RPG Archives - Page 51 of 51 - Tales of the Aggronaut

I am extra groggy this morning. Last night was another episode of that familiar Oklahoma… try and sleep while also listening to the weather forecast because you are under a Tornado Warning. It is a fun game for a large group of players. The negative side effect is that you either don’t really sleep deeply at all, or you end up dreaming about a tornado hitting your house.

Twisteropolis

I have to marvel at just how good the weather is here in Oklahoma. We had been warned about this outbreak of tornados on Friday, and the warnings got steadily more and more dire until yesterday when the show finally began around 5pm. Additionally it is pretty miraculous that over the course of the evening there were 29 separate tornados and uncountable miles of destruction… but only one single fatality. It is just staggering to me that so much destruction could be caused, yet only one life be lost.

Here we live in a culture of constant preparedness for that big tornado, so early in the evening we had prepared our hidey hole, and I was texting people to make sure they were also aware of the imminent danger. Now like many nights, this ended up much ado about nothing… but it is because we take it seriously… that there were so few lives lost. We rolled the dice and lucked out on the path of the twisters, and had the conditions been slightly different they would have hit us for certain.

The closest tornado spawning super cell passed about 30 minutes to the north of our house. When that cell was extremely active over the Wellston area, there is footage of it being roughly a mile and a half wide. Think about that for a moment… there this is thing destroying literally everything in this mile and a half wide path. Tornados feel like a giant eraser tool, smudging out everything in its arc. We fared the night just fine, but this evening is supposed to be worse. Additionally, todays show is supposed to start at roughly 3pm, just in time for the drive home.

To Boldly Go

We had to do something to take our minds off the impending doom, so we went around noonish to a matinee for Star Trek: Into Darkness. I have to say I loved every minute of it. I’ve always been a shirt tail fan of Star Trek, watching whatever series happened to be on the air at the given time. However I have never really reached the point of ravening fanboy, because I just didn’t buy the “utopian experiment” aspect of the franchise. Deepspace 9 was my favorite of the series, because they were essentially in a constant state of war and chaos, it felt like it was Star Trek for the Star Wars fan.

J.J. Abrams has taken this very neat and tidy Star Trek universe and messed it up a bit, producing something that is far more enjoyable for me to watch as a whole. Just like the first one, I loved every single minute of the movie, and cannot wait to see it again. However as I am sitting there watching the movie, I am getting super excited in the back of my head. If Abrams can do this for Star Trek, a series I have always felt was a bit too sterile… it makes me absolutely giddy to think about what he can do to Star Wars.

If you have not seen the film yet, you definitely should. It was a great rollercoaster ride to go on. Essentially from the first moments of the film to the last there is nothing but nonstop action. Additionally it has some truly amazing moments in between that will play on your emotions like a harpsichord. There are purists that will hate the film, and I have already heard enough negative clamor about it… but it is just plain movie fun.

The Most Inappropriately Named Game Series

With the return of having an Xbox console in my loft, I wanted to play a game on it. While over the last few days I have played a good deal of my old friend Castle Crashers, I felt like I wanted to play something more substantial. For whatever reason I never managed to finish Final Fantasy XIII, I just stopped playing it and got out of sync with the storyline… never to return. I have this love/hate relationship with the series as parts of me are super nostalgic about the Nintendo and super Nintendo era titles… and other parts of me are frustrated with what the series has become overall.

The game as a whole feels extremely rehashed at this point. Something is causing the world to end, and only your team can stop it… with the help of super unrealistic armor and needlessly intricate weapons. It will somehow involve god like creatures that you can either summon or will help you in some fashion, and also include insanely unrealistic armor, needlessly intricate weapon designs… and quite possibly take up large amounts of real time to manifest themselves. The game is just drowning in the same tropes every single time.

