Kenzie and Walled City

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Kenzie.exe is hibernating

This morning is one of those mornings when I am not exactly sure what to write about, so as a result I figured I would give an update on Kenzie. Some weeks back in a stress filled post I talked about her being diagnosed with diabetes. In the time since then we have begun an insulin regiment in the morning and evening and are going back for another round of tests on Friday morning. The good news is that the insulin has seemingly halted the weight loss, and she may have gained some back but I am not sure if I am imagining that or not. The bad news is that due to some miscommunications the Vet was not able to successfully complete a glucose curve last week and we have to reattempt it this Friday.

A very tiny shoulder mounted Kenzie

Another positive however is that because she has been with me since a kitten, she pretty much will tolerate me doing anything that needs to happen. That is not to say that she does not protest furiously when I do have to poke her with a needle, but she more or less forgives me immediately. I am so thankful that if I were to have any cat come down with this disease… that it is Kenzie, because there is no way in hell that I could have given twice a day shots to Mollie. I can barely even pick her up without her freaking the hell out. Kenzie on the other hand I can carry around on my shoulder indefinitely because I have done so since she was super tiny. Above is photo evidence of this era when she would sit on my shoulder and watch me game.

While not super evident by the fact that I am only level 50… I have been spending a lot of time playing Diablo III on the Switch. This has recently replaced Dragalia Lost as my before sleep game that I am playing while laying down in bed. Last night I was not feeling super great and wound up going to bed around 9 pm and then hanging out and playing D3 until the news came on. I am mostly spending my time going through bounties, and I doubt that I will complete the seasons journey on console… but it does give me something to work towards. Seeing how freaking brutal Kolrath was I opted to play as a Barbarian, and I like the female Barb way better than the male one.

Another thing that has been going on recently is that I have been playing a lot of Minecraft. I opted to start in creative mode and started piddling around on a giant castle project. I started work on this as some point during Saturday and this is around the time of recording the podcast Saturday night. You can see that I started putting up a giant wall but hadn’t made much progress in actually hollowing anything out. I find the whole process relaxing as hell and lately I have been in this weird funk of not really knowing what to play. I could be finishing up Outer Worlds and I could also be finishing up Jedi Fallen Order, but instead I have spent my time building a castle.

This screenshot is from this morning and hopefully shows off some of the scale of this monstrosity. Inside there are four levels worth of construction, and the “ground floor” enters into what is effectively the 3rd floor going up, with two floors below the ground. I am not entirely certain what I am going to do with the 1st and 2nd floor as of yet, but I think the next big project is to build essentially a “keep” on top of the peak that you can see on the right side of the walled city area.

Since I have been building on creative mode, I have not been super concerned with torching things off and as a result I have a basement full of monsters that have spawned in. This is the second floor or Basement 1 depending on how you think about it, and I need to sort out what I have planned for down here. My general idea was that the ground floor would be shops and this floor would be small houses/apartments and maybe the same for the lowest floor, but ritzier houses since everything floats out over a giant underground lake of sorts. I want to build some other buildings out along the countryside as well, because there would be an assemblage of housing NEAR the walled city but not quite in it as well. Maybe build up a walled farm or two that are protected to feed resources into the city.

I am back playing the Java version of Minecraft because for a bit I kicked around starting a server in my home for this map. I also really miss the minimap addon whenever I am playing on the Windows 10 client. Ultimately this is sorta what I do when I am playing the game. I invent civilizations and build the structures that they would have used. The funny thing is… once the process is over I do absolutely nothing with the end product and often times just discard the maps after having spent hundreds of hours working on them. All that ultimately remains is a series of screenshots to prove that I did the thing.

Games of the Decade: 2011

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Rift

On Friday I started a new series where I talk about the games from the last decade that specifically had an effect on me. The original plan was to do a bunch of single posts, but after some back and forth I decided upon the format of posting games from a specific year. One of the interesting things about this journey is that I am realizing just how fallible my memory is. There is no way I would have ever said that Rift, Skyrim and SWTOR all came out in the same year… but I would have been very wrong. This was seemingly a year of significant changes.

