Tales of the Aggronaut

For Azeroth

June 9, 2016June 9, 2016 by Belghast

maxresdefault I am sitting down to write this Thursday night after having just come from watching the Warcraft movie. Firstly let me state that I am going to do my best to keep this spoiler free, even though in truth the story that the film is based on is now multiple decades old. I attended the movie with quite possibly the perfect person I could have in the grand scheme of things. I went with my friend Vernie, or at least that is the character folks would know him by. On November 24th of 2004 the two of us farmed our little asses off to be able to purchase the guild charter for House Stalwart, a guild that still stands living and breathing today. I have to admit I went into watching this movie with a lot of conflicting emotions. A lot of time has passed since those heady days over ten years ago, and my feelings for Warcraft and the franchise as a whole have evolved over the years. I also had a bit of trepidation going into the picture seeing as I have seen many fondly remembered franchises end up marred by the churning machine that is Hollywood. I wanted to believe that this movie could do at least an adequate job of encompassing my memories and feelings and placing them on the big screen. When I found out that my local theater was showing the film on Thursday night, I purchased two tickets without even checking with Vernie first to see if he was interested. Thankfully he was, but otherwise I would have gone by myself because I had to know one way or another what the film ultimately would be.

Firstly I have to say that overall I am very pleased with the film. This is not a film that is going to win Oscars, but nor do I think that every film should be that. I grew up during the 80s, in an era when it was perfectly okay to make an exciting science fiction or fantasy adventure film without trying to aspire to pretense. I could sit here and knit pick little details, and complain about minor flaws… but instead I decided to embrace the joy of seeing this setting that I have spent so much of my time involved with spread out on the screen before me. If you have ever loved Warcraft, then there is likely magic to be found in this film for you. There was something uniquely mesmerizing as I saw setting after setting that I recognized immediately from my years playing the games. There is a moment early in the film where you see Dun Morogh and Iron Forge, and having spent the early years of my life in this game as a Dwarf there was this excited little child deep inside of me that stirred free from years of being jaded. Moment by moment the characters on screen appeared in settings that were as familiar to me as my own bedroom. There is a certain loving craft that understood the parts that needed to be there, and those that could be enriched and improved without losing the feeling of the original setting.

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Then there are the characters, ones that came largely from a time before the current fidelity of World of Warcraft. We know them largely from lore that has been written in the years since the release of Orcs and Humans and Tides of Darkness. While I said earlier that none of the performances are likely to win Oscars… that is not to say that each of them did not play their parts perfectly. Medivh was immediately recognizable as Medivh for example, and Durotan worked perfectly especially with the renewed focus on that character that Warlords of Draenor brought. There was not a single role that I felt was miscast or failed to hold up to the jumbled memories I have of the lore and setting of the early games. I have to say that of all the characters, the one I came to like the most has to be Khadgar, which is shocking considering I am not much for finger wigglers… and Warlords made me largely think he was an ass. The character I most closely related to of course was Anduin Lothar, but given my proclivity for warriors this should surprise no one. The real breakout for me however has to be a tie between Garona and Draka , but I can’t really go into my reasoning for either without dipping into spoiler territory. Suffice to say that for the story that is being told, I thought each and every actor did a great job delivering their role.

Now for a bit of a warning. For the lore purists out there, you need to go into this accepting that the movie is going to paint a slightly different picture than the one you know from the background of the game. Lets face it… the early years of the Warcraft franchise were a bit of a mess, with a combination of “wouldn’t it be cool” stacked onto layers of “this is awesome” to weave together a passable story. The Chronicles series of books have been a method of trying to clear up the tangled bits of maladjusted lore and set straight the canon once and for all. As a result the story of the movies is likely going to be the new canon of how the events of the first games will be set in stone from this point on. The sequence of events made more sense that some of the existing lore so I am completely fine with this. However for those who have to be tyrannically pure to the original source material… you are going to find certain aspects of this movie frustrating. I highly suggest you approach the movie with an open mind like I did, and allow yourself to simply get sucked along in the currents of nostalgia for a time when Warcraft inspired greatness in us all. I’ve never felt a lot of faction pride, but I have to say there was something that swelled inside of me when I heard the lines “For Azeroth! For the Alliance!”. Thanks to Duncan Jones and everyone at Blizzard for getting the movie right, and making something we can all ultimately be proud of. Not everyone is going to get this movie, but it wasn’t for “everyone”. This is a movie for the long time fans of the Warcraft franchise and I am hopeful this will be a long running series of movies, spreading the giant screen with the characters I have loved.

