Ghostbusters Afterlife

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Good Morning Friends! I have been flailing around a bit game wise. My brain still wants me to be playing New World, but my frustration levels are to the point where that seems like a very anger filled proposition. Since I don’t have a lot of gaming discussion this morning I thought I would talk a bit about Ghostbusters Afterlife the continuation of the original Ghostbusters movies and by reference I guess the cartoon series. I have some thoughts about the movie but first I think we need to get something out of the way.

There has been a lot of vitriol about the 2016 Ghostbusters reboot, and this post is not going to be bashing that movie. I wrote my thoughts in August of 2016 and was probably less generous than I would be today if I wrote a similar post about it. As that movie has aged I have actually liked it considerably more, especially as I have come to realize that they are completely different products. Ghostbusters 2016 is far more the “Scooby Doo” interpretation of Ghostbusters, and it works and is carried in large part by the phenomenal comedians in each of the roles. I love Scooby Doo and I think Ghostbusters works in this more over the top interpretation.

If the 2016 movie is Scooby Doo, the original movie is more akin to Pop Cthulhu. There are some deeply serious and scary things going on, with some really interesting lore pulled from eldritch tomes of knowledge… that gets watered down by the comedic performances taking place when confronted by what would otherwise be deep horror. The tone is just different and as a kid it made me want to read Tobin’s Spirit Guide, Spates Catalog, and even the Necronomicon. What pulled me in was the universe filled with possibilities and the general cosmology of Ghostbusters, that thankfully was fleshed out and continued in “The Real Ghostbusters” cartoon series on Saturday mornings.

We’ve seen so much necromancy involving trying to resurrect a popular movie series from my childhood… aka the 80s. So many of them fall short of what my general goals for this sort of movie are. Essentially I am looking for it to do the following things:

  • Pay Homage to the Original Material
  • Connect the New Material to the Original Story
  • Set Up a New Generation of Characters
  • Introduce a new Threat that is a Call to Action
  • Pass the Baton from the Old Generation to the New Generation
  • Give the Old Generation a Meaningful Send Off

This is Phoebe, she serves as our point of view character for most of the movie. I’m going to be pretty shallow on plot points because I don’t really want to dive into spoilers nor do I really feel like I need to. Shocking to no one and largely explained in the trailer… Phoebe is the Grand Daughter of Egon Spengler. Like Egon she is a science head and genius and also very clearly on the spectrum, which is lightly touched upon but not really treated as some magical power like too many shows seem to. Essentially the family is destitute and when Egon passes, he leaves them his home and land in the middle of nowhere… aka Oklahoma. I know that this was filmed in Canada, but based on the look of things and knowing my state I am guessing it would be somewhere around Weatherford.

One of the things that this movie does extremely well is it blends the feeling of the original Ghostbusters with that of a coming of age adventure like The Goonies. You care about the kids that are largely the ones driving the plot forward and the adults that care about them. These take the form of the form of the Mom played by Carrie Coon and a Seismologist played by Paul Rudd. Rudd’s character is very reminiscent of Science Teacher from Gremlins or the later derivative character from Stranger Things. The story felt more real to me as an Oklahoman because the plot as discussed in the trailer centers around this small town being impacted by random earthquakes every single day. We went through a similar cluster of earthquakes largely blamed upon the fracking industry, and the movie does a good job of latching onto this unknown and turning it into something darker.

This bit is going to be a little bit spoilery so you might want to skip it if you are bothered by such things. So there are also some plot holes that I am a bit confused by. In the original Ghostbusters Ray Stantz accidentally chose the form of “Gozer the Destructor” by thinking of his childhood love of Stay Puft Marshmallows. Per lore each time Gozer manifests a new form is chosen… so when Gozer manifested in 1984 you have a Giant Marshmallow Man. So why exactly would packages of tiny marshmallows be turned into tiny Stay Puft Men? I mean it makes for some cute and disturbing scenes, but also makes no real sense in the grand scheme of things. The only thing I can think is that since the Original Ghostbusters effectively kept Gozer from coming into the world… maybe they just got a stay of execution or some such?

