Shoot'em Ups Archives - Page 2 of 3 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Crimzon CLover World Ignition

June 22, 2014 by Belghast

Technical Difficulties

Last night was probably the roughest time I have had editing the AggroChat podcast in the eleven episodes we have been running. Mostly this centers around us trying to change the way we record the show. Since its inception we have been recording it on the House Stalwart mumble server in a private and locked down channel. This worked pretty well and produced the first ten episodes without much issue. However on July 19th that server will be going away and as a guild we will be permanently switching to the Alliance of Awesome Teamspeak server. In theory Teamspeak does the same type of things that mumble does, so I thought we could simply record our channel without much issue. Turns out that was not quite the case.

Mostly we had a lot of issues with Kodra coming through either garbled or not at all when he was holding down his push to talk key. Apparently on his end it was me that was coming through like this. Oddly enough Ashgar and Rae didn’t seem to have any problems at all. It might be something we can fiddle with codec wise to make it work better, but honestly after the trouble I had with last nights podcast I am just of the opinion that we not try and record on teamspeak again. We have access to a more private mumble server, and I am guessing from now on we will just use that one instead. A lot of folks have suggested skype, but none of us are really skype users… so that would take its own trial and error to figure out how to really use it.

Last night we finished recording around 9:30 and I started editing by 10 pm. I did not actually finish editing the podcast until well after 12:30. The hard part was trying to glue together enough audio out of the garbled sections to make sense of what was being said. I’ve listened to most of it while I was editing and I think the end result works. However if you hear something that doesn’t quite make sense… it was probably me trying to make the of a corrupted segment of speech. While I don’t think the show was our weakest, it definitely made for some strained recording time since we kept having to redo segments that did not transmit. Hopefully what did make it through is enjoyable.

Fly That Geek Flag High

In this weeks episode we have the original cast reunited again. Ashgar is back from doing whatever it was that Ashgar was doing the week before, and Kodra is back from the awesome gaming convention Origins. As we had talked two weeks ago, Kodra gave us a run down of what exactly he did at Origins. This leads to a little discussion about something that is unfortunate in the gaming and geek communities… geek on geek shaming. Apparently Kodra catches some crap from the Magic the Gathering gamers for his choice of playing the My Little Pony card game. But hey we pretty much support all potential diversions here on AggroChat.

Additionally we talk about the Warlords of Draenor expansion and my experiences so far with the Alpha. We also talk at length about the Wildstar patch schedule and our hopes that they are actually able to maintain it. Join us for these topics along with a bunch of other ones that just get slipped in here and there was we go. Since neither Ash or Kodra were here to talk E3 2014, we do a bit of a callback there as well to talk about a few things that make people excited. Remember to let your geek flag fly high, but remember to respect everyone else’s choice of flag as well.

Crimzon Clover World Ignition

For the last couple of weeks I have been trying to get enough time to really give this game a proper playing. My friend Ashgar and I seem to be the only folks in our immediate circle of friends that really appreciate the “bullet hell” shooter. So when a new one comes out, he sometimes throws it on my game pile because he knows I will actually play it with him. The latest one of these is a random gifting of Crimzon Clover, and if you want to see a more logical and proper write-up about the game check out Ash’s blog. The other night when he was working on his indepth reviews of the game I took a break from Four Job Fiesta and Wildstar to play Crimzon Clover with him. I say play it with him… but mostly we just happened to be on voice chat at the same time while both of us are in game. It sadly does not support internet multiplayer gaming.

The game actually does a fair bit of bait and switch. When I booted it up and started playing the other night I originally thought it was going to be a “Shmup” and not really a “Bullet Hell” shooter. This however changes quickly as it somewhat eases you into the game play as you get used to the movement controls and various attacks. By the time you reach the first boss however things have escalated to the point where you are dodging the attacks like crazy. The game itself is extremely clean and the controls responsive. This is the sort of game where you just hold down the fire button at all times and spend the rest of your time looking for the only safe spot on the screen. I question in this genre why the fire isn’t just toggled on and left on, since there is never really a point at which you don’t want to be holding it down.

