May 2019 - Page 4 of 6 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Fuzzy Detectives

May 13, 2019 by Belghast

This weekend was very light on gaming for various reasons. Saturday I scurried around in the morning and cleaned the house so that I could be done in time to hit an 11 am matinee of Detective Pikachu. My wife was busy doing an AP Statistics review session they call “Super STATurday” where they prep them for the upcoming AP exam and then the students take a mock test. Since my wife does not generally go in for the nonsense that I enjoy like Pokemon… I figured it was easiest if I just went by myself. First off… Detective Pikachu is adorable and if you need something pure in your life you should totally go see it. I am not exactly a diehard Pokemon fan but I have been around it enough to get a general feel for the movie doing an excellent job of representing the various critters. Secondly… Ryan Reynolds was perfect in the role and make the entire film feel like a G rated Deadpool… which admittedly Once Upon a Deadpool is my favorite version of Deadpool 2.

The other big takeaway I have from the movie is that Sonic the Hedgehog as a movie is going to do just fine in the box office regardless of how much us nerds are raging against it. The representation of Sonic bothers me greatly, but I was in a theater crammed full of kids on Saturday and they cheered and laughed when that trailer came on. We are not the target audience of that movie, and it instead is designed for the same demographic that all of those Spykids movies were. As much as it pains me to say it… our opinion of that Sonic doesn’t really matter if the kids are engaged. I do however think Pokemon Detective Pikachu was a more faithful recreation of both the look and feel of the Pokemon setting with deep call backs to lots of other settings from the games. I think it was also genius to be handing out packs of Pokemon cards to everyone that bought a ticket… I saw lots of kids excited to be getting these. I am pretty sure that Pikachu was in every pack, but I also pulled a Bulbasaur which is probably my favorite of the starters.

For this next bit I don’t have any photos taken of my device, but I picked up a new tablet and spent a good deal of the weekend messing with it. I’ve had android tablets before and always the experience was less than ideal, at least compared to what I was used to with my old Ipad 2. As much as I hate to admit it… Apple makes damned good tablet devices and I have always wanted something akin to that on the correct marketplace. After a good deal of sifting through product reviews I wound up going with the Samsung Galaxy Tab S4 and so far am exceptionally happy with it. Ultimately my constraints were fairly simple… I wanted to be able to run mobile games on it fluidly, I wanted to be able to read comics on it at a resolution friendly to my aging eyes, and I wanted some sort of a pen device so I could maybe start sketching on it. After looking at a bunch of different options I landed on either the Tab S3 or S4 and wound up finding a decent deal on the S4.

Then for awhile I thought Amazon had lost my order, as it failed to show up during the original delivery estimate and shifted into “maybe your package will arrive someday” mode. The original tracking code is seemingly permanently stuck on “label created” mode. It did however arrive one day late and seemingly no worse for the wear, and I was able to spend most of the weekend getting things set up on it. As such I have been spending a lot of time juggling between Marvel Unlimited and reading up on comics there and the handful of CBZs that I had laying around from various Humble Bundle deals. With those I am using a piece of software called ComiCat that seems to do a good job of both showing an attractive news stand mode and letting me flip through the comics seamlessly.

So far the battery life is excellent as I have not charged it past the first day and used it pretty much every night to go through my dailies in both Dragalia Lost and Marvel Future Fight as well as spending a good deal of time reading comics. At this point I think the battery is somewhere around 85% which fares significantly better than my phone which can be drained by Dragalia Lost in what feels like a few minutes. It is light weight enough to be able to fairly comfortable hold one handed, though I am contemplating investing in a pop socket to make that process a little easier. Side note… as I have said before I have really stupidly large hands so I am not entirely certain if the average human being could hold the tablet one handed, but it works for me. I do however fear dropping this on my face considering I have done that with my phone… given that mobile time is generally my getting ready for sleep activity. All in all however… I am super happy with this tablet and it also cost considerably less than a modern Ipad so bonus points there.

