Tales of the Aggronaut

Squirrelghast

January 21, 2016 by Belghast

Flak Cannon Time

When it comes to playing Warframe I have quite literally spent almost 99% of my time playing the game…. in a full or partial group. This greatly colors my feelings about the game, and in truth it has allowed me to play in a super inefficient manner. Last night we had several group missions and then when Tam went to class and Ashgar went to bed… it just kinda broke up and never reformed in spite of us having several people there. Instead of grouping I opted to start working on some of the missions I had not actually unlocked, and I have to say… I am pretty bad at this game. At the very least my chosen play style is not exactly a solo friendly play style. When I am playing my Excalibur with a Bow…. it works great, because I can sneak around and get a bunch of stealth kills. However last night I was trying to level my Atlas with a Braton… and the ability to stealth kill anything was non-existent. In truth I feel like most of the problem is the fact that I have yet to really sort out how I want to mod anything. At some point I need to spend an entire evening leveling mods, and deciding which ones work best with which weapons.

On the positive side of things, I did manage to finish up all of the sub components of the Rhino Prime and now simply have to wait the 72 hours crafting time to get it. I also managed to finish up the Drakgoon Flak Cannon last night, so I spent some time playing with that as well. I keep calling it a Flak Cannon because it very much reminds me of the Flak Cannon from Quake 3. At close range it can be fired like a shotgun, but if you charge up the attack it can be fired from a much longer range and still be effective. I am digging it quite a bit… and managed to have quite a bit of good luck with it running some missions. I still think that the Strun is probably a better choice for a charge in and sword damage playstyle like I tend to favor, which is something that Ashgar suggested. For the time being I am having a blast with this weapon…. and yes that pun was intended. The other thing I did last night was start building a Boltor rifle, to see if I like that as was suggested to me by Scarybooster. I mean in theory I could have gone shopping for a Boltor prime, but I happened to have all of the crafting mats available to make one without really dipping low in anything. I guess tonight I will give it a shot and see what I think about it.

Blade and Soul

Right now the new hotness at least among the blogosphere seems to be Blade and Soul, which just launched this week. In fact at this moment it seems like unless you are paying for the game, it is highly unlikely that you are going to actually get to play it. My twitter timeline has been full of folks posting pictures of the insane queue times just trying to log in. The other big problem that I have seen is that it seems like no one is actually playing on the same server. I did a few quick queries and it seemed like everyone I know is playing on completely different servers. I had no real interest in this game prior to launch, and honestly…. there isn’t much about it after launch that interests me. That said…. since it is a freemium game I have this overwhelming desire to at least give it a shot. I have to admit I have some pretty severe biases against Korean MMO art styles. There is just something about the art aesthetic that annoys me… the cloyingly pretty men, and the insane “Jessica Rabbit” style women… its just not my thing.

The positive is that there is a Lalafell like race in Blade and Soul so I decided to try and focus instead on the maximum cuteness potential of that. The problem there is… it just isn’t as good as a Lalafell. I created what I am dubbing Squirrelghast on the Old Man Cho server…. simply because I liked the name. At some point if I end up liking the game I will try and sort out another server to roll on that actually has people I know. The only negative is that I have yet to get any further than character creation because I end up getting dumped into a massive queue… and decided that I would simply rather play Warframe or Diablo 3. It is my hope that over the weekend I will be able to get in and give the game a proper try. The only thing I really know about it from clips is that it seems to be an MMO about the whole flying wire “crouching tiger hidden dragon” style of combat. These movies never really appealed to me either, because they just felt so over the top silly to see someone calmly flying across the screen. I’ve heard however that the localization job that Carbine did on this title was really damned good, and much like Final Fantasy XIV they slipped in a ton of cultural references. If for no reason other than that… I kinda want to play it. I really love the folks at Carbine and they seem to do a great job with the games under their care, so it is my hope that I will be charmed enough by the localization effort to overlook all the things I don’t care for.

