Steampowered Sunday Archives - Page 5 of 8

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.

Assassin’s Creed II

March 23, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #10

I have had a really lousy week, and if you have followed my blog you know why. However that said, I did not want to break the Steampowered Sunday tradition. This week we had a tie between Assassin’s Creed II and Evoland, and in order to settle the tie I essentially flipped a coin. As a result I played roughly and hour and a half of Assassin’s Creed II. At face value this seems like a game I would not like very much, considering in general I do not like stealth titles. However so many friends of mine have been so into this game series that I felt like I had to give it a try. I feel like I am somehow losing gamer cred by admitting that I have never played ANY of the Assassin’s Creed games before today.

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTVAll of my friends have said that the essential title that I needed to start with was Assassin’s Creed II, so as a result that is the title I have placed in the running for a few weeks. Initially the title suffers from many of the console game tropes that I hate. Namely the “long introduction” and the forced “stealth” to get to an area where the game opens up. Then when you finally get into the action, there is yet another trope that I cannot stand… “the un-skippable mini-game” namely in the form of the rooftop race with your brother. So early on… things were not looking really good for this title. Within the first 15 minutes it had committed three cardinal sins. That said I kept playing and eventually got a grasp on why exactly this game is fun.

Where this game shines is the open world exploration aspect. While they only give you a small area at a time to roam around, for the most part you are allowed to get to your objective in whatever fashion you like. Additionally the “stealth” aspect of the game is extremely forgiving. If you are “feeling your wheaties” you can beat the shit out of your pursuers, or if you don’t feel like fighting you can simply run away and in a grand theft auto style wait for the coast to be clear again. Your enemies show up as very clear red dots on the map, and in many times you can simply blend into the crowd to avoid them. The only time they seem to notice you is if you are extremely close or doing something like running about or doing something to draw attention to yourself.

I realize at an hour and a half into the game I have barely scratched the surface. So far it seems like the game progresses in a very GTA style, where you are presented a series of small quests. Some of them involve going and fetching something, others beating up a person, and others still following around NPCs and helping them with some task. All of this is pretty boring, but the fact that you can accomplish these missions by wandering around the rooftops of the city make it far more enjoyable. I can see why people are into this title, and I think I would like it even more if it were more open and free. I can only imagine how great this title would be if it were presented in a more “fallout” type sandbox manner. Right now you are given pretty clear direction in what the quests do and which ones you should take.

So far the only real frustration is when I manage to get a “timed event” style quest. I find movement in this world to be cludgy at best, especially after being used to the parkour of newer games like Titanfall. There are many times where I do something like leap off of a building that I did not intend, but did so because I either didn’t wait long enough for my camera angle to readjust or waited too long. If I can get used to the quirks of the movement I feel like my enjoyment will improve, however when you put me under a timer and the movement does something screwball I feel like throwing the controller across the room. I have to remind myself that this game was initially released in 2009, and since then game controls have become so much more responsive. I am sure if I cracked open Assassin’s Creed IV many of these issues have been solved.

Overall I think this is going to be a title I play quite a bit more of. In fact once I finish a few chores this morning, I will probably boot it back up and play some more. I am hooked enough on what is there to make me want to play some more. Right now I am also feeling deeply antisocial, so a single player title is a good option. At this moment I am tentatively positive about the game and considering I got it as part of a massive package of other Assassin’s Creed titles, I can see maybe going back and playing the others as well. My friends all told me to start with 2, because there were some serious controllability issues prior to that point. If that is the case I am very glad I did, because I already feel like 2 is more than a little awkward, I would not have likely made it this far in a title where the controls were worse.

Heroes of the Storm

March 17, 2014 by Belghast

Odd Weekend

With all the excitement of the weekend, yesterday I needed to just recharge a bit and do a bunch of stuff around the house… namely lots of laundry. My wife got up early yesterday morning, as she had planned a trip to Dallas for the day with friends, so this left me completely up to my own devices all day long. I ended up sleeping in until around 9:30 at which point I did my FTL Steampowered Sunday play, and the subsequent blog post. Then it was lots and lots of laundry for several hours. I feel like I might be coming down with something, so I really wasn’t much more useful than that.

