AggroChat Podcast Archives - Page 86 of 86

Big Dumb Broforce

April 17, 2014 by Belghast

Happy Friday

At the very least, Happy Friday to me! This is the last day of my week as we have Good Friday off tomorrow. I plan on spending the day in a near vegetative state playing Elder Scrolls Online and likely streaming quite a bit of it. It seemed like today was going to be a day I could wrap up the loose ends. I have a bunch of projects that each need a few hours of undivided attention to finish up the last bits of coding. The problem is I am constantly getting interrupted at work by “fly bys” when some random person comes by to ask a question. Looking at my calendar it was completely clear, so I thought I would be leisurely listening to the ESO soundtrack and working through the last bits of these projects.

WRONG! I generally check my work email a few times a night, and right before bedtime I noticed I had been invited to a meeting to discuss hopefully the technical details of a new project. Then I panned down and noticed the time. There is a special place in hell for people who schedule 12 am to 1 pm meetings. Sure enough this damned vendor had done just that, so now I have to give up my lunch hour to listen to some vendor do a sloppy job of trying to explain the technical requirements of their product. I hate vendors… mostly because where I work the relationship of vendor and customer seems to be completely backwards. We always end up having to jump through hoops to meet vendor needs… when it should be the other way around.

Big Dumb Broforce

One of the things that I lament about modern video game design… is the attempt to make them feel like interactive movies. While I can appreciate the craftsmanship of the Mass Effect series, it is not the type of game I want to play every single day. I like blowing things up, gibbing bad guys and generally saving the day. I have massive amounts of notalgia over the big dumb games of my childhood. Nobody really gave a shit about the storyline in Double Dragon, because mostly it was completely incoherent. However we did know the bad guys by name and enjoyed punching them repeatedly. The name Abobo still sends an irrational amount of fear through me.

Broforce is basically one of these games with a storyline that is basically an excuse to blow a bunch of stuff up. The game is very reminiscent of Metal Slug, another title that I absolutely love, with a few significant tweaks. The gameplay is very similar, go through the map rescuing prisoners of war. The twist is each time you rescue another prisoner, you gain an extra life and then transform into that prisoner. This gives the game a huge cast of characters, all of which have extremely unique abilities. In the above shot I ended up playing as J from Men in Black… known in this game as “Bro in Black”. All of the various characters have been given bro names like “Brobocop” or “B.A. Broracus”.

At the end of each sequence of levels there is a boss fight, this one is a helicopter that alternates between dropping bombs and firing a chain gun at you. What makes it difficult is that both NPC weapons and your weapons can destroy terrain. Meaning pretty quickly you are running out of places to stand. One nifty tip that I have noticed is that the platforms the flags spawn on are indestructible, meaning you can use them as a shield when the bomb phase starts. All of this said the gameplay is just infectious. I’ve played roughly an hour so far, and am really enjoying myself. The only thing that I find frustrating is that not all of the “bros” are created equal. Some of them like the MacGyver clone are extremely situational. It reminds me of playing Castlevania and getting stuck with the wrong alternate attack right before a boss fight.

The one thing that would greatly improve the experience for me is the ability to swap back and forth between the bros you have rescued. That would make the gameplay feel more strategic and less random. Even in the modern Castlevania games you got a second chance to swap back to the weapon you had before. It is bad enough that if I get MacGyver I tend to just suicide out to swap to a new character. Playing mad bomber is just not as fun as it seems… even though his bombed turkey attack is hilarious to watch. The game is available through steam early release, but it feels pretty damned complete to me. If you like mindless shoot-em-up game play, I highly suggest you give it a look.

Wandering Rivenspire

The rest of the night I ended up working on the various quests in Rivenspire. This zone might be my nemesis, not because I don’t like it… but maybe that I like it too much. I find it nearly impossible to focus while wandering around a landscape full of vampires. I end up falling into vampire hunter mode and spending large amounts of time slaughtering the undead without really knowing I have done it again. I desperately tried to stay focused last night and follow the quest chains. I managed to ding 32 and at this point I am no longer getting drops from most of the encounters around me. It seems like if you are not within five levels of the encounter it becomes trivial and stops dropping anything meaningful.

I am however using the opportunity to loot everything I see, and feed the cooking mats to Kodra and Sylladora depending on the level of the material. I hit a lucky streak last night and managed to get both the Breton and Argonian racial motif books. The Argonian one is still looking for a home by the way if any of my guildies need or want it. A few days ago I managed to get an Imperial motif book, so they do apparently exist for everyone concerned the only way to get imperial gear was through the collectors edition. I managed to find a buyer for it and got 10,000g… which I figured was pretty damned good considering that the other motif books started out around 2,000 and have quickly dropped to 500 as the market has become flooded.

For awhile I was trying to broker a trade for either the Barbarian or Primal racial motif, however I have heard they are pretty common drops in the veteran levels. That ancient elves and daedra are far more difficult to find. I figure getting the gold while I can for the imperial book was the best course of order. Like always I am in a relative state of poor in this game, but I need to begin saving up for my fast pony. I might have to give up on deconstructing everything I see and just start selling it to make a profit. My biggest concern right now is that I am several levels ahead of the zone I am in… and this just seems to keep getting worse as I move upwards. I just find it impossible to move on past a zone until I think I have gotten everything out of it.

