Aggrochat

Reaching Out

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I’m a Leaf on the Wind

Yes I am in fact expecting to get skewered at any moment here.  I did a very dumb thing this morning, or at least I did it last night.  My wife crashed considerably earlier than I did, and by the time I ended up trying to put the house to bed… I was dragging horribly myself.  As a result I seem to have managed to deal with everything, except one of the most important items.  I forgot to set the alarm clock.  Since we are both well trained automaton drones… we only actually over slept 30 minutes.  However that thirty minutes is enough to throw the entire morning into a state of panic.  All of my nice buffers are completely gone and I am having to do things by the seat of my pants.

One of the negative side effects of being a man on a mission, is that even when a minor catastrophe strikes like this one… I still have to perform that mission.  I guess in the light of the Newbie Blogger Initiative this might be a useful post anyways.  I have set down a schedule and I am for the most part sticking to it regardless of the consequences.  This means that occasional I am going to have to knock out a very rushed posting.  Sometimes this is done the night before because I know I wont have time to deal with it in the morning, other times it will be like this morning and I am in an extreme rush to plot words down on the page.  In either case I have devoted myself to the routine and even if I were to miss a morning, the routine would dictate that I put something up before the end of the day.

Ash’s Adventures

I had a really odd weekend for me, in involving doing lots of non-gaming things.  As a result I have felt pretty out of it, and disconnected from my normal gaming group.  We all coalesced together for the AggroChat podcast on Saturday, but then I filtered off and was not heard from much on Sunday.  Somewhere during all of this I completely missed that our very own Ashgar decided to enter the Nehttp://www.newbiebloggerinitiative.com/wbie Blogger Initiative fray.  While currently he has the standard boilerplate “this is me” first post up, or in this case the standard programmer “hello world”,  it is a start into a much bigger world.  Funny thing is… as a programmer my very first post was a “hello world” as well, and his is much better than mine was.

All of this happened under my nose, and in my lapse in checking the forums.  It looks like he did this on Friday, so he completely neglected to mention it during the podcast.  I must scold him for not mentioning it on the podcast and giving himself a plug.  I am sure at this point he is in that odd phase where he isn’t sure if he made the right decision or not.  I’ve been there with my own blog, and you kinda just have to keep pushing forward until it starts to make sense.  The whole “fake it, until you make it” concept works well for blogging.  The only problem is at this point 5 years and 540 posts later… I still very much still feel like I am faking it.  I will do whatever I can to help bolster this effort.

New Crop is a Good One

One of the things about the Class of 2014 I have found the most impressive is how seamless they seem to have integrated with the existing community.  At this point I have already had a couple of length conversations with both Caewen and Missysmojo about bloggery things, and I had talked already to Braxwolf for what seems like ages.  Maybe that is the difference this year, much like with my friend Ashgar… this year seems to be full of folks who have been sitting in the sidelines and are now stepping forth into the game.  A large chunk of this years class are somehow already connected to established bloggers, and that is definitely easing the transition.  However for those who aren’t… I am still impressed by the amount of activity that is happening over on the Newbie Blogger Initiative forums.  I still stand by my statement that as a whole we look like we are going to have one of our strongest years yet.

Of course this is nothing to detract from the class of 2012 and 2013.  You guys rock because if you are still posting you’ve more than won the test of longevity.  I feel like the Class of 2013 and most definitely the Class of 2012… no longer get to call themselves Newbies.  You guys are now well established bloggers with our own readers and followers.  You guys are the proof that this month long madness seems to work really well in renewing our ranks.  The month serves as two things… firstly and most importantly it is a way to try and bolster the community.   If you read the news, they will tell you that blogging is dead.  Certainly Google demolishing Reader was a significant setback in my readership, and I figure it has been for lots of other bloggers as well.  However we are still here and still plying our trade.

Reaching Out

The new reality is that we have to work harder to reach our readers.  For me this involves a complex sequence of events that involves a lot of automatic syndication to lots of different social media networks.  I want to make it ever easy for my readers to find me, regardless of the platform… and this has involved me branching out into networks that I have zero interest in actually being a part of.  However the end result feels like a much more connected experience.  I don’t care if someone is commenting on my blog, retweeting or replying on twitter, or writing a really awesome and long form response on G+.  I am interacting with my readers on whatever platform is most comfortable to them.  However it also means that I have a whole lot of hoops that I have to jump through.

