Tales of the Aggronaut

Bel’s Fake Game Awards

January 3, 2017 by Belghast

This break has been a bit of an odd one… namely because I have completely screwed up a few times and failed to blog. Even worse… I forgot I forgot to blog. It is as though I have been in a bit of a weird time warp where I lived a bit separate from the rest of the world for awhile. So instead of being connected like I usually am… everything has just sort of flown over the top of me without ever really sinking in. I have not been logging into MMOs hardly at all… and when I did it was for a specific focused purpose rather than just hanging out there. The break has been about falling into a number of game shaped holes… including Destiny, Minecraft, Bloodborne, and most recently Tyranny. However today represents the beginning of me trying to get into the swing of things. I technically have two full days left… well not full given that its 9 am when I am finally getting around to writing this morning. However it is time for me to do my sham of an attempt at an Awards Show… that I started last year, where the categories really don’t exist and no one actually wins.

Something Is Missing

Recently in the name of better health and that whole tradition of trying to start the New Year off right… my wife and I have been spending a lot more time walking. One of the things I greatly miss that was a huge part of my life during 2016… is Pokemon Go. One of the updates essentially screwed me over and locked me out at least semi-permanently from playing the game. The Google Safety check… seems to think my phone is rooted even though it is not. My only work around is to actually root my phone and install one of the many applications that will hide root from Pokemon Go… defeating the entire purpose of their safety check. However I am reaching a point where I really want to play the game… and I might just resort to this. Essentially this game was a good chunk of my year… or at least I was obsessive about it for two months. Pokemon Go did something that no game really has… made me care about mobile as a gaming platform and as a result it should get a significant shout out.

You Can’t Go Back

For the AggroChat Game Club, we tend to pick a game for both November and December… since once you take the holidays into account… you really have a single functional month. Last year the game that spanned the two was Fallout 4, and this year Grace chose Diablo 2 as her pick. At first I was all about this because I have some seriously rose colored lenses about this game and my memory of it. I remember trying to see who could get through all of Act V in a single lunch break, and so many farming runs to see if we could get the coveted set pieces. However on replay… I have changed drastically in my tastes since this game released, and while I was on the Diablo 3 doesn’t feel right bandwagon initially… I have evolved. Diablo 2 now feels like a grindy mess of a click fest with very little carrot and a hell of a lot of stick. So I am honestly wishing I had NOT replayed the game… and could leave it sitting happily in my memory untouched. My recent experiences… are proof of that adage that sometimes you can’t go back home.

But Maybe Sometimes You Can

wow-64-2016-12-28-20-36-59-91 — World of Warcraft: Legion

Saying that however… there are apparently times when you can go home and enjoy yourself in the same ways you used to. There was a period of time when I was convinced that Warcraft would always only tangentially matter to me. That I mourned a time and a place and a specific group of people that were long going and could likely never been aligned and arranged in the same pattern again. I’ve devoted a lot of digital ink to this lament throughout the years… and then Legion comes along and proves me to be completely full of shit. I am not exactly sure what it is about this expansion but for the first time in seven years… I feel more hope for the game ahead of me… than nostalgia for the time that has long passed. I thought I was done raiding in World of Warcraft… and instead I am actively raiding three times a week… one night of progression, one night of farmed content, and an amazing karazhan team. I am super happy with the state of the guild, and the game… and how far we have come. I am amped about the prospects of starting Nighthold on time when it releases… and while I have not spent much of this break in game it still very much feels like home. While I still have issues with some of the disjointed feeling of the forced faction storyline at times in Legion… the bulk of the content is amazing and just seems to keep getting more interesting.

But Sometimes It Doesn’t Last

The other subtext of the year is how I have apparently fallen out of love with Final Fantasy XIV. We made an attempt to get the band back together and start raiding once more… and it worked amazingly for awhile. Honestly the Free Company is still an active and happy place… just with myself not really playing much of a role in it. I keep thinking that it will be fun to return… but I knew something was a miss when I started completely blowing off the holiday events that I used to love so much. Now I am significantly behind in gear and in story… and it is going to take a significant push to catch back up. This push however is just something that I have not been willing to do as of yet. I am excited about Stormblood… but nowhere near as much as I was prior to the launch of Heavensward. I guess the scale of Heavensward felt limited… with two dungeons per patch instead of three, and that alone wore on me. When you are grinding two dungeons in an expert tier… it gets super old really fast. They have since added in other content to occupy time like the deep dungeon… but it also feels extremely grindy in nature. I know at some point I will return and happily do so… but in the meantime I have simply not been forcing myself to log in and play a game I was not entirely into.

