Zelda-Like Archives - Page 3 of 5 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Vacation Gaming

March 25, 2019 by Belghast

Today is going to be the first day back after a lengthy break, and as such I am struggling a little bit to get up and around this morning. Last week was the universal spring break week for Oklahoma schools and with that I opted to take Wednesday through Friday off to spend time with my wife. We went back and forth about taking some sort of a trip, but instead just dealt with a lot of things around the house that needed dealing with. I cleaned and organized my office, she tackled the closet, we got a new rug for the living room, made two trips to my mechanic to fix my drivers side window that was having trouble rolling up, finally dealt with our taxes and didn’t have to pay… and a slew of other small things that filled most of the time I took off. In between all of the running around I got in a fair amount of gaming, with the largest single target being The Division 2.

I am completely in the swing of this game and am slowly pushing my way across the map clearing control points and side missions along the way. At this point I have largely cleared the White House surrounding area, Downtown East, Federal Triangle, East Mall and have been focusing my time on clearing out content in the Southwest area. I am spending 99.9% of my time soloing the content and it is going more or less fairly well. My jam is still some sort of a fast firing single shot rifle and a shotgun to back it up when things get too close. What I am actually using for either of those varies based on what I happen to have seen drop… which is the weird thing about this game is the large number of drops I seem to get that are in no way upgrades to the weapon I was using from 3 levels earlier. However as with any Division game… the really important drops are the ones with a teal border like the one shown above.

Another major accomplishment of the weekend is that I finished the Final Fantasy XIV 4.5 content. I was ONE dungeon away from doing so but Anthem launched and then Division 2… and I just couldn’t seem to bring myself to log in and take care of it. Huge kudos to the awesome player who guided three of us newbies through Ghimlyt Dark and did an excellent job explaining the mechanics. I have to say though… it was a WAY easier dungeon than the Burn… which I think Thalen still needs? I need to check into that and help him out this week if that is the case. All in all I am ready for the next content drop to finally explain how we get from this point… to the point shown in the Full Trailer released at Fanfest Tokyo over the weekend. One of my employees is a super serious raider type… so I will be quizzing him this morning as to his thoughts about what was shown.

Another thing that has been stealing my time… namely the hanging out in bed before going to sleep time… is Baba is You. This is a weird puzzle game where you essentially hack reality and rewrite the rules of the universe to get a win condition. It reminds me of this mix between the old shareware title Paganitsu and Basic Programming logic. Paga was a significant title for me growing up because it fit neatly onto a floppy and we could play it clandestine like from the computer lab at school. Baba Is You is great because so often in puzzle games you get introduced to the mechanics and then they simply start dialing up the precision and speed that you need to react in order to complete puzzles. Baba on the other hand keeps challenging your conceptions and does not care at all about the fine motor skills or speed of execution… and as such gives you unlimited rollbacks as you sorta figure out how the pieces move on each map. Well worth checking out if you are interested in such things.

Lastly I started messing around with Breath of the Wild again… but if that were the end of that statement it would not be as nonsense as it ultimately is. I own this game on Wii U and Switch… but last night I started dinking around with Cemu the Wii U Emulator to see just how well it runs and what sort of resolution I could get it working at. The game looks gorgeous running in 4K but requires a bunch of fiddling to get it there. Not to mention just the act of getting it up in running was a pain in the butt which involved a whole slew of hoops to jump through to get the game patched and the emulator running. Then there was the added step of getting it working through Parsec so I could have the same experience while hanging out on the laptop downstairs… which involved installing controller emulators.

Basically I have NO CLUE why I did this thing, but I had a lot of fun and made it as far as Kakariko Village last night. I never made it terribly far into Breath of the Wild in part because of the restart. When the game first came out I did not have a Switch, and then at some point along the line I managed to find one in stock and re-bought the game on that platform. That meant having to redo everything over, which sorta killed my forward momentum. I seemed to log in more to summon treasure chests with Amiibos than I did to actually do anything else. My save game is littered with chests around the Dueling Peaks stable. It is truly shocking how well it runs, but there are a lot of frustrations… because the first time you encounter anything new there is a massive game freeze as it builds shader cache, however from that point on things are fluid again.

Basically chock this up to a long line of stupid things I have done like created a Chinese account so I could try Monster Hunter Online and setting up a Sega of Japan account to play Phantasy Star Online 2. I will likely wander away from it boredly at some point in the near future, but last night I had an awful lot of fun doing things that I should be able to do. I will however due to the potentially shady nature of this not be assembling a guide. I own two copies of Breath of the Wild so I figured it was completely legit for me to do shenanigans, but the real more stable answer to playing Breath of the Wild is to get a Switch.

