Belghast, Author at Tales of the Aggronaut

Shazam and Geek Culture

April 10, 2019 by Belghast

I did not do much in the gaming front last night as I spent the evening watching Shazam. Firstly this movie is pure joy, and I really wish we had more super hero movies that could tell a good story while also maybe not pushing the envelope quite so far into Warhammer 40k Grim Dark future timeline. I realize this maybe only works for a movie like Shazam where you have childhood wonder mixed with instant super hero powers. Basically I loved it and want more of it, however I am not sure if you can bottle the same sort of lightning twice with a sequel. So far however this is probably my favorite DC movie? For reference the other two that I really love are Aquaman and Wonder Woman… so your mileage may vary if those were not your movies. I never really thought the Heath Ledger Joker was that amazing even though he delivered a pretty great performance… I loved the first movie in that series and they sorta went downhill from there for my personal tastes.

What I find weird is the situation we are in right now where DC is decidedly the more gritty movie series, which seems to be the exact opposite of my experience reading the comics growing up. Marvel was the one that had more “realism” and DC was filled with a large number of what I would consider hapless Pollyannas. Movie wise we have the polar opposites going on, where Marvel gives us movies that deliver both crushing sadness but also moments of pure joy and DC has given us “MAAAAARTHAAAAAAA”. I was never really a follower of Shazam or “DC Captain Marvel” depending on how you choose to refer to the character, and I think in many ways that helps with the joy. I went into Guardians of the Galaxy knowing only the most basic of information about those characters and was super fine with whatever tweaks they took to get them on the screen. For Shazam as far as I am aware they represented the character pretty well, but I also don’t know a ton of information and as a result wouldn’t know if they completely butchered something… or care.

There are definite times where our geek cred gets in the way of our enjoyment of things. I’m sure you have experienced moments where you are watching some pop culture recreation of something you loved growing up… and they completely failed at some small piece of it. Then that small piece works at the back of your brain until it starts to color your opinion of the thing as a whole. You don’t want it to happen but it sort of happens automatically without you meaning to, and the next thing you know you are spitting venom about whatever that thing is. I still personally find it hard to reconcile the Star Wars prequels for example, even though I realize they aren’t as bad as I originally thought they were. Also there are moments like when you listen to the actor who played Jar Jar Binks… and hear what hell he went through all over a bunch of fans galvanizing disappointment into something far more dangerous and militant.

Ultimately us geeks need to reach a point where we are capable of taking our loves not quite as seriously as we do. That is the core problem with a lot of the toxicity that I see online… is when disappointed love turns to hatred. Example… I am trying very hard not to allow myself to become that guy with Anthem even though I have already waded knee deep into those waters on many occasions. It is hard when your hope turns sour and you start lamenting all of the things that could have been… rather than focusing on the things that exist and are good. I think the opposite is also bad where you have a sort of toxic positivity that everything is fine and everything is working as intended. I think we need to reach a point where we can accept the fact that occasionally our heroes will let us down and that a lot of things will never quite live up to our expectations. I am trying to get to that place myself honestly, but the fact that I realize I am being unreasonable is probably the first step. The problem is… it feels good to ruminate on that anger especially when it comes in the form of snarky semi-anonymous posts on some message board or YouTube comment section.

The long story short… I loved Shazam and would love to see more movies like this. Not necessarily more Shazam movies… but more super hero movies that are capable of embracing joy. Weirdly one of the other movies that sorta fits these guidelines is Deadpool, which is a fairly joyous movie… in spite of the body count and ribaldry. I feel like the Guardians of the Galaxy movies also were very much in this same style as was Thor Ragnarok and the Antman movies. I want more movies that make me feel like I can ignite the spark of hope inside of me… rather than simply wallowing in the fact that the world is shit and will always be shit. All I have really seen is some reports that the movie did not live up to expectations… but then again much like with a video game release I am wondering if those expectations are deeply inflated and unrealistic. It is a good movie and if you need something that invokes pure joy in your life… then I highly suggest checking it out… especially if you loved John Hughes movies.

