April 2015 - Page 4 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

The Force Awakens

April 18, 2015 by Belghast

A History With Stars Wars

It would be a slight understatement if I were to say that Stars Wars has meant a lot to me over the years. It pretty much represents my childhood wrapped up with a neat little bow. The earliest memory I have is of seeing Star Wars at the local drive-in theater sometime around age two. I became absolutely obsessed with it, and according to my parents walked around the house pretending to be “Darfa Bader”. If nothing else it was the toys that kept the fires lit for me from the moment I started watching through the end of the original trilogy. I played and replayed the scenes from Star Wars so many times with the action figures, and in many ways it was my first foray into storytelling. Sure I started by simply mimicking what I saw on screen, but quickly branched out into telling my own elaborate stories revolving around the cast of characters I knew and loved.

I eventually moved on like all kids do to other things, like GI Joe, Transformers and Mask. The thing is that Star Wars always held a special place in my heart, so when the west end games Role-playing game was released I was all about playing that for a period of time as well. I remember one Christmas all I asked for was the then CBS FOX VHS copies of the movies, and I remember being absolutely ecstatic when I actually got them. I probably damned near wore out my copy of Empire Strikes Back, because that movie just seemed so perfect to me. While I didn’t have a hope of ever seeing more movies at that point, I could at least wallow in the nostalgia of the originals whenever I felt like it. When you grow up in a small town, and live out in the middle of the country… you end up watching a lot of movies, and more than one weekend was spent having impromptu Star Wars marathons.

The Revival

During college Star Wars started to make a comeback in a massive way. At this point we didn’t even know there were new movies in the works, but it started with the re-release of the action figures. At this point I was going to junior college and on my drive to class in the morning I frequented a lot of stores as folks were stocking. I remember the feverish search for the new action figures as they started to hit the store shelves. I was absolutely elated the day I found the extremely illusive Princess Lea and C-3PO figures because in that first run of the new figures… they were the limited quantity ones. As new sets were released I tracked them all down, including some of the variants. At this point I was going to art school and pretty much half of my class were equally obsessed with them, trading tales of where we found what.

I remember sitting in a Wal-mart super center in Fayetteville Arkansas, freaking out as they had figures that we did not have in Oklahoma. My wife was extremely awesome and helped me rifle through the stacks of newly stocked figures looking for all of the ones I was missing. She knew going into our relationship that I was a geek, and she had always been super cool about it. But I admit it was at that moment, when she was helping me hunt for figures… that I realized just how rare she truly was. Even to this day she gets excited for me when I find a cache of Legos or something else that I have been obsessing about. While she doesn’t share a lot of my interests she has always been extremely supportive of them. She put up with me having hundreds of action figures hung up in neat rows in my college apartment, and didn’t seem to act like it was strange or anything.

The Re-releases

Around this time the first of the re-releases happened as we were given the opportunity to watch the movies on the big screen. She was there with me waiting in line for tickets and even though she is not really what you would call a Star Wars fan, sat through all three of the movies. While some of the visual hackery annoyed me… I was getting to see the movies again on the big screen and that was all that really mattered. The feeling of sitting in that theater as the Lucasfilm logo came up on the screen… and the Theater erupted in deafening cheers was one that I will never forget. There were so damned many warm fuzzies coursing through my body that I felt like I was going to explode. The first two movies… were pretty great. I could deal with the silly scenes like Han Solo stepping over Jabbas tail, or the goofily animated CGI dewbacks.

Empire was similarly fine, because it god rid of some of the problems like the transparent snow speeders. My love of Empire as a movie could allow me to look past anything. But when we finally got to Return of the Jedi… my least favorite of the original movies I admit I started to lose my shit. The silly scenes like the musical number just finally got to me. I started to question what in the hell George Lucas was thinking, but by this time we knew about the prequels and I was willing to look past all the flaws and keep up my fanboy hype for the hope of seeing more Star Wars on the big screen. I admit freely I was a junkie and Papa George was going to keep giving me a fix, and I was willing to push aside the growing concerns in the hopes of seeing brand new stories. After all I had dreamt about seeing the Clone Wars play out since I was a little kid, and maybe just maybe this was finally going to happen.

Breaking Me

When the Phantom Menance was released I was working for TV Guide, and had access to a wealth of marketing materials that were filtering around our network. My hype level was over 9000 as I had 8×10 copies of each of the limited edition hand painted covers of the magazine hung up around my office. I remember the lines for Phantom Menace were really the first time I had experienced lines of any sort waiting for a movie. I remember opening day the theaters were showing it on every available screen with a new showing every 2 hours for the first 48 hours. By the time I go in to watch the movie after work I was practically vibrating. Then Jar Jar Happened… and the rest of the movie was instantly tarnished by it.