Rhino Prime Incoming

January 20, 2016 by Belghast

Secondary Market

Once again last night I spent most of it running around with friends in Warframe. At the moment this seems to be the new hotness among the AggroChat podcast crew, and I guess in part I am going to ride the bubble as long as it lasts. I know like many games this one is likely to burst at some point, when either we enter the endgame grind…. or one of us tries to do something that the game doesn’t really allow for. However in the meantime I am enjoying my space ninja action, and spent most of last night leveling “stuff”. Another really important thing that I discovered yesterday was the trade market. Now Tam and Ashgar had both been talking about the deals that they had been getting in trades with players, and I never really spent much time thinking about it… that is until I realized that I was quickly becoming the only player without a prime frame. In many ways the prime frames are just flat out better than a normal frame, and since I had already been laboring towards trying to get a Rhino, I thought maybe I would check out the potential of just bumping that up to prime.

Within a few minutes I was able to find a Prime frame for considerably cheaper than the price of the base Rhino frame on the game store. So I guess in truth if you are willing to spend ANY money on the game at all… you can pick up some bargains. I know some of our crew have picked up really nice weapons… and managed to get some freebie mods thrown in to fill out the rest of the trade window. So for me in particular… last night was all about farming up the rest of the components I needed to craft my Rhino Prime over night. Unfortunately when I checked in this morning I still have a few hours left to go on the build, and then 72 hours after that before I actually get to drive my frame around. In the meantime however… I need to sort out exactly what I want to use for weapons on my stompy mech. I love my excalibur, but there are just times where it does not seem well suited for some activities. Mostly I feel like I need to have a solid backup for when running around like mad and slashing things with a sword is not necessarily the best idea.

Atlas Rising

The other big activity of the night was to begin work on my Atlas frame, that I had picked up some time ago… but never spent much time working on. For the time being I have it decked out in a Braton, those starter fist weapons, and a Lex pistol…. all pretty much for the purpose of leveling them since we were running low level content. Early in the evening we were trying to make it through Phobos, and we ended up struggling quite a bit… so it forced us all to switch back to our “main” frames for the purpose of finishing up that planet. However after that we shifted to doing low level defense runs which are pretty amazing for leveling stuff. By the end of the evening Altas was hovering around 14 with the weapons I think in the 16-18 range. The big draw right now of Atlas is the rock shield ability that I can also push forward as a ball of stone to bowl over enemies. This was absolutely amazing for “wave clear” when the Grineer were stacked up in neat little columns. Nothing yet has beaten the pure joy of hitting the giant “Nope!” button that is Excalibur’s Radial Blind, but this comes close.

I absolutely feel like an earthbender though, and there are several of the abilities I have yet to even play with… like the ability to summon rock golems to fight by my side. The other takeaway of the night is just how damned awesome the Braton is. I was looking for a good light machine gun, to give me that almost destiny like feel… and that really does it. I also plan on building a Latron soon, because several other members of my team have had good luck with that. From the sounds of it… the Braton is more of an Auto Rifle in Destiny terms, and the Latron would be something more like the Scout Rifle. Both are weapons that I really enjoy, but for vastly different purposes. The only thing I wish this game supported was the changing of loadouts while in a mission. Because sometimes you hit situations where your weapons are just ineffective and it would greatly improve the experience to be able to swap things up planet side. Maybe there is a way and I just have not found it, but in any case… because I don’t think I can do it… it makes me pick more generalized builds so that if my primary is ineffective, then my secondary will work as a backup. Regardless… I am still very much enjoying myself and looking forward to getting to play with a Prime frame.

Embargo Over

January 19, 2016 by Belghast

Finally Time

On December 18th I walked into a theater, and had my faith in my favorite childhood memories restored. So powerful was this restoration that I had to talk about it immediately… so I went onto slack and joined a channel that we had created just for this purpose. Similarly powerful was my desire not to spoil the experience for anyone else. So after some thrashing about, I declared over twitter in the above tweet that I would give it a month…. that on January 18th I would feel able to finally talk about Star Wars Force Awakens in the open. Today is January 19th, the day after my self proposed embargo ended, and I am ready to talk. This however it is a bit of a lackluster statement, given that it seems like the global internet embargo was something along the lines of “any time after the first of the year”. While we recorded the AggroChat spoiler show a few weeks back, I kept to my original stated date. Now the floodgates can open and you can expect me to be less measured about information regarding the movie. Essentially my theory is that if you cared at all about this movie… you had a month to go see it relatively unscathed… any spoilers are now on your own damned head.

