghast on www.twitch.tv
So as a result last night I fired up the stream while testing out a few new screen elements and bashed some zombies.  If you are for any reason interested you can check out the Twitch VOD here (or click the embedded player above thanks to Jaedia), but it involved a lot of me stumbling around trying to figure out what to do and a few gloriously brutal deaths.  I also may or may not have run over the NPC that was following me around and bashing things with a frying pan.  The kinda cool thing last night is I had a bunch of folks that were completely different from what I would consider the normal crew of people who take pity on me and hang out while I stream.  It’s really bizarre for me to have someone pop in the channel that I don’t actually know.  It was a surprising amount of fun to just hang out and publicly fail at playing a video game.

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Right now I don’t have much in the way of stamina as far as “being on” goes.  I lasted a little bit over an hour before needing to go do something else with less of an audience for a bit.  I am not sure if it was just that I was tired dying in State of Decay and wanted to play something else for awhile, or if I was tired of interacting.  I need to sort out a proper way to swap games when I am just not feeling the one I am playing, because in truth I wound up logging into Monster Hunter World and farming content and it would have been nice to have a little company doing so.  I originally logged in with the goal of doing a little SOS Roulette, but noticed a note in the Login Bonus about the Aloy event going live.  For those who are curious, the quest is titled “The Proving” and shows up under events as a 6 Star High Rank mission that requires the player to be Hunter Rank 11, so you may need to do a little bit of progressing to get there.

There are two pieces to the set, a full suit of armor similar to the Ryu gear that literally transforms you into the Aloy character model.  Additionally there is a version of Aloy’s bow that can be upgraded to a Rarity 7 weapon with some elder dragon bits.  The gear can be upgraded a total of 10 times allowing it to remain fairly relevant for a long while.  If you want to craft the gear you are looking at collecting the following….

Aloy Armor

  • Nora Brave Trophy – 4 – Obtained from Event Quest
  • Anjanath Pelt+ – 14
  • Anjanath Nosebone+ – 6
  • Anjanath Gem – 1
  • 30,000 Zenny

Aloy’s Bow

  • Nora Brave Trophy – 2
  • Anjanath Fang+ – 3
  • Monster Keenbone – 5
  • Anjanath Plate – 1
  • 16,000 Zenny

Aloy’s War Bow – Upgrade to Rarity 7

  • Nora Brave Trophy – 3
  • Anjanath Scale+ – 7
  • Elder Dragon Bone – 3
  • Wyvern Gem – 1
  • 32,000 Zenny

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Now it should be noted that the only part of this that you absolutely have to collect during the event are the Nora Brave Trophies which drop at least one per mission… and there was one time I lucked out and got four in one shot.  The rest of the bits can be gained from either normal High Rank Anjanath hunts or in the case of the upgrade by taking down Elder Dragons to get those bones.  I ran the mission a total of five times last night and got everything I needed to craft both the base rarity 5 bow and the rarity 5 armor.  The cool thing about this is that it not only makes you look like Aloy… but you also MOVE like Aloy.  Not really sure how to describe it other than that, because it feels like you are playing Horizon Zero Dawn set in the Monster Hunter World setting.  I have no clue how long this event is going to run, but personally I knocked mine out doing good ole SOS Roulette.  That said more than willing to help folks get their parts if they need them.  Honestly I might farm it a bunch while it is available because it seems to be a really good way to get High Rank Anjanath parts.

 

Flower Power

Bad Brain

This morning I am struggling a bit to get started with my normal blogging process.  Right now I am going through what I generally term as a “low spot” in my mental health.  I have been feeling depressed and generally disconnected from the world lately.  It is like I am staring out a window and watching the world go by in fast motion.  Additionally I seem to be focused on only the bad things.  Like I could have a dozen normal conversations, but my brain is heat seeking in on the moments that don’t go perfectly.  Analyzing them, breaking them apart, wallowing in my imagined failure.  What frustrates me the most is that I have a pretty awesome life, but when my brain is on a down cycle it certainly doesn’t seem like it, and my internal critic has been working overtime.

