Month: August 2017

Praise Jick

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Another game that I have been playing a more than significant amount of is West of Loathing.  The attraction of this stick figure graphics clad game won’t make a whole lot of sense unless you too played an awful lot of Kingdom of Loathing.  For those not already indoctrinated… “KoL” was one of the early browser based role-playing games launching in February of 2003.  I am not entirely certain when I first discovered it but I believe it was sometime within that first year.  I would love to say that I have access to my original account…  but that is tied to an email address I no longer have access to.  What set Kingdom of Loathing apart other than the unapologetic programmer art…  was a sense of humor and a general aura of fun around the game.   You chose from classes such as Sauceror, Pastamancer, Turtle Tamer, Disco Bandit, Accordion Thief or Seal Clubber…  all with their largely goofy and nonsensical abilities.  Now you might exact the game to play like a parody of an RPG, but in truth it had a significant amount of depth and was fun in its own right once the gags became a little stale.  This was one of the first times I had encountered the “energy” mechanic that limits how many turns per day you could take, and in truth without Kingdom of Loathing I question of anything like a Fallen London would have ever gained traction considering it uses much the same format.

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What West of Loathing does, is combine all of the elements that I loved about the point and click adventure style RPG that was Kingdom of Loathing and bring it into the real time interactive gaming world.  Instead of navigating through a series of mouse clicks and menu items, you actually go out and explore the world with WASD and keys to interact with objects.  It has been awesome to see all of these scenes that are extremely reminiscent to that of KoL animated and moving on my screen…  with just as many physical gags worked in as I would have expected.  One of the early things you notice is that various objects in the world will add items to your configuration menu.  For example you unlock a check box that is labelled “Stupid Walking” which causes your character to cycle through a series of bizarre walking moves from the dog “butt scoot” animation to something similar to the Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks gag.  Another option is “Best Font Mode” that shifts everything from a Serif font to something resembling Arial…  none of these really have any major effect on the game they just do goofy things because the game is goofy.

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Much like Kingdom of Loathing you are absolutely flooded with items that vary from the completely useless vendor fodder to things that you probably should hold onto just in case there might be a use for it later.  The game will gleefully allow you to consume or destroy a major plot device that will keep you from unlocking segments of the game.  As a result there were several things I failed to do in the introductory area…  that you can apparently never go back to.  The game will also gleefully push you in front of mobs that you have zero hope of actually beating.  It turns out at least in one of these cases I was supposed to allow it to beat me to unlock something I needed for another quest.  However I muscled through and used up my stock of dynamite to be able to succeed.  One of the best parts of the game so far is the fact that it is fairly forgiving of your mistakes when it comes to taking deaths… and will functionally respawn you in a save space as though you simply got beat up and had to retreat.  As far as classes go in West of Loathing you have a much more limited set to choose from.  I went with the Cow Puncher which serves as the Muscle stat class for the game, but you can also choose from Beanslinger the Mysticality class or Snake Oiler the Moxie class.  Pretty early in the game I started down a bit of a secondary path of Necromancy and can now summon all manner of skeletal creatures to help fight for me.

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At this point I have played around five hours of the game and have unlocked a decent chunk of the map so far.  The game itself feels like this weird mix of a Maniac Mansion style adventure game blended with the original Fallout.  As you move between objectives on the world map you encounter random events, and if you just want to partake of the random events…  there is the Wander button that makes your character literally roam around in a circle around your current objective.  In Kingdom of Loathing there were a number of endless combat areas that allows you to level up specific stats or farm for specific items, and this game keeps that concept with several locations including something that allows you to keep jumping into combat as often as you like.  One example of this is a fountain that is spitting out snakes… and you can walk up to it and grab a snake to fight as many times as you like if that sounds like something you actually want to be doing.  There is a bone pit that I go to rather often to find the components I need to summon skeletons.  The absolute best part about West of Loathing is the fact there is no energy mechanic.  That is ultimately my frustration with the original Kingdom of Loathing or Fallen London…  is that I play them in spurts.  I might want to play for a few hours and then will go for a month without playing it again…  and that goes specifically against their model.  West of Loathing on the other hand is something I can roam around at my pace without worry about encountering any hidden barriers.  Ultimately if you ever played Kingdom of Loathing I highly suggest you check out this game, and at only $10 I have gotten more than my enjoyment out of it thus far…  and feel like I have only barely scratched the surface.