Iceborne Frustration

May 10, 2019 by Belghast

Yesterday we were treated to the very awesome gameplay reveal trailer for Monster Hunter World: Iceborne which will serve as both a DLC to the base Monster Hunter World Game and a stand alone game that gives you all of the content contained in both. This is probably a really good call given that Capcom is used to releasing brand new full games anytime they update the Monster Hunter content, and it would have been sorta sad to start over from scratch were that the option. However for anyone who was not hooked the first time around it gives them an easy vehicle for catching up and getting everything. Monster Hunter is a franchise that became near and dear to my heart thanks to World and I have gone back and spent time playing the older titles since finally getting indoctrinated into the flow of the game.

Unfortunately this awesome trailer came with a heap of disappointment in the form of an announcement that while the game would be released on September 6th for console players… that there was no definite date for the second class citizens of the Monster Hunter universe… us PC players. This has been a constant point of frustration during my experience with Monster Hunter World in the fact that the PC release trailed the console release by some seven months. As a result every bit of post release content has been similarly delayed by several months on the PC making us the bastard children of Capcom… never quite having all of the nice things our console brethren had. It was my hope that when Iceborne released that all of this would be a bad memory. That finally a brand new DLC would set straight the records and allow us both to be up to date with the most current content. Instead I find out that Iceborne for Steam doesn’t have a release date but instead a very vague “Winter”… which is similar to the very vague “Spring” the wound up being August for the initial release of the game.

So now I am left with a decision of… do I give in and play the game on consoles initially and then later pick it up for my platform of choice… or do I miss out on all of the fun when it is fresh and bitterly wait to get our turn. I initially played Monster Hunter World on the PS4 but ultimately found the PC experience to be far superior for my specific brand of tastes. There is never going to be a point where I prefer a console over the PC… because console gaming just rarely fits my specific lifestyle. With PC gaming I can play upstairs or downstairs or even remote in via Parsec from my chrome book at work and have a reasonable gaming experience. With PS4 I am stuck to playing upstairs in my office as I generally do not have control of the television in the livingroom… or get to use the cludgy PS4 remote play app which lags constantly unlike my beloved Parsec. Essentially the console experience is never a comfortable one for me and it also forces me to go back to using a controller when I have gotten so comfortable with the keyboard and mouse gameplay.

I am super excited about this expansion but now… all of that excitement is tinged with a bitter aftertaste. For the initial release of Monster Hunter World I swallowed the frustration of the PC release happening so late and chocked it up to this team not being used to releasing on that platform. However it feels inexcusable for that same thing to keep happening as we enter the long tailed life of this product. There is no reason why they should be leaving one of their platforms out of the release… especially when they are still releasing on Xbox which had the smallest user base and absolutely no Japanese presence. In the same announcement they credit their financial success in part to the PC release and it expanding their users… but now they are completely leaving them out of the fun. This feels really bad Capcom.

Part of me knows I will not have the resolve to keep from playing it when it launches on console, in part because very few of my friends followed me when I made the leap to PC. My daydream would be for them to offer interoperability between the console and PC players… but it is still sad that it is a dream that will never happen. I was deeply looking forward to this release, but the entire time I kept thinking in the back of my head “please don’t fuck me Capcom”… and unfortunately they did. I am saddened by the news greatly, but… it still really is an awesome trailer.

Anthem Postmortem

May 9, 2019 by Belghast

As you might have been able to tell from my blog, and the lack of coverage… I’ve more or less stopped playing Anthem. Apologies for using a memey screenshot to lead this discussion off but I somewhat feel like it is fitting for the current state of the game. Anthem does an awful lot right when it comes to the moment to moment gameplay of what it feels like to pilot a mech suit into combat. Once they fixed the controls from the early alpha testing… flying a suit feels amazing and using those same controls to move around the battlefield during combat feels pretty great as well. Additionally I was a huge fan of the characters that were introduced with Anthem and the story arc that was played out… even though it largely felt like the opening chapter of a much larger experience that we have yet to see. I think Bioware had a lot of ambition with this game, but due to all sorts of reasons outlined in the now infamous Jason Schreier “How BioWare’s Anthem Went Wrong” piece on Kotaku… the game that was released simply did not have enough focus or time to incubate into a finished product.

