April 2019 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Regularly Playing: April 2019 Edition

April 30, 2019 by Belghast

It has taken me until this morning to actually get around to writing one of these, but by god it is still april so it still counts in continuing this streak of posts. I am notoriously bad at actually keeping a series going, which is weird considering I did the whole daily posting thing for over three years. For those who are just tuning in once a month I attempt to true up my sidebar and talk about the games that I am actually regularly playing during a given month. Some months there isn’t much net change and then other months we basically wipe the slate clean. This is going to be on of those first types because a lot of things changed this month. Without further stalling… lets rip the band-aid off.

To Those Remaining

Dragalia Lost – Android

I cannot believe that of all of the titles I was playing last month… that this is the only one that is still kicking at the end of the month. Dragalia Lost has been going strong for me pretty much since release, and in part it does well with me because there is always another event just around the corner. Right now we are in the middle of an event that crosses over characters from the Fire Emblem series that came along with a big patch that changed the way that summons work. No more useless Wyrmprints and now we can simply buy the ones we need from a vendor. I play this every night before bed and at a minimum do my daily activities until I reach the point where I am just about to drop the phone… at which point I plug in the charging cable for the night and go to sleep. It has become a part of my routine, which means it is probably here to stay for awhile.

To Those Returning and Brand New

Diablo 3 – Switch

This one never stays off the list for very long, which is in part why I am generally so hesitant to remove it when I eventually do. There is a new season coming up and I fully expect to get re-engaged with this title during that time. As to which platform I do it on is another decision point. Right now my usual partner in crime does not have the switch so more than likely we will be teaming up on the PC. I do however kinda want to make my way through a switch season and try to earn a bonus bank slot in the process. I wish to all that is holy that I could just link my switch copy to my PC copy so I could sure rewards. Cross play is a thing that is needed more than probably any other innovation in gaming.

Final Fantasy XIV – Console

Another game that does not stay off the list for terribly long is Final Fantasy XIV. I am not fully engaged with this game at the moment, but I did come back and finish all of the story content. Since then I have been languishing a bit at trying to find something to draw me to the game and hold me there. Most recently I have started working on beast tribe quests because who doesn’t love mounts. I know I will return in full with the expansion because I always do… but for the moment I am struggling to find purpose.

Grim Dawn – PC

I am not entirely certain if this game has ever made one of these lists but I have played it off and on since its initial early access release on Steam. It only took me until recently however to actually fully engage with the game and find out how damned good it is. This would be my replacement for Diablo 3 entirely… if it were simply better at providing interesting multiplayer options. That said I greatly enjoy what the game does give me, which is a largely single player experience that lets me pour my mind into it and watch fountains of loot explode around me as I do. If someone was looking to get into an ARPG… this is now the title I would probably point them towards.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

A brand new expansion has released and as a result I am back engaged with Magic the Gathering Arena. War of the Spark promises to add a ton of new planeswalkers… 36 in fact… and have the final conclusion of the whole Nicol Bolas storyline. I was nowhere near as engaged with Ravnica Allegiances because none of the guilds included were really my jam apart from Gruul and maybe Orzhov. Whatever the case I never really got super into what was happening and faded away from the content for a bit. With War of the Spark however I am back in full and enjoying the experience… and at the same time starting to do some direct duels with friends with the prospect of playing some weird decks in the future.

Marvel Future Fight – Android / PC Emulator

I have been playing an excessive amount of this game lately, and it shocks the shit out of me. Firstly this journey all started after being nostalgic about the Marvel Heroes ARPG by Gazillion and looking to see if anyone had managed to come up with a private server option yet. In one of those threads someone mentioned that Marvel Future Fight on mobile devices was the closest that we had to that game… which lead me to download… and the rest is more or less history. It feels weird for me to be playing a mobile game in place of other games… because that is a barrier that I never quite crossed before even with Dragalia Lost. Mobile games were something I only did when I did not have ready access to other platforms… this I am playing on an Android Emulator with WASD controls like a traditional PC game. The free-to-play-ness can be really annoying at times, but I am carving out whatever enjoyment I can get from it until this whim passes.

