For most of this month I have been battling some respiratory crud that keeps circulating and recirculating through the office.  I’m currently in another under the weather spell which means that my gaming habits are a bit off.  However it is approximately that time again where I should post what all is in circulation at the Belghast household during the month of February.  For those who have not seen this post before, it is essentially my process of semi-monthly truing up the sidebar of the blog and talking about the various games contained within.  I am notoriously bad at sticking with series but one of my 2019 goals is to try and keep this up to date throughout the year.

To Those Remaining

Assassin’s Creed Origins – PC

I legitimately do not expect this game to stay on the list much longer.  I’ve reached the point where I am a few hours away from the end of the game and as such going through my stalling tactic that avoids actually playing it out.  I think part of this is my wanting a story to not be over, and part of it is knowing how frustrated the ending is going to make me since it will be forcing me to NOT play my actual character.  One way or another however I expect by March this one will drop off the list.  For now however I spent a significant amount of time early in the month and late January playing this so it stays on the list.

Destiny 2 – PC

I’ve not played nearly as much Destiny 2 this month as I probably would have liked.  I spent a lot of time logging in and back out again because for whatever reason it did not seem to scratch whatever gaming itch I was having at the time.  A lot of this lost time went to Assassin’s Creed Origins, which really did hold me in thrall for a few weeks there.  I am sure at some point in the near future I will return to being active again, but for now I am logging in doing a few objectives and then logging right back out.  Still keeping it in the rotation but my weekly play time has decreased significantly.

Dragalia Lost – Android

The thing this game does better than pretty much anything else I have seen… is keep a constant flow of content coming out that makes you want to pop in and participate in each and every event.  Right now there is a Valentines event that isn’t really my jam…  but I am still participating regularly and I applaud them trying to break up the formula.  Most of the story in Dragalia Lost is completely nonsense…  so when you create an event that is almost entirely story driven… it is equally nonsense.  However it has served as a great way to stock up on some of the rarer items that you can purchase with the extremely easy to obtain “rose” currency.  It has however made me burn down my stack of skip tokens so that is a bit of a negative.  Still playing… still engaged.

Elder Scrolls Online – PC

Another game that is sort of holding on by a thread is Elder Scrolls Online.  While I love this game I am just not playing nearly as much as I probably should be of it.  I need to start the Morrowind content because it would give me a sense of grounding in the story that I need to keep logging in on a nightly basis.  That said I have had plenty of games on my plate so I am fine with a few of them slipping off the easy to reach shelf for a moment.  I need to buy that 1 TB SSD/M.2 drive I have been contemplating because I don’t have a ton of space on my current boot drive.  I think this is a game that would DEFINITELY be improved by an SSD given how much loading happens.  A big problem with me and this game right now is knowing how long it is going to take before I load all of the way into it.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

I’ve been going through a bit of a renaissance here this month as I finished leveling Blue Mage to the level cap of 50 and am a single dungeon away from being caught up with the story.  That said… Anthem happened and sorta threw any time that I would be devoting to Final Fantasy for a loop.  However I am starting to feel like I am back in the swing of things.  I am focusing on the Samurai since tanking for strangers seemed like a bit too far off the path for me to wander.  Weirdly I find the dungeon queues for DPS to be massively improved over what they previously were… so maybe that isn’t a horrible choice.  Samurai is a really fun class but it still very much feels like I am “alting”.

Magic the Gathering Arena – PC

Still in the regular rotation but not spending an awful lot of time there on a weekly basis is Magic the Gathering Arena.  I’ve participated in a few events this month with the release of Ravnica Allegiances and all in all still enjoying the format.  The biggest problem I am having at the moment is that formats I am likely to enjoy the most… Pauper and Singleton are dominated by degenerate decks like Rat Colony or Persistent Petitioners.  Both of which are entertaining the first time you encounter them…  but end up with me just conceding out of the match so I can move on with my life.  I is not that the decks are unbeatable…  it is just that it isn’t worth my time to go through the motions.  What makes it worse is the mechanics of MTG Arena make them super easy to field given that if you have 4 copies of a card in your library you effectively have an UNLIMITED number of that card in your library since the system can only keep track of 4 copies.  That means instead of forcing someone to burn through 24+ common tokens…  they have to use 4 at most.  I should build up a proper standard deck and just play that format, but for now I only really play MTGA when I am not feeling like anything else.

