October 2013 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Pokémania

October 15, 2013 by Belghast

Age Gap

I feel like there is this huge phenomena that I completely missed the boat on. Even though it was my generation that brought the Gameboy to the world, and I can remember getting one in 1989 it was never a primary console for me. It was that thing I played when I was on a trip, or more often my younger cousin played when he was visiting. For him the Gameboy was totally a primary means of gameplay, but for me… it was more novelty than anything else. The battery life was pure shit, so it was not like you could actually take it anywhere for long periods of time without a large stock of AA batteries to fuel it.

Additionally it made everything you played look spinach green. There were various big name titles that came out like Metroid II that provided an experience that did not exist on the bigger consoles…. but by that time I had the Super Gameboy and the ability to play these games in pseudo color. While I bought a Gameboy Advance and later a second hand Gameboy SP they were still more novelty devices for me. As a result I feel as though I almost completely missed one of the biggest crazes to ever hit gaming.

Pokémania

I was already well into the working world when the whole Pokémon insanity happened. It was one of those games that I knew existed, but since I didn’t really play Gameboy much, I had never actually experienced. My first entry into the world actually happened when the card game was released. Before it really blew up, it had become something that the card gamer folks dabbled in at my local game store… and I had a starter deck and a handful of boosters. It was a charming little game, and it played rather quickly as compared to Magic: The Gathering that could often times drag on for ages.

I did not really encounter the Gameboy game until much later, when I played Pokémon Blue on a Gameboy emulator. I found it a charming game, and quickly became addicted to capturing these little critters, but the experience ended there for the most part. I don’t think I ever actually beat the game. Once the novelty wore off I was back to playing my JRPGs on the PlayStation, and traded Pokémon for Jade Cocoon. I likely would have stayed disconnected from the Pokémon experience were it not for MMO games and often times being one of the oldest folks in the raid.

Battle Pets

A large number of the gamers that I play with on a regular basis are one full generation younger than I am. As a result… Pokémon was a huge deal for that group. I can remember talking about WoW Pokémon with a small measure of disdain when it was originally announced, but mostly because I really did not get what is so fun about it. However when it was released I went from antagonist to addict in no time. In fact for the first several nights after the release of Mists of Pandaria, I wandered around doing nothing but battle pets. I have always been a pet collector in MMO games, but being able to do something with them… made the whole experience that much better for me.

The thing is… this also made me realize that this madness called Pokémon totally worked on me. I began to feel like I had missed an entire experience. Over the last few months my inner circle of gamer friends have been prepping for the release of Pokémon X and Y, and while at the time I didn’t think much about it… the closer it got to release the more I wanted to participate this time. I have not owned a Gameboy since the SP, and have completely missed the DS era. As a result I missed a number of games that I still want to play. So I feel like I have a significant backlog of games I want to play for it.

However the big title on the horizon that I would have had to play… was Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. A Link to the Past is one of my favorite games of all time… I put it very close to Castlevania Symphony of the Night… the game that is likely my all time favorite. I was always a fan of Legend of Zelda, spending countless hours beating the first one. However, Link to the Past was that game that really proved to me the raw power of the Super Nintendo. I picked up a copy on my way home from getting outpatient sinus surgery and I played the hell out of it as I recuperated. When I heard there was a sequel coming to the 3DS I knew sooner or later I would end up with the console.

Taking the Plunge

Much to the frustration of my wife I am sure… last night I took the plunge and picked up a black/black 3ds XL and Pokémon Y. My immediate group of friends have been keeping the X and Y thing pretty balanced so I could have gotten either. Basically for me it came down to the fact that I would far rather have a crazy red and black flying bird with three hands… than some kind of blue faerie antelope. Other than that… I really could not tell you the difference. I played the absolute crap out of the game last night, and spent most of that time catching Pokémon and then trading them off using the crazy wonder trade system.

This has to be the coolest feature I have found so far. Basically since the 3DS is an extremely connected device, you can place any Pokémon you do not want up for trade, and receive a Pokémon that another trainer does not want. Essentially it is the whole, one mans trash is another mans treasure concept… and while I am sure at later levels you mostly get things you have no interest in… starting out I found it to be the source of many Pokémon I was interested in. I oddly enough ended up with quite a few interesting and potentially rare ones mixed in with the dross.

I still feel a little overwhelmed. Having never really played a Pokémon game… there are so many things that have changed since my brief experience with Pokémon Blue. Luckily I have various friends that serve as an almost encyclopedic tome of knowledge about all things “pocket monster”. They have been helping me out immensely especially in evaluating which things are good and which things are not so good. I feel like I have a couple of decades of research to do before I even feel like I have a slim grasp on what all is going on. I am now a proud member of the 3DS era, so I can now add a “friend code” to the long list of other social identifiers I have.