Rift

Rift released in March of 2011 and on paper appeared to be everything that I had ever wanted in an MMORPG. It was an game with a techno-fantasy setting that allowed me to multi-class builds until my heart was content. More importantly it gave me the ability to have a tank with Charge AND Death Grip! I cannot underscore how important that last bit was to my early enjoyment of this game. I rolled a Bahmi Warrior which placed me on the side of the Defiant, aka the Red Team. The central conflict in World of Warcraft was often presented in terms of Good vs Evil, and your definition of that depended greatly upon the side of the fence you started on. Rift on the other hand focused on a debate between Religion and Technology, with me firmly throwing in on the side of technology.

Rift released at a time when it felt like Blizzard was not listening to the players, and in contrast the fledgling Trion Worlds was constantly engaging with the community greatly increasing the appeal. I changed my own religion at the time of being a World of Warcraft site to being all in on Rift, heralding it as the WoW Killer and true savior of MMORPG gaming. I can’t say for certain why I wandered away from the game, but I think in part it was due to the fact that a large chunk of my gaming circle didn’t quite set down the roots that I did. Without a viable raid, we were limited to doing the hardest version of the Rifts, which got old pretty quickly. The release of another game on this list ultimately signaled the closing of my renaissance with the game. It however has been something that I have returned to time and time again and while I am not actively playing it at the moment, remains an extremely important part of my gaming history.

Rage

Every so often a game is released that I absolutely love… and that apparently no one else did. One of those games was Rage, released by ID software in October. What it promised on paper was Doom meets Fallout… and what it delivered was something that felt like it had all of the potential in the world but never quite delivered on any of it. Rage was one of those games that I finished during act one, and I fully expected to open up a wider world… but instead got a credits roll. The few moments before the credit roll however were extremely compelling game play and presented a really interesting world, that I spent entirely too little time in. The follow up this past year took the wrong queues from how to make a sequel and I largely bounced off of it.

I think Rage would have done well, were it not for the horrific technical issues that I remember at the time. ID Software in the post Quake world is often times more of a game engine company than a game developer themselves, and in some ways Rage felt more like a tech demo than anything fully fleshed out. It was the first game to release on the Id Tech 5 engine, and reportedly at launch was a buggy mess. I remember it being a bit of a beast when it came to requirements, but I also managed to play it fairly successfully on the PC. I remember this game being poorly reviewed… but looking back it managed to get a 79 on meta critic… though maybe at the time we didn’t view that as a positive score. I replayed through this game a few years back and it still more or less holds up well.

The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim

My first foray into the world of the Elder Scrolls was with Daggerfall, and I played through it well after that game was gone from its prime. The first Elder Scrolls game that reeled me in with the genres possibility was Morrowind, and when Oblivion released I was completely hooked. By the time Skyrim was announced and ultimately released I was a ravening fanboy ready to consume more of this giant open world setting, and the game delivered on every possible dimension. It would be impossible to create a greatest games of the last decade list without Skyrim on it, especially now that it is pretty much available for every conceivable platform.

What I love about Skyrim is how I am able to just roam aimlessly through the world deciding my own path at all times. The game doesn’t rush me to make any decisions and allows me to carve my own path through the world. I remember on my first playing I went about 15 levels without ever finding the stones that allow you to effectively choose what sort of “class” you were going to play. In fact I pretty much went the opposite direction and it was a significant time before I finally made it to town. As soon as the shackles of the intro quest were removed… I was off doing my own thing figuring out my place in the world. It is for this reason that the game seems to have infinite replay-ability for me personally. Most of the times I pick it up I don’t get even vaguely close to finishing it, but it gives me a fun escape when I need it most.

Star Wars the Old Republic

I have such mixed feelings about Star Wars the Old Republic. On one hand it is one of the best roleplaying games to ever exist with some of the most interesting story content I have ever played through. On the other hand, it is a clone of a very specific era of World of Warcraft and by the time the game released felt somewhat dated and awkward. This would have made a very worthy sequel to the Knights of the Old Republic franchise, if they would have taken a single path and expanded upon it. However what you have is some of the best story-lines that Bioware has ever created trapped inside the husk of a very traditional MMORPG.

