Games Archives - Page 504 of 691 - Tales of the Aggronaut

A Better Minecraft

September 25, 2015 by Belghast

Ash is Awesome

I have a really huge wishlist on steam, in part because it is a nice way of tracking all of those games that I see every now and then that interest me. Steam will remind me through their UI when they go on sale, and sometimes this is extremely handy. However occasionally it has unintended consequences, like for example… during Pax Prime my friend Ashgar somehow acquired a copy of the sandbox building game Creativerse. The other night he handed me a key for it, and over the last few days I have been playing a significant amount of it. I remember looking at the game and thinking “Pretty Minecraft” and honestly… after playing a lot of it that title still largely applies. Minecraft is a charming game, but it is also a fairly primative game. The magic of Minecraft comes from the fact that it has been so easy to extend and create new types of experiences out of. So in the meantime there have been lots of games that have come out providing a much more aesthetically pleasing experience. Until recently I would have crowned SkySaga the king of this new breed of “pretty minecraft” games, but after playing Creativerse… I think maybe it is more fitting the title.

When you enter the game you are asked to create a name for your character and choose a simple boy or girl avatar. The game loses some points with me right out of the gate because these avatars really are not customized in any fashion. From there you can set up your own private world or join someone elses, and similar to a minecraft server you can toggle different variables. My world for example has PVP disabled, and I set a password… but for the life of me I cannot seem to remember what password I set which will probably come back to bite me in the ass at a later date. You are plunked into this pretty world with a power glove that allows you to pull blocks up from the ground, and a stick that serves as your default weapon. The first thing I noticed was how generally difficult combat is because I died quite a bit trying to sort out which types of creatures I could kill and which I could not. The other item that I finally noticed I had in my inventory allowed me to change my spawn point and plunk down a teleporter allowing me to pop around the world freely and teleport back to my spawn point later.

The Struggle is Enjoyable

With Minecraft, from almost the first moment I set foot in game… I had resources that I could draw on. There are wikis of every sort that contain detailed information about what every block does and how you can best use it in the game world. So far I have not found anything similar for Creativerse, or at the very least when I google for anything… all that returns is a series of YouTube videos. Since I don’t want to have to wade through a YouTube video to find the one nugget of information I need… I just started falling back on the things I know as true in Minecraft. The basic logic of how the world works is very similar, but the primary difference comes in the actual creating of things. Recipes in Creativerse are significantly more complicated than they are in Minecraft. For example to create stone flooring, you need raw stone which is a given, but also stone rods and melted wax. You get the melted wax by taking honey comb that you can only find way up high in the leaves of trees… and melting it in a forge. The end result is this complicated sequence of chicken and egg scenarios where you never actually reach a point of equilibrium where resources no longer are a problem. Coal for example is one of the basic resources needed in both Minecraft and Creativerse… but the primary difference is very early on in Minecraft I reach a point where I no longer care about getting Coal, however here since I have to use special expendable extractor items to harvest it… I am constantly searching for a new supply of both the resources to build more extractors and more coal nodes to extract.

The problem with Minecraft is ultimately that we know that game too well. Within thirty minutes of a new game I can go find every resource I need to do pretty much everything I would want to do. In Creativerse I feel more at the whim of spawn dynamics and hoping to find the right needle in the haystack to keep moving forward. I’ve learned several things, like how to find Diamond, but I still cannot for the life of me figure out a way to get a reasonable supply of obsidian… which is needed for most of the Diamond item crafting. One of the nice things about this game is that as you collect an item it starts opening up your recipes for said resource. Then by crafting sub components it will unlock further things that you can create with it. Occasionally while out in the field you can find books or pages of paper that contain special “fancy” versions of existing items that you already know how to create. As you go through the game you upgrade your weapon and powercells for your glove, that allow you to do progressively more advanced things. However at no point even though I am swinging a magitek looking sword… do I feel like I have made combat any easier. When I see a creature especially while delving deep into the earth… there is still a high likelihood that I am going to get faced rolled and add another “death statue” to my collection. The game keeps giving you these rock idols each time you die… and I’ve started surrounding my base in them as a bit of a sign of honor.

Darkness is Dangerous

Much like Minecraft there is a day night cycle and during the night things spawn that do not appear during the day. For lack of a better term I am going to call these things “corrupted” versions of the normal monsters that you can find during the day. When the sun raises they disappear just like they do in Minecraft. One thing that is different however is during the night treasure chests also appear to spawn, and wandering around the countryside looking for them is much easier because they give off a glow that you can see for a large distance. However to do this you also have to survive the onslaught of aggressive critters that are generally slightly tougher than their day time counterparts. These treasure chests also often give you access to materials that you cannot find yet on your own and give you a bit of a jump start. The problem being however… if you find an item in a treasure chest you have no clue where it actually came from. There has been a lot of trial and error and me taking on things just to see what sorts of materials they might drop. Funny enough it took me a really long time to figure out how to get a reliable source of sinew which is used by so many crafts.

