Aggrochat Archives - Page 96 of 103 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Moon Raider

July 22, 2014 by Belghast

Edition Madness

I feel like the colorful descriptors that companies tack onto iterative versions of games has hit an all time low. Since the 80s we have been forced to play a progressively extreme number of versions of a game. During the 90s the Street Fighter franchise for example proved to us all of the ways it could not actually count to 3. We’ve suffered through Super, Hyper, Ultra, Zero, Alpha, Game of the Year, Ultimate, Legendary and innumerable other hardcore and extreme versions of the games we love. This morning as I idly checked Steam I spotted something that made my eye stop dead over it. We really have a game that is a “Velvet Edition”? What is next suede or cordura?

I keep thinking maybe this is a translation error somehow, but “Samten” doesn’t really sound much better. Maybe it is me, and I just have a negative connotation towards the word velvet, and maybe it is completely normal for someone to use that word in place of say “deluxe”. This is just a first for me, and I think maybe this whole descriptor thing has gone a bit far if we have arrived at fabrics now. I mean even though “game of the year” bundles are completely inappropriately named, considering very few of them have actually won a “game of the year” award… at least for awhile they were something standardized. I personally would rather they go with something like “complete edition” considering that is what we are talking about… the version that includes all the damned DLC in one place. Though I guess game companies would probably frown on admitting they have been rationing game content to us for years.

Moon Raider

We had a few errands to run last night, and by the time I got home I was not sure what exactly to play for the evening. Since this weekends podcast, Kodra has been urging me to finish up Wolfenstein so he could have someone to talk about it with. So I opted to work on that, and while I did not quite make it through the game I figure I am pretty close to the ending. I suffered a series of technical difficulties where I would crash out and have to load back in restarting me at the previous save point. When this happened the last time I figured I would call it a night, as it seemed like I was probably going to have to repeat a significant chunk of the previous level. It seems to be related to when I go into a cutscene and then come back out of it.

It is really hard to find screenshots that I can show off that don’t really give away anything major about the game. Well other than the fact that you get to experience Nazi’s on the moon… but that doesn’t really give much away plot wise. I feel like that is the aspect of the game I enjoy the most is seeing how this alternate reality evolved without the influence of the United States. So much of everything we experience today is because of the global export of American goods and American values. As a culture we have had a death grip on the entertainment industry and the internet as well… and as a result everything that comes from other countries often feels like an odd remix of something we would see in the United States. So to see this reality that evolved entirely in a different direction is interesting to me. I applaud the level designers because all of the little details feel like they come from a completely different place.

This game is definitely going to warrant a second play through, because there is a single decision that you make early on that causes the game to go in different enough directions that from that point on the chapters of the game branch depending on your choice made. It seems that Kodra and I picked completely different routes, and I think it will be interesting to talk about the differences between them. I don’t feel like this is probably a discussion we can really have on AggroChat because it would be impossible to do this in a way that is not spoilerific. I really hope all of you took advantage of the QuakeCon pricing and picked up this awesome game when it was essentially half price. I have a feeling that this game is going to experience quite a bit of third party modding, and I hope that sooner or later they bring out a multiplayer addon. One of the more enjoyable game play and narrative experiences I have had in awhile.

Sparse Next Few Days

The next few days are going to be interesting for me. Today is technically my last day at work this week, but just because I am off does not mean I won’t actually be working harder. My wife is part of a crew putting on a mathematics conference here in town, and I have opted to take off from work to help her with it. I know Wednesday for example I will be operating an impromptu shuttle service, and then the other days I will likely be filling in a tech support role and general “gopher”. With all of these constraints it will be interesting to see what I end up blogging about, as I doubt I will be playing that many games.

That said it sounds like at least one of the conference attendees is a Magic the Gathering fan, so I will be bringing up a box of decks just in case that happens. Speaking of Magic… I really have no clue what Wizards of the Coast was thinking when they came up with the 2015 product designs. Once upon a time the off brand products that you can get in your grocery store that are branded as Always Save or Best Choice or even Sam’s Choice were simply called “Generic”. They featured white labels with start sans-serif writing on them, similar to government commodities. So I cannot look at this magic the gathering set without thinking “oh its generic magic”. I feel like we arrived at this point out of some sort of hipster minimalist design ethic… but yeah it is just not working for me. I guess they have used every other color of the rainbow lately for the primary theme of a set… so sooner or later they were going to get around to white.