As is often the case with this type of game you end up with the choice between different ships. Type-I tends to be the most baseline and the easiest to control, whereas Type-II and Type-III give you a benefit in one area but make another area variable through the play session. I started off trying Type-II but quickly fell back on going with the tried and true “default option”. Ash actually managed to beat the game, but I only made it through boss number four before deciding my fingers were too sore to continue onwards. Apparently in order to truly beat the game, you have to make it through without hitting continue. If you do that you get a different ending and I believe a different boss encounter. This also seems to be a theme with a lot of these very serious games. I remember in the BlazBlue games there were “good” endings and “bad” endings depending on how you did in the earlier content leading up to the final encounter.

I have to say this game is a really good entry into the genre, and combined with Danmaku Unlimited 2 gives some seriously good options for Bullet Hell shooters on steam right now. I am happy that this genre is alive and well and did not die with the death of arcades. This specific title is interesting in that it is what they call a Doujin or essentially the Japanese version of an Independent PC game. This appears to be another thing that steam is doing right, in that it is giving these games a market in the united states. Recettear is another one of these Doujin games and it has been wildly popular and also likely would never have been seen here without steam. If you dig the Bullet Hell shooter genre, this is one of the more pristine examples I have seen in a long while. You should totally check it out because right now during the steam sale you can pick it up for only $7. This game is more than worth that money even if you only slightly like shooters.

Next Gen Achieved

June 14, 2014 by Belghast

Aversion to Sports

It started yesterday with a random dumbass quip that I am known to occasionally spout towards the end of the day. Watching the internet be enthralled about the World Cup is a really surreal experience when you are living in the United States and soccer never actually makes the sports page other than during the World Cup. I figured surely someone would give me shit about my statement, but I expected them to hone in on the World Cup portion. Instead my friend Liore latched onto the root of the comment… asking why exactly I found the appeal of sports bizarre. I rattled off a half truth and said that I just was not born with what I call the “spectator gene”. I love league of legends for example, but no matter how many times I have tried to watch the LCS I find it completely boring. All it does it make me want to boot up League and play it, instead of getting completely caught up in the matches like my friends do.

My aversion to sports however goes far more deeply than that. When you grow up in a small town in Oklahoma or Texas… your entire school life revolves around the sports team. I grew up in a town of 2000, with a graduating class of 60… and even though we had a horrible football team… the entire damned town revolved around it. Growing up a big kid I was stalked from middle school on by coached that wanted to make me part of their “lineup”. I played little league ball and gave an attempt to play football… but I just didn’t enjoy it. Additionally I have never bought into the bullshit drill instructor act that all coaches perform. While that might motivate some people, all it does is make me want to flip them the bird… because I had so many other options for spending my time. It completely baffled them that anyone would not want to play football.

On top of that over the years sports have come to represent what was wrong with a small town. You might have duct taped together supplies in the science classroom, and classes meeting in portable huts instead of actual buildings… but by god if the field house needs renovated that is going to happen, and there is nothing that will ever stand in the way of our losing football team from getting shiny new equipment every year. The focus on football means other things slide and the school as a whole graduated a ton of barely functional adults. In my graduating class of 60, I would say 2/3rds of the kids who went to college flunked out their first year and are now working menial jobs in the same town. Then we get to the problem of the coaches themselves… who always seemed to be History or Mathematics teachers. My Geometry teacher was the head football coach, and would spend exactly five minutes writing something on the board… and then spend the rest of the hour as we worked on our homework assignment with the football players huddled around his desk talking about plays for the “big game”. The history teacher, while a nice guy was equally incompetent. He once told us that “Old Iron Sides” was named that because it was made of Iron not Wood. So how can I respect sports when I grew up in this situation.

