January 2016 - Page 5 of 8 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Daily Blogging

January 15, 2016 by Belghast

The Routine

@belghast @ModeratePeril If took five days off I'd find some other use for that time and never return. Not sure if that would be bad though.

— Wilhelm Arcturus (@wilhelm2451) January 14, 2016

For awhile now I have thought about breaking the habit of daily blogging, but honestly there is a bit of fear in it. I got into a small thread on twitter yesterday about this topic and Wilhelm outlines my biggest fear. If I stopped blogging every single day… I question if I would ever start back up again. The irony of this daily blogging thing… is that when I started it I went from being one of the least prolific bloggers to one of the most… almost over night. I started doing this daily blogging routine in April of 2013. My blog however was started in April of 2009, and during those first four years I only managed to make 148 posts. The largest lapse without any posts was between August of 2012 and April of 2013. Ultimately my fear is that if I stop the routine… I will go back to that… because of the posts on my blog 1018 happened after I forced myself into this routine. Ultimately this is part of my schtick, that I tell folks during the Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust is that once upon a time I used to be one of the least regular bloggers out there, but I started down a path…. and quite honestly I am now a bit scared to ever step off of it.

The truth is, my blog started out as a thing largely about gaming but has turned into something more than that. I never really kept a diary or a journal, but in essence that is what this blog has become. These are the chronicles of my adventures, mistakes and all of the various things that happen in between. Over the years I got considerably more personal, and have shared some pretty private stuff with my blog readers. When something bad has happened in my life, you have been there with me… and often times supporting me. When there has been a victory… you have all shared in the glory. Admittedly there are a lot of details that I leave off the page. For example I don’t usually mention my wife or family members by name. In theory I could give a name to her… the way my friend Grace does her husband… but there is not a nickname that I call her with enough consistency as to make that not feel artificial. Over the years I’ve created a bit of a rule set that I try and follow.

Don’t call people out by name (unless they have called me out first)
If something bad happens, focus on the event and not the people
If something good happens, talk about the people who made it good
Try and remain positive, and not get bogged down in the depression
Even though I am filtering… be honest about my own failures
Be humble and thankful that anyone reads my blog at all

The Benefit

I have of course failed at all of them at some point or another, but those are the basic guidelines that I think about when I am writing. When folks think about this whole daily blogging thing, they tend to focus on the negative. Sure it is tedious to get up every morning and knock out a blog post before I leave the house. On the weekends, and when I am taking a day off like I did today I tend to give myself a little more breathing room. However most of the time like clockwork I can knock out a blog post in thirty minutes to an hour depending on how much I get distracted. The only day it wears on me is Sundays, when I have to prepare both a podcast episode and knock out a blog post before I can really get on with my day. For a long time I was staying up until one or two in the morning editing AggroChat but I’ve recently started just heading to bed after the initial first pass. If I get up at a decent hour I can knock out all of my bloggy/podcasty duties before my wife gets home from church, which gives us a better start to the day.

There is however a lot of benefit to getting up every morning and writing a post. In many ways the act of writing about something, helps me investigate it further. I will turn an idea over in my head, and through writing often process my feelings. There is something about placing words on a page that makes it more “real” for me. There is also the benefit of having a written log of everything I did during the year. Each major event, ends up finding its way into my posts in one form or another, so in essence I am externalizing my memory. So if I wanted to know the weekend I did this, or that… there is almost always a footnote somewhere in my blog about it that I can search later and place specific dates to memories. Not sure exactly why, but there is something comforting about this… being able to look up with certainty when something happened in the past, and I have three years of my life documented like this now.

The Readers

The part of the equation that I have not sorted out however, is why the hell I have actual readers that continue to grow over the years. At this point… they have to be in this because they care about me, and not necessarily what I happen to be saying. That proposition in itself is so damned strange. There is this huge part of me that cannot fathom why more of you have not wandered off in boredom by now. I do not lead an exciting life, and I tend to fall into the same routines in whatever I happen to be playing. The truth is I have nothing terribly profound to say, and just represent your average person applying fingers to the keyboard. I am blessed with some amazing friends, but it still shocks me when I meet someone and they tell me that they have read my blog for a long period of time. I just want to ask them why? At some point I stopped doing this because blogging seemed to be what the cool kids were doing. I guess in truth I do the daily routine for me, and because it makes me feel like I am accomplishing something every morning before I even leave the house. I get more out of this than I think anyone might realize. I have this open dialog with the world, but in truth I am mostly talking to myself. I am putting into print things I need to tell myself, and through the act of writing them out… I actually take the time to listen.