It will be interesting to see how the next few days shake out. Likely you will be getting some more personal posts. Right now the plan is to take my laptop and work on editing my NaNoWriMo novel between times I am needed. The only problem with this is that the guest wifi at the school is horrible. My phone will allow me to tether to it, but not sure how much I can do that without AT&T getting pissy with me. We are grandfathered in on one of the unlimited plans, and I don’t really want to do much to jeopardize that. The positive is that the Galaxy S5 shipped with unlocked tethering software, and it is not like I had to do anything to get it up and running. I just expect that all of the websites I would want to look at would be blocked without it.

#Wolfenstein #MagicTheGathering

Frog Fractions

July 20, 2014 by Belghast

Conference Prep Work

As I mentioned yesterday morning my day was filled with helping my wife prepare for the conference this week. One of the goofy things about a school system is that you cannot take for granted any two rooms being configured the same way. I have no doubt that at one point or another they were probably all working exactly the same. However a series of teachers with their own way of doing things has meant that no two projector systems were set up quite the same. So over the course of the morning we went from room to room turning everything on, and making notes as to how exactly you got sound from the system, and video to the projector. To add a monkey wrench in the works, some of the rooms had what is called an Elmo, which I guess is some sort of modern age version of the overhead projector.

Some of the systems routed through this device, others you simply had to switch the VGA port over to if it you wanted to use it. In each room I left instructions on a sticky note as to how to access both Audio and Video, and where needed how to use the Elmo machine. All of this said I will be around on the first day of the conference playing A/V support if someone has any issues. I am not phenomenally good at this role, but I can usually figure things out. Where things get dicey is in the few rooms that have bad connections run through the walls… and for those they were going to just have to deal with it. Most of the rooms go from an RCA jack to an optical connection that gets run through the wall, and it sounds as though maybe some of the optical cables have been damaged over time. The approved method of fixing this is apparently randomly wiggling the cords… which is probably what fractured the optical cables in the first place.

For the most part it took an hour or so per floor and then we broke for lunch. The highlight of the day was getting to have spicy chicken and cheese tots from Rons. The above picture represents the fruition of our work after lunch. I should have taken a before photo because the room had been previous configured with tons of tables strewn about. The tables didn’t fold and stack, but instead the top flipped up and you had to drive them carefully into the closets in a way as to compact them. I am rather proud of just how compact we managed to get them in there. The next thing was these heavy iron trays that the stacks of chairs sat on, which I carried into place and figured out a way to stack them in the closet as well. Finally this allowed us to arrange the chairs all 180 of them in 12 rows of 15 chairs. It was a busy day, but it looks awesome and is starting to feel ready for guests.

Weary Podcast

Last night was a podcast that I thought might not actually happen. Generally speaking we tend to start recording around 8 pm CST on Saturday nights. Last night it was 10 pm and we had not yet started recording, so I was beginning to think maybe episode 15 was not going to happen. I knew it was going to be a weird week because Rae is travelling and I thought Ashgar was going to be absent as well. Initially Kodra and I had planned on just having a conversation between the two of us about a few things we had talked about earlier in the week. As we got closer and closer to the show time… Kodra was nowhere to be found, but Ashgar miraculously showed up. I knew that Kodra had intended to come, so I just kept waiting. I was playing away in Minecraft and Ash playing Destiny so quite honestly the evening slipped away before we really noticed.

When Kodra finally came online we ran pretty late but I think we recorded an enjoyable podcast in spite of the overall tiredness that we all felt. A major event that happened this week was the complete and utter failure of the Yogventures kickstarter, and the scandal surrounding it. We talk at length about this and the potential ramifications it has for kickstarter projects in general. Additionally we talk about the Destiny Beta and FFXIV free weekends and how crazy it is when so many things are going on during one single weekend. We also talk about how our sense of community has changed and that it seems to no longer be connected to one game, but instead we take it along with us. Finally Kodra and I geek out talking about Wolfenstein New Order since he has recently played it. We had to cut a few sections to trim down time, but we kept the best stuff in there and have it ready to listen to.