Mortal Kombat 11 – PC

I’ve been having a strong itch to play some fighting games and I think it was brought on largely by the advertising about Mortal Kombat 11 making me nostalgic about my arcade rat past. I am also dabbling a bit with Street Fighter V and some other games… but more or less MK11 is the only one I am playing often enough to add to this list. I even went so far as to pick up a Fight Stick as I talked about yesterday. I’ve missed fighting games… and while I am nowhere near as good as I once was… I want to regain at least some of those skills. I will never be competitive… but I figure I can still eek out some enjoyment.

Outward – PC

I played this obsessively for several nights in a row and want to return to it. I wrote at length about how this game reminds me of the way that Everquest used to make me feel. I’ve been distracted by other games but I am adding this on the list if for no other reason than to remind me to return to it. It is a very interesting title and one that I want to explore some more.

Star Wars the Old Republic – PC

This is a title that I was not expecting to add back to the list anytime soon… but Star Wars Celebration caused an upwelling of Star Wars nostalgia leading to me playing some of this. When I last played I had finished the Fallen Empire storyline, and coming back I picked right back up with the Eternal Throne. Now I am working my way slowly through some of the post Eternal Throne content, of which there are several patches worth and several new areas that have been added to the game. So far I am really enjoying myself and it is making me want Ammo to do another “Belghast” this time my Jedi Guardian in the armor set above… that I scrounged hardcore for at release because I loved the look of it. The storyline in this game is still really damned good and it does a pretty good job of scratching that KOTOR itch.

To Those Departing

Anthem – PC

Oh Anthem… what a fraught mess you are. I spent most of April waiting on the sidelines for a supposed “major” patch to land and fix all of my woes. It never came, or at least not in the ways that I wanted it to. Ultimately Bioware made a game that is different from the game that they intended to make… and has yet to realize this. The other stance is that they could be trying to change the game fundamentally to become the game they intended it to be. Whatever the case… they built Mass Effect Multiplayer with Flight and Diablo 3 loot… but with a high end drop rarity rivaling World of Warcraft Legendaries or Destiny Exotics. That rarity more or less worked in those games because every drop was curated. Diablo 3 and Anthem however with random affixes you get a lot of shit items so you need to get a lot of drops to allow you to sift through them to find something workable. I likely won’t play the game again until the loot is raining down around us… if the game survives that long. I am hearing that matchmaking is already a ghost town most of the time, so here is hoping they can make significant enough changes to allow those of us who left to return during year 2 and see the greatly changed and improved game.

Baba Is You – Switch / PC

Super cute game and still probably on my list of best games for 2019… but after the initial desire to play I sorta floated away from it. I am sure I will return at some point but it doesn’t really need a spot on the list for the moment.

Destiny 2 – PC

No clue why on this one… but I am just not feeling Destiny. There isn’t a firm reason other than the fact that I log in and log out almost immediately. From what I hear the game is in a better state than it has been in a really long time… and I am sure at some point I will make my return and obsess about it once more. That said I am just not into it so I am letting it slip off the list.

The Division 2 – PC

Again I am not sure why… but I never latched onto this one as hard as I thought I would. For awhile I was using it as a methadone for Anthem… and then I stopped using it at all. I am sure at some point I will cycle back around to this one but I might simply be “looter shooter”‘d out for the time being.

Pokemon Go – Android

This one ends its very long streak. I still technically crack it up every so often, largely to hatch eggs… but I had four eggs ready to hatch and I let that notification go for two weeks before actually doing anything. It is a perfectly fine game, and if I engaged with some sort of a community I would probably get into it more. I am trying to increase the amount of activity I am doing as a whole now that it has warmed up so it might have a resurgence. That said… my TicWatch tracks my activity without me actually having to open the app so I admit that was a nail in the coffin for this game. Out of sight and out of mind… you had a good run PoGo.

