Tales of the Aggronaut

Getting Unstuck

June 23, 2016 by Belghast

Not-Castlevania

It has been an up and down week for kickstarter games. Namely I am talking about just how bad Mighty No. 9 has been received. I own this on the PS4, and while the gameplay itself is not too horrible… the biggest problem that I have is that it feels like an odd throwback to the GameCube. Which I guess makes sense given that the game has released on a silly number of systems including the 3DS, which makes me think that quite simply all console versions… are the 3DS version. The saddest part about this is at various points during its development cycle the game looked really good, but the end result is this lifeless mess of flat color. Now earlier in the day I had commented that this whole debacle over the “Not-Megaman” game made me extremely concerned about “Not-Castlevania” which is my not so subtle jab at the fact that so many of these kick-started games are simply recreations of whatever game made the developer famous in the first place. Almost as summoned from the abyss… I got an email with a key to the E3 version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which I didn’t even remember being part of the funding level I backed the game at.

It was a little late and I only played the demo long enough to get up to the first boss… I failed miserably at even coming close to defeating it namely because I entered the fight after a lot of backtracking. There are certain things that work extremely well, then there are others that I was largely confused about. The primary point of confusion is that for whatever reason I could not seem to get the game to do jump attacks… which are of course a staple of the Castlevania gameplay. I was playing on my PS4 controller which I happened to have hooked up at the time to my PC, and notoriously it tends to map things oddly, so I might give it a shot with the defacto Xbox 360 controller. As far as every other aspect of gameplay… this is very much the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, but done with cell shaded 3D models instead of 2D pixel art. It works, and it works well.. and gives you the feeling of the Castlevania art style. The game has some really strange creatures that you end up fighting, which is cool and something vastly different from the standard zombies and werewolves and vampires oh my genre. I am assuming that the demo leaves off after the boss fight that is pictured above, but nonetheless I am really happy to see this game at least appears to be still on the rails.

Catching Up

Last night I got drug into Final Fantasy XIV by Ash and Grace… and admittedly they didn’t have to pull too terribly hard. Largely they wanted to run some Void Ark, which is the thing that I needed to do to get caught up in gear levels. I am not sure why this was such an impassible obstacle mentally for me, because I had some serious anxiety about solo queuing for it. Memu had made an offer to help me out, but we failed miserably at coordinating a time to run it together… mostly because I fell into a Rift shaped hope and wasn’t around all that often over the last week. In any case all of my concerns were essentially for naught, because Void Ark is extremely easy…. but unfortunately not the gear bonanza I had hoped it would be. Over the course of the night I ran the Ark three times, two times with Ash and Grace and one time by myself later after getting back from a walk. In all of those boss kills I managed to get two pieces of gear… only one of which actually replacing a slot I had something lower in. I did however get plenty of Esoterics which allowed me to keep upgrading jewelry until a combination of the that and the Mhachi Farthings pushed me over the item level 200 barrier.

Ultimately I am probably going to keep running this place until I run out of slots to upgrade, and even then…. it is still a decent source of gear to help pull my Dragoon up in item level. I guess I am officially off high center, and soon I can pick back up the quest chain and at least be expert viable once more. My hope is that tonight, I can get together with Grace and run the new dungeons who now also needs them since she too broke the 200 barrier last night. I feel better about the game in so many ways considering how frustrating it was to hit this gear wall in the questing. I guess in truth this is something that never happened to me during 2.0, or at least once we got back and started really moving forward. We were always just good enough to keep pushing into the next set of dungeons, but at the same time I was also spending a ton more time grinding out tomestones to make sure I was the best possible tank I could be at all times. That is the piece that has been missing, because I really have not been able to push myself to do that the way I once was. As our little rag tag Tuesday night group is contemplating doing more “Real” content I guess that will start to matter significantly more in the coming weeks and months. Time to get over the hump and gear up a bit, and for the moment Void Ark seems like an easy place to do just that.

