Tales of the Aggronaut

Top Five Lists Are Hard

August 2, 2017 by Belghast

I failed miserably at attempting to do a daily creative thing. Yesterday was an extremely crappy day on the work front, or at least one that drained every little bit of sanity out of me. By the time I got home I just wanted to vegetate on the sofa and play some games. With the announcement of the Guild Wars 2 Path of Fire expansion coming in September, this I am sure rekindled the fires for a lot of folks. For me personally… its particular un-directed style of roaming aimlessly yet still feeling like you accomplished something was a reasonable fit for the state of mind I happened to be in last night. It’s funny how my opinions of this game have changed significantly over the years. While I was in Alpha I was not a fan at all… and this is still the only Alpha program I purposefully resigned from. In Beta however I started to see some of the merits and played a little bit at launch, however that did not last extremely long. For years afterwards I was a bit at odds with the game and not really getting what everyone else was seeing in it. However about a year ago the AggroChat crew all returned and started doing some of the group content and more or less I began to see the merit. More recently I just find it an excellent source of bite sized entertainment… which is I think the intended goal all along. Of the original Guild Wars content, Nightfall was probably my favorite “expansion” that of course wasn’t actually an expansion. So since Path of Fire is going to be in that same area I am looking forward to this expansion way more than I did Heart of Thorns. I also find it extremely interesting that they are continuing to give horizontal progression… which on some level has traditionally bothered me… but also allows me to not feel left behind each time the game moves forward. The primary problem there is that I feel so far behind in the alternate progression paths that I will likely never actually catch up without a serious time investment.

Alright Twitter RT this with your top 5 video games of all time

— Westen (@epicgeezr) July 30, 2017

Yesterday a tweet was making its way across my twitterverse and it was interesting seeing everyone’s responses. The problem however is that I personally have a really hard time narrowing it down to a list of 50… let alone a list of 5. I made an effort to do so… then as soon as I posted it came up with half a dozen other alternates that potentially could have bounced the titles I listed from contention. When I look at an “of all time” list I tend to think of things in terms of long term replay-ability as well as the overall experience I had playing the game. Namely can I pick this title up today and still play it with the same level of joy that I had when I originally played the game. This means there is a significant number of titles from the PS1 and PS2 eras that are just dead to me without the introduction of a remaster or remake. We’ve experienced this several times in the AggroChat game club as we attempted to relive a title from the past only to find it doesn’t live up to our modern expectations for how a game should behave. So here is the list of games that I managed to whittle down to on impulse yesterday.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

This is the only game that is pretty much universally always going to be my number one slot… until something dethrones it. I love everything about this game from the art style to the music to the level design. I have this title in the original PS1 release, Sega Saturn, PSP, PS3, PS Vita, and Xbox 360 versions. To the best of my knowledge this means I own it on pretty much every platform it has been released on… and truthfully I can happily keep playing this over and over. About once a year I seem to boot it up and play through it… and I am secretly hoping that the Switch gets a release at some point.

Fallout New Vegas

I waffled on this one a bit because I like ALL of the modern Fallout games… but personally I feel like New Vegas is the best version so far. It has everything I liked about Fallout 3 but includes a much better overarching storyline. At release this was rife with all manner of bugs… but over time through official and unofficial patches it has reached an extremely solid state and is one of those games I can still boot up at any time and return to happily.

Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

This for me is always likely going to be the pinnacle of the Legend of Zelda franchise. Its Zelda at its most Zeldaish, and again this is one of those games that I can keep playing over and over. I remember this also being one of the first times I was completely shocked by a World 2 transition, in thinking I had almost beat the game… and then finding out that maybe I had finished a fifth of it. What I love the most is just how much stuff lies just slightly off the path and is not really required to beat the game.

Dragon Age: Origins

There are times I would like to say that I love the Dragon Age franchise… but in truth I really just love Dragon Age: Origins. I have significant problems with Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition, and I just can’t ever seem to get anywhere near as engaged as I did the first time. The thing is… it isn’t actually the first time because I have continued to successfully return to this world and play it over and over. The Grey Warden storyline beats every storyline they have come up with to date in every possible way… and I just want to keep reliving that character and experience. Additionally this was my Gateway drug into Mass Effect because if I did not love this game… I probably never would have given that franchise a second shot.