Breached Wall

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This weekend was largely one about me playing quite a bit of Guild Wars 2 while doing other things.  We’ve been binging a few Netflix series, and GW2 is just about the perfect sort of game for that activity.  First we went on a tear of watching through all thirty episodes of The Ranch, a comedy helmed by Ashton Kutcher and a whole slew of other That 70’s show alums like Danny Masterson and Wilmer Valderrama.  There are currently the two “seasons” of the show and that is in quotes because the show has one of the most jacked up naming conventions I have seen yet.  Whatever the case its funny, and reminds me so much of the people I great up with.  While I did not grow up on a ranch…  I grew up knowing someone that pretty much was the same as a character on the show.  From there we finally started watching Orange is the New Black and have barely made a dent in it, but it gives us another thing to watch whenever we are in the mood to watch something.  So far I am digging it.  Again it is another show that pairs nicely with Guild Wars 2 because it is a largely verbal show… and far less about what is happening on screen.  This is ultimately why I don’t watch nearly as much Anime as I would like, because I have reached this point where I cannot bring myself to “only” watch television.  I need to be doing something else at the same time, and I cannot play a game and “read” television at the same time.  How I managed to watch Train to Busan is a bit of a miracle…  because it held my attention enough to keep me from wandering back to playing something at the same time.

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As far as game time goes, I have been slowly working on world completion.  In theory I know I should be spending my time catching up to the story…  but I find myself instead preferring the slow pace of working on knocking out various objectives on the map.  At this point I have 64% zone completion, and am slowly focusing the early zones to get them out of the way.  Over the weekend I wrapped up all of the capitol cities and have been doing the first few zones in each area of the map.  I posted the above screenshot not necessarily because it is majestic, but represents what felt like a significant achievement.  Side note…  even to this day I cannot keep myself from snapping a screenshot when I am viewing a vista for the first time.  This vista in particular is in Diessa Plateau at the Breached Wall, and it is a fairly contorted jumping puzzle.  I wound up spending about an hour working on getting things just right so that I could get up there and score some hero points and the vista.  One of the things that floors me is just how damned many people are still active in this game, because during that hour of working on the Vista… I encountered a couple dozen other players trying to do the same thing.  When a group of us finally made it across there was much spontaneous cheering.  The other weird thing about this game is the way that players will seemingly beeline out of their way just to rez someone.  I’ve found myself doing the same thing, and I think largely it is because the game messages it to players that maybe it is something that they might want to do.

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I remember in 2015 at Pax South when they were unveiling Heart of Thorns… the speakers talked about it being one of the friendliest communities in MMO gaming.  At the time I thought this was a weird boast, because I had never really encountered anyone striking up a conversation with me.  However this time… coming back to the game…  I am finally grasping what they meant by this.  The Guild Wars 2 community is not one of words but instead one of actions.  I cannot count the number of times someone has veered off course to come resurrect me, or seemingly stopped what they were doing to participate in some random event that just happened to be passing their way.  I myself have done both of these and if you allow yourself to just sort of ride along in the current of the game is is an extremely rich experience.  My problem previously was that I kept trying to play Guild Wars 2 like I played other MMOs, where I focused in on a very finite series of goals and expectations and at the same time closed myself to the random happenings.  In some way I have started playing GW2 much the same as how I play Elder Scrolls or Fallout games…  where I allow myself to wander aimlessly and participate in whatever happens to cross my path…  or catch my eye.  As a result the game finally makes sense and finally seems as fun as everyone has made it out to be.  I still marvel that it took five years to reach this point of realization…  but I never claimed to be particularly swift.

Sehnsucht

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I’ve been sort of circling around a drain lately that is Magic the Gathering.  I go through this every so often, thinking that I really wish I could play Magic again.   The key problem is when it comes to this game, I am largely a man out of time…  or at least out of synch with the community of the game.  I’ve talked about my experiences with this  before, but functionally I bought my first Magic the Gathering cards during Unlimited.  I managed to pick up a single starter deck, and then was ultimately confused how to make that starter deck work, not realizing that they were by nature completely unplayable without additional pack support.  I sat on that until around the release of revised when I finally pulled my head out and learned how to play the game.  At this point Magic was really not a big deal in the small town I grew up in, nor the neighboring town where I had a store where I could actually purchase it at.  During this time I picked up a smattering of things from Arabian Nights, Antiquities, Legends… and by the time Dark was released I was 100% in on this game and bought a ton of it the day it was released at my local comic shop.

Back then we largely ignored the way we were supposed to be playing the game and instead ignored the 60 card deck size and played an assortment of whatever the hell the best cards we had were.  Most of these decks were somewhere in the range of 150 cards, and were deeply filled with cards we just happened to like playing with like the Sengir Vampire or Hypnotic Specter.   I bonded heavily with Black as a color and still to this day I cannot really fathom playing any deck that is not at least aligned with black…  my perennial favorite being Black and Green which I have later found out is also called Golgari.  The thing is you can pretty much hand me any color combination that includes black and I will be extremely happy to play it.  The other place where we broke the rules is that we tended to play with a ton of people around a table and this went down one of two ways.  Either we played in a free for all fashion where anyone could attack anyone else…  or after the release of the Jyhad card game we adopted some rules from it.

