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Since this is becoming a regular thing I am doing…  Happy Xursday!  This time around he is located on Io given that it is the flashpoint planet this week.  You can find him in the Giant’s Scar area of the planet in a cave off the lefthand side of the path coming from the fast travel location.  Once again the mobs seem not to be willing to follow you into that cave so you can duck inside to relative safety.  This is going to be the week where we see if Xur really does stick around until the reset, or if that was just a bug since we have had a patch since last week.  There was no specific mention of Xur but as is always the case with MMOs…  patches often times have a bunch of unannounced changes.  Lets get into the item rundown.

Starting off we have the weapon Riskrunner, and for those who played the beta this was the exotic that Warlocks got from Lord Shaxx during the homecoming mission.  It is a really unique feeling weapon given that it fires what looks like an eruption of lightning.  As far as overall usefulness…  it is extremely situational.  The special ability Arc Conductor causes you to deal more damage and gain increased arc resistance…  upon taking any arc damage.  While in this overcharged state, getting kills with the weapon add additional time to the buff.  Without this buff the weapon is largely just another legendary tier sub-machine gun and is quite honestly outclassed by weapons like the MIDA Mini-Tool.  However if you can somehow be regularly taking arc damage…  then you can churn through encounters with this gun and it becomes a formidable beast.  Now if you just like the player fantasy of firing a lightning gun… then screw all of this and use it because it just looks badass.

Last weekend I leveled my hunter at least in part to be able to take proper Xursday shots rather than swiping them off the interwebs.  As a result I am leading off with the Hunter item this week, the Mechaneer’s Tricksleeves.  These are mobility/resistance arms that have the perk Spring-Loaded Mounting which increases the ready time and reload speed of sidearms.  These are one of the choices you can make during the main story quest, and I thought they were really limited in their utility.  You have to love sidearms an awful lot to spend your exotic slot on an item that improves that one weapon.  That said… there are a fair number of really good sidearms in the game like Last Hope that seems to tear people up in the crucible.  I personally do not like sidearms at all… but I did pick these up this week simply for the unlock.  There is just not a lot more I can say about these… if you love sidearms or you also want the unlock… go for it.

The Titan armor is one that I have gotten several times from exotics… and keep infusing away to increase my power level.  That is not due to the fact that it is not a good piece of armor but instead just to play the increasing your level game.  For whatever reason I am just not feeling the Sunbreaker Titan as much as I was in Destiny 1, that said… if you do this is an amazing item.  Functionally the perk is giving us back “Simmering Flames” from Destiny 1.  Sunfire Furnace causes all of your solar abilities to recharge faster while you are sitting on a fully charged super, which in truth I seem to do more often than not because I am looking for the idea time to unleash it.  That means more solar grenades and more solar melee abilities which are really the bread and butter of play for me personally.  I went ahead and picked this back up because while I had this unlocked it was at 205 light…  and I had shards to burn.  I might play with it a bit and determine if it is useful enough to start playing more Sunbreaker.

Do you “Gotta Go Fast” and “Faster Faster Fa Fa Fa Fa Faster”?  These are a weird item that I have used quite a bit largely because they were the highest light boots I had on my Warlock for a good long while.  The perk Strange Protractor causes your sprint to move a heck of a lot faster…  like it is noticeably faster.  While sprinting it also causes your energy weapons to be automatically reloaded.  This again is one of those situationally good items.  I found it really useful in the crucible since I tend to mostly use Uriel’s Gift… and it also meant sprint cancelling a reload caused me to get the full reload.  If you greatly favor energy weapons or just want to go really fast… then these might be the boots for you.  Personally my exotic armor slot goes to Eye of Another World which highlights priority targets and increases the regeneration speed of my melee, grenades and class ability.  If these sound like great boots for you however pick them up, or at least get them so you have them unlocked in your collections.

What are your thoughts?  Did Xur bring something you really wanted or did I completely miss the special utility of a given item when I talk about them?  I’d love to hear your feedback about this weeks offerings and in truth if anyone is actually finding this a useful thing for me to do on Friday mornings.

