We have a pretty small group this week as we are down a Kodra, Ammo, and Thalen for various assorted reasons. We start off the show with Tam talking about Viewfinder a bit which winds its way to Bel talking about the coin pusher indie Clockwork Owl. Grace has been playing a lot of XVI and we talk about the Giant Kaiju Battles that take place when two Eikons fight. Bel got into the Palia beta this week and he talks a bit about what feels like Stardew Valley the MMO. Many of us stopped playing whatever we were playing this week with the launch of Baldur’s Gate III, so we spend a bit talking about that game in largely general terms. This leads to a discussion of JRPGs and CRPGs and how they are generally telling stories in very different ways. We close out with a few topics and Bel shares that he no longer has concerns about Path of Exile II.
Good Morning Folks! This is me doing a Saturday post, which is not exactly something that I do often. However this month we have Blaugust running and I thought that just maybe for once I would try and hit 31 posts in my own damned event. In truth, the only day that I don’t normally post is Saturday given that I make weekly normal blog posts, and on Sundays, I advertise the podcast episode. So that really means I am only trying to squeeze a few more blog posts in total to hit 31 so I might as well actually make that happen. I figured that I would start off the first of these and talk a bit about what has garnered the majority of my attention for the past two days… Baldur’s Gate 3. This is a game that I have technically owned since 2020, but have avoided doing much with because I did not want to spoil the experience. I get that probably does not make a whole lot of sense, but I am a huge fan of Larian Studios and I viewed my purchase of Early Access as a way of helping fund the development. It turns out that faith was rewarded as all of the early access holders got access to the digital deluxe version free.
The original Baldur’s Gate was a heck of a lot of fun, but I will be honest it wasn’t really until Icewind Dale was released that I began ravenously devouring these games. So when Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn I was well enough indoctrinated into the series to be hyped and ready to go on launch day. Playing Baldur’s Gate III, over the last few nights has felt like my memories of Baldur’s Gate II. What I mean by that is that I have been transported back in time to an era when I could just meld with the game and become hopelessly engrossed in it. I’ve experienced “time loss” like I have not in years where I sit down thinking I am only playing for a few minutes, and I look up and three hours have passed. I mean this in the best way possible, and while it took me a bit to get used to the slower pace of a real-time-action game… now that I am engaged I am fully engaged.
I’m not going to dive too deeply into the story, that will probably come for a much later blog post. For character options, I decided to keep it simple and went with a Barbarian. I opted to go for an entertainer background which gave me performance and acrobatics, both of which have already come in handy. For the race I decided to follow my heart and go with a Dwarf and given the Ithilid roots of this game, I opted to go with Duergar. So far I am pretty happy with all of my choices save for maybe the voice I went with. To be truthful, none of the voice actors really felt like a Duergar should feel. Thankfully most of the time I am a silent protagonist, but there is a bit of a mental disconnect whenever I say anything.
For the most part, I like all of the characters. If you told me this was a Bioware game I would have believed you, because I already care about my little party of misfits. Like we really are a “bad ideas” party, but I am enjoying adjusting to the nonsense and I am glad I am able to be zero shocked when someone reveals more awful things that they are dealing with. It does feel a bit weird that in a party of “chosen ones” I seem to keep being set up as the “most chosen” of them all. The only character I am sus about is Lae’zel but mostly because she is a bit aggro all the time. I run around with her mostly because apart from me she is the strongest hitter.
I like Gale an awful lot, but he has this weird uncanny resemblance to a young Mel Gibson. I have to see it every time I play the game so now you do too. All things told though while I don’t normally like “finger wigglers” as I call them… he is pretty cool for a magic user. Like he has his own “bad ideas” traits about him, but he reminds me a bit of my love of Dorian from Dragon Age Inquisition. Shadowheart is probably my favorite, but truthfully… were Shadowheart introduced differently I probably would have hated the character. I have this thing against the “does not trust you” characters… so I could see Shadowheart reading as a “Corso Riggs” if I was not already inherently wired to want to help her because I saved her from a pod.
All told I am about ten hours into the game and still have yet to replace the weapon I got from the tutorial. Admittedly there are a lot of people who probably did not get that weapon, and I only did so because I happened to read a bit specifically stating that I should. Right now my party comp is Shadowheart, Lae’zel, and Gale and I am not sure if I completely missed getting Wyll. I’ve done some research as to where to find him, but I never seemed to bump into him in that area of the game. I do wonder if I screwed that up and am completely unable to get him now. I need to backtrack a bit and roam around the area just to make sure I did not miss something.