Adventures in Fight Sticks

April 29, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve been going through a little bit of a fighting game renaissance lately, especially playing them on the PC with the release of Mortal Kombat 11 and diving into some Street Fighter V on the PS4. I cut my teeth on the 90s arcade scene playing a lot of Street Fighter, Samurai Showdown, Mortal Kombat and Killer Instinct. However as time went on I faded away from that and dug more and more into PC gaming… eventually joining the cult of gamers tied to our MMORPGs. In that time fighting games have evolved and changed, and while I no longer have the reflexes that I once did I have wanted to regain a little bit of my youth. One thing that I noticed while playing these fighting games on my Xbox One controller that I use with my PC… is that my hand would get really tired really fast after trying to do the combos. This lead me down the path of looking into getting a proper fight stick.

For the uninitiated… fight sticks vary wildly in price and quality and it is entirely possible to drop $500 on a custom made stick with the best arcade components. After a bit of research I started to notice that many of the custom builds I was seeing centered around using a Mayflash fight stick as a base and then adding additional components to it. Mayflash is a chinese made budget fight stick that accepts universal arcade components and ships with its own Sanwa-knock-off buttons and joystick that I figured would serve fine for my purposes… but give me the ability to upgrade later if I saw fit to do so. Ultimately there are two models available… the F300 which seems to be more compact and probably ideal for smaller hands… and then the F500 which I ended up getting which has a more spread out design ideal for my stupidly large hands.

The best part about these is the fact that they are wired to support pretty much every console I would ever want to play on. Officially it supports… PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, Android, Switch and the NeoGeo Mini. There are probably some others that it actually works fine on as well. The support for PS4 is a little janky because it requires you to connect an official PS4 controller to the fight stick that then uses it for pass through authentication with the machine. All told however it has been amazingly simple to get it up and running with the platforms I have tried it on. The F300 tends to go for around $60 on Amazon and the F500 for around $80… however I managed to find an Ebay Buy It Now F500 listing with free shipping for only $55 so your mileage may vary. The weird thing about that… is it shipped from Amazon so I am guessing it came from Mayflash directly that was running some sort of an Ebay Special that I legitimately got the last listed copy of.

One of the nice things about this particular stick is the fact that it came with both a Square Gate and an Octagonal Gate. I’ve swiped the above image of two Sanwa gates from the Shoryuken forums to use as a reference… because I am not sure it will make sense entirely without seeing them. Essentially joysticks that came from the west and those that came from Japan evolved differently during the arcade boom. While our 8 way joysticks got a distinct 8 point restrictor plate with a tactile divot for the shaft of the stick to bump into denoting which direction it was currently facing… the Japanese sticks simply took what was previously a 4 way diamond shaped restrictor and rotated it to create what would eventually serve as their 8 way square restrictor. Almost all of the mass produced Fight Sticks on the market come with a square gate, as the hotbed of fight stick production is still Japan. However these feel really awkward for those of us who grew up with the octagonal gate design and the very first thing I did to my stick was pop open the back and change these out.

After having done that… and seeing how easy it was to swap parts out… it has made me daydreaming on Focus Attack about other modifications I could make to tweak it… and then being sad at how much additional cash it would ultimately wind up adding to the price of the stick. This is how you take a $55 stick and turn it into something closer to $200 if you are not careful. There is however one mod that I do plan on making soon. One of the features that Focus Attack has is the ability to download a template for any of the common fight sticks and have them print a high quality laser cut artwork overlay to place under the clear Plexiglas cover that most of these sticks have. So I took all of the awesome Ammo artwork that I have in the masthead of this blog and arranged them around the template. Now the question is… do I order this or do I go ahead and swap the buttons and joystick while I am having to crack open and pull it apart anyway. I feel like I have traveled down a very slippery path.

