Grand Experiment Archives - Page 49 of 200

Proud to be Ul’dahn

January 21, 2015 by Belghast

Progress on Imperator

This morning I am struggling in a big way at getting anything started on my blog post. As I run out of time to actually write I decided to just dig straight in. Last night was our normal raid group time, and we cleared everything up to Imperator, and took some attempts on him. I joked before the start of the raid that since I would not be there Thursday due to Pax, that they would totally defeat him while I was gone. After last night I seriously think that is probably going to happen. Essentially I feel like we have one last hurdle to get through which is the second intermission when three adds spawn. We had one really amazing attempt where no one died at all until 15% or so… when the adds spawned and we got excited and sloppy and caused a bunch of bombs to blow up. To the best of my knowledge no one died to the mark of chaos bullshittery, so all that is really left is getting through that one bit and we have a boss downed.

My general theory is that pending they have full attendance (minus me of course) that they will totally kill Imperator Mar’gok Thursday while I am driving. I would love to be able to pop in for a bit but I am not sure I will even be in my hotel room before the raid ends. We are stopping off in Austin to eat dinner with a friend of my wife. I am a mix of excited and nervous about the whole PAX thing. One of my goals today is to start on lists of things to pack so that I don’t forget anything. I ran out yesterday to Target and picked up a few supplies that I had intended to bring like Beef Jerky and Cliff Bars. Tonight will be devoted to a whirlwind round of cleaning just to make sure things are as nice as we can get for our neighbors to come down and maintain our animals.

Proud to be Ul’dahn

The other big happening yesterday is that Final Fantasy XIV was back online after an extended downtime for the 2.5 patch. My general theory was that I would get into game and get caught up on the new content that just released. However it turns out that I did not actually finish off the story content from the last patch. I guess I ended up never turning in after the big boss battle so I spent most of my time before the raid last night working through the tail end of the 2.4 patch content. The odd thing about Final Fantasy XIV is the way it makes you care about the characters you interact with, and even the characters that are largely in the background of your conflicts. There is not a single Scion that I don’t like, and while there are some that I am more fond of… like Y’shtola and the ever adorable pair of Papalymo and Yda, there is not a single one that I dislike. This is an odd thing for me considering I am only a few hours into Dragon Age: Inquisition and already dislike Vivienne.

More important than that… I like the leaders of the various city states. While my character is technically Limsa Lominsan, as that was the city state that I started my citizenship in… I draw the strongest connection to Ul’dah. Now I am going to try and tread lightly to keep from delivering any spoilers, but I am a huge fan of Nanamo ul Namo and the leader of the Immortal Flames Raubahn. I’ve long though they were interesting characters, but the tail end of the 2.4 patch content has made me proud of both in different ways. There were moments I honestly wondered if I would tear up with pride while going through the quest content. If nothing else finishing that storyline has made me proud of be an adopted Ul’dahn and proud to be an Immortal Flame. That is the magic of FFXIV, to be able to create factions that you care deeply about… without the feeling of needing to somehow be “against” another faction in the process. I wish more games could manage to do that one.

Subligars for Everyone

Another quest series I seemingly did not wrap up was the 2.4 Hildebrand quest chain. While trying to work through the first few steps of the new main story quest, I stumbled across a turn in for Hildebrand and just ran with it. I have to say this is one of the more ludicrous conclusions of a Hildebrand quest in the series. I am not really sure how much I can go into it, other than once again Godbert saves the day. I was able to snap a questionable screenshot. I will let you try and decode what is actually happening here. Once again it was humorous, and a series of extremely well staged in engine cinematics. The only thing that bums me is that more than likely I will not get a chance to play any of the additional content from the patch until after I get back from PAX. Right now it is looking like tonight will be a packing night, and then during the actual convention when I get back to my hotel room I will be furiously working on blog posts. The closer this gets, the more I realize this is going to be a working convention.

