Tales of the Aggronaut

My Five Games

February 6, 2020 by Belghast

There is a thread floating around right now on twitter where you are asked to pick five games that you will play for the rest of your life, or some variant of that concept. I’ve watched it morph a few times as it burns its way through different circles. Yesterday I managed to get tagged twice in the same day within a few hours of each other, and because I am always looking for an excuse to turn something into a blog post you are getting my response here. First off thanks to Maryalee Scarlet and Dusty Monk for tagging me.

First up lets talk a little bit about theory behind this, because in theory I probably should have picked 5 living MMORPGs and called it good because the constant flow of content would ultimately keep me entertained. However instead I tried to pick five games that more or less represent my tastes in gaming and would cover the majority of my interests. Unfortunately even with that there are things that are going to get left off the list that I am sorta bummed about. However I am doing a few honorable mentions in addition to my official five.

Final Fantasy XIV

I am nowhere near as engaged in this game as I could be, and there are so many rocks that I have left uncovered. For example I have barely scratched the deep crafting system, and I could spend months delving into that along. There are of course a ton of the various artifact weapon quests that I could chase as well and I’ve not really touched raiding since Heavensward. If I so chose, I could be very happy chasing the objectives in Final Fantasy XIV and as a result I am throwing it on the list even though I am not actively playing it right now.

Mass Effect Trilogy

I am absolutely cheating my ass off right here with this pick. However it was in fact released as a single package and there are rumors about it getting a remaster at some point, so for the purpose of this challenge I am calling it a single pick. I love the Mass Effect trilogy and I could see myself playing through it at least once a year start to finish. The real question is whether or not I will keep making some of the same decisions each time because I have never been able to successfully complete a renegade run.

Minecraft

Minecraft is one of those titles that I can continue returning to over and over no matter how many times I have played it. I seem to go through these periods where I just need to do something creative for a bit and I build an entire civilization in Minecraft, and then wander off once finished never to visit again. I figure I have to come up with a way to feed that instinct when narrowing down my five games and as such I’m going for the original. There are other builders out there that are much better “games” but the truth is when I go through one of these phases all I care about is building and ultimately wind up playing the game on creative mode.

Destiny 2

I absolutely love this game and no matter what I am doing cannot seem to stay far away from it. Right now I am heavily into bingeing single player games, but I still spent the entire evening last night playing Destiny. I cannot see a future where I am not playing this game or something similar, and the one I keep returning to is Destiny. It managed to gain traction in a manner that none of the similar looter shooters ever managed to. There are so many secrets that I have yet to unlock and I have still not experienced most of the raid content. The moment to moment gameplay however is what keeps me coming back because it is just fun to fire space weapons at space enemies.

Diablo 3

Some of the most fun I have had over the last few years has been hanging out with my friend Grace while grinding Diablo. As such there is no way in hell it does not make the list… that was absolutely intended. While I am absolutely looking forward to Diablo 4, there is just something about the rhythm of Diablo 3 that makes me wonder if I will ever truly abandon it. There is just something it is doing that the other ARPGs are not and because of it I keep returning time and time again. Also there is something special about the launch of a brand new season that feels very much like starting and MMORPG for the first time every few months.

The Honorable Mentions

Now that I have my official five out of the way it is time for me to delve into some games that almost made the list for various reasons.

World of Warcraft

I have to admit that right now I have a really fraught relationship with this game. In part it is probably why FFXIV got the nod and WoW didn’t because at this very moment I think I would be way happier playing in Eorzea than Azeroth. That said I cannot deny that World of Warcraft would also be an exceptionally strong pick because of the decade and a half worth of content waiting on me to re-experience. That said… the level squishes and gear squishes end up making it feel like a vastly different experience than what I remember, so I am not entirely certain how enjoyable it would be. There is also a lot of repetition going on, and in truth… I find the concept of doing everything on a single character way more compelling than alts.

Elder Scrolls Online

Elder Scrolls Online also came super close to getting the nod because I absolutely love all of the story in this game. I could see myself returning to it over and over to experience different pieces of it and I have yet to actually play a second character to any significant level. That said what stopped me from promoting this title is that I am not in love with its combat. I get that it is doing its best to be Elder Scrolls in MMORPG form, but in truth… I never really loved combat in Elder Scrolls in the first place either. Those games have always been about the freedom of exploration and the rich story being told and not so much combat. Ultimately gets me to walk away from ESO is that I find the combat unsatisfying.

Witcher 3

This game was a real strong contender for maybe knocking Mass Effect off the chart, but ultimately didn’t get the nod because I really only feel strongly about the third game. I cannot under any circumstances get myself to play through the first game, and while the second game has a good story I would not consider it to be a wonderful gameplay experience. All of that said the strength of the third game damned near convinced me to give it a proper place in the list, and I am certain that I will replay my way through it in the near future.

Castlevania Symphony of the Night

For years when someone has asked me what my favorite game is, I have often times said Symphony of the Night. There is just so much that I enjoy about this experience. That said I have also been replaying this game on a regular basis since its original release on the Playstation, and own it for pretty much every platform that it exists on. I am not sure if I want to keep doing this for the rest of my life. As it stands there are only so many more secrets for it to summon forth and only so much more joy that I can squeeze out of it. It is so filled with nostalgia and good memories… but maybe it is time for me to see other games.