Rise of Iron

June 9, 2016 by Belghast

Lords of Iron Return

Apparently last night while I was completely oblivious, the trailer for the new Destiny expansion… Rise of Iron leaked out on the internet. All of these leaks of course beg the question… if everything comes out before E3… then why the hell have E3 in the first place? You can watch the entire leaked trailer here, that was apparently ripped from a Snapchat advertisement of some sort. I used VLC Media Player to snap a few pictures from the trailer for use in this blog post. Firstly I am a little disappointed that it seems like we won’t actually be travelling to a new planet or moon. As was originally suggested by many of the youtubers based on the leaked image from around a month ago… this does in fact deal with the twilight gap wall area. It seems like it was repaired at one point and the wall has once again been breached. In the meantime apparently a giant army of mutated Fallen have been amassing on the other side, and we as players are going to help quell this threat. Now the first thing that really stands out is that these fallen seem to have a “taken” like thing going on… but instead of black and white and shaky… it is all dark red and pixelated. Which makes me wonder if the virus is somehow like a digital version of the sword logic that has corrupted so many other things in the Destiny universe?

Regardless… I am pretty damned ready to say goodbye to the taken invasions, and I guess I can accept if that now means we are going to start getting Fallen ones instead. I would have rather seen them spend more time fleshing out the Cabal, but since the Vex and Hive have seen their day in the sun… I guess it is perfectly okay for the Fallen to get theirs. However it seems like we have already spent so much time fighting the Fallen since they literally appear in one form or another on every planet. While they are not extremely active on Mars, there is a spot in the Rubicon wastes where they show themselves for a quest. I guess considering that they are a race that was once chosen by the Traveler as well, it would make sense why they are constantly scavenging in its wake. The other thing that I find interesting is it seems like they have somehow compromised some of the areas that Rasputin might have controlled. There is definitely a Warmind-esc look to some of the areas that they have shown… but again they contain the same dark red contagion look. All of this makes me wonder if… this is really just some sort of an infection that Rasputin has been fighting off.. and it is also why considering his obvious power that he really doesn’t end up lending us all that much help. Maybe he has been busy with whatever is happening in the above screenshot. I would say maybe this was an unknown Warmind, but I think lore wise there is only one per planet.

Gjallahorn is Back

The most controversial point of the trailer however will be the announcement of “Iron Gjallarhorn”. This rocket launcher was the be all end all weapon from year one, and was as beloved as it is reviled. Unfortunately I didn’t play enough in year one to actually use one. In fact the ONLY exotic I managed to get in year one was The Last Word, and I think the game just gave me that one because it felt sorry for me. I am absolutely a year two baby when it comes to this game, and while I played at launch… I only played for a few months before fading into the background and finding something else to do. I’m not a huge fan of rocket launchers, but I have always though that at least on looks the Gjallarhorn looks amazing. Now I seriously doubt they will be bringing back the weapon with the power levels that it apparently had in year one… but just the fact that it is coming back at all makes me extremely happy. I want to be able to use this and see what all the fuss was about. Maybe this will be the rocket launcher to change my tune and make me love rocket launchers?

The controversy that is waiting in the wings however is that this is that getting Gjallarhorn is a pre-order bonus for the Rise of Iron expansion. I personally don’t have a problem with it, because I was going to pre-order the expansion regardless. I like having the peace of mind that the game is there waiting for me whenever I want to participate. This is a side effect of living through an era when copies of games were actually sometimes difficult to get. I remember having to go from store to store to try and find several games in the past, and had that happen as recently as the launch of TERA. The other big benefit in a pre-order is it often comes with the option to pre-load the content so literally at midnight you can pop in and start playing. Granted my ability to stay up for midnight launches is not what it used to be… and I often times only make it through character creation before crashing. What is going to cause the drama in the coming days is the insinuation that this might be your ONLY way to get Gjallarhorn. It is my hope that Bungie is just giving us access to the weapon ahead of time, and that it will exist in the normal exotic rotation from engrams, or at the very least a similarly complete-able quest once the expansion launches. Gjallarhorn is this iconic weapon, that even people who have never played Destiny have often times heard of it. When you have something like that… it just doesn’t seem fair to wall that up behind a pre-order bonus. So hopefully during the E3 presentation they will do some massive clarification on that point.

