Blaugust Archives - Page 33 of 38 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Cannot Be Tamed Questionnaire: Part 1

August 20, 2014 by Belghast

Packaged with a Bow

I am not sure if this was intended to draw out posts during Blaugust or not, but yesterday Jasyla over at Cannot Be Tamed posted a survey. I seem to be able to rattle on every morning without much issue, but I am always thankful when a ready made post is handed to me so neatly. In part my hope is that through my own blog post and Liore’s (who turned me onto this) we will get this one spread through out the Blaugust community and get Jasyla a bunch of responses. I am really not sure how far I will make it into the survey in a single post, but we will see.

Cannot Be Tamed Gaming Questionnaire

You can see the full text of the survey here, but I will attempt to answer all of the questions

1. When did you start playing video games?

I honestly do not remember a time when I was NOT playing video games. I would have to say age three or four maybe? The earliest memory I had of video games was that my parents owned a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. More than actually playing it… I remember the desire to play it. Like from the moment it got hooked up to the television I wanted my hands on it. Though being as young as I was, my parents were super reluctant to let me play. It was finally my Uncle Billy who I think let me play for the first time, and I remember losing almost immediately. The thing is it intrigued me so much that I kept wanting to try over and over. That early experience pretty much imprinted my brain for video games permanently.

2. What is the first game you remember playing?

Well like I said in the above answer the first game I remember playing is Pong. The first game I remember absolutely loving however was probably Ms Pacman. My aunt was the first to get an Atari 2600 and all of us cousins played it nonstop over most of our formative years. I ended up getting a second hand Atari system not too long after that. The game I can remember playing the most of however was Seaquest a game where you rescued drivers from sharks in a little sub that could fire a weapon. It was also the first game I can remember playing that didn’t have just a constant repetition of levels. As you progressed through levels the colors would change and new enemies would be added, and we wove a complex storyline through these simple transitions.

3. PC or Console?

I am primarily a PC gamer, but it hasn’t always been that way. In fact I have a ton of rare console systems stored away in my closet including an 3DO, a NeoGeo and a TurboDuo. In fact during the years before I got hooked on MMOs I had a video game loft with all of my consoles hooked up and “on tap” through a complex series of A/B switches. I have spent large swaths of my time shifting back and forth between them. Prior to 1992 I was a hardcore console gamer and mostly an Super Nintendo JRPG fan. Then we got a PC and I got hooked on Wolfenstein, Doom and Civilization. As I went through college the 3D graphics changes were happening and I was all about playing everything in “GL”. It was during this time that I played Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, Fallout, Quake, Baldur’s Gate and pretty much anything i could get my hands on.

When I got out of college however I had a massive console resurgence with the Sony Playstation, Dreamcast, and Saturn systems. I didn’t really make the journey back into PC exclusivity until I got hopelessly mired in the original Everquest around the release of the Scars of Velious expansion pack. It has been my love of the MMO that has kept me glued to the PC, and while I have dabbled with the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and PS4… I still prefer the PC. While until recently it was the MMOs that had kept me there, it is also the fact that I can modify my games freely. Everytime I install a new back of mods in Fallout 3, it makes it a completely new experience for me and I go through another 50 to 100 hour play through running back through all the content with fresh eyes. So when given the chance I will almost always gravitate back to the PC.

4. XBox, PlayStation, or Wii?

I started off my gaming life as a Nintendo Fanboy, but over the years their consoles have gotten less and less practical. All I really want is for them to release a good solid console without a gimmick controller. I don’t want new ways to play my games, I just want new content. I am admittedly these days a Sony Playstation fan. I have owned two different Xbox 360s, but it is really the value of the Playstation Plus subscription that keeps me attached to Sony. Over the last few years they have come off as the good guy in the console wars, and Microsoft coming off as the part of the stodgy corporate power. I realize that both are huge corporations hell bent on parting me from my money, but I feel less horrible about supporting Sony. Right now I have the PS3, PS4 and Vita in my office and they are hooked up so I can livestream the PS3/PS4 so I guess my alignment is pretty clear.