Interesting Footnote

It seems as though I am going to be on two podcasts this weekend. I will of course be recording the second episode of AggroChat… which I am looking forward to. We have several topics that we may or may not get around to discussing. It should be a fun time for me at least either way. The second however is that I will be guesting on the Multplaying.net podcast. So keep watching their site for the file because I am sure it will be a fun time.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #BroForce #AggroChat #Multiplaying

Life in Castlevania

April 14, 2014 by Belghast

Keep Progress

Last night I popped into Landmark for a bit and continued work on Belgarde Keep. At this point I have burned through around 1 million stone and still have so much more to do. One of my friends chastised me for building with stone. He said that I could do this much more easily with dirt and then come back over and paint in the stone texture. For whatever reason that just feels like cheating. Right now I can carve out bits of detail as I so choose and I still have stone underneath. With dirt I feel like I would be playing a constant game of trying to keep the facade looking right. The irony of my structure is that in a game with a pretty prolific smooth tool… I go out of my way to try and keep from anything getting smoothed. I don’t like the way it mushes up the textures to be honest.

I was feeling pretty good about my progress until I saw this picture… it looks like maybe my structure is a voxel off somewhere when it comes to what is currently the upper tier. So that means I will likely have to rip it out and start over from scratch placing stuff up there. However for the time being I think I will leave it as is until I get the “oomph” to go on another massive stone farming mission. The section I am standing on in this above photo… I am thinking about removing large chunks of it and making it a low balcony. Giving it more of a ramparts feel to it. Right now I am pretty pleased with how things are going, I just need to pull myself away from Elder Scrolls Online more often to do more work on it.

Life in Castlevania

I spent most of yesterday faffing about in Rivenspire, and as was my expectation from yesterday… it is very much Castlevania. Stuff is going horribly wrong in zone, and it is mostly due to the fact that we have free roaming vampires everywhere. There are few things I like more than slaughtering malformed vampires, but apparently one of them is killing Trolls. I remember in Skyrim the first time I was attacked by an Ice Troll. It felt completely epic seeing this lumbering shape charging at me through the blowing snow. That feeling apparently never gets old because I spent a good chunk of the day yesterday avoiding finishing a quest just so I could kill loads more trolls. Fire is traditionally the weakness, and I am not sure if that is still the case… but I as a Dragon Knight I applied loads of it just in case.

Rivenspire in the way it is laid out seems to be designed to keep me moving around in circles. There are so many things I still have to do in the zone to be able to move on… and I have already dinged 30. I am afraid I will be at least 35 before I manage to gather up the presence of mind to focus on the task at hand. This game for whatever reason is almost my kryptonite. There are so many shinnies and rabbit trails that I cannot keep from following. One minute I will be on task riding towards an objective, then a dark tear will open up from the sky and dump things down onto me… then I spend the next forty minutes on a mindless rampage across the country side only to realize I am back where I started and no closer to my objective. Thing is… I might get frustrated over my constant state of distraction, but I am enjoying each and every minute of it.

Faffing About Bleakrock

In an attempt to let people catch up a bit I decided to run around on my little Bosmer Nightblade in the Ebonheart Pact. Nothing terribly exciting but I thought I would stream my adventures. I had not streamed in awhile, and I end up joined by my friend Pazz. Over the course of an hour I make my way through the Bleakrock quests. If you’ve already played through Bleakrock there is nothing terribly exciting to see here, other than me roaming around aimlessly with a big sword. I really like the Bosmer for some reason, they feel more “feral”. In a way I am purposefully rolling things that would not be seen natively in an area. I plan on making an Argonian when I roll a character in the Aldmeri Dominion. You can listen to Pazz and I rattle on for awhile, and since he apparently does not understand how to make a push to talk key you get to listen to his inane water bottle noises that sound rather “questionable”.

You Apparently Like Us?

I am absolutely floored over the support we have gotten so far on the podcast. Embedding it again because it seems like the thing to do. Honestly I expected to post the podcast and then maybe have a dozen listeners that took pity on us enough to download it. Instead I have gotten some pretty positive comments. I know that it is currently pretty low quality, but that is something we can improve on over time. I had a friend ask me what bitrate we encoded at… and I literally had no answer. I just saved it out without really paying attention what I chose. I also want to fiddle a bit with the actual recording next time around. The positive is that I do believe there will be a next time. We all had fun doing it, and even if no one else was listening I think we would still continue recording.

I had a few people offer to be guests, and another few people offer to have us on their podcasts for some cross pollination. I think for the short term we need to lock down exactly what it is that we are doing before changing the mix significantly. I think it would be fun to record a show where we completely open things up similar to my podcasts, but then again that might be a little odd fighting to stay on task with people constantly popping in and out. For the time being what we did works, so I expect to keep tweaking that a little bit to improve the quality. I’ve already worked on a new version of the intro, and hopefully by next week Rae will have our awesome Chibis finished. This is starting to feel like a “real” thing… and while that is odd, it is also pretty damned cool.

