transistor Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

King of Monsters

May 26, 2014 by Belghast

An Odd Day

Sometimes on the weekends you have days that feel like they last significantly longer than they should, and then you have days like yesterday that feel like they are over in a blink of an eye. I guess in theory what made yesterday feel so odd is because the entire day was planned around hanging out with some friends and meeting them for lunch at 1:30. So by the time I got up, grabbed breakfast, wrote a blog post… it was pretty much time to shower and get ready to go out. None of this is to say that yesterday was not a really fun day, but it was just over in a flash.

We ate lunch at a trendy restaurant downtown called the Rusty Crane… which for as trendy as it is, was extremely reasonably priced. My wife and I ate for $16, but then again we ate off the brunch menu. I had this weird breakfast enchilada thing, that while tasty is not likely something I would order again. It was a tortilla filled with egg, sausage, avocado and what was billed as grilled onions and peppers. So that to me made it sound like they would be nice and soft and caramelized, but in reality they were mostly raw and maybe spent a few minutes on the grill lightly singing the edges. Had they been like the veggies inside of a Chimichanga it would have been awesome… but me and crunchy veggies tend to disagree.

But the food overall was tasty and cheap… and the company was the important part. We had not seen our friends in several months, and normally we like to see them at least once a month to hang out and get dinner and a movie or something of the sort. The hard part about being non-parents is finding other couples that don’t have kids in tow to go out and do things with. As a result we tend to hang out with a lot of older couples, and this pair is a really odd situation. He is the very first “pimp” I had, aka the guy who first recruited me into the dark art of consulting. She is a teacher at the same school as my wife. We only realized the connection one year at a back to school barbeque, and ever since we’ve kind of integrated into each others families.

King of Monsters

After we ate we decided to go see a movie. Since my wife and the other two had not seen all of the X-Men films leading up to Days of Future Past, they opted against that one. In reality right now there just isn’t much on at the theatre that is not a comic book-y type film. In the end we decided to go see the new Godzilla film as it aligned up time wise better than almost anything else. Just a heads up… I am not sure you can call them spoilers, but be warned this section is going to have something vaguely resembling them. If you want to be surprised when you see the new Godzilla… feel free to skip ahead, but unfortunately if you have seen ANY Godzilla movie, you have also seen this one which is part of the problem I have.

I am not sure exactly what I was expecting, but this movie literally plays out like every Godzilla movie… or in truth damned near every Anime story as well. Mankind does something stupid > Horrible Monster is spawned > Hero (Godzilla) shows up and is misunderstood and attacked by mankind > Sage/Elder/Scientist explains something about nature balancing itself > We put our fate in the Hero (Godzilla) > Hero gets its ass kicked royally and is defeated > Just when all hope seems lost the Hero rises again using last ounce of strength to defeat the Monster. That is pretty much the template for half of the anime I have seen, not to mention every single Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Power Ranger or anything else in the same “big things battle other big things” genre.

I blame Pacific Rim for giving me hope, that a tired old movie construct like Godzilla could have new and interesting life breathed into it. I love everything about the concept of monsters battling monsters, or giant robots saving the day… it fills my inner thirteen year old with glee. The problem is the 37 year old brain is still there and unable to be detached. There were so many things in the movie that seem to have no explanation and made zero sense. There is a scene where a coal fired train is travelling across the country to deliver a payload of nuclear warheads. It is super foggy, and a bunch of the troops are sent ahead to scout the track to see if it is safe. Next thing we know the train is on fire and coming out of the fog. How exactly did that train catch fire? Sure it looks cool as a special effect but it makes zero sense because the monster attacking doesn’t breathe fire or anything. The train just apparently spontaneously combusted while it was coming across the tracks.

The biggest problem I had with Godzilla is that the movie just felt like it was going through the motions. They so closely followed the template of what a Godzilla movie has to be, that the character actors that participated in the movie just felt like window dressing. There was never a single moment in the movie that I did not feel like I knew the next three scenes that were about to happen. Obviously going into it we know that Godzilla is going to win the day… but if we have that as a fixed ending… sure you can do something to mix up the space between the beginning of the movie and the end. So as much as I am railing on the movie, I do have to give it credit that the monster battles looked good. The monsters were well animated and you can tell they spent large amounts of money trying to make Godzilla feel like the original “man in suit” version without making it look cheesy as hell. If you love the original Godzilla movies and can suspend disbelief and ignore the fact that it is following a very tired template… you might just enjoy this movie.