Frog Fractions

I feel like I might be the last person on the planet to have experienced this game. For some time it has been coming up in both the podcast and just in regular conversation among my circle of friends, and I felt bad because I really did not give the game any time. My patience for web browser played flash games is pretty much non-existent. My line of thinking is, I cannot get away with playing this at work… so when I am home I would far rather be spending my time playing a “real” game instead of a web browser based one. Granted that probably sounds a little harsh but I have yet to find a web based game that really provides me as meaningful of a gaming experience as a traditional PC or console game. So when the absolute hype cycle surrounding the game happened I booted it up, clicked a few bugs saw some random shit appearing over their heads and walked away bored. I guess I didn’t pay close enough attention to realize… there is some really strange shit going on in this game. Be warned… there is no real way for me to talk about this game in any meaningful way without spoiling the fun. If you have not played Frog Fractions you should do so now before you progress any further in this post.

The game starts out as this somewhat charming if not low tech game where you are trying to protect fruit, allowing them to ripen by keeping bugs from eating them. You left click with your mouse to fire out your tongue, gobbling up the bugs and at the end of each round you earn points for each fruit you saved. The ones that you did not save fall into the water, and at first there is nothing really you can do about this. The moment at which the game starts to get odd… is when you start getting power-ups. Like the point at which I thought maybe this game was a bit strange was when I hit Cybernetic Brain. You can also upgrade your lilypad into a turtle friend, that allows you to move around with WASD to catch the fruit as they ripen. There is so much I don’t quite understand… like what the hell Zorkmids are or how you earn Indignity… which I assume is a bad thing. At this point I kept clicking away with the help of the upgrades… of which lock on targetting and static tongue seem to be the most game changing.

Then Shit Gets Weird

At some point you can unlock an upgrade that turns your turtle into a flying dragon… at which point the game suddenly becomes a bullet hell shooter. So you fly around trying to avoid the multicolored balls while still gobbling up the bugs and trying to save the fruit from falling into the water. By this point I had upgraded the fruit to durians… which smell bad, and cause the bugs to eat them more slowly. This is the video game equivalent to Axe Cop, in that it seems like it was almost designed by using madlibs and a 8 year old kid.

It was at this point I figured out that I could go underwater…. where all the lost fruit was apparently waiting on the bottom of the lagoon. You can see that apparently now the fruit score does not matter at all, because it now simply reads “Like a billion”. I have no clue why but I made five or six passes through the fruit watching them all fail to register. I thought maybe something would happen if I did it enough, but finally gave up on the process and went back up to bullet hell land. One of the funniest things is the whole lock on vision upgrade. First you get it, then you get the ability to uninstall it, and then you get the ability to reinstall it… which finally unlocks the ability to uninstall it again. Each time this happens it is not like the previous slot becomes available again… it just keeps tacking new upgrade slots onto the grid. I kind of want to play again and see just how many times I can unlock and remove this option.

Starfox Has Nothing on Me

After a few more waves of bullet hell madness… my dragon apparently decides to shoot off into outerspace. So now I am inexplicably trying to save flying fruit, while dodging asteroids and bug attacks. Apparently I am going to attack the bug homework… which is apparently “Bug Mars”. All the while this phase is going on, various characters keep showing up and giving me words of advice in Starfox fashion… I was disappointed that none of them told me to do a barrel roll (which tam will tell me is not a barrel roll at all). This continued for six or so waves, all the while it getting harder to get at the bugs because my frog tongue could not go through the asteroids.

In the weirdest of possible events… some how I get captured and taken to Bug Court. Where basically I am forced to choose between becoming a naturalized citizen of Bug Mars… or forced labor. I am not sure you actually have a choice here, or if you are pretty much forced to become a citizen either way. They ask you a series of questions about Bug Mars culture, and either I got really lucky or quite literally answering anything… is the correct answer. Some of the responses are really damned funny, but man this is not anything I ever saw coming before playing this game. In a way it kind reminds me of a modern version of “Takeshi’s Challenge”, and for those who have no ideal what this is you should totally watch the JonTron playthrough.

So there you have it… I am now apparently a naturalized Citizen of Bug Mars. You would think that maybe this is as weird as the game gets, but you would be wrong. Shortly after this I rode on the back of my dragon through an underwater world while a narrator explained to me the true meaning of boxing… and how this modern punching thing is just a strange bastardization. Which then lead me to a rocket ship… and a text based adventure game. This is the point at which I stopped playing this morning. This game… is insanity bottled. I keep wondering just how deep the rabbit hole gets. I mean like what is on the other side of the text adventure game. The best thing about all of this is the fact that the name of the game is a complete and total lie. Nothing at all about this game has to do with fractions. Even if you have against my warning made it this far in my post without having played the game yourself… I highly suggest you experience the madness for yourself.