I wanted to maintain my hype… but there was just so much to hate about that first movie. What the fuck were midichlorians? Are they really telling me that Anakin is a Jesus-like virgin birth? There was just so much bullshit packed in that movie that while I tried to maintain my enjoyment, over time it just festered inside of me. By the time the second movie came around… I had no plans of seeing it on opening day until I was given free premiere tickets due to my involvement with the Fan Force group here in town. Admittedly that was a pretty damned cool way to watch the movie, in a private theater along with all of the local press… with open bar and catered food before and after. By the time the third prequel came along… it was about a week before I actually went to the theater to see it.

I’ve since reconciled a lot of my frustration with the prequels. What was anger has faded into a dull annoyance, and a tinge of heartache when I think of what those movies could have been. Brian Posehn does a funny skit about how “Star Wars is his Vietnam”. I am nowhere near as bitter about it as he is… but there are times I have been close. There was a period of time post prequels that I distanced myself from Star Wars as a whole. I stopped collecting the figures, I stopped doing pretty much anything Star Wars related. It was really when Star Wars the Old Republic released that I started to ease up on my position and enjoy the content again. Today I collect Star Wars in Lego form and love it… but anything that comes from Phantom Menace is immediately less important in my eyes. I feel like Clone Wars and Rebels television shows are redeeming the franchise significantly by giving me the sort of storytelling that I always wanted out of the newer films.

The Force Awakens

When the new movies were first announced I was admittedly skeptical, that is until I heard that they were pulling them out of the hands of George Lucas. Better yet I was excited when they announced that J.J. Abrams would be doing them. While this is a point of contention for a lot of fans, I happen to be one of the people that love the newer Star Trek movies. In fact I watched the first one twice in the same weekend. I was never that big of a fan of the original Star Trek series, so I felt the reboot made the movies more enjoyable for me personally. Now take the fact that Abrams is directing and combine it with the fact that Disney now owns Star Wars… and I think we are in better hands than we have been in a very long time. Disney is extremely good at two things… protecting their intellectual property, and churning out content for the fans to snap up. I feel like we are in the best possible place that Star Wars has been in for years.

This week the first real trailer was released for Star Wars 7: The Force Awakens during the 2015 Star Wars Celebration weekend. As you might have been able to tell… the images I am using to narrate this Storytime Saturday are all pulled from the trailer. I find myself shifting from cautiously optimistic about the prospects for this movie… towards full blown hype. Right now the trailer is quite literally showing me everything that I possibly want to see in a new Star Wars film. The costumes for the new Stormtroopers look great. The new Dark Jedi looks to be something straight out of Star Wars the Old Republic. The real money shot however is the one above when we get to see Han Solo and Chewbacca back in action. My first thought was OMG HAN SOLO AND CHEWBACCA! My second thought was… man Harrison Ford looks really old. My third thought was… shouldn’t Chewie be showing some grey hair by now? All I really know is once again I will be waiting in line for tickets so I can see this madness opening day in December. In fact we are talking about maybe going as an office to go see it. I guess in that at least Disney has succeeded in re-igniting the fires of the little kid down inside me who never quite gave up on Star Wars.

Daredevil is Awesome

April 17, 2015 by Belghast

Broadcast Television is Strange

For this mornings post I am going to diverge a bit from my normal gaming topics and talk about some television that I have been watching. Now there are often times I say that I don’t watch much television, and this is both true and not true at the same time. I have not regularly watched television on a schedule for years. For the last few years there have been two shows that I actually tuned in on purpose to watch and that is The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. That said I never “only” watch television. I have gotten to a point where I have be fiddling with something else because the act of watching television feels too passive to me. So Sunday nights it has become almost ritual for me to sit downstairs with my laptop straddling my lap as I watch these shows that all not so coincidentally occur on the same evening.

It just feels strange to me, to have television occur on a schedule. Everything else in my life is on demand and waiting for me when I feel like consuming it. This concept of letting someone else control the pace and timing for my actions just feels deeply foreign, so I greatly appreciate the new paradigms of Netflix and Amazon shows being released one entire season at a time. I am hoping that broadcast networks follow suit at some point, or they simply die out from neglect. I don’t think that I am at all alone in my television consumption habits. It all started with the DVR and my ability to delay content to a time when it was convenient to me. Now I just let entire seasons stack up before bothering to actually watch them. In our household we get more use out of the “on demand” section of cable television than anything else. Now my wife and I both have a default channel that we watch when we want the television on as background noise. For me it is Cartoon Network, and for her it is HGTV… but in both cases we no longer passively watch the television.