Right in the Feels

Now for a game that I will not give any spoilers for… because it really is worthy of cherishing. Last night when we finished with our festivities, I went upstairs, threw my headphones on and sat down with the purpose of getting through Transistor. When we recorded the podcast both Kodra and Ashgar had beaten the game, and I had heard that the ending is really heart wrenching. They were correct… the game got me right in the feels and I think maybe I even bled a little. Everything about this game is wonderful, and if they do not win awards with it… it is a major fucking tragedy. Basically Supergiant Games has a loyal customer now, after loving Bastion and seeing how much more intricate this game is… I have a feeling that anything they could create would turn out phenomenal.

My only disappointment is how generally short the game is. It took me roughly three hours of game play to beat and is the equivalent of I think four areas that you traverse, maybe five. Now one cool thing that happens is when you defeat the game you can play a “recursion” that allows you to play through a second time with all the abilities that you earned the first time… and everything becomes more difficult as well. So instead of Creep 2.0 you start seeing Creep 3.0 etc. I love the way this game embraces code lingo to produce a world that is both Tron and French Noir at the same time. I would love to see a movie made from this game… would be absolutely phenominal. I have to admit as cool as the gameplay is… I mostly wanted to play through this game for the story. I wanted to know what happened and why things were the way they are. The problem is after completing the game it feels like I have more questions than answers.

Beer and Pizza Action

After the emotional rollercoaster that was Transistor, I felt like i needed to play something far more run and gun. So I picked back up on Wolfenstein: New Order, and at the point in which I went to sleep I was roughly three hours into the storyline. There is something compelling about the game, but at the same time something that leaves me completely uneasy about the potential of a fascist future. So far I am loving the game and look forward to playing some more. Oddly enough this game seems to be able to get me to stealth around. There is a sequence where you sneak into a prison, and I loved lurking about and sneaking up on mobs and taking them out with the knife. Normally I do not do stealth at all, but for whatever reason it felt as though I HAD to use stealth. If you fire a gun anywhere near an officer they will sound the alarm and bring on all sorts of really bad shit like these flying robot things that are damned near impossible to take out with anything other than the shotgun. The game is action packed and focused, and precisely what I needed to recover from the case of the feels.

#Godzilla #PacificRim #Transistor #Wolfenstein #NewOrder

Transistor Gushes

May 25, 2014 by Belghast

Good Bye Old Man

Yesterday was a rough day for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had to bury my old man ferret Smokey. In 2009 we got a pair of brothers from a ferret rescue, and at that point they were several years old already. Bandit passed away several years ago from Insulinoma, and it was one of the hardest things I had been through. I feel like maybe him passing quickly was a godsend. For the last several months Smokey had been deteriorating of old age, and it was hard to watch him go through it. For the last couple of months we had kept him in a separate cage in our bedroom, where he could have easy access to food and water since he was not moving around very well at all. His hind legs simply did not obey him any longer and he had developed cataracts in both eyes.

Our goal was to try and keep him as comfortable as we could until he passed. The old man had some fight in him because there were several nights that we were certain he would not make it through til morning. When morning came it was still friendly and very much alive. When we got up yesterday morning we did our normal “check to see if he made it through the night”, and he seemed about as normal as he ever does. Raised his head, sniffed my hand and went back to sleep. While we were out running errands yesterday it seems like he passed in his sleep because he was curled up in the same little ball he always was.

I am thankful at least that it seems as though he went peaceful. He was a good boy and a friendly ferret, even though he never did bond as tightly to us as his brother did. The above photo is of him in much better days, snuggled up with one of our girls Shiloh in the hammock. Bandits passing was so sudden and jarring, but with Smokey we have had months to get used to the idea and just tried to make him as comfortable as we could. So while part of me is definitely sad that he is gone, another part of me is relieved that he no longer has to struggle.

