April 2017 - Page 5 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Thoughts on Switch

April 6, 2017 by Belghast

It has been a week or so since I got my Switch and I felt like I wanted to talk a bit about it this morning. Firstly I really like this console and apart from the relatively low hardware specs and currently small games library, I have to say I think they are on to something. There are a lot of reasons why I have bounced off handheld consoles, but primarily they never really fit the way that I wanted to be playing games. In those brief moments where I needed the ability to play a portable gaming system… they have always been great. The problem being that does not match up with my default mode of play. Generally speaking, if I am somewhere I can be playing games… I am at home with my laptop, desktop and a slew of traditional consoles. Playing games on a larger screen just feels better than playing on the tiny screen in your hands that you ultimately hunch your shoulders and crane down your neck to be able to play comfortably. I have commented for some time that I wish I could play various mobile games on the television with an external controller hooked up to them. Now functionally you can do this with the Vita via the PSTV box… which is essentially a Vita for your television. However this is not exactly a great solution since you are not actually playing on the same system you are using portable… and unless your game supports cloud sync there really is no keeping progress between the vastly different platforms.

Nintendo is known for creating gimmick based systems and there are so many times that I wished they would abandon this and just create a true console generation killer. However they seem to be hung up on different ways of interacting with their games, but for me at least… I always wish I was simply using a traditional controller playing a traditional game. There are a whole slew of games that are functionally dead to me… because I hate the Wiimote and Nunchuck control scheme of the Wii. The Switch is still a gimmick console, but this time the gimmick actually works in its favor by letting the console be whatever I happen to need it to be at the very moment. Right now I am playing a significant amount of the time with the Switch docked into my console gaming set up in my office. This lets me kick back and play with either the pro controller or the detached joycons and get into a comfortable long haul position for gaming. However there are times when I would rather go lay down in the bedroom, because I am starting to wind down and really should probably be asleep already. The Switch allows me to undock and take it downstairs… and the fact that it is chargeable by USB type C lets me also charge it down there without the expensive of a second dock. If I would rather be downstairs because there is something on Television that I want to at least be in the same room with… I can either play it in handheld mode or prop the console up on my lap and play with detached joycons or even the pro controller once again.

Functionally the Switch is at least in part what I had hoped the Wii U would be. Before owning one, I envisioned being able to play games on a big screen and when I wanted to head to bed grab the gamepad and use that instead. The big problem there is that the short range of the gamepad made it impossible to really do this. For awhile I had a compromise of having the Wii U hooked up in the bedroom, but when I wanted to play the thing in “console” mode that left me from a really comfortable way to play. Sitting up with one leg hanging off the bed and zero back support does not exactly make for a comfortable gaming experience for long periods of time. Nor did any combination of propping pillows up against the backboard and instead I found myself either laying down completely and playing with the gamepad or playing in short bursts with constant switching of positions trying to get comfortable. What was sad about this is the fact that I really wanted to keep enjoying Nintendo games… but the systems they were providing me to play them on really never matched up with the way I wanted to play anymore. The Switch while it has its quirks really does being Nintendo gaming back into an era where I care about it again on anything other than a theoretical and cursory level. The only problem is… right now my Switch is a Zelda Breath of the Wild machine… and occasionally a Shovel Knight machine, and there just are not a lot of the games that I wish I could be playing on it.

What I am hoping is that we start seeing a bunch of titles ported to it, and I am hoping that Nintendo can somehow cross the Blue versus Green barrier and pull some titles from both camps. I personally would love to see Persona 4 Golden released on the Switch given how hard I bounced off that on the Vita. I think in theory I might be able to hook up the PSTV upstairs in my console configuration and be able to enjoy the experience, because the truth is I just never liked using my Vita enough to be playing it for extended periods of time. I largely bought it as a remote screen for playing Destiny in bed, which is sad to say but true. Thankfully I got it for less than $100 from one of my Craigslist deals, so I don’t necessarily feel super bad about that either. The other thing that I am absolutely dying for is the Virtual Console… sure I imagine Nintendo is going to make us repurchase things, but in truth I don’t much care. The Switch really is the ideal system for playing classic games on because of its extreme convertibility. I also really want to see the Pokemon titles get ported to the platform, given that more or less I have bounced pretty hard off of each of those at some point… because I simply didn’t want to play a handheld for long periods of time. I also really want Castlevania Symphony of the Night on the platform… which is something admittedly that probably won’t happen but I sorta buy it on every platform it comes out on. More than that though the Virtual Console is going to hopefully bring a whole slew of other Castlevania games to the platform which might be good enough for me. Basically I see so much promise for this system… and now it is just a waiting game for companies to figure out how to port games to it… and hoping that Nintendo largely doesn’t get in the way of its success and fuck this up.