For starters…. I love this film. I love so much about it. Largely because it made me realize how much I really did love Star Wars after all. In the post Phantom Menace era I spent much of my time suppressing my joy about the franchise even though there were really awesome offshoots like Star Wars Rebels and the Clone Wars cartoons that absolutely redeemed just how frustratingly bad at times the prequels were. I guess part of me didn’t want to get hurt again, and while I started off trying to fight the hype… by the time Force Awakens launched…. I was a gibbering mess of fandom. The most awesome part of all of it, was sitting in the theater and listening to the entire place erupt in applause when the opening scroll came on screen. I did find it funny that in my theater a few people booed when they saw the Lucasfilm logo, but that quickly gave way to much cheering. Then at various moments, like BB8 flipping the thumbs up… made everyone laugh and cheer as well. I am so happy that I got to see it on opening night, because I feel like the energy was so amazing that it would have been painful to have missed that. Now to delve into some of my characters and thoughts about them.

Rey

Rey for me is the Star Wars equivalent of Amy Pond… the girl who waited. The question is who exactly was she waiting for. Right now there are two competing camps in fandom… that peg her at either being the daughter of Luke Skywalker or the grand daughter of Obi-Wan Kenobi. There is another group of people who seem to think she is the lost child of Han and Leia… but I seriously think that someone might have known about this before now and maybe just maybe they would have recognized her. I mean this is the universe where a Senator can go from pregnancy through delivery without receiving any prenatal care and be completely baffled by the fact that there are twins. So maybe they lose babies all the time. Part of me wants it to be as simple as Luke’s kid, because Disney talked about how the “Saga” movies centered around the Skywalker legacy. If Rey is not a Skywalker… that means that the focus of the movie according to Disney has to be on a Skywalker… and the only one of those that we know is Kylo Ren. I want this movie to be about Rey, because she is hands down the best character we have seen. Part of me still hopes that Mara Jade gets brought back from the now destroyed Expanded Universe… and we end up seeing Rey as the child of Luke and Mara. I could see Mara having to hide her on a backwater planet. Going to go into more about the staff she carries around all the time…. but mostly I love Rey with all of my heart and she is the sort of character we need to carry forward the franchise for the next generation.

Finn

Finn is super awesome… and I think his story arc of how the reluctant Stormtrooper escaped to join the Rebellion is great. I fully expected him to be the new Han Solo in that he is the one that is super reluctant to “do the right thing”. This over reaching desire is to get as far as humanly possible away from the First Order, and rightly so… given that he was abducted as a child and placed into their creepy mind control scheme for breeding perfect warriors. I need to actually read the novel related to Finn, but enough of a summary was that basically the other Stormtroopers you see him interact with… were all in his four member pod that he trained with. He served as the captain.. and the guy who plants the bloody hand on his helmet is suggested to be the “screw up” of that team named Slip. When Finn is confronted by TR-8R the shock baton trooper… it seems super personal… which makes us think that maybe he was either Zero or Nines one of the other two members of that team. The Finn story arc is one of redemption, but he comes across as such a likable character from the moment we meet him. Like there was part of me that wanted Rey and Finn go to off into the sunset having amazing adventures together. As far as how he works into the trilogy… there are folks that seem to think he is going to be Lando’s kid but that would just cheapen the character of Finn. If anything I think Finn might somehow end up being related to Sana Starros, a character introduced in the “in canon” comic book series. I just keep thinking that the various characters that have been carefully introduced in those comics will eventually make their way into the movies in one form or another.