This is going to be a bit of an odd post, but it is something that has been kicking around in my head lately and something that we have discussed a bit on AggroChat.  Back in 2015 when I attended Pax South 2015… I walked away with one game on my lips…  Gigantic.  It was what I felt at the time a fresh take on the whole MOBA genre and the state at which the game was in at the show… I fully expected it to be launching within the next six months.  Sure Blizzard had just announced Overwatch a few months earlier… but this was here and playable right now.  We scan forward several years… and Gigantic finally launched on July 20th of 2017.  It launched into a climate that has Paladins, Smite, Battleborn, and a plethora of other similar games vying for the same eyeballs on the same screens.  Most importantly though when Overwatch officially launched on May 24th of 2016 it sucked every last drop of oxygen from the room.  Sure there are a ton of differences between each of these games, but in the eyes of the customers…  I am not actually sure any of them matter.  They all fall into this broad category of cartoony stylistic shooter… and the one that gets the most time on the lips of players…  is Overwatch.  I’ve not played Gigantic in a long while in part because there is some nonsense of multiple competing versions for Windows…  but in truth because that moment passed and I moved on to other things.  To be fair I am not playing Overwatch either.

When Dauntless was announced at The Game Awards in December of 2016, I thought it looked really interesting namely because there really isn’t a great PC resident Monster Hunter experience.  Sure there is Godeater but it is sorta doing its own thing that is not entirely connected to the Monster Hunter fame.  I realize Toukiden also exists but neither has really developed the same sort of following.  At Pax South 2017 I got to lay my hands on the game and give it a shot, and while I was completely horrible at it…  the experience seemed like something that with time I could get into.  However soon I started to see a very painfully similar pattern emerging with this game that I did with Gigantic.  At E3 2017 Capcom announced Monster Hunter World and with it for the first time in the franchise PC support.  At this point Dauntless was on a clock, they either had to get to market first or would have all of their available oxygen sucked out of the room as well.  A few days ago it was announced at the Tokyo Game show that Monster Hunter World would be shipping in all markets on January 26th 2018.  While they say the PC version will follow later…  this still adds additional pressure to Dauntless to release and firms up the time table of when they have to launch.  The game is currently in Closed Beta but has never really had a more firm launch window other than “2017” of which we are starting to run out of months.

For me personally…  that time is already over.  Once Monster Hunter World was announced to be coming to PC, I for the most part stopped caring that much about Dauntless news.  I was going to get my Monster Hunter game on the PC and it was going to come from Capcom and share all of the traits and lore and history of the Monster Hunter franchise as a whole.  Dauntless on the other hand has to fight an uphill battle of coming up with a brand new IP and then trying to infuse enough into that world to make it feel alive and exciting and not just a sequence of arenas where you fight boss monsters.  Even the monsters themselves are a challenge because they have to come up with a whole slew of brand new creatures with their own mechanics and tactics…  whereas Monster Hunter world can draw heavily on fourteen years of experience and fourteen related games worth of monster battles.  Basically the oxygen is gone for me personally, but if they hope to get Monster Hunter devotees their clock is ticking down quickly because the moment the actual Monster Hunter is available on PC…  a whole lot of the unique gimmick factor of Dauntless goes away.  I might be overly grim here, but I watched this all play out for Gigantic and I have a feeling we are just about to see a repeat of that story.

Last night was one of those evenings when I just straight up crashed.  I wound up heading towards bed a bit before 9 pm and as far as I know I largely slept straight through without waking up.  I’ve felt like I had been coming down with something for a few days, but what I think instead is just that the allergens are going haywire.  The pollen index it seems has been stuck in the “Very High” state for the last few days which can absolutely account for why I have been generally sluggish and miserable.  All of this and the work load I am under has somewhat blunted what is generally a magical time for me…   convention season.  Right now both GamesCom and QuakeCon are happening and in a few weeks it will be Pax West.  This is in theory the time of the year when a bunch of announcements get made, but thusfar there has been nothing terribly groundbreaking.  At the moment I think the game I am most interested in of those announced this week is BioMutant by THQ Nordic.  While I generally don’t go in for the whole “Anthro” thing…  this game does however check all the forgotten and post apocalyptic world boxes.  I love games that are set in a time where technology is almost treated like magic and you have to scavenge the wastes to fortify yourself.  I wasn’t super sure about the game until I watched 11 minutes of gameplay footage that got released by IGN.

