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

Hunting Malboros

July 23, 2014 by Belghast

The Night Before

This mornings post is going to be a little scant on visuals so I am just going to leave you with this amazing cinematic trailer that Riot released yesterday called A New Dawn. You should totally watch it and marvel at just how awesome Graves is. If you watch the making up they talk about the whole video having a meme running through it “Graves is not impressed”. Onwards to the real post. This morning is the beginning of the Mathematics conference, and throughout the day today I will be playing chauffer to a group of folks who need ferried from the airport to the hotel. As a result we spent some time last night cleaning out my wife’s Pontiac Torrent since it has the most comfortable seating for a large number of adults. The thing that makes that vehicle awesome is that it has a sliding bench seat so you can push it back for extra leg room but still have a significant amount of cargo space.

I went comatose around 10:30 last night, but apparently my wife is having schoolgirl jitters. As a denizen of twitter as well… I guess I would probably be jittery about meeting a bunch of folks all at once from the twitterverse. Granted this is the third running of this conference, but it has never been anywhere near as large as it is this year. We have apparently completely sold out two hotels and they are booking in a third overflow hotel now. To give me fortitude to get through a day of meeting all of these people I don’t know but will be expected to be cordial with… I am leaning on both coffee and a monster ultra. Mostly I just wanted to show off this awesome WW2 Dalek poster coffee mug we found the other day. My wife actually spotted the Doctor Who mugs first, and there were a bunch of designs to choose from… but I have always been partial to the WW2 era propaganda poster from Victory of the Daleks.

So while I conked out completely around 10:30 my wife was apparently up until 1 am. Then when I woke up this morning at 5 to get around and showered, she was awake again and responding to tweets. I think its adorable that she can be all hyped up on nerves and I will likely be the same way when January rolls around and I go to Pax South. I am not sure if have mentioned that on my blog or not yet, but as of right now I have tickets for all three days to Pax South. I may or may not be attending Sunday, but I am definitely going to try and be there for Friday and Saturday. I figure the last day of a con is likely the “anything you missed” day and all the major stuff will likely occur on Friday and Saturday. I might be completely wrong, but that would at least give me Sunday to drive home. If you are also going to Pax South give me a shout, because I would love to arrange some sort of a twitter/blogosphere/whatever meetup.

Attack on Deathshead

I made it a bit further in my play through of Wolfenstein New Order but I am still struggling with crash to desktop issues. I had a spot in the moon base that was doing it, and now am having a spot in Deathshead compound that is kicking me out. Last night I gave it a few attempts but just didn’t have the patience. I think next time I try it I might shut down EVERYTHING, including DXtory that I generally have running so I can take screenshots. I know some games get a little pissy about overlays, or it might simply be that I need to disable the steam overlay. In any case this game is really amazing and it gives me totally unrelated hope. This past weekend at Quakecon, ID Software gave an exclusive peak at Doom 4 that has apparently just be renamed Doom and is somewhat of a reboot. If Machine Games can give us a game as awesome as Wolfenstein… I have high hopes for what Doom has in store for us.

As my friend Kodra has said before, Wolfenstein is very much exactly what games felt and sounded like in the 90s. Everything was industrial metal… and we liked it. I am perfectly fine with this throwback syndrome, because the modern FPS is nowhere near as much fun as the first generation of them used to be. We have come so far in trying to make everything more and more realistic, and I think in that struggle we lost sight on what actually made the games fun. If Wolfenstein and the reboot of Doom herald in an era of interesting level design with secrets and multiple paths to the objective… then hell yes I want to return to the 90s. Right now my goal is to make it through Wolf one way or another by this weekend, so we can potentially talk about the ending on the podcast. We will of course warn people ahead of time before the spoilers start flying.