This era is also somewhat tainted by the fact that it was a grand experiment in guild building as I attempted to make lots of disparate groups of people mesh together, a problem that I consistently find myself in. This experiment however didn’t go so smoothly and saw the guild fracturing into two factions. In later years the game redeemed itself as the sort of expression of pure joy that I seem to find myself returning to anytime there is a Star Wars movie on the horizon. The more single player focus allows you to churn through the story and feel powerful doing so, more or less allowing you to skip over the bumpy bits. The Fallen Empire and Knights of the Eternal Throne campaigns represent some of the best RPG goodness I have experienced in a long while. I would at a bare minimum suggest working your way through the original story-line on every single class, because there is interesting overlap and interplay between them. It was and continues to be a pretty phenomenal game-play experience, once you get past a few of the rough spots.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2011

I felt extremely off balance, having left a game I had been playing for the better part of several years and trying to find a new home. House Stalwart had been that home and as I ventured forth into post WoW territory I found a bunch of temporary housing but it really did take me a long time until I settled into a new family. It also begins the era I am in currently of never quite being able to fully commit to any game. I was super prolific when I was into Rift… and then not at all as I started to pull away from that game. During April I had 24 posts… and by the time you get to November I was down to a single post for that entire month. I found myself actively avoiding the concept of raiding, having effectively just had a “bad breakup” with World of Warcraft and raiding in that game.

So where were you in 2011? What were the games that you found important during that year? Drop me a comment below and let me know what I missed that really mattered to you personally.

AggroChat #278 – Mario and Master Sword

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Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

Tonight we start the show with Bel talking about Darksiders Genesis and how it doesn’t really fit into the Diablo mold.  Bel also talks about his recent experience with the vastly different Wolcen as it nears entering early access. We talk about the large free update to Mario Maker 2 that among other things introduces the Master Sword powerup.  We discuss the Turn Based mod for Pathfinder Kingmaker which leads into a discussion about Turn Based and the Pause/Action RPGs. Tam talks about his recent journey into Star Trek Online and Ash talks about One Step from Eden. Finally Bel and Thalen talk a bit about the upcoming Season of Dawn in Destiny 2 and the end of the Season of Undying.

Topics Discussed

  • Darksiders Genesis
  • Wolcen Post Alpha
  • Mario Maker 2 Update 2
    • Link In Mario Maker
  • Turn Based Pathfinder Kingmaker
    • Turn based vs Action/Pause RPGs
  • Star Trek Online
  • One Step from Eden
  • Destiny 2 Season of Dawn

Original Blog post on AggroChat.com

Games of the Decade: 2010

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While not my first blog, Tales of the Aggronaut was created back in 2009. This means that the decade of 2010 to 2019 is the first time I am really able to legitimately look back on the last decade of gaming from a blogging standpoint. I’ve gone back and forth over the last several weeks about what sort of form these posts would take. For awhile I contemplated doing one post per day covering 5 games per decade. However at the time I dreamed up this concept it would mean that more or less you would get nothing from me but these posts for the rest of the year.

Instead I scaled things back to a single post per year, but even then I was uncertain of the number of games to talk about in each year. Being the unorganized person that I am, I could not really whittle things down to a clean number each year. So instead what you are getting is a compromise of a compromise, where I just write about the games in each year that were particularly important or noteworthy to me. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I am sure I will be completely blowing past titles that you my readers feel are super important. If that is the case feel free to leave me comments below with the game I should have included.

Minecraft

Technically Minecraft was available and playable in 2009, but I didn’t pay much attention until August of 2010 when I saw the above video from YouTuber DavidAngel64. The “X Series” as it came to be known was a series of videos where he explored various games, and in it he did a deep dive into those early days of Minecraft. I watched several of these and was hooked, and immediately went out and purchased the game and started doing my own explorations. It was a simple time when we were more or less figuring out the rules of the game and now to get to the sort of resources we wanted. For example the hunt for diamond because an overarching goal that pretty much dominated every waking moment of playing the game when I was not finding uses for the copious amounts of cobblestone that I was dredging from the earth.