On the Grandmother front, she is doing as well as could be expected. She woke up yesterday for a bit before they sedated her again. Her kidney functions have not returned, but she was severely dehydrated. They have a nephrologist coming into the hospital today that is going to look at her and see what they can do to stimulate activity. Once the kidneys start working again they will be much closer to “in the clear”. Mostly they think she just needs to rest and let the body do its natural recovery. She is a really tough woman, so I have faith that she is going to pull through this. Her vitals all look okayish and seem to be improving by the day. so here is hoping time is really all she needs.

As far as the sick cat, she seems to be doing much better. She was extremely needy of attention yesterday, and her appetite seems to have returned. For the majority of the week she had not eaten much of anything, so yesterday whenever she acted hungry I was opening a cat of food for her. I think she ended up eating five different times yesterday. She had lost quite a bit of weight over the course of this ordeal so while I will taper back her feeding eventually… for now I am just happy she is eating. She demanded attention, which is good… because while she was sick she was pretty scarce. Preferring to just lay down on the couch by herself instead of wherever we happened to be in the house.

Elder Scrolls Final Beta Weekend

Since this past weekend is the final beta weekend before launch in a few weeks, and since we had been given leave to stream whatever we wanted… I did as much playing and streaming as I could fit in. All told I think I streamed a little bit over four hours, split up between four different videos. Most of the time was spent faffing about on my Orsimer Dragon Knight in the Daggerfall covenant area. I closed the weekend sitting a little bit away from thirteen. However because of the absolutely illogical pattern I followed I know I missed a good number of the quests from the first area of Glenumbra. I would love to say that the beta weekend was completely smooth, but it seemed as though a lot of the systems were bugged out. Dark Anchors for example seemed to spawn, and then just stay active even after the forces had been defeated and a player got credit for destroying them.

One of the systems that was completely new to me, were the Dark Fissures. These are essentially mini versions of the Dark Anchors and can just spawn almost anywhere around the map. Think of these as “soloable” Rifts. I say soloable in quotes because really unless you are prepared to take on boss level monsters they will be pretty freakin hard. I defeated two of these and did so just barely. If you go into them make sure you have your health potions hotkeyed and ready to go. The awesome thing about the Dark Fissures is that they seem to drop really awesome stuff. The final one I closed out yesterday evening dropped a level 12 blue fire staff, which I am sure would have been awesome… had I used staves. If the beta weekend were going longer I would have tried to find that a good home.

Heroes of the Storm

I know I mentioned this the other day, but I am still pretty pumped that I am in the Heroes of the Storm technical alpha. One of the really cool things about it is that it is completely sans-NDA. This means that I can stream the hell out of the game, and I intend to. I recorded a few videos over the weekend, the first of which was just me playing around in practice mode working on the weekly quests for getting victories with heroes from each of the franchises. The second video however I dipped my toes into cooperative mode fighting bots with other players. I have to say I found the jump in AI to be quite extremely between practice mode and cooperative. I earned enough gold through the various quests to purchase two of the cheaper heroes Muridan and Raynor. At some point I hope to pick up Falstad, because while he is in the free to play rotation currently… I am sure this will change similar to how it does in League of Legends.

Right now I am enjoying the game far more than I ever did League. Basically it has all of the aspects of league that I really enjoyed… namely fighting people with awesome champions, and none of the aspects that I didn’t like. League build path was always an enigma to me, and I tended to play champions that I could use the same build on over and over. League gameplay is far more nuanced, but Blizzard has done for League what they did for the MMO genre. Streamlined, simplified, polished and created something that the masses can latch onto. Instead of a huge list of items for you to purchase, you build your character by making a few simple choices. In the beginning at least all of these are either or choices like “survival” or “damage”. Over the course of the map this ends up building a semi-custom champion.

