Building

Kenzie and Walled City

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Kenzie.exe is hibernating

This morning is one of those mornings when I am not exactly sure what to write about, so as a result I figured I would give an update on Kenzie. Some weeks back in a stress filled post I talked about her being diagnosed with diabetes. In the time since then we have begun an insulin regiment in the morning and evening and are going back for another round of tests on Friday morning. The good news is that the insulin has seemingly halted the weight loss, and she may have gained some back but I am not sure if I am imagining that or not. The bad news is that due to some miscommunications the Vet was not able to successfully complete a glucose curve last week and we have to reattempt it this Friday.

A very tiny shoulder mounted Kenzie

Another positive however is that because she has been with me since a kitten, she pretty much will tolerate me doing anything that needs to happen. That is not to say that she does not protest furiously when I do have to poke her with a needle, but she more or less forgives me immediately. I am so thankful that if I were to have any cat come down with this disease… that it is Kenzie, because there is no way in hell that I could have given twice a day shots to Mollie. I can barely even pick her up without her freaking the hell out. Kenzie on the other hand I can carry around on my shoulder indefinitely because I have done so since she was super tiny. Above is photo evidence of this era when she would sit on my shoulder and watch me game.

While not super evident by the fact that I am only level 50… I have been spending a lot of time playing Diablo III on the Switch. This has recently replaced Dragalia Lost as my before sleep game that I am playing while laying down in bed. Last night I was not feeling super great and wound up going to bed around 9 pm and then hanging out and playing D3 until the news came on. I am mostly spending my time going through bounties, and I doubt that I will complete the seasons journey on console… but it does give me something to work towards. Seeing how freaking brutal Kolrath was I opted to play as a Barbarian, and I like the female Barb way better than the male one.

Another thing that has been going on recently is that I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. I opted to start in creative mode and started piddling around on a giant castle project. I started work on this as some point during Saturday and this is around the time of recording the podcast Saturday night. You can see that I started putting up a giant wall but hadn’t made much progress in actually hollowing anything out. I find the whole process relaxing as hell and lately I have been in this weird funk of not really knowing what to play. I could be finishing up Outer Worlds and I could also be finishing up Jedi Fallen Order, but instead I have spent my time building a castle.

This screenshot is from this morning and hopefully shows off some of the scale of this monstrosity. Inside there are four levels worth of construction, and the “ground floor” enters into what is effectively the 3rd floor going up, with two floors below the ground. I am not entirely certain what I am going to do with the 1st and 2nd floor as of yet, but I think the next big project is to build essentially a “keep” on top of the peak that you can see on the right side of the walled city area.

Since I have been building on creative mode, I have not been super concerned with torching things off and as a result I have a basement full of monsters that have spawned in. This is the second floor or Basement 1 depending on how you think about it, and I need to sort out what I have planned for down here. My general idea was that the ground floor would be shops and this floor would be small houses/apartments and maybe the same for the lowest floor, but ritzier houses since everything floats out over a giant underground lake of sorts. I want to build some other buildings out along the countryside as well, because there would be an assemblage of housing NEAR the walled city but not quite in it as well. Maybe build up a walled farm or two that are protected to feed resources into the city.

I am back playing the Java version of Minecraft because for a bit I kicked around starting a server in my home for this map. I also really miss the minimap addon whenever I am playing on the Windows 10 client. Ultimately this is sorta what I do when I am playing the game. I invent civilizations and build the structures that they would have used. The funny thing is… once the process is over I do absolutely nothing with the end product and often times just discard the maps after having spent hundreds of hours working on them. All that ultimately remains is a series of screenshots to prove that I did the thing.

Games of the Decade: 2010

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While not my first blog, Tales of the Aggronaut was created back in 2009. This means that the decade of 2010 to 2019 is the first time I am really able to legitimately look back on the last decade of gaming from a blogging standpoint. I’ve gone back and forth over the last several weeks about what sort of form these posts would take. For awhile I contemplated doing one post per day covering 5 games per decade. However at the time I dreamed up this concept it would mean that more or less you would get nothing from me but these posts for the rest of the year.