I’ve come to realize that each of the social media platforms is like a little club.  I know personally I get frustrated as hell when someone tries to force me to use Facebook.  However I am there posting my content, because I know for some people Facebook is their comfort zone.  Similarly I have started trying to branch out into Anook, after a length conversation with their community manager.  Sure it is a little more work on my side to make sure I am spreading my content everywhere it can be spread, but in doing so I am trying to reach the most people I can.  Sure the numbers in the analytics look nice, but for each person I reach out to they are a potential new friend.  As much as I pretend to espouse a philosophy of “hating people” the opposite is actually true.  Growing up an “only child” has made me want to surround myself with awesome people, and the way I meet more awesome people… is by first reaching out.

So while I first intended to simply syndicate to Facebook for example, I am actually starting to use it when someone replies.  I am also finding a surprising number of people interacting with me over Tumblr, which previous was just that place where I reposted interesting comic and gaming photos.  The same is starting to happen as I allow myself to get more involved in what appears to be a community of Twitch streamers.  It takes effort on my part, but I am finding that each one of these new ramparts is not by any means impassible.  It seems that if you put yourself out there, folks will generally embrace you.  Essentially with the great reduction in the traction that RSS has, I am trying to include pretty much everyone as I move forward.  Trying to tailor my content so that it appears in whatever format they feel most comfortable consuming it in.  I am by no means a heavy traffic site, but I am seeing the fruits of this effort.  At the end of the day I write these words to be read, so if more people are reading them… it is worth the extra work.

Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater HD

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Steampowered Sunday #12

This weeks episode of Steampowered Sunday is chock full of self indulgent cheatery.  Firstly we have plans on going out and about Sunday morning, so I am technically playing the game and doing this review Saturday night shortly before recording AggroChat.  The second bit of cheatery is that normally I play through a game in my steam back catalog.  That however is not the case this week as currently steam is having a sale on all Activision titles.  Among the list was one that caught my eye.  I had noticed it a few times in the past but was never at a price point I was wiling to snap it up for.  However yesterday for $5 I figured it was well worth that just for a trip down memory lane.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-32-02-65Something you need to know about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater franchise is that I played the hell out of it.  I was one of those little skater kids, and I even went so far as to have the “Tony Hawk” style “hangover” haircut.  As a result when this came out for the original Playstation I latched onto it with both hands.  One of the things I always wanted was a really good skating game, however we were stuck with either Skate or Die that at least had a free style ramp mode, or 720* which lacked any kind of free skate option… and if you took too long you were chased by an angry swarm of bees.  No game gave me what I wanted, which was the ability to faff about without a timer ticking and do all sorts of nifty tricks.  This game franchise had exactly that, and I spent countless hours playing and it and it’s higher resolution cousins on the Dreamcast.

Memory Lane

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-34-59-10 When the I got my Playstation 2 one of the first titles I picked up was Tony Hawk Pro Skater 3.  So I knew one of two things was going to happen.  Either I would have a wonderful romp down memory lane, or I would be severely disappointed by the crappy remake.  Thankfully the game is pretty much a 1080p remake of the original playstation title, and this is a good thing.  Playing the game with a XBOX 360 controller on my PC feels almost exactly like I remember playing it on the PSX.  All the tricks worked essentially the same, and I struggled with the same problems I ever did.  The game works the same way, each map has a ton of objectives and as you move your way around the area you get bonus scores for collecting them.  As always the first objective I generally go for is for grabbing the letters S K A T E scattered around the room.

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-35-37-03 Additionally all of the old secrets are exactly where I remember them, and accessed through the same kind of tricks.  I really was not expecting anything more than a graphical update, so I was not terribly disappointed to find that literally nothing had changed.  I got the same enjoyment crashing through the room on top of the ramp as I ever did.  One of my favorite things about the series was trying to find all the named “gaps” and a lot of these work the same as they always did.  The only thing that is confusing really is that the game is like a remix of all of the Tony Hawk titles.  There are maps from the early THPS games as well as the later Underground games.  Overall this gives you a good mix of things to go and explore, and Free Skate mode is just as much of a guilty pleasure as it ever was.

Stripped Down Game

THHDGame 2014-05-03 19-34-43-14 My biggest complaint about the game is that it is greatly stripped down.  Gone is the ability to create custom skaters, and also gone are the weird unlockable characters like the Neversoft eyeball guy, and Spiderman.  The lack of ability to create your own skater really hurts my overall enjoyment of the title.  I liked creating a skater that was a reasonable facsimile of myself and customizing his stat package to be only the things I cared about… namely street skating.  I found that overall Eric Koston has the closest stat package to what I would want, so I have been using him.  The game has been out for two years, so I doubt that we will be seeing any kind of DLC that adds in the missing functionality.  My only hope is that maybe just maybe someone cares enough to create a mod that lets you do the same thing.