Regularly Playing: May Edition

May 1, 2017 by Belghast

I had a realization over the weekend as I stared at my sidebar… that it has been a significant amount of time since I last did the regularly playing thing. The last one I was able to find was on October 3rd of 2016… some 210 days ago. I may or may not have completely fallen off the wagon on this concept. The original intent was to take a moment once a month to “true up” the side bar and shift out what I was no longer playing for what I was currently playing. As a result we are going to see some significant moving and shaking in the list as a result.

To Those Remaining

Final Fantasy XIV

I am still going fairly strongly in Final Fantasy XIV, and while I might not log in every night I am logging in multiple times a week. I am definitely still making the Tuesday night raid thing, and while we don’t always make progress each week we get together to do something. Thanks to the wonder of cross server grouping we have been able to pull in our friend Kelesti into some stuff as well. Largely we are all in a big holding pattern until the release of Stormblood which comes in July, and as a result I am still in the middle of my “level everything” binge. Right now my Machinist is just shy of 40, and that leaves Astrologian the only thing that has yet to be touched. The whole purpose behind all of this madness is so that I can purge my vault of anything at minimum sub 30… and the grand hope is to sort through anything sub 50 and be extremely judicious in what I choose to keep. Still having a lot of fun in Palace of the Dead, just have had other distractions of late.

To the Returning and New

Skyforge

This is one of those games that has not graced my sidebar in a very very long time. In July of 2015 I played quite a bit of the game around the time that it launched, and while I enjoyed it… it always felt like it was missing something. Apparently October of last year an expansion released that added in pretty much all of the features that I am finding myself enjoying now. Additionally the game just works better with a controller than it ever did with a keyboard and mouse and while I returned primarily on the PS4… I am also dipping my toes back into the PC experience as well. Both are extremely fun and I am not entirely sure how long I will be splitting time before I officially pick one platform. Whatever the case if you have ever played this game I highly suggest checking it out. It has some issues… namely you are limited to three classes at the start with no clear path to add new ones. However each of the classes is doing something somewhat unique which makes them more enjoyable than the standard Tank, Mage and Healer that they represent.

Star Wars the Old Republic

There are two things that are shocking about this game gracing my list. Firstly that apparently I never actually made a “now playing” widget for it, and secondly… that I am back playing it again. I blame a sequence of nostalgic events happening at exactly the same time… all of the hype about the next Star Wars movie, the love of Rogue One, and my deep enjoyment of Mass Effect Andromeda has lead to an upwelling of love for both Bioware and Star Wars. As a result I have returned to an old mission, which is trying to level through all of the class stories. I managed to finish off the Sith Sorcerer and am now through Hoth so far in the Imperial Agent. It seems as though I picked one of the best storylines for last, and even though I am not traditionally a stealthy/shooty type class… there is something extremely awesome about this one. I largely went Sniper because my Smuggler on the other side of the fence is Sawbones/Healer. I am having a blast right now, so I am going to ride the enjoyment until it lasts. The goal is to push forward into the story I have not touched on my Jedi Knight main after finishing the Agent story… which involves Shadow of Revan, Fallen Empire and Eternal Throne.

Horizon Zero Dawn

I do not normally put many single player games on the regularly playing list, but we have this sequence of amazing ones being released in short order. One of those is Horizon Zero Dawn, which is a game that I hit hard at launch… and then for whatever release lost momentum to Mass Effect Andromeda. As a result I have been slowly playing it here and there as time and desire allows. I could force myself through the story, but I want to play it when I want to play it… and that is right now involving the occasional hour long session of hunting giant robot dinosaurs rather than pushing forward the main story. I am still very much enjoying the game, but I need to find some catalyst that really gets me back into it and dying to play the next chapter. In the mean time however I am still enjoying the “bowplay” if I can coin that term.

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

This is very much another “as desire hits me” sort of experience. When the game came out I picked it up on the Wii U and in the time between then and now I have managed to pick up a switch effecting starting back at square one. This stalled my progress a little bit but for the most part I have returned to where I left in the Wii U and am once again moving forward. I have designs on starting to take this to work and playing a little over lunch and on break times. While I have the switch I really have not done a lot of handheld play with it remaining largely docked upstairs so I can play it with the pro controller. It is a great game and in spite of having a lot of things that frustrate me about the game… is yet another in a long list of titles contending for my game of the year bid.