Much like The Force Awakens feels like a remix of A New Hope, in some ways this movie feels like a remix of the original Ghostbusters film. There are a lot of plot points that follow a similar pattern, but do so in a fresh enough way that they feel like an event happening again and less a remake of the earlier film. The big payoff for me personally is how neatly everything fits into the larger narrative of the Ghostbusters universe and a continuation of the mythology set up in that first film. Lore is one of those things that I just eat up and part of the reason why I dove so heavily into games like Destiny and even more recently New World. I like the world I am experiencing to make sense within the context of the film and it to feel like the events are part of something larger than the narrow view port that I see on the screen. Afterlife pays off in this aspect in spades.

Afterlife is also a movie that resolves itself pretty cleanly. There are no obvious dangling plot threads that feel cheap if not continued in a sequel. However there is enough meat left on the bones that if they wanted to create a new series of movies involving these characters that it would totally make sense and be welcome. Ultimately I guess the performance of the film will determine if this is the final chapter of a beloved story, or the start of something new. I am on board either way and would honestly love to see more of the characters in the future.

The only real regret I have about the movie is that you don’t really get a good action shot of the new cast of characters AS the new Ghostbusters. For me at least I had two characters that I absolutely fell in love with in the form of Phoebe and “Podcast”, but Trevor and Lucky don’t really have a lot of plot development other than “romantic interests”. I guess we get to briefly see that Trevor is a bit of a mechanic, but it feels like maybe some of the more specific character development for them was maybe left on the cutting room floor. That said I am completely on board with a brand new series of movies surrounding these characters and their new adventures resurrecting the Ghostbusters.

If you ever loved Ghostbusters, then I highly suggest you watch this new entry in the series. If you love the 80s “horror comedy” tropes like Lost Boys, then I also highly suggest you watch this film. If you were deeply passionate about the 2016 Ghostbusters Reboot, then I still suggest you watch this film because it spends zero time disparaging that movie and is a really enjoyable ride even if you don’t care much about the classical Ghostbusters. On a personal level, this is pretty much as close to a perfect resurrection of a franchise has seen and ultimately checks off all of the boxes on my list of requirements for a good outing in an old series.

Bleeding Earthquakes

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Good Morning Friends! I had a very rough weekend for a few different reasons. The main reason however is that Friday night my wife and I had the Pfizer COVID booster along with the Flu Shot. This was maybe not the best idea because I had all sorts of symptoms over the weekend and had no real clue if it was the Booster or the Flu shot, but absolutely know that both arms were sore as hell Saturday morning. We survived and I am feeling much better so far this morning, but yesterday was a bit rough. Saturday was largely “splitting headache” and everything aches territory, and yesterday was run a fever and feel like I am going to die for a couple of hours in the afternoon then things start to fade away. Interesting thing we heard about the booster is that the efficacy should only take about 48 hours to kick in, which means we should be good for any Thanksgiving shenanigans.

The above screenshot is from Final Fantasy XIV as I dipped in briefly over the weekend to try and start to get back into the swing of logging in again. I managed to finish the Doman Enclave and with it comes a really cool ceremony that reminds me of the similar ceremony from Horizon Zero Dawn. I need to find my footing in the coming weeks in FFXIV again, and spend a good deal of time cleaning out my retainers because a large part of the whole “level everything to 80” campaign was so that I could safely chuck a bunch of unneeded gear into the bin… or more likely feed it to the Grand Company vendor for seals. The other part of this that needs to happen is to cobble together some outfits for my retainers themselves as a number of them are quite high up in various professions.

