May 2014 - Page 3 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Let There Be Rangers

May 23, 2014 by Belghast

Dabbling with Danger

At work there are a bunch of us who have at one point or another played Magic: The Gathering. I don’t play the game regularly, because I simply do not have the time to commit to going to a shop regularly to play. However I still love playing the game, and it is wrapped up in so much nostalgia for me. My first starter deck was from unlimited, and I dabbled a bit here and there through Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and started getting serious about the time revised came out. I played super actively until the launch of Ice Age and then for one reason or another got out of it. At that point I was really into the World of Darkness games, and was doing far more pen and paper than magic… also I started college and seemed to have far less disposable money.

I flirted with the game again my Senior year, because there was this great culture at the local game shop. I came in at the tail end of Mirage, played through Visions and was super involved with Weatherlight… probably my favorite expansion to date. When I left college I also left the community I liked hanging out with an playing magic regularly, so I stopped playing again. Since then I have picked up the occasional pack of cards to see what was new, but never really got involved with the game again. That was until I found out that we had a bunch of former magic players at work, and I thought it would be awesome to foster a sort of lunchtime M:TG group. Yesterday I got to break this awesome reaper miniature again, as I tutored my friend Rae through her first game of Magic. This could end in madness, but my hopes is that we can just develop a casual magic culture to hang out and enjoy.

The Ancient Library

Last night while waiting on the pizza to arrive and Elder Scrolls Online to patch, I decided to attempt to play some more Final Fantasy 5. I had a near mishap where I thought for a moment I had lost my saved game and had to revert back to a period of time when I was still in white mage hell. However that was not the case, and I managed to restore back and get to where I should have been. I kinda went crazy at one point and ground my way to 19… which means that in order to be safe for the Ancient Library I needed to be at least 21. So most of the time waiting on the Pizza was spent grinding aimlessly trying to get the last two levels so I could start my quest proper. You might ask why I need to be 21?

If you enter the Library of Ancients, there are various creatures that can cast the dreaded Level 5 Death spell. This will target any character with a level that is a multiple of 5, aka ending in 5 or 0 and pretty much instant kill them. This means in order to be safe you have to enter the library at something OTHER than that. Now if you have a Blue Mage, you want to de-synchronize your party so that you have exactly one party member at a “5” level so you can learn it. Both fortunately and unfortunately I do not have one so I just needed to be safe as I finished the library. The above monster is Byblos the guardian of the library, and I found him pretty easy considering I had ground to a much higher level than you normally need for the encounter. Most people natively get here around 15, so at 21 I was significantly higher.

Goodbye Ship, Hello Chocobo

Final Fantasy 5 is a story about destroying modes of transportation and then curiously finding a new one to replace them. After the library you find new information that allows the fire-powered-ship to start moving again without the power of the fire crystal. Unfortunately as you move to your next destination you encounter an earthquake and the fire-powered-ship gets sucked into a giant whirlpool. Conveniently you just happen to be on an island that just happens to have a Black Chocobo Forest. I know from lore that these are Black Chocobo, but I will be damned if this one is not pink… so you pilot your Pink Chocobo around the world visiting all the destinations that you missed and picking up any gear or spells that you might need.

Let There Be Rangers

The big takeaway from the encounter with the Pink Chocobo, is that it had the last two fire crystal jobs stuck in its gullet. One of which was the Ranger job that I had been waiting patiently for. This means from this point out I must have a White Mage, Mystic Knight and Ranger in the party at all times. I opted to shift Faris and Galuf to rangers in order to teach them the Rapid Fire ability as soon as I could. Basically you enter a period where you can reach most of the world so it is a great time to finish up anything you left unfinished. I headed up to Istory and went ahead and defeated Ramuh for example. Since I do not have a summoner in my party, this was a completely optional step… but Ramuh is generally my favorite of the espers so I figured I would go ahead and fight him.

Once finished messing around the room I proceeded with opening the way to the Tower of Ruin. The desert area is one of my least favorite, mostly because the sandworm fight is a pain in the butt. Considering my party composition, it was not really technically difficult, just annoying in that the Sandworm jumps between one of three holes on the screen. You don’t target the worm itself, but instead the hole it came out of, this means that more often than not you can target a hole and it might have moved before the attack lands. With the white mage, I was able to heal through anything the worm could throw at me, and it was simply a matter of wearing it down. Mostly this just meant that my rangers could not benefit from their !Aim ability, as it took way too long for it to actually resolve the damage.

Airship Go!

Once you complete the Tower of Ruin you get rewarded with access to the airship, and find out that your fire-powered-ship didn’t get destroyed, but instead fell into a chamber underneath crescent isle. Now you have this really awesome base that you can launch either the fire-powered-ship or airship out of. You end up faffing about running several mini missions all in the effort of trying to teach your airship how to flight higher to reach the earth shrine that has been elevated up into the air by the power of yet another crystal draining… and ultimately crystal destroying machine. We are nearing the sequence of events that I hate each time I play this game.

