Grand Experiment Archives - Page 127 of 200

Eternal Pessimist

February 23, 2014 by Belghast

The Sick Kid

Growing up I was that kid that was sick all of the time. During my elementary School Years it was a rarity that I was not in the doctors office at least once a week with something. In part this was completely legitimate, because I was born without a fully functioning immune system. Basically to put it simply I have a “lazy immune system” meaning that it takes a really long time before my body reacts to things it should be reacting to. It is like that kid that hosts a party, then realizes way too late that shit is going to get out of control. Then at that point, he can’t kick everyone out without calling the cops. In this analogy the cops are antibiotics, of which I know by name and color and even oddly enough I associate some of them with their taste.

On top of this I also have pretty severe asthma, but I grew up in a household where no bruise was just a bruise… it might after all be the early stages of Necrotizing fasciitis. My mother tends to be quite a bit of a hypochondriac, and as such passed along some of those traits to me. My wife finds it funny, because I always go into a situation expecting the worse. The problem is… because I grew up in a doctors office, I have developed a severe hatred of going to the doctor. So instead I deal with it until I absolutely cannot any longer, in part because I always fear it is going to be worse than it actually is. In the end I am always relieved when I am not really dying of some dread disease… but getting me to actually go to the doctor to get that relief is extremely difficult.

Eternal Pessimist

Part of asthma is knowing when it medicate yourself to stave off things from getting worse. I have a full arsenal of tools at my disposal to keep my lungs from going into a complete state of lockdown. The problem is, I try and apply this same logic to everything else. I always keep an arsenal of over the counter medications at my disposal and there rarely is a day where I am not taking something. So I am an odd mix of actually being sick, but also making it far worse than it actually is. For the most part on a day to day basis I am fairly healthy, but I am always looking for the next illness waiting around the corner. I guess as a eternal pessimist I am always looking for the worst thing to happen, and then confused when it didn’t.

As a programmer expecting the worst is a really useful survival trait. It means I always have a backup plan for when the shit hits the fan. So this instinct of expecting the worst has been a really successful trait in my day to day working life. The problem is in my personal life and my health especially it is not the best thing. I am thankful I have a wife that calls me out on my shit, more often than not. The only problem is, since I cry wolf so often… it can be hard to get the severity of something across. When I had my bathroom bleed out moment… since she is so used to me cutting myself on this thing or the other… she didn’t grasp the severity immediately as I stood there blood spilling out on the bathroom floor. I am working on trying to freak out less about non-consequential things… so that the big ones actually are meaningful. I am pretty prone to panic attacks, but they are getting better… as I learn to calm the hell down.

Farcry 3: BLood Dragon

February 23, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #6

A few weeks back I did Steampowered Sunday over Far Cry 3, and thanks to the frustrations of dealing with UPlay I didn’t really give it that stellar of a rating. The forced stealth play just was not my thing, but one resounding chorus from folks responding to the post was… play Blood Dragon instead. From the moment I saw the artwork for the title… I knew I would love it, because I am an unrepentant child of the 80s. Everything about the game artwork alone screams 1980’s arcade cabinet artwork. Hand drawn polygon landscapes were a thing that became insanely popular in the post War Games sequence of games. We all wanted to be part of cyberspace in one way or another… even though at the time this was a largely fictional destination. Which leads to the question… did William Gibson predict the future in Neuromancer… or did we just build his future because of our love for it. That however is a topic for a completely different day.

All the Movies Rolled Into One

This game is in every way a love song for not only the video games of the 1980s but the movies as well. You start off with a minigun raid on a base form a Helicopter, while Little Richard’s “Long Tall Sally” plays on the stereo… a song that featured heavily in the pinnacle of 80s scifi action movies… Predator. It just keeps getting better from there. If you took Robocop, Universal Soldier, Ultraforce, and dumped them in a blender with Bad Dudes, Shinobi, and Duke Nukem… you might come close to creating a game like this. The visuals seem like a 1980s movie arcade scene vomited its magenta and red neon all over your screen. I could pick apart the picture above and name a dozen different movie and video game references in this one shot alone.