The final fantasy trope that just kills me though, is the fact that they give you this one character that they want you to hate. In FF13 this is Hope… when you use him he is markedly weaker than every single character you have gotten to that point. He literally has half of the hitpoints of Vanille the character that is introduced to pair with him. Additionally he wields this goofy boomarang, and seems to do far less damage than Vanille.

To complete the arc of hatred, he is annoying as shit… and throws the game into this entire arc of falsetto emotion. I think we are supposed to feel sorry for him, or identify with him in some way… but all I see is a kid with goofy hair, crappy weapons, no hit points and no personality. Final Fantasy as a franchise has a history of setting up completely useless character and intending for us to like them… need I mention Edward the Bard from Final Fantasy IV?

All this bitching aside, I rather enjoyed playing FF13 again last night. The story is kinda lame, and the characters are overly dramatic… but I still enjoy it for whatever reason. I think one of my impediments from enjoying console games in the past is that I always felt rushed when I played one. Since it was hooked up to our main television, I always felt like I was somehow imposing by playing the game. Now that I have a television of my own, set up in a gaming area of my own… I can take as much time to play whatever I like and not have to worry about rushing through the cut scenes to get to the action. I don’t feel like I have to hurry and get my fill so I can return the television to its intended purpose.

Alucard Again

I find it completely unsurprising that my favorite game right now on the PS3 is the same favorite game I have had ever since first playing it. Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is that game for me, that is so far ahead of every other game I have played in matter of deep personal enjoyment. No matter how many times, and on how many different platforms I have access to it… I still return to playing it. Thanks to the PlayStation network, there is a really great emulated copy of it running inside my PS3.

I had started the game just prior to the whole tornado madness last night, so only made it past the first boss before shutting it down and heading downstairs. I am sure I will be tag teaming back and forth between this and Final Fantasy 13 for a few weeks. The funny thing is, that while I can remember large chunks of the game, every time I play it I cannot remember the exact order and locations of items I need to get… so the gameplay never gets stale. This is for me as close to a perfect game as it gets, and sadly nothing has ever really come close.

Guacamelee! does a really good job of invoking the same feeling. But for whatever reason I just don’t feel as connected to the Luchador, as I do to Alucard the son of Dracula. I won’t lie, I love vampires… I always have. I was a pretty rabid player of Vampire the Masquerade, and did not really get disenfranchised with the genre until the last few years and the whole “vampires are people too” movement. So the thought of running around in Castlevania as this sword swinging badass that you also played in Castlevania 3… is pretty much the pinnacle of awesome.

I need to hurry up and finish my net top PC so I can also be playing Super Metroid from the loft. I feel like I am old now, because I would rather play a side scrolling sprite based game, than any of the new shiny 3D titles available for the console. I think this is ultimately what the process of getting old feels like, mind crushing nostalgia about the things you used to love and still do. I can remember thinking about consoles like the Gamecube… that no one will feel nostalgic about this… but sure enough the generation that grew up with Super Smash Brothers is going through the same exact thing. Oh well I guess we just have to enjoy whatever we can when we can.

Constant Vigilance

I need to wrap up and get on the road. It looks like we are going to have another beautiful day of thunderstorms ahead of us. All indications say that today will be far worse and far more likely to hit the Tulsa area. The thing that freaks me out the most is the fact that the deluge will be hitting as we begin the drive home. Here is hoping if it ends up looking bad enough, that we can duck out early. I have so much to do this week, and so many non-work things to try and arrange for. I hope you all have a great week, and I hope you too can get done all the things you need to do.

Elite Ready

One of the things I have been attempting to accomplish over my lunch time gaming break is to finish all of the Ashora and Steppes daily quests in Rift. Usually I manage to chew through Ashora, but rarely do I make a significant dent in Steppes. However yesterday for whatever reason I seemed to be able to do both without much issue. This put me fairly high on the daily infinity stone count, and creeping close to that piece of gear that would tip me over 300 hit.