I legitimately feel bad for the crew after reading that post, but I am also left with the competing interests of being a consumer that bought in hook line and sinker into a broken product. I think given time and money and resources and sufficient good will from the community… Anthem is a ship that could right itself. However on many fronts things are not looking stellar as we move into May some almost 3 months after the early access release began. As many users I spent a good part of April waiting on a big patch they were supposedly working on that would in theory fix a lot of things. While 1.1.0 added a new piece of non-story content and provided some quality of life changes… it also failed to deliver most of the things that were on the road map for April. More damning however it did nothing to fix the core problems that the player base has been chanting since day one… that there were issues with both the quality of loot drops and the quantity of the highest end drops called Legendaries.

April was the month that I more or less stopped playing. Mentally I was thinking to myself… what was the point of grinding when there was supposedly a patch to fix all patches just around the corner. At the beginning of that month it sounded as though the patch would be landing at any day… and as we reached the tail of the month and the eventually release of it on April 23rd as a community the expectations were pretty high. From what I hear the Stronghold that was added is in fact a really good experience and was not plagued by a number of the bugs that the earlier strongholds had. I say “from what I hear” because even if Sunken Cell is the best experience in the world, it does nothing to fix the fact that BioWare built a game different from the one they were intending to build and have done nothing to fix the core loot issues. I just cannot be bothered to log in to play through any more content when I know all that will be waiting on me at the end of the content is a sea of trash purple drops that force me to play a constant game of inventory management just to stay ahead of the tiny 250 item vault limit.

I feel like I need to dig into the statement I just made that BioWare built a game that they never intended to make. Once again if you follow the Schreier piece it tells a take of a game studio that wasn’t exactly sure what they were making part from it absolutely not being a “Destiny Clone”. They leaned heavily into the comparison to Diablo 3, but the problem with that is it denotes a very specific style of game-play. In Diablo 3 post Loot 2.0 update the drops are plentiful with a bad luck timer ticking in the background and making sure that you get a drop every so often that scales with difficulty. The reason why it is so plentiful is that a good number of the drops end up being randomized to be not that great for whatever build you are going for… but they become workable until you can get something better. Getting something better is not a case of praying for the drops, but instead a case of applying time because eventually the thing you want will drop. I know this for a fact given how many seasons I have completed at this point and managed to get all of the drops I needed for a specific build. There is a high chance that you will see literally every item that can drop for your character during the course of a season.

The other thing that the Diablo model has going for it is the fact that the game gives you a number of levers that you can pull to help defeat bad luck streaks as well. They have a machine of sorts called Kunai’s Cube that allows you to pour crafting materials into it to get a Legendary item for a specific slot. Similarly doing higher tier stuff in the game rewards you with Blood Shards and you can spend these with the merchant Kadala in order to again get a chance at items for a specific slot. As a result through a combination of playing the games and getting drops and targeting specific gear slots you can pretty effectively get the items that you were actually needing. It feels as though you are always working towards the goal of getting your full set of gear needed for your specific build, and even when you get gear drops that are less than perfect the game has an enchanting system that allows you to swap a single stat on an item to help fix the problems with any gear. Again the game is exceedingly generous with its drops and also gives the player systems in order to mitigate any issues that might occur where they aren’t getting the items that they actually need.

Anthem is sorta like a kid who only read the first chapter of a novel and is now trying to pass the test in English Lit. They got the part where the gear is randomized, but were apparently absent on the days they talked about all of the ways that Diablo 3 tries to help mitigate any times when the random loot machine isn’t working as intended. Additionally they seem to have missed the part where if you are building a game with loot that swings wildly between “god rolls” and “garbage fire” that you have to make sure that the drops themselves are plentiful so that sharding an item doesn’t feel like you just destroyed what amounted to several hours of your life. Legendary drops in Anthem are still fairly rare in that you may see one in a nights worth of play or you may not. In theory they should be guaranteed drops from the end boss of Tier 2 or higher content, but instead they are an exceedingly rare drop from any encounter in the game which means that you realistically need to clear every single trash mob so that you don’t feel like you are missing the opportunity to see a Lime Green diamond on your screen.