Instead I scaled things back to a single post per year, but even then I was uncertain of the number of games to talk about in each year. Being the unorganized person that I am, I could not really whittle things down to a clean number each year. So instead what you are getting is a compromise of a compromise, where I just write about the games in each year that were particularly important or noteworthy to me. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I am sure I will be completely blowing past titles that you my readers feel are super important. If that is the case feel free to leave me comments below with the game I should have included.

Minecraft

Technically Minecraft was available and playable in 2009, but I didn’t pay much attention until August of 2010 when I saw the above video from YouTuber DavidAngel64. The “X Series” as it came to be known was a series of videos where he explored various games, and in it he did a deep dive into those early days of Minecraft. I watched several of these and was hooked, and immediately went out and purchased the game and started doing my own explorations. It was a simple time when we were more or less figuring out the rules of the game and now to get to the sort of resources we wanted. For example the hunt for diamond because an overarching goal that pretty much dominated every waking moment of playing the game when I was not finding uses for the copious amounts of cobblestone that I was dredging from the earth.

The peak of my non-group gameplay was in October when I recorded a series of YouTube videos using Fraps and showing off some of the nonsense I had built. That channel is more or less abandoned and everything is on the “Belghast” channel that I dump our podcast on, and with no real great way or moving them, and no access to the original recordings… they more or less live out their life as they are… poorly done with crappy audio. I still have the original Minecraft files laying around in a zip, because I used to trade my files to other friends playing the game and they would zip up theirs and trade them to me so we could explore each others work in the days before an active Minecraft server. In 2011 the way we interacted with the game shifted significantly as we stood up our first server for the House Stalwart guild to all build together. That said 2010 was the renaissance of the game for me, and that blissful era when everything was new and magical.

Fallout New Vegas

I love the Fallout setting, and I can still remember saving up my pennies to buy the original game when it came out back during college. I’ve always been drawn to post apocalyptic settings, and Fallout is a world that is rich and textured and full of tantalizing bits of lore. While Fallout 3 pushed us into a brand new territory of exploring what happened to the Capitol Wasteland, Fallout New Vegas saw us returning to our roots of Southern California, the setting of the first two games. As a result what follows is a nostalgic ride seeing how the settings you were familiar with evolved in the time between the games.

The game is also a return to being controlled by Obsidian games, which represented a significant portion of the folks from Black Isle Studios that worked on the original two games. Fallout New Vegas is known for a handful of things… but the first being that the game does not start you in a vault and instead gives you what feels like a much more weighty introduction in the form of an attempt on your life. The other thing it is known for, is just how freaking buggy the game was at launch. I personally managed to get around most of these and found myself enjoying it greatly. The game is also significant because it represents one of the first times I wrote a review for a site that was not my own. You can still find my original review up on Polygamerous, though due to shifts in hosting I no longer have an account there… but the byline is still at the bottom.

Mass Effect 2

We are travelling through a time period when I was not quite as rabid about keeping screenshots for eternity. As a result I don’t have a ready archive of images to draw upon for most of these games. Mass Effect 2 represents my first entry in the series, and I remember buying it digitally on the ill fated Direct2Drive, because some other subscription I had that I am drawing a blank on gave me a significant discount there. This is the game that shaped my view of the Mass Effect setting, and still to this day is probably my favorite game in the series. I loved the characters and the interactions and the “away team mission” nature of the gameplay. In the years between then and now I have played through this game I believe five times in total, often times as part of a full replay of the series.