I realize that huge swaths of the population love sports, and love cheering for their team. I try my damnedest to just ignore it, because I really don’t want to be a buzzkill. Every now and then one of these quips slips out, and as I said while I really do not have the spectator gene… there is a lot more driving that attitude. I played little league ball, but for whatever reason the indoctrination never really took. Which is humorous because I used to work in a baseball card and later comic shop. I even collected cards… but then it was more about the artwork on the card or the value of a specific rookie… and not about me actually caring about the game itself. I will say though that to this day Baseball is the only game I will really willingly watch. There is something untainted about that sport, because at our high school they never got any attention either. They had to play in old uniforms and on a crappy field… because the football and basketball programs drained the system dry. So in a way I felt almost a sense of kinship with them, since they too were damaged by the system.

Next Gen Achieved

I have for the most part avoided the “next generation” of consoles, and as all the hype surrounded them leading up to the launch I didn’t think much about any of them. Then something happened… and I saw the 2013 E3 presser from Sony. During the current generation of consoles I started out an XBox 360 fan… but over time I gravitated towards the Sony Playstation 3 when I picked up one used from a friend. The primary reason behind this shift in allegiance was the phenominal deal that is the Playstation Plus membership. For what is roughly $50 it gave me access to a massive game library of I think a dozen different playstation 3 titles at a time. So not only was the service cheaper than Xbox Gold but worth way more value in that it actually just gave me a curated collection of games every month for me to download. One of my good friends Ashgarshowed me a nifty trick that allowed me to log into the website and “purchase” the free games to add them to my account each month. After watching the E3 press conference last year, I knew sooner or later I would be getting a Playstation 4, but I was mostly waiting for the price to come down. Nonetheless this meant every single month I would add the new PS4 game to my account knowing that sooner or later I would get one and have a game library ready to play.

Awhile back on the AggroChat podcast, my friend Tam introduced me a rule he uses for the purchase of new console systems. He waits to buy a new console until it has at least five games, either currently released or releasing within the next six months that he wants to play. The more I thought about it, the more I thought this was an excellent and logical way to decide when to jump into a new console. For me right now the list of games I am excited about looks something like this.

Infamous: Second Son
Assassins Creed 4: Black Flag
Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
Last of Us: Remastered
Destiny
Kingdom Hearts III
Final Fantasy XV
The Order: 1886
Guilty Gear Xrd
Bloodborne

While many of those are not Playstation 4 exclusives… I am devoted to the playstation family of consoles thanks to the warm fuzzies I have about playstation plus as a whole. In the time I have been subbed to the service I have gotten 151 games, and have a library of six PS4 titles waiting on me. Granted most of these are not exactly AAA titles yet, but one of them at least is something I have amped to play since the moment I saw game play from it. Microsoft on the other hand… really has nothing to offer me. As far as Microsoft Console exclusives… the only two that I am interested in that are not also coming to the PC are Killer Instinct and Sunset Overdrive. Neither of which are going to be games I play enough to make that console worth my time. Then again… there is just a lot I don’t like about the target of the XBox One. I was watching an excellent rundown video about the two consoles yesterday, and the guy admits that while he used the Kinect and TV integration features for the first month… he hasn’t used them at all since.

Getting the Goods

When it comes to buying hardware especially… I am a cheap bastard. I rarely if ever buy game systems new… in fact the only game system I did buy new was the 3DS, and only because I had pretty much exhausted all options. So when I started kicking around the notion of maybe picking up a PS4… I hit craigslist like normal. I did a search of the site and noticed that someone had a PS4 incorrectly posted in the barter section for way less than normal. They were wanting $280 and it came with two sports titles. Since I have zero use for those… I opted to try and talk the guy into a price without them. I honestly expected nothing to come of it, so when it texted me back a day later saying he would do $250 without the games… I was absolutely pumped. I joked during the day yesterday that I hope I didn’t get killed meeting a stranger on craigslist… which apparently disturbed Rae considerably. It was a little odd because generally I am not alone when I meet people from craigslist, but my rule has always been that we meet at one of the many QuikTrips in Tulsa… since they are ALWAYS busy 24/7.