The rarity of Legendary drops feels more akin to Destiny 2 and getting an Exotic Weapon. The challenge there however is that an Exotic weapon when it drops is the only version of that weapon you will ever need, because they had the foresight to make all Exotic weapons drop with static rolls. I have a handful of legendary weapons at this point and none of them are what I would consider to be a good roll for the specific type of weapon or damage that is being dealt with them. You use them because they are significantly higher level than Masterworks, but they don’t necessarily feel great to use or at least good enough to account for the time spent in acquiring them. It takes Legendaries to grind to get more Legendaries to grind to get more Legendaries… and at some point the incentive feels bad and not worth the effort you are expending to get it given the interval of drops seems to ranges from 30 minutes to 300 hours.

The other major issue with Anthem is that months into the game we are still encountering massive issues that tell me that the game itself behind the scenes is held together with duct tape and bailing twine. On May 7th they released a minor patch, large with the purpose of removing the Elysian Cache reward system from the game. I could go into how dumb of an idea I think this is since they removed content from a game that already feels like it doesn’t have enough content… and didn’t replace it with anything. However they did state from the beginning that this was a temporary system and in theory was designed to apply enough friction to keep people grinding until they had gathered all of the 160 or so loot possibilities. The issue however is that when they released the patch they also inadvertently removed loot drops entirely from a handful of encounter types in the process. This has been a pretty common cadence with Anthem so far is that touching one system seems to often times wreck what would seem to be an unrelated system.

One of the things that always impresses me is a PC case that has extremely neat looking cable management. However often times if you pull off the opposite panel on those cases and you see a rats nest of wires in all sorts of odd places in order to achieve what appears to be a polished look on the visible side. This is what I feel like Anthem is probably like once you peel back the pretty facade… a game that has gone through so many rapid iterations and has lots and lots of “temp” code still in place to try and hot wire systems so that they work. I’ve written more than my share of this style of code when we were rushed to meet a deadline and couldn’t be bothered to follow best practices when so much needed to be done in such a short amount of time. Crunch makes you do really dumb things that will ultimately bite you in the ass in the long run… and I feel like Anthem is a game full of Crunch decisions and compromises in order to ship a product that was not ready for shipping.

The challenge however is once they released that road-map, to some extent they are being judged upon it. It is hard to stem the hemorrhaging of all of these short term decisions when you are being pushed to make even more of them. At this point however… I think the race is over and they lost. It is far too late to be able to create a narrative of “we had a rough start but everything is on solid ground now” as has been the case with so many MMO launches. The time has come for them to take their time and figure out what kind of game they want Anthem to be… and then start working towards that FFXIV A Realm Reborn resurrection narrative instead. Anthem is dead… long live Anthem? At this point I could be grinding for Legendaries, but even then I am not sure what the point in doing so would be? There is no real end game in Anthem as of yet, no raid to be gearing towards and not even an equivalent of the Destiny Nightfall. The only end game to the grind is more grind and once I realized that… and the fact that loot would theoretically never get fixed I checked out of the game.

I am however keeping tabs on it as is the case with this postmortem of sorts. I want Anthem to have one hell of a comeback story, much like Destiny did with Taken King… and sadly Destiny 2 did with Forsaken (because they should have learned the damned lessons the first time). The negative of the life and death of Anthem has been that it seemingly has soured my tastes for looter shooters in general… since I seem to have also ejected from Division 2 and cannot seem to get back into the groove of Destiny 2 either. So now I largely wait and hope that BioWare Austin can pick this game out of the dirt and turn it into something we actually want to play.

