Month: September 2020

Swords ‘n Magic and Stuff

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Sometimes on AggroChat we inadvertently sell each other on the games we are playing. On this weekend’s show Tam threw a topic on the trello that I couldn’t pass up, because initially I thought he just wanted to talk about generic fantasy tropes. However apparently it was instead a topic about the Steam recommendation system sending him in the direction of a game named Swords ‘N Magic and Stuff, which exudes a significant amount of charm. I checked it out during the show and it reminded more than a little bit of Cube World, which is a pretty crunchy voxel exploration game. What ultimately made me pick the game up, is knowing that Tam very much does not go in for the Minecraftian style graphical thing and if he was interested them probably it was worth noting.

First points scored for the game is that it has a really interesting character creation system. The characters themselves are extremely stylized but at the same time are capable of expressive characteristics. Right now you have Human, Dryad, Faun, Moon Elf and Sun Orc to choose from with their own color variations available. In practice what this really meant to me was general human, woodgrain character, has ram horns, can be purple and has tusks and horns. I ended up gravitating towards the Orc and made one with rusty red skin and dark green hair and beard. The game scores big props with me for being entirely genderless so you have access to all the same bits and can fiddle with them until you get something that makes you happy. I even got the over the eye scar thing that I seem to love so much and always choose when it is an option as well as a rather high quality braided beard.

The game starts you off on a ship heading to an island in order to seek your fortune. Ships make for an excellent starting point, given that you are in a relatively confined place which makes for easy to follow tutorials. You go through the paces of having the simple interactions of the game explained a bit, and are walked through an early example of a quest where you fetch something that another character can’t get to. Once you have looted anything that isn’t nailed down, you can proceed up on the deck of the ship where you have arrived at the island in question. The captain wants to talk to you about the matter of settling up for your journey, and introduces you to the first few quests which involve going and procuring some dizzy juice for him.

Questing seems to be very much of the “If you give a mouse a cookie variety”, as so far other than a quest to find some glasses they all appear to branch out significantly. In order to get the Dizzy Juice, the tavern keeper asks you to clear out a cave and in order to get into the cave the person standing guard asks you to fetch a mug from inside. Inside the cave there are three crabs and a mug that you can loot, which then allows you to retrace your steps back to the guy who loaned you his key, and back to the tavern keeper who wanted you to clear the cave out… and then back to the captain who gives you a second quest to reserve a room at the inn. As I spread out through the island, many of these quests involved doing sub quests to retrieve something else, which in itself often requires you to get something in order to do it. For example I am being asked to get a candle for a picnic, and in order to get that I need to get some honey combs for the candlemaker… which it seems requires me to have purchased a sling shot to knock them down.

The combat system is fairly straight forward, but one that it very much feels like the deck is stacked against you. Every thing I have encountered so far deals significantly more damage than I am capable of. Additionally there is no health regeneration, so you need to carry with you a fairly ample supply of healing potions which I am hoping at some point I will be able to learn how to craft. Using a weapon increases your skill in that weapon, which seems to increase your likelihood for critical strikes. There is a crafting system that I have not interacted with much, but it allows for you to upgrade your weapons if you gather the resources to do so. Right now I have largely focused on a sword and shield because these were the first weapons that I got access to.

While combat seems a bit uneven at times, one huge boon is the fact that death seems to largely be meaningless. When you die you go into a spirit world similar to that of World of Warcraft, but where it varies greatly is that a timer starts ticking down. When it completes you will be summoned back to life at the nearest shrine, which in the case of early exploration seems to be right near the docks in town. While you are in the spirit world with the timer ticking down you can free explore and scope out dangerous areas, which is pretty cool. The initial island itself seems fairly small, but I did notice there was a ferry that I am guessing will take you to other islands. In some ways the game reminds me of a more combat focused “The Touryst”, because it has a similarly interesting lighting engine.

At this point I have not really spent much time in the game, but I don’t want to dig in too deeply given that it is a pretty fresh early access title. I want to get together with Tam and try out the multiplayer, so we can see how exactly that works. This was the product of a fairly successful kickstarter, and looking at the various stretch goals it seems like there is going to be a lot of interesting things added in over time. That said there already is a lot here, given that there appears to be a fully fleshed out cosmetic system and from the looks of it maybe even a housing system. I find I really like the art style, and once I get a hang of the combat I think that will become a little more fair feeling. I think mostly it is just getting used to bringing up your shield at the exact moment of the attack rather than my usual of holding the shield in front of me… waiting for an attack and then striking.