While the game does not have the sort of food and water survival system that Minecraft eventually adopted and so many addons provided, it does have something interesting. When you are exposed to dangerous conditions you start to see an exposure bar appear. For example if you are roaming through the solidified Magma area, you will start see a flame gauge begin to creep up. I am not sure what happens when the gauge reaches the top, but I am guessing you catch on fire and die. Similarly in the above image you can see a purple biohazard gauge which is when I broke through into the “corrupted” zone. Deep under ground I found an area that had a slight purple glow, and featured corrupted trees and all sorts of nasty creatures. It has been extremely difficult to explore because I broke through into the cavern way the hell up into the air, and I can only spend so much time in there before my corruption creeps too high and I have to retreat. I need to figure out how exactly you can fight these influences and see if there is a way to counteract the exposure gauge. Similarly I went out exploring and found a tundra biome and the entire time I was there a cold exposure gauge kept creeping up. With no real way to counteract it I finally had to teleport back to base. The tunnel to the corrupted zone is deep under my base so I figure at some point over the next few days I will explore it further.

Speaking of Bases

Almost all of my time so far has been spent underground, but towards the end of the night I started working on an above ground dwelling I can be more proud of. For a long time I had a simple stone shack plunked out in the middle of the Savannah. Last night I started raising walls for a courtyard and building a proper stone floor. I am not sure exactly where I am going with it, but I just wanted something more noticeable while I am out roaming around. I want to build some sort of a tower and place a beacon at the top of that now that I finally have all of the components to build one. I am certain that once I build a white beacon it will start unlocking the patterns for different colors. The building system is pretty intuitive, but it reminds me more of Trove than it does of Minecraft in that you toggle back and forth between building and combat modes. Trove would honestly be my ultimate “minecraft-like” game if it weren’t for the simple blocks and insanely garish color palette. I love the combat though, and that along keeps me coming back… I am just not that big of a fan of the building aspect. Creativerse however seems to have that side of the equation for me, and if you also really like Minecraft, but are getting tired of its primitive client… you might check this game out. Right now it is $19.99 on Steam Early access, but supposedly if it ever launches it will be free to play. They originally planned on being in early access for 4-6 months… but now it has been a little over a year so who knows how long it will last.

Misery and NDAs

September 24, 2015 by Belghast

Broken

Over the last few days I have felt run down, and I am grasping at straws to figure out exactly why. There seems to be something going around the office, but so far I am not really showing any signs of whatever it is other than simply being exhausted. Last night I largely struggled with a Migraine that kept me in a pseudo hibernation state, but this morning as I sit down to the keyboard and attempt to drink my coffee I am just feeling generally lousy. One of my co-workers has been out for three days with something, so I am hoping I am not coming down with whatever that was. Last night was the night of restless gaming. I attempted to log in and be present in Final Fantasy XIV but only wound up AFKing outside the guild hall. It made me appreciate just how much I love our free company house. It really is in just about the perfect location that seems to be close to just about everything in The Mists neighborhood. The only problem is… it is small. We have talked for a bit about potentially trying to pool our resources and getting a bigger house, but the problem there is we would have to move and likely out of our neighborhood.

One of the things that I like the most about where we are situated is that we actually know a large chunk of the neighbors surrounding us. While it has not been nearly as busy since the launch of Heavensward as everyone has fallen into this pre 3.1 lull… it is still nice feeling like you are part of something larger. While idling in FFXIV I attempted to play some Destiny and managed to complete a few bounties. However my aim was constantly wonky, and I knew I should not be attempting anything serious. As the night wore on the headache got worse and ultimately I ended up retiring to bed for awhile… the finally ending up on the Sofa. I hate those days where you have the will to play something… but cannot struggle through the “bad feels” in order to actually make any headway.

NDAs are Back

I am using Trove as the screenshot for this little section because it was one of the first “who needs an NDA” alpha games that I can remember playing. Everything about that game process was so out in the open that development discussions were openly happening on Reddit. For a period of time it seemed like every new game coming down the pipe was sans NDA so that folks could stream it freely and generate buzz. I was shocked when I managed to get into the Warlords of Draenor friends and family alpha for example… and was told that I could talk about it freely. The problem being… this open transparency bit more than a few games in the ass. Development is a messy time and as things are changing… you end up with features in “partially finished” states that look like a finished product to the gamer. The big problem with open and “pay to join” Alphas is that they no longer feel like testing. Instead you have simply released a broken game.

