Tales of the Aggronaut

Nomad Valet Service

April 10, 2017 by Belghast

This weekend was a fun one, and not because I did anything special… but more for the absence of anything planned. Saturday we got up fairly early, and ran errands. I had been putting off going to the eye glasses place since getting my prescription, and I guess I was doing so for good reason. Bifocals are extremely expensive. I priced out a set of daily wear and a set of sunglasses and it was going to be almost $800. That is just straight up ludicrous for eyewear… but it is a carnival of errors that adds up in a final price. I have an insanely strong prescription which generally means I need some of those double super bonus lenses with all of the bells and whistles to keep the thickness down. Then when you combine that with the fact that this time around they were going to be adding bifocals and a prism… shit got crazy really fast. Instead I opted to wait… since my Optometrist said I was really on the borderline as to whether or not they would actually benefit me. So I opted to think about it… and wound up just ordering more single vision glasses for the moment from Zenni optical. I have a feeling that I am going to have enough trouble getting adjusted to the prism… that I am not sure if I want to further complicate things with bifocal lenses this time. However I guess when it comes time to renew I will be going for the vision insurance since that at least will hopefully dent that blow.

As far as the rest of the weekend… we cleaned the house like mad when we got home from errands and this largely freed me up to be able to just chill the hell out upstairs with a cat on either side playing some Andromeda. I have to say I love that I ultimately have two cats on my desk most of the time… I have blankets on either side of the keyboard and it isn’t super long before I have attract both Allie our eldest cat, and Kenzie our middle cat. Hell right now as I am writing this post at 6 in the morning… I already have Allie crashed out on the blanket to the right of my keyboard. She will probably sit there in that state for a bit longer until she decides it is time for food and starts prancing back and forth in front of my keyboard. As far as gaming went… I am so deep into Andromeda at this point. All told I am nearly 70 hours into the game and I have been stalling moving the main story forward until I can complete all of the side stuff. As I learn more about the universe… I am starting to feel like maybe this is a better game than the original trilogy. I know that is going to be a controversial statement. I will however add the qualifier of “for me” to the statement, because personally the original trilogy hit a high point with the second game and Andromeda is really structured in a similar fashion. It involves going off on small missions with your team to effect the world in subtle ways. The game play itself feels like this amalgam of Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect, namely the way that KOTOR used to let you roam around planets in what felt like at the time a free manner.

This free roaming nature is for good and bad… like the fact that I never seem to park my Nomad in a reasonable way as I hurriedly hit the E button as I roll up on the next combat vignette. In this case I literally had to jump and try and hit E to re-enter in order to get back in after finishing the remnant site. Side note the N7 armor is still probably the coolest design in Mass Effect, and the Andromeda logo especially will never be quite as cool as it. At this point I am I believe level 43, and I think in truth the game probably expected me to be done with it ages ago. There is a lot of sadness about to happen however, because with the deluxe edition I got a set of really awesome Pathfinder weapons. I’ve become very close with my Pathfinder Auto Rifle, and every time I leveled into a new bracket the next pattern was magically available for development. This has been the biggest resource sink for me as I made one of these each time it was possible. However it seems like you stop getting patterns at Tier 5… and I am not really looking forward to the prospect of trying to find a new auto rifle crush. I am hoping that one of these patches fixes this and lets me keep making my little Pathfinder auto rifle friends. For the moment I am going to be getting my hands on other types of rifles and trying out which seems to fit best for that archetype. In a way it reminded me of the way that Red Death feels in Destiny… and while this game calls it an auto rifle… by Destiny terms it would be a pulse rifle. Whatever the case I am slowing wrapping up some of the loyalty missions because before I start moving the priority ops again I want to make sure I have access to all of the toys.

The weirdest part about this play through is that I am playing in a fashion that I never really thought I would. For the most part I have maxed out a number of the weapon abilities and all of the passive benefit traits. From there I am largely playing a “pet class” for lack of a better term. I am using the turret which I find insanely handy, and my common MO is to open the door to a base… chunk a turret in and then back out to safety as I let it soften the defenses before ducking back in and mopping up. In addition to the turret I am regularly using the hacked observer that PeeBee gives you access to, and letting it loose to run amok. These two things often times distract the enemy and I can pick them off with headshots from either the auto rifle if medium range, or sniper rifle if extreme ranges. For up close and personal action… I have shockwave with the knock back that can clear out a bunch of things rushing at me. In truth it is more of a jack of all trades build than any deep synergy between abilities… but it is also tailored to some of the things that I like from other games. In the Borderlands series I have almost exclusively played whatever character could use auto rifles and turrets. While I like getting up close and personal in most games… in shooters I tend to relish hanging out in that medium range with the ability to duck behind cover. Lately however I have gotten into using my Asari sword to slice and dice Kett in close quarters… so maybe that medium range thing is shifting. Whatever the case… I spent so much time with Andromeda this weekend and the game just keeps getting better as I get further into it. While the game might have started out awkwardly… it really feels like it is going to finish in style.

