A Long Time Ago

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… in a Galaxy Far Far Away there was a game that was beloved by a group of players for the sort of things that it allowed them to do. I was not one of those players. While I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, I somehow missed actually playing the game when it was in its heyday. At the time it came out I was somewhere between my pre-World of Warcraft scrawl of games which were Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon: Empire if Istaria, and City of Heroes. The return to what seemed like a more Everquest experience and combat system did not seem at all interesting to me, and I was buffered by the fact that none of my active gaming group at the time were playing it either. However in the years since I feel like I missed a pivotal gaming experience.

Some years back I heard about an emulator server called SWG Legends, but at the time it was a less than retail experience and one largely that required you to know what you were doing before really being able to mess with it properly. Seeing as I never played retail I was completely unaware of how best to get in and experience the game, so as a result I bounced pretty heavily off of it. However in the several years that have passed SWG Legends has turned into what appears to be a full retail experience, even including in game events like Life Day. Recently my friend Tam went on a journey back into this game, and last night for some reason I decided to follow in his footsteps and give it a proper try.

The first challenge is getting Star Wars Galaxies up and running because it has not been online or available for purchase for quite some time. Essentially you have a few options in front of you, the option that the server operators would like you to take is to go onto ebay and purchase a set of the original discs. I did this years ago and picked up a set for $5, but the popularity of this emulator server has seemingly driven the price up to somewhere in the $50-$150 price range. The SWG Reddit has some links in the sidebar to a few options which will allow you to download the three isos directly. After acquiring and installing the original Client, you will have to grab the SWG Legends Launcher pictured above which will patch your client up to the correct version as well as allow you to patch in some upgraded assets. Your first step however should probably be going onto the SWG Legends forums and signing up for an account, because there will be some lead time before one of the volunteer admins authorizes your account which allows you to log in and play the game.

What follows is a fairly modern tutorial driven experience walking you through the first ten levels of your character while exploring a space station. The interface took some getting used to, namely the swapping in and out of mouse-look mode while hitting the alt key. I did some research looking into the combat class that was the easiest to solo, and most of the sources lead me towards a Commando, and as such Belghast Dorgastu the Mon Calamari Commando was born. I am not entirely certain how to play the game to be honest, but left click fires my primary attack and right click fires a charged bolt and with those two things I managed to limp my way to level 10 while following the quest chain and get off of the station.

The piece that was not down my alley at all however was space flight, and as such I plan on taking shuttles wherever I need to go even though the tutorial gave me a perfectly reasonable ship. The end result is more flight sim than I care to experience, so if you have long played that style of game then it might be your jam. Tamrielo grew up playing flight sims so it was absolutely his style, whereas for me anything more realistic than Star Fox is not going to be for me when it comes to space combat. Realistically you need some sort of a controller because the keyboard controls were nonsense trying to do the dog fighting quest against the black sun pirates.

I’ve now allowed myself to get mixed up with the Hutt Cartel and am aligned to the rebels which I am assuming is following a different path than had I chosen to work with the Empire. The first planet is Tatooine and Han Solo unceremoniously deposited me there. I have a speeder though which is cool and am tooling around the dunes completing objectives. All in all it is a pretty fun experience and it is very interesting to see the missing link between what SOE was doing with Everquest and the decisions they ultimately made with Everquest 2. The only bad bits are that the game is native 4:3 resolution and as a result wants to run at 1024×768. I will have to do some research to see if there are ways to mod that up to something more modern. My evening exploring Star Wars Galaxies Legends server was most definitely time well wasted.

Wolfendooms

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It was a really bizarro weekend. First off I opted to talk off Friday afternoon, which in itself isn’t too strange other than the fact that I more or less went home and slept for a couple of hours. I normally can’t take naps but I guess it was a week worth of not sleeping super well catching up with me. For those who have read this blog lately you will know that my wife was on a work trip in Portugal. Whenever she is gone the house and most specifically the bed feel very wrong and as a result it greatly impairs my sleep patterns. She flew in safely during the time when I would normally be recording AggroChat, and due to scheduling problems with lots of people we just skipped doing one of those this week.