The other missing feature is the skate park creator.  I spent hours building interesting skate parks to go explore, and I remember THPS 2 for the Dreamcast had a wide variety of items you could choose from.  I realize this title was released not only on the PC but also tablets and phones… so there is a limited amount of stuff they could realistically squeeze into the game given those constraints.  Even with these missing features, I have definitely gotten my $5 worth of fun.  Sure I still have my playstation, playstation 2 and dreamcast…  but I am not going to go dig them out of the closet and hook them up just to play Tony Hawk.  This little download has allowed me to relive some of those memories without having to do that.

Watch Me Suck at THPS!

As has been the trend lately, I recorded the entire play though of THPS, or at least a good chunk of it.  You can see just how bad I suck at the game these days, and how many jumps and tricks I miss.  I had a blast doing it, and I need to figure out a better option for a push to talk key while playing a game that requires a controller.  As a result there are huge blocks of time where I say nothing.  But it is fun nonetheless.  If you had good memories of the game like I did, you might check out the sale while it is still going on.  Well worth the few bucks, and the game performs extremely well.  I didn’t notice anything glitchy about it, so it seems like a pretty solid experience.

Episode 4:  Mentors for Everyone

Last night we recorded Episode 4 of the AggroChat podcast, and once again we had our regular cast in place.  Kodra was back from his business trip, and Rae was no longer trying to join the circus.  I tried a little experiment last night, that I probably won’t repeat again.  I had been concerned that I had been overly directing the flow of conversation, so I tried to take a step back and let the rest of the hosts introduce topics.  The end result lead me to do way more editing and massaging on this episode than normal as I deleted a ton of awkward pauses.  The end result is still fairly interesting.  We ended up talking about the current state of Elder Scrolls Online with its launch and remaining bugs.  We talked quite a bit about ArcheAge and how intrigued I am by it.  Finally I nudged the rest of my panel into talking about League of Legends.  They had been threatening for weeks to derail the podcast, and I encouraged it… and the end result was not terribly derailed after all.

#SteamPoweredSunday #AggroChat #TonyHawkProSkater #ElderScrollsOnline #ESO

The City of Crows

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The Second Year

This morning I am feeling more than a little groggy, but this isn’t unusual coming back into the working world of Mondays.  Today I feel like I should be extolling you all with some great wisdom, considering this is the beginning of a second year of daily Tales of the Aggronaut posts.  However I am pretty empty of anything that seems close at all to wisdom.  So instead I am going to continue to ramble on like I always have and hope people are still willing to listen to it.  Honestly at this point I am shocked and amazed that I still have a decent number of readers each day.  I keep thinking that the novelty is going to wear off sooner or later.  The biggest thing I do know is that I am helped in ways you won’t likely even understand by the fact that I do have readers to keep me honest.

I figure I will get the inevitable Monday morning plug of the Aggrochat podcast out of the way.  I am honestly pretty damned proud of the fact that we have managed to record three episodes in a row in spite of some scheduling difficulties.  In light of the fact that I am beginning my second year of daily posting, I am really hoping at this same time next year we can look forward to celebrating the anniversary of a year of weekly podcasts.  I have a lot of fun recording these, but then again I also have a lot of fun recording my game stream whenever folks decide to join me in the mumble channel.  One of the things I have always been about above all other things… is gaming with friends, and I guess a part of me is trying to capture that and bottle it in either podcast or game stream form.  Though honestly the connections have been a little off lately as we’ve not run a dungeon together in weeks, so here is hoping this coming week we can all remedy that.

The City of Crows

Screenshot_20140428_061028 In spite of not being able to really play much Friday night and having to program on an application most of Saturday, I seem to have made up sufficient ground most of Sunday.  I started the day at 39 and working on the tail end of Alik’r and I finished the night dinging 42 and starting to make a dent in Bangkorai.  Right now I am questing out of Evermore and something odd is going on here.  The town is absolutely deluged in crows, and for those who have been through the Ebonheart Pact zone Crows Wood… I am beginning to wonder if it is for similar reasons.  If that is the case I will be extremely happy, because I love all things relating to that Daedra.  If not… it is at the very least a very cool and brooding locale, and thankfully a return to Breton architecture.  There is a kind of beauty to the harsh Redguard landscapes…  but their “cities” never really feel like proper cities to me.