Boosts and Buffs

April 7, 2017 by Belghast

I’ve officially reached the point in the Diablo 3 season where I can straight up wreck at least early torment content, which means… I can boost my friends. Last night I snagged Byx, Ammo and Sol and drug them through a few Nephilim rifts until they came out level 70s on the other side. In truth I am rather horrible at boosting people… I tend to overclear because my tank instincts kick in and I desperately want to protect my fledgling charges. So that means that the individual Rifts probably take way longer than they should. However it also means if you are being boosted by me… you are not only walking away with levels but also with a sizable amount of cash and gems. Sadly the loot is functionally meaningless until you hit 70. However since Byx was way ahead of the rest of the crew I am pretty certain she walked with some decent loot as well. The funny thing with writing about how much I was not feeling this season… is that it actually made me really want to play. The moment I posted the blog post I logged in and did a solo greater rift before heading into work that day, and each night since I have at least spent a little bit of time playing. After the boostery, I connected with Grace and we did a couple of rounds of bounties since we were both in desperate need of the crafting materials. I technically have everything that I need gear wise apart from one legendary gem, and a single ring…. but everything could be improved by getting some ancients which have been in short supply thus far.

After playing some Diablo 3 on the laptop, I decided to go upstairs and check out the latest patch for Mass Effect Andromeda. All in all there have been a lot of subtle improvements to the way that the character models look. In truth I think there are a bunch of improvements to the game in general because the worlds just feel better looking. This might of course be the placebo effect, and because they said they patched…. it is making my brain desperately want to see the improvements. However at the very least my Ryder and all of the characters I am interacting with seem more normal looking. The Botox face is largely gone… and the fully open surprise eyes seems to be gone as well. I am pretty pleased with the results because this little bit of window dressing has fixed a lot of my gripes about the game. On the other side of the equation on non-cosmetic changes… the general inventory increases are also amazing. I feel like I am no longer needing to deconstruct items in the middle of a planet rather than waiting for me to be back on my ship. Similarly the ability to tab out of the flight animations while in a solar system makes that just work better, and I am wondering if there is some option I can check in the settings to default to disabled so I don’t need to hit tab.

I put a few hours in last night and in truth probably played about thirty minutes longer than I should have… for my sanity… and my sleep patterns. I really like this game and It definitely is up in the game of the year territory for me. The problem there is… so is Zelda Breath of the Wild and Horizon Zero Dawn… and all of those were released in the first quarter of the year. I guess in a way I am extremely thankful for all of these games, because with the way the real world is turning out… this seems to be the golden age of escapism. It is comforting to be able to lose yourself in a deep and rich game, and completely forget that the world is apparently on fire and someone replaced the fire extinguisher with a can of easy cheese. There are just so damned many quests that I have picked up and that are littering my inventory that I need to spend one entire night trying to burn those down before I move forward. I will probably always be grossly over-leveled for the content as a result… but whatever I have my trust Rank V Pioneer Gun. I just gotta say that once I stumbled onto the weapons provided by the DLC… or more so I stumbled onto how to GET the DLC items… I fell in love with the Auto Rifle. Yes I keep giving mine bizarre names because I’ve had to craft each after the first one…. but whatever it is a freaking awesome gun. More importantly… Ashgar can be happy that I have finally moved on past the Avenger.

Thoughts on Switch

April 6, 2017 by Belghast

It has been a week or so since I got my Switch and I felt like I wanted to talk a bit about it this morning. Firstly I really like this console and apart from the relatively low hardware specs and currently small games library, I have to say I think they are on to something. There are a lot of reasons why I have bounced off handheld consoles, but primarily they never really fit the way that I wanted to be playing games. In those brief moments where I needed the ability to play a portable gaming system… they have always been great. The problem being that does not match up with my default mode of play. Generally speaking, if I am somewhere I can be playing games… I am at home with my laptop, desktop and a slew of traditional consoles. Playing games on a larger screen just feels better than playing on the tiny screen in your hands that you ultimately hunch your shoulders and crane down your neck to be able to play comfortably. I have commented for some time that I wish I could play various mobile games on the television with an external controller hooked up to them. Now functionally you can do this with the Vita via the PSTV box… which is essentially a Vita for your television. However this is not exactly a great solution since you are not actually playing on the same system you are using portable… and unless your game supports cloud sync there really is no keeping progress between the vastly different platforms.

Nintendo is known for creating gimmick based systems and there are so many times that I wished they would abandon this and just create a true console generation killer. However they seem to be hung up on different ways of interacting with their games, but for me at least… I always wish I was simply using a traditional controller playing a traditional game. There are a whole slew of games that are functionally dead to me… because I hate the Wiimote and Nunchuck control scheme of the Wii. The Switch is still a gimmick console, but this time the gimmick actually works in its favor by letting the console be whatever I happen to need it to be at the very moment. Right now I am playing a significant amount of the time with the Switch docked into my console gaming set up in my office. This lets me kick back and play with either the pro controller or the detached joycons and get into a comfortable long haul position for gaming. However there are times when I would rather go lay down in the bedroom, because I am starting to wind down and really should probably be asleep already. The Switch allows me to undock and take it downstairs… and the fact that it is chargeable by USB type C lets me also charge it down there without the expensive of a second dock. If I would rather be downstairs because there is something on Television that I want to at least be in the same room with… I can either play it in handheld mode or prop the console up on my lap and play with detached joycons or even the pro controller once again.