Mass Effect 2

Linked to the one above… Mass Effect 2 is the pinnacle of the series for me personally. It does the most things I want from Mass Effect which is honestly the “away mission” feel that you have in this game. In part I think Andromeda does a good job of recapturing this feeling, but the second game in the series will always hold a special place in my heart because it is the game that made me fall in love with this setting. I bounced pretty hard off of the PC port of Mass Effect because of the fairly cludgy interface, but after absolutely loving Dragon Age… and finding out that ME2 was going to be using that engine I gave the game a second shot. What I found was this rich world that ultimately caused me to go back and suffer through the first game so I could experience more of it. I love everything about this game from the recruitment of interesting characters, to ominous baddies… and even more ominous allies.

More Games

The moment I hit send I had a flood of other titles that really should have been included, and as a result I am just going to run through a few of these without delving into them. Regardless this is an extremely difficult exercise, because how do you condense over thirty five years of gaming into a single list of five.

Destiny
Diablo 3
Final Fantasy VI
Super Mario World
Knights of the Old Republic
Planescape Torment
Super Metroid
Phantasy Star IV
Guardian Heroes
Rivercity Ransom
Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo
Mortal Kombat II
World of Warcraft
Hellgate London
Wolfenstein New Order
Doom II
Minecraft
Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2
Thomas Was Alone

and honestly… the moment I hit post I will think of several dozen more than deserve to be on the list. Basically this is a really hard thing to do for me.

A Warm Blanket

August 1, 2017 by Belghast

Today marks the beginning of the whole “Daily Creative Thing” business and while you might have been expecting something from me… unfortunately you can’t really expect me to get up and do creativity by six in the morning. Sitting down and writing out a blog post is challenging enough. I am however planning on making something happen today or tonight depending upon when the muse hits me. The other big thing going on today is that it is my Nineteenth wedding anniversary, and while I am not entirely certain what we are doing to mark the occasion yet I am sure we will come up with something. In truth what it will probably mean is that my wife and I go out to dinner, and then wander around hitting the various stores and checking to see if they have started marking down their back to school stuff yet. “School Supply Season” is like Christmas for my wife, and while this is not exactly the normal thing for people to get excited about… it is for a teacher. I’ve spent many an hour over the years scrounging for one last folder or ruler or package of gluesticks for her classroom.

Work is still madness and I am still finding myself deep in the throes of turtle mode. Honestly more than anything what happens during these times is I resort to comfort gaming. I end up dusting off a game that I had not been playing that much and spend a significant chunk of time roaming around its world. Lately that has meant an awful lot of Rift because much like Phantasy Star Online yesterday… I carry a significant torch for this game as well. In honor of the occasion I decided to vary up my default wardrobe a bit from what I had been running around in the first screenshot… to what I am now running around in… which is honestly mostly just some dye and swapping a few pieces. I never managed to hit the “Prophecy of” level cap and I’ve just been working my way through any of the content that I had left to do in various zones. So far the thing that I am liking the most about the content is the way that each zone has this major event that takes place at the very end of the zone that ties up a bunch of loose threads from various quests and packages it neatly in this really epic fight. In many ways Rift feels like a game from a different time, and this has both good and bad aspects to it. The bad is it feels much slower than other MMOs and the time to kill and time to level can feel a little grating at times. However on the good side this is also this same thing that makes it feel familiar and lived in… and something that I can return to over and over to wear it like a blanket. The main problem that I have with Rift that ultimately causes me to wander away is that I don’t have my social infrastructure here. My circle of friends that I record the podcast and game on a nightly basis with… have moved on past this game and will likely never return. At this point I think I am just too set in my ways to branch out and build new communities, and I also know that I will soon return to the fold and wander away from the game myself.