The Earth Shrine is guarded by four missile launchers and the extremely frustrating boss Soul Cannon. This is the point at which I stopped playing for the night. I made an attempt at the missile launcher fights, and while I managed to get through one of them… I didn’t back out and save like I should have. The big problem with the fights are the “rocket punch” attacks that cause your characters to go confused, and the Rocket Launcher that is an insanely nasty percentage based attack. Thing is if I can get enough time to Spellblade, the Rocket Launchers drop fast but I seem to spend my entire time trying to heal up and un-confuse my party. If I am struggling with the Rocket Launchers I have having trouble fathoming just how bad the Soul Cannon encounter will be. I am thinking this might be time to grind again and get a level advantage.

Being 22 has allowed me to just steamroll the encounters leading up to this one, but that level gap has closed on me. So I am thinking I will spend some time over the weekend watching TV and grinding away to build back up a buffer. Additionally I would really like it if most of my characters had Rapidfire as an option for the Soul Cannon encounter. I think I got through it during last years Four Job Fiesta by double casting lightning attacks, so if I can get two Mystic Knights with Rapidfire I might be able to do the same kind of trickery. Spellblade is a super powerful ability, but it sucks in that it takes one turn to cast in which you essentially do nothing. The Soul Cannon sequence is one of the big hurdles that most players get hung up on, so I don’t feel too bad that I am having to rethink my strategy before moving forward. I am sure with the Black Mage/Red Mage combo Kodra was able to just absolutely destroy it. What I really need is a bunch of Ribbons, but I think at this point in the game I only have access to the one I have.

#FF5 #FinalFantasy #MagicTheGathering #MTG

Re-Return to Castle Wolfenstein

May 22, 2014 by Belghast

Cyrodil Faffed

It seems like none of the screenshots that I took last night… actually got saved to the disk. Not sure what is up but over the last few days I have had Dxtory flake the hell out on me. I’ve used it lately to capture screenshots while streaming because OBS and Fraps seem to piss each other off. That said something seems to have changed in the mix and I couldn’t get Dxtory working on steam games Tuesday night, and last night it apparently was not taking any screenshots while streaming. Anyways as a result you get a cool screenshot of Coldharbor instead of a screenshot of what actually happened last night. What happened you ask? Well we had our second “Faff About in Cyrodil” night as a guild and while we had fewer people than last time I feel like we got more cool stuff accomplished.

We started off hunting skyshards and that morphed into delving into a whole bunch of dungeons. Along the way we had a few blips of PVP that surprisingly enough we not only survived by dominated. We of course has the numbers advantage, but last week that did not matter at all as I saw a dozen of us get taken down by 3 veteran players. That seems to be the key difference, this week I was a veteran player, and could in theory “tank” the players we were up against. We found a really awesome town full of repeatable quests that just happened to have a dolmen in the center of it. We managed to get two Dark Anchor spawns while we were there, and towards the end of one of the battles we had another guy jump in and try and gank us while we were fighting the demons. Thankfully once again the power of veteran rank won the day.

It is disturbing how much of a difference that makes. Just being 50 out in Cyrodil seems to completely even the playing field. At one point we ended up getting attacked by a Veteran Rank 8 player, and still we were able to dispatch him handily. So the moral of the story is… Cyrodil sucks if you are not at least 50. I have an idea of maybe pairing up into dungeons next week during the same time slot, but if that doesn’t work we will just break out and do more cyrodil. There is still a ton of area left to explore. The map is huge, a point that was not fully driven home until the end of the above video when myself, Delevax, Horli and Scopique attempted to run back to the way shrine. It was a really really long run.

Re-Return to Castle Wolfenstein

First let me get this out of the way… I have a boyish untarnished love for all things Wolfenstein. The original game is on my 15 gaming influences list, because it truly was the game that turned me away from console gaming in the first place. All of that said… I found the last jaunt through the Wolfenstein universe extremely disappointing… even for an admitted fanboy. In theory Wolfenstein: New Order is a continuation of the story arc started with Return to Castle Wolfenstein, continued in the self titled Wolfenstein and finished up in this game. That story arc involves trying to stop the dastardly Wilhelm Strauss otherwise known as Deathshead. Whereas the original game was all about tackling Hitler himself, the modern incarnations have shifted into something more malleable, and it works for the most part.