As a result lately I’ve noticed a significant number of games bringing back the NDA. Hell some of them seem to be almost unwilling to let the NDA go, as they have been in fairly prolific testing for a couple of years. As of right now I am in a handful of NDA bound alpha processes, and each of them seems to be trying to return to the era when Alphas were actually that. The problem with this is, I am finding myself far less interested in playing something that I can’t actually talk about on my blog. So generally speaking I install the Alpha client and play every now and then, but I am not actually playing enough to be a proper tester. I feel bad for this because I have always been the type to bug note the hell out of things as I see them. While I think it is probably a good thing for Alpha processes to regain some of their previous closed nature, I also feel far less invested in a game until it is actually hatched and ready for public consumption. So many things over the last years have blurred the lines between finished product and testing, and the current era of incessant and constant “early access” games just makes me leery to invest too much of myself in a game until I know that it is nearing its finished state.

Titans and Skywhales

September 22, 2015 by Belghast

Two Worlds

Last night was a bit of a mixed night, in that I logged into Final Fantasy XIV early in the evening… and then spent most of the night with my chair turned to the side playing Destiny instead. I largely logged in when I did to be available for any raid shenanigans later that evening and also be available for various folks who were wanting to get friends invited to the guild. So I sat there with my headphones on attempting to monitor both games at the same time and doing a fairly poor job of paying attention to guild chat. I gotta say I am enjoying the Titan again now that I gave up on the whole defensive thing and went back to striker. There is something gratifying about doing Fist of Havoc in the middle of a pack of mobs and walking away to tell the tale. Largely I spent my evening working on quests and bounties. There are a handful that I cannot for the life of me figure out how to complete… what the fuck is an “attachable grenade”? I thought at first it was the lightning grenade that “sticks to any surface” but after a bit of reading this morning apparently it is the FIRST grenade option… which I don’t think sticks to anything.

At this point I am level 30, which I have to say really quickly how much nicer it is to have a simply leveling curve instead of that light bullshit. Having to sift through items and find the one with the highest light amount… was maddening especially when it often meant you were maybe turning down an otherwise superior item. The only thing I question at the moment is the fact that all of this “leveling” gear is upgradeable… whereas I am swapping out gear pretty much every single time I go out into the world, so upgrading it really is meaningless. The only thing I am still holding onto right now is my exotic gun, and that is simply because I have not found anything with higher damage. The moment I find a hand cannon with better stats, this exotic will likely get chunked in the bank for nostalgia reasons and I will happily use the next gun with better stats on it. I am still fairly firmly attached to a Hand Cannon as my primary weapon… or as they for some reason occasionally refer to them as “Sidearms” instead. As far as secondary and heavy… I am pretty partial to the Sniper Rifle and the Machine Gun because that combo gives me a strong way to pick mobs off at range… with a heavy with some serious stopping power. Stopping power that you need for the Taken invasions that seem to spring up at random in every single open world zone in the game. I stuck around on Mars long enough last night while working on a “kill champions” bounty last night, that I got to fight the same event several times in a row. The giant Taken Vex Minotaur thing… is freaking brutal. I don’t think it is quite as bad as a spider tank, but still pretty horrible to content with especially when there are not a ton of players around.

Taking Down Skywhales

While fiddling around with Destiny a large gathering of folks started showing up in Final Fantasy XIV. After a bit Kodra being the awesome person that he is, took it upon himself to try and make a group happen. I am super thankful that he did… because I was absolutely not paying a whole lot of attention because I was busy trying to headshot Taken. It turns out we had a few people who had not managed to get Bismarck Extreme yet, so that set our course for the evening. Learning nights are interesting when you are teaching a handful of people a fight, because it ends up shifting the balance for the rest of the group as well. Players who were the newbie last time, step up and become the experts and I saw that happening quite a bit last night. Bismarck Extreme is still serious business even though we have downed it several times now, and I went into it knowing that it would take a few tries before we finally got it down. On our first attempt we predictably missed the back on the first try, but after that we adjusted and started hitting that first hurdle pretty reliably.

The hardest hurdle as always is getting down the two snakes in time. The challenge there was simply a matter of keeping all of our dps alive and busy killing sky snakes because during that phase if you lose a single player it is highly unlikely that you will be able to pull it out. We are quite simply not geared enough to be able to carry that objective too hard. In truth we downed the boss the try in which we kept everyone alive. That just happened to be about 15 minutes before the instance timer ran out. I think it was a pretty great night though all things consider and we broke a few more players into the rigors of end game Final Fantasy XIV content. For the time being Monday night raids are on hiatus until November when the 3.1 patch lands, and I think in the mean time we are going to use Monday nights as a sort of “get stuff accomplished” night for whatever anyone happens to need. I would not mind farming more Bismarck or even getting a group back into Binding Coil of Bahamut. Cosmetic gear is always a strong draw to get me back into a place.