Hunting Malboros

This is one of those moments when I really wish Hitbox.tv knew what “today” and “tomorrow” actually meant. For the last several days they have said that they would have the export to youtube functionality back up and running today or tomorrow. I realize they are a small company and this is a beta product, but at this point it is seriously making me consider going back to Twitch. I don’t want to, but I also like having the ability to embed video recorded from the night before in my mornings blog post. Complaining aside… one of the things that I have been enjoying since coming back to FFXIV is the hunt system. Each day you can go to a hunt board in your grand company offices and grab a new set of wanted posters. They call them bills… but “handbill” hasn’t really been used popularly in the United States in decades.

I love that the various wanted posters just list a bounty and a basic location for where the mob will spawn. In general I can remember where in each zone that type of mob already exists, and usually the type you need is intermingled within the pack. This system would totally be a quick enjoyable jaunt out into the world if it were not for the two FATE based encounters each day. Here you are either super lucky or have to wait around for hours. Last night I streamed a fairly boring stream, because it was me killing Malboros and Dark Sylphs while waiting on an apparently rare fate to spawn. The positive is this is causing me to actually level my chocobo. As of last night I dinged level 3 on it and made a goodly dent into 4.

The big thing I have noticing is it is super horrible about standing in stuff. Like I had to do all sorts of crazy to try and position the Malboros in such a way as to not let the Daedalus (my chocobo) get breathed upon. Hint… I am pretty horrible at this and probably went through a dozen gysahl greens during the course of the night resummoning him. I find this game extremely relaxing compared to the spastic pace of Wildstar. I have lots of love for that game, but just watching the world absolutely wears me out. Coming back to FFXIV and its more sedate pace felt like crawling into a warm bed. Granted the combat system is still interesting in that I am constantly having to move out of stuff while keeping up my combos, but it is far less button mashy since everything has a sizeable cool down. In any case I am enjoying myself, and at some point I am going to get brave enough to do Duty Roulette for the big prizes.

#WolfensteinNewOrder #FFXIV

Moon Raider

July 22, 2014 by Belghast

Edition Madness

I feel like the colorful descriptors that companies tack onto iterative versions of games has hit an all time low. Since the 80s we have been forced to play a progressively extreme number of versions of a game. During the 90s the Street Fighter franchise for example proved to us all of the ways it could not actually count to 3. We’ve suffered through Super, Hyper, Ultra, Zero, Alpha, Game of the Year, Ultimate, Legendary and innumerable other hardcore and extreme versions of the games we love. This morning as I idly checked Steam I spotted something that made my eye stop dead over it. We really have a game that is a “Velvet Edition”? What is next suede or cordura?

I keep thinking maybe this is a translation error somehow, but “Samten” doesn’t really sound much better. Maybe it is me, and I just have a negative connotation towards the word velvet, and maybe it is completely normal for someone to use that word in place of say “deluxe”. This is just a first for me, and I think maybe this whole descriptor thing has gone a bit far if we have arrived at fabrics now. I mean even though “game of the year” bundles are completely inappropriately named, considering very few of them have actually won a “game of the year” award… at least for awhile they were something standardized. I personally would rather they go with something like “complete edition” considering that is what we are talking about… the version that includes all the damned DLC in one place. Though I guess game companies would probably frown on admitting they have been rationing game content to us for years.

Moon Raider

We had a few errands to run last night, and by the time I got home I was not sure what exactly to play for the evening. Since this weekends podcast, Kodra has been urging me to finish up Wolfenstein so he could have someone to talk about it with. So I opted to work on that, and while I did not quite make it through the game I figure I am pretty close to the ending. I suffered a series of technical difficulties where I would crash out and have to load back in restarting me at the previous save point. When this happened the last time I figured I would call it a night, as it seemed like I was probably going to have to repeat a significant chunk of the previous level. It seems to be related to when I go into a cutscene and then come back out of it.