However once you reach level 8, they open up these choices significantly. While playing Muridan yesterday there was one of these levels where I had five different choices for how I wanted to proceed. Each choice causes you to give up other options with no real way of getting those back. For me… a player that found the item buying system of League completely unfathomable this works so much better. For a player who wants a deeply nuanced and unique approach to each match… they are probably still going to favor League. The champions as a whole feel more well rounded than League champions, in that they have a wider “kit” of abilities and the option to choose between two different “R” attacks really seems to help this.

The place where the game really shines is in their map creation. At their core, each of the maps is essentially “Summoner’s Rift”. That said each of the maps has a unique sub game to them, while League tries to do this with the various map types… it simply does not work as well as it does here. For example in the map shown above Blackheart’s Bay… you have a really awesome coastal city/pirate theme going on. When one team collects enough doubloons they can turn them in to call in a bombardment from the pirates on the enemy team. In one map the mini game is all about controlling two shrines which allow you to waken the Dragon Knight. When you do so the player transforms into this unstoppable juggernaut perfect for diving straight into towers and destroying the enemy resources. I have only played the game a little bit, but I have to say I am deeply hooked.

Gamer Hangout

Another odd happening this weekend is that I ended up participating in Beau Hindman’s Gamer Hangout show. I’ve been friends with the members for some time, and there was a week where they had asked me to join in the show… but I until recently I simply did not have a camera. Now you will be able to see the WHY I didn’t have a camera. I have always been pretty closed with separating the real me from the gamer me… so it took quite a bit of courage to appear on camera like this. I am always far more comfortable behind the scenes than being out front and animated. What was cool about the show is that in essence they based this week on one of my blog posts.

It just happened to be where I was available to join in and chat about it. While most of us only actually got through two different games on our list, we somehow managed to talk over an hour about them. They have apparently extended an open invitation for me to participate more in the future, so I guess that means I did not completely make an ass of myself. My office is a pit, and if I do this more often I think I would want to rearrange things some… however that involves me cleaning and moving and not sure how likely that is to happen. It was really enjoyable, and the other folks were great. Was very much an odd end to an odd weekend. I just wish that youtube would not have picked a thumbnail of me talking for the video.

FTL: Faster Than Light

March 16, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #9

Watch live video from Belghast on TwitchTV

This week I am doing something a little differently with my Steampowered Sunday post. Since streaming is new and shiny… and as a result I am doing a ton of it… I decided to livestream my playtime in FTL. This was after all the game you chose for me to play this week. Previously I had done a few things wrong with my voting. Firstly I made the link super hard to see at the bottom of my post. Secondly I gave you guys like ten choices to choose from, which ended up with a bunch of widely dispersed results. This go around I opted to have you all choose from the three that did not win last week, but had the highest number of votes. You all apparently wanted me to play FTL, because it managed to net 53% of the vote.

Steep Learning Curve

Like most of the games I play for Steampowered Sunday, I went into FTL with absolutely no information. This is one of those titles that was insanely popular in the internet zeitgeist a few months back. I picked it up on a steam sale but never actually got around to playing it. As a result it sat there sadly in my steam library until you guys resurrected it. This is one of those games that is really hard to go into cold. I liken it to trying to play Minecraft for the first time without any guides. So I had no clue how to do anything in the game, and ended up dying horribly to the first encounter I happened across. I thought my weapons would fire themselves I guess. It was not honestly until my third ship that I managed to glean that you could toggle on and off your weapons with the number keys, and fire them that way as well.

Similarly it took me a bit to understand that moving your crew around the ship would help to put out fires, fight boarding parties and repair damaged systems. Essentially playing FTL you die a lot, and hopefully you learned something from the death that you can carry forward into the next ship. That said sometimes you just get fucked by random chance. In the above screenshot I happened to wander into a star system with active solar flares. Just like in Star Trek episodes… solar flares are murder on your shields. Had I happened across the system with no hostiles I could have potentially pooled my resources in the shield room and kept myself repaired long enough to jump out. That said I had a pretty nasty fight with a mantis drone and by the time that was finished my system was a mess. I fought the death of my ship in vain as the solar flares slowly destroyed me.