#AggroChat #FrogFractions #SteampoweredSunday

Wandering Auridon

July 14, 2014 by Belghast

Cheating on AggroChat

I don’t believe I said anything about this beforehand, but once again I was invited to guest host on Game On the MMORPG.com podcast hosted by @GameByNight and @Liores. I guess this means I didn’t make an ass of myself the first time they had me on. I have a lot of fun doing the podcast with them, because since I have known both for quite some time… it just feels like having a conversation with friends. This time around they also invited @AppleCiderMage so it was awesome getting to properly meet and hang out with her as well. The two of us have operated in the same circles for awhile, but never really had any direct interaction other than through twitter.

The podcast generally releases around Wednesday and I will post a link when it is up and ready to go. I feel like we maybe derailed the podcast, because they had this long list of things to talk about and I think maybe we got through three of them in the allotted time. Then again anyone who has listened to AggroChat should know that I can ramble on about nothing at length. AppleCider held up her end of the rambling as well, and I feel like the two of us combined pushed the train good and solidly off the rails. That said it was a blast to do it, and I look forward to maybe filling in again sometime in the future. I have to say though that since we record AggroChat on Saturday nights, it was weird to get up the next morning and prepare to do another podcast.

Wandering Auridon

While waiting around on podcast time I decided to stream a little Elder Scrolls Online. The other day I was absolutely shocked that someone posted on my youtube channel asking why I had stopped playing. It made me realize just how much time had passed since I had streamed anything, let alone Elder Scrolls Online. I guess maybe I am poking my head out of turtle mode, because streaming didn’t seem that bad yesterday. I am still poking my way around Auridon working on the quests there. In the video I play for roughly an hour and complete a couple of different quest chains. Most of my morning however was spent trying to sort out my addons. It seems like recently they had a patch that broke several of the addons that I was using. The weird thing about it is that several of the addons were apparently working, but being suppressed by other addons that were not.

While I still really enjoy Elder Scrolls Online, it had been quite some time since I had logged in. I of course logged into a mail message from my research assistant, but the one prior to that was from 19 days ago, so that means I had been offline for at least that long. The pace of the veteran content is a bit of a problem to be honest. While it is enjoyable to quest my way through the Aldmeri content that I had not seen… in the video I complete a handful of quest chains and my experience bar makes no noticeable movement. It gets frustrating to feel like you are making no forward momentum as you quest your way around the world. I talk about that a bit on the Game On podcast but when you move into veteran content it feels like you get stuck on high center. There are some rather sweeping changes coming in August, so here is hoping it improves the feel of the veteran experience.

Modding Fallout 3

The other day I stumbled across a series of pictures of a completely modded out Fallout 3 install. This combined with me playing some FO3 on the PS3 made me want to try playing the game with the same visual effects as shown in those photos. While I am getting closer, I can’t seem to get the visual splendor shown there. Right now I think I have all of the mods mentioned in the description installed and it looks much better than a default install, but something is still missing. Namely the sky is still the ominous grey blob that it has been on previous plays of the game. I am wondering if this is just a side effect of being in the Megaton area, and as I move out into the game proper maybe that changes. In any case I am going to keep trying to mod it until I can achieve the kind of clarity that you see in the images.

Other major change this play through is that I am trying to stick to using the Xbox 360 controller. Basically I have reached a point where I feel like the mouse and keyboard artificially limit me in the number of games that I can play. Right now the consoles seem to be the primary target for game developers, and the PC market gets ports namely, and that means all of these interfaces are designed with a controller in mind… and then later retrofitted to work with a keyboard and mouse. I feel like at this point I need to teach myself to be better at using a controller or ultimately there will reach a point where my chosen way of gaming is no longer supported. Hell to be honest it feels like the keyboard and mouse thing is already a rarity among anything that is not an MMO. With games like Destiny looming on the horizon, I feel like training myself to get by with only the controller is going to be a good thing… and I will go through the growing pains with games that I am already very familiar with before branching out on new titles that I am not.