If you are so inclined you can watch me faff about for awhile yesterday afternoon working on finishing a few quest chains in Alik’r.  Unfortunately I cannot “100%” the zone, due to the fact of a few bugged areas that I will have to come back for.  I am however happy enough to be moving on.  The desert is gorgeous, but also very spartan… and I will be happy to be roaming around areas with grass and trees again.  Bangkorai in general feels like a wrapping up of things.  This could be in part because the finale of both the Mages Guild and Fighters Guild quests chains occur within the city of Evermore.  I am rather happy with the conclusion of both to be honest, even though at least in the case of the fighters guild it took more than a few ziggzags to get there.

The Earth Forge

Screenshot_20140428_061721 One of the awesome things about both quest chains is that they unlock locations that were previously unreachable.  In the case of the Fighter’s guild you can then travel to the Earth Forge at any time, and I have to say… if they ever open up player housing… I am really hoping I have the option of getting a room here.  The Earth Forge is pretty much my ideal location.  It somehow blends a rocky pine filled mountain climate with the skeletal remains of a massive Dwemer machine.  This pretty much combines two of the things I love the most in Elder Scrolls games in one place.  If not I hope I can at least get a portal in my house to the Earth Forge, because I have a feeling I will be going out of my way to visit here regularly.

Screenshot_20140428_061328 The Mage’s Guild quest line similarly opens up permanent access to the lost island of Eyevea that Shalidor once controlled.  If you are into mages and such you should really like this place.  In a similar fashion to the Freeport Enchanters guild in Everquest, you travel around the island through a series of portals.  You can of course do it by foot, but the place is massive.  From the architecture and the environmental details I would guess this area is technically in the Ebonheart Pact somewhere, specificially in Morrowind.  The buildings are all mostly Dunmer architecture and the flora are mostly large mushrooms.  The best part about both unlocks is that they now give you access to two new crafting stations per location, that each creates an extremely powerful set of gear.  The only drawback is that each of them requires eight traits to be learned per item slot in order to craft them.

Grindless Crafting

Last night a discussion spawned in guild chat from one of our members talking about how much he disliked the way crafting worked in this game.  First off I was shocked a bit, because I personally could not describe a better system.  It is like everything I always wanted in a crafting system, and as I started digging into the reasons for why he didn’t like it, every point I brought up seemed to be something he enjoyed about it.  Finally I got down to the root of the problem… he felt that leveling tradeskills was a painful undertaking.  To some extent I agree, it feels like you are not making any progress, but then you learn that this is not the type of system you would ever “grind” your way through.

This is a negative side effect of the World of Warcrafts of the MMO world, in that it feels like you should grind your way through crafting to make sure you keep up.  So far I have not really made it my missing to level crafting at all, but instead have simply played the game as I normally would.  Multiple times a night I wayshrine back to a crafting hub, deconstruct any gear that I have gotten and go on about my business.  As a result my Blacksmithing is level 28, and Clothing and Woodworking 24.  Please note that the only thing I have ever crafted is sets of gear for myself and the occasional set of gear for a guildie.  I’ve never crafted a single Clothing or Woodworking item at all, and those skills have both progressed nicely.  This is the aspect of the game that I like almost more than anything else, crafting just happens as you play the game.

We’ve learned that the best way to level crafting is through deconstruction of gear.  At low levels you don’t get very much of it to be truthful, but as you move through the game the amount of drops that you get increases wildly.  Simply by playing the game and deconstructing everything you get, your tradeskills will more than keep up with where you need them to be.  It is hard to get used to this concept, and that progression through the ranks of crafting is more about how you spend your skill points and less about raw tradeskill level.  Mostly I just wanted to take a moment to address this today, just in case anyone else out there was trying to “grind” their way through crafting.  If you are doing this, you are on a path of madness because crafting and deconstructing your own items is without a doubt the least efficient way to level.  If you feel the need to “grind” at the very least find a crafting buddy.  You get far more experience deconstructing gear that someone else has crafted, so if you both craft items and swap you will both end up better off.

