Cardboard Forts and Fine Dinnerware

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Last night was a bit of a mixed bag when it comes to gaming. I am very listless after having finished Death Stranding last night, and knowing that next Tuesday I will likely be starting Horizon Zero Dawn again on the PC. I also used the weird lull to call my Mom and engaged in some truly bizarre conversations. First up she asked if I wanted the box for their new dryer… because apparently there is some commercial on network television where a little girl makes a castle out of a box. Not watching network television, I really didn’t have a frame of reference and passed… though as a kid I would have made a truly nonsense base out of that box.

Next up they forgot about our Anniversary, which isn’t a big deal given that my brain mostly still thinks it is March. They however thought it was our 20th, when that happened 2 years ago… but again not a big deal. Where things started to get weird is the conversation wound its way around to buying fine dinnerware and purchasing salad plates at $33 a plate for someone that was getting married. I’ve never understood the whole registering for a set of dinnerware thing, because that just seems like an exceptional waste of money. We made it for like 18 years on a set of plates that we got at a Family Dollar for $5 for 4 place settings… and then recently upgraded to some from IKEA. We are not fancy.

It was around this time that she started asking me if I wanted “my” dinnerware. First off I had no clue I had some, but apparently around the time we got married she had purchased a set for us without ANY input. Apparently they have a black band around then and orange flowers, which is nothing that we would have ever purchased for ourselves. Thing is… we have been married 22 years and I am pretty sure this is the first time I have ever heard of this. I told her to please give them to someone that will use them, because it is highly unlikely we will ever have anyone over to “entertain”.

As far as gaming goes, I tried out Fall Guys and it was cute. I can’t exactly see myself playing a lot of it, but it was a good spin on the “battle royale” genre. It is essentially something like Takeshi’s Castle turned into a multiplayer video game. It was fun to play for a few rounds. Essentially you race to the objective and when a certain number of people make it across the finish line the others are eliminated. You can stick around and watch the next rounds or you can just escape out and queue for another match. You seem to earn rewards either way, so you are likely best just bailing and trying again.

Other than Fall Guys I spent some time last night playing World of Warcraft. I’ve been leveling as an Elemental Shaman, and quite honestly it was what was keeping me sane during the earlier phone call. I’ve never really played as elemental, but I am finding it extremely enjoyable. I am starting to doubt however that I will actually manage to level the rest of my horde characters prior to shadowlands. I had a good run, but I am starting to lose steam and keeping up a brisk leveling pace. Shaman is now up to 51 and the Rogue and Priest are around 20.

Lastly the Retro Freak has made me contemplate some truly silly things like trying to bid on this lot of 200 famicom cartridges. Japan doesn’t have Ebay, and instead it is this alternate reality where Yahoo Auctions is what became popular. The problem with this however is that you cannot bid on anything on Yahoo Auctions in Japan without a Japanese address. When I first started watching this auction it was going for around $50 and has now jumped up to just shy of $80. The challenge there is the only way I could make this work is by dealing with a proxy bidding company, that purchases the item on my behalf, gets it mailed to them, and then turns around and ships it to the United States.

So that $80 would get around $20 added onto it for the proxy service, another $10 or so for Japanese shipping, and then a large chunk for EMS shipping from Japan to the United States which would likely add about $50 more onto the price tag. So even if I could secure it for $80 the final bill of sale would be around $160-200 depending on the amount of weight 200 famicom cartridges would actually weigh. I’ve largely talked myself out of it… but one can daydream about getting a large batch of completely nonsense games from Japan to play with. The truth is I could just load a bunch of roms on the Retro Freak, but there is something neat about owning the way cooler looking Japanese carts as compared to the ugly monstrosity that was the Nintendo Entertainment System.

Death Stranding Final Impressions

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I am not sure how exactly one talks about this game without delving deeply into spoiler territory. That said I am going to try my best not to as I talk about my experiences finishing the game. The term “finishing” is about disingenuous as you move into a 15th chapter that to the best of my knowledge cannot be completed after you have received your proper “narrative ending” to the experience. I will talk about that more, but on its core Death Stranding is a game about connections. Right now we find ourselves living through a period of time where human touch and a connection to others is more than a little strained. The time following the event known as the “Death Stranding” is much the same.

The United States of America is no more, and all that is left of this country is a number of scattered Fallout style bunkers, with a few inhabitants in them. You play Sam Porter Bridges, and your job is to deliver much needed packages to these far flung settlements, and as the story progresses act as a way of connecting them all together and joining this remote network. Joining the network allows for instantaneous sharing of data along with access to what are effectively way higher tech 3D printers allowing these distant settlements to start making much needed items. Each time you bring another settlement online, it also has the side effect of sharing more fragments of information with the network as a whole and discovering new types of items that you can fabricate for your own use.

