Games

A Collection of Games that I Write Posts About

Trials of Mana Demo

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It is the beginning of my third day of remote work and I already have no clue what day of the week it is. In theory this should mean that it is Thursday, but I am also deeply skeptical that time still moves in the same fashion that it used to. The weirdest part about working from home is how phenomenally busy I seem to stay, because I am having to exert so much effort to keep tabs on everything that is going on as opposed to news just finding me randomly. I spent most of yesterday on conference calls for various reasons and I think for the most part things are working as intended. My crew, also working remotely appears to be successfully knocking out things so I think the experiment is more or less working.

My evenings on the gaming front have been completely all over the place. Yesterday during the day I saw that Trials of Mana released a demo, and more important than that one that allows you to continue your progress in the full game. I have been exceptionally excited for the release of the remake of this game, largely because I have been waiting to play this game for legitimately decades. Back during the Super Nintendo era there were two games that made me want to learn Japanese so that I could play them. The first of these was Final Fantasy V, which I have played through several times now as part of the four job fiesta and attempted to play an early fan sub during the late 90s on an emulator. The other of these was Seiken Densetsu 3 or as we eventually came to know it in the west Trials of Mana.

The fan subs for this game were always lagging behind because the game proceeds in a manner that isn’t exactly like its predecessors in the “mana” series. Instead of having a fixed party you choose three characters to focus on and then that dictates what sort of quests and content you experience along the way. I remember there being a “golden” path translation that allows you to play specific characters, but even then… the game required way too much horsepower to be able to run on a Super Nintendo emulator at the time I was messing around with such things circa 1997/98. After that it was filed away in my brain as a game I would love to play if I ever got the chance and was quickly forgotten about as I transitioned mostly into PC gaming.

In June of 2019 the game was re-released as part of the Collection of Mana, but at that same time was announced that a fully 3D remake was on its way. Instead of playing the original 2D sprite based game I decided to bide my time and wait for its eventual release on the Switch in all of its shiny new glory. As a result last night I legitimately played through the entire battery on my switch poking around the demo and I have to say I am fully on board with this game. I legitimately loved the “Mana” series back in the day and Secret of Mana is among my favorite Super Nintendo titles. I even enjoyed the quirky Secret of Evermore that I still think is a hidden gem among the Super Nintendo era titles.

So far I have to say that the transition from traditional 2D Seiken Densetsu gameplay works pretty freaking well. The combat feels good and fluid and the jumping mechanics are functional for both getting to aerial enemies and traversing the 3D set pieces. I am enjoying the scavenger hunt aspect of the world in finding all of the hidden treasure chests, glowing items on the ground and pots to smash. The world map is adequate and combined with the in screen messaging does a good job of directing you towards the objectives you need to be paying attention to. On some level this feels like maybe a throwback to the Playstation 2 era of Action RPGs like Dark Cloud, but with significantly better visuals.

The demo allows players to get to level 7 and I believe through the initial story of each of the characters you have chosen. I fully expect to play my way through all of that and then continue into the full release when it comes out on the Switch on April 24th. My hope is that I can get Animal Crossing out of my system enough to give it some free reign in a month when it officially is available. This game feels like I had been hoping the most recent Dragon Quest game would have felt like, which I realize doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than myself. Since I played the original game with the Sprite as my healer, the girl as a dragoon and the boy as a sword wielder… I figured going for Duran, Charlotte and Riesz was the closest I could get to that sort of a setup.

In other news that absolutely made the world feel better for a little while… we saw Tripod last night. For those who have not followed the blog for long we have a community of neighborhood cats that we feed. We have super original names for each of them, but the most important one to us is the three legged female calico cat that we refer to as “tripod”. We promise we would give her a proper name if we could ever befriend her and get her into the vet. She comes and goes irregularly and is also way the hell too stealthy to get caught on the front porch video camera. This is a horrible quality photo take from my wife’s phone, but after a few months of not seeing her and fearing the worst we saw her up on the porch going for the food dish. It does my heart good to know she is okay and has made it fine through the recent cold snaps. We have a feeling that both her and the cat we refer to as “three” are actually living in our backyard, but any attempts to locate where they are staying have been unsuccessful. I believe however that they might be living way down underneath our slightly elevated wooden deck.

