Tales of the Aggronaut

Toys R Us Kid

March 16, 2018 by Belghast

The news about Toys R Us closing is not shocking given the rapid slide over the last month or so… but still hits me fairly hard. The truth is I didn’t go to the store that often anymore because quite frankly it was inconvenient. I did however take the opportunity on a regular occasion to visit them while roaming around other towns. I’ve been to at least one Toys R Us in San Antonio for awhile while we were down there for Pax South, but in that case it was largely because it was beside a Container Store my wife wanted to go to. I think ultimately everyone stopped going to the store for their various reasons, and this is yet another step along the chain to the loss of brick and mortar retail as a whole. It does however make me nostalgic about the Toys R Us from my past.

I found this image online, and decided to use it because more or less this represents the Toys R Us I remember from my childhood. The closest location for me was roughly an hour from my home and it was a destination location for whenever I had birthday money to spend. The reason why is that because as a kid it felt like Toys R Us had literally everything we could ever want to play with. You would go there and see toy lines that you didn’t even know existed, and for the ones you did know about… they usually had one of every figure in the line along with all of the accessories you had only heard about.

As my passion for Star Wars, GI Joe and the Thundercats turned to Video Games… Toys R Us became in a way more elevated in my mind as a destination for glory. During the heyday of the Nintendo Entertainment System they stocked what felt like every single game available for the system. For those who were not around during this era I found an image online representing how games were presented to us. There would be essentially the cover of one of the games with maybe some information about it on the backside hanging on a rack with some tickets. You would dread getting to the store and seeing an empty envelope hanging beneath the game you were looking for. I remember a few sad trips up to the redemption booth to ask if they maybe had one more copy of whatever game I was wanting somewhere in the back.

Regardless any time I managed to save up enough money to get a new game… I was immediately pestering my parents to see when we could next make the hour long slog to Tulsa and visit Toys R Us. I remember feeling like the Ticket Booth was a magical portal that had a copy of everything ever in existence… rather than just the entrance to the stock room. The core problem with the Toys R Us equation is that they made their name on being the “Biggest Toy Store There Is”. That meant to keep the promise they needed to stock more of everything to be that go to place when someone can’t find something anywhere else.

The problem is the “Children’s Bargain Town” slogan was mostly a lie, because as soon as I understood the concept of money… I understood that everything cost a little bit more at Toys R Us. In my market for a good chunk of my childhood there were was a single Toys R Us location. During the late 80s and early 90s they built a second location in what seemed to be the next up and coming area of town. However at no point was Toys R Us the bargain option. On the value for your money spectrum you had Walmart as the cheapest place you could buy anything followed fairly closely by K-Mart and Target being roughly the same. From there you jumped up to the Mall offerings of Circus World and KB Toys… and in a far distant end of the spectrum you had Toys R Us. I remember when Nintendo was king, a game at Toys R Us cost roughly ten dollars more than a game at Walmart for example.

Since they could not compete on price, they had to compete on the sheer nonsense amount of stuff they carried… but in the mid to late 90s that equation changed to. They started clearing out sections of the store to hollow them out and make room for the Babies R Us Franchise. In our store this meant that no longer did they carry products that you had never heard of… or in most cases even the entire product line for the ones you had heard of. Also it was around this time that the Video Game section was ejected from is prime real estate and shoved into a cubical in the far corner of the store the furthest location from the door. Additionally they shifted away from the ticket system and started carrying far fewer items meaning that they lost their sheer selection advantage over other stores. I remember trying Toys R Us first a few times like when Final Fantasy III (VI) came out… but finding them completely out of stock and having to move on and ultimately pick it up from Target.

As they lost selection advantage it felt like they started pushing more and more for product advantage by strong arming producers into creating a plethora of “exclusive” lines available only at Toys R Us. The problem is that this was ultimately a losing battle as well because for example in my metro area at our height we had 2 Toys R Us locations. On the other hand we have around twenty Walmart stores and about half that number of Targets. If you expand that out to the United States as a whole… the amount of products that discount retailers purchase and stock as compared to specialty toy retailers has to be staggering. So following on the heels quickly similarly exclusive product offerings started showing up in Target and then not long after Walmart diluting whatever advantage you once had. Sure you could get a collector into your store to buy that one product, but it was likely they were ONLY buying that and then moving onto another location where the money stretched a little further.

The up-swell of GameStop and Best Buy during the 90’s put a nail in the coffin in product offering advantage Toys R Us might have had on the video games front as well. Why would you go to Toys R Us for what was already a limited offering from their glory days… when you could just go to GameStop and find the return of carrying every available product offering for each console? Every one of these missteps hurt Toys R Us long before online retailing came in to take the final chomp out of it. Unfortunately the “biggest toy store there is” crown now belongs to Amazon. Why would you drive from store to store to find the one action figure you want… when you can just place an order online and get it shipped to your door in two days time?