That game had the concept of Predator and Prey…  so you attacked the player on the left and defended against the player on the right.  We functionally adopted this concept for Magic the Gathering and it left some really interesting things going on…  namely you never could completely go full tap on your prey because you would then leave yourself completely open for attack from your predator.  Additionally there was a significant amount of bargaining going on… and collusion.  Functionally we had one friend who refused to touch Black anything due to I think some pseudo religious conviction… and instead played largely mono White or White and Green.  The moment he played Karma which is a card that causes players to take damage for every swamp they controlled during their upkeep…  there were deals to figure out a way to either disable that card or outright remove him from the game.  Similarly there was usually a significant amount of aggro generated by someone who played a Rack or a Black Vise that has similar effects based on your current hand size.

It was an era when we played whatever seemed cool without a lot of forethought into the deck design.  You would sit down and never really know what you were going to encounter, and a good part of that made it exciting.  It was less about “combo magic” and more a period of just playing whatever the hell felt good.  There was this period during college where I really was not playing much, and I skipped most of Alliances and Mirage…  tagging back in during the tail end of Visions and was completely back in my prime for the release of Weatherlight and Tempest.  My world largely shifted with me starting to care about what was then called “Type II” magic…  which I believe is now called “Modern”.  Functionally it is a limited format and was the birth of what became block play where you were functionally limited to whatever the current block was and the previous one for deck construction.  I had entered a few tournaments before, but they were largely big sloppy messes that were super fun until the last rounds where they were completely dominated by whoever had the power nine.  In college however I started actually caring about proper deck construction and the game shop I played at was both extremely supportive to players but also a fertile ground for really fun pick up games.

The shop was constantly opening boxes of product for singles to sell, because the massive internet sales thing was not really in place.  In fact the few sales that I made wound up with me meeting up on IRC with magic players and arranging trades.  This is how I completed my play set of Jester’s Cap and Helm of Obedience when I was working on my Millstone deck.  What all of these box openings meant more than anything was that the shop had a robust commons bin, and it became tradition to build cheap decks from it and then battle each other.  Some of the absolute best times playing magic were done playing with a few dollars worth of cards.  However I also had many competitive decks that I broke out when they had weekend tournaments.  This is the first and only time I have ever really been deeply engaged with the card shop life.  From there I graduated college and got busy with the real world… and largely stopped following Magic the Gathering.  It has always been something I am fond of, and over the years I pick up the occasional random booster pack just because I love that freshly opened pack smell.  There is something magical…  no pun intended…   about opening a pack of cards and having the possibility of getting something interesting.  I also find it somewhat magical about getting resented with a slate of possibilities in the form of all of those common cards that can potentially interact in interesting ways.

The problem is…  I just don’t have a card shop home to even begin to get involved with if I so choose.  Nor do I honestly really have the dedication to bring myself to go on a regular basis.  Sure there is Friday night magic, but it is a way more serious scene around here than I really want to be part of.  I wish there was a weird league of people who played oddball “fun” decks.  However for many Magic players…  “fun” seems to be “winning at any cost” and that is not exactly drift compatible with my views.  In this current nostalgia for a time that never really existed other than the scope of my close circle of friends..  I’ve found myself watching a lot of videos on Youtube about box opening.  The one linked at the beginning of this post takes me way back because while I’ve only ever cracked one box of anything… and it was Mercadian Masques that I happened to win from a drawing…  I have opened more than my fair share of old school packs of Magic the Gathering.  This is one of those moments when I lament not really having a good circle of geek friends in real life to hang out with.  Since college I have largely been focused on online communities and have let some of my real world ones atrophy to the point of simply no longer existing.  We have a pool of gamers at work and I keep kicking around the concept of trying to create some sort of magic the gathering scene there.  The only problem is I am afraid that it might end up not being what I am actually looking for.  More than anything I think I just want to travel back in time and partake of some of those big free for all matches that we used to play.

The Wall

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Originally I was planning on simply just calling this an off day and not making a post at all.  However you can blame Kiwi for suddenly summoning the desire to actually do this thing that she told me to do.  This is a segment of the wall behind my computer monitors and something I stare at a lot.  That map of Norrath has been up on my wall since the Kunark expansion to the original game.  The figures…  also have been up on the wall since I first got them…  and some random googling is telling me that the expanded universe line was released in 1998.  Considering we moved into the house in 1999 either my memory is lying to me or I got them awhile after they actually were released.  I am pretty sure the Cloud figure traveled with me to the house and then was put up in a place of honor.  I have a Vincent Valentine figure from the same set somewhere… but I have zero clue where that somewhere might be.  I have so many random figures and collectibles that I really do need to make an effort to display them in a more sane and rational manner.  Functionally like my original tweet states… I feel all glitchy this morning.  My brain is full of a bunch of segments of ideas but none of them really have cohesion enough to form an actual post from them.  So instead you are getting this non-post of a post largely because once the seed was planted I thought it was a funny idea.  I am sure I will return to being inspired and more or less functional tomorrow.  Today however you are getting complete nonsense.