Zombies Calm Me

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The first day of going on remote protocol was interesting. For the most part the entire day was spent with triage of why various members of the team could not get connected remotely to specific resources. I did however manage to make it through the entire day without finding something I had to drive in for, so I guess that is working as intended? It very much is like raid leadership, but if your raid is acting independently of each other and that you are having to talk to them in tells. The two stand up meetings more or less worked as intended and I limited them just to critical issues. The first one unfortunately was pushed back due to a mandatory meeting, but we managed to get started just fine an hour later than originally planned.

The thing that I am noticing is that while working remotely I tend to put in more hours overall. I tagged in and did my first “work” about 6:30 in the morning and I tagged out for the night around 5 pm, and also ate lunch at the keyboard. So maybe I need to work on setting up a bit of time boxing and only making myself available during my normal 7:30 am to 4:30 pm window. Were it not rainy as hell I would have probably gone out into the backyard to eat lunch just to get a bit of a change of scenery. I have Shin Ramen for days and I wound up eating a cup of that for lunch much like I would have were I sitting in the office. In theory I might partake of Doordash and start ordering in lunch for my wife and I. Yesterday the Tulsa metro escalated its protocols and all restaurants and bars that do not have a delivery or carry out service are closed. As a result we are going to try and order take out from as many small establishments as possible over the next few days to try and keep them in business.

As far as gaming goes when I went downstairs and fixed dinner I eventually settled in and tried to play some more Diablo 3. Firstly I do not really love the Natalya’s set build, but it is functional and I can do Torment 1 pretty easily with only having my 4 piece and none of the other important items needed. My biggest problem still is the fact that I am gold locked in that I need roughly a million gold per attempt to keep trying to socket a weapon so that I can get my 6 piece set and finally start the season properly. The challenge there is that I am just not making that much gold per run and it feels like I am in a super grindy place. I need to catch up with Grace so we can use the Puzzle Ring and I can at least get my Boon of the Hoarder gem.

On a whim I opted to fire up my Playstation 4 remotely and start playing Last of Us. Yes I know I should be branded as a pariah for making it this far into my gaming career without having played this game. I have to admit part of this is spurred on by the fact that there is an HBO series in the work and another part by the fact that the second part should be releasing soon. So far I am really digging it, but I also don’t love aiming guns with a controller so we will see how long this lasts. I would have so much rather played this with a mouse and keyboard and on some level I kept hoping that like Horizon Zero Dawn it would also eventually release on the PC.

I didn’t make it terribly far into the game but I have to say that even on a baseline PS4 it looks gorgeous. I will likely play some more tonight as weirdly games and fiction about post apocalyptic settings calm me when the world is falling apart around my shoulders. I guess it is a way of showing me that “it could be worse”, and really for me it could be very worse. You know when you are wandering around in Silent Hill during the day time and everything feels wrong… but at the same time nothing is really dangerous? That is how living in pandemia feels right now because for the most part things are close to normal… but not quite. I am still hoping we all make it out safely on the other side of this mess. I am a prime candidate for having a bad time of it due to my health problems so I feel like I keep needing to tell everyone around them that I love them just in case things go badly at some point in the future.

Tres Cazadora

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This weekend was the beginning of another Diablo 3 season and once again we are on our bullshit. I was super happy to see that Byx was around and wanting to do nonsense and since we are all sorta stressed to the highest degree we seemingly all chose the easy mode. Demon Hunter is pretty much the default state for me and a Diablo season because I know with a little push I can get in and get the content knocked out in relatively short order. I decided to rebirth an older Demon Hunter which lead to the above state of our party, where we are all desperately in need of clothing and kicking demon butt in high heels.

This was a fairly low gaming weekend, because we spent a lot of our time doing various cleaning activities both for the sake of covid19 and for the fact that it is spring break and we always seem to do big cleaning projects. We went out shopping for awhile on Saturday and managed to get a new pair of outdoor rugs for the backyard, so pending things ever warm up again we will get everything set up back there again. This is mostly for our own mental fortitude because if we are sequestered for very long in the near future we will want access to our peaceful oasis with birbs, squirrels and neighborhood cats. Huge thanks to my friend Kolrath for giving me a lift from 55ish to 70 on Saturday morning fairly early, and Grace and I finally managed to catch up with each other on Sunday night to hang for a bit again.