Right now the plan is that Friday I will be roaming around the booth space, trying to talk to as many people as I can. I currently have a media appointment around noonish, but other than that my day is going to be devoted to playing demos and talking to the folks behind it. Saturday there are a few panels I intend to go to, and that will be the day that Ashgar arrives. So more than likely we will hang out a bunch since we have never actually met. In between all of these happenings I am going to try and meet as many folks from the twitter/blogosphere as possible. I plan on taking lots of photos with my cell phone, and jotting down lots of notes either the old fashioned way on a notebook or with my chromebook. Battery life is a concern so probably going to use the chromebook sparingly throughout the day. I kinda wish I had the forsight to arrange a spare battery. I did pick up one of those extra cell phone power packs yesterday so I should be good from the random twitter aspect. Similarly I am sure my 3DS will survive the day because they seem to have insane battery life. Tonight I will most likely prep the post for tomorrow morning… because we plan on getting up early and getting on the road. So much to do!

Restarting Inquisition

January 20, 2015 by Belghast

Final Fantasy XIV Downtime

The is something strange about knowing you can’t play something… that makes you want to play it. Right now this is happening for me with Final Fantasy XIV, especially since I knew that more than likely I would not really be able to sink my teeth into it until I got back from Pax South. It sounds from the early reports that World of Darkness is absolutely not the cakewalk that Syrcus Tower has come to be. Then again maybe at one point Syrcus wasn’t either… considering I have never actually been around when one of the 24 man dungeons was “new”. Both Labyrinth of the Ancients and Syrcus Tower were aging content when we came back to the game. So it will be interesting to see how it works out.

Pax is going to pretty much eat all my time starting tomorrow with the planning and packing. So I am not likely going to get to experience much of this patch until I come back Sunday/Monday. In the Pax front I have some exciting but scary news. I guess I totally have a media appointment with a game company. It started with a conversation over twitter and lead to a discussion over email and an appointment. It should be awesome, but it is a new experience for me so hopefully I won’t bore or annoy the devs too much with my questions. I might end up doing more of these but right now this is the only one I actually have scheduled. Its strange that my first convention, is in a way a working one since I will be covering the convention in part for a bigger site than mine.

Restarting Inquisition

When Dragon Age: Inquisition first landed it did so during a fairly bad time for me. We were starting raiding in Final Fantasy XIV and I was just then coming back to World of Warcraft for the impending Warlords of Draenor launch. To make matters worse I suffered some pretty crippling technical issues surrounding this game. Every six to ten seconds there would be a hitch in the gameplay, like a record skipping. There were numerous reports of this, and even more fixes but none of them seem to work quite right for me. A few of them made things better but this hitch happened on even the lowest possible settings. Finally I found the solution myself that involved playing the game in fullscreen windowed. However at that point I was just flat out pissed at the game itself and really wanted nothing to do with it. I listened as friends raved about the game but ultimately I would put it away for the time being.

With the force downtime in Final Fantasy XIV I used my day yesterday to restart the game fresh. I feel like this “better” mindset has made so much of the game more enjoyable. The first time I was trying to play the traditional “Belghast” character, aka a Human Sword and Shield Warrior. The problem with that is that once again the first companion you meet up with… is a far better tank than you will ever be for awhile. I wanted to be able to group with Cassandra, so on the second play through I opted to go for a Dwarven Two Handed Weapon Warrior. So far the choice has been a good one, and I am enjoying the game much better. The worst part about restarting is having to play through that section where it flips you into tactical mode. Everything about that mode feels horrible, and it took me a bit to figure out how to flip back to the normal combat. The first quality of life change I made was rebinding “search” from V to R making it significantly easier to hit while moving.