Belghast Gameplay Not Suggested

I really do one thing in video games… I run in guns-a-blazing and hope for the best. In an FPS I am the king of the spray and pray arsenal. In an MMO I am the guy that habitually charges everything. It is the thing I do. This is very much not the way you want to play FTL, unless you like resetting constantly. If you wander into a system and encounter an “advanced tactical drone” chances are you should really not screw with that. I had that happen, and it started neutral to me… but moments after attacking it, it had disabled all of my ships systems and I was left to sit and watch as all things blew up around me. I feel like that is the real lesson of FTL… stuff happens, often times bad… so hope you can learn from it and not be dumb in the next iteration. The game is pretty brutal about punishing you for your bad decisions, and that is okay… because it tends to be brutal about everything.

I feel like there are so many things I am still missing about success. While playing one of my friends told me over twitch chat that I could vent the compartment to space to put out fires. Which is awesome… except I couldn’t seem to do that when I had attackers in a compartment. The learning curve is exceedingly steep and unforgiving. Much like that first time I played Minecraft, I feel like I need to spend an entire afternoon wandering around a wiki somewhere to figure out what exactly I was doing wrong. I feel like there is a “oh! That is what Coal looks like” moment waiting to happen.

Deathcab for Cutie and Starships

One of the things I enjoyed the most about the game is the soundtrack. It is this really pleasant postal service/deathcab type soundtrack that makes you not care so much that the world is burning down around you. This is one of those moments when I happened to get trapped behind enemy lines and had to fight a far more advanced ship than I had. Notice how they pretty much disabled everything I had and are essentially unharmed. I feel like this is where tactics come in, which is never a strong suit of mine. I tend to be a “shoot first, ask questions never” type player… and this is going to be something I have to get over if I ever want to succeed at FTL for more than a few minutes. Tactics matter a lot, and one of the things I learned early on is… if they have drones, for the love of god kill the drones.

Right now I am really bad at deciding what thing to attack first. I tend to have the best luck destroying ships by killing their engines. That said I feel like i would have a lot more success disabling their weapons, then shields, then engines. When they are charging the engines to escape it seems like a single shot to the engine can slow them down enough to kill them before they jump. So I know this is a good theory, but getting me to do that when everything is burning on my ship seems to be the problem. To quote Wash… “Oh god, Oh God, We’re Gonna Die”. I have trouble keeping focused when my cute little people are dying horribly fighting fires. In the immortal words of my friend Vexa… “Fire is pretty much the worst.”

More Play Warranted

I feel like I am fundamentally bad at this game. That said I feel like this is an okay thing. Much like MInecraft, one of the simple joys is rolling the dice and seeing what combination of events you happen to get this time. I felt completely fine resetting and starting over from scratch. In many ways this reminds me of an early Shareware title called EGA Trek that I used to play the hell out of. The gameplay basically was the same, it involved warping around the galaxy looking for trouble. I played this game for hours upon hours… rolling the dice and seeing what trouble I could get myself into. Combat was very similar, and I would not be shocked at all if the FTL folks had played this game at one point or another. Granted FTL is all of this in much higher detail, but the same pure fun is there. Sometimes it is just fun to die over and over horribly. May the “SS Were Gonna Die” continue to fly onwards.

Mystery Game Time

I’ve decided to shift things up a bit, and start giving away random games instead of a specific title per week. This weeks winner will be contacted today and given a copy of Brutal Legend. However this coming week I will be grabbing something from the stack of mostly indie games that I have laying around. If you win, and it is a title you already have… share the love and give it to a friend that doesn’t already have the game. Another thing I am doing is leaving the two losing titles on the list, and replacing FTL with a brand new title… this week Evoland enters the ring. This way I actually have a shot of playing through the games that were the losers of previous weeks. As always to take the survey click the big bright button below.