Tech Triage

June 22, 2016 by Belghast

Last night went a bit off the rails early on. Traditionally I participate in the Final Fantasy XIV pony farm night on Tuesdays, and every since I showed up and won two mounts on my return… I have felt committed to be there and help more folks get theirs. However last night something else happened that precluded that obligation. When I got home sitting on the coffee table was my shiny new GTX 980 graphics card. I managed to make it through dinner successfully, but as soon as that was over I was upstairs tearing into my case to install it. First however I had to clean said case out… it is shocking just how damned dusty a computer can get so I had to drag my vacuum upstairs. I could have of course done the canned air thing, but firstly it would have choked me up horribly and secondly… said dust would just eventually end up right back inside the computer case. So for a period of time that was probably way shorter than it seemed I meticulously cleaned off the vans and interior surfaces of the case with the vacuum wand.

I get the card seated and tightened into place, and the only real frustration was the two 8 pin connectors. My power supply doesn’t actually have 8 pins… but instead it has six pin connectors with this little two pin that you sort of wedge in beside it. Trying to guide two different connectors in at the same time is extremely maddening but with some effort I finished the job, all the while anxious to boot things up and see purty graphics. Now this is the point where things start to spin out of control. Firstly I am bad at doing windows updates… and in rebooting my computer I had a whole slew of them apparently queued up to install and thanks to the glory of Windows 10 you don’t really get a reprieve. You reboot your computer for any reason and by god they are going to take that moment of weakness to install every fucking thing under the sun. After a sequence of three or four reboots, Windows decided to do two things that were maddening. Firstly it decided to uninstall the lovely Nvidia drivers that should have worked just fine since I was going from a 960 to a 980… and instead installing its completely useless stock driver. Secondly after a sequence of reboots I loaded into a game… and quickly realized I had no audio.

Some time ago I purchased an Asus Xonar DG audio card, and I really have enjoyed it. It sounds significantly nicer than the default Realtek on-board audio, with the only negative being that on my current motherboard it is sandwiched right up against the video card. Windows jettisoned the drivers, and I didn’t even get a little angry “no audio device found” message when it tried to load the tray icon tool. The tray icon tool for the Xonar drivers was simply gone. I guess in the grand scheme of things this probably makes sense, because the Xonar drivers I was running were some unified third party drivers that fix the faults in the card that the default Asus drivers still seem to have. In any case… I had no audio… which is the point at which I start trying to configure my damned onboard card once more. This of course took another series of reboots… the first being that I didn’t remember what the hell the MSI bios hotkey was. The second being me actually managing to mash the delete key at the right time to enter the bios, and finally the third being to install the damned drivers. Life was more or less peachy, until I once again began fiddling to try and make the on-board sound, sound considerably less horrible.

I started this process around 6 pm, and finally got to a point where I could start playing something around 9:30 pm. This is always what happens when you decide to open up your case and do quite literally anything. One thing leads to another, which leads to a desperate sequence of events… which finally leads to success but several hours past when you expected. I hopped on Teamspeak to sort out if the audio was set up properly and thankfully both Ashgar and Tam were there to help me test. Then I did what you do anytime you upgrade literally anything in your machine…. you start launching every game you have installed to tweak the settings. The new card does not of course make everything magically better. I still have a woefully outdated Motherboard and Processor, which I will have to address at some point, however I have more than enough graphics card to be able to run damned near anything I care to throw at it. The fun thing I learned last night is that Nvidia Experience is woefully confused as to what my system can actually run. I’ve often used their optimization as a baseline to then go in and further tweak until things are a good mix of pretty and performance. However thanks to the outdated CPU it just sort of throws its hands up and chooses low at times. Whereas pretty much everything I have thrown at it since last night has been able to bump on up to ultra settings regardless of the outdated processor.