Arcade Box

October 14, 2013 by Belghast

Loft 1.0

Currently I am known for being a fairly PC centric gamer, but this was not always the case. Once upon a time I had a game loft with all of the major console systems prior to the Xbox hooked up and playable at any given time via a complex set of switches. It was a ton of fun, but also a massive pain in the ass to remember which combination of video switches produced which actual game system being fed to the arcade style RGB Monitor. Ultimately things happened that lead to at least in part the dismantling of the game loft, and other interests kept me from ever really rebuilding it in the same fashion.

During the summer we cleaned out the loft and set up the loft again, but this time I did not want to string cords all over the place like I had before. Currently I only have my Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 hooked up long with a cable box. The problem is… I still want access to all those retro games, or for me “the good old days”. Essentially I decided I was going to create a dedicated emulator PC, but I wanted it to be something small and quiet. I ended up going with a Foxconn Nettop machine similar to this one.

Something Simple

The current iteration of the box relies upon XBox Media Center and quite honestly has been more fiddly than I would have liked. As a result it is still sitting in my office instead of hooked up out in the loft as it should be. So yesterday when an interesting thing crossed my feed I had to explore it. One of my friends on G+ shared a link to a project called ICE. Essentially it is an interface between Steam and the various Console Emulators, allowing them to be added to your game library and accessible through Big Picture mode. Personally I thought this was a really awesome idea, as running a system through steam big picture mode would also give me access to a lot of the indie games that would run just fine through the nettop as well.

I did quite a bit of research into how it actually worked, as I did not want anything accessing my steam account and potentially compromising it. Essentially it only acts as a go between, in a sort of batch file mode, automatically registering a bunch of roms with steam and configuring them to load the emulator and the file as command line arguments. For the most part it works really well. I had no problem getting the Nintendo 64 and Gameboy Advance games working, however I was unable to get any Super Nintendo title to work. The list of currently supported consoles is a little something like this.

NES – Nintendo Entertainment System
SNES – Super Nintendo
N64 – Nintendo 64
Gamecube – Nintendo Gamecube
PS1 – Sony Playstation
PS2 – Sony Playstation 2
Genesis – Sega Genesis
Gameboy – Nintendo Gameboy
GBA – Nintendo Gameboy Advance

Arcade Box

Were I only interested in having console games on tap… it would have been a pretty solid solution, pending I could get all of the games to register properly and get the super nintendo emulation working. The problem is… I also want access to Mame which Ice currently does not support or have listed for future intended support either. Why play a console port of an arcade game when you can just play the actual arcade title. So this has lead me to search further for an easy to use solution, and I have landed upon a nifty piece of software called Maximus Arcade.

Once upon a time I worked as a developer at a Palm Pilot software company. Before the environment got the life sucked out of it by corporatization… we had this amazing Mame cabinet that one of the developers had built after hours… and then brought into the office for us all to enjoy. Through a whole bunch of arcane bullshit he had cobbled together this really cool menu system that let us have over 4000 arcade games “on tap” at any given time. Maximus Arcade seems like a piece of software that does all the configuration for you and just presents a really nice and cohesive interface. Currently the software ships with all X-Arcade joysticks, but you can purchase it separately for the really paltry sum of $25.

So once again begins a little phase of me determining how best to build a Maximus Arcade machine. Right now all suggestions are pointing at WIndows XP, specifically a derivative known as Micro XP. The software has decent forums so I intend to do quite a bit of research there before I do the system build out. The cool thing about it is, that it supports every console and arcade emulator I have heard of… as well as several that I have not. So it seems like I would be able to grow the system to support anything I might want to add in later. For the time being the important things to me are Nintendo, Super Nintendo, Genesis, Master System, Gameboy Advance and Mame and it seems to do all of those without issue. I will keep you guys updated as I work on the build and get it rolled out into the game loft.

End Game

October 13, 2013 by Belghast

Slowing Down

For most of us in House Stalwart the wild ride that was the Final Fantasy XIV storyline has come to a conclusion. As a result a large number of us have dialed back our playtime a bit to recover. This is only magnified by the fact that the game that none of us may speak of is having yet another event and a large number of us are actively playing that. The storyline was extremely exceptional and did everything I would expect in the ending of a classic final fantasy game. However this time it left the door completely open.

It felt much like that first time you transitioned Legend of Zelda a Link to the Past into the Dark World. It feels like we just scratched the surface of the game, which I guess is how the ending of the storyline content should feel in every MMO. Lots of things are resolved, but very quickly you realize that nothing at all is truly resolved. Now that we have spent all the storyline we are left with the fact that other than the wonderful story… the FFXIV experience is a rather skeletal one.