Poe Dameron

Poe is one of those characters that I thought I would end up being annoyed by. In every single pre-release shot had this strutting and preening nature to it… and I guess in theory he does do that. His character however is super likeable and ends up being this awesome character from the moment he hits the screen. Firstly he wins huge points with me by being devoted to his droid… since droids are in essence the pets of the Star Wars universe. The folks that care about them as more than just a walking toaster… always win huge points with me. On top of that he is like the best damned pilot legitimately. I don’t remember what Tam had his kill count at, but it was irrationally high. What makes it even better is the fact that Poe and Finn make such an amazing team. There is talk as to whether or not this is a “bromance” or a romance and I am honestly fine with whatever that ends up being. I don’t necessarily feel the need to ship these two together, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if that was the direction the movie was going. For me the interactions in the Tie Fighter mimic those of Han and Luke in the Millennium Falcon taking out Tie Fighters. I personally feel like Finn was so interested in seeing that he survived, because he is super loyal to his team members…. and from the moment they escaped together Finn I think considered Poe as part of his “new” team, just like he seemed to have the same instant loyalty to Rey. Supposedly there is a bunch of backstory about his parents in a comic series leading up to Force Awakens and I need to track it down… but the lineage ties back to the Rogue Squadron from what I am hearing. Which makes me wonder if Poe is going to be the star of the Rogue One movie.

BB-8

I had some serious reservations about this droid before the launch of the movie, because it seemed like Disney was setting this character up to be the new Jar Jar. Disney films all have quirky often annoying animal sidekicks… and I think that is precisely what Jar Jar was trying to be… and what BB-8 seemed to be based on the insane amount of merchandising. On top of everything else… the design seemed to make no sense. Like I could not sort out what the robots primary function was, and I guess in theory… they are designed to be small compact astromech droids. Seeing BB-8 on screen however melted all the ice, and made me just simply gush. The thing about BB-8 and its head tilt ability… is that it makes the droid far more emotive than any other to date. Sure R2-D2 could convey a bunch of emotion with his antsy little back and forth dance…. but BB-8 can simply tilt its head to the side or let it drop… to convey curiosity or sadness. From the moment the little guy flipped open the lighter to signal a Thumbs up…. I was completely sold. I think BB-8 is pretty much the best dog ever… and if they ever made an open world Force Awakens game… I would want to run around the wasteland with BB-8 in the same way as I do Dogmeat in Fallout 4.

Kylo Ren

Kylo Ren was exactly the type of bad guy we needed in this film. We had heard before the film released that he was a Vader groupy, and I was not really sure how that would play out on screen. However they made it work… because he is still very much a boy trying to play for the affection of his grandparent. He never fully grew up… and far as much as he wants to be like Vader… he ends up nothing at all like him other than the same taste in clothing. Vader was this stoic force that made you afraid to even be in the same room with him… in part because his emotions were unreadable. Kylo on the other hand lets the entire world know at all times what he is feeling, and throws these temper tantrums anytime something does not go his way. He is a brash child, demanding to be respected…. when in truth no one actually respects him. Any fear they have of him, is not because of his power, but instead because he serves as this loose canon that does more harm to the First Order that he actually seems to do to the Resistance. There was one plot point that I knew would happen somehow… and that was the death of Han Solo. Once we learned the parentage of Kylo it pretty much decided that by the end of the movie he would end up killing his father. While I saw that scene coming… I still thought it did an excellent job of showing just how NOT in control Kylo really was. How he was continuing to struggle with his light side up until the very moment he ignited his saber into his father. I have this feeling that by the time we see Ren in the next movie, he will be more like Vader and be significantly more machine than he is man.

Snoke

The last character that I am going to talk about specifically is Snoke, the enigmatic leader of the First Order. There is a lot of speculation as to who he really is… and I am absolutely putting my hopes in the Darth Plagueis basket. There are so many little things that are either purposefully trying to mislead us… or are there intentinally. Firstly the music that plays when they go talk to Snoke is apparently the same music that plays in Revenge of the Sith during the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise scene. Also Snoke is referred to as “wise” in the movie, which might also be a bit of foreshadowing. Similarly on the cover of the Darth Plagueis novel he is shown appearing to Palpatine in a hugely inflated hologram much the same way as Snoke does. When you look at his face… there is something going on… almost necrotic which would make you wonder if he is being kept alive through the sheer force of the Dark Side. Now on the other side of things… Plagueis was a Muun apparently at the request of Lucas. However since this series is departing from the Lucas approved universe… he could in theory be brought back and just about any damned thing they wanted to.