It is really hard to find screenshots that I can show off that don’t really give away anything major about the game. Well other than the fact that you get to experience Nazi’s on the moon… but that doesn’t really give much away plot wise. I feel like that is the aspect of the game I enjoy the most is seeing how this alternate reality evolved without the influence of the United States. So much of everything we experience today is because of the global export of American goods and American values. As a culture we have had a death grip on the entertainment industry and the internet as well… and as a result everything that comes from other countries often feels like an odd remix of something we would see in the United States. So to see this reality that evolved entirely in a different direction is interesting to me. I applaud the level designers because all of the little details feel like they come from a completely different place.

This game is definitely going to warrant a second play through, because there is a single decision that you make early on that causes the game to go in different enough directions that from that point on the chapters of the game branch depending on your choice made. It seems that Kodra and I picked completely different routes, and I think it will be interesting to talk about the differences between them. I don’t feel like this is probably a discussion we can really have on AggroChat because it would be impossible to do this in a way that is not spoilerific. I really hope all of you took advantage of the QuakeCon pricing and picked up this awesome game when it was essentially half price. I have a feeling that this game is going to experience quite a bit of third party modding, and I hope that sooner or later they bring out a multiplayer addon. One of the more enjoyable game play and narrative experiences I have had in awhile.

Sparse Next Few Days

The next few days are going to be interesting for me. Today is technically my last day at work this week, but just because I am off does not mean I won’t actually be working harder. My wife is part of a crew putting on a mathematics conference here in town, and I have opted to take off from work to help her with it. I know Wednesday for example I will be operating an impromptu shuttle service, and then the other days I will likely be filling in a tech support role and general “gopher”. With all of these constraints it will be interesting to see what I end up blogging about, as I doubt I will be playing that many games.

That said it sounds like at least one of the conference attendees is a Magic the Gathering fan, so I will be bringing up a box of decks just in case that happens. Speaking of Magic… I really have no clue what Wizards of the Coast was thinking when they came up with the 2015 product designs. Once upon a time the off brand products that you can get in your grocery store that are branded as Always Save or Best Choice or even Sam’s Choice were simply called “Generic”. They featured white labels with start sans-serif writing on them, similar to government commodities. So I cannot look at this magic the gathering set without thinking “oh its generic magic”. I feel like we arrived at this point out of some sort of hipster minimalist design ethic… but yeah it is just not working for me. I guess they have used every other color of the rainbow lately for the primary theme of a set… so sooner or later they were going to get around to white.

It will be interesting to see how the next few days shake out. Likely you will be getting some more personal posts. Right now the plan is to take my laptop and work on editing my NaNoWriMo novel between times I am needed. The only problem with this is that the guest wifi at the school is horrible. My phone will allow me to tether to it, but not sure how much I can do that without AT&T getting pissy with me. We are grandfathered in on one of the unlimited plans, and I don’t really want to do much to jeopardize that. The positive is that the Galaxy S5 shipped with unlocked tethering software, and it is not like I had to do anything to get it up and running. I just expect that all of the websites I would want to look at would be blocked without it.

#Wolfenstein #MagicTheGathering

Fear of the Tonberry

July 21, 2014 by Belghast

Unexpected Enjoyment

This weekend was an odd one, in that I had to devote pretty much all of Sunday to helping set up for the upcoming conference. Since we recorded so late Saturday night, that meant that pretty much as soon as we finished with the podcast I crashed hard. Normally I stay up that night and edit away on the podcast getting it posted round or about midnight generally speaking. What this meant in practice is that my entire day was pushed by by a number of hours yesterday. So by the time I had finished with that, played my SteamPowered Sunday title and knocked out yesterday mornings blog post… it was 11 pm.

At this point I struggled to find anything to settle into, in part because playing Frog Fractions was such a weird experience. Before long my wife and I decided to go run some errands and get lunch. By the time we made it back from that my day had pretty much dissipated. When it came time to finally play something I settled into Final Fantasy XIV and quested my way through the daily hunt. After finishing that I opted to work on my gladiator a bit, which meant trying to remember where the hell the optimal area for level 27 was. It turns out that FATE running isn’t quite like it used to be.