End Game

Basically eight of us have entered the phase of the end game at this point… which is extremely limited. Each step along the path has some pretty severe gear requirements, so what we have ahead of us is a large amount of running the same two dungeons over and over. Basically you are given two paths forward for gear. The first of which is running two 8 man dungeons that reward a lot of tomestones, but absolutely no gear… or running two 4 man dungeons that drop gear but very few tomestones. Neither option feels really good, considering for the time spent running Amdapor you really do not end up with much gear. I’ve run it three times as a tank and have yet to see a single drop.

The real problem is the fact that each run through the dungeon racks up a not insignificant repair bill. One of the big problems I have talked about before is the fact that there really is no good way to gain money at level 50. I carried with me into the end game about 200,000 gil, and that has been going fast as I use it for various needed things at the maximum level. The options I have before me are grinding fates which pay out around 200 gil each, grinding leves which pay out around 500 gil each… and playing the auction house. The problem with the auction house is that `the only thing worth anything really are high level crafted items. Leveling your crafting however can bankrupt your character… so it is a bit of a catch 22.

Relic Weapon

The goal of the game right now seems to be to get your relic weapon and later on your +1 upgrade to it. This is the best item in the game you can get, but much like the Everquest Epic weapon it is a long and drawn out process. To start down this path is a rather expensive one. Firstly you have to acquire the base weapon, for a Warrior this is the Barbarian’s Bardiche. This is crafted by a high level blacksmith and is gathered together out of bits that have to be farmed from a combination of dungeons and overworld zones. They currently go for about 10,000 gil on the open market, and since I do not have access to a max level Blacksmith that is the option I chose to go with. In my experience it costs far more than 10,000 gil to get a smith to create one for you.

From there you need to infuse 2 Battledance III materia onto the item. This once again has to be done by a level 50 blacksmith… and the going rate per infuse on my server is 10,000 gil. Acquiring the Battledance III materia is a whole other matter that is far more time consuming. These are gained from disassembling level 45 or higher items that are 100% spiritbound. The problem is… individual items can be disassembled into a wide variety of different materia. I spiritbound a set of Mithril Plate gear, and did not manage to get a single Battledance III. Ultimately I had a guild member give me one of them, and I bought the second on the open market for 15,000 gil.

So just to get to the point of turning in the infused axe I have already spent over 50,000 gil once you factor in the material costs of the infusions. I apparently got off easily… for a Paladin or a Scholar apparently the costs are more like 100,000 gil. From here it is a series of monsters that I have to take down, starting in Coerthas with the Chimera and ending with Hard Mode Titan. All of which is rather honestly a pretty horrific grind, considering by the time you get to Hard Mode Titan, you damned well better be in full darklight gear, the set you get from the tomestones I talk about grinding out earlier.

Grind, Grind, Grind

Ultimately this is going to be the thing that kills the game for me if they do not introduce some less grindy paths. Right now I have the option of grinding for money, grinding to level other classes or grinding out end game gear. There is nothing left to do in the game that is anywhere near as enjoyable as the questing experience was. At this point, the game is a really fun ride to 50, and then grind city afterwards. I still greatly enjoy the dungeon runs, and I look forward to doing more of that, but that involves getting a large number of people online at the same time. When there is not a full groups worth online, I am finding myself lacking in things I really want to do.

At this point I have leveled my Warrior to 50 and my Bard to 50… but any additional characters involve lots and lots of either mob grinding or fate grinding and right now after having done it twice… that lacks any sort of luster. So I find myself piddling around in other games waiting on enough of a critical mass to form in FFXIV that we can do some dungeons. At this point I really lack interest in doing anything else in the game. I think as time passes I will want to level other classes, but after having ground out two to 50, I need a bit of a break. As a result I have been piddling around in League of Legends and finding myself pining away from my Hex invite. FFXIV still has a ton of potential, but they really need to make some changes in 2.1 to make the game more livable.

Role-Playing

October 12, 2013October 12, 2013 by Belghast

Make Believe

This is a topic I have kicked around for awhile, and been uncertain of when exactly I wanted to use it. I have a rather conflicted relationship with role-playing. Essentially every person that plays a video game to at least some extent pretends to be someone else while they are playing it. Even if it is just changing your own world view just enough to accept that you can shoot laser beams out of your eyes… or jump in mid air. Role-playing however takes this simple “being someone else” a whole lot further. The average role-player generates a whole series of motivations and outlooks for their character fleshing them out into a real virtual personality.

I find this whole process extremely interesting, and I have always gotten along extremely well with serious role-players. I think this starts back when I found the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Manual in a locker at the end of school one year. From that point onwards pen and paper games colored my destiny. The thing is… or me they were always a game, not really a way of looking at the world. While some of my friends geeked out on figuring out a series of complex motivations for their character… I just wanted to grab a sword and slaughter endless goblins in search for big treasure and even bigger weapons.