The Music is So Authentic

The visuals would not be enough to deliver the feeling of travelling back in time… but the music is really where the game scores 110%. Listening to the insane synths gave me flash backs of so many separate movies at once. I mean you could take this game as making fun of all the absolutely over the topness that was the 1980s, but instead they chose to make it some sort of a time capsule. For someone who lived through all of this, it is like a really crazy trip down memory lane. I had moments where I remembered the first time I watched Terminator, the first time I caught Highlander on HBO, the first time I watched Big Trouble In Little China… and Escape from New York. While none of it really is some kind of clone of the original tracks that obviously inspired it… it has the same feeling of sonic dissonance, driving drum machines and power chords.

Neon Archery Should Be A Thing

The weapons not only look great, but they are really functional. There is a sequence not far from the start of the game where like every 80s movie… you are captured and stripped of all of your weapons. Your fearless hero that has named Captain Rex Colt Power… has to get by with nothing but a bow and the ability to use the environmental behemoths… the Blood Dragons to take down a base. Sure the Blood Dragons do a lot of heavy lifting, but I feel like some sort of Neon Green Arrow as I headshot the guards with a bow. Firstly… I would wonder how the hell I could sneak around with glowing arms, and massively glowing weapons. However since everything in this world seems to glow… I am guessing also glowing is a form of camouflage? Whatever the reasoning behind it, things look badass. I mean as a child of the 80s… making something glow neon and putting skulls and spikes on it… is the absolute guarantee for making something awesome.

The Stealth Did Not Piss Me Off

Normally I hate stealth in games, but there is something about this game that simply changing the skins and color palettes immediately makes the default Far Cry 3 engine feel so much better. I think in part it is because I know that if I perform a take down, I get to see the awesome glowing blue wakizashi slice through the enemy and spill light blue glowing cyber fluid. Additionally there is a completely broken and overpowered ability to chain a bunch of take downs together by pressing your movement keys in the direction of the next mob in sequence. So far I have managed to take down 4 at once, but I imagine in later levels this becomes completely ludicrous. I think mostly my problem with stealth in games is the whole idea of a “bloodless” victory. I play these games to kill everything that stands, and when a storyline impedes me from doing this… my brain rebels.

The Cut Scenes are Amazing

Normally I also hate cut scenes of pretty much any kind. However apparently if you take those cut scenes… make them infused with the spirit of the 80s… and hand drawn… apparently I love them? The combination of the arcade game style pixel artwork and cheesy action movie dialog makes the whole experience enjoyable for me. That seems to really be an undercurrent of this game, “taking things Bel hates and making them enjoyable.” One of the more humorous moments is when your stereotypical mouthy partner initiates a tutorial sequence moments after dropping you on the island as a way of screwing with you. So you are forced there to sit through a sequence of tutorial commands… all the while you are yelling at your partner for making you do them. This is an awesome and irreverent way of making you play through the basic commands so that you know how the game controls.

The Game Is Still Farcry 3

Everything about the game is still very much Farcry 3. You move around the world capturing back positions… but instead of doing so from generic badguys that happen to all wear red bandanas… you are doing it from the Omega Force androids. I guess at the end of the day it is all about the packaging. If you have played Farcry 3, you know how the gameplay works. Capture a base, which opens up side missions, which then leads to the next base to capture. The key difference everything from Farcry has been taken to eleven. One of my favorite things is capturing cyber hearts and then using it to lure the Blood Dragons to bases and make them do your work for you. I mean what is cooler than than giant dinosaurs with glowing neon stripes… that have a plasma cannon breath attack? While I gave Farcry 3, a colossal score of 3 Mehs out of Meh… I have to give the Blood Dragon counterpart 5 Kick Asses out of Fucking Awesome.