The guy was running late… as in he was an hour late at the time he finally arrived. For awhile I was thinking that it was going to fall through like so many other “good deals” from Craigslist have. However he arrived with a PS4 in hand, with the original box and everything that came with it. It seemed that once again I was benefiting from the flighty nature of teenagers. He bought the PS4 and games with High School graduation money… and then decided he needed that money to move into an apartment. It is funny the stuff that folks you meet from craigslist will tell you, like when we bought my chromebook we found out that the guy grew up in the same town as my wife… and that they knew some of each others family. I think maybe this stuff only actually works out this well here in Oklahoma… where people are generally well meaning and rather polite about everything. But once again I am more than happy to take advantage of a good deal when I can find it. I took the machine home, booted it up and everything works awesome. It feels as though the dual shock four hasn’t really even been broken in. The guy had not even registered an account on the playstation network, so after a wipe of the system it is now set up with all the plus games.

So far I am mostly playing Resogun and Infamous Second Son. I would like to find a cheap copy of Killzone Shadowfall because it looks pretty cool. I am also kicking myself that I did not sign up for the Destiny Alpha. At that point I had no clue I would actually be getting a PS4, so of course hindsight is 20/20. Here is hoping I can figure out a way to get an alpha key and play it as well. So far I am loving the system, and super happy with the purchase. It is actually good timing considering my allergies are going completely haywire and right now I can barely breath. Seems like the perfect time to hibernate with a console and play some games. I might even try streaming to twitch later, just to see how well the service works.

#PS4

Grand Anniversary

April 27, 2014 by Belghast

No Free Lunch

Last night was Saturday night, and that means we recorded another episode of the Tales of the Aggronaut podcast… AggroChat! We had a few odd things going on last night. Firstly Rae was off travelling in world visiting her longtime friends Ahi and Bez. This means she was completely unavailable. Additionally Kodra was travelling, and connected in from crappy hotel wifi in San Francisco… leading him to be a little bit robotty. However we pushed through all of this and picked up a 4th player in the form of our good friend Tam. He had been talked about plenty of times on the podcast already, and it only seemed fitting to have him sub in. Super thankful for him to be willing to do it in a pinch. We talked about all manner of things including Hex Closed Beta, ArcheAge and the concept of selling entry into the beta process, and our ideal scenarios as far as character building and abilities in MMOs go.

We are going to have to find a way to stay more on topic, because each episode has increased every so slightly in length. The first one was right at an hour, the second an hour and fifteen minutes, and this one roughly an hour and thirty minutes. We could have formal topics that we push through, but I personally like the meandering format, because it means it is more like the natural conversations we already have. I wish I had kept rolling because moments after I cut the podcast off we had a pretty epic conversation about how Lucasfilm is disavowing the entire Expanded Universe concept… and while we will miss some things maybe it isn’t so much of a bad idea. There were some really odd fan service things about the Expanded Universe that don’t really hold up story wise.

Steampowered Sunday #11

When Elder Scrolls Online released on a Sunday, it pretty much put a severe halt to my blog series known as Steampowered Sunday where I take some time and play a game from my backlog of titles. Last night during the podcast we were talking about a game that Ashgar had been playing this week that fell firmly into the Bullet Hell genre. Kodra seemed to think this was madness, and having been a big fan of Ikaruga I totally understood the draw. There was a time period when I used to play lots of bullet hell shooters and pre-hell shooters. Gradius, Darius Twin, Raiden Trad… all games I remember fondly. I was never particularly good at them, but I enjoyed them nonetheless. I remember playing 1942 on the nintendo for hour upon hour trying to make my way through all the stages.