The Big Clean

Pet funeral aside, yesterday was a good but very tiring day. If it tells you anything I managed to hit 10,000 steps on my fitbit before we actually went for our evening walk. As I said before the house needed cleaning badly, and I got up and around yesterday morning and picked most of it up. However there are still a few deep cleaning projects that need to happen. We needed to run to the bank, so we got out and about and did some shopping. The shirts I had been wearing were getting huge on me, and my wife would visibly sigh each time I wore one of them that now hung from my shoulders like a drape. JC Penny was running a door buster sale that we just happened to luck into without really meaning to. I picked up a bunch of new and better fitting shirts and this prompted me to remove a ton of older shirts from the closet.

Similarly both myself and my wife needed new bathing suits. I found a nice pair of trunks that are far more colorful than anything I have ever bought in the past, and she found a nice one-piece at Old Navy. All of the shopping inspired her to come home and tear apart the closet both figuratively and quite literally. The bedroom for several hours yesterday was a warzone, and among other projects we cleaned out the catch all corner that had jewelry, perfume and lotions on what used to be a typewriter desk. For some time I have been hauling around a cabinet to go into that corner that we picked up on craigslist, but simply lacked the time to do the necessary cleaning to make room for it. It fit in nicely, and honestly could have been a bit bigger.

Similarly she tore apart the bathroom that joins to our bedroom and set up one of those wire divider shelves underneath to segment what is normally just one big space. My biggest contribution was culling my wardrobe by literally half and folding it neatly for a garage sale. As mentioned yesterday in a few weeks we are getting pulled into a garage sale, and I am wondering exactly what else I will be selling. I have tons of compact discs in my office, that I simply never listen to anymore. The idea of listening to a CD just feels foreign, since I stream almost everything thanks to Google Music. I don’t feel the need to own music any longer, I just want access to said music when I want it. As a result I am probably going to get rid of my entire collection, but I seriously doubt any of the regular garage sale fare will want the type of stuff I listen to. Not a single CD could you really classify as “pop”.

Transistor Gushes

Finally last night we recorded our seventh episode of Aggrochat. Once again Rae was travelling, so since Dallian has been so gracious to be a kind of unofficial fifth member of the cast, he stepped in at literally ten minutes notice. I called the episode “Transistor Gushes” because quite literally… that game has hijacked the podcast. For those who don’t know we keep a running shared Google document for the show notes, and during the week we jot down ideas, and recycle ones that we didn’t get to from previous weeks. This week the only thing mentioned is Transistor written in 72 point font, with a much smaller blurb below it that says “things that are not Transistor”.

We successfully covered both, and we discussed Transistor, Wolfenstein: New Order, the Final Fantasy 5 draft, Watchdogs, Dark Souls II, Comics, and a few other things along the way. I feel like it was a really good podcast, and while most of the topics only actually engaged 2-3 of us at a time, the mix of which 3 people were talking was pretty evenly distributed. We plan on having a follow-up show in a few weeks to talk about the actual storyline and elements of Transistor, but for the time being we limited ourselves to just talking about the interesting game play elements. We will of course start giving a massive spoiler warning when we get into discussion of plot points. When talking about Wolf, I tried to limit myself to only discussing things that happen as part of the introduction to the game. Hopefully this works for people, but if not let us know in the comments… hell if it does work let us know… we love feedback.

Search for a Voice

May 21, 2014 by Belghast

Not Enough Time

Yesterday is one of those days that I both hate and love at the same time. Two very different games released, but both were games that I had been looking forward to for some time. When this happens, generally speaking I will wait on one of them until I have a lull in game play enough to be able to pick it up and consume it. Problem is, in this case I inadvertedly pre-ordered both not really knowing when one of them would release. So last night I made an attempt to devote a sufficient amount of time to both of them. At the very least we have a long holiday weekend coming up that hopefully I can spend completing them both.