5. What’s the best game you’ve ever played?

The game I constantly keep coming back to over the years is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The game represents pretty much my perfectly crafted game. For starters it is lovingly drawn 2D animation and not 3D. It has an amazing soundtrack with awesome rock versions of the Castlevania classics. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Castlevania franchise, despite how many false steps it has taken over the years. I love the idea of hunting down Vampires, Werewolves, Ghouls, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. Castlevania is one of the first games I purchased for myself on the original Nintendo. I remember saving up my money and making a trip to Toys R Us to get it… and that was quite the pilgrimage considering the closest one was an hour away. Symphony of the Night was pretty much the pinnacle of “metroidvania” for me. It had roleplaying and leveling elements to keep me hooked, and an awesome world to explore and find all sorts of secrets. I have repurchased this game at least four different times, on various platforms and I have it installed on my Vita at the moment. When I am feeling horrible this is the game I boot up to take me back to a time when everything made sense.

6. What’s the worst game you’ve ever played?

I have played so many games since the days of the Atari 2600, but no game has ever absolutely confounded me as much as E.T. the Extraterrestrial. This game is the game that began my fear of movie tie-ins regardless of what they might be. I was still in elementary school when the movie came out, and absolutely loved it. So when they released it on my favorite console system the Atari, I had to get it right? There was nothing at all about this game that made any sense what so ever, and still to this day I cannot reason what the hell I am supposed to do. You alternated between getting humped by men in trenchcoats, to picking up piles of poo on the ground that were supposed to be Reese’s Pieces… to falling into trenches for no apparent reason. To make things even stranger… sometimes the trenches had things that looked like record players… that gave you credit of some sort for collecting them. But the most frustrating part was trying to get back out of the trenches, which involved extending your neck and levitating out… but you had to do so in exactly the right spot or you fell back down again. This was the first game to ever make me want to throw my controller across the room. After all of these years I still get angry thinking about the disappointment I felt as a kid playing this game. I have to say that the Ghostbusters Atari 2600 game redeemed movie ports somewhat, because I remember that game was really good.

Taking Longer than Expected

So at this point I am only 6 questions in… and there are a total of 21. This is going to take awhile, so hopefully you can bare with me as I answer a few questions each morning. I simply have run out of time this morning so I have to cut this off here. I blame the fact that I just had to look up images to go with each of the paragraphs. In any case tune in tomorrow for the next set of questions, where I hopefully make it through more than six!

Whorleater

August 18, 2014 by Belghast

Monday Morning Coming Down

This morning I quite literally could not remember if it was Monday or Sunday. I had to turn on the television just to make sure it really was Monday and that I should be getting up instead of heading back to sleep. This is not the best possible start to the work week, but I am slowly climbing my way to consciousness as I sip this coffee. Not quite certain why this morning is such a struggle, because in theory I got to bed at a decent hour last night. My wife and I both spontaneously decided it was bedtime at roughly 10pm. Ultimately I managed to get to sleep a little bit after that fact, but this morning I am still periodically trying to type with my eyes closed.

I would say it was a medium busy weekend as far as weekends go. We spent a good deal of time attempting to clothing shop for my wife, which means I spent a good deal of time messing about on my phone. Sadly in both our excursion to Muskogee and our outing yesterday afternoon she did not find much of anything. I did however find more severely discounted Legos and added a couple more Lord of the Rings sets to my collection. Other than the shopping excursions and dropping my jeep off to get oil changed and a flat fixed… the bulk of my weekend was spent in Final Fantasy XIV. Overall it was an extremely productive weekend all around.

Whorleater

One of my goals this weekend was to catch up on the main storyline quest to be prepared for the eventual 2.4 patch. So far there have been three major content patches in Final Fantasy XIV and in each they have progressed the main storyline adding a new primal to fight. The first patch added Good King Moggle Mog, the second Leviathan, and the third patch added Ramuh. Before yesterday morning I had caught up in the quest chain to Leviathan, but had limited luck in getting a group. However yesterday I managed to get a group within ten minutes of queuing. The fight takes place out on the ocean. The storyline is that they have built a special platform to help neutralize his abilities and allow you to fight him. So you are towed out into the middle of the ocean and left to fight him off alone.

The fight feels deeply foreboding and the music that plays in the background only serves to reinforce this. They are after all asking you to duel a god. During the fight itself the platform is attacked by the head of Leviathan and his tail. The DPS shifts back and forth between fighting the tail and destroying these globules that spawn up on deck. I am not sure exactly what killing them does, but I know that ignoring them completely wipes the raid. Every so often Leviathan will do this attack where he lays his body across the bow of the platform causing it to rock violently against the waves, and tilting the entire platform to one side dragging everyone there. Seeing this in action looks amazing since the entire horizon shifts slightly as the platform lists in the waves. It took a few tries but we managed to down him without much issue.