The thing is, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if my brain would just stop with statements like pointing out that I have gained weight, or that I am failing to live up to this or  that goal.  It always has to be the bully and take things one step too far.  My brain is telling me constantly that I am an imposter and that no one actually likes me, and that at best everyone simply tolerates my actions.  My brain is kicking things up another notch over the last few days, and incessant about telling me that the world would simply be a better place if I no longer existed.  The thing is… I know deep down inside my core that my brain is a liar, but man…  is it relentless.  I am not expecting anything from this, but I figured I would open up a bit more into my own personal struggles.  No one likes hanging around with someone that bums them out, but maybe me talking about it helps someone else who is struggling with the same demons.  I know my brain is wrong, and that this will pass in time… but right now, it is pretty hellacious to live with 24/7.

Flower Power

ffxiv 2015-04-29 20-59-51-21 Last night was yet another running of the second static in our Final Fantasy Free Company.  We are still struggling a bit to gather up the eight people needed to raid, but hopefully as people continue leveling and gearing that will change a bit.  Ultimately I would love it were I able to be an optional in this group, since I have my group that meets seriously on Monday already, and our secondary night on Saturday before the podcast.  That said at raid time we managed to gather up seven people and attempted to pug an eighth.  That didn’t go terribly well, because while we were talking about the fights he ran off and pulled some golems.  I mean on one level I get it, because we had not said much in the game chat, and were sorting things out on voice chat…  but taking it upon yourself  to pull is rarely the right answer.  After a few wipes he refused to resurrect and we kicked him, abandoning duty and bringing in Ashgar.  From that point on the night seemed to improve.

Things were far more tense than they should have been, and there was a bit of an outburst on Teamspeak but other than that things fell in place fairly well.  I would be bummed that this team managed to get turn six in a single night of tries, whereas it took our team two nights…  but this group is leaning heavily on past experience.  When we tried to do each turn we tried really hard to go in as a blank slate and figure things out as they happened.  It was cool though to get another raid boss killed with this group and we moved on to Turn Seven.  There are a lot of moving parts in that fight, and largely the group still needs to figure out how best to control the Renaud freezing action.  It is a really fun fight and even more than turn six, it came back to me quickly as we started going through the motions.  I am starting to wonder though if I should be running Paladin on these fights since Damai is a Warrior main.  Not sure what additional benefit having a Paladin would give the group since it has a slightly different skillset.  Would at least give me practical experience doing stuff as my “other” tank class.

Another Outpost

StateOfDecay 2015-04-29 12-34-32-25 The other game that I played a significant amount of yesterday was State of Decay Year One Survivor Edition.  I am back to playing Marcus after going on some crazy misadventures as Maya.  When I last played I got the radio announcement that a military presence had been spotted on the outskirts of town.  Having done this song and dance before I knew that it was best to take Maya over there to check it out.  Additionally at that point Marcus was doing the whole “not sure how long I can go on” thing, meaning he was exhausted and needed to be rested.  Around this same time I got reports that two hordes of zombies were getting close to town.  I’ve found the best way to take out a horde is vehicular zombiecide.  So I laughably grabbed the Pizza Delivery car and took the the roads running them down.  This ends up stirring up quite a few additional zombies in the process, but far less in my experience than trying to put down a horde with gun fire.

After quelling the two hordes I moved on to the Military encampment and it went just as well as it had in the past.  The military wants everyone to stay inside and shelter in place… which is fine and good until the zombies try breaking down your door.  The military house was next to one of the survivor houses I was working on gaining trust with.  Unfortunately the person that normally gives me quests to complete to gain their trust was not available, so not sure exactly where they wandered off to.  About this time I got a frantic radio message from Lucy telling me that her brother was trapped and needed my help.  He had managed to get himself pinned down in a barn, and I had to ride in and save the day.  This actually was tougher than I thought it would be and ended up having to clear about nine zombies to get to him and save him.  By this time Maya was going through her whole “too exhausted to continue” routine, but I managed to finish things off and get back home with Jacob.  So there we are, back home and ready for another jaunt out with Marcus.  Hopefully I will get in and play some more tonight.

Year One Survivor Edition

State of Decay

State of Decay Sept 2013 Back in June of 2013 I was completely amped with the release of State of Decay on the Xbox Live Arcade.  While I am not traditionally a console gamer I spent a good deal of my time out in the loft playing this game at launch.  When it came out that September of the PC I was even more excited because it meant that I would be spending more time playing it.  Since then I have picked up the two expansions…  that I have woefully not spent much time playing.  This has been one of those titles that when it goes on sale I sent copies to friends, considering it is as close to the perfect zombie survival game as I have ever played.  The only flaw however is the fact that this game desperately wants to be multiplayer.  In fact when I told my friends last night what I was playing before the raid…  the immediate response was an excited question asking if they added in multiplayer.