Bloodstained Ritual of the Night

In a similar fashion Bloodstained damned near made the list because if I were going to choose between this and SOTN right now… I am more than likely going to be playing Bloodstained. It does everything I loved about Symphony of the Night but better and presents it in a much higher fidelity package. The only reason why I didn’t make the cut is that I have not spent anywhere near as much time with it as I have with some of the other titles. I know that I can keep returning to the ones that made the list, I am not sure how I will feel about this game on repeat playings.

So there are my five games. I am going to stop the chain however and not name any successors because I figure this viral thread will burn its way through the gaming community with or without my help. I could tag some of the AggroChat crew but honestly… we just did something similar and have our games of the decade show that we still plan on recording where we have asked everyone to chip in with topics.

Savior of Mars

February 5, 2020 by Belghast

This morning we are in the middle of a spot of winter weather and as a result all of the schools are closed down and there is madness on the roadways. As such I am going to shorten my normal morning post so that I can get out in said madness and contribute to it. Last night I wrapped up The Technomancer and across the board I considered it to be a really enjoyable game experience. My willingness and ultimate enjoyment of these games may be conditioned by having just finished Witcher 2 before starting down this descent into all things Spiders. If that is the case I am still very thankful for the shift in perspective because there is a lot of good happening in these titles.

They are all deeply flawed experiences, and I keep bringing up that point because it is important. If you can look past those flaws there is underneath it all a really enjoyable narrative with some really interesting ideas at work. The Technomancer is a sequel to Mars: War Logs in the same sort of way that Dragon Age 2 is a sequel to Dragon Age: Origins. It contains some of the same settings and central conflict but with a significantly different cast of characters and perspective on the ongoing “war” between the water merchants of Mars. Technomancer is effectively the heroes journey of one Zachariah Mancer an initiate into this order that plays a similar role in their society as the Jedi did in the Old Republic.

Your journey takes you across the face of Mars and two multiple city states in search of answers about the past and to uncover the secrets of your order. It also has a central theme about Mars being abandoned by Earth and the entire population striving to reconnect and ultimately waiting for a rescue mission that in multiple generations of estrangement never came. This central theme causes you to cross paths with so many interesting characters along the way that have moments of poor writing and moments of absolute genius dialog. The rough around the edges nature however seems to just be the hallmark of Spiders as I am now starting a third game and seeing the same sort of “almost but not quite” characteristics there as well.

Were I to give The Technomancer a numerical rating, I would give it a solid 7 out of 10. There is a good story and a lot of interesting characters if you can make it far enough into the game to feel a sense of investment in the setting and the political intrigue. The biggest negative that the game has going for it right now is the fact that you are locked into playing a Male character, and I am wondering if Greedfall was maybe the first game where Spiders experimented with having a main protagonist that did not have a fixed gender. I hope they keep that up going forward because you are playing Zachariah Mancer in Technomancer and as I am starting “Mars: War Logs” you are also playing a fixed character as well.

Speaking of which I did in fact start Mars: War Logs last night, lighting that wick off the waning light of the previous candle. Graphically the game is attractive and the motions all seem to be fine. Combat once again is vastly different from either Greedfall or Technomancer, so it is going to take some getting used to another interface. Like I have said before it seems like they are constantly searching but never quite finding the ideal interface for their games. This game came out in 2013, and as such it really belongs to the previous Xbox 360/PS3 era of games. That said I am enjoying myself so far and I think I will have no problem getting engaged with it much the same as I have the others. I’ve said it many times before… there is something about these games that makes them deeply interesting to me even though their ambition greatly outstrips their technical prowess.

Apparently Chosen One

February 4, 2020 by Belghast

It is not a great morning. I am suffering from what I sometimes refer to as “intestinal panic” and have been since last night. As a result I am little out of it and also did not get amazing sleep which has caused me to stare blankly into the void several times this morning instead of writing a post. Yesterday I found out that a round of mass banning went out in TemTem and for whatever reason I always get paranoid when something like that happens. To the best of my knowledge I have not done anything to warrant a ban, but given that there is usually no recourse it always makes me more than a little paranoid. This time around specifically because the company seems to think that maybe they accidentally banned a few people. Thankfully however I was able to log in just fine and thankfully this time around Crema is accepting appeals. However posts like this one will always serve to make me extra paranoid about random bans.

I continue to push forward in The Technomancer and while I thought I was getting close to the end… I realize that I have yet to finish chapter three of the game because I don’t have that achievement, and that there is also apparently a chapter four achievement. I may just not be able to tell at all where I am in the pacing unless the final chapter is super short. Last night I mostly spent my time working on a plan to disgrace my arch nemesis, which to be honest… I still don’t quite understand why he is chasing me in the manner that he is. That is a finer point that I have yet to figure out, and I am hoping that eventually as I wind my way further down this rabbit hole that it is explained. I am apparently the chosen one without actually having explained why anything about me makes me the chosen one.