Lord of Levin

After defeating Leviathan a large chunk of us from the free company moved on to do Battle of the Big Bridge which is an optional primal like encounter where you face Gilgamesh the samurai. The most awesome thing about this encounter was the fact that we managed to pull it together through the use of several different linkshells. We picked up a person from our housing linkshell and then another person through a social linkshell that Tam was a part of. The fact that people are willing to drop what they are doing and help out with things like this makes me happy. The Big Bridge encounter doesn’t really reward much of anything, and there are no drops to speak of, just a crazy time running around. The best part about it is almost all of the Dialog that Gilgamesh speaks comes directly from encounters with him in Final Fantasy V. Speaking of which… I really need to finish my play through of that game for the four job fiesta.

After finishing the Gilgamesh encounter, I spent much of the afternoon working my way through the main storyline to get caught up and ready to take on the next encounter the Striking Tree. In the Final Fantasy mythos Ramuh tends to be a friend to humanity, helping them along the way. In Final Fantasy V it is Ramuh that teaches your party more or less how to channel the power of the Espers (summons) and call them in battle. In this game his role has shifted slightly, but he still acts with reason and wisdom rather than fury and rage like the other primals. The Striking Tree hard is a battle about proving your worth to this elder god more than defeating him. We failed miserably, or at least did not succeed. Our time ran out before we managed to defeat him.

It seems like when you are dealing with the newest tier of content they completely remove the echo buff system. Meaning that as we wiped, we did not get a stat boost allowing us to slowly overcome the obstacle. I knew this was the case for the various Extreme mode versions of the encounters but I was shocked to find it as the case for Ramuh. Ultimately we simply lacked the DPS to burn through a series of adds. Ramuh has a similar wipe mechanic to Ifrit, in that if you don’t dps down the adds you cannot survive the next attack. We were able to limit break one round of adds, but this was short lived as we lacked the dps to continue on after that fact. Basically I reached a point where I was one of the most geared players in the instance, and could simply not carry the group as a whole. I plan on giving it a shot on a night that is not Sunday, since that tends to be a lousy time for MMO groups in general.

Fully Geared Dragoon

Through all of this running around this weekend I managed to “finish” gearing my dragoon. I say finish in quotes because there are still several things I can get that are upgrades, however they are all much slower prospects and either involve getting lucky drops in Syrcus Tower, joining a Coil of Bahamut raid, or saving up Soldiery bookrocks which the game tends to reward 5 to 10 at a time. At this point I have level 90 gear or better in every single slot, with a level 100 ring from the soldiery vendor and level 100 gloves from Syrcus Tower. I feel like my Dragoon dps is as good as I can get it for the time being, and more than ready for us to begin Coil when we have enough people. Now my focus shifts to gearing out my warrior who right now is sitting in the low 70s, but in part only because of me using some of my DPS jewelry to buff him up a bit.

There was a huge sense of accomplishment last night when I bought the belt that replaced my final sub 90 item. In a few weeks time I have managed to catch up to Cylladora who continued playing the game long after we all left. Last night I also tanked my first dungeon since coming back and overall I think it went smooth enough. I was pulling pretty quickly and trying to figure out how to maintain aggro again. It feels like the win condition as a warrior is the fact that I have steel cyclone, and the goal of every pull was to build up enough rage to be able to start the next fight with this attack. When I managed to do so things stayed fairly glued to me. When I didn’t I struggled to play catch up with overpower. Tam was playing his summoner and there is always going to be a point where I lose control of adds to his dots, however for the most part I was able to mitigate this pretty successfully. I guess the real determination is going to be whether or not I start pugging for duty roulette or not. If they rewarded me extra bookrocks I would do so in heartbeat, but the extra money may or may not be worth the headache.