State of Decay: Year One Survivor Edition 2015 While I did not take the best reference shots, because I was too busy playing the game…  I did dig up one of the screenshots I took playing the original steam release in the above section, and now directly above this paragraph is a screenshot from the Year One Survivor Edition… which is essentially an HD Remaster more than anything.  I definitely find screenshot two more appealing.  The first screenshot uses a lot of deep shadow to mask the extremely muddy textures, whereas the second shot is more willing to let you see things more naturally.  Another thing that I really dig is that the game has some nice Depth of Field going on in the YOSE edition.  You can see this in the second character on screen but even more so below in the shot of my character climbing the tower in town to scout for a view.  The world feels more “real” which makes it all the more creepy as you are wandering the wastes looking for resources.

Year One Survivor Edition

Awesome Depth of Field Effects The biggest thing I have noticed while playing is that the controls seem much more responsive.  I am playing the game using the exact same black wired xbox 360 controller I did the first time, but this time around everything feels more fluid.  If this were just shooting I would think potentially it was me, since between the times playing this game…  I played a lot of Destiny with a controller, which has greatly improved my aiming.  I am noticing it especially when I am driving a car however, that things feel more controllable and less all over the place.  Additionally the melee combat feels more responsive.  This is aided by the fact that our character has now learned how to use a knife, instead of simply kicking zombies when your melee weapon breaks.  Stupid as this sounds, it feels even more “walking dead” thanks to this little motion.  This works unbelievably well when your companion holds the zombie and you finish them off with the knife.  I did a lot of this in the lake area before moving into the town for example.

All Three Versions in One I did not make it terribly far last night, because I was playing for about an hour before and after my World of Warcraft raid, but I did manage to get far enough in to remember why I liked this game so much.  Since it had been so long since I had last played, I opted to just restart the original campaign, as it tends to be the best way to ease into the game.  Additionally while running around yesterday at lunch I picked up a Xbox One copy for my boss, so I am figuring he will want to discuss what is going on in the game.  He is not much of a gamer but picked up the  Xbox One because his grand kids also have one…  and is a huge Walking Dead fan so I figured State of Decay was just about the perfect game for him.  I am one of those people that can do something, but struggle to talk someone through it… unless I am doing it myself.  I figured the only way I could be of any help to him was to actually be playing the content myself.

Making Progress

StateOfDecay 2015-04-28 22-56-06-48 Like I said earlier I did not make a ton of progress, but after having played this multiple times I feel like maybe my play is a bit more focused than it was the first time.  As a result I have already rescued one group of survivors, cleaned out the veterinary clinic, built an outpost, built a sleeping area, built a workshop… and am working on building trust with a second group of survivors.  Not too shabby for about two hours of play if I do say so myself.  The whole “knowing what you are doing” aspect definitely speeds things up, as well as having a basic understanding of the lay of the land.  The first time I played this game I was having to constantly check the map, whereas this time around I can navigate at least somewhat based on landmarks.  I remember on my first play I overshot the church by a huge margin, crashed my car… had to get a new one… and finally made it back to the church at night.  This time I went straight there, knowing there was no real sense in exploring until I had done the introductory stuff at the church.

This is still a really great game, and like I said at the start of all of this… the only weakness is it would be so much more enjoyable were I exploring with my friends.  The bane of my existence is just how fast melee weapons break.  I feel like this is a game about me searching for my next weapon, more than anything else.  I rarely use guns, and prefer to take on the zombies in close range… in part  because it doesn’t summon more zombies to the gun shots.  Additionally I really do not want to summon a zombie horde down upon me.  That said I did at one point clear out a couple of hordes with a random car, which was extremely gratifying.  The other strange thing I have noticed is that I no longer fear the zombies.  The first time I played this game I was scared to death of interaction with them.  Every time I would search a location I would take the time to carefully board it up before proceeding.  Now I just deal with the zombies as they come… so in a way it feels like the transition someone would have to make in this world.  I understand it better, and therefore I am less concerned by it.  Still having a blast after all of the time I have played the game in the past, which is quite the compliment to the developers.

#StateOfDecay #YOSE #UndeadLabs