Another game I have been playing a not insignificant amount of is Fallout 4. This runs pretty damned smoothly on the laptop and it has been a recent go to for when I want to wander around a world and explore a bit. In the theme of carrying torches for games… I have loved Fallout since I saved up my pennies to buy the first game when it released back in 1997. I was going to college at the time and not really buying many games, but still made a beeline to Walmart to pick it up once I knew they had it in stock. Side note… that was literally the only place in town that sold PC games and was before the mass expansion of Game Stop. At that point Software Etc and Babbages still existed as separate entities as well as Comp USA and the unrelated Circuit City and Computer City. When the games made the tradition to the open world format I was skeptical but quickly got on board thanks to my love of the Elder Scrolls games. Now the modern Fallout games serve as this familiar touchstone that I can keep returning to anytime I need solace. I’ve started countless games of Fallout 3 and New Vegas and it seems like now I am carrying that tradition over into Fallout 4 as well. My default play mode tends to be to wander towards a corner of the map and do whatever happens to be there. I am not really big for following larger quests in this game, and I likely would have never actually beaten it were it not for the fact that we chose this as a game club game… and I felt obligated to do so. Gaming in general for me is not ever really about beating the game… but more about existing in that game world for a period of time. The game world of choice is determined by whatever mood I happen to be in. Fallout for me tends to be for when I am in a slower paced mood and want to wander around aimlessly dispensing frontier justice on the raiders.

Burning Torch

July 31, 2017 by Belghast

There are a lot of games that I hold a torch for… even when they are long dead and gone. Specifically I am looking at you Hellgate London… that I will always have a significant amount of love for. However another of those titles is Phantasy Star Online. This is ultimately what I consider to be my first MMO, or at the very least the gateway drug that opened me up to the possibilities of Everquest. The Dreamcast is a special console for me, and in large part it is due to this game. I spent many a weekend afternoon dialed into SegaNet with the 56k modem and eventually upgraded to the “broadband adapter” and running a 50 ft network cable out of my office and around the edge of the loft so I could partake of this title at my then DSL speeds. I even went so far as to purchase a weird controller adapter that among other things had a PC PS/2 port that allows me to connect a keyboard so that I could communicate more easily with other players while running group content. I played a RAcast, which was the giant robot ranger character… which is probably why I have so damned much fondness for Exo’s in Destiny. Because of just how hard the various mobs hit… I found playing a sword wielding Hunter class to be awkward and involved way too much dancing in and out of melee range just barely not getting hit. Ranger on the other hand could absolutely abuse the fact that mobs would turn back around when you encountered a gate between areas… and I would sit at the space between zones and effectively “kite” the mobs until they were dead.

For awhile I have known about unofficial community run servers for Phantasy Star Blue Burst the PC release of the game that came out in 2003. However with the one I had messed with before, the game felt not completely functional in some way. The controls were wonky, and the servers felt laggy. However I heard there was a much better experience in the form of the Ephinea Private server. I never quite know where whims come from… but suddenly this weekend I was hitting the page and downloading the client. Firstly the experience of getting into the game is much better than the version I had messed with before, that involved downloading the game via a large torrent. This instead is a fairly slim roughly 650 meg installer. From there it boots into a menu system that features its own built in patcher, so there has been a significant amount of time spent making this as good of an experience as is possible. The client also seems to support a whole slew of modern resolutions and some advanced options for a higher resolution HUD, all of which was missing from the version I played a few years back. Reading the FAQ on the website you can see that they have made a significant number of tweaks to improve overall game play experience like giving all of your characters a shared bank. What is also interesting is that there are three seperate rulesets that are supported: Normal, Hardcore and Sandbox. The second being much more difficult but having much better drop rewards, and the later being a pseudo “admin mode” that allows players to summon up items and such. For the time being however I have simply been playing on Normal mode while I get used to the game again.

It is funny just how fast the game has come back to me, and even though my Fusion Pro Controller is nothing like a Dreamcast Controller… I have managed to adjust to the differences rather rapidly. In truth there is not a lot of deep strategy going on in this game other than the rhythm of landing a triple hit attack… which I remembered pretty quickly and have been abusing since. Ultimately I probably wouldn’t suggest downloading the game unless you are in one of two camps. Firstly this is awesome for those of us who played the game back when this was literally better than anything out on the market, and want a trip down memory lane. Secondly this is awesome for anyone who completely missed the boat on Phantasy Star Online and would like to at least see what the game was like. In both of those cases it will provide some enjoyment, but for anyone expecting a modern experience… you should probably keep on moving. I’ve talked about this before, but there is an era in gaming where the ability to play online with others… especially from a console was the central feature of the game and any other details were by nature secondary. While the core gameplay loop is still enjoyable to me personally… it won’t be for many especially considering how slow paced the game is and how cludgy the targeting system can be. A good bit of my love of Destiny is likely because Phantasy Star Online was my first “looter shooter”. I ran around with a rifle wielding RACast and shot things until they dropped boxes of loot… that I then either equipped or took back to the Tekker to identify the item. Master Rahoul has nothing on the disappointment the Tekkers used to bring us when that weapon we have trudged up from the bowels of Ruins 3 turns out not to be the upgrade we were looking for. If you too want a trip down memory lane however… I suggest you check out Ephinea and their awesomely tweaked version of the PC Phantasy Online Star Blue Burst client.