To Those Departing

World of Warcraft

While I still have an active account, I am just not really playing at all. I logged in shortly after the last patch and got bored and logged out again. I fell off the raiding bandwagon about halfway through Nighthold, and honestly just sort of reached the point I have in so many other expansions. I think in theory I could come back and play casually and enjoy the experience but there are just simply too many other things I would rather be playing right now. So as a result this is going to find its way off my side bar, but I did have the forethought to simply comment it out rather than remove it because I am sure at some point around Blizzcon time I will get hit by the bug once more.

Rift

Much like with Nightmare Tide… I just failed to gain traction with the latest expansion the Starfall Prophecy. A large part of my struggle with Rift is that I can never seem to find a warrior spec that I really like anymore. What I ultimately want is a juggernaut for doing PVE/Leveling content that can burn through the mobs with nonexistent downtime. If I ever find that spec again I will return to the game and happily finish up leveling. The other huge struggle is that the game lacks a reliable current font of knowledge. The forums in theory have a lot of the information but it is this blend of current information and ancient and no longer reliable, and I just lack the mental fortitude to sift through it. I am hoping that after writing this… Muspel or PK will come to the rescue once again with a viable Warrior build like they have in the past. The other huge challenge with Rift is the fact that none of my gaming infrastructure is playing the game, nor do any of my regular suspects have any interest in the game at this point.

Destiny

It hurts more than a little bit to be adding this game to this space on my list. The truth is I am just not playing it right now and I don’t see that changing for the foreseeable future. I have too many other games fighting for my attention, and while I absolutely know I will be returning with Destiny 2… the amount of stuff that I can do solo or want to so solo is pretty limited. At this point it feels like I would be working towards something that is ultimately going to disappear. I also have a lot of questions because as it is right now… I am looking at making the leap to PC from PS4 for the second game… and I am not sure what if anything might transfer.

Guild Wars 2

Adding this one to the list really doesn’t take a lot of effort. I was only into this game so long as some of my friends were actively playing it. Once Tam and Ash and Kodra faded away… so did I. It is still not my favorite game but I have developed a certain appreciation for it. Most of what it is doing however isn’t really all that interesting to me. I largely got to play along with my friends only because I had maxed out my Warrior soloing for ages without them. He was geared and ready to go… and will still be there if it ever has a resurgence. Much like Warframe this is a game that was not ultimately for me… but somewhat enjoyable so long as I was playing with friends.

The Switch and Zelda

April 3, 2017 by Belghast

I have officially now joined the cult of the switch. For a brief period of time… probably fifteen minutes if we are going to be honest about it… Amazon had switch units in stock for prime members only. Now that sounds like an exclusive club or something… but quite literally everyone I know that shops Amazon regularly…. is a prime member. I had said for awhile that if I ever stumbled across one I would pick it up immediately, and I guess in my mind limited availability over Amazon was the same thing. What is even more shocking however is that I ordered it at 2pm on a Thursday and by some quirk or time travel it was waiting for me when I got home Friday afternoon. As a result I got to spend a good chunk of the weekend playing with it and fiddling with the various console modes. So far the honestly most comfortable mode for me to play is with the joycons detached and the little bumper things that it comes with attached. This allows me to just chill with each arm resting on whatever is comfortable be it leg, lap or the arm of a chair. All in all I am really damned happy with the unit, and it feels extremely good especially in “handheld” mode. I spent some time Saturday afternoon hanging out in the back yard playing Zelda Breath of the Wild and it was glorious. The switch is essentially everything that I assumed the Wii U would be for me… and probably was if not the for the fact that the gamepad has such an insanely short range from the base unit.

The thing I want to talk about this morning however is Zelda itself. There was a side conversation that happened over the weekend, of all places on facebook about switch ownership and the limited number of games. One friend mentioned that if there was ever a game worth spending $400 to play that it was Breath of the Wild. Then another friend chimed in that folks have said this a lot, but that no one has really been able to put into words why this game is special given the extremely stiff competition.

I keep hearing comments like this but still don’t understand what is so special about it. No one seems able to capture that in words. My skeptical self thinks it has a lot to do with Nintendo nostalgia, but that is just based on a lack of understanding of what is so compelling about it.

So as a result I think I am going to attempt this morning to put it into words why I feel this game is so special. For me at least it is not really a nostalgia thing given that in truth I have never been that big of a fan of the 3D Zelda games. I’ve beaten Ocarina of Time, Majora’s Mask, and Windwaker and while they were okay… they were not even close to dethroning A Link to the Past as my favorite Zelda series game. I never really could put my finger on it, but something always felt off about them. For me a huge factor of what made Zelda fun was that I had this huge world to explore, and barring that I had the right items at the right time… it felt like I could pretty much go anywhere. Granted in the 2D era this meant a bunch of tiles stacked side by side… which in truth was pretty limited… but in my mind it absolutely Felt open. When it comes to the 3D Zeldas… they have always felt like I was much more limited on my range of motion and where I could actually go based on how far I had progressed in the game.