There are two things that this game needs badly. The first is a way to skip time without having to find a bed, because unlike the Fallout/Elder Scrolls games beds are in fairly short supply in this world. The second thing is some sort of a fast travel system because I have retread the same steps to the point of madness. Normally this wouldn’t be a big deal, but Spiders made the design decision that encounters would respawn frequently, which means each time that I trek through the slums I have to fight the same guards and the same gates over and over. The game suffers from a significant amount of backtracking because new quests will send you to the same destinations you have been to hundreds of times, and will again force you to fight the same encounters. This is definitely something they seem to have learned from this game because Greedfall had a perfectly adequate fast travel system.

In Josie news, she has entered the phase where she is into everything. She has explored her environment enough to be comfortable with going places she shouldn’t go now. I woke up this morning and she had knocked a ton of stuff off the top of one of the dressers because of course she did. We are reaching a point of equilibrium with the cats, or at least Mollie is starting to settle down. She has always been our high strung baby, and as I said yesterday over twitter she has now adopted the upstairs cat toy and Josie has adopted the downstairs one. Last night was the first time since Josie coming home with us that Mollie snuggled properly, which I am hoping is a good sign. In fact for most of the night I had Kenzie snuggling on the blanket draping my legs, Mollie laying over my mouse arm and Josie sprawled out behind my head on the top of the sectional. This absolutely seems like progress.

Melancholic Undertones

February 3, 2020 by Belghast

It has been a really weird weekend and as I sit down here to write my Monday morning post I largely just find myself staring at a blank screen. It was real hard getting up this morning because it was real hard sleeping last night. Around 9:30 Saturday morning I dropped my wife off at the airport for her very first international flight and around 7:30 Sunday morning she was landing in Lisbon Portugal. Knowing that she is that far away is doing weird things to my brain, and that first night I suffered a pretty nasty panic attack. Like it is not unusual for her to travel but for whatever reason the distance seems all the more extreme and tangible.

My parents wanted to meet for dinner Saturday night and that is probably the exact wrong thing for me to do. I love my folks dearly but they have a way of putting me into a real bad mindset after being around them. Admittedly it is a large part of why I avoid phone calls and have tried really hard to get them used to texting. I get off the phone with my mother and I am in a foul mood for the next three or four hours… and I am never exactly sure why because there really isn’t a reason to be. However that reaction combined with the fact that I was already worried about my wife’s international adventures sent me down a deep hole that I am finding it hard to dig out of today. Apologies that this is not the most cheery of topics for you to be reading on a Monday morning.

All in all however things are fine apart from the bed being too cold and there being too much room in it. Kenzie and Josie have more or less been glued to my side the entire time. I am not sure if it is that they can tell I am somewhat distraught or if they are continuing to get along better. Whatever the case I have had both of them with me in bed the last two nights, generally speaking Josie in my knee pit and Kenzie either laying on top of me or beside me. Mollie on the other hand has largely been non-interactive and I am guessing this is due to the brewing collusion between the other two. She is largely spending the majority of her time up in my wife’s office where she has reclaimed the room we formerly had Josie isolated in.

As far as media goes, I watched the first season of Atlanta because I am wildly behind watching things. That was one of my hopes for the period where I am the only person in the house was to watch a bunch of shows that I had wanted to. I knew that I really should not catch up on BoJack Horseman for reasons that it always makes me question my own existence… but Atlanta maybe wasn’t that much better of an idea. While I loved the season it also has some deeply melancholic undertones which likely did not at all help my mental state. I am engaged however and I am probably going to watch the second season tonight, or at least start it. It really has such a phenomenal cast and I am fully on board with anything that has Donald Glover or Zazie Beetz in it.

On the gaming front I made more progress into The Technomancer and I continue to love it even more. I am really interested in seeing the games that Spiders has to offer because there absolutely was a void left by Bioware that they are seemingly trying to fill. I feel like I am maybe starting to enter the phase of the game where you begin to collect allied forces and head towards a final showdown. That seems to always be a thing that exists in the type of games that Mass Effect or Dragon Age represent, and I am not exactly sure what to call that genre. It is like a sub genre within the Action RPG genre and I sorta feel dumb always referring to them as Bioware-Likes. Whatever the case I am on this course until I finish the game. It is doing a lot of interesting things, but unfortunately I can’t talk about them at length without generating significant spoilers. Part of why this game works is the way in which it unfolds the setting, and in case someone wants to follow in my shoes I don’t want to ruin it for them.

Josie is getting exceptionally good at climbing things… including me. Sunday morning I was sitting working on editing the podcast and Josie was apparently completely enthralled by whatever was happening on the screen. She figured out a way to latch onto my shoulder and then sorta drape herself down my chest as I leaned back in my chair. She is super bonded at this point and follows me around like a little lost puppy. It is almost always Kenzie and Josie that are with me all of the time, and I try and make sure they both get equal attention so that Kenz doesn’t get jealous. I write that and behind me Kenzie just bopped Josie for some reason that I fail to grasp. For those who are like me and search the background of photos, some things that you can see.