At some point I just stopped playing them. I think it was during the death of the dreamcast, but when I bought my PS2 I just simply stopped picking up the games anymore. While I have Gradius 5 on my PS2, I guess my tastes in games changed a bit. This honestly more than anything represents a period of time when I stopped playing consoles very much and started consuming games almost exclusively on the PC. Every now and then I would flirt with a new shooter like the ever amazing Jamestown, but I never really got heavily into it again. Last night in an attempt to cold boot this series again, Ashgar griefed me by gifting me a copy of a really rather awesome bullet hell shooter on steam. At face value Danmaku Unlimited 2 reminds me of a less technical cousin to Ikaruga. The soundtrack is in part what makes the gameplay, and helps you do what is needed to make it through the levels. The secret to a bullet hell is to zone out and focus only on the pattern and not so much about the rest of the noise on screen. Only a few things can actually hurt you, so you focus in on those things.

The hilarity of my play through is that after years of not playing these games my reflexes that had built up are completely gone. In addition I am playing this game roughly thirty minutes after waking up. So yeah I do pretty bad. Ashgar tried to make me feel better by saying that I did significantly better than he did the first time. Essentially the gameplay video is roughly seventeen minutes and the point at which I ran out of lives to keep going. I made it to about the mid point of stage four. All in all I think I did a pretty good job. The awesome thing about the game is it is really cheap. So for the price you cannot beat this kind of bullet hell goodness. I feel like there is a lot of customization in the way you set up the game. I went with pretty generic options and was playing on easy, so I think there is a lot more depth to be had there if I dig into it. Probably going to stream some more of me trying to play it later. In any case… I have successfully rebooted the Steampowered Sunday feature. Long live me playing through my steam backlog!

Grand Anniversary

Last but definitely not least… today is the one year anniversary of the Grand Experiment… my attempt to blog something each and every day. This means as of today I have made a post every single day for a year. That is a pretty significant feat and I am really damned proud of myself for sticking with it. At this point I figure I am going to try and make it another whole year without letting the beat drop. It hasn’t been the most easy thing to do, but I want to take a moment to thank my wife who has been extremely supportive in this adventure. There have been days where I might not have made it through the post without her just assuming that it was going to happen and giving me time and space to do so. Additionally I want to thank my friends who have supported me in this madness and my readers. There have been moments when I felt alone in my mission, and was surprised at how many of you have reached out your arms to help me along the way. Somehow I have gone from being the least regular of bloggers… to the most regular, and it is a pretty insane transition. I feel like I have grown a lot in the past year, and I thank you all for helping me with it.

Big Dumb Broforce

April 17, 2014 by Belghast

Happy Friday

At the very least, Happy Friday to me! This is the last day of my week as we have Good Friday off tomorrow. I plan on spending the day in a near vegetative state playing Elder Scrolls Online and likely streaming quite a bit of it. It seemed like today was going to be a day I could wrap up the loose ends. I have a bunch of projects that each need a few hours of undivided attention to finish up the last bits of coding. The problem is I am constantly getting interrupted at work by “fly bys” when some random person comes by to ask a question. Looking at my calendar it was completely clear, so I thought I would be leisurely listening to the ESO soundtrack and working through the last bits of these projects.

WRONG! I generally check my work email a few times a night, and right before bedtime I noticed I had been invited to a meeting to discuss hopefully the technical details of a new project. Then I panned down and noticed the time. There is a special place in hell for people who schedule 12 am to 1 pm meetings. Sure enough this damned vendor had done just that, so now I have to give up my lunch hour to listen to some vendor do a sloppy job of trying to explain the technical requirements of their product. I hate vendors… mostly because where I work the relationship of vendor and customer seems to be completely backwards. We always end up having to jump through hoops to meet vendor needs… when it should be the other way around.

Big Dumb Broforce

One of the things that I lament about modern video game design… is the attempt to make them feel like interactive movies. While I can appreciate the craftsmanship of the Mass Effect series, it is not the type of game I want to play every single day. I like blowing things up, gibbing bad guys and generally saving the day. I have massive amounts of notalgia over the big dumb games of my childhood. Nobody really gave a shit about the storyline in Double Dragon, because mostly it was completely incoherent. However we did know the bad guys by name and enjoyed punching them repeatedly. The name Abobo still sends an irrational amount of fear through me.