Previously you would jump the gun 25-30 and go straight to Costa Del Sol. The problem with this is that you no longer have the huge wandering mass of players needed to make an army of under level characters work in a zone. As a side effect however FATEs have become far more enjoyable in that running across a zone to get to one is no longer an act of futility. They are no longer up for a matter of seconds but instead feel like real epic battles with big monsters. So for me at least this makes it a far more enjoyable prospect for leveling, in that I feel like I actually have to work to get my experience. The single best addition to FFXIV though is the ability to have your Chocobo out to get it experience, and then turn around and mount it again when you are finished. This instantly improved the enjoyment of the game for me ten fold by no longer having to make the choice of leveling my Chocobo, or moving at a snails pace.

Fear of the Tonberry

Something interesting happened while I was sitting there playing Final Fantasy XIV. One by one various friends opted to download the game or at the very least patch it back up, given that it was a free weekend. Before we knew it we had the beginnings of a group. Tam first started the idea of running a dungeon, and after I had fixed some dinner for my wife and I that is precisely what we did. Sadly at this point Warenwolf had to leave because he gets up at a truly insane hour in the morning, this coming from someone who gets up every morning at 5:30 am. We decided to roll the dice and pug in a fourth player to run Wanderers Palace. This served two purposes, firstly Ashgar needed it for a grand company hunt log and secondly this is one of the easier max level dungeons. We figured it was a good way to break us back into the game.

Surprisingly it went really smoothly, with only one wipe happening… and that was in the not terribly surprising “rush to climb the tower” phase. We had two things happening at the same time that proceeded to make it a difficult thing. The first thing was the fact that for whatever reason myself and Tam were having some massive lag spikes, that even went so far as to cause him… our healer… to disconnect a few times. Secondly I really did not remember how to bard. The muscle reflexes came back instantly for playing a Warrior, since I spent most of my time in this game tanking, but Bard was a relatively new thing and while I had completed up through Hard Mode Ifrit as a bard… it took me a bit to remember what exactly I should be rotating through attack wise.

During the course of this run is when we started to remember just how enjoyable the dungeon content is in FFXIV. Of all of the games I have played over the last few years, I think I have enjoyed these dungeons the most. They seem to be the absolute perfect blend of challenge and reward and are beautifully done. I am sure we will remember why we all faded away from this game, but at the moment all we are able to do is remember just how much fun we had. Ultimately where things will either click or fall apart is if we can manage to find enough things to do to level our alternate jobs. That is the point at which I started to lose interest. I leveled one job through questing, and the second job through FATE grinding… and at that point I felt like I had exhausted all of the ways to level in that game.

The thing is Square has been quietly plugging away on this game in the year we have been gone, and as a result there is a ton of new content. I just hope I can find some mix of it that makes the leveling process enjoyable. There seem to be a ton of quality of life changes, like being able to repair gear to past 100% durability without actually switching to the profession needed to repair it. Also while you are out harvesting nodes you can get treasure maps, which open up a new minigame of trying to find the treasure. They seem to have finally added in some Gold Fountains to counteract the Gold Sinks. The daily hunts for example will earn you a grand total of 7,000 gil pending you do not spend too much of it teleporting across the world in search of the next mobs. In any case there seems to be a way to finally earn some money, instead of constantly being broke. I have a feeling I will be mostly leveling through dungeons, as the overall community of the game seems to have been massively improved.

Blaugust Update

Over the last few days I have received quite a bit of interest in this whole Blaugust thing. However along with this has been quite a bit of confusion over what exactly I mean by a new post a day. Since this is coming from the gaming blogosphere, many folks are assuming that I mean it has to be a gaming post. Additionally there has been some discussion in exactly I consider a post. Wilhelm for example keeps a photo blog updated, and he wondered if this classified as a daily post for the purpose of the contest. Now if you wrote a couple of paragraphs about the image, then totally this is a post… if it is simply a bunch of pictures, then no sadly I have to say it doesn’t qualify. I figured I would post some ground rules today. I will be expanding on these further on the Blaugust Anook since that is the official headquarters for this initiative.