With Guns Blazing

The real winner of the year as far as my total time spent… I feel is probably Destiny. This game has gone from being something that never quite clicked…. to turning into a game that I obsessively play on an almost nightly basis. Over the break I spent a good chunk of my time playing “Not-Wipeout” and participating in the Sparrow Racing League. I managed to hit the currently light cap of 400, and instead of it diminishing my desire to play… it seems to have only spurred me on further trying to get infusion fodder to upgrade all of my favorite items. I cannot tell you how much being able to bring my favorite weapons from Year 2… into Year 3 has improved the game for me. Traditionally MMO items are just stat sticks with a look and a feel… and cosmetic systems make it so that you can look however you want therefor really negating any need to keep using older items. Destiny however… your items have a feel and a purpose and greatly effect the gameplay. I have guns that I love… that feel amazing to use… that I cannot actually quantify in words as to why. For example I love the Fabian Strategy… even though I technically have far superior legendary items that don’t eat my single exotic weapon slot. I just feel sorry for my friends who are casually interested in the game… because I go from zero to “let me show you my pokemans” in a frighteningly short amount of time.

Bad Christmas Was A Bust

TheDivision 2016-03-09 19-09-27-97 — The Division

This time last year… I was looking forward to the impending launch of The Division. I thought this game would end up being my new Destiny, and even better so because it allowed me to get the sort of gun play and looter shooter action I craved without having to resort to consoles. Unfortunately that was not the case and I never actually made it to the level cap. Going into Division I thought I would have a strong community to support me… but one by one my friends checked out quickly for a lot of reasons not directly connected to the game play. Largely they objected to the themes… and enough so that at least one of them immediately turned around and refunded the game through steam. I could have reached outside of my circle of friends and found new communities… but I was left with the awkward situation that my PS4 clan was of course playing on that platform and that I just didn’t really want to have to pester folks to play with me on the PC side. As a result I solo’d a hell of a lot… and reached a point where to progress at the speed I wanted to progress I needed some people with me. There was also the technical problem that I just don’t really like playing a third person over the shoulder shooter nearly as much as I enjoyed playing Destiny. Even more than that… the thing that was missing was the futurism of Destiny weapons. None of the guns felt any different than any other gun to me… so ALL SMGs felt the same, ALL LMGs essentially felt the same etc… they were more stat sticks than something that felt unique or individual. I still hold hope that at some point that I will be able to get back into the game and push the last bit to hit the level cap and start doing interesting content.

Awesome But Not My Deal

Overwatch 2016-06-21 23-03-33-56 — Overwatch

Sometimes there is a game that I am way more into the game world… and the lore than actually playing it. This is very much the case with Overwatch. I love the characters, and all of the storyline that is coming out surrounding the game… and while I enjoy playing the game in small bursts it just never seems to be the game I choose to play on any given night. As a result I am something ridiculous like level 6… and have only logged a few hours in total playing the game. I think much like with League of Legends… I would enjoy playing with a team of friends… but then you run into the issue of getting bored with bots… and not having the chops or desire to learn them to play against other pre-made teams. I also tend to be most happy when I am playing Torbjorn, but always end up playing Reinhardt or Mercy because I end up getting randomed into a team full of Hanzos and Genjis. I wish I had the burning desire to play this game because I love everything about its world and what it is doing with its narrative. In truth I find myself mourning the game it could have been… back when it was originally slated to be a new MMO. I would to play a Destiny like game… set in the Overwatch universe.

Games Played 2016 Edition

December 30, 2022December 30, 2016 by Belghast

First I want to take a quick moment to talk about the awesome avatar adorning the right side of this paragraph. Some time ago I talked about doing the Icecrown Challenge and to the best of my knowledge most of the folks I challenged have since completed their own and donated some money to the cause. I still feel slightly sorry for Mort who ended up taking almost 50 minutes to get through the raid because had apparently never actually raided during Wrath of the Lich King. I did the challenge because one… I end up doing Icecrown Citadel almost every week anyways, and two because of the weird connection that Ratsel and I just found out that we have. Then of course there is always the part that it is a good cause. Of all of the reasons however… none of them was to win any prizes but apparently I did. The prize I happened to win was the amazing Faebelina doing an avatar, and instead of my character I chose to have her do a “Me”. So I supplied her some images and set her loose in a specific direction… and largely wanted to see what she came up with on her own. The end result is something really interesting that so far everyone has said “yup, that looks like you”. In the end though I really need to get the hat, hoodie and shirt so I can cosplay myself. I am mostly using it on my “real life” accounts but I wanted to show it off nonetheless because I think it is really cool.