Prone to Rant

April 9, 2019 by Belghast

I love it when a game makes me seem like a whiny madman. I regularly read reddit, but very rarely comment about anything. However my frustration levels with Anthem have been growing to the point where I occasionally want to vent. I mean I try my best to keep this blog fairly positive, or at least balanced… but the Anthem reddit has been a salt mine since release so I figured it was a safe place to vent my frustrations. After today’s patch still announced no relief to the loot woes… I wound up venting at the nearest thread basically stating that apparently Bioware considers the current state of the game to be working as intended. To which I threw this lengthy comment.

So they have stated that loot isn’t where they want it to be. However it has been 52 days since the launch of the game and there has been a constant drumbeat from the player base that “loot is broken”. They have “accidentally” fixed loot twice to much praise from the players, so I find it hard to believe they do not understand which levers need to be pulled to give us what we actually want.

What I do believe however is they do not understand the kind of game that they built. They seemingly created Destiny with Flight… but with the loot system from Diablo 3 without fully understanding what makes either game tick. In Destiny… Exotics are these rare drops that feel super special when one happens, but that only works because every Exotic Weapon that you get is a curated roll and in the case of the armor that has some variation you have a way of re-rolling the stats. Diablo 3 on the other hand has a lot of variation in the loot and with that a bunch of crap items that are immediately going to get sharded… but the drops are plentiful which makes up for the fact you are going to keep very few of them.

If they want to continue to be Destiny with Flight and Diablo 3 Loot… then they need to make the tweaks and turn on the fountain of loot that makes that concept work. Either that or they need to change Legendaries so that they drop as perfectly curated rolls for optimal play if they want them to still be as rare as they are currently. The current combination is an incongruous mess.

I don’t want to abandon hope… I really don’t. However after gearing up all four Javelins to Masterwork level, and with the very limited content that is currently available there isn’t much for me to do right now other than decide either to walk away and cut my losses until “Year Two” and everything magically gets fixed like it did for Destiny, Diablo and The Division… or to keep slamming my forehead into the brick wall until I am dizzy enough not to care about the lack of legendary drops in GM2.

I had heard the term “Reddit Gold” before but never really understood what it was. I had to get Ashgar to explain to me how exactly it works because I legitimately had no clue. Apparently someone paid money to give me an award for that post? Anyways the funny bit about this when I got home and I did my daily run of trying to get a key and then doing a stronghold to use said key, the game decided to actually drop a legendary.

It is actually a fairly good legendary at that, if you are the type of person who enjoys playing with sniper rifles. I run with Siege Breaker for one reason and one reason only… it can freeze targets. Otherwise I would probably never use a sniper rifle in this game, and unfortunately because I know I squandered my luck on this drop it will probably be another week before I see something else. There was someone in the comment thread that theorized that they are working on some sort of a Stronghold challenge similar to Nightfalls in Destiny 2, and that maybe it would reward guaranteed legendaries. There is still supposed to be a large patch in the works for some point this month, so I guess we will wait and see. In the mean time I am trying to decide if doing dailies to get crafting materials and crappy decals is worth logging in on a daily basis.

Since I complain that Anthem is a game that wants to be Diablo 3 but doesn’t exactly understand Diablo 3 Loot…. I decided to play some actual Diablo 3. The last few nights I have been hanging out before bed working on my Crusader on the Switch version, and last night I wound up playing while upstairs in my office piped through my Elgato HD. I find it weird that my default method for playing consoles right now is through a capture card, but it more or less works other than the fact that it doesn’t take amazing screenshots of the switch given the amount of upscaling that happens. Over the weekend I finally beat the main story and now I am focused on running Rifts and doing bounties. Over the last two nights I have worked my way act through act doing a full set of bounties… only to realize that apparently the season that I started playing on is over and that didn’t count towards the normal seasons journey achievement. Ultimately I am progressing too slow to really be worrying too much about seasons in the first place.

