Good morning you happy people out in digital land… I Belghast am doing my best to try and be noble and bloggified this morning… but seeming to fail miserably. If you have not figured out by now… this top paragraph is really just me psyching myself up to write. Think of it as the wind-up to a pitch, and while I do divulge important bits of information from time to time… mostly it is just my way of easing into writing about “things”. This morning I am still drinking a cup of coffee, so who knows what adventures my mind will go on throughout the course of the day.
Lego Friends
So a few weeks back my niece wanted Legos for her birthday. This was one of my happiest moments as an uncle, and I spoiled her fairly rotten. I may or may not have bought like $80 in Legos for her… because by god I am going to support the notion of my niece being into “building things”. I have to say I was extremely disappointed in what I was able to find however. It seems like all of the Lego City products have essentially nothing but male minifigures. On a completely seperate row… were the Lego Friends toys… and scattered in among those were an assortment of “real” Lego sets with female characters. So I ended up getting her a pink bucket with a girl minifig, a blue bucket with a boy minifig… and this princess horse grooming set because the minifig in that one looked a lot like her.
I was woefully sadden later to find out that she used some of her own money to buy a bunch of the Lego Friends sets. Feminist Frequency released a video on the Lego Friends and for the most part I agreed… that they were an un-needed aberration in Legoland. I had no clue why they existed in the first place. I could not understand why they did not just release a series of Lego city sets with female heroines. But yesterday I think I finally grok exactly what the Lego Friends do that the minifigures do not.
We spent most of our day yesterday either preparing for or spending time with family. We had a surprise get together for my wife’s fathers birthday, and this was the first time I had seen my niece in awhile. During my wife’s insane Lego find she found 3 sets for my niece. One Lego friends set, and two normal lego sets but with gender neutral themes and including girl minifigs. Thing is… when we gave them to her… she was excited about all the sets for different reasons… but she was especially excited about the Lego Friends set… because it she did not already have “Andrea”. I never once thought about the fact that the Lego friends might have names.
So I started listening to how she talked about Lego friends… and it finally made sense. She cares about the different characters and their personalities much the same way as a little girl assigns attributes to each of the members of the Barbie universe. The catch is that instead of teaching copious consumption… in that you need to buy Barbie all these things… like a dream house and a car… it is letting her BUILD things for her new imaginary friends. She talked about that she is building a house for all her lego friends… which is going completely off the map since none of the sets we have gotten for her so far was anything resembling a house. Essentially from my standpoint Lego Friends are “working as intended”.
She is having all sorts of imaginative play… but she is building various aspects of the universe inhabited by these five named minifigures. So I no longer feel like a horrible person for buying into this “Friends” franchise. She is building and creating and imaging all sorts of new experience for her “dolls” and it seems like it is the best of both the Lego and Barbie experience. She is having aspirational play imaging herself as a vet or a doctor or a home builder… but doing so in a way that she is actually making the things happen by building them… rather than waiting on another trip to the store to acquire another item. Here is hoping that she continues to build and create… and we will do our best to keep supplying a fresh set of bricks to incorporate into her little world.
Heroica
Part of the whole going to see family thing, involves going to a small town about an hour from Tulsa. With it being back to school time, my wife wanted to stop and see if they had any different school supplies… or more importantly ones on clearance at the small town Wal-mart. While we did not really find much in the way of school supplies they had a bunch of Lego stuff on clearance. I have seen the various Lego board games for awhile, but never actually picked them up. I have heard they were an awesome source for relatively rare pieces, but they were always way too expensive for me to just pick up on a lark to part out. I found these two Heroica sets for less than twenty bucks combined so I figured it was well worth that.
It got me to thinking… wouldn’t it be cool to run a D&D or similar pen and paper campaign using the Lego board games as a mapping system? I saw a picture from G+ the other day of a dad teaching his kids D&D using minifigures to represent their characters. It seems like father of the year material there, but wouldn’t it be cool if you also built the dungeon they were exploring out of Lego? Granted it would involve kitbashing a TON of these sets to find enough pieces to be able to do it… but it seems like a noble undertaking. Sadly I don’t really have enough friends nearby to really support a D&D campaign. When we do pen and paper we tend to do it as a google hangout… and I think the tactile experience of Lego everything… would be lost horribly over a camera.
Nipple Chests
When I finally got back home from our family outing excursions… I sat down on the couch just absolutely drained. I initially fired up Rift, but I just was not feeling up to grinding my harvest skills any further. Granted I know I could have played something else… but I am somewhat obsessed with getting my Cleric to a level at which he can do Storm Legion content. I logged into Mumble and everyone there was playing Final Fantasy XIV… so I figured… what the hell… might as well join them. The game is growing on me, I will admit… but I am just not sure to what extent. There are still so many things that bother me about the game in general.
If my character looks awesome… I feel awesome while playing it. This is why I am such a huge proponent of cosmetic gear systems. If I can set my appearance and always look amazing… I will feel happy while playing that character. Final Fantasy XIV has way too much of the bullshit you see in the above picture. Wearing a “nipple chest” and powder blue assless chaps does not make me feel heroic in ANY way. I just feel like a walking punchline to a horrible joke. This shit might fly in Japan… but I just feel like a moron walking around like this. Sadly earlier my character looked amazing… I had a really slick looking set of gear… that fit the way my character plays… but since FFXIV has no cosmetic system to speak off… I am stuck looking like an abomination if I want to wear the most effective gear.
There is definitely something charming about the gameplay however. It feels like a much better version of World of Warcraft. The world looks nicer, the character models themselves are awesome… and the way combat chains off other abilities is a huge step forward from the WoW model. The world seems fairly intricate as well, with lots of little things to explore and find. I am still experience the whole things named nonsensically aspect… like what the hell is a Guildleve or a Levemete in the first place? It feels like when Americans try and make ethnic sounding names that end up just being gibberish. The whole game could do with a better cultural pass to change the names of things into something that makes sense. As a result I can never remember what anything is called and just end up making names up for them.
I figure I will play the rest of the weekend and see where I feel about the game at the end of it. It is more enjoyable than TERA or Dragons Prophet for example… so were this a free to play game it would be a no-brainer as to whether or not I would be occasionally playing it. But the whole subscription thing is still a sticking point for me. I keep hoping that it will miraculously get better. One of the things I want to try out is the jobs system. I need to get up to around 15 to fully unlock the airship system be able to travel to the towns that have the guilds I want to pick up. I think I am more than likely going to switch to pugilist or lancer first after getting Maurader to 15.
Wrapping Up
Well I managed to ramble on about meaningless stuff for another hour. I hope you all have a great weekend. I am guessing I will be splitting my Sunday between FFXIV and Rift. I might even go upstairs and build some more Lego sets since that seems to be on my brain. I still feel like I am potentially coming down with something… and as of this morning my wife seems similarly effected. Here is hoping it just ends up as allergies and nothing more serious.