Assorted Turtling

July 27, 2017 by Belghast

Yesterday was an exceedingly stressful day, and that combined with the fact that my wife is out of town… lead to a sudden bout of turtling. For those unfamiliar with the nomenclature… I go through these periods where I feel like I need to pull my head into my shell to attempt to remain sane. I’m thankful that I have a few friends that get it, and don’t give me too much hassle about it, but every so often I just reach this point where I need to disconnect from humanity. Last night was one of those nights and I cycled restlessly through a whole bunch of games to see if I could find something that would fit well enough to pass the evening in. The negative is that in theory this should have been a night I was tanking in Final Fantasy XIV, but I just could not handle communicating with others… or having anyone I cared about relying on me. The irony is that I wound up for a bit early in the evening in Destiny… and absolutely wound up carrying two other players hard through a random strike. I took a screenshot not because it is impressive… but because it shows the massive difference between my participation and that of the other two. This was on the Wretched Eye strike… and I wound up kiting the Ogre… and DPSing most things down… and resurrecting the other two people constantly. Now I know what Squirrel and Jex feel like when I run with them.

From there I wound up back downstairs and watched the last episode of Handmaid’s Tale… which is maybe not the best idea to watch when you are already feeling depressed. While doing so I ended booting up Rift and playing around some there. I am still level 67 and working on the Gedlo Badlands, which is not exactly my favorite zone so far. Moonshade Highlands is my jam, and I have never been that big of a fan of desolate desert landscapes… especially not ones where everything is on fire. That said I did make a lot of progress knocking out various quests and while it still feels like my experience bar isn’t really moving… the constant ding of planar levels seems to help the feeling of being mired. I have been running around with a heavy Warlord hybrid build, and while I have been absent it seems to have been buffed significantly. Previously I had a lot of problems with struggling to kill a given mob in time before it killed me. Now I seem to be able to run around and wreck things pretty safely. My biggest complaint with Starfall Prophecy now Prophecy of Ahnket… are the legendary morphs of abilities. Each of them seems to read like it is going to be universally better than the original… but after taking a few of them they seem to FEEL worse. The biggest problem here is that you cannot undo them without paying for a respec…and then you have to remember what the hell you chose as a spec down to the point where you screwed up and chose the wrong legendary morph. Personally I think the system should just be a toggle, and that you can have X number of legendaries toggled on equal to the number you have earned.

I also played a little Secret World Legends, which is something I seem to do just about every day… or at the very least I am logging in to get the rewards. I am not completely sold on the game but I am enjoying it enough to keep showing up and experiencing it. The combat feels fresh enough to make going through a bunch of quests I did long long ago feel worth it. My key complaint however is the game still does a piss poor job of clearly identifying which quests you have completed and which ones you have not. That was one of my biggest problems with the game is to log in and roam around through a sea of cutely named quests… that all sort of blend together in my head making it impossible to sort out if I have or have not completed them. This was even worse when it came to expansion content going into the game, and blending in among all of those other quests that I did a year ago. So far blade and elemental is fun enough, but I find myself really missing the shotgun… and with the way gear levels up in this game I feel like I am really not in a great place to switch gears at any point soon. I do have an extremely low level shotgun sitting in my inventory and I might try swapping it out at some point soon just to see if it is viable. I’ve moved on to the Savage Coast but there is honestly still a lot in Kingsmouth that I have never really gotten around to completing. My biggest complaint overall is as compared to the original… the drop rates of anything meaningful in the world is nonexistent. All of your gear seems to come from lootbags gained through doing quests… so I have a feeling that a big part of the “endgame” is going to be repeating quests on the daily reset to get more stuff to fuse into your gear. That doesn’t really bode well for those players that are not a big fan of grindy mechanics.