While I have not really made it terribly far into the game at this point, I know this will be one that I return to and play again quite often. It is the sort of game you need to be in the mood for mindless carnage to be able to enjoy. At this point I have secured the first base, and started working on some of the side missions. Every now and then I come home from work, and just need to kill something. This is the ideal game to reach for, because the objectives pretty much are all “kill all the things”. There is zero subtlety here, but I am not really that subtle of a person, so it works for me. Since this is such a nostalgic ride for me, I find it odd how popular it has been among generations of folks who did not live this experience the first time. Maybe the camp of the 80s is universal and will always appeal. God save us all.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

February 21, 2014 by Belghast

Rest In Peace

A few weeks back I had an idea for another regular column of sorts. The idea was that I would react to things I found on forums. I had enough fuel for one topic, but that’s where things went off the rails. It turns out that I really don’t read the various game forums as often as I thought I did, so Friday mornings became a mad dash for me to try and find something that inspired me in any way to write about it. After spending a few minutes this morning trying to do the same… much like I tried last week… I have reached the point where I am just filing this one away in the “bad idea” vault. Essentially the crux of this is in order to make it work I would have to devote more time than I currently have to trolling the forums.

I might make another stab at a feature, because Steampowered Sunday seems to work pretty well. Admitted it has been a few years since I have frequented the battle.net forums, and similarly with the rift forums as well. There seems to be a drought of substantive conversation out there, or maybe it really never was and I just applied substance in my head? I have heard for some time that forums are a dying thing, and by my attempts to find something worth writing about lately… it would almost seem to be the case. I am wondering if people have moved on to posting about things on the forums, and instead posting about them on social media or potentially sub reddits. I would be curious to find out you guys take on this. I know personally I tend to post things on my morning blogs rather than trying to find a home for them on a game forum.

Community Chest

Last night I had a fairly spastic night again, but towards the end of the evening I patched up Trove. Now I have not really followed the subreddit as closely as I once did, but they have been plugging away at this with high frequency. They seem like they have posted roughly a patch a week, and keep adding more features and polish. It had been roughly a month since I had last played it, and while Landmark has taken most of my “building game” focus, Trove is still very much an awesome game to play. I always sell the game as “minecraft with MMO loot” but as a whole the game is so much more than that. Right now I am loving the focus on the social community of a server, that really does seem like the ultimate win for trion is to make people care about the world.

One of the coolest additions that I saw last night was the community chest. For some time at the spawn point there has been a giant version of the in game chests, but inside of it now is a storage system. It allows players to donate items to noobies, and last night I was extremely thankful for this. I was able to pull a good weapon and a good shield out of the bin and jump straight into doing cool stuff. Another really cool thing is they added in /randomhead command, which you can see above I now have this really awesome engineer goggles appearance. This was the first thing to go into game to make abandoning the Fez and Moustache worth it!

The best quality of life change is the addition of a map. You can see above that each of the various biomes is now marked. I have not quite figured out what the red X icons are for, maybe dead bosses? Your home is marked with a little sign post to make it easier to find it. Of course this is still very alpha, and there are lots of bugs. Last night for example I killed six golden beetles… which are now super rare, and not a single one dropped the golden soul. Golden Souls are now needed to craft the gold torch, which in turn unlocks the ability to craft a robotic workbench opening up a whole new tier of crafting. That change went in some time ago, but crafting is now a tiered affair where crafting this thing unlocks the ability to purchase another thing.

I spent most of the night playing as Gunslinger because I had not really spent any time leveling that up. Right now I am level 12 Knight I believe, which gives me a good start each server reset, so I am hoping to bring Gunslinger in line to that same range. So far I am really enjoying the “rocket jump” ability where the Gunslinger fires at the ground and propels themselves high into the air. Really great for exploring areas. Another cool thing are the random quests while out in the world that provide fuel to the star meter shown on the right hand of the screen. This is something that the entire server works towards, so each boss you beat in the world helps leveling the world as a whole. Not really sure what happens when the world “dings” but the world I have been playing on has 46 stars.