With Breath of the Wild, the sense of exploration I felt in the original games is there in full. While I am similarly limited by my stamina meter, or weather effects like cold or rain… the game feels completely open to me to go wherever I think I can survive. There is a certain thrill of discovery when you find a new shrine and figure out the puzzle that exists within. That was the part I liked of the 3D Zelda “temples” is the fact that each one of them had some gimmick that had to be learned in order to progress through them… and in Breath of the Wild this same idea is contained with 120 of them. That is so much more of that element that I really enjoyed in past games, and is only improved by the fact that no one in games is going to explain to you where all of them are. Sure there are easy ones to find, that are right off the path or that serve as the teleport for a given town. However most of them involve getting out and roaming around, to try and find where they have been hidden into the landscape.

Similarly there is the Korok Seed mini game, and from what I understand there are 900 of them scattered throughout the world. Most of them involve noticing something going on in the landscape and then interacting with the elements in a certain way to reveal the Korok that is hiding. For example one of the very early ones involves diving off of a cliff into a ring of lily pads that are sitting in the water below. It is the sort of thing that as you walk by you notice… “that looks odd” and then when you start to investigate you try different things until you ultimately reveal another Korok. There is a challenge with Open World games to both allow open space to exist… but make that open space be meaningful and that is one of the things that Breath of the Wild really succeeds at. Not to mention that the Korok mini game is charming as hell as you keep bringing more seeds to Hestu for his Maracas. There are honestly an awful lot of elements of this game that just come across as charming. Once you leave the “starter zone” for lack of a better term you find out that the world is not really as “post apoc” as it seems at the start. Folks have learned how to survive and often times thrive in a world where destruction is looming over it, and each of the people scattered has a story to tell and hints to be given about other things happening in the world.

It is extremely hard to put into words what it is about this game that is so damned appealing. Even as I sit down with the purpose to do just that, I am finding myself lacking the necessary vocabulary to really make it make sense. I have plenty of problems with the game, namely the way the weapon durability system worlds. However that said I like it enough to have just purchased a second copy and completely restarted the game after getting a decent ways into it on the Wii U. There really are not a lot of games that you could say the same for, with the big two that are standing out in my head that I own multiple copies of being Destiny and Castlevania Symphony of the Night. There is an awful lot going on in the game… but I have this constant feeling that I have only barely scratched the surface of its complexity. I think that more than anything is what keeps drawing me to it. Its like this grand puzzle that, as I solve one little bit of it… keeps exposing new areas for me to explore and then ultimately solve as well. Its not just that I need to go to a new land and vanquish a new evil… but as I wander across that land I am constantly finding myself needing to learn a brand new mechanical vocabulary to survive its trials. In some ways the puzzles in this game remind me of the way the ones from Thomas Was Alone felt… where each time it increments on the information you already have but keeps pushing the boundary to incorporate new elements and challenges.

Unfortunately I am not entirely certain I have even begun to scratch the surface of the job I set out to do. Which of course was the put into words what made this game worth spending so much time and effort on playing. There are so many great games out there right now like Horizon Zero Dawn and Mass Effect Andromeda… both of which I am playing quite a bit of. However I still find myself drawn to keep venturing into Hyrule on a regular basis and keep figuring out how the world ticks. I can’t really say if this game is better than that game… because so far I have been enjoying all of them. I also feel like my attention isn’t a zero sum game, and that all of these games are worthy of it. I will say that Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild is doing something different. It feels different from the previous 3D Zelda offerings, but at the same time very different from the traditional Open World model. Some of these differences are frustrating, but at the same time the quirks are also what makes the game itself feel extremely fresh. I will say having played it on both the Switch and Wii U now… that there is just something about the Switch that makes it all feel better. Its like playing a game on the platform it was designed for…. and playing it when it got ported to another system. Some of the things that felt awkward on the Wii U just seem to work beautifully on the Switch. So if you have not already ventured forth into Hyrule… I would probably suggest just waiting until you ultimately get your hands on a Switch. Is this game worth buying a console for? I obviously thought so, but in part I also bought the console knowing that there are always a high number of Nintendo games that I want to play on every platform they create. I’ve thought my purchase of the Wii U was well worth it, in spite of the fact that it never quite worked the way I wanted it to. All of that said… I don’t think the Switch is worth the markups or crazy “bundle” deals that places are trying to direct users towards. Just wait for the base unit to come back in stock, and I am hoping with the release of Mario Kart in a few weeks that there are going to be a whole lot more units available.