Full Spreadsheet Link

Last year I realized that with the whole daily blogging thing that I had a decent way of telling exactly what games I had played during the year. Like I often do I took to Google Sheets and started a spreadsheet trying to track what games I played during what months. This year I went sorta overboard with that concept and you see the image above as a result. Essentially if I talked about a game during a given month… I put a 1 in that square and ultimately colored it it. Then in the last column I did a calculation that added up all of the months that a given game appeared in… and as a result you have the sort above… by number of months played and then alphabetically. The first thing we can take away from this graphic is that there is no denying the fact that I am an online and MMO gamer. Based on the data above I played the following MMOs…

World of Warcraft – All Twelve Months
Destiny – 10 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 10 Months
Rift – 8 Months
Diablo 3 – 6 Months
The Division – 5 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 4 Months
Overwatch – 4 Months
ArcheAge – 3 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 3 Months

As far as non-online games that I played… you end up dropping down significantly into single digit territory with only a handful of games like Fallout 4, Skyrim, and No Man’s Sky making that repeat list. The big shocker for me is always seeing all the various singlets I end up playing throughout the year that I completely forget about. All told I played 57 different games during the year… which seems like a lot but is a bit down from last year and it’s 67 unique games. So I feel like the real tale of the year is just how much World of Warcraft and Destiny I wound up playing. Sure FFXIV is up there at 10 months but some of that is a technicality while I was subbed but only logging in once a week or every few weeks. Destiny and World of Warcraft really were constant things throughout the course of the year. This was the year I feel like I really learned to love WoW again, more than just a passing fancy that let me play with my friends. With the launch of Legion I was legitimately and unabashedly happy to be playing the game for the first time since the launch of Cataclysm. In fact Destiny dropped off the Radar only for the blip around the launch of Legion because I was just playing that game so damned much.

Even More Madness

Full Spreadsheet Link

The problem with spreadsheets is that they crave more data… and once I start down a path I tend to go into really insane territory. I had data that I had collected for 2015, and now data that I had collected for 2016. I wondered what would happen if I went all the way back to 2013, the year I first started the daily blogging experiment. Now of note… the 2013 data is super spotty given that I did not officially start the daily blogging thing until April. However I managed to piece together some data based on my archive of screenshots mixed with actual data from the blog. The end result is a view of the games I have played since 2013 copied into my weird google sheets format. Once again you can see that I really am an MMO Gamer overall. The top ten games played in total number of months is as follows…

World of Warcraft – 37 Months
Final Fantasy XIV – 35 Months
Rift – 35 Months
Elder Scrolls Online – 24 Months
Destiny – 19 Months
Diablo 3 – 16 Months
ArcheAge – 13 Months
Wildstar – 12 Months
Everquest II – 11 Months
Guild Wars 2 – 9 Months
Trove – 9 Months

Of note… Trove and Guild Wars 2 are technically tied for 10th place with the same number of months. The only one that gets a little weird is Elder Scrolls Online, because I am counting time spent playing in the Alpha and Beta process which I could not of course talk about on my blog. However I entered that process in February of 2013 and we had one or two events a month through launch. During that four year period I played 172 different unique games. Again however if you look at the distribution of titles played… you have to go pretty far on the list until you get into single player territory with Minecraft, Fallout 4 and Final Fantasy V leading there. Minecraft technically can be a multiplayer game, but generally speaking I go on single player building binges. Final Fantasy V pretty much accounts for all of the years I have gotten talked into participating in the Four Job Fiesta thanks to Ashgar.