Daydreams and Anger

January 14, 2016 by Belghast

Powerball Mania

It seems like the only thing that people have been talking about over the last few days at least locally, is the insanity that is the 1.5 billion dollar powerball jackpot. This sounds only slightly less impressive when you realize that the cash payout was 900 million… and that the IRS would have claimed at least a third of that before it ever actually got to you. Still however roughly 600 million dollars is a lot of money, more money that I would ever know what to do with. Which is a fact that became more clear as the days went on. I’ve been part of an office pool for years, that I largely look at as “insurance”. Enough people are in said pool that if they hit the numbers there would be a lot of tendered resignations the next day…. and I feel like I would like to at least have that option. If all of those folks walked…. work would be a pretty miserable place to be for awhile. The thing is… for me it is exactly like paying an extra tax and I never really consider what would happen if they actually did win. However when the powerball itself was up this high, I had to actually purchase a handful of tickets for myself.

The thing about holding something in your hand that could potentially make you at least on paper a billionaire, starts you daydreaming a little. However I feel like maybe went in different directions than most people. Quite honestly the only things I could really think of that I would want to do with the money is buy a new gaming rig and a new gaming laptop. I mean there is the usual “lets quit work and do what we want to” pipe dream as well, but that one is probably common among all people. I have no burning desire to buy a bunch of cars, or buy a new lavish and extravagant house. In the grand scheme of things… I life a pretty damned charmed life and how “meager” my lottery daydreams were only served to prove that I guess. Most of the things that I would ultimately end up doing… are already in the realm of possibility for me… well other than the quitting work thing. Even though my brain consistently tries to tell me that I am not… fuck you depression… I guess I really am fairly happy with life in general. Now if someone wanted to give me part of their winnings however…. I wouldn’t say no.

Calm Night

Warframe 2016-01-12 22-26-28-02

Life affirming message above aside… yesterday was a really really bad day. Nothing truly catastrophic mind you, because there are lots of worse things that could have happened. We have just been dealing with this vendor at work, that seems to keep pulling new requirements out of their ass at the 11th hour. I get really tired of parachuting in and fixing messes, that never needed to be messes in the first place. I have some rage issues, and I always have had them. As a kid I used to push down all the negativity until it eventually erupted and all of that bile and bad blood ended up getting targeted at usually the wrong person. Over the years I have learned to blow off steam in little bits here and there, rather than letting my problems get big enough to cause a thermonuclear explosion. Yesterday however… I came precariously close to losing my shit on a conference call. There was a point at which I just had to stop talking for a little bit… I am not sure how long… but I knew if I continued talking a stream of hate would spew forth in a manner that is just not acceptable in the work place. Within a 45 minute period I had to configure a new reverse proxy server… on the existing application box… configure it… and all the while keep from trying to break the vendor application sharing the same space. I got it done… and then a friend took me out to lunch to get me out of the environment long enough to reset the fuse.

So on the way home from work last night, I stopped by the liquor store to get something that would hopefully cause me to chill out and relax the rest of the evening. I took a red solo cup… because there is just something comforting about them… filled it up one third buttershots, one third baileys, and the last third with milk. If you want to chill out… I highly suggest this drink because after that the world felt nice and warm and fuzzy. After that I had a night where I flitted around games, popping into World of Warcraft and messing with my garrisons and shipyards…. but not really settling on any one character long enough to play much of anything. I eventually popped into voice chat and logged over into Warframe running a few things with Tam and Ashgar until Tam needed to go to class. From there Ash and I attempted to do a bunch of things… the last of which was defeating a planetary boss. The unfortunate thing is that Ash ran out of resurrections… and I barely finished the boss off… but he didn’t get credit which is kinda bullshit. As an Excaliber the best thing about me… is my melee abilities, but unfortunately on that boss that seemed useless. Hopefully when I am not imparied the fight will go a hell of a lot easier, and we can get him through it maybe tonight.

Pumpkin King

January 13, 2016 by Belghast

The Hammer

All day long yesterday I had been craving some more Victor Vran, so when I got home last night… I fed the animals… fed myself… and plunked down on the couch to play some more. Firstly I have to say how nice it runs on my aging gaming laptop. For many games that I would want to play downstairs… like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4… they simply do not run well on the dual 650 video cards that the laptop has in it. This game however looks gorgeous and runs at a solid 60 fps, which makes me happy. Granted graphically it is a much more simple game than the ones I rattled off, but nonetheless it makes me happy. While roaming around last night I found this crazy boss fight, that spawned after taking down several other bosses in an area. Upon defeating the specter it announced that if I would only spare him… I could have access to his truly rare wares. When I opened up the vendor window I saw my very first purple weapon…. the Pumpkin Hammer. So I proceeded to liquidate everything in my inventory except my handful of favorite weapons… and was barely able to afford it.