RetroArch Shader Fun

May 8, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I was back to messing about with RetroArch and already I am way happier with the results than I was underneath GameEx Evolution. I am certain that GameEx is a really cool option but it didn’t feel stable enough for me to really keep messing with. RetroArch on the other hand feels nice and solid for the most part, and offers a slew of really nice options that for me at least improve the experience. I have most of the emulators up and running… in spite of somehow screwing up Nintendo 64 last night… and still needing to sort out what is going on with MAME. I tend to think of MAME as its official release versions and Libretro Cores are not named in any semblance of version order but instead named after the years a specific version of MAME was released in? Ultimately I might just drop trying to use MAME entirely and start going down the Final Burn path given that I only really care about a very limited set of arcade ROMs and I think Final Burn likely supports all of them? What I spent most of the night doing was fiddling with shaders in order to attempt to improve the experience. The first target was Castlevania Aria of Sorrow… a game I am damned determined to actually beat given it plays almost exactly like probably my favorite game ever… Symphony of the Night.

This first image is an example of the output that I was getting the other night while using MGBA Libretro core without any special processing applied. It looks and feels like a blurry mess in part because the resolution of the Gameboy Advanced is relatively limited, and as such it is trying to do some pixel smoothing but just ends up degrading the image quality entirely. It was playable but not necessarily enjoyable to play.

After a good deal of fiddling I landed on using the gba-color.glslp preset that attempts to mimic what it would actually feel to play the game on Gameboy Advance hardware and the end result is perfect as far as I am concerned. It feels to me like playing the game in the manner that I would expect to be playing it. I noticed no real performance hit and spent a good chunk of the night playing my way through the game. The only problem with playing with a controller is that I am generally bad about taking screenshots while doing so… as a result you only have this one and the title sequence above before I go too engaged in the action to care about snapping a screenshot to use as an example.

For Castlevania Symphony of the Night I opted to go down the path of trying to mimic an SVGA display that I would have been using around the time the game released. After trying a handful I landed on using ntsc-320px-svideo-gauss-scanline.glslp which to me gives me the feel of playing on a 4:3 era television with composite cables.

Here is another example from the intro sequence to SOTN where Death decides to strip you of your powers before entering the castle. While it may not be exact it certainly feels like I remember playing this game felt. In truth this is likely the filter I am going to use on most of these titles, and then stick to the custom handheld specific filters for any games that originally appeared on handheld hardware. I am not necessarily going for the crispest picture… I am going for something that feels like the game felt back then. It might look like a total mess to you, but it feels like home to me.

I spent a good deal of time configuring RetroArch in general, turning off the PS3 era animated ribbon appearance and going for a nice static gradient instead. The only menu that is really as I want it to be is the Gameboy Advance one, in part because I have a very limited set of games configured. What I need to do now is spend some time sifting through the giant “romset” folders that I acquired and culling anything that I am not absolutely certain I want to play to cut down on the “spam”. Quite frankly nobody cares about playing 3 Ninjas Kick Back… but they probably do care about Super Metroid and would probably want it easy to get to without scrolling for 20 minutes. Once I have a paired down set of games I will likely spend the time downloading the artwork that goes with them like I have done with the Gameboy Advance menu. Thankfully the playlists themselves are just text files and if you want to wipe one out completely you can go into the \playlists directory and delete the specific one you are going to rescan.

In all I am super happy with how this is starting to turn out… enough so that I legitimately spent a lot of time playing Aria of Sorrow last night. I’m further in than I have gotten before, which isn’t exactly saying much but I did stumble across a really nice weapon… the Bastard Sword last night. I’ve taken down I think 3 bosses so far but still am looking for where I acquire double jump from. I am assuming it is going to be something I have to equip sorta like the winged knight “falling slowly” thing… but I am not entirely certain. The whole “monsters allow you to collect their abilities” mechanic is really cool and it ends up making me want to kill a specific mob over and over and over until it finally drops whatever ability it might give me. I am missing several like my beloved Axe Knight axes… and as a result right now I am using the skeletal arrows which are a bit fiddly but I like that you can rapid fire several at a time. That is useful given that if you know exactly how many arrows it will take to kill a target you can fire that many off in row… which I guess is important as the ability itself sorta freezes your character while you are using it.