At some point I want to true up the data even further by going through my screenshot archive and sorting it by dates. I have literally every screenshot I have taken over the last several years archived and sorted by game sitting on a network attached storage device. I am maybe a little obsessive about such things, especially since screenshots tend to play such a large role in my blog. I like having a deep archive of things that I can go back to for getting reference material. From that I should be able to get a few more games that maybe I played but didn’t actually write about. However I think for the most part this represents a pretty true picture of my gameplay for the last four years. It took awhile to compile, but much of it was done while hanging out downstairs on the laptop as we watched something on television. The end result gives me a really interesting tool to use going forward, and I plan on keeping the spreadsheet up to date as I go through 2017. The biggest thing we can take away from this however is that… firstly I am a creature of habit and keep returning to the same games over and over. Secondly I tend to be one of those players that keeps returning to MMOs that I have played in the past to see how they are getting along. Lastly… I really do not play the number of single player games that I would like to play, mostly because while playing them I get lonely. It feels strange to roam around a world without lots of other people sharing it with me.

Tunneling Addiction

December 28, 2016 by Belghast

I think we need to talk. I have a significant problem on my hands… and that problem is Minecraft. What I mean by that is that I have been obsessing about the game since Christmas day, and wound up staying up until 1:30 last night. I apparently was digging more tunnels that never seem to end… and just when they appear that they might… I find a way to start a new one. I’ve said before how my bases in Minecraft tend to be more a complex of interconnected tunnels and underground areas than really anything big and above ground… and in truth that is happening again in a big way. The project I happened to be obsessed with last night, however was my treasure room.

When I play Minecraft, it is less that I am willfully building structures and more like discovering them in the existing land. I almost always start out exactly the same way… which is burrowing into the side of a nice large hill with the purpose of creating a temporary shelter to survive that first night. However what inevitably happens is that I then use that cave as a sort of starting point for burrowing deep into the hillside and connecting up a bunch of disconnected areas. Then it is almost as though I am uncovering a lost civilization… and connecting up pieces to create a former empire or something. Which lead to the thought that I really needed a proper warehouse/treasure room… and where better to put it than deep under the ocean. I have a dock of sorts and off of it is a large building hovering out over the water… which then leads to my obsession of the night which is a large stairwell shaft that leads down into the water and underground beneath the ocean finally ending up in a room with tons of chests for storage…. and then apparently I dug a shaft back up to create a skylight of sorts.

There was then a point last night when I realized that I had no real way of getting back out of my tunnel system other than jumping from one of the many bridges I have built. As a result I constructed this entrance point of sorts that leads out onto the mainland… and being me I then apparently started off a whole new tunnel complex to the left of the above screenshot. Now my previous tunnels had quickly ended up in the ocean… where I built some sort of an outpost. One of which literally is a staircase that goes deep down into the ocean and all the way down to bedrock. That was a bit of a challenge to build and I ultimately flipped on creative mode since I had to be underwater for large chunks of time during its construction. It is cool however because as you are going down the staircase I have windows that allow you to see out into the ocean and it is really cool when the sun is coming up and the water is swarming with squid.

This new tunnel project however that has consumed most of today… is apparently going off in a direction where there is nothing but land and mountains. So as a result each time the tunnel has broken free of the mountain briefly I have created a little outpost or at least an exit into whatever area happens to be surrounding it. There are roughly five of these… and another that I discovered yet another ravine while tunneling, so I took time to build a ladder all the way down to its floor. The problem with my tunneling obsession is that I have zero clue where exactly I am going or if I will ever reach a point where I consider it “done”. This is ultimately the challenge I face each time I boot back up Minecraft, is that I get caught up in a project that I never quite know when it is going to let go of me. However since it had literally been a few years since I last built anything in the game… I am guessing I had a lot of tunneling pent up inside of me.

A Shit Year for Idols

December 27, 2016 by Belghast

In the microcosm that is my life today was a pretty good one. My wife and I spent it running around Northwest Arkansas… more specifically the sprawling corridor that connects Fayetteville to Bentonville and all points between. We have family there and quite honestly… its just a nice place to go visit every now an then. We always say we should do it more often… but in truth we seem to get there once a year… almost exclusively over Christmas break. However while running around and enjoying myself… I was also processing the news that this asshole of a year 2016… took yet another awesome person from us. So now that I am finally home I thought I would write a thoroughly bummer post and talk about all of the amazing people we lost this year… or at least a small list of them.