Failed Intentions

March 16, 2017 by Belghast

Last night I had every intention of playing the Mass Effect Andromeda trial, however that did not actually happen. It of course needed to install, and one of the things about Final Fantasy XIV is that when something is thrashing the hard drive… like a game download it becomes nigh unplayable. I’ve seen many games that are cpu bound, and even more than a graphics card bound… but FFXIV is the first game I have played ever that was truly hard drive bound. In theory I am guessing this is a side effect of needing to run on systems like the PS3 where there are simply not that many system resources, so instead of loading a bunch of stuff in memory the game is constantly caching bite sized chunks of the world. The end result works extremely well, and is probably why the game seems to be able to run on literally anything. However it also means that last night while Mass Effect was installing I could not partake of my most common PC diversion… chain running Palace of the Dead. So instead I decided to filter off to the bedroom to “play a little Zelda while the game installed” and wound up playing until midnight. I said this over twitter the other day and I will repeat it again… that I feel like it is a testament to just how damned good this game is that I have very serious issues with certain aspects of it and still find myself constantly playing it.

The thing that I find absolutely amazing about it is how well it supports my “oooh a piece of candy” approach to most games. I am not following any semblance of a pattern in exploring this world and the game seems completely fine with that. I feel like I have barely scratched the first three areas… and then found myself wandering into Zora’s Domain last night and following that chain of events. A good chunk of the night was spent trying to unlock towers…. only to find out that several of them are at least theoretically blocked by Guardians. As of yet I really do not have a good answer for them… and they are sort of a dalek-esc death force as they try and EXTERMINATE! There is nothing quite like the change in music when a Guardian has locked onto you, because you know that any minute you are going to see the target on your back and you are frantically looking for anything that could serve as cover. The other thing I really don’t have an answer to is spike traps, because I found a shrine in my extremely sporadic travels that was completely blocked by spikes… and the earlier answer was to get up high enough and glide down. The problem this time is there really was nothing to actually glide down from… so I am guessing that is simply not a puzzle I can solve at the moment. The core of my gaming focus seems to be on finding shrines, beating shrines… and then going to find more shrines. I literally was caught in this loop until midnight when I realized I probably should get some sleep considering I am driving to Dallas today.

Based on the results of last weekends podcast… there really is no way I can put into words why this game works for me. Any time I attempt to explain it I get bogged down in the grindy aspects of it, and the constant hunt for new weapons. However there is a core game here that is really damned amazing. Once you remove the durability problems and the wonky gyro puzzles… you are left with the core Zelda game I always wanted. I feel about this world the same way as I felt about the original Legend of Zelda on the Nintendo. It was this big open space with all sorts of mysteries to unlock. Its the little things… like when you lift up a boulder and see an insect or frog scurry out from under it… that you can then catch and use to make potions. The world feels vast and empty at times… but it really isn’t. Every copse of trees is placed there with purpose and reason… and many hold puzzles that unlock one of the around 900 korok seeds that are available. This is if nothing else a game about exploration and trying things until you can figure out how to make something work. The shrines are essentially the ultimate form of this expression, and as I have gotten deeper into the game… they are no longer the “use this one effect” style and more “chain everything you know how to do in different ways” effect. There was a puzzle last night where I had to use ice blocks to get objects out of the water… and throw them into a metal basket that I could then lift in the air with my magnetic ability and use the wall to tip the basket over and dump them onto a target. It took me quite a bit to realize that was my end goal and how to maneuver all of the elements into place to get it to work… and I found it an overall awesome experience. The part that I find interesting is how much I don’t mind the constant “Game Over” screen, because there is almost always a save just around the corner from wherever you happened to die… and you can get right back into the action almost immediately.

Functionally this month has not gone at all like planned… I expected to be spending all of my time in Horizon Zero Dawn… and instead I seem to be logging way more hours in Zelda at the moment. I also did not expect to be feverishly searching for a switch… with the realization that if I find one I will ultimately start over from scratch again. In any case I need to wrap this up and get on the road. Just a heads up to my loyal readers, I will not be doing a morning post tomorrow and instead be doing some sort of an evening post when I finally get home. Until then I would love to hear your thoughts on Zelda and if it is nearly as sticky for you as it seems to be for me.