She is safe and sound and past the first day of culture shock seemed to really enjoy the trip. I am enjoying having her back and she has adjusted back to our standard schedule a lot faster than I would have expected. We wound up going to bed around 10:30 on Saturday night after getting her home and a rapid round of unpacking. Then she was up around 6 am and managed to keep it together until around 8 pm last night. Then we were up as per normal around 5:30 am and hopefully she makes it successfully throughout the day without crashing. I have a silly belief in the totemic power of the purple coffee mug that I sent her off to work with, and I hope it shields her throughout the day. We have a lot of bright and colorful mugs, but the purple one is by far the most important.

This weekend there was a test for Phantasy Star Online 2 on the Xbox One and I booted up my console for the sole purpose of participating. As I understand it there will be a later test for the Windows client, and I am mostly just going to have to tide myself over until then. For those who may remember I went through the nonsense process of getting set up to play PSO2 some time back and then proceeded to stop playing it after the initial few weeks. The Japanese client jumped ahead four versions and I felt like I was missing so much stuff and had no clue who any of the characters were. I am hoping that when it finally comes here officially we can play it properly from the very beginning. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing but it did make me realize that I am probably going to go back to my good ole fashioned RAcast instead of the HUmar I was playing during the beta this weekend.

As far as traditional gaming goes, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend playing Mars: War Logs. As I have said before there is just something about the way Spiders makes games that I find appealing. I greatly enjoyed Technomancer and Mars: War Logs comes considerably before that game in a timeline and explores an area of Mars that is mentioned in Technomancer but that you can never quite go to. I am somewhat glad that I played the games in the order that I did because there are some interactions that I would have viewed in completely different light had I known things that transpired in this game. Much like the difference between Witcher 2 and Witcher 3… this game is a much more simplified version of the same formula that I have seen in other games like Greedfall and Technomancer. As a result it is way more streamlined and other than the fact that the game has horrible quest advisement… it is way easier to follow what you need to do in the world.

On the cat front, Josie is pretty bonded with me after having spent a week with me being her only human. I am hoping that over the next several days she starts snuggling with my wife again, but all day yesterday she was pretty much glued to me. I mean I guess it makes sense because not only was I the only human around for a week but I am also the human that provides food twice a day every day. The whole feeding thing goes a long way for an animal friend. It is in part why I keep hoping that someday the outdoor cats will let me pet them. The latest Josie trick is that she has learned how to climb the ferret cage that is still in the kitchen, and has also figured out how to climb halfway up and then parkour her way into the windowsill. She is adorable, which is good for her because it gets her out of trouble for all of the messes that she inherently makes during her manic play sessions.

And now to the title of the post. The above thread is courtesy of Thalen who posted it on the AggroChat staff slack. I am completely on board with calling shooters Wolfendooms. Does that mean that Destiny would be a Wolfendoomtribes though? The whole transition from “Doom Clone” to “FPS” is still one that I find interesting. I’ve been struggling to figure out a term for the Bioware Dragon Age/Mass Effect genre since I have been playing so many Spiders games that are desperately trying to fill that niche. I’m also really curious if there are more games out there like that from smaller studios that I just never encountered. Anyways time to wrap this up and head to work, but if you have any Bioware-esc games that you know of that might not be on my radar drop me a line in the comments.

Bel Folks Stuff – Episode 5

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We are still in the process of re-releasing the original episodes of Bel FolksStuff.  This episode in question was originally released on March 2nd of 2015 and features my friend Qelric.  She was probably the first YouTuber that I ever watched with any consistency and while I am sadden that she has since moved on from her extremely excellent update videos, I am excited for all of the changes in her life including becoming a parent.  These days she has returned to her art roots and has an active Patreon to support her adventures in digital painting. It was a great evening sitting down to talk with her and on some level I would love to revisit these chats with a few guests at some point down the line to see how things have changed for them in the time between.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

State of the Cats

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Since this is a week that brought us pretty fraught other “states of the”, I figure I would present some alternatives and talk about the cats. At this point we have had Josie the Pussycat since January 21st and in those 18 days she has adapted swimmingly to our home. Prior to my wife’s trip I was not exactly her favorite person. We got along fine because I was the person who feeds in the morning and evening, but we weren’t exactly on cuddling terms. This was fine because in reality I needed to be spending as much time as possible with Kenzie and Mollie to make sure they knew that nothing was going to change in how much attention they were getting. If fact as I am typing this I am reaching over and petting Kenzie who has appeared beside me wanting attention.