Right now the game is roughly $20 on Steam, but like I said before is in early access so your mileage may vary depending on your proclivity for early access titles. Right now I plan on poking my head into the game off and on to continue to exploring it in small doses. I am intrigued by what is there enough to keep playing, but I do hope that a more functional map is in the works. Right now you can bring up a sketch of the island but you can’t seem to scroll in or anything. As is usually my case I will likely write again in the future about my adventures, especially if I can find a time when Tam and I can get in and kick the tires for the multiplayer functionality.

AggroChat #315 – Infernal Escape Room

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Featuring:  Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Ring Fit Adventure released just shy of a year ago at this point, and it is only now finally reliably available in stores.  As a result of several of us finally getting our hands on it we talk a little bit about the experience of using it.  From there we talk about the PS5 Price Reveal and pre-order debacle.  This moves into discussing the RTX 3080 launch as well and the application of bots from Bounce Alerts snagging most of the stock in both cases.  Hades from Supergiant games has finally officially released and we are talking about the game that was described by Tam as an “Escape Room”.  From there Tam talks about finding gold in the Steam suggestion queue in Swords n Magic n Stuff.  Finally we talk a bit more about Final Fantasy XVI and speculate on when we might actually get to see it.

Topics Discussed:

  • Ring Fit Adventure
    • Tricking us into exercise
  • The PlayStation 5 Price Reveal
    • Pre-Order Debacle
    • RTX 3080 Pre-Order Debacle
    • Bounce Alerts Bots
    • Trolling Ebay Flippers
  • Hades
    • Rogue-Lite Games
  • Swords ‘n Magic and Stuff
    • Bad Name, Solid Game
    • Bel Want’s Minecraft Meets Sims
  • Final Fantasy XVI
    • Similarities to Vagrant Story
    • Return to Fantasy

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Console Generations

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There are a couple different versions of this “quiz” floating around social media. I saw the very truncated version on the left first and later a more complete version circulated on the right. However it got me thinking about consoles and the generations that they belong to. Essentially for a long time now I have heard people refer to a specific console as being part of the third, the seventh , or even now that we are entering the ninth generation. I wanted to know more about this and as a result it sent me down a rabbit hole that I am now sharing with you. Of course you can just read this handy wikipedia page I found in my travels and be done with it, but I figure if you have made it this far into the post you are probably going to continue down to the end.

Generation One – The Single Game Units

Generation one for the first part were the pong clones. The above is an image of the unit that I remember playing as a kid but unfortunately I didn’t get to play very much of it. My nephew had borrowed it and apparently left the image up on screen all night and burned it into the very expensive zenith cabinet television that my grandparents had, and from that point forward it was only used with the utmost of caution and under full supervision. Even as we entered the Nintendo era of gaming, said Grandparents refused to let me hook any game consoles up to any of their televisions. For the most part the consoles in this generation were a single game, or a number of game modes that were switchable on unit.

Generation Two – The Era of Cartridges

This is the era that was the counter effect of the arcade boom and in my memory was dominated by the Atari 2600. The defining feature of this generation was the inclusion of some way of swapping games, usually through a cartridge slot. For the most part, even though I played a pong clone… the Atari 2600 was the first video game system that I considered to be mine. I remember a few friends had the Intellivision or the ColecoVision… and a very rare few had an Atari 5200… but the vast majority were 2600 kids. I won’t lie I have a certain nostalgia for the wood grain era of gaming, and I really would have loved to have seen a Vectrex in its prime.

Generation Three – The 8-Bit Era

The second generation was exceptionally long, not necessarily because it was still booming but more that video games crashed hard in the late 70s and early 80s. This generation was largely heralded by the introduction of better 8 bit graphics into the equation. It was not until the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System that this marketplace revived, and with it was a change to start treating these things as toys rather than living room computers. For me 1987 was the “Nintendo Christmas”, and I remember it being legitimately the only thing I wanted that year and I was scared to death when nothing vaguely Nintendo shaped showed up under the Christmas tree. I remember the consoles being in extremely short supply, but ultimately I got the set I wanted with the all important Super Mario Bros. The folks left out in the cold here were the kids who ended up getting a Sega Master System, because they couldn’t quite join in the recess huddles talking about game strategy, and absolutely couldn’t participate in swapping cartridges.

Generation Four – The 16-Bit Era

This era is really my favorite and the one I am the most nostalgic for, but it was also a really odd generation. It is largely signified by the inclusion of 16 bit graphics, but as a result you have a few odd cases where technically the Sega Genesis and the Turbografx 16 were contemporaries of both the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Super Nintendo. Ultimately this generation will forever be marked by the competition between the SNES and the Genesis and the various advertising campaigns fomenting this. The staggered nature of the generation was a bit odd because even though the Genesis and Turbografx released in 1989, they wouldn’t really have much impact in toppling the older 8 Bit NES. This was also the first generation when I owned more than one console, as I got a used Genesis Model 1 pretty late in the cycle.