As great as these fabrication machines are… they can’t deal with anything organic and as a result your role as the “Great Deliverer” continues to be exceptionally important. You play a minor role in the lives of these settlers that you interact with, and once they join the network they stay in fairly regular contact with you in the form of emails. Sometimes they tell you that there is something that the need recovered and delivered and other time they send you a formal work order through the network of terminals that you interact with at each location. I said the game was about connections and as you travel through the world you feel more and more engaged with the inhabitants surrounding you.

The game wouldn’t were if it were just about a bunch of distant connections. Instead the game introduces you to a cast of strangely named characters that you develop a more significant bond with. This cast becomes your team as you attempt to solve the mysteries of the Death Stranding and halt what you ultimately realize is the sixth extinction of the world. Your mission pivots from connecting the world to ultimately saving it. You begin the game as a character that has no use for anyone but himself, and is effectively running from all the bad things that have happened in his life. You end the game with a realization that we need others in order to make it in this world and that humanity is in fact worth saving.

So much of this game is lonely vistas as you carefully trudge across the hostile terrain, and during this time your only companion is the games soundtrack that kicks in at significant moments. I remember thinking when I started the game that it was a weird game soundtrack because it more or less defied all of the normal beats that I expect from game music. However after having finished the game, I appreciate the auditory experience all the more. It largely reaches a crescendo in the final acts and as the credits played… I found myself weeping just from the release of emotions that the music brought on. There is a theme that gets played that I would probably cry right now were I to hear it.

Playing this game was a deeply emotional experience for me, and I am not certain it would be for everyone. Right now this game feels all the more poignant because of the time we find ourselves living in. Humanity is constantly divided by what feels like a very finite line between two opposing sides, and at the same time we are effectively forced to shelter indoors from an existential and unseen force that we can’t easily evade. While we were not at the time of this games release… we are effectively living the Death Stranding. Our Stranding is not one where the world of the dead starts to bleed into the world of the living, but instead of an invisible enemy that seeks to rob us of everything we knew as normal.

The game gets a little heavy handed with its narrative, and the last “chapters” of the game are effectively long extended cutscenes. However I would not change a single beat of how this game unfolds. Everything that I experienced was needed at the moment I experienced it. I’ve never played another Kojima game, and I know he is an incredibly divisive figure. That said Death Stranding is a masterpiece of narrative design, and one of the first games I have played that abolished the line between video game and interactive movie. I am not sure the story works without the gameplay elements and the gameplay elements don’t work without the lengthy cutscenes. The whole package felt amazing to experience, but it was also a deeply personal one.

I cannot guarantee that the unique blend of isolation and connections would mean the same thing to you as it did to me. You might bounce hard after the first time you are asked to painstakingly transport a difficult load across a minefield of things that will likely make you fall over and damage all of your cargo. You might find the fact that you end up carrying extra boots because you wear them out tedious as hell. I enjoyed the mechanics of solitude and the narrative journey brought on by interactions, and that paring for me worked. In the end I have no clue if my experience with the game was unique to me or if it will be translatable to others. Whatever the case this is currently at the top spot for games I have played this year and is likely going to be one of my candidates for the AggroChat games of the year show list.

Fire Soldiers and Elf Beards

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Death Stranding - Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire
Death Stranding – Creepy Dudes Standing in Fire

When in doubt folks, lead with the coolest screenshot that you have. This is one of those weekends when I spent a truly phenomenal amount of time playing a specific game… that I absolutely cannot talk about because reasons. I believe I clocked in around twenty hours playing the thing that I can’t talk about over the course of primarily Friday and Saturday. I look forward to seeing more of the thing that I can’t talk about seeing. Instead this morning you are going to get one of those general rundown type posts talking about where I am in various games.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Blood Elf Character Creator
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Blood Elf Character Creator

I got into Shadowlands Beta out of the magnanimous nature of a friend of mine, so huge props to them for helping me out there. I’ve been piddling around over the last week and I am having a lot of fun. The most important thing to talk about however is the changes to the character creator. I can have a beard as a Blood Elf, which is phenomenal since that was not a thing you could really do well. The best you could do previously was a weak assed chinstrip. The undead models look amazing as well and are pretty much everything I have ever wanted in a rotting corpse. The big thing is it seems like they have expanded the options and decoupled them so whereas things used to be locked to specific sets of choices, but for example Tauren horn and hair and face are no longer combined in weird forced sets.