There are a lot of games out there that hope to be a narrative story that rivals that of Star Wars. Very few manage to pull this goal off, but Mass Effect absolutely did. I still stand by my stance that this series would make one of the absolute best Science Fiction/Fantasy television series out there. I keep hoping that Netflix options the rights, or shit even Disney Plus after seeing how amazing The Mandalorian has been. While I played through as Male Shepard, the canonical version based on all of my friends has to be the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard. I will admit I had a real hang up for a long time about playing female characters in video games. When I play a video game I am essentially playing me in whatever form takes place on screen, and I tried to always make each character as close to “Belghast” as I could. I seemingly have gotten past that… and at some point I need to break this game back out and play it through in the mode that so many people say is the best possible version.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2010

So those are the games that I was playing behind the scenes, but on this blog… you got a vastly different view of me. It was a time of deep irregularity in my posting schedule. I didn’t really start doing this regular posting thing until 2013, and each time I had a major lapse it was harder and harder to get back into posting again. There are so many sign posts in those early years like this one from April where I find myself apologizing for not feeling up to writing. I was not happy with the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and similarly not super happy with the beginning of Cataclysm. I was also super hung up on this blog being a World of Warcraft Tanking and Raid Leadership blog. That niche no longer really fit me, and as a result I was struggling trying to get the oomph to be writing about what I thought were the topics folks wanted me to write about.

I’m glad I figured this whole thing out at some point, or at least have a working theory about how to progress forward with a blog. I am not sure how often I will be writing these pieces, but I figure I will probably do Monday and Friday or some semblance of that until I get through the years between 2010 and 2019. As I do this, I would love to hear in the comments about your own games of a specific year.

Bathtubs and Nonsense

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I’ve been partaking in some serious nonsense of late, not the least of which has been Dragon Quest Builders… and streaming me playing Dragon Quest Builders.  I figured I would lead off with this screenshot because it is absolutely amazing.  My townsfolk decided to build me a bath tub…  which I immediately installed in my private master suite.  So the funny thing about Twitch in its most modern incarnation is…  it makes it silly easy to be an Affiliate.  From the moment you start streaming it starts ticking off little achievements, which in some bizarro world way made me want to get them.  One of them is called “Path to Affiliate” and it shows up as a little quest of sorts in the sidebar of the achievements page.  It includes…

  • Stream 8 hours in the last 30 days
  • Stream for 7 unique days in the last 30 days
  • Reach 3 average viewers in the last 30 days
  • Reach 50 followers

The last one was easy because I have had my account so damned long that I have more than 50 pity follows at this point if nothing else.  In theory once you qualify and get that achievement checkmark… you are done.  Lately I have been dabbling around with streaming, and one by one each of the boxes got checked… and now I am apparently an affiliate.  I am not entirely certain why I did this thing, but it happened.  Now I actually sorta want to try and come up with a proper schedule, which is super difficult because with my managerial duties my arrive home time is super variable, as is whether or not I feel like playing any games in “live” mode.

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This did force me to contemplate what would happen if someone actually subbed to me.  As a result I named them appropriately to attempt to encourage people that this is not a thing that they should actually do.  I keep expecting Twitch to lower some hammer on me for discouraging people from giving them money.  Basically I would feel super awkward to actually take any money from anyone.  This is mostly a thing I did for myself… and in part because it will allow me to create a spiffy twitch emojii if I so choose.  I am not even sure what else Affiliate includes otherwise, mostly it was just…  a thing I felt like doing because it was available.

Now however I find myself involved in all sorts of other nonsense as a result.  I talked yesterday a bit about StreamLabs OBS… or SLOBS as apparently people are calling it…  why people why.  I’ve also been dabbling with their custom Chatbot that is apparently what happened when they gobbled up Ankhbot.  As a result I now have the beginnings of a custom channel bot named MrAggroBot that will do some of the basic functionality you see in chat bots… and at least in theory also works on Discord.

Similarly I have set up a “BelStreamTime” Discord with the sole purpose of joining it while streaming, and as a result allowing anyone else who cares to hang out with me join as well.  I realize no one actually needs a new discord to join…  but I also did not want to dirty up any of the other discords I am part of with my streaming nonsense.  The highlight of the night had to be getting everything actually working so that the Chatbot joined my quickie Twitch test stream, accepted commands and also announced that I went live through the Discord.  It was more proof of concept than anything useful but I sorta felt like Doctor Frankenstein bringing life into the world…  if that life was complete and utter nonsense.