On the video game side we have a wide array of digital store fronts allowing us to plunk down our money… and get a game within a few minutes rather than needing to throw pants on and drive to the store. For me personally the convenience is king over anything else. I could in theory purchase some of the games cheaper in physical form from Amazon and have the discs shipped to me in two days. However I would rather just have the game installed and always “on tap” rather than needing to fiddle for the disc or figure out which case I shoved which game into. In truth I am having a hard time remembering what the last game I purchased in physical form was. More than likely it was World of Warcraft Cataclysm collectors edition, and even then only because they had not yet started offering digital collectors editions of their games. From Pandaria onwards I happily gobbled up that digital CE and went on with my life rather than trying to hope and pray that Amazon would ship the game on time for me to hit the midnight start.

On consoles it is even more important to me personally to have games digitally, because when I take my switch or 3DS somewhere I don’t want to juggle a bunch of awkward cartridges… nor do I want some sort of a “cozy” that I carry around with me to keep them organized. I want the ability to flip to the game I want, hit a button and boot directly into it with no muss or fuss. Since at least 2007 I have been 99.9% digital in my game purchases, and each one of those sales is in theory one that could have gone to a retailer like Toys R Us. I am part of the problem and I am absolutely part of why this store is closing.

I have a deep nostalgia about my experiences with Toys R Us as a kid, but the adult version never quite lived up to those memories. While I would like to think I am still a Toys R Us kid at heart and can break into song singing the theme… I never had kids of my own to continue the tradition with. Additionally shopping at the physical store is inconvenient and requires a trip to a completely different area of town than I visit on a regular basis. Before the second store closed a few years ago… I used to go to that one occasionally because it was easy to get in and out of without a lot of hassle. I remember semi-regularly visiting when I was looking for Lego Minifigures blind bags and even finding some ones stashed from an ancient series.

The problem is… I maybe went there once a month if that and prior to the blind bags… it had been maybe five years since I had darkened the door of that store. I will miss the Toys R Us from my memories, and this absolutely feels like one of those “end of an era” moments. However it will join the same memory bin where Babbages, Software Etc, Media Play, Hastings, Circuit City, Computer City, Comp USA, KB Toys, Circus World and countless other stores I liked going to… but no longer exist. Part of getting older is remembering fondly things that don’t exist anymore… and I guess after a decline that started decades ago… I am okay with adding Toys R Us to that stack.

Nergal Reaver

March 15, 2018 by Belghast

One of the more interesting things about Monster Hunter World is how your perspectives shift as you level through the game and ultimately get better at it. There was a time during the pre-launch demo that I considered Great Jagras to be challenging, and now that encounter doesn’t even bear mentioning. I’ve beaten that monsters several times before it even had a chance to run anywhere as a way of testing out new weapons. Similarly I remember a time when Tobi Kadachi invoked fear in me, and now it is just a chill electrical squirrel lizard that I largely ignore unless I specifically need parts from it. Similarly I used to run from Legiana and now… if it really wants to start some shit I will end it.

So the question is… what changed? Ultimately the answer is that I did. Sure I have better gear but also I have a better understanding of each of those fights. I also understand how the higher progressed players are always willing to take on whatever happens to be that fight that you are currently considering difficult. I remember being terrified of Anjanath but just recently farmed it to help folks get tickets for the Aloy appearance and bow event. It is all a matter of perspective and each time you move up in the game you reach a new plateau of difficulty… that tends to make everything below it pale in comparison.

This moves us forward to last nights activities. Nergigante was one of those encounters that I never thought would ever reach a point where I was comfortable with it. For me at least it was an extreme challenge to get through this fight when I needed it to move the story forward. In the meantime I have been fighting other elder dragons, that in truth are way more annoying than Nergi or at least have the potential to be more annoying. One of the weapons I have wanted in my elder dragon slaying arsenal is a Nergal Reaper… which does some dragon elemental damage but more importantly has high elderseal. This unfortunately would require me to farm Nergi… and that is just what I did last night.

Bel, the patron saint of questionable decisions

— x1101 (@x1101) March 13, 2018

Instead of throwing myself at this encounter solo… I decided on the nonsense option. That means I threw myself at SOS roulette over and over until I farmed the components I needed from Nergigante. This also means that there were more than a few times when a single newer player used up all of our faints and I failed at my mission. However even then… I walked away with a point of pride because during none of the MANY times I did this last night… did I actually faint myself. I managed to get in… deal significant amounts of damage with my new friend the poison blade and get out each time Nergi’s gaze turned to me.

