Belghast, Author at Tales of the Aggronaut

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.

Mortal Kombat 11 – Early Thoughts

April 24, 2019 by Belghast

Yesterday Mortal Kombat 11 released and I spent some time last night playing it. Warning there will likely be spoiler information included in this post, but seeing as I have not gotten terribly deep into the game it won’t be very complete. One thing you need to understand about my psyche is that I was a fighting game arcade rat. During my High School years the world was having its renaissance of fighting games that began with the release of Street Fighter 2 and continued through until the franchises evolved into 3D and the arcade construct as a whole eventually petered out after my college years. That time however was one of mystery filled with random messages scrawled on the proto-internet message boards like those of CompuServe and AOL and a heaping dose of misinformation. I still remember the day my local arcade… and by local I mean one thirty minutes away from my house… got one of the beta boards for Mortal Kombat II. It had a limited set of characters and only a handful of fatalities introduced in the game… but we hungrily devoured what content it did have trading home made guides with each other to try and level the playing field.

From the very beginning I found myself drawn to the lore of this world and its weird inhabitants. Mortal Kombat 1 was a fairly dry game that was more or less a straight rip off of Enter the Dragon. With the second installment in the franchise they expanded this lore to include the Outland a realm which the Earth Realm was in a constant struggle for domination. Only through the rules of the tournament were we the players able to keep this other realm at bay and from invading our own. Then with the third installment of the game… we learn that unlike the first tournament… we didn’t actually win. This was crazy for me to wrap my head around at the time… because here was a game that was telling a narrative through a fighting game that had both an official canon that was different from that of the player “heroes journey”. It was always trying to do something really unique and cinematic with its storytelling that other fighting games at the time were not, and I appreciated that. However as my personal tastes changed I found myself exiting the Fighting Game genre and moving on with my life… eventually getting engrossed in MMORPGs. There was something however about what I had been seeing surrounding Mortal Kombat 11 that made me want to pick the game back up and see what the story mode was like.

Time has passed and a new generation of characters is effectively taking the place of some of the names I recognized. The long canon relationship between Johnny Cage and Sonya Blade apparently bore fruit in the form of a daughter named Cassie. Similarly we are introduced to the daughter of Jackson Briggs (Jax) named Jaqui who happens to serve in the same defense force unit as Cassie under the command of Sonya. The opening scenes of the game revolve around the family connection and how in order to get her promotion to Commander… Cassie has to defeat Sonya in combat. Then bam… we are immediately and seamlessly transitioning into the fighting game with no real pause… the camera rotates and the familiar 2Dish playing field is presented with the combat bars overhead. The game controls pretty much like I would expect a Mortal Kombat game to control and before long I was able to pick up some of the basic muscle memory of how to do this thing. Cassie more or less controls like Johnny Cage… with some tweaks here or there that make it more an amalgam of both Cage and Sonya’s move set.

What I found most odd about this whole experience is how once you get started you are largely on rails and working your way through a story sequence without any pauses. Eventually I needed to go do something else for the night… and it was awkward to find a natural place to break off the game. I am guessing the story sequences will pick up where I left off as I get pushed into the next fight. I made it through the opening sequence which involved a strike on Kitana’s Castle in the outland… where both her and Liu Kang have apparently been corrupted by Shinnok… a perennial baddie in the series since Sub Zero Mythologies and natural foil to our own protective Elder God Raiden. I feel like there is a ton of story here that I have missed over the years… and while I own Mortal Kombat X because I got it as part of another package I never really cracked it open and played it to see how its story worked out. In theory this first mission was to stave off an invasion of Earth from the Outland… but not everything goes entirely as planned.

Raiden is not the person we knew, because he too seemingly is being corrupted by the influence of Shinnok. You can see he is wearing Shinnok’s amulet around his neck… but his eyes and lightning attacks now glow red as opposed to the usual blue. That’s right… Raiden has fallen to the dark side and is now a Sith… or something like that. He still seems to be dead set on protecting the Earth Realm… but is way more harsh than the Raiden I remember. The team escapes from Outland back to Earth only to have another player peek her head onto the stage. We are introduced to Kronika the Keeper of Time who is tired of Raiden’s corruption of the timeline and probably pissed at him beheading Shinnok her apparent child. So some timey wimey stuff happens and suddenly we have a mix of timelines where characters from Mortal Kombat 1, 2, 3, and other games that I don’t recognize get blended together into one amalgam timeline that allows quite simply for us to play all the things in a single game without having to care much about why. Most time travel storylines are complete nonsense and bullshit… and I sorta expect this one to end up that way in the end. However for the moment I am engaged… but cannot play for long because my muscle memory for a fighting game ain’t exactly what it used to be… and my hand got to hurting after a handful of fights.

Other random observations… I never liked Johnny Cage. He always annoyed me as the consummate incarnation of a dudebro and the rich kid bully “Blaine” character from every 80s teen movie. You take his same actions and place it in a female character and it is insanely way the hell more tolerable… so I kinda like Cassie Cage so far. Jaqui seems an awful lot like her father Jax… so there is a weird mirror of some of the same dynamics I remember between Jax and Sonya before. So you get this whole feeling of getting the band back together… but the band performers are the children of the previous generation. Based on this game and what footage I have seen of the Injustice series… NetherRealm Studios seems to have perfected the art of telling a story through a fighting game. I look forward to making it through the story mode, but I am honestly doubtful that I will ever play this in any sort of a mode that allows the game to go online with other players. My days of slapping a quarter on the monitor to reserve the next game are well past me… and I doubt I would come anywhere close to enjoying playing random strangers on the internet. I do however appreciate a good story told through a vehicle that I enjoy playing… so this might cause me to go on a renaissance of playing other NetherRealm fighting games to experience more of it.

All in all… I am digging it heavily. The game is getting panned hard by critics due to the inclusion of micro-transactions but I have not gotten anywhere near enough into the game to be able to judge that. They are claiming that the game gains currency to unlock things from the “Krypt” very slowly… but I also remember sitting in our RV at the lake grinding the same tower over and over to unlock randomized coins in Mortal Kombat Deception on the PS2… which incidentally is probably the last MK game I heavily played. The coins did not come quickly and it find super grindy to get unlocks… so I am guessing this game is going to feel very similar. Those are vehicles for folks to invest more time in the game… not necessarily for casual players like myself. There is a really cool customization system that lets you swap out appearances and abilities on various characters which seems like it might be a cool idea… so that your sub zero might perform slightly different to that of your friends adding a bit of the whole MOBA character design into the mix. I cannot however gauge how that will work out in the end, because I am just a tiny bit into the game right now.