This week of being the sole “parent” however has reached a place where Josie is fully bonded. This means that pretty much all of the time I have both Kenzie and Mollie with me, and at certain points I have had all three girls trying to snuggle at the same time which while precarious has worked fine. The thing with Josie is she moves really fast and shifts positions pretty often. The above photo is a case of “suddenly cat” as she came bounding in from out of nowhere and hopped up on my chest to snuggle into my beard. She tends to prefer sitting on my chest, draped over my mouse arm or snuggled in beside me on the right side. Some of these work better than others… like last night I was playing some destiny and she was bound and determined to half sit/half stand on my chest and make me crane my neck to look around her while playing. She for whatever reason likes watching the screen while I play games.

Kenzie and Josie get along pretty well which is good, because I was concerned they absolutely would not. Kenzie and Mollie do not at all get along, nor did Kenzie and Luna. However in both cases I am starting to wonder if it was more of a Luna and Mollie thing than a Kenzie thing. Luna would absolutely attack first with Kenzie which is ultimately why we ended up finding her a new loving home. Mollie is skittish as hell and we blamed that on Kenzie wanting to be up in her business, but again Mollie always makes the aggressive noises first and then Kenzie turns around and bops her. Whatever the case Kenz and Josie seem to be buds and I am super fine with this.

In fact at one point last night they were chasing each other and it was the sort of back and forth friendly chasing. Josie would chase Kenzie… then give up the chase and Kenzie would turn around and chase her back. This went on and on back and forth across the living room for a good ten minutes. They also regularly rub up against each other which I take to be a good sign, and last night I saw Kenzie grooming Josie a bit. I am hoping with time that they end up snuggling with each other, because that will make the logistics of me sitting on the couch with three cats a little easier. At all points however I seem to always have both of them. As I write this Kenzie is on the box laying beside me like she often does and Josie is sprawled out on the floor behind me.

Mollie unfortunately is still the odd duck of the group. She is bonded with me, but only just barely. Our working theory has been that she was in a shelter for too long and way too early in her life. More specifically she was in a shelter where she was the only cat filled in a room full of very loud dogs. She will snuggle with me but if I sneeze, cough, or even clear my throat she is gone like the wind only to return after a significant passage of time. She has been snuggling with me again this week so I am going to take that as her starting to settle in. Everything with Mollie takes way longer than it would with any other cat. You mark progress with her in millimeters not and not meters.

At first she was very much not into Josie and still to this day there are squabbles between them. However I have also caught her sniffing Josie and the other day little britches came running in and head butted Mollie who more or less was okay with it. Given enough passage of time I think things will reach a stable truce, or at least as well as there has been with Kenzie. Mollie loves that there is a hammock upstairs and she pretty much spends the vast majority of her time in it. The hammock downstairs is now populated by Josie, and Mollie seems to be okay with this swap. My wife’s office is pretty much always a warm room and that probably adds to the enjoyment for Mollie.

I wish I could somehow wave a wand and make them all be the best of friends. However for two weeks in we have made more progress than I was honestly expecting. Kenzie and Josie are now my partners in crime which is awesome. There is a reason why I had chosen Kenzie as my Palico in Monster Hunter World, and if I had the ability to create two… Josie would absolutely get added into that mix. Little britches certainly is making life interesting in a good way. I am anxious to see what happens when my wife gets home from Portugal on Saturday. I expect that Josie will be excited to see her since it has been shown that cats remember their humans for long periods of time. If nothing else it will be nice to have another human in the house because Josie pretty much wants constant attention.

I am super looking forward to having my wife back because I have missed her. I keep thinking I see her out of the corner of my eye while sitting downstairs. There have been a bunch of times I almost made a random comment only to realize that it is just me and the cats. I’ve not done anything terribly exciting during my bachelor mode time. Probably the most exciting thing was using Door Dash for the first time to try ordering from a restaurant I have never eat at… only to get what I am pretty sure was a minor case of food poisoning about 24 hours later. Needless to say I did not touch those leftovers. I am ready for life to start being back to whatever normal passes for in our household.