Once again I had climbed to the top of the pile through repetition and experience… and even more importantly perspective. I’ve now fought things way harder than Nergigante and as a result the fight while mechanically the same seemed way easier. This is the aspect of Monster Hunter World that I think I like more than any, the feeling that I grew as a player more than my character did. Sure I am methodical when it comes to tackling new content, and sure I seem to be moving at a snails pace… but I feel like I am continuing to move the needle forward. Nergi has now entered the realm of things I feel comfortable farming… which is good I guess since my friend Grace is sitting at that step in the process meaning the cycle continues.

The Stronghold Chasm

March 14, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I fell down an unexpected rabbit hole. For a few weeks I have known that my good friend PizzaMaid has been dabbling in Neverwinter, but I did not actually know that we were apparently all playing on the same server until last night. When I got upstairs to nom my noms and check into the world, I saw that she was streaming neverwinter. Joining her were my friends and fellow Pom’s Wolfy, Jaedia and Starspun all logging in to run a dungeon in game. We had some confusion earlier in the week as to which server we were all on, and I thought I remembered the name Dragon at some point. Apparently yes we are all in fact on Dragon which allows us to do interesting things together.

I had my own renaissance of Neverwinter back in January as I installed and booted up the game on a whim. For years I had been getting press releases about the game to my blogging/podcasting email and I guess over time it built up a desire to log in and see how things were going. What I found when I got there was an extremely fun and also insanely intricate game… that I struggled to grasp. I already thought there was a wide chasm of features and functionalities that I did not quite understand… but I was apparently only on the rim of said chasm. Last night we full well opened the maelstrom and hopped right in.

One of the activities were partook of was forming a guild, so as of last night the Owlbear Preservation Society lives in Neverwinter with the aforementioned members as the inaugural group. This unlocked the ability to start messing around with our Stromhold which is essentially the equivalent of the Guild Hall in Guild Wars 2. Now I had been carrying around items that assisted in the function of a guild hall for ages, likely since the game originally launched. The problem is I never actually had a guild to spend them on… so I spent the first few minutes of my time in our stronghold trying to figure out what to do with them.

It turns out you feed them to the mimic friend that we are all taking a screenshot with, and he then applies them to the various costs associated with building things back to their grand status. I thought Guild Wars 2 had a pretty deep rabbit hole when it came to a guild hall… but this one might be deeper. The problem is at this moment we have only barely scratched the surface and unlike Guild Wars 2… there are no really easy gains that can be applied and instead everything seems to be pretty slow to acquire. Right now we are being directed to build a lumberyard, which seems to be capable of producing at least some of the materials we need to start crafting things.

Everything that is flagged with a green icon has a placard in front of it allowing us to build it. I am guessing everything marked with a grey X is something that will eventually unlock… once we have built up a certain number of things in our Stromhold. This is a really deep well we have fallen into and I am not entirely certain we will really make much headway. The collection of items seems to be through “daily quests” of a sort that reset every 9 hours in the Stronghold. I will not be playing actively enough to do these on cool down, however considering most of the activities are pretty chill I am likely to do a set of them each time I log in.

The biggest problem we have currently is the fact that there are only five of us and this seems to be a design feature that is intended to be sped through by mass amounts of players doing these and funding the building coffers. I have no clue how wide this madness will spread, but I somehow doubt we will have a mass influx of players like we have had when a new game launches. I might be wrong, but I am guessing this is going to be a pretty low key grind that takes place over several months.

As far as the rest of my play session, I managed to ding 41 and now that we have our stronghold… I can see that the level cap is 70. The Stronghold itself is populated with tons of heroic encounters designed for a balanced group of players to go out and tackle which is fairly slick. We downed a few of them and failed one major event largely because we didn’t really know what the purpose was until it was a bit too late. It was a really fun night of nonsense and it has sparked my desire to poke my head into Neverwinter more often now that I am actually part of a guild.

Trapping Anjie

March 13, 2018 by Belghast

Watch PSO2 Nonsense because Sol requested it from Belghast on www.twitch.tvLast night when I got home I fired up the stream and played a little Phantasy Star Online 2. Over the weekend Sol made a comment over my Stream discord that I really should be streaming as I played… I assume so she could see what the game was about. The core problem with that is I am guessing based on some of the things I have seen is that the early game is very much not entirely like the late game. One of the reasons why I loved PSO back in the Dreamcast days is that it was essentially “Space Diablo”. Essentially you had a randomly assembled corridor dungeon crawler set on a series interesting tilesets that involved killing everything and getting loot drops as your reward. This core design loop seems to be in place in PSO2, and while I absolutely knew what I was getting myself into… I am not sure if most other gamers would view the title the same way I do.