Generation Five – The CD-ROM ERA

Things get a little squirrely with this generation as well as you ended up with a mix of “32 bit” and “64 bit” graphical processing, or at least that was the advertising at the time. In the case of Nintendo it was a 32 bit CPU and a 128 bit graphical processor… and apparently they averaged these numbers to get 64? The Nintendo 64 and the Atari Jaguar clung to the more expensive to manufacturer and more limited space of the cartridge, but the vast majority of consoles in this generation made the leap to the new and exciting CD-Rom technology. This is also the era of the Modchip and rampant console piracy with many offerings in this generation having little to no protection other than the thought that at the time CD Burners were terribly expensive. The most popular consoles of this generation were the Sony PlayStation, Nintendo 64 and the Sega Saturn. The strangest consoles of this generation were likely the 3DO and the Atari Jaguar… which did some interesting things but never really caught on and looking back have very few games that would be considered as classics.

Generation Six – The DVD Era

I am calling it the DVD Era because that was the new hotness and every single console above uses some sort of DVD drive technology, with the Dreamcast and the Gamecube going to lengths to obfuscate this fact. However for me there are really two key things that happened. First it was the death of Sega, with the Dreamcast failing to gain traction and being more or less killed by piracy. This meant with it the death of the old Sega versus Nintendo Rivalry, but as that banner fell the next generation of Microsoft versus Sony stepped in to take its place. This also more or less begins the era of Nintendo not really trying to compete directly with the other consoles and doing its own thing, which is a strategy that have served them well throughout the generations. The Sony PlayStation was the clear winner of the generation, but the Dreamcast will always hold a special place in my heart. While I never owned one the Xbox was essentially a PC in a black plastic box and I remember all of my friends that had them modding and doing all sorts of nonsense to dump games to the hard drive.

Generation Seven – The Online Gaming Era

This is a weird generation, because looking back the highest selling console is also the least relevant to the direction in which gaming has moved. The Nintendo Wii sold over 100 million consoles and became a craze with folks who you absolutely did not expect to own one playing Wii Bowling. The thing is… it didn’t convert people into core gamers and I know so many people who bought a Wii and never played anything other than the sports pack in disc. I think a truer representation of this generation and how it moved things forward is that this is the era in which online gaming dominated the platforms. Sure the Dreamcast offered pretty reasonable online play, and you could get a PS2 or Saturn online with a lot of hoops to jump through… but the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 were internet native consoles and finally knew how the hell to handle this interaction with Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network. Nintendo still to this day doesn’t entirely know what the hell to do with the internet. This is also the generation where severe mistakes were made and Sony had the hubris to expect to dominate this generation the way they had the previous and unintendedly made a machine that was hell to develop for.

Generation Eight – The Digital Distribution Era

Sure you could download games on the Xbox 360, Wii and the PlayStation 3… but it was only specific games and often times limited to ports of older generations or independent games. It was during the Eighth generation that we figured out digital distribution in the proper way, with the ability to buy any game that was being released on day one from the comfort of your home and often times have it downloaded well ahead of time and unlocked at midnight. This is a generation that saw the biggest console flop in years in the form of the WiiU and the effective reboot of the same games to critical acclaim in the form of the exceptionally versatile Nintendo Switch. Microsoft started the generation leaning entirely too heavily on trying to go back to the era of being the “Livingroom PC” that did everything including watch television for you. However after this misstep they carved a really solid path forward with Games with Live and now Game Pass. PlayStation on the other hand rode into the generation with the exceptional value of PlayStation Plus that they used to turn around the previous generation, and more or less squandered that. PlayStation however still stands strong on its exclusives that have only recently been making their way to the PC. The PlayStation 4 has sold the most units, but I feel like Nintendo with the Switch will eventually surpass that.

Generation Nine – ???

So here we sit on the precipice of the ninth console generation, and I have no idea what the eventual hallmark of this generation will be. I think the challenge with this generation is that it doesn’t feel like it is a significant leap forward. As we have moved each generational leap has felt smaller, and largely just being indicated by slightly higher resolutions and graphical fidelity. Maybe ray tracing will be a game changer, or maybe this will be the generation finally capable of delivering virtual reality for the masses. Right now however both consoles that release in November are deeply unproven as to how exactly they are going to make their mark. They are both effectively the same PC being sold under different brands, because at the end of the day the difference between the hardware being offered is marginal.