So that is my fun evening and I have peppered the post with various screenshots taken in the games I loaded up… and happened to think to take a screen shot. I am sure I will likely tweak each of them further, and also try flipping various games to Dynamic Super Resolution which seems to work awesome now, when it only barely worked before. Huge apologies to my friends in FFXIV, but thankfully I did warn them that it was a possibility yesterday. Hopefully everything went off over there without a hitch and I will join them next week like normal. In the meantime… I am probably going to continue spending the next several days… launching games and logging out of them just to see what the difference is. I am also wondering if somehow when I installed the Video card… if I managed to unseat the audio card. I will probably give that a shot tonight, but I made that realization way too late in the evening for me to venture back inside of my case that night.

Scrap Collector

June 21, 2016 by Belghast

The Wastelands

The Rift resurgence continues and this time around I find myself working on tradeskills. Every so often I find myself stuck in a loop, that winds up with me leveling one thing like mad. The focus currently is pushing as many trade-skills up as I can manage… and honestly afford. I went into this little mission with roughly 1600 platinum, and as of last night I had dropped under 500. Please not this is just on reagent costs and pattern training costs, as I have been going out into the wild to gather materials on a pretty regular basis. The above image was taken on one of these many trips, this time to find Rhenium nodes in the Steppes of Infinity. I am not sure if this is even the best place to look for these, but I figured the highest level zone in Storm Legion would probably have the highest chance of these nodes. Currently I am working on Artificer which as of last night is I believe sitting at 360 of 450, but thankfully it was one of my lowest trades. When the game went free to play, one of the things that I spent a bunch of my “free” currency on was adding tradeskill unlocks to my main. The goal is to eventually turn Belghast into an omnicrafter, which is a term that is common in FFXIV but not possible in most games. Currently my trade-skill load-out looks a little something like this…

Armorsmith – 450
Butchering – 450
Foraging – 450
Mining – 450
Outfitter – 450
Runecrafter – 450
Weaponsmith – 450
Dream Weaver – 390
Fishing – 375
Survival – 375
Artificer – 370

So like I said Artificer is the lowest of my skills or at least the last of my “make gear” skills so I have been focusing on it. Fishing and Survival hopefully I will be able to level in tandem as I have done in the past. Dream Weaver I probably have more than enough material to start pushing it up there in level given that I salvage every single artifact that I get that I already have…. which at this point is a considerable number. The worst part of the artificer grind right now is trying to acquire gemstones which is namely why I am out in the Steppes farming Rhenium for those every so lucrative Heavy gem nodes. The only problem I foresee however is that a some point soon I am simply going to run out of money, probably long before I actually hit the goal of leveling all of these things. I am also lacking one tradeskill on this character, and that is Apothecary the one I have never actually successfully leveled on any character. At some point I will end up picking up one more tradeskill unlock and start working on that, but I think that will ultimately happen at a later date. The only real disappointment so far is that apparently this awesome 38 Slot Cosmic Bag pattern that I picked up can only be crafted with a drop from Tier 3 raid bosses, with no other way to acquire it. That is a bit of a kick in the pants…. but hopefully they will add it to the cash shop or something at a later date.

Low Key Activity

I think that after coming back from our whirlwind birthday weekend… I have just needed something super chill to do and crafting became that activity. The biggest problem is that if I keep on this course I am going to ultimately bankrupt myself. Tonight is going to be a night of fiddling with my desktop upstairs, because in theory I should have a shiny new graphics card to install. If I can manage to get that done in time I will probably end up participating in the FFXIV pony farm and miscellaneous activity night. If I do not get finished with machine upgrades until after the start time, I will likely just piddle around in Rift. I need to get back to doing some Intrepid Adventures because it turns out that they are still a pretty damned good source of upgrades. I also need to get some more Expert dungeons in, as in a perfect world I would do at least seven a week so that I get all of my currency bonuses. As far as raiding goes I am still up in the air as to what I want to do there. There are supposedly a good number of pick up raids, and I would love to see some of the content at least once… namely the new Comet of Ahnkhet raid. I would also love to get some of those bag reagents to craft up a few 38 slotters… but I would imagine that even now those items are in high demand. I wish they dropped form the Mind of Madness bosses in Intrepid Adventure, but as I have not seen one yet… I would assume that is not something that happens. For sheer gear acquisition Hammerknell seems way faster for getting cache drops, but then again that could simply be that people are just more used to those encounters.