Faffing the Hinterlands

In spite of everything my friends have told me… I faffed about heavily in the Hinterlands. When planted down there with a blazing inquisition eyeball icon showing me the way I needed to go… I chose to go the opposite direction. This has always served me well in Elder Scrolls games and overall I think it was the right choice for me this time as well. It gave me time to get used to combat and explore the world a bit before being locked into more serious dialog again. I am very much a man of action, and the introduction to all games generally makes me deeply unhappy. I keep saying to myself “why won’t it just let me play the game!”. Dragon Age Inquisition was a fairly action oriented introduction, but still there were moments where I was more than ready to move past the talking about things phase. So I puttered around exploring things, picking up quests and figuring things out before the game actually intended me to learn things.

During this time I was thrown directly into the fact that the mages and templars were at war with themselves… and everyone that happened across their paths… including towns folk, the chantry, and the occasional farmer. It was also during this time that I started to embrace the notion that maybe I was in fact the chosen one. I think I did enough objectives to get to 8 or 9 power, closing several rifts before eventually meandering my way to my objective. Ultimately I did end up leaving the Hinterlands before getting entirely mired in them… but I did it in my own fashion without the feel of rushing through them. The game feels better to me now, or maybe I am just in the right frame of mind to be playing it. I’ve added several more companions to my crusade, including the very amazing Sera. So far the only one I don’t really like is Vivienne, but that really isn’t terribly shocking. What does amuse me is how much I actually like Solas, but then again I tend to get along far better with apostates than circle mages. I picked a poor time to start playing, given that I am just about to lose a weekend to Pax, but hopefully I have made it far enough into the game to have the storyline cemented so I can pick it up again later.

Lalafell Pirate Time

January 19, 2015 by Belghast

The Dust Ruffle

Yesterday ended up absolutely nothing like I expected. I had a super late night recording the double episode of Aggrochat. By the time I had edited episode one, and made my way to bed it was roughly 2 am. I knew two things needed to happen yesterday. Firstly we needed to deep clean the house so it would be nice for the neighbor coming down to check in on the animals, and so that we would also have a friendly home to come back to. So after finishing my blog post I went through a whirlwind of cleaning momentum. I cleaned the livingroom, organized all the loose paperwork deciding what needed to be kept, what needed to be shredded and what could just be pitched. It took about an hour of serious cleaning, some of which requiring both myself and my wife working together to accomplish. We also organized a few areas that really needed help like our “pantry” closet that is really not a pantry not a full closet.

I grabbed a monster and collapsed into my desk chair when finished with the flurry of activity, and my wife did the same out in the loft. I had just started trying to play something when pidgin the IM client I use, started blowing up with bings and bongs. My wife had sent me a few links to look at along with what would ultimately end up being an ominous phrase “(10:01:04 AM) : bwt, I want to go buy a bed skirt today”. For the record I hate bed skirts, and find them both superfluous and annoying when you try and make the bed… they keep getting picked up with your covers and inadvertently tucked places. To my wife however it is a key piece of a bed… and ours has been in pretty poor shape for a few years. Considering that I wouldn’t really get to enjoy myself with another trip looming over my head… I suggested we go shower and get ready and go in search of said dust ruffle.

The Storage Bed

There was another footnote to this story however. For weeks we have been throwing around the notion of a getting a storage bed. Both my wife grew up in the era of the waterbed, and it was pretty standard for those to have a number of drawers set into the pedestal base. This would be perfect for keeping things like socks, scarves, various sundry other bits that need a place to be. One of my wife’s friends mentioned a store in town that she had seen some at, so we started off our trip by going over there to look. One of the problems that we found is that right now for some reason most of these style of beds only actually have drawers in the front. The problem with that is we do not have a massive amount of space in front of our bed. In any case we looked around through the store, found nothing and meandered our way back to the mattresses. During fall break we had gotten pretty close to purchasing a new bed for us, because our previous one was purchased not long after we moved into our house in 1999.