Mostly my time spent playing last night has made me realize that I really need to devote more time to this game. While it is not as mind bending as Landmark, it has so much charm. Everything about the game, especially the user submitted weapons just drips “fun”. Especially as the game gets fleshed out, it has started to feel more and more cube world like, which is awesome. That game was a really great idea that was never really capitalized on. I might ping the Alliance of Awesome and see just how many of us are in Trove currently. Would be fun to have a night where we meet up on voice chat and wander about the world looking for mischief. Saying this is making me realize that I never actually mentioned the AoA before now… I should remedy that.

Alliance of Awesome

The blogosphere and the gaming groups they are associated with is a really twisted up community. Each of us have been the part of so many different groups that it became super evident with the launch of Landmark that we needed to come up with a way of standardizing some things. There was a period of time when several of us were joining upwards of seven different social channels, each of them with a different subset of players in them. I believe it was Scarybooster who first voiced the idea, but from there it spread quickly and the ever amazing Zelibeli became the ideas Champion. The idea was simple… to create a super alliance of all the different multi-gaming groups that our little community was associated with. After a few different tries we landed on using a subreddit as our “global forums” of sorts, and as a way for us to post about upcoming events in the various groups. Also it acts as a nice call to action to figure out what people are doing in the various games. Another big thing to come out of it is that we decided to start using “AoA” as our global social channel to span the various groups.

One of the challenges we have had in House Stalwart is trying to maintain guilds in each of the games we happen to be playing. When there is a rush of players it is an amazing thing and we have 50 or so active members. However after a few months this becomes a skeletal crew, and the question of whether or not it is actually worth keeping up arises. As it stands right now House Stalwart will focus on World of Warcraft Alliance side, Rift, and The Elder Scrolls. These will be the only “official” stalwart guilds, and for the rest of the games our members want to play we will be leaning on other AoA member groups to maintain them. This does two things…firstly it makes my life less spastic for trying to maintain a presense in so many games. Secondly it opens up so many more worlds to us. You can just take a look at the right hand side of the subreddit to see which guilds have active groups in which games. So when folks want to dabble in FFXIV or SWTOR or eventually Wildstar… they have a ready made home they can go to. While this arrangement is still very much in its infancy… it gives me a lot of hope for the future.

My Adoration of QuikTrip

I am in love with a gas station station… and have been since the first time I set foot in one. One of the things people not from this area find hard to understand, is the love that Tulsans have for the QuikTrip chain of stores. While I will use other Gas Stations, I will always go to a QuikTrip if one is available even if it is significantly out of the way. A little over a year ago, a friend of mine moved to town to accept a job at my workplace. She had heard me talk about QuikTrip but was skeptical, but within weeks of coming to town she was a devoted acolyte. Quite simply the chain is unlike any other gas station. Now I have had people sing the praises of Kumandgo, Casey’s, Flying J, PDQ… and many others that I have visited in my travels. None of them compare to the awesomeness of the QT.

Why do we love it? Well for starters even in the slummiest parts of town… QuikTrip is clean, well stocked, brightly lit and fully staffed 24/7. On top of this… they have actual food. Their breakfast offerings are especially awesome, but pretty much you can go into a QT any time of day and get fresh food that is not a “stomach bomb”. They have really great donuts and muffins… and if they ever have their limited time Red Velvet Muffins… you have to try them. They have a half dozen flavors of Taquito, Country Sausage, Jalepeno Sauage, Buffalo Chicken roller, cheese burger rollers… and fresh steamed buns. The newer stores have a place in store where they offer made to order food and coffee drinks as well. My friend Rae pretty much stops by every day to pick up a sandwich for lunch, because they have fresh made sandwiches and wraps.

Another really awesome thing about the chain is that they guarantee their gasoline… and were the first place I can remember doing this. It was their claim to fame back in the 80s, and has continued on to the current day. If you ever have a fuel related problem with your car, QuikTrip with pay to fix whatever it is… pending I am sure you can back up receipts of purchasing gas from there. Still however it is more than almost any other chain can say, and at the very least makes you feel better about purchasing your gas from them. Admittedly this is a huge chunk of why I always gas up before leaving town in the hopes that the tank of gas will last me until we reach another QuikTrip. Unfortunately their reach only extends so far, so once you leave the south central united states you have to rely on other chains.

