Random Screenshots #4

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This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool.  Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content.  I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV.  I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest.  In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in.  Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be.  So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs.  Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night.  So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda.  It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive.  As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

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Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game.  This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone.  There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior.  The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks.  There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would.  I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks.  In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box.  Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard…  you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

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Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much.  I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to.  For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly.  As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes.  So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again.  This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance.  This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up.  The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently.  The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

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Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV.  For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits.  What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK.  When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science.  At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive.  While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires.  If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best.  I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for.  All of this…  was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.

Cars and Wielding Garbage

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I said this over the weekend and I feel like I need to reiterate it this morning.  For a little over a month my wife has been passively looking for a new vehicle.  When she hit 120,000 miles on her Pontiac Torrent all sorts of little things started failing.  The latest is a check engine light being caused by something in the engine emission filters… which in itself isn’t a huge deal apart from the fact that it disables remote start while the engine is in an error code.  So for a month now I have been receiving links to vehicles from my wife, and we’ve made a few ventures out to car lots to see what we think of various models.  There is an auto lot within a mile of the house that leaves all of the vehicles unlocked so that it is sort of a tradition to go there on Sunday when you to check out various vehicles unmolested by sales people.  There are a lot of vehicles that got marked off of the list simply because my knees would not fit underneath the dash, and some others the first time my wife test drove them.  We had narrowed things down to a half dozen different models, and one lot about an hour from where we live seemed to have all of them.  The irony is  that when we ultimately bought a vehicle…  it wasn’t even one that was on the short list.  The whole car buying experience thought feels foreign to me, and grossly outdated.  During this whole sequence of events we found out that no car lot has anything even resembling updated inventory on their website.  Its like this entire process is stuck somewhere back in the 1960s and never quite graduated to modernity.

My wife and I are both very data-centric people…  and actively reject the “personal touch” that car salesmen try and put on the deal.  Fortunately we maybe found the perfect sales person for us, who literally just handed us the keys to the vehicles we wanted to check out and left us completely alone to wander around the small town.  Over the course of the day we drove I think five different vehicles, and spent a ton of time on our phones researching each of them while sitting in said vehicle.  The problem is… a vehicle seems to permanent.  We are not the type to trade them off frequently and instead tend to buy a vehicle and drive it until past the point it is paid off.  Finally it came down to a dance of “funny math” which is frustrating as shit.  Ultimately the dance involved the monthly payment rate, and a thin line in the sand that we were not willing to budge off of, which meant that in order to seal the deal given that we were not trading in a vehicle…  that the dealership had to come down off the price a bit.  There was a funny sequence of events where the dealer and my wife were both on their phones using the exact same financing calculator app trying to reach a consensus of numbers.  Whatever the case we wound up buying, after an  entire day of looking at this one lot…  and made it home just in time for the AggroChat podcast.

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The other big happening of the weekend is that I now have Zelda Breath of the Wild in my grubby little hands.  No that does not mean I have a switch, but instead have been playing it on the Wii U.  The screenshots I will be posting are not mine, but instead ones I have scavenged from the internet, because I do not have my Wii U set up so that it can go through a capture card… and I have never quite figured out how the hell to take a screenshot on the console itself.  Even more so I have no clue how to POST a screenshot someplace I can actually snag it if I did take a screenshot.  I have to say I have really mixed emotions about this game, and in truth I have barely just scratched the surface.  I’ve cleared two of the early plateau shrines and have been trying to figure out how to get to a third one that is in a snowy region.  Any time I get close to it, I start taking ticks of damage from the cold…  and this is the point where I realized that there was a temperature gauge in the UI.  The first hurdle that I have been trying to get past is the controls themselves.  The default mapping of buttons is not that great to use… with jump being assigned to X at the top of the button layout… where I am much more used to it being B at the bottom of the button layout.  This however apparently is something you can fix, but the other problem is I am so used to using triggers as weapon attacks in modern games and keep accidentally throwing whatever weapon I have equipped when I accidentally hit the right bumper.