Anyways greatly enjoy the game, and will very likely be mainlining this at least until the launch of the Path of Exile Ancestor’s League on the 18th. I hope yall are having a most excellent weekend. It is raining this morning, which we desperately need because it hit 107 the other day… which is just not fun.
Good Morning Folks! August is turning out to be exceptionally busy with me doing some build testing ahead of the 3.22 League in Path of Exile, the Launch of Baldurs Gate 3, and in the midst of all of this I finally got my email inviting me to Palia. For those who have not been following this game, it has been billed in the media as coming from former Blizzard and Riot employees, but frankly… given the colossal turnover at both companies, you would be hard-pressed to point at ANY game without being able to say that. It does have a graphical style that reminds me of an amalgam of World of Warcraft, Wildstar, and Free Realms.
What the game promises is an interesting concept, a hangout MMO without combat. What this feels like in practice is Stardew Valley the MMORPG. More than that I also get Landmark vibes when it comes to hunting down rare resources, and even a bit of Animal Crossing. Essentially you are teleported to this world and given an instanced plot of land and some resources to be able to harvest and craft your way into making it a home.
The character creation system is “aggressively fine” but that opinion might be coming from the fact that I also created my character in Baldur’s Gate 3 within a few hours of each other… and that creation system is phenomenal. My key complaint is the lack of beards, which is often a complaint I have with various games. However one of my friends came to the rescue to inform me that this is on the roadmap. Other than being clean-shaven, I was able to create a reasonable facsimile of “Belghast” as I often appear in various games. I would never wear skinny jeans, but I am going to blame some non-GenX artists for that one as they were the most non-descript black pants option I had. I assume over time more clothing options will open up. It would also be cool to have some different body options given that I am a very large man and I would absolutely give my avatar a belly.
Just like in StarDew Valley you are given an area of the map that is littered with volunteer trees, stones, assorted collectibles, and the remnants of a broken down fence and housing foundation. My OCD required that I harvest EVERYTHING within the boundary of my fence line. So now I also have a bulging storage shed filled with basic resources, which should hold me for a little bit when it comes to crafting.
The initial objectives were to build a tent, a workbench, and a storage bin and then the game sent me into town to meet a bunch of town folk. This in turn gave me a whole slew of other objectives. I’ve also learned how to hunt and fish. Hunting… I am extremely bad at it as it involves trying to slowly fire a bow as woodland creatures scurry around the map. Fishing… I got the hang of it pretty quickly once I figured out that I needed to move my mouse from side to side to keep up with the bobber. I’ve yet to learn how to actually go to sleep, or even if I need to but I have a way larger than I expected tent filled with nothing at the moment.
The game is charming as heck and I look forward to watching as it progresses. It definitely fills that Stardew Valley with friends vibe, and I want to see what grouping up while harvesting does. Landmark used to have this mode where if you grouped up and then gathered resources, everyone in the party got a copy of everything that was looted. I could see something like that going really well here. I would also love to see this game implement some sort of large-town project system. In Horizon/Istaria, there were these massive crafting projects that involved building bridges to new areas or building out towns, that essentially required the entire community to pool resources. This sort of experience would fit this game especially given that there is no combat.
I figure most everyone that is interested in this game has already signed up, but if you have not… please feel free to use my Referal Code. As far as I know, it does nothing to expedite your access to the beta but does give me sweet stuff for signing people up, and I believe you get a care package when you first log into the game. I know I had stuff waiting on me from the code I got from Scopique when I finally got access yesterday. All in all, this looks like a really cool game to watch as it develops into a chill game for nights when you just can’t handle anything too terribly complex. I am of course Belghast in thegame, so feel free to friend me if you are already there.
Friends… there are times when I feel my age. Namely when I get something stuck in my head from the early years of the internet. Essentially for me, there is this time from the late 90s to the existence of YouTube where the internet was a wild place. Instead of Social Media you had forum culture, SlashDot, Ebaums World, and New Grounds. It is still a marvel how in an era of so many disconnected islands, things still managed to go viral. If you were “very online” it is certain that you know what the above image represents… and you are finding yourself singing along to it in your head without me needing to post a compilation video where it loops for 10 hours.