#Landmark #ElderScrollsOnline #AggroChat #RIvenspire #Bleakrock

A Wild Podcast Appears!

April 13, 2014 by Belghast

The Birth of AggroChat

This mornings blog post is going to be heavily related to what we did yesterday. Firstly… I have long thought that some of the conversations we had on the House Stalwart mumble sounded pretty damned close to many of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis. While I did not think we would ever be as polished as Alternative Chat, or as awesomely thematically focused as the Battle Bards… I thought our people had something interesting to add to the mix. This is happening super fast to be honest, but that is probably a good thing. I was afraid that this would end up being yet another idea we had, that we never quite capitalized on.

We first talked about doing this on April 9th, and here it is the 13th and we have our first show up. I am sure at this point it is somewhat awkward of a recording but we will get better. Additionally at some point I will lean how the hell to use audacity and make a better sounding introduction. We have a super ghetto libsyn page up right now, and that will also be changing hopefully over the coming weeks. Rae is working on some really awesome chibi versions of the co-hosts and she would likely kill me if I posted the pencil versions before she has time to pretty them up. If you guys did not know it was Rae that drew the original Belghast chibi that adorns this blog, so the new ones are truly awesome. Since libsyn needed a 1400×1400 square image I threw together a truly obnoxious placeholder image.

A Wild Podcast Appears!

As I alluded to above… last night at 8pm EST we did our very first recording. It was a little awkward starting out, but as the night went on things felt more natural. There was a point at the end where I finally looked at the clock and noticed we had been rambling on for an hour and decided to cut things off. In truth we hang out on mumble damned near every night, so I knew that once we got over the hump of doing this “for real” things would begin to flow again. We covered a pretty wide gamut of topics from ESO Craglorn Adventure Zone, to Heroes of the Storm, to My Little Pony Card game and many many stops in-between. I will leave it up to you guys to determine if it is a worthy pursuit. I am pretty happy with the way things turned out, for it being our very first podcast… and none of us really know what the hell we are doing. Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the end result.

Right now we are very much in a “finding our format” mode. Functionally we have been keeping things really simple. We all share access to a google doc that is a running show topics of sorts. In this first episode we barely scratched the surface of all the things we ended up brainstorming. Mostly I would like to see us keep things pretty lose, but we might start doing a section for news after the what we are playing bit. While the “what everyone is playing” thing is pretty generic, it seems to work really well to break the ice and get things rolling. I’ve seen numerous podcasts and video casts do that one… so I felt not shame in blatantly stealing it.

Rivenspire is Serious Business

Yesterday morning pretty early I finished up the content in Stormhaven and moved up into the Rivenspire area. The transition between Glenumbra and Stormhaven was pretty extreme, but there seems to be an equally steep divide between Stormhaven and Rivenspire. Single pulls are pretty much a thing of the past, and it is very unlikely that I now find smaller than a three pull when I am running around. As a result of this and a result of the fact that I have a really awesome onehander right now… I am back to mostly playing as sword and shield instead of two hander. I am still really enjoying the content, and if you played through SWTOR at all… Rivenspire feels a lot like Alderaan.

You have these competing families vying for control of the land, with one of them having gone completely off the deep end. Additionally there is a very “Castlevania” feel to the zone, which tells me as I get deeper in I will like the content even more. Few things make me happier than slaying Werewolves and Vampires…. and the zone also has a pretty heavy contingent of Daedra to boot. In fact one of the public dungeons I ventured into thinking I could solo it… and ended up getting bailed out by my friend Warenwolf. It easily had to have a dozen different bosses in it including the ones associated with the quest chain. It is truly insane the amount of loot you get in a group public dungeon like that. We both had to resort to “mail banking” where we mail the items to a friend and they return it back to us later.

Tag Team Farming

While recording the podcast last night, Rae and I spend most of it faffing about in Landmark. The thing that has had me high center in my building project is a complete and total lack of stone. My structure is almost entirely made of stone and it took over 200,000 to get to the point at which it is today. Last night I went out into the desert and dug down, as underneath sand is generally a solid bed of stone as far as you can possibly dig. Before I knew it Rae had joined me and we were carving out a massive swath of stone beneath the ground. While recording we managed to harvest up over 300,000 and as a result I went back and added in floors/ceilings to my stone superstructure. This makes me happy as I was getting tired of seeing the grass growing up in the middle of my keep. From here I am not quite sure where I am going next but I have a few ideas.

If you are in game you should totally swing by Liberation/Levee and check out Rae’s adjoining claims. They are located on a hill southeast of the spire, and the low settings I have to run the game on for my laptop to not completely die… are not doing it justice. She has this really awesome garden area, and then down the hill she has a guest house. Her main house is carved out of the hillside and a subterranean area. If you are in need of a crafting hub she also has pretty much all of the machines. She has another super secret project, but I won’t be showing it since i think she is going to try and enter it in the “Landmark’s Landmarks” contest. Here is hoping she does well because it is looking really cool.