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The other big problem I have been having is that so far the game has the “Halo problem” for me.  What I mean by that is that in Halo you have to constantly keep switching off weapons and wind up using some absolutely trash to try and progress through levels.  The same thing is happening here… where a given weapon seems to last maybe one or two combat sequences before it breaks and I have to hurriedly swap to some other random piece of junk I picked up along the way.  I’ve killed plenty of things by beating it down with a skeleton arm and I am not super proud of it.  This is a Zelda game… I want to use a sword and a shield and until the game gives me some sort of permanent option for this I am not going to be terribly happy.  It gave me a foresters axe early on… and I loved that weapon…  right up until the point that it broke and now I feel like I am constantly robbed of the amount of fun I had using it.  My fear is that I am going to bounce pretty soon if the game does not end up giving me some unlimited durability weapons that I can just use as often as I like.  As far as the goods however… once I got used to the clunky controls it does in fact feel like an open world Zelda.  I like that I can choose my own battles and that I see enemy camps usually well ahead of them actually attacking me.  There was a cool sequence where there were a bunch of bow wielding characters up in a tower with no visible way to get up.  However there was a draw bridge and I was able to sever the ropes holding it up with arrows causing it to fall down below and giving me access.  This is a primary example of the sort of visual puzzle solving that seems to be going on in this game, and the early shrines I believe are teaching you a toolbox that can then be used later in the game to solve more complex puzzles.  I do however absolutely want to stab the “Old Man” or at least push him off the tower, because I find him really annoying.

Garula Is Mad

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Tonight I am sitting down to knock out a blog post because in the morning I will be interrupting my routine.  Tomorrow night my wife and I will be going to see the a stage production of the Wizard of Oz and it is going to simply be much handier to have a single vehicle.  However this also means that I have to get up and out the door considerably earlier than I normally would.  On an average day I leave the house around 7 and tomorrow that deadline is getting pushed up before 6:30.  There is no way I can get showered and ready and write a blog post all within that time frame so you are getting something tonight.  I was a bit all of the place putting time in Final Fantasy XIV, Horizon Zero Dawn and Final Fantasy XV.  All of them were enjoyable in their own way but much like last night…  I was never fully committed to any of them.  I think I am trying to come down with something, because I have just felt drained and hollow at the end of the day.

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The highlight of the night however was hanging out on Spiral/Weiward’s Twitch channel as she played Final Fantasy V.  The entire AggroChat crew has a very specific relationship with Final Fantasy V.  The game I believe is among Ash’s favorites in the series, and as a result we get roped into participating in the Four Job Fiesta every year.  I’ve talked about the charity event numerous times, but the roots are that you play Final Fantasy V with only a randomly chosen set of jobs.  The truth is I have never actually played Final Fantasy V legitimately, having only beaten it while doing the Fiesta.  That said it was super interesting to watch Spiral struggle with some of the same things we have all struggled with in confronting this game.  The best part of the night however is when she started having the same realizations that a lot of us have… about the deep connections between a lot of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavenward content and characters and settings from V.  You can be absolutely certain that when the Fiesta time comes around again, we will be pestering Spiral to join in the fun.

Many Games! Handle It!

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Last night was a bit of an odd one, in that I did not get out of work until after 6 pm and did not get home until almost 7 pm.  The series of meetings that I have been thrust into on Wednesday nights has been a thing, and there seems to be no end to them in the near future.  By the time I finally got home I was feeling fairly lousy, and after fixing dinner for wife and I didn’t really feel like doing much.  I sort of melted into the couch and attempted to do a little gaming on the laptop, but before I realized it I was falling asleep.  My wife seemed to be going through the same thing and by the time I headed to bed around 8 pm she was completely dead to the world on the couch and unwakeable without going through an excessive amount of effort.  So I left her sleeping there and crashed…  only to wake up just shy of 1 am due to the cats getting into a bit of a tussle.  I stumbled into the kitchen to take some meds because I was still feeling generally lousy, and around that point in my sleepy fumbling I dropped a pill blister on the floor that miraculously roused sleeping beauty.  So we attempted to head to bed while not waking up enough to make falling right back to sleep a chore.  Thankfully after about thirty minutes of “adjusting” I got right back to sleep and was not woken again until my watch “pre-alarm” started going off.  Generally speaking my smart watch makes me up by buzzing taps about a minute ahead of our insanely annoying alarm on the other side of the room…  giving me a bit of a gentle rousing before the crash of reality hits with the elder machination.