At least with the September 20th date… we won’t have all that long to wait until we get to experience it all for ourselves.

Why Not Try Pax South?

June 8, 2016 by Belghast

This is going to be a bit of a frivolous topic, but I am writing it the night before posting. Tomorrow I have to be up well before dawn to take my wife to the airport. As a result I searched my thoughts for something worth writing about and landed on this discussion. Today the PAX West tickets went on sale… or PAX Prime for those not yet with the program… or just plain old PAX for those who have been living under a rock and missed the slow invasion of the show across the country and world. These notoriously sell out almost instantly, and unless you happen to be watching the site at the exact second it goes live, there is no way you are likely getting tickets. I have two friends who tried today… one of which practically lives for PAX… and while they both made it into the queue within a very short amount of time, but the time I actually arrived at a screen which allowed them to purchase anything… Sunday tickets were almost gone and Monday was in low availability. This is kinda insane given that they have expanded the show to a fourth day and seemingly keep expanding it. The problem is that more people want to go than are tickets available. I am sure a good number of the tickets get snatched up by speculators, and others are buying trying to get as many as their friends in as they can. I even found out that apparently folks have written scripts that are supposed to get them in the queue the second the page is published.

This same sort of madness goes on with Blizzcon but is magnified by the fact that they do several small batches of ticket sales, each of them selling out in a matter of minutes. Whereas with Pax West there is a nearly instant queue, and it simply takes awhile for those folks to filter through it to the other end. Still it seems that you had to get into the queue with the first few minutes to guarantee that you had any tickets to purchase. This presents a huge problem for folks attending, because at least for me a huge part of why I am interested in PAX at all is to use it as a destination to meet up with friends from the internet that I may never actually see otherwise. Just watching the reactions from folks attending both PAX and Blizzcon this seems to be the general consensus and the challenge is that it is nearly impossible to insure that all of your friends can actually attend. I know among my friends they had a complicated system of trying to make sure they could cover all of the people needed for Blizzcon with everyone trying to fight through the queue, and talking over chat to arrange who was buying tickets for whom when someone actually made it through the queue. Watching my friends today it seems like that is just about the only way to actually guarantee attending PAX West as well.

What I am presenting with this mornings post is another alternative. If PAX Prime is not your native PAX location… meaning it is further than reasonable driving distance away from you… might I suggest the alternative of PAX South? Granted it happened in January and is still over six months away… but I’ve been attending since its inception and I have to say it is a pretty great place to be. This past year we had something like fifteen people running around in different numbers taking in all that the convention had to offer. While I failed miserably at spending time with most of the people due to the sheer number, it was nonetheless awesome to get to see and hang out with everyone. PAX South has this super chill vibe to it and has a lot of positives going for it, that might not be the case with West or even East. The show is still very much in fledgling status, but the attendance was up quite a bit last year and expanded to a whole new area of the convention center in order to accommodate a significantly harder tabletop section. While the show was missing several of the headliners that were there the first year… such as Bioware or Gearbox… the indie section seemed to expand massively. What I liked about it was that I could pretty much lay hands on any of the devs attending, and get to talk to them face to face about the game they were showing off. Several of them were extremely excited to be talking about this labor of love that they had been working on so long.

I’ve always gotten the impression that at the larger conventions, unless you are wearing a media badge it can be really hard to actually get face time with the various exhibitors. That seems insanely easy to do at South. It also seemed like it was extremely easy to talk to the various streamers and gaming personalities. While that is not really my corner of the world, I spotted several dozen streamers that I recognized mingling out in the floor or tucked away in a corner always willing to stop and chat with fans. This was absolutely the case the first year as well, because one of the members of my party wound up getting a bunch of autographs from several of the personalities. It is my hope that the 2017 show can somehow pull together the best of the two years. Year one had some bigger names, but year two had way more stuff… and significantly more people in attendance. If this year they can convince several of the larger companies to show products, as well as keep the attendance on an upward trajectory I think there are going to be awesome things in the future. My goal as always will be to meet and hang out with as many people as I can from my extended circles.