It is every bit as cool as you might imagine. Firstly you are running around with a giant jack-o-lantern on a stick which in itself has a cool factor. To add to the effect however, when you hit anything… it spawns a pumpkin bomb on the ground… which moments later then explodes taking out more stuff. The only negative here is it actually cost me an objective last night. The objective was to take out a handful of monsters with the hammer… problem being that in one case at least the pumpkin bomb went off and finished off the monster and as a result it did not count. So that is something to watch, but what I like about it is the fact that the attack animation seems much faster than the standard hammer. It hits for slightly less than my previous hammer, but since I am able to hit more often it balances out in the end. Other than the hammer the ghost sold a few spells, that also looked pretty great… but after bankrupting myself I could not afford anything else. From the sound of the message it seems like the creature appears at random in various levels, so hopefully I can build back up my gold reserves by the time I see him again.

Guyver Time

Warframe and I have this strange relationship… where I have downloaded it for PC, PS3 and PS4… but never actually played it. I’ve seen friends on my various social media timelines playing it for ages, and been intrigued. The problem being that I apparently had the wrong impression of what sort of game it actually was. In my head I had this filed away as some sort of PVP experience, when in truth it is largely a PVE team based experience. Over the weekend Ashgar and Tamrielo discovered the game, and Monday night I was going to join them. Unfortunately there were some complications…. namely that for whatever reason my ISP could not connect to Warframe.com or any of the game servers for a period of time. As a result I instead spent the entire night playing Victor Vran and had a blast doing so. Since I spent the evening on the sofa, it meant that I needed to download the client again, and about half way through the evening I switched games.

So far I have to say I am pretty impressed. I am only running the game at 720p because I didn’t want to have any possible frame rate issues on the laptop, however the game itself looks gorgeous. In many way its missions remind me of the missions from Mass Effect 2 and 3. The most fun I had was this mission we did as a group where we entered a ship, triggered an alarm and then tried to hold out as long as we could. We managed to make it up until the point that the ship started spawning in waves of level 5 mobs… at which point we retreated to the extraction zone and held that tunnel for as long as we could before making a break for it. Towards the end these firebombing mobs started coming in and we damned near lost Ashgar. I myself came precariously close to dying a few times, only to get revived in a similar fashion to how you can players in Destiny. All in all it was a really good experience, and I think honestly the Excaliber warframe suits me pretty well. I like the blade, and for my main weapon I ended up choosing a bow. Later I spent a little money on the game and got some upgrades and now my secondary weapon is a heavy double firing pistol called the Kraken. I also spent some time making the suit look more “me”. Look forward to playing more over the coming weeks.

Victor Vran Review

January 12, 2016 by Belghast

Secrets Abound

One of the hardest parts about getting steam gifts for folks… is trying to pick a game that you think they will really like. I know in one case every single game I thought “man that is perfect” for a friend of mine, it turned he had… and had already beaten. Every now and then someone completely nails it though, and I think this year my friend Ashgar did just that. As a kid I envisioned this game that I wanted to create, that was a lot like Castlevania in setting, but while adventuring you might see something in the background of a level. Then through doing a specific ability sequence you would be able to enter the background and find secret areas. The concept was pretty straight forward, and I’ve mentally conformed it to lots of different genres. The game I have been playing however… Victor Vran… does this thing and does it extremely well. You cannot imagine how exited I was the first time I played the game and saw it doing pretty much that thing I had always wanted to do. The game has old school secret areas, that are accessed by blowing up walls, jumping over seemingly impassable objects… or sometimes wall jumping your way up to a higher game field that you didn’t notice at first.

The gameplay itself is this strange amalgam of Diablo, with a setting that feels like the love child of Witcher and Castlevania. The monkey wrench into the traditional Diablo model is that the Z axis exists… you can jump and even deliver jump attacks. In many ways there are aspects of the game that remind me of Guild Wars 2, where there are several different types of weapons you can pick up and wield: sword, rapier, hammer, lightning gun, shotgun, spellbook, scythe, and mortar. There might be other weapons available but these are the ones that I have seen so far, and each of them comes with a specific main attack… as well as two special attacks that are bound to Q and E if you are using the keyboard and mouse controls. In addition to this you have two demonic power slots, which serve as spells that you pick up while playing the game. These are extremely varied and do everything from hurling down fireballs at the opponent, to shielding the player… to throwing you into a frenzied rage increasing your melee damage…. but also causing you to take more damage yourself at the time.

Your Destiny

Finally you have a series of Destiny cards that tweak your character in certain ways. At level 18 I have 11 Destiny points worth of cards that I can use at any given time… and as I open chests, kill monsters, and complete quests I often times have the chance of picking up additional cards. These vary greatly in their effect… so for example The Sun that I have equipped gives me a chance of proccing a huge explosion anytime I “overkill” a mob… meaning deal more damage than is needed to kill them in a single hit. Others like Hope simply increases your hitpoint pool directly, and others still add additional combat traits like The Vampire which causes all of your attacks to life steal. The game feels like it has just enough customization to let you feel like you have some measure of control on how your character feels, but not so much as to cause a quagmire of possible build options. Diablo almost suffers from this at times, and it feels like in order to really play your character efficiently you need to do a lot more planning than I really want to do while playing a game. In this game I often fiddle with my equipped items in the middle of levels just to see how it feels differently, and the ability to hot swap between two different weapons comes in extremely handy when dealing with different monster types.