Honestly the pure joy of playing two amazingly crafted games was exactly what I needed to combat yesterday. Everything about yesterday was pure crap. Monday afternoon I remember remarking with joy that I had a completely open Tuesday, then over the course of the day one by one the meetings piled up. So not only did I spend almost the entire day in one meeting or another, we also had a handful of crisis to deal with. So by the end of the day I just wanted the world to burn around me… which is something you can do very easily in a video game. Braxwolf made an interesting post about the nature of gaming, and for me… games are often more than just games. After a bad day like yesterday… games are very much therapy.

Search for a Voice

Since the E3 that they announced it, I have been looking forward to Transistor, the new isometric beat-em-up from Supergiant Games the creators of Bastion. The game company has singlehandedly redefined how I feel about the narrator and how it relates to the action on screen. With Bastion, the narrator was a character in itself, telling you the story of the protagonist you were playing. In Transistor we have a similar setup going on, except this time the narrator is actually the sword you wield named Transistor. As the course of the game unfolds you find that you are Red a famous pop singer, and that some organization called the Camerata killed your boyfriend… somehow transforming him into the blade and stole your voice. The other odd twist is that all of you seem to be computer programs, and after one dies you can pick their core up and use them as a weapon against the evil “Process”.

The entire treatment of the game has a very “Tron-Noir” feel to it, and I am eating up all of the visuals. Your character is gorgeously animated, and the surroundings feel lush and vibrant, with tons of little things for you to encounter that serve no real purpose other than to have the narrator tell you more tidbits of information. The gameplay is… to say nothing else “different”. It is a mix of real time and turn based gameplay that feels fresh and unique. I have no clue what the controls are without a controller, but if you press the right trigger button you pause time allowing you to plot a move and funnel attacks quickly into a target. Pressing the trigger again unfreezes time and executes the attack pattern. The gotcha is that lots of mob types will move out of your way and you will have just wasted all of your energy on an attack that doesn’t land the blow.

The trick of the game seems to be figuring out which attacks work best on which mob types and figuring out which to take out in real time and which to defeat using this pseudo “bullet time”. Executing a sequence of attacks causes you to be drained for a period of time, which means you can do absolutely nothing but run around to avoid mob counter attacks. There are lots of white boxes scattered throughout the levels that you end up using as a buffer to avoid getting hit. These are unfortunately destructible which means you only have so long to faff about before you have no cover to duck behind. The death sequence is a bit odd, in that instead of losing a life it overloads whatever weapon you happen to be using. This weapon then stays down for as long as it takes you to get to the next checkpoint. This means you want to be proficient at more than one weapon in case you are stuck without your attack of choice.

I played the game long enough to clear the first “world” of sorts and am in transition to the next main area of the game. The game has me hooked and wanting more, so I figure over the next few days I will devote the several hours needed to finish it up. From what I have heard the game has around 6 hours of game play in it, which seems like a good amount for an isometric beat-em-up like this. Because of the way you can combine new attacks that you find with your existing attacks to product new results, I feel like there is more than likely quite a bit of replay value. Even if there isn’t the game is gorgeous, and absolutely oozing personality… so more than worth the $20 purchase price. Right now I am very much in the “not as good at this game as I wish I was” phase, so hopefully that will improve as I get more used to the unique control scheme.

Faff About In Cyrodil

Since I am running out of time… and I ended up writing so much about Transistor without really meaning to, I am opting to leave my review of Wolfenstein: New Order until tomorrow morning. I actually ended up playing it quite a bit longer last night, so I am afraid I have even more to say about that. It was a really great day for gaming. Just a friendly reminder that tonight I will be playing Elder Scrolls Online as we have another “Faff About in Cyrodil” night planned. If you have not seen the notice check out the Anook event. If you are a member of the Alliance of Awesome community, you are more than welcome to join along even if you are not in the House Stalwart guild. We are all Daggerfall Covenant so there is also that restriction. I just dinged 50 this week and will actually be Veteran Rank 1 as we do this… so maybe just maybe we won’t get rolled quite so hard out in Cyrodil. I am not holding my breath however. In any case it was a lot of fun last week and we ran around collecting skyshards and doing quests out there as a horde.

#AllianceOfAwesome #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Transistor