Most of my weekend was spent playing Outriders and the New Horizon patch is in fact good. I got together with Waren a bit on Saturday and ran through some expeditions where he carried me an extreme amount. The rest of the weekend was spent trying to grind up the resources in order to catch up my gear to where maybe I won’t be quite the “backpack” that I ended up being. I also spent some time exploring various builds, and ended up changing my spec up completely to one focused on earthquake and bleed effects. I’ve never NOT been the center tree of Devastator so it is interesting how little it makes a difference survival wise dropping to what I thought was one of the “DPS” trees.

For those who might be curious here is my current talent choices and skills being used composited together into a single screenshot. Here is a note for developers where build diversity is a key part of your game. Maybe you should create a single screen that someone can take a screenshot of that includes all of the relevant choices made for that specific character. It would be nice if it had a rundown of the various bonuses being applied from gear along with the skills chosen and relevant talent choices. I’ve needed to fake out one of these screens so many times while playing different games when I wanted to share my “build” with my readers. I can’t think that I am the only one who wants to do this thing and surely it would be simple enough to create a screen that summarizes all of the various bits of data you already have access to.

I have also been spending a fair amount of time playing my “main alt” which is the Technomancer. Thing I have learned about Outriders at least, but I am wondering if it applies to all third person shooters… is that apparently I prefer playing a female character model because it takes up less space on the screen. The male character in outriders is kinda bulky, and is occluding a fair amount of the visual area… and honestly I sorta wish I could gender change my main to being something more svelte and taking up less space. I remember having this issue with the Norn in GW2, and why I ended up going with the much smaller Human when I rolled a main after beta. I need to pay more attention to this in the future and see if this is something that carries over to other games.

Lastly I am not going to talk about it much this morning, but I left a heated review of New World on Steam over the weekend. I’ve uninstalled the game and I am not really ready to talk about it in any manner that does not come across as angry gibberish yet. If you are super curious I littered my Twitter account with random threads throughout the weekend. Basically Patch 1.1 killed my desire to play the game with its changes to the end game camps, and after growing steadily more agitated Saturday night while recording the podcast… I decided it was better for my mental health to uninstall and force myself to walk away from it. The only game that I have ever loved this much and see managed this poorly is World of Warcraft, and I think that is probably why my posts on that game often come across as angry drivel as well. Key difference being that anger was spread out over a decades worth of decisions… and this was all crammed in a two month period making it seem so much worse.

AggroChat #368 – Fallen Earth Gets Up

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Featuring: Ammosart, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Tonight we are down a few people for various reasons and Bel is hanging on by a thread because he managed to schedule his Covid booster on Friday.  We start off with a discussion of the Final Fantasy XIV Endwalker delay and how in theory we would have all been playing the game in another world.  In news we never thought we would cover, Fallen Earth has come back from the dead and is actually better than any of our memories.  From there we discuss Guardians of the Galaxy, that game we all thought would be another Avengers Flop but has apparently turned out to be pretty dang good.  Bel talks a bit about the Outriders New Horizon patch and the changes it made ot the game including a full transmog system.  Finally Tam discusses his experiences with Star Citizen and how it is way more of a fleshed out game than he ever expected at this point.  Additionally we talk about the free trial that is going on right now.

Topics Discussed

  • Final Fantasy XIV Delay
  • Fallen Earth rises from the grave
    • Better than our memories
  • Guardians of the Galaxy
    • Not another Avengers Failure
    • Fjording the Uncanny Valley
  • Outriders New Horizon
    • Balance Improvements
    • Cosmetic Transmog System
  • Star Citizen in 2021
    • Free Trial Period

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Adjorjan Still Lives

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Hey Friends! Still enjoying my recent return to Outriders. I am not playing a ton of it, but I am popping in periodically to collect some loot before scooting off again. Most recently I have been working on my Technomancer… which I apparently call Marksman in my most recent video. I have to admit at this point I don’t remember any of the names of the classes that are not Pryomancer because that one is pretty clear cut. Mentally I think of them as the Hunter, Tank, and Assassin even though those are technically called Technomancer, Devastator, and Trickster. You can obfuscate the holy trinity out but I will always ultimately use it as the lens in which I view online games.