#Fallout3 #ElderScrollsOnline

We Kill Routers

July 13, 2014 by Belghast

Running About in OKC

My wife and I first got hooked on Half Priced Books during a random trip to Dallas Texas. I had heard of the chain before, but had never been to one. At that point we had a Garmin GPS and we punched “book” into the POI search and happened to find one nearby. From that point onwards when we went to a new area we immediately searched to see if they had any of the stores. During a trip to Madison Wisconsin we managed to hit three different stores up there, and on our last trip to Dallas I think we hit around fifteen of them. Tulsa unfortunately does not have any yet, but an hour and a half from Tulsa in Oklahoma City they have three of them in the metro area. So every now and then we make a trip down there just for the purpose of hitting all three of them.

I was trying to explain to my coworkers what makes them special, and if you have never been… and especially if you not a bibliophile it just would never make any sense. One of the most magic things about the store is they have a rather large used role-playing games section. On past trips I have found all sorts of wonders, but just the simple fact that a store exists in Oklahoma with this sort of stuff makes me happy. This trip I honestly didn’t walk away with much from HBP. I picked up a Minecraft book by scholastic, that is obviously targeting children but manages to explain Redstone wiring in a simple enough manner that I think I can “grok” it. Additionally I picked up the second book in the Odd Thomas series, and the Silent Hill Collection for the PS3 since I have never actually played 2 or 3 in that series but loved the hell out of the first one.

Carpet Jesus

Another thing we did yesterday was run around to a series of pawn shops in my search for “cheap” Xbox 360 and PS3 games. I managed to stumble onto a cache of $5 a piece PS3 games here in Tulsa at a Cash America pawn shop, and I knew that in OKC they had at least 11 of them. We tried to hit as many of them as we could while weaving across town to hit all three of the HBP stores. The lesson of the day seemed to be that OKC wanted more for their stuff than I was willing to pay for it. Locally the most you will ever pay for a game in a pawn shop is $15, and while wandering across OKC I routinely saw them for as much as $30 in the same pawn shop chains we have here in town. I even managed to hit a Game XChange which is a chain that used to be really big around here… and there they were selling PS4 games that you can buy brand new at Target for $39.95 for $54.

When I see a price like that, maybe it is horrible of me… but the first thing that goes through my head is “that’s adorable”. I feel like maybe Oklahoma City in general just doesn’t know how to price things. During our travels we stumbled across a fairly nice looking thrift store and the carpet jesus picture above hails from it. Among the various baubles is a brand new sealed box for an Intel EtherExpress LAN Adapter. The one pictured above is an ISA card… designed to go in an IBM 286/386 machine and Novell Netware that is advertised on the back side. This is pretty much the best technology Intel had to offer in 1992, and seems to be pulled off the shelf of someone’s closet and donated to charity. The pricetag is not a mistake… they apparently do want $59 for this mint in box artifact of the pre-internet age. Oklahoma City apparently lives in a bubble where they don’t have a clue what anything is actually worth.

We Kill Routers

This morning I woke to the fun surprise of having no internet in our house. Apparently between the time that I recorded our podcast and edited it last night, and this morning our Asus router died. The thing is we are exceptionally hard on routers it seems, because it seems that at least once a year I end up replacing one. I have to think it is because we have so many internet connected devices. We have 5 laptops, 3 desktops, 2 phones, 2 tablets, 3 chromecasts, and 5 gaming consoles connected to our wireless router pretty much all of the time. That is a lot of strain on any device and they seem to just explode after awhile. So this morning I connected the internet directly into my main desktop and got on long enough to do some research and write this blog post.

I found a device at our local Best Buy that looks like it might do the job. It is supposedly designed to handle multiple devices at the same time, so we will see if we end up killing this one as well. The last one only manages to survive 6 months… and honestly it might still be under warranty and I will try and dig that information up and try and replace it. It would make a nice little router for the lake to be honest. I did the in store pickup option on the new one, so right now I am just waiting on the email to let me know it is ready to go. I had heard really good things about the Netgear Nighthawk, so we will see if it lives up to the marketing hype.

Exclusionary Subcultures

Last night we managed to get the entire AggroChat podcast crew together once again for another broadcast. Tonight we talk at length about the various things we have been doing including Minecraft, VVVVVV, Adventure Time Battle Party, and a few other things. The bulk of the show however is a discussion about various subcultures. Gaming and geekdom in general can be a very exclusionary place. Not that we solve any of the worlds problems, but we at least have a discussion about them. We ran a bit longer than normal this time, but we had a lot of stuff to talk about.