The aspect of the game that most endeared me, was that every single area of the game feels like it is part of the larger game as a whole. What I mean by that is that there is one big play field for an area, and then linked off of that are a bunch of smaller sub dungeons. Then those dungeons often times are cross linked to other dungeons as well, giving the progression of play field an almost MMO like quality. Sure this exists in Diablo, but it feels almost accidental rather than “these are the building blocks of this zone”. What I like quite a bit is the fact that you can get a preview of a zone before you actually enter it. The above screen is an example of that, it shows what the new zone is, some examples of what kind of critters might be found in it… as well as a listing of all of the challenges. So in the above example I know that I probably want to have a scythe at the ready, so I can swap to it in order to kill a certain type of mob in the zone known as the “Volkavs”. I know the area has three secrets to find, and that I want to try really hard to power up my demon abilities so that I can kill lots of mobs with them. Then while going through the level each time you trigger one of those objectives it spawns in some sort of a reward. Finding all of the secrets will reward lots of gold, or slaying the champions will spawn a banner that starts to spit out experience globes for example. Each of the symbols out beside the objective means something different.

Not Perfect, But Fun

When I initially looked at this game, there was a lot that made me interested…. but the big turnoff was that you seemed to be playing a single character named Victor Vran that almost felt like this generic demon hunter character. Now that I have gotten into the game, the setting itself is way cooler than I gave it credit, but at the same time… it does feel a bit like a heavy metal video. You are a lone demon hunter entering a city that has fallen to the demons… one that has been a death trap for so many other hunters. As you go through the zones you are constantly seeing reminders of other hunters fallen and dead, and as the plot unfolds you get an understanding of why exactly this one city has been so besieged. There are so many common tropes here that the story itself could be a bit of a turn off for many players. The gameplay and moment to moment fun of the game however is amazing. You end up picking up a “Bob the Skull” like companion that serves as a voice in your head… and a running narration of your actions. There is a moment when if you don’t head towards the clear objective… but instead wander around trying to make sure you have cleared everything out… he accuses you of going in the wrong direction…. and then begins to sing the “Brave Sir Robin” song from Monty Python. So at times this ever present narrator feels like it does in say Thomas Was Alone or Bastion.

The other negative is… you are stuck being Victor. You don’t get to create your own demon slayer, but instead are dumped into the role of this existing one. So much like playing Uncharted where you are always going to be Nathan Drake… you are always going to be Victor Vran. I mean I get why they are doing what they are doing, because it makes a much cleaner and more simple narrative path for the game. That said you encounter other cool characters, that I had hoped maybe you would be able to take them out adventuring instead. You meet another Demon Hunter pretty early on named Irene, who eventually serves the role of selling advanced gear back in the castle. It would have been really cool if when you met her… you could have chosen to take her out adventuring instead with Victor guarding the hunter stores. Similarly you bump into a royal guard, that I could see taking out for a spin, or a grumpy old military adviser or priest. The feeling that you are adventuring with a team and rather than just one dude with a sword would have been welcome. I guess they are still adding content and planning on releasing expansions, so here is hoping at some point they will flesh out some of that.

Team Play

Last night my focus was less of working through my own story, and more on hanging out with Grace and Thalen who now also have the game. At first it felt like there was not much challenge at all, but I think maybe the game has trouble scaling up content the moment a new player joins. As we started moving around more the challenge level seemed to increase to something of an average of our levels. So for Grace and Thalen the mobs probably felt really rough, and for me… since I was as eight levels over the next closest player in the above example… it felt something on the easy side. What I enjoyed the most about group play, was that even though I had already completed the objectives… I was still able to get rewards from helping Grace and Thalen complete them. Additionally “Kill X” type tasks… count for the entire group so every hammer kill counted for a hammer kill objective… regardless of who got the final blow. The game seems to use Diablo style personal loot, and the exploration aspect was really cool when one of us would figure out how to get up to some secret… then have to show the others how to get there as well. My only real complaint about grouping was that there is no trade system. I would have happily dropped some decent weapons on my friend when we first started, because I personally have ended up favoring a specific set of weapons that is different from what they ultimately ended up enjoying. All of this said… the game works well, is gorgeous to play through… and controls better that I would expect. If you are looking for a fun dungeon crawler with some unique twists on the Diablo model… I highly suggest you check it out.