I am fairly notoriously against game introductions, and prefer the game just to plunk me down unceremoniously at the beginning of a level. That said I have to say the easing into the storyline here in Wolfenstein is one of the more enjoyable introductions I have played through. They manage to pepper just enough action into what would other be a cinematic to make me feel like I am actually part of it. The game starts with us trying to land on the island held by Deathshead, and having to content with both Anti-aircraft guns and the ubiquitous Nazi flying V attack fighters. I am not sure of the specific hardware we are flying into the base but it is some sort of bomber with a forward mounted ball turret, that you actually end up manning at one point during the sequence. When you finally land on the island you are sent ahead to try and break through the defenses and allow the rest of your team to move forward.

All of this works really well, and I found the storming gun nests aspect of it exhilarating. Moments later you are involved in what I feel is the single coolest sequence in a modern shooter. You fire up these really cool grappling hook guns and then walk up the side of the castle as the winch slowly retracts the cable pulling you up with it. As you go up you encounter all sorts of obstacles, not the least of which are German soldiers opening the windows and firing out at you. I am not sure exactly what it is about this sequence, but I wish I could play it over and over. Everything about it just feels really damned epic. Once you get to the top, your job is to unlock the gate so that the rest of the party can come up from the bottom to meet you.

I am not really sure how they pulled this off, but the game FEELS like a spiritual successor to the original Wolfenstein and even to Doom. Sure there is the standard sneaking about trying to knife soldiers before they see you gameplay that all of the modern shooters seem to be riddled with. However there is also a much more arcade “run and gun” feel to the game that works. I don’t have to play it in a style where I duck behind cover every few seconds for fear of taking a bullet. You can ping pong around taking out soldiers left and right in an insane ballet that only works in the movies. I mean you can dual wield machine guns… and it feels amazing, so if it is hyper realism you are looking for… go somewhere else. This feels like a return to the area when these games were actually fun to play, and not simply this seasons multiplayer fodder.

Right now after seeing and playing this for awhile, I have so much hope for what this might mean going forward. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and the eventual Enemy Territory addon… represents the most fun I have ever had playing an online shooter. I hope and pray that they give us a multiplayer DLC that is every bit as brilliant as RTCW and ET were. This is a game I actually want to play online. In the meantime I am going to devote more time to beating the single player campaign as at this point I literally have not talked about anything that is not included in the “introduction”. Things get gloriously strange as you move forward and the entire world is a sort of nod to the book Fatherland, setting up a dark and stranger alternate history for the events of World War 2. Thank you Machine Games, and ID for giving us the Wolfenstein we have wanted for so long.

#ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Wolfenstein #RTCW

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

The Ritual

May 20, 2014 by Belghast

Bad Mentor

It is generally this point in the month that I start to feel like I have not done enough to help out the Newbie Blogger Initiative. I am not very active on the forums, and I thus far have not been active at all in the Steam Group. I managed to miss both the Hearthstone tournament and the League of Legends night because I was recording Aggrochat during the events. I’ve only managed to post a few articles relating to the NBI so far this season, so it is generally at this point that I feel like I have to get my act together. One of the things that I did as a result was port my blogroll over to a database driven system that I had been meaning to for some time. This has made it far easier for me to update not only my main blogroll but also highlight specific groups, in this case the Class of 2014.

At some point when I was not paying attention, we zoomed from about fifteen blogs to twenty seven as of yesterday when I was setting up my blogroll. Had I been watching the forums I would have realized this, but this so far is a really impressive turnout for the third running of this event. I’ve added them all to my feedly and I look forward to seeing the wonderful stuff they post over this next year. Several of the folks have hit the ground running and have already racked up a dozen or so posts on their respective blogs, so I am thinking this might be one of our most prolific groups yet. In light of this I am not sure what sage advice I really have to give that they don’t seem to be taking to heart already.

This year has been less about making proclamations for me, and more about reaching out and getting to know some of the individuals involved in the NBI. While it seems like the sort of thing I do normally on twitter, I have fielded a lot of questions from various members of the group. Hopefully in some small way this has helped, but I still feel like I could be doing so much more. Ultimately May is a fairly horrible month for me, as the spouse of a teacher there are two hellacious time of the year… beginning of school and end of school. Couple this with a string of weddings and graduations to attend and I feel wildly off balance right now. Its moments like these that I entrench and try and narrow my focus so I keep doing the things that have to be done.

The Ritual

In the middle of this hell month, I feel mostly void of good advice, however there is one thing that I feel like I can pass along. There are as many kinds of blogs as there are bloggers out there, each of them can and should be unique. However each of them should also have some form of a natural schedule. While I do not promote the daily blogging madness that I embarked upon over a year ago, I feel like most bloggers can and should find a specific schedule for writing. One of the interesting things about a schedule is it forces you to think about how you can find the time to specifically carve out that chunk of time, and what you need to reschedule or push to one side or another to make it happen.