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The challenge I am struggling with right now is there are just too damned many games I want to play.  For starters thanks to a whole slew of reasons I have yet to be Final Fantasy XV.  As I said the other day I am between two decisions on this game… do I force myself to push ahead and play the game in a manner that I do not feel enjoyable, or do I keep piddling away at it in my own manner and make the most of it?  So far I am leaning towards option two, and I am still very much enjoying this game.  Were this my ONLY game I probably would be considerably further in it, because in every manner it feels like a single player MMO to me, and I am sort of piddling around in it like I do an MMO.

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Then there is of course Horizon Zero Dawn, the new hotness that I want to spend all my time playing.  I wrote at length about my feelings regarding this game and it bummed me out that I didn’t feel okay with hanging out upstairs and playing it last night.  I felt largely out of sorts and the game does in fact require a modicum of coordination to land shots in the appropriate sweet spots.  As a result I opted against playing, but I still have a super strong drive to do so… and am hoping I will be feeling generally grand this evening and can return to exploring the much more opened world.

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Then there is of course Zelda Breath of the Wild which should be arriving for my Wii U next Tuesday.  I am not really sure why the delay but in truth I am a bit thankful for it.  I’ve opted against getting a Switch on launch day, because really there is just this one title that I would want to play on it.  In theory I will be happy enough playing it on the Wii U because all I really want to do is explore the world and get my Zelda on once again.  That said the major problem is… it is once again another big game stacked on top of a pile of already big games.

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Another big game that is now sitting in my Steam Library waiting to be installed is Torment Tides of Numenera.  The funny thing about Kickstarter games is that when they finally release… they sort of sneak up on you.  I just looked it up in gmail, and my original backing of this game was on March 6th of 2013, and almost four years later it finally shows up.  The problem with Torment however is that it is also waiting in line behind another similar title… Tyranny which I also have yet to finish.  Spoiler alert, Tyranny will be the March AggroChat game club title, so one way or another I will be finishing that one off in the coming weeks.  However I really only want to have one classic PC RPG sitting waiting in the wings at a time, so for the moment Torment will sit there waiting.

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Then there is of course the next Mass Effect game which releases somewhere towards the end of March.  I am hoping and praying that this will not be another Dragon Age Inquisition, where it is a Bioware experience that I just could not get into for whatever reason.  Generally speaking I like the Mass Effect series way better than I do Dragon Age, because overall the games have been a much more even handed experience for me.  My favorite in the series is Mass Effect 2, but I still find it super easy to get enjoyment out of both the original and the third installment.  I’ve played through the entire sequence several times as well, and they still have lots of great replayability for me personally.  I am hoping that Andromeda just adds to that experience, but once again it is a HUGE game… landing at almost exactly the same time as everything else.

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Then in the summer we have Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind… which lands June 6th and looks awesome.  The only problem there however is that I know the experience is going to get overshadowed by the launch of another MMO expansion.  However this post is more a placeholder saying that I would absolutely LOVE to wrap up the other content, or at least make a dent in it before Morrowind officially lands.

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Finally we have Stormblood… the Final Fantasy XIV expansion that is certain to overshadow literally anything else that is going on at that time.  It launches June 20th and is going to ultimately spawn a feeding frenzy of leveling through both the new story and content and beginning all of the things that come with a proper expansion.  Essentially this is also a line in the sand…  that I basically need to have completed any of the games that I mentioned above before we reach this point in the year or I am simply not going to get around to it for several months.  I am certain that I have left some things off of the list, but it seems like there are just an awful lot of big gaming experiences landing next to each other that I really want to play.  What I mean by “big gaming” is that each of these is a massive game featuring more gameplay that a person could reasonably sit through in a day or two.  With a shooter for example, you have a linear story arc that follows a sequence of levels until you finally reach the crescendo in the final boss fight. Each of the games on my list however is an RPG with meandering and character progression… all of which for me at least can take hundreds of hours of gameplay rather than tens of hours.  For the moment however… I am going to keep juggling FFXV and Horizon and see where I can make it progress wise.  However I still feel like I am drowning in too many good games to play at once and the fear of missing out…  is tangible.