Right now I just want to hit 70 so I can gear out in the Thorns set which is hands down my favorite way to Crusader… and a play style that I thought would translate well to handheld mode. By the end of the night I managed to hit 58 and just a little bit away from 59, which means right around the corner I will start being able to collect Deaths Breath and finish unlocking the rest of the stuff in camp. Additionally it means that I will be able to start Cubing some of the low level drops that I have gotten like the Heart of Iron that I managed to get during my 40s. I am still only playing on Hard and have not ratcheted up the difficulty at all… but without Haedrig’s Gift I feel like that ratcheting process is going to go way slower as I try and painstakingly collect a set of Invoker gear.

It would be nice of Haedrig’s Gift worked for pretty much any character to be honest, season or not. The highlight of the night was seeing my very first Menagerist Goblin on the console and it dropped one of my favorite pets… the Flaming Skull. At some point I will have to test out how grouping works as I know a handful of my friends have the copy on Switch. That said this is largely a before bed solo grinding game for me as I find it incredibly relaxing. I do however wish there was a way to link your Blizzard account and get some sort of cross play going on. I somehow doubt that is going to be a thing anytime soon unfortunately.

Outward and Blades

April 8, 2019 by Belghast

This morning I do not have a ton of great screenshots because for some reason over the weekend GeForce Experience decided to stop doing its thing. So the majority of the time when I thought I was taking a good screenshot… I got nothing at all which is insanely maddening given that I rely on these screenshots for this blog. This weekend I tried a couple of new things, firstly Outward which is billed as a survival game published by Deep Silver and developed by Nine Dots Studio. For me personally however it is something completely different. Playing Outward reminds me of how it felt to play Everquest. I don’t necessarily think this game was intending to be one of the many Everquest nostalgia titles out there, but in my hands it ends up being the best one so far. I am not entirely sure what exactly throws it in this category, but a large piece of it is the fact that you have no minimap and the overworld map you do have does not show you where your character actually is at any given time. This means you need to sort your own directions out by following the compass rose or by moving around based on landmarks.

Additionally I have been thrust into a world where I don’t quite understand the rules, and I realize this will fade over time… but for now everything is interesting and dangerous. I have no clue what might be around the next corner and if it will end up killing me. Lastly the game has a system the requires you to venture back into the wild to do a manner of corpse recovery in the form of your backpack that is ultimately left behind when you die. All of these things combine to provide a much truer experience to how Everquest felt as a brand new player than anything to date, and I am pretty certain that was not at all what this title was going for. I think the design goal was to have an RPG rooted in the survival game tradition with extremely challenging stamina based combat that makes you choose your attacks carefully. It succeeds at that, but I honestly don’t think I would have spent nearly as much time playing it this weekend were it not for the fact it was playing upon my memories.

In the above screenshot I remember not noticing that I had a disease for a really long time… because it was the common cold and not the insane life drain disease that I had gotten before. The common cold mean’t that my stamina regeneration was greatly impacted… which also lead to me taking a death in the cave just in front of me. Little things like that sneak up on you in this game and honestly make it feel way more cruel and brutal that any other similar game. The story is pretty bleak so far as well given that you are effected by a blood tax due to the fact that your ancestor turned away some religions pilgrims… that ultimately became the majority power in the setting… things are pretty harsh. After returning from being shipwrecked… the townsfolk demand 150 silver within five in game days or they will repossess your house. So you are set off on a path of either finding a way to earn that money, ignoring it and letting your house get taken… or finding a way to do a favor for one of the locals big enough to get some debt relief. It is a call to action, but sort of a maddening one… that caused me to restart the game a few times until I sorted out how best to play it.

The other new game that I tried out this weekend was Elder Scrolls Blades which promised to be a mobile Elder Scrolls Experience… which admittedly was something I had been throwing a little side eye towards since the original announcement. I’ve played Bethesda mobile games before and was greatly concerned about what monetization methods would be built into this one. Ultimately the choice landed on a timer based system that locks your loot behind a gate of either waiting for it to open or paying to open it immediately. Additionally the first chest you get has a wide array of stuff that is actually useful to you including a significant weapon upgrade. The chests that I found following that initial tutorial chest however largely included unexciting common rarity junk, that admittedly is probably useful for the games in built crafting system… but nothing hear as exciting as getting item drops that you can equip.