For the most part we thought the whole “every eight years” thing was a marketing ploy… but in truth after about eight years your mattress has doubled in weight from the dead skin cells you have shed… making it a smorgasbord for dust mites. After the guy tried to set us up with a “Bellagio” bed, we snuck away and went on about our business of trying to find the dust ruffle. On the way across town we passed this giant Mattress Firm showroom and opted to stop in. We had a decent experience with the folks in our local store back over fall break… so we figured might as well see what the big location had to offer. After playing the “lay down on all the things” process we found a bed we liked that was the store brand. The person waiting on us was awesome, and a few customers came back in that had apparently talked to her before so she excused herself to go fill out the paperwork for their purchase. This left me to do what I normally do and open up my phone and start googling to see what I could find out about the model and the company.

What I saw I did not like at all. On Consumer Affairs the company as a whole had a one star rating, with huge stacks of complaints… and the final nail in the deal was the fact that on the BBB.org they have a F rating… and are unaccredited. While we had a really nice saleswoman… when I see something like that I back away very quickly. We excused ourselves and said we were going to go eat dinner. Which is not entirely a lie, because we did in fact go eat dinner… but we also started driving towards Denver Mattress. That is where our current mattress came from, and other than the fact that it is very old… we have loved it. While there we found a Mattress we liked, as well as the storage bed above. However after some deliberation decided not to do the storage bed… because it was pretty intense. I am 6’4” and I had to lift myself a bit to get onto the bed… so that would make life hell on my slightly shorter wife. So while we set out to get a dust ruffle… and finally did get that about 7 pm last night at Wal-Mart… we also purchased a new mattress that is being delivered today. As I started off this conversation… yesterday went nothing like we had planned.

Lalafell Pirate Time

When I finally did manage to get home, I opted to pop into Final Fantasy XIV because today there is the big 2.5 patch going on… and the servers will be unplayable. I figured I would run some Syrcus Tower in an attempt to get the rest of my set of bard gear. Sure enough after a 30 minute long wait to get in… my queue popped and I had a pretty relaxed run with no real issues. When it came down to the final boss Zande, there waiting for me was my hat. My friend Thalen I am sure is jealous considering he has run this place on a daily basis trying to get it for months. While I had not officially gotten every piece of gear, I at least had all of the cosmetic ones. The above photo is in me with the full Amon outfit… and I have to say it lasted maybe 10 minutes at most before I was glamouring the hideousness away.

ffxiv 2015-01-18 21-40-43-02

After sifting through my bags and looking on the market board, I settled on a set that I liked for barding. The Buccaneer’s Tricorne, Shirt and Boots are the basis for the outfit. From there I mixed in Foestriker Mitts because they matched and looked awesome, and the Lalafell Gaskins “went” with the outfit given their greenish grey appearance. I needed to shift to something after my recent holiday outfit, and I have to say I am pretty pleased with how it worked out. I am the most adorable pirate ever. After all the outfit shenanigans a guildie was complaining about the lack of luck she had with Garuda. At which point I volunteered to tank it for her, and within a few minutes we had assembled a guild group. Lesson learned for the night… Normal Mode Garuda is NOTHING like the other modes. It took us about four attempts to remember how the fight worked, but was a small price to pay to help out a friend. While the day went nothing like expected, it ended in a really happy way surrounded by friends in Final Fantasy XIV.

Nostaltic Americana

January 18, 2015 by Belghast

Aggrochat #40 – Hexcells and H1Z1

It feels a little insane to be saying that we recorded episode 40 last night of our podcast. It just doesn’t seem like we have been running that long, but quite honestly at this point we have outlasted a large number of podcasts so I guess that’s a thing. We still manage to meet up each week to record a conversation about games… and then manage to like each other enough to do the same thing almost every night throughout the week. So I guess that in itself is an accomplishment. Last night was an absolute insane show, that in it’s content but in the fact that we recorded two shows back to back. So yes we are going to be perpetrating a dirty dirty lie, and releasing the shows a week a part as though it were fresh content.