War of the Spark Pre-order Packs

April 26, 2019 by Belghast

Today is a weird day as far as days go. I took the day off in order to go see Avengers Endgame as an 11 am matinee in a hope of avoiding the majority of the crowds. Past that I got up and around like a normal day but because of the lack of pressure it is meaning that I am doing everything a little big slower than normal since I am not actually required to get out the door and on my way to work by 7 am… aka the time I am actually starting this blog today. Yesterday was the beginning of War of the Spark on Magic the Gathering Arena and with that I finally got to open my 50 pre-order packs. If you are playing Magic the Gathering Arena you too can also get three free packs by entering the new “PlayWarSpark” code. On a whim I decided to stream opening the packs last night and I am super thankful to a bunch of people who tuned in to watch and comment on my pulls. I love opening packs, and honestly so far I am really liking what I am seeing of this set. If you are curious you can check out the full opening over on my YouTube channel or through the Twitch VOD. Be warned however with the VOD there is a bunch of faffing about with sound levels early on that I cut out of the eventual upload to YouTube. If you are simply curious about what I pulled I exported the list to Google Sheets including everything I currently have from War of the Spark including the 50 pre-order packs and the 3 free packs that you get from the “PlayWarSpark” code.

This morning I am going to talk about a few of my favorite cards so far from the expansion. Please not that I have deep ties to green and black and as a result am mostly going to be talking about the cards that I know I will be playing. I can already tell that I will be building an amass zombies deck sooner or later.

Leyline Prowler

What is not to love about this card. It is a 2/3 for 1BG with Deathtouch, Lifelink AND is a Bird of Paradise. It allows you to be offensive with it when you need to… but if for some reason you can’t be… you can tap it for mana. It is a weird card but man do I love it. I think mostly I just love it because it is a standard legal bird of paradise that happens to be in my favorite Golgari colors. Even if you take the tap effect off of it… 2/3 with deathtouch and lifelink for 3 seems really good.

Banehound

This is another of what seems to be a stupidly good common card…. its a one drop black 1/1 with lifelink and haste. Sure this probably does not matter at all if you are not getting this on turn one… but still it seems like something worth playing and probably godly in sealed. It is going to add a lot of turn one pressure I think.

Duskmantle Operative

Another one of the really good commons I think is Duskmantle Operative. You get a 2/2 for 2 that cannot be blocked by creatures with power 4 or greater… which probably won’t come into play when you are actually dropping this on the board but later in the game it might be useful. Definitely playable in sealed, potentially less so in constructed… but I still like the card.

Eternal Taskmaster

So the initial problem with Eternal Taskmaster is the fact that it enters the battlefield tapped, meaning you are going to get this a turn later than you probably want it. However still a 2/3 for 2 seems pretty okay… but why you would really play this is for its effect. When it attacks you can play 2B and if you do so return target creature card from your graveyard to your hand. What I like about this… is it is triggered on attack… not dealing damage meaning just turning this card horizontal is going to allow you to bring back a creature regardless if your plan actually works. I view it as a capable early game creature with an optional resurrection card built into the text.

Arboreal Grazer

Another card that seems just stupidly good is Arboreal Grazer. Firstly this is a one drop that gives you a 0/3 with reach… so basically you are just going to use this as anti-air defense. If it was just that I would probably play it… but it also allows you to put a land card from your hand into play tapped, adding some mana ramp. In a Standard format that already has Llanowar elves… this might not be a first round choice depending on your draw but it would definitely be an alternative slightly slower mana fixing option.

Living Twister

Now this card sorta falls in the stupid party trick category… but it might be fun to build a land dredge deck around it. Living Twister is a decent creature for RRG at 2/5 but then has the ability to plink any target for 2 by discarding a card and spending 1R. Additionally you can pay G to return a tapped land you control to owners hand… giving you potential fodder for the first ability. It has a lot of weird use cases, but I still think if you are running this you will want to build a deck around setting up a condition where you can keep pulling lands out of the graveyard and throwing them at your opponent for 2.

Sorin, Vengeful Bloodlord

I’m only calling this one out because at some point I will be building a Castlevania deck full of white/black vampires with Sorin as the focal point. Vampires are already good but if you can dredge up a creature from your graveyard and turn it into a vampire along with the other types that seems interesting… and worthy of building a weird deck around that mechanic… and then using the various Ixalan block cards that buff vampires to make it stupid. I’m not entirely certain what I will be doing with it but it should be fun… also Sorin is absolutely Alucard.