#FFXIV #Blaugust

Play What You Love

August 17, 2014 by Belghast

AggroChat Episode 18

This week on AggroChat I am joined by regular hosts Rae, Ashgar and Tam which means we are unfortunately without a Kodra this weekend. He is off enjoying the sights, sounds and gaming opportunities of GenCon. I swear one of these years I want to go to this, because it has been like the pinnacle of all gaming shows in my head since I was a youngin reading Dragon magazine. I realize that in reality it is a fair bit smaller than likely even PaxSouth that I will be going to in January, but there is just something extra epic about GenCon. In honor of this convention we talk at length about the latest rendition of Dungeons and Dragons… the fabled Fifth Edition and why you should be excited for it. Wizards of the Coast at this point pretty much knows that they made some serious mistakes with fourth edition, allowing for the meteoric rise of Pathfinder. In 5th Edition it feels like they are trying to pay for the sins of the past with awesome.

In addition to D&D 5th, it was a pretty significant week in gaming in that GamesCom, the Blizzard Warlords announcement and SOE Live were going as well as an event for EVE and SWTOR. I talk about the things that really stuck out to me from the GamesCom feed, including the PS4 Shareplay system and the controversy over Tomb Raider exclusivity. We talk about the World of Warcraft Warlords launch announcement and the subsequent trailer, and the general feeling of “blah” we seem to have towards it. Finally we talk about Everquest Next and that it does in fact seem to be a game they are actually working on and not just vaporware. Additionally we talk about the upcoming changes in Landmark, and how it is a step in the right direction but not enough to get Ashgar interested again. It is a pretty packed show so hopefully you will tune in.

Play What You Love

Since coming back to Final Fantasy XIV and the release of the 14 day trial program, I have had a number of friends give it a shot. A good number of them have gone ahead purchasing and subscribing to the game and this is awesome. However for a handful of players it just didn’t click for whatever reason and they sent me heartfelt apologies for not being able to get into the game. This is perfectly natural, not all games are for all people… and in the current gaming climate we are in there is more diversity than ever, so there really is no excuse to play something you don’t enjoy. So I feel like each of us owes it to ourselves to play whatever it is that we love, and never apologize for doing it. Life is too short to spend time playing something you just don’t enjoy for some reason.

Right now I am enjoying the hell out of Final Fantasy XIV, and I feel like this is a game I could settle down in. However if I reach a point where I am not enjoying it any longer, you can bet I will move on to whatever seems to “feel good” to play at the time. If you stick around and play a game you just aren’t enjoying it only really leads to you either getting completely burnt out, or extremely bitter about the fact that your friends are forcing you to play something you hate. If you allow yourself to glide along through a whole bunch of different fun experiences… I feel like we all end up happier as a result. So please if you try this game or any other and you really don’t enjoy it… go play something else. All you ever have to tell me is that it just “wasn’t for you” and I will completely understand.

Blaugust Prompts

I have been rather slack with a lot of the Blaugust related things, but the biggest of these is my original intent to collect a bunch of writing prompts. While the threat on the forum has a ton of these already I still need to add a bunch more. So today here goes a few related to this weeks podcast and this weekend post.

What game do you love that none of your friends seem to enjoy? Is there a game that you keep returning to but wish your friends were playing along with you?
For me GenCon is this fabled event, what is yours? What is the event that you would love to attend but have never had the opportunity to do so for whatever reason.
What makes a good community? What aspects of a game or social community do you enjoy, and what aspects detract from it?

I am extremely proud of all the bloggers who are participating daily in the Blaugust event. Thanks for making this a truly awesome month.

#FFXIV #AggroChat #Blaugust

Death by Adorable

August 16, 2014 by Belghast

Back to School Time

I’ve said this before but the two most frustrating times in the life of a teacher spouse are the beginning of school and the end of school. It is hard to watch your spouse going through a stress filled ballet and not really having much that you can do to stop it. Here in Oklahoma it is of course the beginning of a new school year, and while my wife does have have students yet she has been back officially at work several days now. To be truthful this summer she barely got any time off at all considering she was up in her classroom almost every day. Apparently during the welcome back speech that the principal gave he mentioned this fact.

Today we are going out on that ritual of rituals… back to school shopping. It is in fact not just a ritual that the students go through. I am sure we will be hitting lots of different clothing stores in search of that “first day” outfit that we always seem to get. Back to school sales are like porn for teachers, and I am not sure if the rest of the world knows this or not. The odd thing is that this year the sales are just lacking. I am not sure what exactly it is, but so far it is not only that the stores don’t have much in the way of sales going on, but they don’t have much in the way of interesting stuff either. In the past Target and Walmart both would have these dollar sections full of all sorts of organization ideas that my wife would come away with inspired from. This year they are pretty much non-existant… and I don’t think Walmart even has their dollar section.

