This was originally aired on November 14th of 2014. It is being released as part of the reboot of the podcast as we go through the process of recording new episodes and because it never quite made its way to YouTube. This is part of a run up to the start of brand new episodes that are currently being recorded.
This is a discussion with @RowanBlaze and his partner @Sctrz who are a pair that often time explore MMORPGs together so it absolutely made sense to talk to both at the same time. Rowan is best known for the I Have Touched The Sky blog and some time after recording this I actually got to meet both of them at Pax South in San Antonio and hang out a bit. It was a fun evening of sitting down and talking to both of them, and as such I share it again with the world.
The other day I posted a New Years resolutions post of a sort, and one of the topics addressed is how I really miss the existence of a thing that I once did called “Bel Folks Stuff”. The idea was simple, that I get together with some people that I interested in and have a sit down to talk about various topics. There really wasn’t much of a format other than that, and this idea of starting it up again has been something rolling around in my brain for the last year. The original series run released starting in October of 2014 and the last episode ever produced was released in May of 2015 with a new episode releasing almost every month during that time.
I really enjoyed the series but I allowed myself to get hung up on the fact that it seemed like no one was actually listening to them. They were in theory a labor of love, with me talking to a bunch of my friends rather than seeking out industry names and trying to wrangle them for a conversation that would ultimately feel more interview that honest discourse. In theory I have reached the point where I am just not watching stats in the way I once was, and if this ends up being listened to only by a handful of people then honestly I am fine with this. I went back and listened to a few of the episodes yesterday and it was a fun trip down memory lane with me talking to some of my friends for an hour and some change each time.
In the years since 2014 I have maybe figured out how I want to proceed in this whole podcasting thing. This past weekend we recorded our 282nd episode of AggroChat and that show has shifted a bunch since the super cringe-worthy first episodes. Weirdly however I think that Bel Folks Stuff more or less still holds up so I have decided to start re-releasing them. The show is going to live as part of this blog and I will configure a section for it. The goal is going to be to start re-releasing them on Saturday since I don’t generally make a post then. I will be doing the whole show card treatment like I do with AggroChat as well as starting to upload them to YouTube.
I am going to kick the process off by recording an episode zero, that is just me talking about the goals of the show. While the early episodes didn’t have much of a structure they did have several questions that I asked pretty much all of my guests, and in similar fashion I am going to be setting up a new set of questions going forward for episodes past what has been recorded to date. In episode zero I will be essentially laying out the sales pitch for the show and answering the questions about myself.
Moving forward I am going to be sitting down and having an hour long conversation with people as often as I can seem to manage it. Then I will file these recordings away and release them as I need fresh content. I’ve cobbled together a list of about thirty people that I am going to seek out and I am sure I will be adding more people to that list as I go forward. I’m being all responsible like and using Trello for this much like how we use Trello to keep track of topics for AggroChat so I guess I legitimately mean business now about this nonsense. As I see it I have a few months before I run out of the original show run and have to start producing real content. The first series of interviews are likely going to be me sitting down with the folks from AggroChat and using them as guinea pigs before branching out into a new batch of folks.
At the end of the day this talk show of sorts was a labor of love, and as I post the old episodes I am going to try my best to do a sort of “where are they now” update in the post as to what they are up to these days. The challenge as always is going to be finding the time to sit down and talk to all of the people who are in time zones diametrically opposed to my own. I am trying to focus on doing things this year that bring me joy and this show absolutely did. I mean 2014/2015 was a better time over all in our gaming community, and maybe naively I can think I will recapture some of that magic by travelling back down this path. The other secret hope is this will be a sort of long form method of introducing the consumers of my nonsense a whole list of new people to care about.
For those who have been reading this blog for some time you will know I have a yearly tradition of doing a rundown of the games that I played during the year and comparing them to the same periods over previous years. I have this weird habit of keeping track of what I am playing in a given month and tracking this in spreadsheet form. I started doing this in 2013 and thanks to my other habit of keeping track of spreadsheets I have gone back as far as 2012 with some level of accuracy. I could likely go back further… but that is a job for another time. Essentially based on screenshots, what I am blogging about and what I am talking about on the podcast I can create a fairly accurate record of the games played during a given year. For those who are prepared to descend into madness you can view the entire spreadsheet here.