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As far as doing actual gaming stuff…  I grouped up with Grace and took down some low rank monsters.  I never really reached the point where I farmed Low Rank content the way I now do High Rank, and as a result I am missing a ton of parts to make lower level items required to make the higher level versions.  I’ve been working slowly on building a Tobi Kadachi Longsword for its lightning damage, and we wound up farming Tobi a bunch of times for parts.  From there we started doing more esoteric hunts, like an Anjanath and a Pukei Pukei with a 30 minute timer in which I tried to hammer.  I am not exactly completely effective as hammer, but it was a lot of fun.  Unfortunately I apparently completely phased out the fact that Tam was trying to invite me to a party and wound up heading to bed around 9:20.  It was a fun night, but also one where I did a bunch of silly things with minimal use to anyone.  So yeah… I am apparently a Twitch Affiliate now and am starting to build up the infrastructure needed to do “stuff and things” on that platform.

 

Dragon Quest Builders Thoughts

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I thought I would take a bit of a break from the constant stream of Monster Hunter World posts to talk about something else that I’ve been playing.  Dragon Quest Builders was originally released on the PS4 and Vita back in October 2016 in the United States.  There is apparently also a version that runs on the PS3 in Japan, but seemingly that copy never made it over here.  I remember being super interested when I first saw the trailer, but by the time it was released was deeply distracted by other things.  Just scrolling back through my blog…  on the month it released I seemed to be dabbling in World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Destiny 1, Diablo 3 and a little bit of Skyrim.  Basically it released while I was distracted by other things…  and as a result I never actually got around to picking it up.

Scroll forward to February, a month where I am mostly in a Monster Hunter Shaped hole…  and I notice that it officially releases on the Nintendo Switch.  I’ve not really had any builder games in my life over the last few months, so in theory it was maybe a good time to dig into a new one.  It is really hard to describe what Dragon Quest Builders is because it is this sort of beautiful amalgam of a bunch of different games.  At times it feels like a Legend of Zelda game especially when you don a sword and shield and go out into the world to whack monsters.  There are times when it feels like Minecraft because you are absolutely collecting resources and building up your base.  Then there are times when it feels a bit like Actraiser where you are intervening in the lives of the NPCs that populate your village.

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The story of the game is pretty simple at face value.  The game world itself is that of Alefgard the world of the original Dragon Quest, and is essentially what would have happened…  if we had failed and the Dragonlord won.  It is also a world where over time the fledgling human populace has lost hope and forgotten the power of creation.  You as a builder are granted the ability to look at a set of raw resources and gain inspiration in how they might be shaped into useful objects.  As a result it is your place as the new hero… to start reclaiming the world through combat and creativity and push back the forces of the Dragonlord.

The world itself is divided up into a series of islands, and through the course of gameplay you can learn how to make teleporters allowing you to traverse between them for different resources.  All the while you continue running quests for the NPCs that start showing up in the town you are slowly piecing back together.  Placing blocks together in certain ways creates rooms that then the NPCs can inhabit, and you begin to create machines that they can then utilize giving you resources that then can be used as you go out venturing the “save the world”.

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I’ve loved Minecraft since the moment I first watched a YouTube video explaining the basics of the game.  The problem with Minecraft however is that it is awesome to go out and create things in…  but it also doesn’t really have a point.  Sure there is the whole Ender Dragon nonsense that was placed in game late…  but really there is no sequence of events that you need to complete to “beat” the game.  For me “beating” Minecraft is amassing enough Diamonds to be able to use full Diamond everything and not give a crap about it.  However regardless of how cool you build your world out… it feels hollow because there are no NPCs inhabiting it.

Dragon Quest solves this problem by allowing you to build a world… that then comes to life as various types of NPCs come live in it.  Sure you can get this sort of functionality with modding, but it always feels tacked on to the side of the game and not really part of it.  Dragon Quest gives you a reason for your wanderlust and harvesting and allows you to keep coming back to a place you call home and in doing so help out the people surrounding you.  This might be a subtle difference but it is the one that is the most important and is why I have been playing the heck out of this game each night before falling to sleep.  I like that I can pick it up, do a few things and feel like I have accomplished something.  If this sounds at all interesting to you, I highly suggest checking it out.