Next week Kodra was going to be out anyways, and Ash, Rae and myself are going to Pax South and as such won’t have any of our normal recording style equipment. So the first episode we recorded last night follows the normal format, but the second episode is going to be announcing a new thing we are doing. However unfortunately I am going to make you all wait until next week to find out what it is. As far as the show proper yesterday we uncovered a recent addiction to a game called Hex Cells which if I am to believe Tam, Kodra and Rae is this super chill minesweeper like game. The fact that they mentioned minesweeper pretty much flagged me as not interested at all. Additionally we talk about the upcoming 2.5 patch in Final Fantasy XIV and finally I talk about my experiences playing H1Z1 in Early Release. Then I descend into my frustrations about the Early Access model and why if you are taking money for a game… your game is “Release” but you just released a broken game.

In Search of Vitamin D

Lately the weather here in the Tulsa area has been absolutely atrocious, not necessarily in precipitation but in the fact that it has rarely gotten above freezing for the last week. This means that the likelihood of us venturing outside of our house in a major way was next to nil. Now I have a love / hate relationship with the sun. I have super sensitive eyes and being out in bright sunlight pretty much gives me an instant headache. My wife on the other hand LOVES the sun, and during the winter months suffers from Seasonal Affective Disorder or “SAD”, so I know so many times I will be pushed out into the bright light for her health and well being. Yesterday was one of those days because the temperature actually managed to climb up into the 60s. We juggled a few different ideas for how we would spend the day but finally landed upon “junking”.

One of the towns nearby has this really historic main street district where almost every building has been carved up into an “Antique Mall”. For those not familiar with the concept, it is basically where someone renovates a huge old open floor plan, and carves it up into little booths that they then rent out to folks wanting to sell their wares. Generally speaking they have an all too clever name like the image above, that is some sort of pun on what they are selling. The problem is when EVERYONE has a “clever” name it loses much of the desired effect and just becomes a painful cliché. Mixed in among the dross and “upcycled” furnishings are some interesting relics from the past. THIS is why I enjoy going junking, because you never know quite what you might find.

I mostly am interested in relics of my own past, namely interesting toys that I can remember and ones that I didn’t even know existed. Sometimes you find some quirks of branding… for example yesterday I saw an Archie Bunker themed baby doll, and this awesome construction set by Kenner. Mostly I snapped a photo of it because there is this really awesome twitter thread where they tweet various photos of kenner products. We spent the entire day roaming around, and the odd thing is at the end of the day we had purchased exactly nothing. Mostly for us at least it is getting out and doing something rather than just sitting at home, and in that we accomplished our mission.

Nostalgic Americana

While roaming around yesterday I got the “hankering” for some traditional American south “comfort food”, and the best place for something like that is Tally’s Cafe. It is one of those places that has always been there that I can remember and is somewhat of an icon for Tulsa food. It is seated on Historic Route 66, and gets a lot of traffic from folks traveling the old highway. What makes Tally’s so interesting to me is the fact that it is this strange nostalgic version of Americana that likely never existed other than in movies like American Graffiti. The owner Talal Jalil Alame aka “Tally” came to the United States during the 1979 Civil War in Lebanon, and after some time purchased the current restaurant opening on a Friday 13th in 1987. What makes the restaurant special is two fold. The decor is this idealized version of the 1950 that could only exist in the mind of someone who grew up watching 1950s movies. Lots of chrome, neon, and clean tiles give the appearance of this tribute to the mystique of Route 66.

The second aspect of the restaurant is the fact that the food is really good. Yesterday I had the boneless fried chicken which is precisely what it sounds like. These three huge pieces of fried chicken, deboned and served with two sides and a dinner roll. Quite literally two plates of food, for like $8. Tally could easily get away with charging far more than he does, but in truth he is more than a small part humanitarian. Each year during Thanksgiving he fixes this massive meal, dinner with all the fixings. Anyone can walk in off the street and have a meal, and you quite literally pay whatever you can afford. Honestly when we were not sure what we were doing for thanksgiving, I had seriously considering trying this out and massively overpaying to support the cause. In any case Tally’s definitely fit that comfort food desire and I ended up taking a good chunk of it home for pre-podcast leftovers. All in all it was a pretty great day.