I know how frustrating it can be to not get tickets for that event you wanted. I after all tried to get Pax Prime tickets last year, and after the frustrating debacle that it ultimately was didn’t even try this year. South is my home PAX, and is a roughly nine hour drive for me. I will likely attend it every year so long as they keep having them. I’ve gotten the impression that there are others like me that consider it their PAX. However for those really just wanting the PAX experience, without the hassle and overpriced after market tickets… I highly suggest you give PAX South a go. I will continue to trumpet it as the year goes on… or at least until they have sold out the passes. Throughout this post I have linked to a series of YouTube videos put out about the South show, as I am sure a way to try and drum up interest. I know this will be the last year in Penny Arcade’s contract with the Henry B. Gonzalez convention center. I think there is enough interest in the con to warrant it continuing in one form or another, but it might end up moving to another city. I’ve greatly enjoyed both years, and while I would love to have it in Dallas or Austin… just because they are significantly closer drives, I am more than willing to make the lengthy trek to San Antonio. Essentially if you failed to get into West/Prime… South might just be the convention you are looking for.

Wabbit Season

June 7, 2016 by Belghast

Outdoor Fuzzbutts

Yesterday I still felt like crap for the majority of the day, and even though I had the desire to play something video game wise… I somehow lacked the focus to actually accomplish that. Instead I laid around the house feeling pitiful for a large chunk of the day watching reruns of Teen Titans Go, Amazing World of Gumball and Steven Universe. Towards the evening I wound up on the back patio because we had some unexpected visitors. It seems that a huge cottontail has decided to take up residence in our backyard. My wife sent me a sequence of texts that ultimately summoned me out into the backyard. The bunny didn’t seem to give a shit about me opening the bedroom door and walking out onto the patio. Granted I tried to do both of these activities as quietly as possible but at that point he bunny was maybe three feet away from me. Generally this is well within the range of “bolt and hide” territory. I have this feeling that this kiddo has lived around our yard for several years given the sheer size… as an estimate would be at least as long as my hand and forearm outstretched. What was awesome is that even with us both on the back patio he continued to go about his business foraging. There was a point where he came within less than a foot of where we were sitting, and that was during a period of time when he encountered another rabbit hopping around the backyard.

I failed to get a shot of the two of them nosing each other because it happened super briefly, but you can use this shot as scale for the sheer size of the larger bunny. What was hilarious is that the little guy was more skittish, but actually wound up walking onto the patio rug with us inches away from it while it was dancing around uncertain of the intentions of the other rabbit. When I went to walk upstairs to write my blog post I happened to look out the stairwell window and I saw this little guy hanging out on the concrete. Ultimately I think this summer I am going to have to find something to put out for watering the bunnies. In past summers that have started as hot as this one… I have wound up coming home and having to fish rabbits out of the swimming pool. That is not really something I want to repeat this summer. I would love it if they became friendly… I mean I have known for awhile that we have a bunch of rabbits that seem to take up residence in and around our yard, and since we have never done anything against them… I am wondering if some ancestral knowledge of our yard as a safe spot has been handed down. We have a few places where they can easily pass in and out of our yard between the green belt behind the house and the front yard as well. I would totally start feeding them if I had a clue what to actually feed.

What is extra funny about this situation… is that after the little interaction with us I thought they had run off and hid. However at some point before we went in for the night I walked around the yard and wound up going up on our deck on the far side of the pool. Sure enough there stretched out on the lawn like he didn’t have a care in the world was the big bunny again. Just chilling, and even when I started talking it didn’t seem to phase him at all. I would totally bring stuff out to feed the bunnies, but then again I am kinda afraid to get them used to being fed by humans. We love bunnies in our yard… but not everyone is as happy to have random wildlife inhabiting their lawn. So while it would be awesome to have outdoor fuzzbutts to pet and play with while sitting on our patio… I don’t want to end up getting the bunnies harmed by someone with less than friendly intent. Between the bunnies and the birds though… I am loving our little haven outside. Sure it is kinda annoying to have to water the flowers every morning and evening…. and sure the birds seem to burn through a container full of seed in a mater of hours. The end result though is this peaceful place where there is always something interesting to watch while we chill on the patio. I still have yet to see any sign of the baby Robins, but the tiny Sparrows continue to visit on a regular basis. We have a pair of Cardinals and Blue Jays as well… and several of what I have been told after the fact are “Turtle” Doves. I am not sure if these outdoor posts bore the pants off of people as they read them, but yesterday especially I didn’t have a lot else to talk about.