The Top 10 of 2019
The rules are simple… if I played a game in a given month I fill in a box and then tabulate the number of filled in boxes giving me how many months in a given year I played a game. This is not nearly as granular as I would have liked, but trying to keep a journal of every game I played on a specific day truly would be madness. From this we can see some trends about my tastes during a given year and how these have changed over time. The games I played over the most months are as follows.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch – Played All 12 Months
Dragalia Lost – Android – Played All 12 Months
MTG Arena – PC – Played All 12 Months
Destiny 2 – 10 Total Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 9 Total Months
World of Warcraft Classic – 7 Total Months (counting beta time)
Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night – 6 Total Months (counting beta time)
Elder Scrolls Online – 6 Total Months
Anthem – 5 Total Months
Pokemon Go – 5 Total Months
Now lets take a look to see how this compares to last year, as there are several changes that are worth talking about.
First off there are some significant games that are completely missing from the list. World of Warcraft for example which still reigns as the game I have played for the most months total is completely missing from the top ten. Additionally Monster Hunter World which came on with a vengeance last year is also missing from the list because I more or less have been waiting for the PC release of Iceborne given that I have little to no interest in playing on the console release. I took a break in Destiny 2 for a few months and because of fun seasonal events and the switch release I have played Diablo 3 significantly more often this year. The release of an excellent expansion in the form of Shadowbringers also leapfrogged Final Fantasy XIV several positions. Dragalia Lost had not quite launched early enough to make the list for last year but was a nearly daily fixture in my life in this past year. Both Elder Scrolls Online and Pokemon Go have been on the decline in my free time, so both dropped significantly in the numbers.
The Top 15 of All Time
Now we are getting into the territory of the images being impossible to read, but the above sheet snippet shows the top 15 games of all time. However for sake of sanity I am going to bullet point the list so you can see it more clearly.
World of Warcraft – 60 Months
Destiny / Destiny 2 – 55 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 55 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 44 Months
Diablo 3 – 41 Months
Rift – 39 Months
Pokemon Go – 25 Months
MTG Arena – 21 Months
Dragalia Lost – 16 Months
Monster Hunter World – 16 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 14 Months
Minecraft – 14 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Fallout 4 – 13 Months
Wildstar – 13 Months
World of Warcraft continues to reign at the top of the list, but its lead on the other options is shrinking because I am continuing to play that game less. Destiny and FFXIV are now tied for second place, and I fully expect that the Destiny Franchise will have potentially knocked Warcraft out of that top spot. Elder Scrolls knocked Rift out of the previous 4th place but didn’t gain as much ground this year as I didn’t play it nearly as often. Diablo 3 has risen up to claim the 5th spot and gained significant ground considering there was a big gap before between 5 and 6. Rift continues to descend the list because I am not actively playing it and also did not spend much time playing it last year either. What I find most interesting is the last three on the list because if you had asked me to guess as to what this list would like like ArcheAge, Fallout 4 and Wildstar would not have been still hanging on after all of this time. For reference you can check out last years post where I am pulling the comparisons from.
Other Interesting Data
Some other interesting data worth noting. In 2018 I played 70 unique games and this year I played considerably fewer, only racking up 48 games. That is still a lot of games but I felt like for a large chunk of the year I had a pretty stable list of titles that I kept bouncing back and forth between. The weirdest thing is… that if you look where I spent a lot of my time they are not on the same titles that I listed in my top games of 2019 post. I am a sucker for “comfort gaming” and there are a lot of times I keep playing games that present familiar patterns. I’ve spent a huge chunk of my vacation playing The Witcher 3 and I have loved it, and I guess my hope for this new year is to spend more time playing single player games since my multiplayer communities have been waning.
In 2018 I played 33 games that I would describe as a “Singleton” or a game that I only poked my head into for a single month. In 2019 that only represented 19 total games and it feels like that is really where the difference between the years comes into play. I was seemingly more adventurous in 2018 than I was in 2019 and I hope I can capture that spirit for 2020 and get out of my comfort zone a bit more often. For those interested in more trending information along this topic you can see a number of my posts since starting this tradition.