Role-playing

While I love the theory of role-playing, and I will always gravitate towards a role-playing community… or a role-playing server… I am not actually a role-player. The above image is a collage of my characters from multiple games. You will notice a distinct pattern among them because in essence they are all exactly the same character. Belghast is essentailly the “super me”, an idealized version of myself and the way I wish I actually looked. While I do rock a moustache and goatee I have always wished my hair was black instead of the odd mishmash of brown, blond, with little bits of red especially in my beard.

Additionally I have always wished I had the type of head shape to support a pony-tail and make it look natural. However when I have tried it in the past, it hangs off my head like a top-knot so I only end up looking like a very fat samurai. It is in online games that I can fix the flaws in my own appearance and great this idealized version of myself. The games that allow me to create this appearance are ultimately games I really enjoy playing, however the ones that do not really support it.. ultimately are not as enjoyable for me and fall by the wayside. Namely I am looking at the Asian-styled games with their pretty boy appearances.

The thing is… there is no actual “character” of Belghast. Just like I use online games to revise my own appearance, to a lesser extent I revise my character and pump them into each of these avatars. While I keep all the good traits, like empathy and compassion… I get rid of my more conflicted and cerebral nature so that I can essentially become a man of action and not so much a man of constant indecision. The funny thing is… over the years of playing this character it has made the real person behind it more confident, less likely to mire down in over evaluation and more likely to take actions and risks. I feel like being a leader in online games has in turn made me more of a leader in real life, or at least have more confidence to lead.

Shoot First, Ask Questions Never

While so many of my life long friends are serious role-players, there is so much about their nature that I just do not understand. This has come to light lately while we are playing Final Fantasy XIV A Realm Reborn. In this game you are actually penalized for rolling multiple characters, since one character can literally do everything in the game. However as they approach the game… each of their internalized characters has a specific thing they do, and sensibilities. So for them it is extremely jarring to see their mage archetype wielding a sword as a gladiator. For me… it just keeps me from having to create three clones of myself like I did in The Secret World.

The end result is that many of them are splitting their focus between different characters, or in the case of a few of them creating a melee character and a caster character to keep from destroying their mental picture of what each character should be. So much of me just doesn’t understand why it matters. I respect the fact that it does matter to them, but since I always play the same character regardless of what game or class I am playing… it all feels so esoteric to me.

In-Character

The concept of role-playing inside of a game is also mostly lost on me. In every RP focused game there has been some spot where players gather together to talk amongst themselves in character. While I think it is extremely cool that people do this… I have never really understood it. Character dialog has always been the part of pen and paper role-playing that I was least interested in. I am that guy in ever campaign that always wants to blow the informants head off and search the corpse for clues… rather than try and ferret the information out of them with dialog. As a result I am the character with the highest body count, and the most well armed.

By a similar fashion.. I just can’t understand standing around in Stormwind talking about dragons that you have killed… when I could be out in the world killing new ones. I get fidgety when I go too long without combat in and MMO. I have developed this notorious reputation for always being in combat at exactly the wrong time. If the party pauses even for a moment… I am off pulling something else… and as a tank I have a long line of really amazing healers that enable these bad decisions. But nothing about this personal make-up is conducive to sitting around a hub and having long drawn out conversations “in-character”.

The Community

So as I said at the beginning of this post… I have deeply conflicted feelings about role-playing in general. On one hand, I will always gravitate towards a Role-playing server, simply because I feel that role-players as a whole are far more community minded. As a result a RP server will have all of the social structure I am used to… crafters guilds, event planners, friendly, helpful and mostly mature gamers that will in turn make my gaming experience more enjoyable. So as a result I support role-playing in whatever form it takes. If someone talks to me in character, I try my damnedest to respond back in character to not break the narrative.

However there will never be a time at which I actually seek out role-playing. If I know a guild or a raid stays in character constant, I will actively shy away from it. One of my really great friends had an amazing RP guild in WoW… but I did a dungeon run with them once… and after seeing that they chose to run dungeons in character… it was not a thing I ever repeated. It feels very foreign to me, and gets in the way of my constantly causing mayhem style of play. The thing is… I thought it was super cool that they had a group of individuals that wanted to do that, so while I was along for the ride I tried my damnedest not to break their run.

So I love Role-players, I love that people exist that can create such vivid make believe worlds that they can sustain similarly vibrant characters. I however am not one of them, but I don’t have to be a dancer to admire the beauty of ballet, and in a similar fashion I do not have to be an RPer to admire the fact that they exist. So as a result I will always be a supporter of the practice, even if I am not a participator. I hope games continue to support role-playing as a community rule-set, and I will continue to rabidly report all those horrible non-character names out there. I feel that games that support multiple play-styles and points of view to be the best, so here is hoping that games in the future will not forget that.