The Topic

Since this is the biggest point of questions, I figured I would get it out of the way. You can write about anything you want to write about. You can diverge from gaming in any fashion you like, and your blog doesn’t even have to be gaming related. Liore for example was talking about making a gaming foodie blog, and that would totally count for the purpose of this event. The idea is to get you used to writing on a schedule, and not so much dictating what you are writing about. Inspiration can be an extremely fickle thing, and if you want for it… there end up being massive lapses in your posts. The idea here is make you realize that you don’t need the muse to crank out interesting posts. If you allow yourself to, your personality with inhabit the writing and inspiration will find you mid paragraph.

The Guidelines

Write a New Blog Post no less than 10 sentences in length.
Include a link back to the Blaugust Initiative page
Advertise the post on the Blaugust blog – you will be given permissions to do this
If you Advertise the post via twitter, please include #Blaugust hashtag
Over the course of the month, repeat this 31 times.
????
Profit!

The Rewards

I will be keeping track of who has posted a post each day during the course of August. On September 1st I will be holding a drawing for several prize packages. Firstly I hope you like games… and want to acquire more of them, because basically that is what is going to happen here. Over the course of a few years of the Humble Bundle series, I have accumulated a bunch of duplicate keys. I can think of no better way to give away some of these, than to reward the hard work of participating in a challenge such as this.

– Grand Prize

I hope you follow me on Steam, because I will be picking a game off your Steam Wishlist and purchasing it for you. In addition to this I will be letting you pick a game from my Humble Bundle surplus list as well. For this prize specifically I will be looking for someone who has actually posted a post each individual day, rather than someone who has posted 31 posts in the month. This prize should represent the truest form of the challenge.

– Three Also-Awesomes

Additionally I will be picking three individuals at random from the total pool of contestants to win the “Also-Awesome” award. To quality for this you have to have started your posting on August 1st, and written a total of 31 posts over the course of the month. I will be having these folks in order drawn pick 2 games a piece from my Humble Bundle surplus list. I am varying the requirements here a bit, to allow someone to have missed a day here or there but posted a catch-up post to still be in the running for something.

– The Catch-Up Artist

Anyone who joins the initiative late, is going to be in the running for this one. To quality you have to have joined after August 1st, but managed to catch up and still write a total of 31 posts in the month. You an procrastinate however long you like, but I am expecting 31 well formed posts to get this one. After the above prizes have been picked from my Humble Bundle surplus list, the winner of this prize gets to nab one of the games for themselves as well. I promise the surplus list is big enough to support all of these people… and still allow them quite a bit of variety in the choices.

– All Participants

I will be crafting some sidebar badges and banners that can be affixed to your website showing the world that you won the Blaugust challenge. Additionally you will be able to bask in the warm afterglow of knowing you accomplished something awesome. Depending on the number of participants I reserve the right to make up a bunch of other awards along the way.

The Sign-up

While there has been quite a bit of interest, only a handful of you have actually joined the Blaugust nook. For ease of maintenance on my part, I would really appreciate it if you all went out there and clicked the Join button. This and the whole advertising on the nooks blog thing is going to help me account for all of the posts, and also turn around and advertise them myself easier. I am trying to make this work but at the same time not make August a hellacious month for me. I appreciate the desire to participate, and I appreciate everything you are doing to make my life easier as well. As I said before I will be posting some prompts before the start of the initiative. Right now I am shooting for 60, but that number might change. I look forward to reading all of your entries during the month!

Frog Fractions

July 20, 2014 by Belghast

Conference Prep Work

As I mentioned yesterday morning my day was filled with helping my wife prepare for the conference this week. One of the goofy things about a school system is that you cannot take for granted any two rooms being configured the same way. I have no doubt that at one point or another they were probably all working exactly the same. However a series of teachers with their own way of doing things has meant that no two projector systems were set up quite the same. So over the course of the morning we went from room to room turning everything on, and making notes as to how exactly you got sound from the system, and video to the projector. To add a monkey wrench in the works, some of the rooms had what is called an Elmo, which I guess is some sort of modern age version of the overhead projector.