The chain itself has really good cashiers, and the custom software they maintain is designed to be able to ring up I believe up to 16 customers at the same time. Once I finish writing this blog post, I will go to QuikTrip this morning and get a drink and a jalepeno sausage roll. I know that I can get in and out extremely quickly because there is a culture of efficiency that has sprung up around the store. Expected protocol is for there to be two lines at each and every cash register, one to the left and one to the right. As the QT employee finishes ringing up one, they immediately begin to ring up the next one on the other side, giving the first one time to walk away from the counter. When this works, it is a thing of beauty… but you can always tell neophytes when they try and form a single line.

I think in part QuikTrip is so successful because they have really good working conditions. They have managed to make the Fortune magazine top places to work list for 11 years in a row. In part this is due to their really odd practice of after 25 years with the company, you can take a year paid sabbatical, to do whatever the hell you want to do with it. This on top of paying significantly better than average wage allows them to keep good employees for the long haul. It is the type of place that folks either thrive in or they wash out really fast. As a customer and loyal devotee I really appreciate their attention to detail. I have long said that I could never live in a city that did not have QuikTrip… so pretty much that leaves me St. Louis Metro, Dallas Metro, and Kansas City Metro. Granted I am not sure if I would want to be without Taco Bueno, Arbys or Sonic Drive-In either… but the most important one is my beloved QuikTrip.

Corruption of My Youth

February 20, 2014 by Belghast

Confusing Dialog

For the last week or so I have been having an odd issue connecting to steam on my desktop. For random periods of time, steam cannot connect. However if I wait an hour or so… it connects in just fine. So far the online wisdom is that this has something to do with bad network drivers, but unfortunately nothing has changed on the system in the time it has occurred. So right now I am at a complete loss for this intermittent behavior. Would greatly appreciate any suggestions, especially if some of you have had this issue firing up the steam client… and better yet have found a solution. At this point my plan is to try and dig up the reference driver for my network card and install that, wondering if maybe a windows patch jacked something up.

The odd thing is, steam only hates me sometimes. Last night when I could connect I re-downloaded The Secret World and it was coming down at a peak of 10.5 megabytes per second. It seemed like the download was only being throttled by my disk I/O. Of note… I am really going to have to manually throttle steam because my system was really mostly unusable when it was downloading that fast. The hard drive was going through periods of being busied out by it. Games were completely unplayable during this time, so I am hoping that somewhere in steam there is a maximum speed setting I can ratchet down a bit. It was nice to download 18 gig in 30 minutes though.

Black Screen Blue Logo

Last night the wild goose chase in search of bottles continued, and on the way home I had to hit both Michaels and Hobby Lobby to finish getting the last few of them. So by the time I made it home I was just feeling out of it. I had a bit of trouble with my gaming desktop, and then a bout of the reoccurring steam issues, and by that time I was just mentally drained. I found out the hard way that Cyberpower PC, does the same bullshit that every manufacturer does. Namely tries to put a 350 watt power supply in a PC designed for gaming. I went to install a new video card, and noticed the size of the power supply, and didn’t even bother getting into the case. I did however at that point unhook everything.

After connecting everything back up again, I went to boot the machine and it hung indefinitely on the black screen with the blue windows logo. Thankfully I have a second machine beside this one, and I started furiously googling. Internet consensus is that something was up with the power supply. I had literally not doing anything other than unhook things… so after making sure the power cord was seated well a few times I got another idea. I unhooked absolutely everything from the machine again. This time only hooking up the monitor, mouse, keyboard, network cable and power cord. Sure enough it booted up happily… apparently in the processes I had hooked one too many things to a usb jack on the machine and it did not have enough power to boot.