Daredevil Is Awesome

Over the last two weeks I have watched my way through the latest of the Netflix original series, and I have to say I am damned happy to have done so. Daredevil was never really “the guy” for me, but for one of my friends growing up he was. As a result I read more than my fair share of Daredevil comics, especially in part because of the constant cross over with the Punisher who absolutely was one of my favorites. Daredevil and Punisher both always seemed to have this characteristic that the more spandex and super powers comics never had. They were gritty and rough around the edges… and gave us a window into a darker side of the marvel universe. Hells Kitchen was a horrible place, but at the same time there was a resilience there and a determination to keep moving forward. The Netflix Daredevil series captures this spirit perfectly, in a simple unassuming way. The character of Matt Murdock is portrayed perfectly in all of the nuance of the character. Daredevil has always been this split character, part hero, part victim of his own fatalism… and this is played out on the screen amazingly well.

The real triumph is the fact that this is a show that does not idealize violence. While Matt makes a difference, we get to see the high personal toll that is taken on his body. He does not make it out of these fights unscathed like we normally see from a Batman movie, but instead has a constantly bloodied body to show at the end of the night. What made Daredevil great was the constant sense that he was in over his head, but that he kept fighting the noble fight because no one else would. The best performance in the show however has to come from Vincent D’Onofrio as the Kingpin. He makes this character into someone you almost want to root for during the course of the show. You are both sympathetic to the character and repulsed by it at the same time, which is a rare trait. You want the Kingpin to win… if for no other reason than to set up the ultimate triumphant fight between he and the Daredevil. I feel like this first season has created fertile ground for this show to grow and change, and ultimately serves as quite possibly the greatest comic book origin story I have seen in a long while. The only sad part is that I want another thirteen episodes to watch, because this first batch was simply not enough.

Unbreakable Kimmy

The other show that I have been watching lately is also a Netflix original, this time by Tiny Fey of 30 Rock and SNL fame. The premise of the show is that Kimmy Schmidt was captured when she was in 8th grade by the leader of a doomsday cult. Now freed she is taking on the world with her middle school understanding of it. Kimmy Schmidt the show feels very much like 30 Rock meets Sister Wives turned Doomsday cult, but for the most part it works. The character of Kimmy is essentially the same character as Kenneth played by Jack McBrayer. I have to assume that a lot of the writers from 30 Rock are now doing this show, because the comedic timing is almost exactly the same. I’ve only made it five episodes into the show so far but at this point the cast of characters seems to be set. On the home front you have the crazy landlord played by the always amazing Carol Kane, and the gay failed actor roommate played by Tituss Burgess. Both serve to balance and unbalance the character in various ways, and the interactions by Kane and Burgess are amazing… there is an almost loving parental thing going on.

As far as work goes Kimmy finds her way into the employ of Jane Krakowski’s character Jacqueline Vorhees, as assistant, nanny, life coach, best friend, and whatever else she needs. The problem here is that Krakowski is essentially playing the same character as she did on 30 Rock, which makes me wonder if this show was originally designed as a spin off vehicle for the Kenneth character after the ending of that series? You could seriously plug the characters in from 30 Rock and the show would still work, which I find bizarre. Sure in this case Krakowski is a wealthy Manhattanite with no grasp on reality, instead of a falling Hollywood star with no grasp on reality… but they feel exactly the same in practice. There are definitely some laugh out loud moments but these all come from the fact that Kimmy is still for the most part stuck with an eighth graders understanding of the world. All of this said, if you loved 30 Rock… and I did… this will provide the same sort of awkward humor fix that you might be left craving. I plan on watching the rest of the series, and I am hoping it gets picked up for another run. I can’t necessarily give it the rave review that I gave Daredevil, but it is most definitely a fun show to watch.

Building a Better Wardrobe

April 16, 2015 by Belghast

Allergy Apocalypse

I have been more than a bit out of it over the last few days. Here in Oklahoma every allergy index be it mold spore or tree pollen has been through the roof. This means that I have been living in a permanent daze. The frustrating thing is that sooner or later it starts to piss off my Asthma and over the last few days that has finally happened. It is extremely hard to keep a constant thread going in my head when I am in this situation so I want to thank you all for bearing with me. I am sure I will be making the occasional unintelligible statement. I promise the things I say make sense in my head, but often times there is a translation layer that gets obliterated by the allergen haze. The frustrating thing is I am quite literally taking as much as I possibly can to combat it. I am not really sure why things are so bad this year, but even people who do not normally have problems are struggling.