Monster Hunter World – PC

Another game that is holding on by a thread is Monster Hunter World, and it isn’t for lack of wanting to play…  but more a case that I have a wealth of other games to play right now that all function similarly.  I consider Anthem, Destiny and Monster Hunter to all be filling the same basic niche of the MMO-Lite style of game.  For now I am devoting those efforts to Anthem, but I am sure in the coming months some of that time will be spent killing monsters.  When some of the console exclusive quests start trickling over to PC I am sure I will come back in and participate in them again.  That is a major problem I have with the PC version right now however is the staggered release schedule.  It should have been their goal to catch the PC up at a hyper inflated rate so that they could have events going on in both locations at the same time.  However Capcom seems to be fine with leaving PC as a less than equal version of the game… which I find maddening.  I am hoping with the expansion that all of this shakes out and they can both be on equal footing once and for all.

Pokemon Go – Android

I have to admit that the only thing really keeping me engaged with Pokemon Go right now is the fact that Android Wear integrates with it.  What means my TicWatch E is constantly logging steps made and giving me credit so…  I spend most of my time hatching eggs.  That means I am also using my backlog of friend gifts as a repository for getting more of the eggs that I want to hatch.  At this moment I spent some coins on the store and am hatching ALL the eggs at once so I can clear all 9 slots for more friend egg hatching nonsense.  Side note… I love my TicWatch E and at some point should probably write a post about it since I have been using it for months after my formerly beloved Pebble Time stopped synchronizing with my phone.

To The Returning and Brand New

Anthem – PC

This is the new hotness in my life and I am loving the game.  Seeing a lot of negative reviews floating about and I keep thinking that they are playing a different game.  Flying around in a mech suit has been a dream of mine since I was a little kid.  There were some folks that loved the Valkyries from Robotech…  but for me… it was all about the Cyclone armor.  In the Rifts pen and paper game… it was all about the S.A.M.A.S. and the Glitterboys.  In Fallout I have sought out wearing Powered Armor as soon as I could possibly get a suit.  So as a result there may be a player fantasy that Anthem is providing that fits neatly into my wheelhouse.  I am having a blast and look forward to seeing what the world as a whole feels about the game on Friday.  I think the big publication game reviewers in general consider being bitter fucks about everything to be “on brand”, so as such I largely ignore them.  Instead when it comes to games…  my focus tends to be how my friends with similar play styles are feeling about a new title.

To Those Departing

Ashen – PC

This game while super interesting… just did not stand the test of time for me personally.  I stalled out and never wound up returning to it.  This was not helped by the fact I went through a week where the Epic Games launcher kept crashing constantly for me.  I probably will return to it at some point because I still find what it is doing interesting, it just lost out to other games that were holding my attention a bit better.

Far Cry 5 – PC

Ultimately I beat the game and as a result it fell off my radar.  At some point I will probably play through the Zombie Survival mode of the game just to see what it is all about.  However I more or less moved on to Assassin’s Creed Origins and as a result this is dropping off the list.  You can follow down some of my post about the game to track my sentiments, because while I loved a lot of the experience it had real flaws when it came to the forced narrative.  Still would absolutely play again… and it makes me want to spend some more time in Far Cry 4.

Minecraft – Windows Store

Not shocked at all to see this dropping off the list because this tends to be how I play Minecraft lately.  I will go through an obsessive building phase for a few weeks… and then stop playing altogether for several months.  Still a great game and shocked at just how evergreen the experience of virtual legos ends up being for me for the long run.  I do not care at all about the survival aspects and tend to play the game mostly on creative mode.  I return to this when my mind wants me to build something… and exit again once I have finished tinkering with it.  It serves a glorious purpose in my life and I am thankful to have it.  Playing Minecraft calms me.

Summary

All in all there was not a ton of movement this month, but I will say there are a bunch of games in danger of dropping off the list come next time.  I also know that Division 2 is looming on the horizon and I am not sure where it will fit into the entire apparatus since it is launching roughly a month after Anthem.  All in all… question to the readers.  Do you enjoy this column of sorts or do you wish I would just drop it and do normal posts in place of them?