The first one of these that I remember was Hamster Dance, which is itself just a page filled with animated gifs that has a looping wav file. The “song” only lasted a few seconds and was an extremely sped-up loop of a portion of Whistle Stop from the 1973 Robin Hood movie. If you are really curious about this page, there is apparently a CBC deep dive into the story behind it. What matters more was the fact that it was a signpost on the internet that everyone of a certain age knew about. It was even printed out in various physical guidebooks to the internet that inexplicably existed from the era. I think things like this achieved a state of virality, just because there was so much less content being created. While I started fucking around with HTML circa 1993/94ish… most people were completely in the dark bout how to craft any sort of online content until the mid-2000s. So when something novel and interesting sprung up, word tended to spread quickly.
It is now time to bring this discussion around to what is actually stuck in my head right now. In the era of the internet prior to YouTube… video was very much an unsolved problem. Sure you had RealPlayer and QuickTime… but the proliferation of motion video did not really happen in a large way until Macromedia Flash came on the scene. Download speeds were a problem as most of the folks online were still connecting through a 56k or worse dial-up modem. I believe I managed to get DSL in 2000, but I was one of the very first people in my town and Cable Internet existed… but was still very limited in its reach. Instead of transferring frames of video, Flash allowed you to effectively transfer a number of highly compressed assets and vector animation paths, that were then recreated into something that resembled video on the end user’s machine through a browser plugin.
This created an explosion of websites sharing short looping animations. “Look at my Horse” mentioned above is one of these from Weebl who also gave us “Badger Badger Badger“. The one that is stuck in my head however comes from Rather Good, and features a duo of crudely mashed-together characters known collectively as “Spongmonkeys”. This pops into my head at the least appropriate times… and I am forced to belt out “We Like Tha Moon!”. I was working at a small startup with my good friend Chuck/Vernie and for whatever reason… we got this stuck in our head for weeks. There was a whole series of these videos featuring these abominations, but nothing really hit as hard as the first one. It is when you get to the “We Like Cheese We Like Zeppelins” that tends to make me lose my shit.
If people remember these now, however… they tend to be referred to as the “Quiznos Rats“. How “We Like Tha Moon” got stuck into my head recently is because I saw a meme talking about how no one would believe you that this was a commercial. It wasn’t just a commercial… it was a Super Bowl commercial. The mid-2000s was this time when advertisers had no clue at all how to deal with advertising to an internet-enabled audience. Meme culture existed, but no one really knew what to do with it once it left some random forum of friends. What these ended up being is a weird sly nod to the aggressively online like me… and completely fucking baffling to random Grandmothers in Wisconsin. Everything was weird in the heady days before the Dot Com Crash.
So you might be asking yourself… “Old Man Bel, Why are you talking about this nonsense?”. The other day I came across a video that made me “lose my collective shit” in a way similar to those classics of a bygone era. The problem is… it is so damned ephemeral that I could not track down the original version on TikTok. I could not embed the version posted on Mastodon, and in order to get something with enough permanance to feel comfortable sticking it in a post… I had to download the damned video and generate a nonsensical unlisted YouTube video. None of the original sites surrounding the content I have talked about today still exist. RatherGood seems to have been sold off probably several times over, and Weebl to the best of my knowledge has not existed for a very long time. What we have instead is crappy Youtube copies of the originals that were made in an era of postage stamp resolutions. Even then… only the most popular things remain. I was looking this morning for another video from RatherGood called “Jamie and the Magic Todger” and could find no version that still played.
I guess it concerns me that there is this entire era that just is ephemeral. I already find myself questioning my memory of these things. Did they really exist or did I just imagine them? We will likely always have David After Dentist as long as YouTube still exists, but Charlie Bit My Finger appears to be gone from the site as apparently it was sold as an NFT. We are living in the worst timeline. I guess the slow death of Twitter and Reddit, have made me contemplate the mortality of internet culture. Things that I once took for granted, like the ability to watch Charlie the Unicorn any time I want… now suddenly seem a bit less certain when I am not really certain that YouTube actually turns a profit. The end of the era of unlimited VC funding seems to be over, and it does make me wonder if there is a way to archive all of this for future generations. Like I am not necessarily saying that We Like Tha Moon, rises to the level of high culture… but it is at least important to me.