The other thing that I keep coming back to as well is Rey’s staff looks oddly like pretty much every single incarnation of Plagueis’s Staff Lightsaber we have seen in comics and the toys. I think there would be an interesting symmetry if she had this Sith artifact with her all along. Also given that Plagueis was essentially betrayed by the old Sith ways… he would be suspicious of the old “Rule of Two” thing and even the Sith lineage in general. So instead we have the Knights of Ren, which is a group of force users…. that he even talks about have not completed their training, in that he tells Hux to bring Kylo’s body so they can finish. Since he was thought destroyed by Palpatine his apprentice, it would absolutely make sense for him to create an order of a bunch of “less powerful” force users, instead of bestowing all of his knowledge onto a single apprentice that could easily depose him again. If we believe the whole “vergence in the force” stuff from the prequels… it would also mean that Plagueis either intentionally or not… created the Skywalker lineage. This loops back to the whole Saga movies being about the Legacy of Skywalker, which would be a pretty nice bookend especially if Plagueis ends up legitimately destroyed by the end. In any case… I need to wrap this post up because it has gotten pretty long. At another date I will talk about some of my disappointments in the movie, albeit super minor ones.

Have an awesome week.. and May the Force Be With You!

Banking and Bosses

January 18, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Morning

Trying to knock out a really quick blog post, because if I don’t right now I am not entirely certain when I will get the chance. Both my wife and I are off today for the holiday, and as a result we have tried to schedule as much as humanly possible to do today. Largely this means finally getting in to talk to the bank about refinancing our loan. Adulting is frustrating and horrible… and hopefully it will go smoother than I have made it out to be in my head. In a perfect scenario we will be able to do this without much hassle. In theory it should only really be a case of someone from the bank coming to look over the house and appraise it, and after the recent renovations that should go a hell of a lot more smoothly. I mean we have a relatively new roof and very new siding, so the house has looked better than it has in years. All of that said… there is still so much anxiety for me anytime you are dealing with finances and banks and such.

After that I have this feeling that we are going to run around looking at dish washers. For whatever reason… it is suddenly a big deal to my wife that we have a non-functional dish washer. Don’t get me wrong I understand, I hate washing the dishes but for reasons entirely different from probably hers. When you are 6’4″ they simply do not make a sink that is comfortable to stand at, and by the time I finish washing dishes my back is killing me from stooping over the sink. Why it is suddenly a crisis is the part that I am not quite understanding, because the thing has been dead for several years now. All of that said… if she wants a new dishwasher we are getting a new dishwasher. I know she has looked at a couple of them, and I know she wants my input… but basically whatever one she wants I am completely happy with. I just hope this one I can actually figure out how to use…. because the last one… every time I seemed to run a load of dishes something horrible went wrong.

Boss Farming

It was fairly late by the time I finally filtered downstairs and got set down, and by then a bunch of my friends were in Warframe so I decided to join them. We spent the next hour and some change farming a boss mission trying to get myself and Thalen the last pieces of the Mag Warframe that we needed. Unfortunately… we didn’t have much luck. It seems that through killing planetary bosses you have a chance of getting parts to drop to a specific type of warframe. The boss in question was at the end of Mars, and drops all three parts of the Mag frame. I am not really sure why we cared so much about it, other than the fact that we both had all but one part… and it was the same part we were missing. I am in that same position with Rhino, and that is a mech I am far more likely to use. But whatever the case we were wrapped up in the moment of killing stuff for loot, and I have to say… we walked away with a bunch of awesome stuff.

If nothing else… it was a great source of the various crafting materials needed to create mechs. There is a single piece that I am missing for a couple of helmets that I will need to track down at some point. I also had plenty of materials to craft a bunch of weapons, including two new swords, a new bow, and a set of fists for me to use on my Rhino frame. Right now I am really liking the moment to moment feel of this game, and it seems to be the ideal drop in and hang out type co-operative experience. The question will be how long it takes for one of us to get super serious about the game, because this feels like the sort of game that is fun to play casually… but deeply frustrating to play seriously. There is one mission type that I absolutely hate, and that is the sneak up and capture the target type mission. I never can seem to get in close enough to them to keep from triggering them to make a run for the escape vessel. Then when they start running… I am simply not fast enough to take them down before they get away. There is one mission that I tried four or five times yesterday and never seemed to be able to finish successfully. Other than that mild frustration… I am enjoying pretty much every other mission type I have done.