I actually recorded a really quick video at lunch, because while I did one over the loot cave mission I never actually updated it to include the more recent method I use for gear farming. Essentially what I do more often than not is reset the Typhon Hunt mission and run it over and over. Each time it drops at least two epic items and now that I am largely farming gear for cosmetics, it is a great way to get five or six potential unlocks in really short order. I’ve heard that at higher tiers it is possible to get legendaries to drop this way, but I have never actually had that happen. What it is useful for is farming up a bunch of drops to collect mods and appearances which is how I am utilizing it on my alt.

Another thing that happened yesterday is a big new world patch, that had a number of less than awesome consequences. Firstly a number of the items that I carry around in my inventory to swap for equipment got downgraded from Purple to Blue. Additionally something seems to have changed with the way health is calculated and in the process without changing any gear or my attributes I have lost roughly 1500 health. Another super frustrating change is the regeneration from food seems to have been nerfed significantly with the regen tick rate being 1% of your health every 2.5 seconds. I can still do the drinking water trick to trigger slightly faster regeneration but overall it feels like I am struggling to stay alive more than I did previously.

A number of camps have been ruined due to changes in the patch as well, with Priests no longer being as doable because you can no longer skip the corruption portal due to terrain changes. This made me want to go check out our good friend Adjorjan to see if any changes were made to ruin that farm. When I talked about it previously I did not include a map, but he can be found in Edengrove and initially I went out there last night in the hopes of getting a Void Gauntlet to play with. What ensued instead was a combination of Waren, Eliyon, and I ended up farming him for about two and a half hours. He still drops relevant gear and while the watermark increases seem to have slowed they were still happening especially with weapons. So this is very much still a valid camp for watermarking purposes.

I am a little concerned about some of the other things that I heard throughout the night. The zerg on our server starts at 5:30 my time and I was not online and available to do content when it started up so I did not participate last night. However I have heard that there are some sort of anti-zerg mechanics that have more or less made Myrkgard a pain in the butt to run like we used to. Again I did not experience these first hand, but hearing discussion about things being unkillable to a large group of players, but a smaller group could take it out without issue. The zerg and priest farms were honestly the most enjoyable things I had experienced in the game and if both of those are effectively dead… I do sorry about my longevity with the title. Amazon seems to be making sweeping changes regularly that swing between extremes… and I am not sure how on board I am with their master vision right now.

I don’t care at all about PVP and if they make PVE content too painful I will just end up wandering off… as will I think most of the less hardcore player base. A lot of what they are doing feels like stalling to me… trying to spread the butter super thin to slow players down and buy them time to release more content. This has happened a lot in other games as the developers have this “oh god they are consuming content too fast!” moment. The watermark system was painful enough as is, but if they are actively ruining the farms we had developed to raise our level… then I am not sure it is worth sticking around. I know in December when Endwalker releases I am probably gone anyway, but was hoping to enjoy the remaining month here.

In other news it seems like at least someone in the guild “Run It” has found my blog post about the fall of Everfall. I feel like I need to qualify my definition of a Slum Lord when it comes to New World. If you own territory but are not keeping the machinery upgraded and keeping a constant flow of townboard quests going for your patrons to complete and assist in the leveling process… then by my personal definition you are a Slum Lord. At the time in which I posted this… most of the towns were running a full compliment of quests but as I myself was using them to level… I noticed that Monarch’s Bluff never really had any other than the default free “Upkeep” quests. Run It has done a perfectly cromulent job of running Everfall the two times they have held it, but Monarch’s Bluff is still unappreciated. So if y’all are reading this blog stop being a Slum Lord and load some damned quests for people to complete. Additionally the Freeze thing y’all were doing WAS an exploit and it WAS patched by New World, so I stand by everything I said.