I am currently stalled out on the seasonal journey and my six piece gear set by a single thing. I cannot for the life of me get a weapon to roll a socket. I’ve completely bankrupted myself on five or six occasions trying to roll a socket on a yellow bow and it just isn’t happening. Ultimately my game time has been spent farming gold and then blowing all of it on a futile attempt to get through chapter four. The worst part is that I don’t even love the gear set that is for this season, but I have been rat-holing other set pieces I come across because I think ultimately for farming purposes I am going to want a Yang’s Multishot build, which is probably my favorite? I am not sure what sort of shenanigans I can get up to this season with the ability to have odd combinations of cube items but I figure bolas and grenades are on the menu for nonsense.

The other thing that I did this weekend was spend the podcast getting reacquainted with Elder Scrolls Online. Effectively patching up right now will replace your current client with a brand new one, and while this is in itself a cumbersome and lengthy process… the end result is amazing. Elder Scrolls Online has always had significant performance issues, namely when it comes to loading into the game initially and loading into new areas. This client seems to completely fix these issues for me at least and has greatly improved general performance across the board. As always I am several content releases behind and am now working my way through the Morrowind content drop. I have no clue where I picked up the bad-ass Khajiit mask but I am absolutely rocking this cat lord vibe right now.

Interesting Times

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There is an ancient “curse” that reads “may you live in interesting times”. I feel like right now at this moment we are all living in interesting times regardless if we want to. This has been a bizarre week, and comes on the tail of several bizarre weeks. In a Pinball machine there is an anti-cheating mechanism designed to lock down the controls if you push it off axis just a little too much and cause a plumb bob to bang against its housing. This is referred to as tilting the machine, and I feel like at some point on Thursday I officially entered the tilt state as a human being and am more or less just operating on instinct. As a technologist I often times think of my own internal processes as though they were that of a machine, because in some way it makes me feel like I have more control over them than I actually do.

Video games are a large part of my coping mechanism for stress. I often want to dig into some other world or setting as a way of resetting my brain back to healthy parameters. However when too much stress builds up too quickly I find myself in this restless state where nothing seems to be soothing. I am officially in that state as I flit between activities desperately trying to find something to bring some semblance of solace to my mind. Last night I spent some time playing Doom 2016, because I never actually managed to beat that game before careening off like a bored toddler into some other thing that caught my attention. The jury is out if it actually helped because I woke up this morning feeling just as frazzled as I was before heading to bed and I know I was up several times during the night tossing and turning and struggling with temperature regulation.

Starting around the 26th of February I started fighting a case of Influenza A that was thankfully tested and classified as that. However I took the advice of shelter and self care and as a result I was too late for antivirals meaning that I got the full brunt. I had a Flu Shot but got the trivalent version that my workplace was offering, and my wife later got the quadrivalent version that Walgreens had. Apparently the strain I got was the one covered under the one she received because she never actually managed to catch it which is a blessing. However while I am in recovery mode still and taking a course of steroids to attempt to clear out my lungs, we have also been dealing with the ramping up of concern and reaction to Covid19.

I won’t lie I am concerned about this virus, largely because when the news talks about about the people this sort of thing effects the worst… I am in that category. I have severe respiratory problems and have had my entire life. When you combine that with the fact that I have a less than fully functioning immune system due to some IgG deficiencies you end up with a recipe for me having a really bad time if I catch this thing. I am trying desperately not to let this fear control me, but it is nonetheless a thing. I am one of those people that seems to catch everything that happens to be going around, and I feel like it is just a matter of time before I myself get infected. I feel like I keep wanting to tell everyone that I love them… just in case something goes south because I am riding that line between understandable concern and sheer panic way too much of the day.

On one level it seems strange to be coming home and pushing my brain into another world… especially one as violent as Doom. However for me I guess it is a way of not being me for awhile and going into a setting with clearly defined rules that I can manipulate and bend to my will. It is a way of me getting back some control when I am feeling like I have none. I am a very information based person and the lack of what it seems like good solid verified information is ultimately the thing that pushes me into a state of panic the most. The fact checkers of the world are in a state of overload and too much information is flowing out through less than reliable sources that make for a very challenging time to decide what you can actually trust. So instead I keep looking for shelter for the night in the form of a game, because the day will always mean a return to the logistics of the world and the weariness that it brings.