@belghast its just a sign were getting older combined with the speed news can travel. this same kinda of thing happens every generation

— Squirrel Pope (@squirrelpope) December 25, 2016

The other day I commented about just how many people this year has stolen from us and my friend Squirrel gave some sage advice. Firstly that we are getting old, and that the people that are dying… are finally folks we looked up to as kids or at least came to know through out our lives. I remember my parents going through this same phase, and I guess it is my time. They now joke that they attend more funerals than anything else… and since I have gone through the “everyone is getting married” phase, and the “everyone is having kids” phase… I guess I am beginning to enter that territory as well. Since the Idols we grow up with tend to be a generation ahead of us… I guess that it makes sense we are entering that territory with them first. Tonight I am going to talk a little bit about some names that we lost this year.

David Bowie

This one hit me way harder than I expected it to. Bowie was one of those presences that always just sort of existed as a beacon that you could literally be anything you wanted to be. Throughout my life I watched this man re-invent himself every few years and still seem just as genuine in doing so as he did the very first time. He was a force of constant evolution that made me realize that we never had to stop growing as people. Tin Machine still will stand out as probably my favorite of his phases… but I can find something from literally every one of his phases that I can relate to.

Alan Rickman

Such an amazing actor that I am still pissed that this shitty year conspired to rob us of. Sure he was Snape, but before that he was Hans Gruber, the voice of god, a hair stylist, and so many other roles that always played out in unique and interesting ways. By Grabthar’s hammer, by the Sons of Warvan, you shall be avenged!

Garry Shandling

This is the theme to Garry’s show, the opening theme to Garry’s show… Garry called me up last night and asked if I could write his theme song. I grew up during that weird time during the early days of the Fox Network… and one of those early shows was the Garry Shandling show and I loved it so much. He has a sense of humor that seemed to match mine and he even played a great bad guy… as evidenced from Winter Soldier.

Prince

Now I am not the biggest Prince fan in the world, but no one can doubt how much of a force he was in music. So insanely talented, and even though he become the brunt of many punchlines during the era when he shifted to being an unpronounceable symbol, he managed to continue trucking on and making solid music. I guess the biggest thing about him is that he was an individual much in the same way as Bowie was, and served as this alternate focal point to say you could grow up to be any damned thing you wanted to be. All of his music holds up today in the same way as the day it was released.

Morley Safer

For me at least this man represented seasoned journalism in a way that probably few could. I grew up with him as the face and voice of so many stories on 60 minutes. In many ways it feels like the end of an era… and in this political cycle where the truth seemed not to matter much… we are far worse off for it.

Kenny Baker

This was the first of the Star Wars cast that we lost during 2016, and for those who might not know who he is… he was the actor behind R2-D2. For me he will always be Fidget from Time Bandits, or honestly a long slew of roles he played.

Gene Wilder

I am pretty sure if you did not like Gene Wilder you did not have a soul. He was the only Willy Wonka as far as I am concerned. There is an entire chunk of my childhood devoted to laughing at movies like Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein.

Leonard Cohen

So if anyone is going to single out a single song by Leonard Cohen… they are going to bring up Hallelujah. It has been covered time and time again… because in truth it is just that damned good. It would be hard to find a more perfect song in composition or lyrics that conveys a certain feeling of lost innocence and longing and still a tinge of hope for better things to come. I was late to know about him to be honest, because it was not until the Natural Born Killers soundtrack that I even knew he really existed. There was something about his voice however that was just so damned unique and intoxicating. I am personally partial to The Stranger Song.

Carrie Fisher

This one is possibly the hardest right now… because it is also the freshest. It is impossible to put into words or adequately explain how much Star Wars meant to me growing up. Luke and Leia were almost family members, and as those characters shifted into the very real world Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher they almost felt like the Aunt and Uncle you wish you had. There has been a certain pride as I followed each of their careers, and it was absolutely glorious and triumphant to see both in Force Awakens this time last year. Star Wars was the second movie I saw in my life… and in many ways it was the character of Princess Leia that taught me that Princesses didn’t really need saving in the first place. While that might sound cheesy it was a powerful lesson that I carried with me from that point on. The real Carrie Fisher though… was a freaking badass. I angrily shook my fist at 2016 when she had her heart attack and told it that the year could not have her. This year really is horrible, and I am saddened that it won.

There are so many others that I didn’t mention for one reason or another… but earlier I paged through a list of some hundred or so deaths this year… and so many of them were really important figures that we lost. With each one I think there was a certain feeling of “it can’t get any worse right?”… but no it continued to get worse as the year went on. I am ready to put a close to this chapter and hope the next year will start to get even the slightest bit better. In the immortal words of Ripley… take off and nuke the entire year from orbit… it’s the only way to be sure.