There are certain aspects of the game that feel very dated from the relatively chunky terrain to the fact that everything is essentially a tightly closed in circuit. Sure you can do more with your terrain than you used to be able to do… like jump… I don’t think you could jump in the first PSO. This is actually used in many cases to hide secrets in the verticality of the level design… but as is also seen in a sequence in my VOD from last night it adds to frustration because the jumping mechanics are also relatively low fidelity. There is a point where I am trying to jump between the individual islands of rock in a chain surrounded by lava, and I am constantly failing to hit the terrain at exactly the right spot allowing me to hop up onto the surface. While the game is only five years old at this point… but in some ways it feels older.

One thing of note… it took me a bit to realize that my microphone was muted so for the first little bit of the VOD I am completely silent. I was talking up a storm, describing the various things I was encountering… all wondering why the folks watching were not responding. Then I noticed the blinking red light on my Yeti telling me that I had muted it at some point. I think I have this revelation about ten minutes into the video where I correct it and apologize. I am not really sure how often I will be playing PSO2 but I am nonetheless glad I went through the process of installing it. It is a fun game and the core mechanical loop of killing sci-fi monsters for fun and profit is one that I enjoy greatly. Just not all that sure how fun it is to watch me doing this thing.

The tail end of my evening was spent in Monster Hunter World hanging out with my friend Grace and working on getting her the last few tickets needed for The Proving quest. I had originally hoped to grab Thalen as well and help him out, but he was nowhere to be seen last night. Generally speaking I am assuming he had pressing family matters, which I hear is a thing when you are a parent. I mean I sometimes have pressing family matters too with my cats, but they are on I feel a completely different plateau of general needs. Usually what I am dealing with is Kenzie prancing around in front of me trying to make sure I see the rubber band that she just dropped on my desk… that she wants me to fling out into the hall so she can chase it. If you ever hear the sound of a rubber band zinging through the air while I am streaming… then I am doing precisely that.

The whole Anjanath farm thing had a side benefit in that I had really wanted to create Flammensucher the crazy flame axe that passes for a sword and shield. During our final run of the night I managed to get the last of my fangs allowing me to craft it… and I have to say while I love it… I am having a little bit of buyers remorse. The problem is not the negative affinity, because it deals more than enough fire damage to make up for that. The core problem so far is that it has completely horrible durability and I got down to orange sharpness while killing ten Gajau for an investigation. I am used to being able to fight the boss through two changes of venue before dropping out of blue sharpness… so this is a significant change for me to get used to. The positive however is that the fire damage is still potent regardless of the base sharpness.

At some point I need to get back on the wagon and work towards downing the final boss of the game. I’ve been sitting on that step since this weekend and have yet to really give it an attempt. I think that is in part because I have a screenshot directory full of things that look like the above… with me failing various elder dragon fights. Granted I tend to fail upwards and learn from my mistakes, but it also takes a lot out of me. This combined with the fact that I have zero burning desire to “finish the game” means I tend to languish around in the doldrums leading up to final boss fights most of the time. My friends like Void/GrnMushroom have a deep burning desire to defeat games that propels them forward into throwing themselves against fights until they eventually batter them down. Me… I just like to wander around and constantly find myself actively avoiding finishing things… even in a situation like this where I know it is just the beginning of a whole new playstyle.

I do however want to uncap my level… at least until 49 where I have to fight another roadblock… and start farming elder dragons for bits and pieces to make interesting sets and weapons. I really need to start throwing myself at Nergigante until he is no big deal and something I can down regularly. The weird thing is… I would far rather throw myself into the nonsense that is SOS Roulette most of the time than actually solo something in this game. I am not sure what it is about soloing that feels bad to me, even though my palico does an amazing job of tanking the bosses and keeping me alive with a constant string of vigor wasps. It just somehow feels better when I am running around at minimum with another player, and at best with a full party of varied weapons.

Sure it gets frustrating when folks are fainting and there is nothing you can do about it… it even causes me to curse very loudly sometimes… but the fights are interesting because I am having to deal with all sorts of random elements. This weekend when I was attempting Teostra I was starting to feel like I needed to stop calling myself a positivity gamer given how much I was cursing. However Sita hung out with me and we Duo’d the fight… but even that took a few attempts. Basically Monster Hunter World feels best when it is a game played with other players be they friends or completely random strangers. As a result I doubt I will stop the madness of SOS Roulette any time soon.