Mechanics: The Fight

April 5, 2017 by Belghast

In our continued trend of being months behind the curve and happy about it… last night we worked again on Thordan Ex. We jokingly refer to this fight as “Mechanics: The Fight” because it this weird amalgam of every mechanic from binding coil and a mix of new ones. This is a prime example of what I think of as the archetypal Final Fantasy XIV fight… where it relies on you memorizing a DDR like pattern and then everyone in the party completing that pattern flawlessly. That however is not exactly the sort of fight our group excels at. When we go up against a “managing sheer chaos” style fight, we tend to be able to pull those out as one shots. However when you ask us to memorize and execute a specific pattern… it takes forever for us to memorize the dance. I am especially bad at pattern matching and memorization… and as one of the primary tanks this is not exactly a great thing. We did however get to the point last night where we were getting everyone through the dive bomb phase and through the meteor phase. There is a whole lot of bullshit that happens at the tail end of the fight and we were noticing that things started to completely fall apart during the pillars phase…. so I feel like if we can get through that… we can get through the rest of the fight. I also feel like this is the sort of fight that once the pattern is learned and beat into our brains… we will be able to execute it pretty flawlessly from that part out. Which is a good thing… because there are a lot of us that would like to farm birbs.

Speaking of Birbs…. I can now poop chocobos. Right now the Hatching-Tide event is going on in Eorzea, which sort of serves as the Easter celebration. Lets be fair… that like so many Eorzean Holidays… Hatching-Tide is mostly nonsense. The yearly event usually revolves around eggs and spriggans… that often times steal the eggs or somehow interact with the eggs. None of this really matters however because the important part is the fact that this year there is a mount. You can ride around on a giant floating egg… and ejects a baby Chocobo on command. So I think most of us that completed the event spent a good deal of the evening riding around on eggs and hurling chocobos at people. This is a prime example of why I love this game so much at times, because it is just down right absurd. There are so many “why not” moments that the game has where they put silly things in the hands of the players… who then do things like create Fat Chocobo parades. In Idyllshire last night there were a whole slew of people trying to synchronize the ejecting of Chocobos… which is an extremely aptly named place now that I think of it since so many people go there to Idle. For now I have fallen off the “get every class to 50” wagon but I hope to hop back on shortly. I just have too many games I want to be playing… and as a result am sort of playing all of them poorly.

Seasons End

April 4, 2017 by Belghast

Last Friday was the beginning of the tenth season of Diablo 3. In the lead up I had just about convinced myself simply to skip this one, because I really was not feeling it this go around. Generally speaking I chase the pet that is being offered as part of the seasons journey… and this time around there was no pet. Instead they offered the weird lamp post back piece thing you can see me wearing in the above image. However as time got closer to the launch I opted in given that I at least knew that Grace would be playing. While I do not at all regret doing this… I lacked the proper amount of steam that I normally have going into this sort of thing. Firstly I got home a little later than intended and by the time I had nommed some dinner I was about fifteen to twenty minutes behind Grace and Noreek. I think as a whole everyone pretty much either forgot that the season start was a thing… or they themselves had petered out as well. Normally on season launch night my friends list is completely chock full of little green leaves… aka the icon that represents a seasonal character. Instead of the usual twenty plus… there were five and two of them were in my party. I went Demon Hunter largely because they seem to be extremely easy to push through the seasonal journey content. Generally speaking I greatly prefer the Crusader, but they are not exactly known for their clear speeds.

Now it is not to say that I did not enjoy myself like I often do. Noreek was attempting to follow some best practices and for whatever reason, our luck did not hold out. In theory one of the first patterns you are supposed to get is the Cain set, which allows you to have a significant experience boost. However after doing a couple of rounds of bounties and none of us getting the book… we finally gave up and returned to Nephilim Rift grinding. However you could audibly tell that we were losing steam when about 8:30 or 9 pm voice chat started to get completely silent. I myself was just sort of barely hanging in there and I think I wound up tagging out around 10 pm and heading to bed to play a little switch before nodding off completely. It sounds like the rest of the group did not make it terribly further, with me leaving somewhere in my 50s and Grace only making it to I believe 59 before calling it a night. Each season it seems like we make it a shorter distance in the initial push before finally calling it. That first season for me I think I made it to 65 before calling it a night and by the time I logged in the next morning Grace was already paragon 150 or so.