Goodbye PS5 Preorders

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Yesterday was a bit of a cluster, as is the days that most console pre-orders go live. I was expecting something calm and orderly as it seemed to be with Sony’s system of signing up to pre-order, but that was not the case. Above is a link to the PlayStation 5 show that started at 3 pm my time and finally dropped the official price and release dates of the console. The all digital version I had been wanting would be going for $399 and the disc version for $499 and both consoles would be available starting November 12th. The consoles were to go up for pre-order on the 17th… aka today as I am writing this. That however is not at all what happened.

GameStop stores started doing in person pre-orders as the show as going on, and Walmart started their pre-order machine around 5:30 pm my time and was sold out before I had even managed to put one in my cart. Target dropped their pre-orders around 6:30 my time, and I had one in the cart but it sold out before I managed to successfully check out. Best Buy followed suit around 7 pm and once again I had one in the cart but they sold out while I was attempting to check out. Game Stop started online pre-orders around that time and by the time I even got the link they were sold out for both units. My last and only chance was Amazon and seemingly they started pre-orders at 10:30 last night… whereas I went to bed around 10:20 and once again missed the boat.

The logical part of my brain is telling me that there won’t be a single title that HAS to be played on the console until at least summer of 2021. However I am more than a little disappointed because I skipped upgrading to the PlayStation Pro thinking that the PS5 was just around the corner. As a result there is a huge backlog of PlayStation 4 era games that I have been waiting on diving into because I wanted to be able to play them in 4k. Once you get used to 4k there really is no going back, and I have been playing my PC Titles at that resolution for quite some time. Going back to the base PlayStation 4 just feels bad. Maybe I can snag a restock at some point along the line, but it seems like it is just not in the cards for me to get a PlayStation 5 this year.

So you remember that nonsense of signing up for the chance to pre-order through Sony? Well it turns out those emails also went out yesterday around 9 pm, with a second wave going out around 10 pm. I did not get an email in either case so that seemingly turned out to be nothing. This lottery is also not a guarantee, but instead you are given a unique URL that you then have to click on and try and order along with everyone else doing the same thing on Friday at 10 am Pacific Time. This too will sell out, so even if you did manage to be among the chosen by Sony, it is likely going to be another cast of fastest fingers first.

In the proud tradition of assholes flipping pre-orders, at the time of writing this there are 1919 sold listings for a PlayStation 5 on Ebay. I knew that more or less based on past experience that it would be secure a pre-order or just not have access to a PlayStation 5 this calendar year. In the past I was always one of those folks trying to get them after they were already long sold out. The first console I remember having extreme shortages for was the Nintendo Entertainment System, but the first I actively sought out was the Nintendo 64. It was the summer of the next calendar year before I was able to find one that was in store and available for purchase. With the PlayStation 2 I completely missed the boat and lucked into someone who had effectively bankrupted themselves buying it in the first place and picked it up second hand. Nintendo Wii and Nintendo Switch… I want to say I managed to pick them both up a good 4 or 5 months after the release as the major restock waves hit.

The frustrating part is that I probably could have easily scored a disc model if I wanted that. However I have been focused on trying to get one of the elusive unicorn all digital models. I say they are illusive because in all of the cases I talked about above, the Digital was the first to completely sell out. This seems to be because Sony maybe underestimated the demand for those who are like me and have zero use for a physical drive. So far I have been seeing reports that retailers are getting roughly 20% of the number of Digital units that they are physical units. In the case of GameStop this was reported to be an allocation of 10 physical units and 2 digital units per store.

Yesterday Microsoft threw a not insignificant amount of shade at the fiasco going on with the PlayStation 5 pre-orders. They begin taking pre-orders next Tuesday and are promising that they will all go live at the same time and folks will know exactly when that times is. I guess time will tell if they can somehow manage to wrangle all of the third party vendors into following the company line. I expect that it will be just as chaotic as the PlayStation mess turned out to be. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on the point of view, I will not be participating because the new Microsoft console doesn’t really do much for me personally. I think it is a phenomenal deal if you are a console only gamer, but I have a PC and I have access to pretty much all of the same games. The PlayStation has always been about exclusive titles and I have a backlog of those that I had been wanting to wait and play in a higher resolution.

The Ninth Generation of consoles has begun like so many before it as a chaotic train wreck. I expect that I will be able to get a PlayStation 5 next March once the supply loosens up a bit. Maybe by then there will be some exclusive titles to play on it. March seems to be when I get new consoles, I remember getting my PlayStation 4 right after Infamous Second Son released in 2014. If you were hunting a pre-order I hope you got one, but I have a feeling that most of us will not have. As we try and snipe any restocks… may the odds be ever in your favor.