One of the constants of Tales of the Aggronaut is my sheer inability to keep any form of a series going for any length of time.  There is a thing that I used to do semi-monthly where I trued up the regularly playing widget on my blog’s sidebar and talked a bit about the games that I have actually been playing.  I would talk about the things that I was adding to the list, the things that I was for whatever reason still playing… and then talked about the things I was removing from the list and a bit about why.  Unfortunately based on a quick search of my blog…  this is not something that I have done since August of 2017.  A lot has changed since then and a lot of games have come up and gone away, and quite frankly I am not sure how valid any sort of a comparison might be.  However I wanted to get this started again.  So from now on I expect to be updating these towards the end of the month rather than at the beginning of a new month.  I’ve also decided to start including the platform I am playing on, since in a few cases that actually does matter a lot.

Destiny 2 – PC

I’ve been having a bit of a renaissance with Destiny 2 and I spent the vast majority of the weekend hanging out downstairs and playing it while remoted into my desktop upstairs.  My nonsense Parsec setup is amazing, and this really has become my default gameplay method most of the time.  I mean who doesn’t want to play sitting on the sofa, wrapped up in fuzzy blankets…  with two cats snuggling into them?  I got the Trinity Ghoul to drop after completing Ikora Rey’s bounty objective, and it is awesome…  unfortunately I will probably never actually use it.  The fact that we can only use one exotic weapon pretty much means that choice is always going to go to the Thunderlord.  If they introduce some legendary HMGs into the game again…  that decision might shift…  but for now it feels damned good to have access to one again.  For the most part I am spending my time knocking out various things that award Powerful/Prime engrams, and other than that I started leveling the Hunter last night while watching Walking Dead.  The game really is in the best state it has been in period… and I am probably counting all of the awesome stuff that was available during Year 3 of Destiny 1.  If you are not playing this game you owe it to yourself to check it out again.

Monster Hunter World – PC

The other primary game that I am spending most of my time playing is Monster Hunter World on the PC.  This game is so much more enjoyable with a mouse and keyboard, and I have recently been grinding away for the Dante weapon and armor set that came in with the Devil May Cry cross over event.  I also had no clue how often I use the term grinding… until this weekend when a Chinese Cutting Wheel and Grinder company reached out to me to see if I wanted to do a paid product placement.  It is weird how things like that happen… how the  gaming sphere takes a perfectly normal and reasonable word and shifts it into something else.  I still have yet to get over the level 49 hump that is Tempered Kirin…  but I figure in the coming week I might start devoting some of my play time towards doing that.  I would really like to be uncapped again by the time the Winter Festival starts up, so that all of the time spent doing those events can bolster my hunting rank.  The highlight of the weekend was the Code Red match when three of us were using Kulve Taroth Paralysis weapons…  and it was shocking just how often we had the mob locked down tight…  even Teostra.

Final Fantasy XIV – PC

Somewhat shocking to me… I am apparently back playing Final Fantasy XIV regularly after my extremely long absence?  The last update from August 2017 was just about when I started to peel away from Stormblood, because that was also the month that I played a significant amount of Guild Wars 2… enough to probably consider it my main game back then.  In the year and some change that has passed since that post… I really have not spent all that much time playing the game.  I came back a few times attempting to get caught up with the main story quest, only to stall out in this place or another.  However lately it has felt really good to roam around and play something like this, especially when paired with my more action oriented main squeezes of Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World.  I can only take so much of that in a single setting and need to retreat back into something slower paced…  and for now at least hotbar combat works nicely for that.

Diablo 3 – Switch

Another game that I have been enjoying the hell out of is Diablo 3 on the Nintendo Switch.  It is a really great platform for the game and I had never really given the console version any serious play prior to this.  My only gripe is the way it requires connectivity to play seasonal characters.  Essentially if you want to play these in a disconnected state, you need to have the forethought to start up a game before you leave the safety of WiFi… and then place your switch into Airplane Mode.  From there the game will allow you to continue playing your seasonal character, and eventually synchronize everything when you get connected once again.  This is somewhat maddening, but at least I have the ability to tether to my phone if for some reason I did not think ahead to do this thing before I left the house.  I am spending a lot of my “while trying to fall asleep” time playing Diablo 3.

Pokemon Let’s Go Eevee – Switch

While I did not play much of it this weekend, I am still very much enthralled with Let’s Go Pokemon.  When I last played I had just beaten the third gym and was grinding my way towards the next one.  However when I get back into game I want to do some backtracking and train my Eevee with some of the silly named abilities that the mentor is offering.  Based on Ashgar’s suggestions, these are apparently really good moves.  This is the biggest problem that I have with Pokemon games in general, is that I never know what moves I should be allowing it to learn and what ones I should be ignoring.  As a result I tend to largely favor straight damage attacks and ignore the more fiddly nonsense of raising and lowering accuracy and such.  Pokemon is a game about collecting cute pets for me… and the combat nonsense is largely just something I have to deal with in order to collect said cute pets.