Some of the systems routed through this device, others you simply had to switch the VGA port over to if it you wanted to use it. In each room I left instructions on a sticky note as to how to access both Audio and Video, and where needed how to use the Elmo machine. All of this said I will be around on the first day of the conference playing A/V support if someone has any issues. I am not phenomenally good at this role, but I can usually figure things out. Where things get dicey is in the few rooms that have bad connections run through the walls… and for those they were going to just have to deal with it. Most of the rooms go from an RCA jack to an optical connection that gets run through the wall, and it sounds as though maybe some of the optical cables have been damaged over time. The approved method of fixing this is apparently randomly wiggling the cords… which is probably what fractured the optical cables in the first place.

For the most part it took an hour or so per floor and then we broke for lunch. The highlight of the day was getting to have spicy chicken and cheese tots from Rons. The above picture represents the fruition of our work after lunch. I should have taken a before photo because the room had been previous configured with tons of tables strewn about. The tables didn’t fold and stack, but instead the top flipped up and you had to drive them carefully into the closets in a way as to compact them. I am rather proud of just how compact we managed to get them in there. The next thing was these heavy iron trays that the stacks of chairs sat on, which I carried into place and figured out a way to stack them in the closet as well. Finally this allowed us to arrange the chairs all 180 of them in 12 rows of 15 chairs. It was a busy day, but it looks awesome and is starting to feel ready for guests.

Weary Podcast

Last night was a podcast that I thought might not actually happen. Generally speaking we tend to start recording around 8 pm CST on Saturday nights. Last night it was 10 pm and we had not yet started recording, so I was beginning to think maybe episode 15 was not going to happen. I knew it was going to be a weird week because Rae is travelling and I thought Ashgar was going to be absent as well. Initially Kodra and I had planned on just having a conversation between the two of us about a few things we had talked about earlier in the week. As we got closer and closer to the show time… Kodra was nowhere to be found, but Ashgar miraculously showed up. I knew that Kodra had intended to come, so I just kept waiting. I was playing away in Minecraft and Ash playing Destiny so quite honestly the evening slipped away before we really noticed.

When Kodra finally came online we ran pretty late but I think we recorded an enjoyable podcast in spite of the overall tiredness that we all felt. A major event that happened this week was the complete and utter failure of the Yogventures kickstarter, and the scandal surrounding it. We talk at length about this and the potential ramifications it has for kickstarter projects in general. Additionally we talk about the Destiny Beta and FFXIV free weekends and how crazy it is when so many things are going on during one single weekend. We also talk about how our sense of community has changed and that it seems to no longer be connected to one game, but instead we take it along with us. Finally Kodra and I geek out talking about Wolfenstein New Order since he has recently played it. We had to cut a few sections to trim down time, but we kept the best stuff in there and have it ready to listen to.

Frog Fractions

I feel like I might be the last person on the planet to have experienced this game. For some time it has been coming up in both the podcast and just in regular conversation among my circle of friends, and I felt bad because I really did not give the game any time. My patience for web browser played flash games is pretty much non-existent. My line of thinking is, I cannot get away with playing this at work… so when I am home I would far rather be spending my time playing a “real” game instead of a web browser based one. Granted that probably sounds a little harsh but I have yet to find a web based game that really provides me as meaningful of a gaming experience as a traditional PC or console game. So when the absolute hype cycle surrounding the game happened I booted it up, clicked a few bugs saw some random shit appearing over their heads and walked away bored. I guess I didn’t pay close enough attention to realize… there is some really strange shit going on in this game. Be warned… there is no real way for me to talk about this game in any meaningful way without spoiling the fun. If you have not played Frog Fractions you should do so now before you progress any further in this post.