The biggest disappointment I have is in Office Depot. Once upon a time they were among the most supportive businesses for teachers. We had a teachers appreciation card that gave us a discount on damned near everything we bought, and while the discount wasn’t amazing… it felt like it was something. Several years back they replaced this program with one similar to that of Best Buy where you get gift cards for every X dollars that you spend. Even this has been reduced to a pittance. On top of this the stores themselves seem to have gone through a state of decline as they just don’t have the stock that they used to. I think this is the first year that I can recall where they didn’t have a teachers appreciation day, or give teachers the ability to buy more than the limit on the sales. In any case it has been frustrating to watch this, and for my wife it is like ruining Christmas morning.

Death By Adorable

For some time I had been blocked from progressing along the main storyline quest by the Thornmarch Hard primal fight. Instead of waiting for the rest of the guild to catch up so we could do the fight legitimately as an 8 man team, several of us decided to go ahead and knock it out of the way. The fourth primal of course is Good King Moggle Mog the king of the Moogles. It is a council fight of sorts, but to really call it a council fight is a bit of a misstatement. It is a fight of sheer chaos for the most part. First you are presented with a series of Moogle adds, each one representing a class in the game. Some of these are more important for you to kill than others, and as DPS I pretty much just followed the marked targets. After defeating all either of the Mooglesguard the king himself spawns and the actual fight begins.

The council aspect comes into play in that when you kill an add the King inherent their power. The Black Mage for example does an AOE ability that spreads through the entire room, the White Mage heals, the Warrior a giant version of steel cyclone, and the Paladin taunts and pulls everyone into him. These last two can be brutal in that the Paladin and Warrior and time them to happen at the same time essentially wiping the raid. This fight as a result is all about killing things in the right order and keeping the various Mooglesguard away from targets that buff them. I am not 100% sure what order we went in but I know without a doubt that Black Mage and White Mage were the first two to go down. I also know that we killed warrior, but left Paladin up in the successful attempt. However we only managed to down them because someone got off a limit break as we were wiping horribly at the time.

The fight itself is sheer chaos and the hardest part about pugging it was that no one seemed to be able to agree on the “correct” kill order. In many ways it reminded me of the Paragons fight in Siege of Orgrimmar, but at least there everyone agreed that one target was far more important than the others. I am glad to be through the fight and able to move on with my main storyline quest. That said I would gladly go back and do it another time. Extreme mode sounds like insanity, because supposedly you have to carefully dps down each of the Mooglesguard without killing them, because the king himself is immune to damage… however when any member of the Mooglesguard dies he heals all of them back to full from his own health pool. So in theory you have to burn down all of the moogles down to near death and then kill one off draining the health of the King in the process. The madness of constantly having to fight all eight Mooglesguard and deal with the king at the same time just seems like pure hell.

Syrcus Tower

The only other big thing that I did last night was work through the quest chain leading up to the next step of Crystal Tower. From what I hear Syrcus Tower is a significantly different beast than Labyrinth of the Ancients. Whereas in Labyrinth you could theoretically get a piece of loot from every encounter, each time you chose to run it, in Syrcus you are limited to receiving a single piece of loot per week. This has made it a frustrating time for a lot of people as they watch so much really good loot rot. I guess the bulk of people running it are doing so in hope of getting a piece needed for weapon upgrades. So no one actually rolls on the gear, and that means in general if you are going in there for gearing purposes you have your pick of whatever you could want.

The only problem is it takes awhile to run and I have yet to actually have time to really queue for it. Instead of doing it I ended up doing a random hard mode dungeon with the guild. So hopefully tonight I will be able to dip my toes into the dungeon proper. At this point I have progressed significantly gear wise. Right now I am sitting at 83 ilevel and the only pieces that are sub 90 are my boots, belt and gloves. All of which can be upgraded through a number of means, not the least of which are running hunts and gaining bookrocks. Additionally I could luck out and get replacements for any of those slots while running Syrcus. It seems like the hardest thing to get is jewelry as far as drops go, and as a result I have spent most of my bookrocks and hunt tokens on getting those sorted out. Still really enjoying the game and pumped to see more people joining in every few days. Our hope is that as some point we can try the actual raid the Binding Coil of Bahamut which is an 8 man duty.

#FFXIV