After all was said and done, I was sitting at 2 stones away from the gauntlets. Last night I went back out to the Steppes and wandered down along the coastline. I knew I had left a carnage quest partially finished down there, and as a result I pushed through those last few stones rather quickly. Still feeling pretty worn out, I decided to go ahead and port back to Tempest Bay and purchase my upgrade. While I knew I did not have the juice to do any random elites last night, I at least was Elite ready for the grouping tonight.

Late to the Dance

Since redoing the loft I have found myself playing around on my PlayStation 3 a good deal more. Quite honestly, the loss of my gaming loft as viable space pretty much marks the end of me regularly playing console games. I simply did not have a TV that was dedicated to gaming, and I never wanted to monopolize the tv downstairs in case my wife wanted to watch something. So as a result I have essentially been a non-console gamer during this current generation of systems.

As a way to catch up, I went ahead and signed up for a years subscription to PlayStation Plus, as this gives me around a dozen games immediately to play around with. Namely there were a bunch of titles that I had wanted, but never really had picked or played… namely Sleeping Dogs, Darksiders, The Cave, Ratchet and Clank All 4 One, and Little Big Planet 2. Since they release new titles for free over the network on a regular basis, I figured it would be an excellent way to passively acquire titles.

Darksiders

I knew this game would be right down my alley, but for whatever reason over the years since its release I have never actually played it. Big dude, in bigger armor, carrying an even bigger sword really is my ideal game archetype… and this game does not disappoint. Everything controls extremely well, and it feels a lot like a modern golden axe at times. I had heard this in the past compared to Legend of Zelda, and I can kind of see the similarities but to me it feels more in line with the old school final fight style fighting games. I played this for quite awhile last night before my ADD kicked in, but I am sure I will be devoting many hours to running around as a badass horseman of the apocalypse.

Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One

Since I was pretty tired still, my gaming wanderlust was in full effect… also I had a whole stack of games I was wanting to try. The next on the list was Ratchet and Clank: All 4 One. I remember being a big fan of the Ratchet and Clank games on the PS2, so this was pretty much a no brainer for me to try out. I went into it knowing that this was basically a streamlined experience designed to be played with four players. I was okay with this, and while the world was not nearly as intricate as the ones I was used to from the PS2, it still retained all of the enjoyment of the earlier titles.

My only takeaway is that the game seemed really easy with Ratchet and Clank as an AI controlled bot. Clank seemed to always be targeting and taking out the mob types that were difficult for me to get with my wrench. All of the controls were essentially the same as before, so I regained my ability to play the game rather quickly. I did not play terribly far but I thought the “driving a space taxi” sequence was extremely fun, with me steering by moving to one side of the taxi platform or another. Should be a great game to return to and give it more time.

The Cave

The last game I went on a tour of last night was The Cave, and I did so on a very cursory level. I fired it up, and selected a team of the Knight, the Monk, and the Twins. Each character feels extremely interesting and has some special ability… that I have yet to really figure out what it is for. Right now the game seems like it is going to be a puzzle and exploration game. Essentially you have three characters to control, and various puzzles will require one or more characters to solve. It has the interesting and humorous writing that is trademark of Double Fine games, so given the time I am sure I will get into it. Having not played it terribly long, all I can really say is that the world is gorgeous and full of interesting visuals.

Crashing

At this point I was past going, so I decided I needed to head to bed. I still have Sleeping Dogs downloading as well as a couple others. Having access to a fresh font of games will definitely make the ps3 feel more useful. Also having access to a place to set it up, on a dedicated tv… with a comfy love seat to sit on will make it that more likely to get used on a regular basis. It was absolutely glorious sitting up there with a fan on me happily playing away in our newly renovated loft. I am going to have to try and resurrect my long red-ringed xbox 360 and get started back playing those games as well.

I have a ton of things to deal with, and today is trash day… so I bid you all goodbye. I hope you have a great day, and that you survive the rest of the week. I will be heading downstairs myself to take out the trash, and try and deal with the front door that appears to not be wanting to lock. It is always something…