The peak of my non-group gameplay was in October when I recorded a series of YouTube videos using Fraps and showing off some of the nonsense I had built. That channel is more or less abandoned and everything is on the “Belghast” channel that I dump our podcast on, and with no real great way or moving them, and no access to the original recordings… they more or less live out their life as they are… poorly done with crappy audio. I still have the original Minecraft files laying around in a zip, because I used to trade my files to other friends playing the game and they would zip up theirs and trade them to me so we could explore each others work in the days before an active Minecraft server. In 2011 the way we interacted with the game shifted significantly as we stood up our first server for the House Stalwart guild to all build together. That said 2010 was the renaissance of the game for me, and that blissful era when everything was new and magical.

Fallout New Vegas

I love the Fallout setting, and I can still remember saving up my pennies to buy the original game when it came out back during college. I’ve always been drawn to post apocalyptic settings, and Fallout is a world that is rich and textured and full of tantalizing bits of lore. While Fallout 3 pushed us into a brand new territory of exploring what happened to the Capitol Wasteland, Fallout New Vegas saw us returning to our roots of Southern California, the setting of the first two games. As a result what follows is a nostalgic ride seeing how the settings you were familiar with evolved in the time between the games.

The game is also a return to being controlled by Obsidian games, which represented a significant portion of the folks from Black Isle Studios that worked on the original two games. Fallout New Vegas is known for a handful of things… but the first being that the game does not start you in a vault and instead gives you what feels like a much more weighty introduction in the form of an attempt on your life. The other thing it is known for, is just how freaking buggy the game was at launch. I personally managed to get around most of these and found myself enjoying it greatly. The game is also significant because it represents one of the first times I wrote a review for a site that was not my own. You can still find my original review up on Polygamerous, though due to shifts in hosting I no longer have an account there… but the byline is still at the bottom.

Mass Effect 2

We are travelling through a time period when I was not quite as rabid about keeping screenshots for eternity. As a result I don’t have a ready archive of images to draw upon for most of these games. Mass Effect 2 represents my first entry in the series, and I remember buying it digitally on the ill fated Direct2Drive, because some other subscription I had that I am drawing a blank on gave me a significant discount there. This is the game that shaped my view of the Mass Effect setting, and still to this day is probably my favorite game in the series. I loved the characters and the interactions and the “away team mission” nature of the gameplay. In the years between then and now I have played through this game I believe five times in total, often times as part of a full replay of the series.

There are a lot of games out there that hope to be a narrative story that rivals that of Star Wars. Very few manage to pull this goal off, but Mass Effect absolutely did. I still stand by my stance that this series would make one of the absolute best Science Fiction/Fantasy television series out there. I keep hoping that Netflix options the rights, or shit even Disney Plus after seeing how amazing The Mandalorian has been. While I played through as Male Shepard, the canonical version based on all of my friends has to be the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard. I will admit I had a real hang up for a long time about playing female characters in video games. When I play a video game I am essentially playing me in whatever form takes place on screen, and I tried to always make each character as close to “Belghast” as I could. I seemingly have gotten past that… and at some point I need to break this game back out and play it through in the mode that so many people say is the best possible version.

Where Bel Was Mentally in 2010

So those are the games that I was playing behind the scenes, but on this blog… you got a vastly different view of me. It was a time of deep irregularity in my posting schedule. I didn’t really start doing this regular posting thing until 2013, and each time I had a major lapse it was harder and harder to get back into posting again. There are so many sign posts in those early years like this one from April where I find myself apologizing for not feeling up to writing. I was not happy with the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and similarly not super happy with the beginning of Cataclysm. I was also super hung up on this blog being a World of Warcraft Tanking and Raid Leadership blog. That niche no longer really fit me, and as a result I was struggling trying to get the oomph to be writing about what I thought were the topics folks wanted me to write about.

I’m glad I figured this whole thing out at some point, or at least have a working theory about how to progress forward with a blog. I am not sure how often I will be writing these pieces, but I figure I will probably do Monday and Friday or some semblance of that until I get through the years between 2010 and 2019. As I do this, I would love to hear in the comments about your own games of a specific year.