#AggroChat #ESO #ElderScrollsOnline #Alik’r #Bangkorai

Grand Anniversary

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No Free Lunch

Last night was Saturday night, and that means we recorded another episode of the Tales of the Aggronaut podcast…  AggroChat!  We had a few odd things going on last night.  Firstly Rae was off travelling in world visiting her longtime friends Ahi and Bez.  This means she was completely unavailable.  Additionally Kodra was travelling, and connected in from crappy hotel wifi in San Francisco… leading him to be a little bit robotty.  However we pushed through all of this and picked up a 4th player in the form of our good friend Tam.  He had been talked about plenty of times on the podcast already, and it only seemed fitting to have him sub in.  Super thankful for him to be willing to do it in a pinch.  We talked about all manner of things including Hex Closed Beta, ArcheAge and the concept of selling entry into the beta process, and our ideal scenarios as far as character building and abilities in MMOs go.

We are going to have to find a way to stay more on topic, because each episode has increased every so slightly in length.  The first one was right at an hour, the second an hour and fifteen minutes, and this one roughly an hour and thirty minutes.  We could have formal topics that we push through, but I personally like the meandering format, because it means it is more like the natural conversations we already have.  I wish I had kept rolling because moments after I cut the podcast off we had a pretty epic conversation about how Lucasfilm is disavowing the entire Expanded Universe concept… and while we will miss some things maybe it isn’t so much of a bad idea.  There were some really odd fan service things about the Expanded Universe that don’t really hold up story wise.

Steampowered Sunday #11

When Elder Scrolls Online released on a Sunday, it pretty much put a severe halt to my blog series known as Steampowered Sunday where I take some time and play a game from my backlog of titles.  Last night during the podcast we were talking about a game that Ashgar had been playing this week that fell firmly into the Bullet Hell genre.  Kodra seemed to think this was madness, and having been a big fan of Ikaruga I totally understood the draw.  There was a time period when I used to play lots of bullet hell shooters and pre-hell shooters.  Gradius, Darius Twin, Raiden Trad… all games I remember fondly.  I was never particularly good at them, but I enjoyed them nonetheless.  I remember playing 1942 on the nintendo for hour upon hour trying to make my way through all the stages.

At some point I just stopped playing them.  I think it was during the death of the dreamcast, but when I bought my PS2 I just simply stopped picking up the games anymore.  While I have Gradius 5 on my PS2, I guess my tastes in games changed a bit.  This honestly more than anything represents a period of time when I stopped playing consoles very much and started consuming games almost exclusively on the PC.  Every now and then I would flirt with a new shooter like the ever amazing Jamestown, but I never really got heavily into it again.  Last night in an attempt to cold boot this series again, Ashgar griefed me by gifting me a copy of a really rather awesome bullet hell shooter on steam.  At face value Danmaku Unlimited 2 reminds me of a less technical cousin to Ikaruga.  The soundtrack is in part what makes the gameplay, and helps you do what is needed to make it through the levels.  The secret to a bullet hell is to zone out and focus only on the pattern and not so much about the rest of the noise on screen.  Only a few things can actually hurt you, so you focus in on those things.

The hilarity of my play through is that after years of not playing these games my reflexes that had built up are completely gone.  In addition I am playing this game roughly thirty minutes after waking up.  So yeah I do pretty bad.  Ashgar tried to make me feel better by saying that I did significantly better than he did the first time.  Essentially the gameplay video is roughly seventeen minutes and the point at which I ran out of lives to keep going.  I made it to about the mid point of stage four.  All in all I think I did a pretty good job.  The awesome thing about the game is it is really cheap.  So for the price you cannot beat this kind of bullet hell goodness.  I feel like there is a lot of customization in the way you set up the game.  I went with pretty generic options and was playing on easy, so I think there is a lot more depth to be had there if I dig into it.  Probably going to stream some more of me trying to play it later.  In any case… I have successfully rebooted the Steampowered Sunday feature.  Long live me playing through my steam backlog!

Grand Anniversary

Last but definitely not least… today is the one year anniversary of the Grand Experiment… my attempt to blog something each and every day.  This means as of today I have made a post every single day for a year.  That is a pretty significant feat and I am really damned proud of myself for sticking with it.  At this point I figure I am going to try and make it another whole year without letting the beat drop.  It hasn’t been the most easy thing to do, but I want to take a moment to thank my wife who has been extremely supportive in this adventure.  There have been days where I might not have made it through the post without her just assuming that it was going to happen and giving me time and space to do so.  Additionally I want to thank my friends who have supported me in this madness and my readers.  There have been moments when I felt alone in my mission, and was surprised at how many of you have reached out your arms to help me along the way.  Somehow I have gone from being the least regular of bloggers… to the most regular, and it is a pretty insane transition.  I feel like I have grown a lot in the past year, and I thank you all for helping me with it.