Fallout 76 – PC

This game is still very much on the list but I have not devoted near enough time to it.  Largely this requires me to be upstairs… and since I have been spending most of my time downstairs it just isn’t getting played.  I’ve also been dealing with a lot of stress and that makes me turtle and avoid doing any manner of group activity that requires voice communication.  This is coupled with the fact that I don’t really have a great comms set up downstairs, and as a result simply avoid joining voice servers.  I could of course go into “listen only” mode but that doesn’t really work in situations where the in game chat is not amazing.  I did spend some time this weekend hanging out with Rae and walking her through the finer points of Monster Hunter World… or at least answering a bunch of the questions anyone has starting that game.  I know Tam, Kodra, Shiana and Waren have been having a massively fun time running around in a big group… and as cool as that sounds… I just can’t bring myself to be that interactive.  I am hoping when the private servers release that there will be a second awakening of this game and I can hop on the bandwagon at that point.  In the meantime however I am playing a very quiet and crafting-centric version of the game as I expand my nifty roadside base.

Hellgate London – PC (Steam)

As generally “not good” as the Steam version of this game is…  I find myself still regularly booting it up and playing around with it.  I did however dig out my copy of Hellgate London on DVD, and plan on going through the nonsense to install it and get set up to use the London 2038 emulator servers to see just how well that version of the game plays.  In the mean time however… it is still Hellgate London,  no matter how cludgy it might be and I love this game.  I am guessing this would be on my list of guilty pleasure games that no one else really understands…  like Vagrant Story…  or Simon’s Quest.  Remember kids…  Excessive game play may affect your lifestyle.

Dragalia Lost – Android

While this is not necessarily an every day thing anymore… I am still very much playing Dragalia Lost on a regular basis.  At this very moment there is a special summon event going on, and I seem to have missed the guaranteed five star adventurer summon…  and currently it is a wyrmprint.  No one gives a shit about wyrmprints…  so I will wait to use mine until the five star dragons kick in at the end of the cycle.  The current event is somewhat enjoyable, but I do greatly prefer the cycles where we have a raid open and a new character that we can gain faction with.  So far it seems to alternate back and forth between kill a boss and get bonus loot…  and earn a new character and do a raid.  Since this is a wind event and that tends to be the crew that is the least used overall… I am using it to work up their levels and have largely coalesced on using Melody the Samurai Maid as my main for the event.  Admittedly I mostly like her because it reminds me of my friend PizzaMaid… only because she is a maid that kicks lots of ass as well.

Pokemon Go – Android

With the connectivity between Let’s Go and Pokemon Go… it has also spurred me to be a lot more active in this game as well.  I don’t have an awful lot to say about it other than the fact that I am regularly checking what “Mons” might be around when I am out about in the world.  The fact that I got a Google Wear watch has also increased this experience because I am now getting credit via Google Fit for the time when I don’t have the app open.  As a result I am hatching a lot more eggs than I did previously, since it seemed inconvenient to keep the app open all of the time.  Mobile games are generally a massive drain on the battery, and none are harder on it than Dragalia and Pokemon Go… so as a result I tend to play them sparingly when I am at fear of running down my battery and without a way to charge it again.

Walking Dead Our World – Android

This game is barely holding in there and since being punted from the clan I was in…  a lot of my reason for playing on a nightly basis has disappeared.  It was enjoyable to feel like my little bits of play were adding up to larger objectives, but without that incentive…  I am just not motivated to play that often.  The game has a problem of not making it really reasonable to acquire better characters or weapons.  99.9% of the activities you do will give you white cards, which might as well go straight into the dumpster.  The only things worth using really are purple or orange the highest tiers, and they have tied a number of objectives to doing things with specific legendary weapons making it really hard to knock those out each week.  They really want you to spend money on the game, and I feel like I am just not getting enough joy out of the game to do so.  I’ve lucked my way into a few items and they were running a special where Legendary Morgan and Rick were super cheap to purchase with one of the in game grindable currencies.  I fully expect however that by the time I do my next update this game will be on the outs.

There are other games that I might boot up here or there but for the most part this is the crux of games that I am playing regularly as the title of the post suggests.  What are you my wonderful readers playing lately?