I am super thankful to Noreek for giving me the much needed boost on Sunday to get to 70 and start unlocking the first few pieces of gear from Haedrig’s Gift. I turned that into a season finish Sunday night during the Walking Dead season finale. So now I am technically finished with the cosmetic portion of the season and trying to sort out how much further I am going to go. The set this season for Demon Hunters is Maurader’s which seems pretty easy to push content in. I just need to get to get the drive to do so… because last night I had ample opportunity to play because I knew Grace was going to be playing. However for whatever reason I just lacked the desire to log in… so instead I did something that was completely fruitless and ground random Hive mobs on the Dreadnaught for hours trying to get my Husk of the Pit for Necrochasm. I knocked out a few things on the Slayer list, and in doing so knocked out a few things it seems on the lists after that. I could in theory probably get an extra bank tab rather easily this season… if I can just muster the desire to do so. Right now it feels like I have this wealth of other things to be playing, so buckling down and playing Diablo 3… a game that is more than well trodden at this point just seems difficult. In all of this I am sort of saddened by the fact that it seems the magic of the seasonal journey is diminished. I’ve written several posts in the past talking about how much fun it is to push with your friends in an atmosphere like the launch of a new MMO… and that seems to be lacking this time around.

The Switch and Zelda

April 3, 2017 by Belghast

I have officially now joined the cult of the switch. For a brief period of time… probably fifteen minutes if we are going to be honest about it… Amazon had switch units in stock for prime members only. Now that sounds like an exclusive club or something… but quite literally everyone I know that shops Amazon regularly…. is a prime member. I had said for awhile that if I ever stumbled across one I would pick it up immediately, and I guess in my mind limited availability over Amazon was the same thing. What is even more shocking however is that I ordered it at 2pm on a Thursday and by some quirk or time travel it was waiting for me when I got home Friday afternoon. As a result I got to spend a good chunk of the weekend playing with it and fiddling with the various console modes. So far the honestly most comfortable mode for me to play is with the joycons detached and the little bumper things that it comes with attached. This allows me to just chill with each arm resting on whatever is comfortable be it leg, lap or the arm of a chair. All in all I am really damned happy with the unit, and it feels extremely good especially in “handheld” mode. I spent some time Saturday afternoon hanging out in the back yard playing Zelda Breath of the Wild and it was glorious. The switch is essentially everything that I assumed the Wii U would be for me… and probably was if not the for the fact that the gamepad has such an insanely short range from the base unit.

The thing I want to talk about this morning however is Zelda itself. There was a side conversation that happened over the weekend, of all places on facebook about switch ownership and the limited number of games. One friend mentioned that if there was ever a game worth spending $400 to play that it was Breath of the Wild. Then another friend chimed in that folks have said this a lot, but that no one has really been able to put into words why this game is special given the extremely stiff competition.

I keep hearing comments like this but still don’t understand what is so special about it. No one seems able to capture that in words. My skeptical self thinks it has a lot to do with Nintendo nostalgia, but that is just based on a lack of understanding of what is so compelling about it.

So as a result I think I am going to attempt this morning to put it into words why I feel this game is so special. For me at least it is not really a nostalgia thing given that in truth I have never been that big of a fan of the 3D Zelda games. I’ve beaten Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and Windwaker and while they were okay… they were not even close to dethroning A Link to the Past as my favorite Zelda series game. I never really could put my finger on it, but something always felt off about them. For me a huge factor of what made Zelda fun was that I had this huge world to explore, and barring that I had the right items at the right time… it felt like I could pretty much go anywhere. Granted in the 2D era this meant a bunch of tiles stacked side by side… which in truth was pretty limited… but in my mind it absolutely Felt open. When it comes to the 3D Zeldas… they have always felt like I was much more limited on my range of motion and where I could actually go based on how far I had progressed in the game.