At some point I also want to begin leveling my rogue, but in the past my key reason for doing this… was to have a bag maker. Since going all omnicraftery that reason went out the door so ultimately I need to find a spec that I can really enjoy. I somehow down the “grandpa build ” is still as effective as it once was for soloing content. For doing Instant Adventures I am currently running around as Marksman, because standing back and plinking tends to require less focus than getting up close and personal with the mob encounters. Similarly at some point I do want to level a character on the European servers, and I have gotten my Zaviel character up to 22. Right now I am largely just opening patron caches on him every day in the hopes of getting extra loyalty, but at some point I want to start pushing him in levels again. At some point I left the tracks and entered the Instant Adventure zone and it is unlikely that I will ever return to proper leveling with quests on that guy. The IA is a bit of a trap… in that the experience you gain seems so much faster than anything you can get while questing… but as a result it ends up with you being severely under-geared for your level. It also make sure that your tradeskills are woefully behind, and at some point I will have to go on a gathering binge to even begin to catch up. In any case… its been a little over a week now since my return to Rift and I am still finding so many of the things compelling. Even more so I have dove back into the community and am hanging my hat on discord, so if you have any interest in Rift I highly suggest you check it out as well.

HPB Tourism

June 20, 2016 by Belghast

Forty On Internet

This weekend was an extremely interesting one for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly instead of my wife flying home from her week grading AP exams in Kansas City I decided to go up and meet her. KC is only a 3 1/2 hour drive, and the roads are great… albeit travelling across Kansas is a boring mess with both spotty cell phone and radio coverage. While travelling I played this game called “find the radio station with the least static”. I have not joined the realm of paid radio, because around Tulsa I prefer to listen to our NPR station. Once I got close to the KC Metro I thankfully found one located in Topeka that seemed to come in just fine, which oddly turned into a Classical Station in the metro proper. I took a half day Friday and after piddling around the house and doing a few last minute chores I managed to leave around 2:30 which put me pulling into the hotel around 6 pm. Firstly I have to say that we had never stayed in a Drury Inn before, but it is definitely a hotel chain I would be interested in within the near future. Not that I partook of it but they offered a free dinner buffet each evening from 5pm to 7pm coupled with happy hour at the same time. We did however hit up the free breakfast Saturday morning which consisted of biscuits and gravy, scrambled eggs, sausage patties and a plethora of pastry options. It seemed like a shame that quite literally we just slept there the one night, but I think when we go to Pax South next year we might see where the Drury Inn locations are in that town because it was pretty spiffy.

The other big thing that happened on Saturday other than running around Kansas City was the fact that I turned Forty. Having a birthday on the internet is a really interesting thing and as we roamed around town, each time I stopped to check my phone I had another deluge of well wishers. I cannot say enough how much I appreciate this, because wow it was just overwhelming in a good way. There are times you wonder if you have much effect on other people, and then there are other times where they completely collapse upon you with feels. This was one of the later times, and I thought about a proper way to represent this feeling on the blog but failed miserably. The good is the warm fuzzies I felt all day long… the bad was the fact that my phone battery died at some point during the day before we got home from all the notifications. Turning Forty feels so damned strange because in truth I don’t feel that much different than I did in my 20s. I am maybe a little slower to anger, maybe a little less impulsive… but overall I think I am the same “Bel” I have always been. The internet has been a strange equalizer, because I don’t feel nearly as out of touch as I thought my dad was when he turned Forty. It feels like I am still very much on the first wave of memes, before they enter the public conscious. The one place I feel like I am lagging behind horribly is in music, but namely because I don’t listen to a lot of it anymore. I stumble onto new music via YouTube or google music, but I am not actively engaged in the indie scene the way I once was.