Broforce is basically one of these games with a storyline that is basically an excuse to blow a bunch of stuff up. The game is very reminiscent of Metal Slug, another title that I absolutely love, with a few significant tweaks. The gameplay is very similar, go through the map rescuing prisoners of war. The twist is each time you rescue another prisoner, you gain an extra life and then transform into that prisoner. This gives the game a huge cast of characters, all of which have extremely unique abilities. In the above shot I ended up playing as J from Men in Black… known in this game as “Bro in Black”. All of the various characters have been given bro names like “Brobocop” or “B.A. Broracus”.

At the end of each sequence of levels there is a boss fight, this one is a helicopter that alternates between dropping bombs and firing a chain gun at you. What makes it difficult is that both NPC weapons and your weapons can destroy terrain. Meaning pretty quickly you are running out of places to stand. One nifty tip that I have noticed is that the platforms the flags spawn on are indestructible, meaning you can use them as a shield when the bomb phase starts. All of this said the gameplay is just infectious. I’ve played roughly an hour so far, and am really enjoying myself. The only thing that I find frustrating is that not all of the “bros” are created equal. Some of them like the MacGyver clone are extremely situational. It reminds me of playing Castlevania and getting stuck with the wrong alternate attack right before a boss fight.

The one thing that would greatly improve the experience for me is the ability to swap back and forth between the bros you have rescued. That would make the gameplay feel more strategic and less random. Even in the modern Castlevania games you got a second chance to swap back to the weapon you had before. It is bad enough that if I get MacGyver I tend to just suicide out to swap to a new character. Playing mad bomber is just not as fun as it seems… even though his bombed turkey attack is hilarious to watch. The game is available through steam early release, but it feels pretty damned complete to me. If you like mindless shoot-em-up game play, I highly suggest you give it a look.

Wandering Rivenspire

The rest of the night I ended up working on the various quests in Rivenspire. This zone might be my nemesis, not because I don’t like it… but maybe that I like it too much. I find it nearly impossible to focus while wandering around a landscape full of vampires. I end up falling into vampire hunter mode and spending large amounts of time slaughtering the undead without really knowing I have done it again. I desperately tried to stay focused last night and follow the quest chains. I managed to ding 32 and at this point I am no longer getting drops from most of the encounters around me. It seems like if you are not within five levels of the encounter it becomes trivial and stops dropping anything meaningful.

I am however using the opportunity to loot everything I see, and feed the cooking mats to Kodra and Sylladora depending on the level of the material. I hit a lucky streak last night and managed to get both the Breton and Argonian racial motif books. The Argonian one is still looking for a home by the way if any of my guildies need or want it. A few days ago I managed to get an Imperial motif book, so they do apparently exist for everyone concerned the only way to get imperial gear was through the collectors edition. I managed to find a buyer for it and got 10,000g… which I figured was pretty damned good considering that the other motif books started out around 2,000 and have quickly dropped to 500 as the market has become flooded.

For awhile I was trying to broker a trade for either the Barbarian or Primal racial motif, however I have heard they are pretty common drops in the veteran levels. That ancient elves and daedra are far more difficult to find. I figure getting the gold while I can for the imperial book was the best course of order. Like always I am in a relative state of poor in this game, but I need to begin saving up for my fast pony. I might have to give up on deconstructing everything I see and just start selling it to make a profit. My biggest concern right now is that I am several levels ahead of the zone I am in… and this just seems to keep getting worse as I move upwards. I just find it impossible to move on past a zone until I think I have gotten everything out of it.

Interesting Footnote

It seems as though I am going to be on two podcasts this weekend. I will of course be recording the second episode of AggroChat… which I am looking forward to. We have several topics that we may or may not get around to discussing. It should be a fun time for me at least either way. The second however is that I will be guesting on the Multplaying.net podcast. So keep watching their site for the file because I am sure it will be a fun time.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #BroForce #AggroChat #Multiplaying