The game itself feels like a really weird point and click adventure game… with the addition of real time combat that feels awkward and non-intuitive. My instinct is to click on the mob with my finger to swing my weapon at that body part. Instead you have to press and hold and then release to swing your weapon. You guard by pressing and holding on the shield icon… that isn’t on your screen all of the time and seems to only appear roughly a second after stopping attacking… making the whole experience feel a little stilted. The purpose of all of this appears to be to go on missions and complete objectives… like in this case I was saving some prisoners that you can see caged in the central image of the above triptych. Then you go back to town and use the resources that you just got to rebuild the town. The only negative is… this is fairly time consuming and requires something close to 20-30 minutes per iteration rather than the normal 5-10 minute loop that I expect out of mobile games. This is definitely something you would play on your lunch break… rather than something you might pop open while waiting in line somewhere.

The other big problem that I encountered is that while I have a fairly modern phone that has feature parity with all of the current flagship models… I apparently was ineligible for app install. If you are curious here is a supposed complete list of devices the game is available for… which seems to be missing a ton of devices it can technically run fine on. So when you encounter a situation like this… you don’t really have to sit and take it or at least not if you are an android user. Sure Google Play is the most common app store and the one in general you want to use for most purposes. However there are a bunch out there that will let you install literally anything you want on any device you want… whether or not it will run is a completely different challenge. Personally I tend to favor APKPure as I have had a lot of luck with that app in the past and it has some built in patcher support similar to Google Play. Functionally this is going to be a two part step… firstly you need to enable installing apps from unknown sources and secondly you need to download the APKPure app to your device. After that you can install Elder Scrolls Blades on your device and log in with your Bethesda.net launcher account. If everything worked as expected you should be able to try out Blades on any device not listed on the official list. For me it ran perfectly fine on my ZTE Axon 7… though admittedly it is a significant battery drain taking me from 100% to 79% before completing the first tutorial quest… which admittedly was like 20-30 minutes worth of game play.

I will probably poke my head into the game a bit more, but I am not entirely certain if it is really for me. I was expecting Mobile Skyrim… and what I got was a traditional mobile device game. Once I reset those expectations I am sure I will probably enjoy the experience and add it to my before bed roster of mobile games.

Epic Games Through Steam Launcher

April 5, 2019 by Belghast

I’ve spent more time this morning talking on twitter than actually working on a blog post. I’m still very much in that state where I am fighting something… be it a cold or something worse. The hammer has not quite slammed down on me, but I feel like I am on the cusp of really getting sick. My wife has continued to cough like mad pretty much every night to which I often say “Please don’t die” and she will angrily respond between coughs “I’m Not Dying!”. She also won’t really go seek assistance either… which admittedly were the roles reverse I probably wouldn’t either. Still it is painful to hear her cough like that, and with my own fucked up immune system… I know that it is just a matter of time until I will be doing the same. As a precaution I have been trying to push fluids hard and get extra sleep… but the second point doesn’t exactly make for interesting topics to talk about in the morning when you barely played any games the night before.

One of the things about yesterdays luke warm take on not really caring about Epic Games exclusives that I did not fully estimate… was just how much hatred folks in general seem to have about a game like Borderlands 3 going exclusive on that platform. The latest is a rumor that Epic Games is now doing something to block launching under steam as a “non-steam game”. One of the arguments by supporters of Epic Games has been that you can still launch the games under Steam if you really just wanted to put them all in one location. Were this rumor true it would seem that someone on one side or the other was actively taking moves to ward against this. As someone who has three titles installed through the launcher I figured I would do some detective work. For reference those titles are Fortnite which I picked up prior to the Battle Royale version because it was a game that I had been following in development. The next is Ashen which is a platform exclusive and a game I very much wanted to try out. The last is Hades which was ultimately the game that made me have that “whelp I guess I am installing this launcher” moment because I absolutely love Super Giant Games.