Functionally the Switch is at least in part what I had hoped the Wii U would be. Before owning one, I envisioned being able to play games on a big screen and when I wanted to head to bed grab the gamepad and use that instead. The big problem there is that the short range of the gamepad made it impossible to really do this. For awhile I had a compromise of having the Wii U hooked up in the bedroom, but when I wanted to play the thing in “console” mode that left me from a really comfortable way to play. Sitting up with one leg hanging off the bed and zero back support does not exactly make for a comfortable gaming experience for long periods of time. Nor did any combination of propping pillows up against the backboard and instead I found myself either laying down completely and playing with the gamepad or playing in short bursts with constant switching of positions trying to get comfortable. What was sad about this is the fact that I really wanted to keep enjoying Nintendo games… but the systems they were providing me to play them on really never matched up with the way I wanted to play anymore. The Switch while it has its quirks really does being Nintendo gaming back into an era where I care about it again on anything other than a theoretical and cursory level. The only problem is… right now my Switch is a Zelda Breath of the Wild machine… and occasionally a Shovel Knight machine, and there just are not a lot of the games that I wish I could be playing on it.

What I am hoping is that we start seeing a bunch of titles ported to it, and I am hoping that Nintendo can somehow cross the Blue versus Green barrier and pull some titles from both camps. I personally would love to see Persona 4 Golden released on the Switch given how hard I bounced off that on the Vita. I think in theory I might be able to hook up the PSTV upstairs in my console configuration and be able to enjoy the experience, because the truth is I just never liked using my Vita enough to be playing it for extended periods of time. I largely bought it as a remote screen for playing Destiny in bed, which is sad to say but true. Thankfully I got it for less than $100 from one of my Craigslist deals, so I don’t necessarily feel super bad about that either. The other thing that I am absolutely dying for is the Virtual Console… sure I imagine Nintendo is going to make us repurchase things, but in truth I don’t much care. The Switch really is the ideal system for playing classic games on because of its extreme convertibility. I also really want to see the Pokemon titles get ported to the platform, given that more or less I have bounced pretty hard off of each of those at some point… because I simply didn’t want to play a handheld for long periods of time. I also really want Castlevania Symphony of the Night on the platform… which is something admittedly that probably won’t happen but I sorta buy it on every platform it comes out on. More than that though the Virtual Console is going to hopefully bring a whole slew of other Castlevania games to the platform which might be good enough for me. Basically I see so much promise for this system… and now it is just a waiting game for companies to figure out how to port games to it… and hoping that Nintendo largely doesn’t get in the way of its success and fuck this up.

Mechanics: The Fight

April 5, 2017 by Belghast

In our continued trend of being months behind the curve and happy about it… last night we worked again on Thordan Ex. We jokingly refer to this fight as “Mechanics: The Fight” because it this weird amalgam of every mechanic from binding coil and a mix of new ones. This is a prime example of what I think of as the archetypal Final Fantasy XIV fight… where it relies on you memorizing a DDR like pattern and then everyone in the party completing that pattern flawlessly. That however is not exactly the sort of fight our group excels at. When we go up against a “managing sheer chaos” style fight, we tend to be able to pull those out as one shots. However when you ask us to memorize and execute a specific pattern… it takes forever for us to memorize the dance. I am especially bad at pattern matching and memorization… and as one of the primary tanks this is not exactly a great thing. We did however get to the point last night where we were getting everyone through the dive bomb phase and through the meteor phase. There is a whole lot of bullshit that happens at the tail end of the fight and we were noticing that things started to completely fall apart during the pillars phase…. so I feel like if we can get through that… we can get through the rest of the fight. I also feel like this is the sort of fight that once the pattern is learned and beat into our brains… we will be able to execute it pretty flawlessly from that part out. Which is a good thing… because there are a lot of us that would like to farm birbs.

Speaking of Birbs…. I can now poop chocobos. Right now the Hatching-Tide event is going on in Eorzea, which sort of serves as the Easter celebration. Lets be fair… that like so many Eorzean Holidays… Hatching-Tide is mostly nonsense. The yearly event usually revolves around eggs and spriggans… that often times steal the eggs or somehow interact with the eggs. None of this really matters however because the important part is the fact that this year there is a mount. You can ride around on a giant floating egg… and ejects a baby Chocobo on command. So I think most of us that completed the event spent a good deal of the evening riding around on eggs and hurling chocobos at people. This is a prime example of why I love this game so much at times, because it is just down right absurd. There are so many “why not” moments that the game has where they put silly things in the hands of the players… who then do things like create Fat Chocobo parades. In Idyllshire last night there were a whole slew of people trying to synchronize the ejecting of Chocobos… which is an extremely aptly named place now that I think of it since so many people go there to Idle. For now I have fallen off the “get every class to 50” wagon but I hope to hop back on shortly. I just have too many games I want to be playing… and as a result am sort of playing all of them poorly.