The game starts out as this somewhat charming if not low tech game where you are trying to protect fruit, allowing them to ripen by keeping bugs from eating them. You left click with your mouse to fire out your tongue, gobbling up the bugs and at the end of each round you earn points for each fruit you saved. The ones that you did not save fall into the water, and at first there is nothing really you can do about this. The moment at which the game starts to get odd… is when you start getting power-ups. Like the point at which I thought maybe this game was a bit strange was when I hit Cybernetic Brain. You can also upgrade your lilypad into a turtle friend, that allows you to move around with WASD to catch the fruit as they ripen. There is so much I don’t quite understand… like what the hell Zorkmids are or how you earn Indignity… which I assume is a bad thing. At this point I kept clicking away with the help of the upgrades… of which lock on targetting and static tongue seem to be the most game changing.

Then Shit Gets Weird

At some point you can unlock an upgrade that turns your turtle into a flying dragon… at which point the game suddenly becomes a bullet hell shooter. So you fly around trying to avoid the multicolored balls while still gobbling up the bugs and trying to save the fruit from falling into the water. By this point I had upgraded the fruit to durians… which smell bad, and cause the bugs to eat them more slowly. This is the video game equivalent to Axe Cop, in that it seems like it was almost designed by using madlibs and a 8 year old kid.

It was at this point I figured out that I could go underwater…. where all the lost fruit was apparently waiting on the bottom of the lagoon. You can see that apparently now the fruit score does not matter at all, because it now simply reads “Like a billion”. I have no clue why but I made five or six passes through the fruit watching them all fail to register. I thought maybe something would happen if I did it enough, but finally gave up on the process and went back up to bullet hell land. One of the funniest things is the whole lock on vision upgrade. First you get it, then you get the ability to uninstall it, and then you get the ability to reinstall it… which finally unlocks the ability to uninstall it again. Each time this happens it is not like the previous slot becomes available again… it just keeps tacking new upgrade slots onto the grid. I kind of want to play again and see just how many times I can unlock and remove this option.

Starfox Has Nothing on Me

After a few more waves of bullet hell madness… my dragon apparently decides to shoot off into outerspace. So now I am inexplicably trying to save flying fruit, while dodging asteroids and bug attacks. Apparently I am going to attack the bug homework… which is apparently “Bug Mars”. All the while this phase is going on, various characters keep showing up and giving me words of advice in Starfox fashion… I was disappointed that none of them told me to do a barrel roll (which tam will tell me is not a barrel roll at all). This continued for six or so waves, all the while it getting harder to get at the bugs because my frog tongue could not go through the asteroids.

In the weirdest of possible events… some how I get captured and taken to Bug Court. Where basically I am forced to choose between becoming a naturalized citizen of Bug Mars… or forced labor. I am not sure you actually have a choice here, or if you are pretty much forced to become a citizen either way. They ask you a series of questions about Bug Mars culture, and either I got really lucky or quite literally answering anything… is the correct answer. Some of the responses are really damned funny, but man this is not anything I ever saw coming before playing this game. In a way it kind reminds me of a modern version of “Takeshi’s Challenge”, and for those who have no ideal what this is you should totally watch the JonTron playthrough.

So there you have it… I am now apparently a naturalized Citizen of Bug Mars. You would think that maybe this is as weird as the game gets, but you would be wrong. Shortly after this I rode on the back of my dragon through an underwater world while a narrator explained to me the true meaning of boxing… and how this modern punching thing is just a strange bastardization. Which then lead me to a rocket ship… and a text based adventure game. This is the point at which I stopped playing this morning. This game… is insanity bottled. I keep wondering just how deep the rabbit hole gets. I mean like what is on the other side of the text adventure game. The best thing about all of this is the fact that the name of the game is a complete and total lie. Nothing at all about this game has to do with fractions. Even if you have against my warning made it this far in my post without having played the game yourself… I highly suggest you experience the madness for yourself.

#AggroChat #FrogFractions #SteampoweredSunday