The game that this rumor is circulating around however is Metro Exodus, that I did not purchase on any platform because quite frankly I don’t have the bandwidth to play it. I am maybe finally learning my lesson to put of purchases until I am actually going to do something with the damned game. So this is not necessarily going to be a fair test of the complaint that is circulating, but this should be a test if the launcher itself is blocking access to the games in some manner. For the uninitiated you can effectively add any game to steam by going up to the “Games” menu at the top and choosing “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library”. This ends up bringing up the dialog above and sure enough… none of the three Epic Games Launcher games were showing up in the menu in spite of it seemingly bringing up every other executable on my system. Curiouser and Curiouser.

I am one of those weirdos that allows every game to drop an icon on my desktop, so I decided to check out what exactly Hades was launching. When you look into the shortcut you see something that is complete gibberish and that potentially only the Epic Games Launcher has any idea what to do with it. “com.epicgames.launcher://apps/Min?action=launch&silent=true” is not something that steam can launch seeing as it is looking for some sort of executable. I remember installing Hades to my bulk storage drive and the “Games” directory and sure enough I quickly found its directory. Underneath was an X64 and a X86 directory and inside of each was an executable called “Hades.exe”. So with path in hand I used the browse option to manually add this to steam and sure enough it launched the game as expected.

Now you can do this with games that are purchased through platforms like UbiSoft’s UPlay, but there is almost always the caveat that you need to have the Games Launcher running in the system tray in order for the game to successfully launch. In the case of UPlay even games you purchased THROUGH Steam itself… have to have the Uplay client running to access. To test this theory further I decided to hard kill the Epic Games Launcher and make sure nothing remained of it in memory. Unexpectedly… Hades still launched fine and even managed to get the Steam Overlay successfully over the top of the game play. The above screenshot is originally 4K resolution scaled down to 1080p so I could actually upload it to my blog, but you will see the tiny overlay window from steam in the lower right hand corner happily over top of Hades.

Maybe this was a fluke specific to the way Hades was developed, so I decided to try it again and go for a Ashen this time which is another platform exclusive title. Same process as above, I had to go find the actual game executable but once I knew its location I was able to browse to it through the “Add A Non-Steam Game to My Library” dialog. Again the game launched fine and again the steam overlay showed up in the lower right hand corner. So the 25 year plus of experience technologist in me says… that this isn’t a behavior baked into the launcher itself. I am not saying that something shady isn’t happening, just not necessarily the behavior that folks seem to be indicating. I do find it weird that Steam seemingly refuses to find the executables for any of the games that I have installed through the Epic Games launcher, but has picked up like all of my Adobe Products… all of the Asus apps that came with my Motherboard drivers… Skype… every single MMO and all of the games that installed through Origin. Steam literally ONLY excluded the Epic Games titles which was bonkers.

The funny thing is about today’s post… I have already written more words about the Epic Games store than I ever intended to. I am not going to defend it because really I don’t care. I used to have extreme loyalty to Steam as a platform, but originally it was a pretty great place to find new games. I valued its discovery system to help me find titles that I might be interested in. Lately however all of the really poor and asset flip titles clogging the platform… has made it extremely hard to find anything. So often its discovery system now gives me games “because it is popular” and not actually based on any past purchase or play history that I have had. Steam isn’t exactly doing a great job… but the problem is… nobody else is either. I admit I like the more curated experience of Epic Games because it has so many orders of magnitude fewer titles than Steam. Ultimately at the end of the day I will buy the game in whatever digital platform it is available on… and for Ubisoft titles for example I have stopped buying them through steam entirely and just go through the Native launcher since I will have to have it running in the background regardless to play the games.

I didn’t have anything better to talk about this morning, and I spent most of my writing time researching this nonsense… so you are getting it as the daily post. Please note… I am not trying to dissuade you from hating Epic Games or video game exclusivity. You can hate anything you want and there is plenty of ammo on either one of those stances. However the rumor floating around that Epic Games is actively blocking launching games through steam… does not appear to have any validity. I launched two exclusive titles through steam this morning both with and without the Epic Games launcher running in the background. In both cases it just worked without problems. Since Metro Exodus is the game in question and I do not own it… I cannot diagnose what is going on there. It could be that 4A Games or Deep Silver is doing something to block the Steam process from launching their executable, but again I can’t test this. I can say that in my opinion it isn’t actually the launcher at fault.