Like I said in yesterdays post, last night I saw the new Star Wars film and the capstone to the trilogy of trilogies… The Rise of Skywalker. I also managed to leave my credit card at dinner and am going to have to go pick that up tonight, but that is another story. Watching Rise of Skywalker in some ways reminded me of watching Return of the Jedi but for the wrong reasons. When I was a kid I was so deathly sick the weekend we were supposed to go see Return, but I refused to let my parents cancel because I was desperate to see it. Last night I was similarly fighting some sort of a crud and I think it dulled my senses, because there were so many moments that should have made me cheer or weep but all I could do was sit there glued to the screen attempting to continue breathing.
This is going to be a post about impressions and will be my attempt to do a spoiler free review. All of the imagery that you see in this post was pulled from the “Final Trailer” which wasn’t actually the Final trailer as I have seen 3 more new ones since then. I will however mention parts of Force Awakens and Last Jedi as I consider those to largely be “fair game” at this point. First off lets get my ranking of Star Wars films out of the way because in some ways that is going to tell you quickly how much of this “review” you are going to personally agree with. I posted it on twitter last night but here is my revised order of preference. I don’t hate any Star Wars films, I just have some that I like better than others. I’ve made my peace with the prequels.
The Empire Strikes Back
Rogue One
The Rise of Skywalker
The Force Awakens
A New Hope
Solo
Return of the Jedi
The Last Jedi
Revenge of the Sith
Attack of the Clones
The Phantom Menace
The most controversial part of that list is going to be Last Jedi since it is a deeply polarizing movie. There are some of my friends that hate it with the passion of a Sith, and there are others that feel like it heralded in a brand new era of excellence for Star Wars. I’m somewhere between. There are moments in that movie that I really liked but I found it to be an overall disappointing experience. Force Awakens set up all of these mystery boxes that I desperately wanted to see opened in the follow up. Rian Johnson on the other hand seemed damned determined to toss them all over his shoulder into the ocean the way Luke tried to toss Anakin’s Lightsaber. It was a movie that purposefully tried to undo all of the knots that Force Awakens tied, and for that I will always be disappointed.
My cat loves to knock over the bathroom trash can, and get to any crinkly wrappers that might have been thrown away. I dutifully set the trash can upright and try and stuff everything back inside rather than just emptying the damned thing and moving on with my life. Rise of Skywalker is a movie that tries to set the trash can upright and get things back to a state of where the franchise was heading at the end of Force Awakens. As a result it feels like it undoes a lot of the things that are just tossed aside in Last Jedi, all the while attempting to walk the thin line between doing this and doing it in such a flagrant way as to piss off all of the Last Jedi stalwarts.
The Last Jedi was a smaller film about personal interactions and character development. Rise of Skywalker is a movie about giant epic set pieces that the story flows between with them purposefully knowing that this is the grand send off of the entire “Saga”. I like big damned action sequences and I like giant scenes that are going to be paused forever as the lore hounds mine tidbits of information from the corners of the screen. I really enjoyed the film, but it more or less follows the script that I had originally thought was going to happen after Force Awakens. None of the reveals or the way that the content flows was really a surprise to me because I had imagined things unfolding in this manner for some time.
There are also more bits of the previously expanded universe that creep into the film in ways that aren’t really addressed setting up even more mystery boxes. I have some tasty theories but I won’t dare talk about them for some time, because spoilers. If you’ve always loved Star Wars you are probably going to be happy enough with this outing. As I said before it is a grand send off of the entire Saga and it makes me super interested to see what might come along later. This movie finishes the story of the Skywalker lineage, but I am not entirely certain that the story that is expressed in this film is really over. I feel about the Star Wars universe now much like I did at the end of Return of the Jedi. The sky is the limit and there are so many more tales out there to tell.
I’m thoroughly happy with this film and I am looking forward to seeing it again. I wish we lived in a world where you could watch first run films in your home, but we do not yet live in that world. So at some point during the holiday season I am going to make my wife venture forth and go see it with me. Last night I saw it with a bunch of friends, because while my wife is awesome and seems to have a begrudging respect for the original Trilogy, she is in no way near the fan that I am. Harry Potter was her universe that she fell in love with, but she was sleeping last night in a Santa Yoda shirt so at least some of me has rubbed off on her. I am satisfied with where the movies have gone, and I have a feeling that knowing what is coming in this movie will probably make my opinion of Last Jedi improve significantly.