World of Warcraft Shadowlands - Intro Quest
World of Warcraft Shadowlands – Intro Quest

As far as the Story itself… I am getting DEEP Wrath of the Lich King vibes here and it is more than just the fact that the Ebon Blade are factoring significantly in everything we are doing right now. I am also greatly enjoying that there has been no faction based bullshit yet, and it is all a big team pulling together to save Azeroth sort of feel. The intro quest reminds me of the storming of the Dark Portal in Warlords, if that even were less on-rails. It has a “we did a thing and we were absolutely not prepared for the ramifications” type feeling to it. As far as the zone content, it reminds me of the best parts of Legion and Burning Crusade in that we are exploring a world that works NOTHING like the one we came from and it is a “stranger in a strange land” sort of feel.

Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server
Warhammer Online: Return of Reckoning Server

In more of my usual nonsense, I for some reason decided to reinstall Return of Reckoning which is a thing. I’ve not really done much but I did create a Dwarven Iron Breaker which was my class of choice back when this thing was a live game. I have to say that the quest advisement is not super amazing. Sure this was the first game to do the whole highlight an area of the map, which was cool… but I still cannot for the life of me find a damned book that is supposed to be on a nearby bench. I got in for a bit, played through a few quests and then got frustrated. Hopefully when I am in a different mindset I can pop back in and play some more.

Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller
Sega Saturn Bluetooth Retro Controller

In other random news I have settled on what I feel is the perfect controller for my Retro Freak. I greatly prefer the layout of the 6 button genesis and saturn controllers, especially when it comes to fighting games. I never got used to hitting the shoulder buttons in place of attack keys and spent a lot of my time on SNES playing with the Capcom Soldier Pad. Ultimately I was looking for something that would facilitate my preferred layout but also offer a bunch of buttons for mapping things to. Enter the line of officially licensed Sega Saturn controllers from Retro-Bit. The only negative is the home button appears to be unique to the Switch and is not mappable, but it gives me A, B, C, X, Y, Z, Start, Select, Left bumper and Right bumper to map inputs to which neatly fits all of the systems that are playable on the Retro Freak. I have to use it wired, but I went ahead and got the Bluetooth model for future options.

Death Stranding - The Final Run
Death Stranding – The Final Run

Lastly I have been trying to wrap up Death Stranding, and spent most of the day yesterday working my towards the eventual conclusion of the game. My grand plan had been to be finished with it by the time Horizon Zero Dawn lands next week, and I think that is well within reach… at the very least finishing the story. There are a bunch of miscellaneous side quests that I could be doing, but I have to say the mountain region really killed my joy for running random fetch quests. Hideo Kojima really loves sending you completely out of your way… because there have been three times so far when I have been asked to more or less traverse the entirety of what was then my game map. Yesterday I was asked yet again to traverse from the furthest possible point on the west coast of the map, all the way to the east coast of the map while dealing with extremely ramped up versions of everything I had encountered before.

Death Stranding - Corpse in a Cart
Death Stranding – Corpse in a Cart

At this point… I am ready to be done. I have greatly enjoyed this game and the storyline has wound its way through some deeply interesting lore and world building bits, but I am ready to say goodbye to Sam Porter Bridges. It is a phenomenal game, and pending you have the time to really spend exploring it then I would highly suggest giving it a go. There is a lot that you have to get used to early in the game, but it really is a masterpiece as far as games go. What has been surprising is how much of the stuff I considered to be complete nonsense on day one, has been fully explained and has paid off in a significant way. Extremely impressive.

Changing A Fandom

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Morning Folks! Today represents the first day of what will hopefully be 31 days of writing prompts to hopefully give you some ideas as we ease into this “low key” Blaugust event. As a result I have recruited a bunch of other bloggers to help me share the prompts with you, and since I made this thing up… I get the honor of kicking things off. For those who have not been following along at home, Blaugust is an event that we run every year where originally I challenged folks to write 31 posts in a single month. Given the times we are living in, we moved this original event up to April and had Blapril this year as a way of hopefully giving folks something else to think about while we were all in lockdown.

However now that we are finding ourselves still several months in living in lockdown mode, the greater community wanted to do something to mark the normal running of Blaugust. As a result each day a new blogger is going to share a prompt with you, and each day that blogger is going to lead you to the blog of the person who will post the next prompt in sequence. For more information you should really just check out my guide post. It should give you a better run down of exactly what is going to happen. If you want to participate, all you have to do is grab the prompts that interest you and write your own posts based on them. I technically wrote most of the prompts, but I threw them in a randomizer and assigned them out so that I didn’t exactly know which one I would be getting.

Blaugust Promptapalooza – Prompt 1

If you could change anything about one of your core fandoms, what would it be?