Lost in Infinity

September 21, 2015 by Belghast

Upgrade Day

For whatever reason I have been putting off the upgrade to Windows 10, even though all of my machines have been asking me to do it for some time now. Essentially I keep telling myself there is always something looming on the horizon that is way to important to risk having a machine down. It is either the Monday or Wednesday raids or the impending Saturday session for recording AggroChat. However this week I told myself… that as soon as I finished with the AggroChat festivities Sunday morning that I would exit out of everything and upgrade. So roughly 9:30 in the morning yesterday I took a leap of faith and performed a Windows 10 in place upgrade. I have to say I am shocked and amazed at just how smoothly things went. The only major issue that I have run into so far is the fact that I had no sound… which isn’t terribly shocking because I use an Asus Xonar sound card. After some quick digging I found out that the Unified Drivers that I had been running all along updated to fix this issue.

The best surprise however was something that I had been concerned about for some time. The account that I use to log into windows, and have used for awhile is my outlook.com account. I like using this… as it makes more sense than my previous windows account. That said my Xbox 360s as well as the old Games for Windows are configured to use a completely different account that is based on one of my second gmails. So my biggest concern was how the Xbox Windows 10 app would work. However it seems like Microsoft has thought of this problem and allows you to sign in a different account. When I did this bam… my Windows login account is now bound to my Xbox Live account and cross linked allowing me the best of both worlds. I don’t have an Xbox One, but if I did I am sure it would be handy to have this set up in such a fashion.

Lost in Infinity

While upgrading Windows I ended up playing Playstation 4 pretty much all day long, and inadvertently falling into a Disney Infinity shaped hole. This time around the hub world feels much more interactive than it did in 2.0. Additionally you have all of these really cool sidekicks to collect, and I am guessing the majority of which are gained through doing side quests. While working on the Twilight of the Empire playset I managed to find four younglings that I could then use as sidekicks when I got back to the toybox. I of course chose the Wookie youngling because who doesn’t want to be followed around by a tiny Wookie. I’ve spent a lot of time playing both Asoka and Boba Fett, but Asoka is by far the furthest progressed. Namely I don’t think I have Boba Fett as an option for any of my playsets that are available yet.

There are so many aspects of this game that are absolute crack for me, like collecting bits to decorate my house. I added on a bit to my house which is basically a combat arena that lets you fight level appropriate baddies while in there. You talk to a tiny side kick form Agent Coulson and bam he spawns a whole bunch of stuff for you to jump down and fight. At this point I have only actually made it through a few areas of Twilight of the Republic, but I am now on Coruscant and just checked into the Jedi Temple. I am just shocked that I quite literally lost from about 9 am until 3:30 pm yesterday afternoon playing this game. The gameplay is pretty damned fun, and much in the same was as I enjoyed running around in Ratchet and Clank beating things up for bolts… the same sort of mechanic is in place here for Sparks that can then be spent on items for the toybox.

Waiting for Sleep

Last night when it came time for bed I was getting choked up again from my allergies. So I took some Benedryl and went upstairs to wait for it to kick in. Since I did not really feel like futzing with my PC I opted to fire back up the PS4 and piddle around on it. Would you believe that until last night I had never actually played a Rayman game? I mean they always looked interesting enough, but there was something about the arms and legs floating in the air that bugged me about the character. There was a recent flash sale and I managed to pick up Rayman Legends dirt cheap for the PS4, and since I had always wanted to give it a shot… it seemed like an awesome idea. So far it seems like a fun game, but for whatever reason didn’t hold my attention for long last night. I made it through one level before popping out and trying something else.

Instead I settled into a game of Destiny and spent my time fiddling with gear and trying to sort out the things that had changed. It seems like most of the really cool stuff is already available to me which kinda shocked me. I’ve not picked up Fallen King and was not really planning on doing so any time soon. However when I started working on leveling my character with their much streamlined system… all of this loot flagged with a Taken King icon started dropping. I spent a lot of time on Mars working on a few bounties and kept running into fallen corruption zones where corrupted Vex and Cabal would spawn in. These things were extremely nasty but had a chance of dropping some pretty nice stuff. The biggest thing I noticed is that it seems like the drop rates are greatly increased when it comes to pretty much everything you can do. I walked away with more weapons than I had seen in a very long time… since maybe launch. Also it seems like engrams are more true to their color… if I got a blue engram I pretty much got a blue item out of it. Maybe I was just exceptionally lucky last night, but it did not seem like I was pulling greens out of them like I did before. I need to spend more time playing Destiny, I enjoy it still and I have a lot of fun running around with my Hand Cannon. I still have yet to play any of the expansion content, so I need to do that at some point.