Bibliophiles

I would say that you could tell our ages by our activities, but then again we aren’t really do anything we have not always done. When it comes to wandering around a town we have a pecking order of priorities. The number one being hitting old bookstores, and namely finding out if a town has any Half Price Books locations. It is extremely hard to describe this store to the uninitiated. To call it a used book store is a bit of an understatement, and to call it anything else… well I lack the proper words. Essentially it is the best bookstore chain my wife and I have ever found, and namely because of the breadth of material they have within them… that and the extremely high turnover rate. We could easily hit the same HPB every single week and keep finding new stuff. I personally go there for the SciFi, RPG, Comics and Software sections… all of which are generally amazing, and my wife goes there for teaching materials which are also amazing. Then there are all of the little neat incidentals that they have like Doctor Who memorabilia, LEGO stuff, and a random assortment of cool action figures and other geek accouterments. The highlight for me will always be the pen and paper section because I am constantly looking for gems. When we were in St Louis I found a copy of the unofficial Headhunter expansion for Rifts, which I picked up because it was extremely cheap and also pretty.

This time around I mostly window shopped finding a neat Menzoberanzan boxed set, that was sadly incomplete missing several maps… and an original “Cthulhu” version of the Deities and Demigods book. The last bit would have been something I picked up… were it not $75. It was cool but not that price tag worth of cool. The thing I was a big shocked about was the lack of Palladium stuff, which makes me wonder if that system never really caught on in KC… or if it caught on so much that no one ever sold their books. My friends however lacked onto the GURPS books when I tweeted out the pictures, which is a system that always seemed interesting but I never really got into. I figured I only had room for a single one size fits all pen and paper system in my life, and I went down the Palladium route. The truth is… we go to a lot of HPB locations. There are none in the Tulsa area, but several times a year we head down the turnpike to Oklahoma City just to hit the three locations there. We’ve been to most of the Half Price Book locations in the Dallas area, including the giant flag ship store downtown. In addition to that we have been to Kansas City, St Louis MO, Every Location on the way to San Antonio TX, Madison WI, and if we make it to any of the other towns where they exist… you can bet we will go there as well. Other than HPB I hit up a Micro Center…. which was way smaller than the St Louis store, and a few Targets and Toys R Us looking for the new Destiny Megablocks that are supposedly now out in the wild. Then there was of course a trip to IKEA to try and find the one thing that was out of stock when we were in St Louis. It was a great day and according to my Pebble Time we wound up walking around 14,000 steps.

The Homefront

On the home front, all of the animals missed my wife… and when she has not been outside partaking of the back patio… she has had two or three of them surrounding her. On the flower front I regret to say that the heat claimed our first victim. We had this hybrid mini petunia plant that was a mix of red and white flowers. Several weeks ago when we were in St Louis the heat and potentially the change in watering habits claimed the red flower from that pot. The white one however seemed to be holding on, and we had removed the dead red plant hoping that it would be able to spread out and claim the extra area for its own. Life was going peachy until this week when the extreme temperatures had a serious effect on the plant. When we got home Saturday night it was pretty crispy, and while I am still watering it hoping that maybe it will spring back… we’ve replaced it for the time being with the above pictured plant. The greenhouse around the corner from our house is currently having a 20%-50% off sale on all plants, so we took that as a good sign that we should go ahead and replace it with something else. So far it is happy, but the blue plant has only actually been seated in our back yard for less than 24 hours. Like always I have no real clue what the plants are by name other than the made up names that I end up calling them. My neighbors probably think I am absolutely insane because I talk to them while I water them. I treat my flowers the same way I treat my other pets…. which might be odd or insane but screw it… it makes me happy.

All in all it was a great weekend, and I am thankful that I took today off to recuperate before heading back to work. Other than the above… I have been spending a lot of time in Rift but that is a story for another day. Thanks again for all of the Birthday wishes. Each and every one of you out there are amazing and I am thankful to have you in my life.