Blaugust as a whole started as a game blog thing, and over the years I have been trying to make tweaks to open it up to bloggers of other fandoms. However for me… my core fandom will likely always be gaming, more specifically video games. If you want even more specificity… then I am probably most attached to online gaming in the form of MMORPGs. So if I could change anything about gamer culture, it would be to make it a whole lot more inclusive. As a whole gamers can be a horrible toxic lot, and it is really hard to justify this to anyone looking from the outside in. That said there are also amazing pockets of pure joy that take place within gaming, and it is really hard to reconcile how both exist and can often times shift on a dime.

I think we have a few problems that escalate the issue. For starters, there is still a chunk of gaming that does not view themselves as being part of the mainstream. They define themselves as being a niche culture and fight hard to protect anything that tries to change that. This insular attitude tries to push anything out that might serve to endanger their “fun”. This has so many different representations but one of the biggest that you see is the “battle between like objects”. I legitimately randomly picked a screenshot, but it will serve as an illustration. This is The Division 2, it lives in the genre known as the looter shooter… and has major competition from Destiny 2 and Warframe each with their own very stratified communities.

In the case of all three games, they are more or less fighting over the same pool of players to some extent and this is absolutely felt by the player base. So instead of playing all three and determining which one fits the specific tastes of a player, you will see segments of these communities actively bashing the other two. You see a lot of reactionary posts on Reddit or YouTube videos talking about how this is the game you should be playing and cataloging all of the wrongs with the others within the peer group. I mean I feel like this comes from the very real fear that you need players in a game to keep it active and for it to survive, but unfortunately pushing other players away is not exactly a great way of accomplishing the goal of a thriving community.

Another type of exclusion that I see an awful lot is what can be collectively termed as “Git Gud” culture. There is a constant thread of trying to push “scrubs” out of the community and force them to play better. I think in some ways this starts off as a somewhat toxic altruism… like that players are being “bad” because they don’t know any better so folks will take it upon themselves to “educate the bads”. I mean there is an awful lot of hyper cringe content in the early years of this blog that would fall into this category. The problem however is that this does not take into account that folks often times come to a game for different reasons. There is the false assumption that every player is playing a game for the exact same reasons you are.

For example I don’t play games these days to optimize my skill rotation or to be better than every other player. I play games as an escape from the rigors of my very real obligations and have a moment to chill out in a world where I feel powerful, and that does not have any of the stresses that my daily life does. I am a bad player, or at least I am in the eyes of those who feel like optimal play should be a requirement for entry. I am honestly a fairly decent player to be truthful, but I feel so much stress at the thought of doing anything with other players because I might run into someone who is going to get all up in my shit because I pushed the wrong button at the wrong time. I realize this is mostly a mental block on my part, but it is one influenced by lots of real life experiences with very toxic players.

On this last point, gaming is very much still struggles with anything other a White CIS Male Hetero narrative. I am using this image as an example because you notice, whoever compiled this… did not include the Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale in this image. So much of the advertising around Mass Effect also focused on the male character arc, so much so that it feels like they are intending that to be the default state even though everything I have heard is that the female arc is just plain more enjoyable. Gaming struggles at representation in a way that is natural and organic and has this bad habit of tokenism.

Another reference point, this week footage of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla started circulating showing two male warriors “embracing”. I’ve seen a lot of backlash over this, including one twitter threading going on about how “no one asked for this” and to “leave politics out of video games”. The thing is… so many have begged for more casual and natural representation of something other than the hetero-normative over the course of the last few decades. The fact it still invokes an outrage is the sign of how desperately we need it woven into the tapestry of our stories. In gaming there is such a long way to go before there is a clear “default” path and a clear “other” path.

All of these things are about less gate keeping in video games, and more inclusion of different viewpoints. The players need to evolve, but at the same time the games need to keep pushing us to evolve. It is important that we focus on what we enjoy, and less on what games are doing to make sure others are enjoying themselves as well. One of the other important points of view that I have reached over the years, is that it is okay if you decide a game “just isn’t for you”. You don’t have to play everything, and god knows with as much content as being released each year there is no way you will ever be able to in the first place. I would love us to reach a point where we can just be happy that nice things exist for other people even if we don’t want to partake of them ourselves.

The Next Blogger

Tomorrow you will be able to find the next prompt in Blaugust Promptapalooza over at Azerothian Life. This is a really great blog by @Dragonray and focuses primarily on her adventures in the World of Warcraft. There is often times a side focus on glorious transmoggy goodness that I definitely appreciate. We all know that is the TRUE end game of MMORPGs, and I personally end up transferring gold over to alts just so I can afford to keep up appearances. So check Azerothian Life out tomorrow to continue this “blog crawl”