I really like that the game has a narrator, and that it chooses to have the characters speak in some sort of native animal language that we don’t understand.  Part of what made Bastion so damned infectious was the relationship between narrator and your actions… and I am hoping that BioMutant in many ways will feel similar.  Right now the game seems like Horizon Zero Dawn with TMNT style mutant animal people….  and in some what this reminds me a bit of Rage.  It is being described as a Post Apocalyptic Kung Fu Fable…  and I am generally okay with that notion.  The game play seemed really fluid switching back and forth between jumping swordwork and gunplay.  I have a lot of love for the concept of this because back in the day I was a HUGE fan of the After The Bomb setting in in the Palladium games Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pen and paper game.  It already has a page stubbed out on Steam so I am guessing it will be an early 2018 release and not something we are going to wait a super long time for.  The worst part about the game convention cycle is that you see a game well before it is set to release… and then by the time it actually launches the excitement has died down significantly.  I’ve long through the Bethesda system of announcing a game within six months of release is probably the ideal window.  Sure there are always rumors circulating before hand… but it is damned nice to see a trailer and see a firm release date at the end of it so that you know “this is how many months I have to wait”.  The truth is I find it harder and harder to muster the fever pitch levels of excitement that I once had for games… I think in part because we are deluged with so much information about it.  Every single rumor or half heard sentence gets dissected and churned into “exclusive” YouTube content….  that then gets copied by a half a dozen places because they are all desperate for eyeballs and clicks to try and pay the bills.  I think once you see the strings… or the great and powerful oz behind the curtain… the whole experience is a little less interesting.

One of the things that I do occasionally with some coworkers is go to the live broadcast of Rifftrax.  The concept there is a little odd given that the actual “live” show is in Nashville but is simulcast to theaters around the country…  two of which are in the Tulsa area.  Generally speaking we all meet for dinner first and then attend whatever they happen to be Riffing at that time.  Traditionally this is some movie down on the deep B and or Cult status list.  I think the last one I saw before last night was Samurai Cop back in March, and hands down the best one ever was them taking on The Room.  The weird thing about last night is that I was not terribly sure how I would feel about them Riffing on one of my Fandoms.  I’ve been a Doctor Who fan since my father indoctrinated me during the very long rein of Tom Baker.  Whatever concerns I might have had vanished quickly because their send up of the Five Doctors was amazing.  Pretty much everything we ever thought while watching some of the campy 80s shows…  took verbal form.  If you have a chance to see it I highly suggest it.  They are doing the traditional rebroadcast on August 24th so you might check to see if it is available at a theater near you.  I highly suggest the “live” Rifftrax experience in general.

Past this I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about.  The problem with a Rifftrax night is that I don’t get home early enough to really do much in the way of gaming.  It was not long before I was downstairs conked out completely.  The following story is related for humor… and for evidence of how generally dead to the world I was.  I turned in pretty early and at some point during the night I apparently got up to use the restroom.  I don’t remember this at all, instead it was just like I suddenly woke up and was on the toilet….  and had apparently been there long enough to have my legs completely fall asleep.  So in my sleepy state I had to figure out how to finish my business…  and then pull my pants up and somehow stabilize myself as blood goes rushing back into my legs.  There was a point where I legitimately considered crawling on the floor to bed.  Even weirder was when I managed to hobble my way to the bed and sit down…  I couldn’t quite reason how to lift my then “full on pins and needles with a vengeance” legs up into the bed so I could lay down again.  This is of course way more than you bargained for when you decided to click through to my blog this morning.  While I do suggest Rifftrax… I would not suggest this whole walking on legs that you can’t actually feel thing.  It is an overrated experience.