So for the time being I am going to keep pushing forward and trying to write posts that make sense. Sometimes this will work, other times it will very much not work. Unfortunately this same stupor has been extending to my gaming. All night on Tuesday night I felt like I was disconnected from reality, and it was significantly more than just being in a funk with Warcraft. My reflexes are much slower than normal, and I get frustrated with myself when I don’t perform at the level I have come to expect. My instinct is to hide away for awhile and simply not group with other people, but I am going to try and fight that since my guildies are extremely understanding individuals. Hopefully this will pass soon, and I will start to feel like a human being once more. In the mean time… this really sucks.

Building a Better Wardrobe

Yesterday I vented some of my frustrations about the reported 6.2 content patch in World of Warcraft. The bulk of my frustrations centered around the timewalking system, and how I expected it to finally be a mentoring system. I was reminded in the comments however that there is another game out there with an extremely robust mentoring system. So as a result I patched up Rift yesterday and poked my head around it once more. It turns out that yesterday just happened to be the day the latest patch dropped. Among other things this introduced an extremely robust wardrobe system, one that I would honestly call the best available currently. If you have read my blog for any length of time you will know just how important cosmetic systems are to me. I like swapping the appearance of my gear, and I tend to collect looks to reuse later. In fact my bank in most games is full of items that I thought might be interesting to use eventually.

What makes the system so awesome is that as you are out in the world each time you pick up a new item you collect its appearance. Guild Wars 2 and Diablo 3 have similar systems, but what sets the Rift model ahead of these two is the fact that you can swap your items around freely without a currency or token expense. Another nice feature is that in Rift you have forty wardrobe slots that can be unlocked allowing you to create a vast array of interesting looks. While the wardrobe system had that functionality before, what it adds is the ability to also control the dye options at the outfit level. It seems like I got a basic set of dye colors with the ability to unlock more. Also an improvement is the removal of the item appearance system and inclusion of it into the wardrobe system. Instead of having to use a bauble to change the look of your weapon you now just item slots that allow you to pick from the weapon graphics that you know. To make all of this more awesome, the unlocks happen at a region level meaning you have access account wide across all of your characters on that server region.

Freeing Bank Space

Since I had collected weapons and armor that I happened to like the appearance of over the course of my time leveling in Rift, I had stacks of the stuff in my bank. With the addition of this new wardrobe system it meant that every last bit of it could be removed either through selling it or what I ended up doing… salvaging it for crafting materials. The problem with the implementation of this system coming so late is that I have gotten rid of so much already. The cool thing is that I am a high level crafter for pretty much every armor type, so at some point I want to burn through some of my old materials crafting sets of stuff just to get the appearance unlock. This seems like potentially the easiest and least expensive way to get lots of unlocks quickly. For the time being I have enough items to give me a wide range of options to swap back and forth between. I especially like having access to some of the gear sets I purchased for my rogue, letting me mix things up a bit with the heavy plate gear my warrior wears.

Admittedly one of the biggest things that keeps me from playing Rift is the fact that my inventory is out of control. I cannot bring myself to get rid of anything… and thanks to the Minion system I am absolutely swimming in dimension items. The vast majority of the items in my bank are somehow related to the dimension system. At some point I need to actually start working on a zone. For the time being I have a Stoneflask Tavern instance loaded with lots of other big objects that I have picked up along the way. Right now I have something like six additional buildings that I picked up along the way and added to the instance. The problem is it makes no sense currently, and I will need to spend some time making it make sense. I really like the large prefab buildings, because it gives you a lot of space while only consuming a single dimension item slot. I keep thinking this is going to be a weekend project, of working on my dimension… but that never actually happens. In fact Rift as a whole has been one of those games that I wanted to return to, but find myself just not logging into it. There is so much interesting stuff going on, I just wish it grabbed my attention more often.