So the power supply issue is not only critical to getting this newer video card installed, but seemingly for day to day usage as well. I realize it is a numbers game for companies, they try and put the smallest thing in a machine they can get away with. I just don’t understand however why anyone would put something smaller than a 500W supply in a new machine. Ultimately like it did me, it will bite the owner in the ass. Long story short, I have a new Corsair power supply on the way and it should be here on Friday. So I will be playing the swap power supplies game this weekend. Generally speaking I like to pull one power supply with all the wires connected, then disconnect the PSU one connector at a time, replacing it with a connecter from the new one. That way I am certain that nothing gets missed.

All Over the Map

By the time I finally got to where I could start playing games last night… I was like a toddler desperately in need of a nap. Nothing really seemed right, and in truth I should have just gone on to bed. I played a little bit of everything last night, but only a few minutes of each. I mined three or four resource nodes in Landmark, killed Onyxia and did Crown Chemicals in World of Warcraft, fired up Rift long enough to collect the weekly patron gift, played some of “that space game”, and finally spent the most amount of time playing some of “that elder game”. But like Goldilocks, everything was either too this or too that. I should have grabbed my 3DS and went to bed playing some Bravely Default.

The highlight of the evening was the fact that I picked up Chicken Tikka Masala on the way home from my errands from our favorite Indian place… Desi Wok. Even that just didn’t seem right, and I was only able to finish like half of mine. Nights like that suck, where you don’t like the world and you are pretty sure that it doesn’t like you either. Hopefully tonight I won’t have a bunch of running around to do before heading home. I think that combined with the power supply issues are what put me in that mood. What sucks is… I knew I was “in a mood” but I didn’t really know what I could do to snap myself back out of it. I have yet to find my personal slider that allows me to back off on the “pissy” setting.

Corruption of My Youth

I think I have told at least part of this tale, but I never had a chance to “not” be a geek. One of the cool things about being a teachers kid was that at the end of the school year, we got to rifle through the stuff left in kids lockers. The janitors would come through and dump everything out into the hall, and if it was not gone by that evening they would come through with a big dumpster and pitch it all. I felt this was a bit of a consolation prize for being stuck there as my mom cleaned her own room to get ready for summer. Over the years I found many prizes, but none of them were as life changing for me as stumbling across a Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook. Mind you this was when I was in first grade, and upon receiving that book I absolutely obsessed about it. While I didn’t fully understand much of it at the time, I started building games around the things that I found between its covers.

I wanted nothing more than to play a real D&D session… but I grew up deep in the bible belt and the popular consensus was that “D&D” would somehow make you into a mass murderer. So all through elementary school I collected everything I could get my hands on, but had never really played any of it. My parents obviously did not care, but the parents of my best friends at the time were absolute bible thumpers. It was mid way through elementary school that I found another option. Marvel Super Heroes by TSR was in reality a pretty damned crappy game system, but it was completely benign and with the little paper foldouts made it look like a board game and not something akin to D&D. I kept all of the dice and such at my house, and for the most part their parents never questioned what they were doing. I mean funny shaped dice would have been a dead give away… and something worthy of shunning.

As I moved into my High School years I found friends with whom we could pretty much play anything… and we did, so many different systems. While we didn’t really go back and play much D&D other than at conventions… we did play an absolutely silly amount of the Palladium system. The above image is a quick picture I snapped this morning of just a small sampling of the various palladium books I have accumulated. The thing about that system that drew me to it, was the fact that if I or my friends could dream it up… we could find rules to build it. The Rifts setting at the time completely blew me away, and I played it through most of high school. Even though I don’t really play much anymore, because I don’t have a local circle of people to play with… I still pick up the books anytime I find them out and about.

MMOs for the most part have become my new “D&D night”, and it just honestly fits my schedule better. Occasionally I join in games run by friends over one of the various Google hangout pen and paper mods, but that is about as close as I get to the old tabletop experience these days. So many of the things I have been into over the years, probably started with finding that first players handbook. It got me interested in what that was all about, and got me into Time Warp comics for the first time in search of “more”. It was through this connection that I go into Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, and so many other geeky things. While the bible thumpers seemed to think it would steal my soul, more than anything it enflamed my curiosity and creativity. Pen and Paper games taught me it was completely okay to create my own reality. That seems like a skill we could use a lot more of.