With Breath of the Wild, the sense of exploration I felt in the original games is there in full. While I am similarly limited by my stamina meter, or weather effects like cold or rain… the game feels completely open to me to go wherever I think I can survive. There is a certain thrill of discovery when you find a new shrine and figure out the puzzle that exists within. That was the part I liked of the 3D Zelda “temples” is the fact that each one of them had some gimmick that had to be learned in order to progress through them… and in Breath of the Wild this same idea is contained with 120 of them. That is so much more of that element that I really enjoyed in past games, and is only improved by the fact that no one in games is going to explain to you where all of them are. Sure there are easy ones to find, that are right off the path or that serve as the teleport for a given town. However most of them involve getting out and roaming around, to try and find where they have been hidden into the landscape.

Similarly there is the Korok Seed mini game, and from what I understand there are 900 of them scattered throughout the world. Most of them involve noticing something going on in the landscape and then interacting with the elements in a certain way to reveal the Korok that is hiding. For example one of the very early ones involves diving off of a cliff into a ring of lily pads that are sitting in the water below. It is the sort of thing that as you walk by you notice… “that looks odd” and then when you start to investigate you try different things until you ultimately reveal another Korok. There is a challenge with Open World games to both allow open space to exist… but make that open space be meaningful and that is one of the things that Breath of the Wild really succeeds at. Not to mention that the Korok mini game is charming as hell as you keep bringing more seeds to Hestu for his Maracas. There are honestly an awful lot of elements of this game that just come across as charming. Once you leave the “starter zone” for lack of a better term you find out that the world is not really as “post apoc” as it seems at the start. Folks have learned how to survive and often times thrive in a world where destruction is looming over it, and each of the people scattered has a story to tell and hints to be given about other things happening in the world.

It is extremely hard to put into words what it is about this game that is so damned appealing. Even as I sit down with the purpose to do just that, I am finding myself lacking the necessary vocabulary to really make it make sense. I have plenty of problems with the game, namely the way the weapon durability system worlds. However that said I like it enough to have just purchased a second copy and completely restarted the game after getting a decent ways into it on the Wii U. There really are not a lot of games that you could say the same for, with the big two that are standing out in my head that I own multiple copies of being Destiny and Castlevania Symphony of the Night. There is an awful lot going on in the game… but I have this constant feeling that I have only barely scratched the surface of its complexity. I think that more than anything is what keeps drawing me to it. Its like this grand puzzle that, as I solve one little bit of it… keeps exposing new areas for me to explore and then ultimately solve as well. Its not just that I need to go to a new land and vanquish a new evil… but as I wander across that land I am constantly finding myself needing to learn a brand new mechanical vocabulary to survive its trials. In some ways the puzzles in this game remind me of the way the ones from Thomas Was Alone felt… where each time it increments on the information you already have but keeps pushing the boundary to incorporate new elements and challenges.

Unfortunately I am not entirely certain I have even begun to scratch the surface of the job I set out to do. Which of course was the put into words what made this game worth spending so much time and effort on playing. There are so many great games out there right now like Horizon Zero Dawn and Mass Effect Andromeda… both of which I am playing quite a bit of. However I still find myself drawn to keep venturing into Hyrule on a regular basis and keep figuring out how the world ticks. I can’t really say if this game is better than that game… because so far I have been enjoying all of them. I also feel like my attention isn’t a zero sum game, and that all of these games are worthy of it. I will say that Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is doing something different. It feels different from the previous 3D Zelda offerings, but at the same time very different from the traditional Open World model. Some of these differences are frustrating, but at the same time the quirks are also what makes the game itself feel extremely fresh. I will say having played it on both the Switch and Wii U now… that there is just something about the Switch that makes it all feel better. Its like playing a game on the platform it was designed for…. and playing it when it got ported to another system. Some of the things that felt awkward on the Wii U just seem to work beautifully on the Switch. So if you have not already ventured forth into Hyrule… I would probably suggest just waiting until you ultimately get your hands on a Switch. Is this game worth buying a console for? I obviously thought so, but in part I also bought the console knowing that there are always a high number of Nintendo games that I want to play on every platform they create. I’ve thought my purchase of the Wii U was well worth it, in spite of the fact that it never quite worked the way I wanted it to. All of that said… I don’t think the Switch is worth the markups or crazy “bundle” deals that places are trying to direct users towards. Just wait for the base unit to come back in stock, and I am hoping with the release of Mario Kart in a few weeks that there are going to be a whole lot more units available.