That was mostly just a first pass and some of the cards that I will probably be playing around with. Again if you want to see everything that got opened I am embedding the youtube video. So far I think War of the Spark looks like a fun set. I might do some sealed later and see what it feels like in a more limited environment. My big takeaway is that I think aggro decks are going to get a lot of fuel for early game with cheap powerful creatures.

Marvel Future Fight Thoughts

April 25, 2019 by Belghast

Lately I have been feeling fairly awful, which is leading me to vary my gaming patterns a bit. The last few nights I have been heading to bed earlier, but not necessarily because I am ready for sleep… but more because I am tired of being upright. Additionally my wife has been drained as she is entering that end of the year rush…. and when she decides it is time to sleep I tend to follow her to the bedroom as well. However since I am in a state of not quite ready for sleep I have been looking for activities to do on my phone. Dragalia Lost is still great and still something I pretty much play on a nightly basis… but since we are between events I do my five or so daily activities and then pop right back out of that game. As such I have been looking for new things to try and recently landed upon Marvel Future Fight, in part because I have been nostalgic about Marvel Heroes the Diablo-esc action rpg that was cancelled a few years back. In a post about Marvel Heroes someone mentioned that Future Fight was probably the closest thing that was currently available… which peaked my interests. Future Fight is not exactly new however as it is currently celebrating its 4 year anniversary with an event based on Avengers Endgame.

Effectively it is an Action RPG where you build a team of characters to bring into the content… but only actually control one of them at a time. Each champion of sorts has a basic attack and a range of abilities that can all be powered up. I am weirdly playing Morgan Le Fay in part because I had read she was one of the easier characters to get through the main story with… and seeing as how my mobile skills are still not amazing I figured I needed all the help I could get. At various points over the last couple of days I have been given free unlocks… and have wound up building a team that consists of Morgan as my main and Sharon Rogers and Shuri as my alternates. Ultimately everything appears to be gated based on where you are in the story, and as you progress through you unlock new options… which in truth seems to be a common design for mobile games in general. To some extent Dragalia Lost does some of this with various things unlocking as you reach different chapters in the primary story. The missions thusfar involve running through a few small areas, encountering a boss… and then getting some story afterwards and usually unlocking whatever character you just fought as something that becomes playable.

So far in my experience the character unlocks appear to be plentiful, however the vast majority are all “one star”, which means that they are really not that usable until you start pouring resources into them. I’ve played two nights… and already have an arsenal of 15 characters that have been unlocked and are playable. Among that mix is 4 6 stars, 4 5 stars, 2 3 stars and 5 1 stars… and I am not entirely certain if this is always the case or if the escalation of six stars is somehow due to the fact that there is an Avengers Endgame themed event happening right now. As is almost always the case I am probably going to stick with the same core team before I start messing with other characters. As you work through the main story you are effectively ranking up Captain America, Ironman and Black Widow… that begin as 1 star champions but now that I am halfway through chapter three of the story are up to 5 stars. I am somewhat assuming that before long they will be 6 star champions giving you three freebies in the process.

The only real negative is that Future Fight is what I would refer to as a “very free to play game”. What I mean by that is you are constantly having “special offers” thrown at you, and this game seems to go one step further than most. When you cancel out of one of the offers you are occasionally greeted with a message that states you will not be able to get this offer once you close the window. In the case of my screenshot above it is simply advertising something that already exists in the store… but those “limited” offers are there to try and invoke FOMO or Fear of Missing Out. If you are susceptible to this sort of twisting of your arm… then it might not be a game you want to try. In all truth there is a past version of me that would have been turned off massively by it… but now I am mostly apathetic about it and just accept it as part of the price that comes with playing games on your phone. They all seem to do something like this in one form or another… with the only real exceptions being the ones that are released by Nintendo and their advisement to not abuse the users. In the end… Future Fight is a fun time waster and fills the bill of laying in bed and messing around on my phone.