Timewalking Frustrations

April 15, 2015 by Belghast

6.2 Disappointment

This week we have had a pretty massive information dump about the 6.2 PTR patch information. I have to say overall I am fairly disappointed, not necessarily in what is contained within the patch, but that everything about it feels like an “end of expansion” content patch. The patch information is super spoilerific, but it seems as though the Burning Crusade is now invading Tanaan Jungle. Soon the gates will open revealing a zone besieged by fel magics, that culminate in the Hellfire Citadel raid zone. All of that sounds pretty badass, but the problem is it also sounds like the end of an expansion scenario. If 6.2 is on the PTR that means more than likely we are a little over a month from seeing this content in game. Which would probably place it landing at the beginning of June. We have no new expansion announcement, which means that more than likely they will be announcing it in November at Blizzcon.

The problem there is that unless they launch immediately following Blizzcon, we will be looking at another Siege of Orgrimmar style content lag. I feel like if they announce at Blizzcon the earliest an expansion would be launched is Spring 2016. The best case scenario I can think of in my mind places a new expansion in our hands in March 2016 which would be a nine month content lag. While that is nothing near as bad as the sixteen month lag at the end of Pandaria, it is still not amazing. Sure they would I guess shoehorn another minor content tier like Ruby Sanctum, but I don’t think that will really make anyone happy. Maybe I will be wrong, and maybe they have an even more epic conclusion of this expansion planned. This Siege on Hellfire Citadel however just feels like the last grand hurray for the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Which leaves the question in my mind of… what next?

Timewalking Frustrations

The absolute largest disappointment coming from this however relates to the Timewalking system. This was hinted at quite some time ago in an interview that something was in the worlks called Timewalking mode, and my mind was set ablaze. My grand crusade has been for years that World of Warcraft needs a mentoring system, that allows higher level players to scale down to the level of lower level players… and do content with them “for real”. When this new game system was hinted at, I was absolutely giddy because this meant finally after all these years WoW was getting mentoring. This has probably been the biggest reveal as part of the 6.2 informational dump, and I have to say I am really frustrated with the result. I am going to full quote a section of the announcement below.

In Patch 6.2, we’re introducing seven different weekend events that will run from noon Friday through noon Monday every week. Two of those events will be Timewalking weekends, in which you’ll be able to queue up for a randomly selected old-school dungeon with a new sort of “heroic” difficulty: When you Timewalk these dungeons, you’ll find that your character’s power and gear has been scaled down to a fraction of what they normally are. For the first time in years, some dungeons you outgrew long ago will once more put your skills to the test.

So instead of a robust mentoring system, we are apparently going to get a weekend gimmick. If I am reading this statement correctly it sounds like these are going to be limited time events that will happen twice. Maybe this is going to be like the pvp weekend construct, and simply rotate through seven different events, or maybe there are literally only going to be seven events ever. Right now we don’t really know, but regardless of the situation it feels like a complete waste of resources to put these in as limited time events. I was hoping for and expecting a robust mentoring system, but instead I am getting a carnival ride. I really don’t know why I set myself up for these disappointments, because traditionally my hopes are dashed on a regular basis when it comes to this game. I still have so much hope and can imagine a game that is so much better than what we actually have to play, but we never seem to get there.

Cycling Down

I am more than willing to admit that some of my frustrations might just be me. I have reached that point with World of Warcraft that I often do… where I am simply not enjoying the game. In previous trips back to the game I would have left it months ago. I pushed three characters to level 100 and everyone to within Garrison levels… and simply lacked the drive to push any further. The moment to moment gameplay was extremely fun while leveling, but the non-raid end game content has felt like I had no real purpose. So instead I log in an hour before raid on Tuesday, so that I can get my extra roll tokens, and make sure I have potions and flasks. Occasionally I half heartedly log in to run Garrison missions on my main, just for the hopes of those raid loot boxes every other week. I feel like I am spending the absolute bare minimum of time in this game, and so long as we were progressing smoothly in the raid it felt like it was time well spent.

Unfortunately we are not progressing smoothly. We will have a good night, and then it feels like we regress five steps the next one. I am tied to this game because I am actively raiding in it, but I have to say I am starting to question why I am even doing that. When raid voice chat is full of frustrated and stressed out voices… it pretty much destroys the enjoyment for me. I am all about joking and having a good time… and kicking ass while doing it. When we stop being able to have that relaxed raid dynamic, and still be high functioning my will to care drains from me. Ultimately I came back to the game riding a wave of nostalgia. I stayed because I was raiding and getting to hang out with a handful of friends that I missed. When even Rylacus, the life of the party, is starting to sound stressed and worn down… I question why we are doing any of this? I am sure I will chill out in the coming days, but seeing the 6.2 content, and our current raid struggles… it is making me question why I am still playing.