As I said my personal schedule is blogging each and every day, and in order to accomplish this I had to build a sort of ritual. Every morning I get up, turn on the television to start my wife waking up and stumble into the kitchen to flip the Keurig on. I hop in the shower and after getting dressed make a cup of Revv for myself and a travel mug full of whatever flavor my wife happens to be making. At this point I mutter “going upstairs” and find my way to my office. Here I sit for the next thirty minutes to an hour banging away at the keyboard in Live Writer until I have something that vaguely resembles a post. I give it the most summary of glances to look for anything odd, assign categories and tags and post it as a draft. Finally I open up the wordpress backend and edit my posting options, making the tweet have the relevant hashtags before finally publishing. On a good day this all happens within a thirty minute window… on a bad day upwards to an hour.

In either case I have set up a block of time every single morning and committed it to a routine. The weekends are a bit more haphazard as I find that it seems writing with time constraints tends to speed my process. When I have too much time available and no real pressure to finish quickly… I can take upwards of two hours to knock out my post. Occasionally when I know I won’t have time to write on a given morning, I stage my post the night before… but I really don’t like doing this. When you have a pattern and follow it religiously… your entire day feels off when you don’t blog. So those days where I have staged content and I simply hit the post button in the morning… I feel like something is missing from the day. In essence my brain has learned to crave these little data dumps.

Finding Your Schedule

This pattern works for me, and it is something I have come to rely on. You need to find your own pattern, be it posting something each week on a specific day or posting something every few days. The pattern helps, and your readers come to expect your content. It is getting to the point where if I do not make my morning post for some reason, folks start emailing/tweeting/IMing me to see if I am okay. Thankfully this has happened only a few times, and due to extraneous circumstances, but I still made posts those days albeit significantly delayed. The schedule helps me think more than anything, it helps focus me on a goal of doing this one thing and repeating it. The interesting thing about carving out a block of time like this, is that you realize you can do the same for other things you want to do as well.

Basically look at your routine, the things you do every single day and see if there is one of those you can hack into “also” being writing time. For me this was simple… I was already used to going upstairs each morning and drinking my coffee while reading my RSS feed or playing a game for a bit to wake myself up. I simply stopped doing those other activities, and substituted writing in its place. Look at your daily activity and see if you have a similar places where you could substitute in writing instead. Do you have a long commute to work on public transportation? I wish I had one of those… I would spend the entire time banging out ideas on my chromebook and then posting them later when I got to a stable internet connection. Do you have a lunch time ritual, that you could including writing in? Each of us has some time that we can claim for ourselves and for writing, and you need to find yours.

Ammunition

When I make my posts, they tend to be very spontaneous and stream of consciousness, as I compose at the keyboard without a lot of thought beforehand. This works for me, but it doesn’t work for others. I’ve had conversations with Gypsy Syl about this a few times, and how instead she tends to sit on a post for a bit and groom it until it is ready to be made. Both are awesome ways to write, and both have strengths and weaknesses, but in both cases they need something to feed the process. One of the hardest things about keeping a schedule is always having something you want to say. I find I have to keep various things for inspiration that can be drawn upon at a moments notice. Since I only have thirty minutes to an hour to write each morning, I need to have a system for getting my creative juices flowing quickly.

The biggest source of inspiration for me is my blogroll, and as a result I tend to keep mine packed full of stuff. At this very moment I have 626 unread articles in my feed reader, from an unknown number of sources. If I find something interesting, I dump it in my reader and I do a pretty poor job of categorizing. I tend to have a “Gaming” firehose that I try and drink from when I need inspiration or have idle time while running errands or at the beginning of meetings. Sometimes this just isn’t enough to start the process in motion. Additionally I try and keep a google doc going of little fragments of ideas that come to me throughout the day. Inevitably the second you hit publish, you think of thirty other things that you should have said. Capture these… while some of them are crap, some of them will be absolute gems that need to be refined at a later date. Keeping this list of potential topics also makes for a great start on those days when you don’t have any ideas.

Contingency Plan

I am extremely devoted to my chosen schedule, and I will do absolute silly things to make sure that it is maintained. Part of this is knowing your schedule ahead of time, and plotting your life around it. Like I said before, I write every morning, but occasionally there are mornings where I cannot write. As a result I set aside time the night before, or later in the morning to be able to get my post ready and out the door. Before you embark upon a schedule, have ways that you can juggle your writing to make sure that the schedule is maintained without breaking you in the process. If you are going on vacation, it is perfectly okay to write a bunch of topics ahead of time and schedule them to post periodically throughout your time off. Other bloggers have had great luck with guest posts during these lapses. I personally just bring my laptop with me and bang them out in the hotel room either that morning or the night before. Hell at one point I even made a morning blog post while sitting in one of the terminals at Chicago O’Hare. Whatever you choose to do, it is important that you at least think about what you will do when you can’t post for some reason. The one thing I have learned above all else is that your readers crave consistency.