Week in Gaming 1/17/2016

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weekingamingIt has been awhile since I have done one of these, and of the various failed columns that I have tried over the years…. I think this one is the best for me personally.  Sunday is a rough day in general, in part because I wake up and have to finish up AggroChat and get it out to the various locations.  As a result it helps to have a fairly formulaic option I can lean on when I am not feeling super inspired.  As a result I am leaning once again on the Week in Gaming series just to talk about a bunch of stuff I played this week.

Pax South Hype!

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I am starting to get super excited for Pax South.  Last year I had various companies ask me for a business card, and I was somewhat kicking myself for not having any.  I mean I guess part of me never really thought that having a business card for a blog and podcast was a good idea.  This year however I have gotten my ass in order and if everything works as intended the cards will arrive at the beginning of next week.  I only ordered 250 because I could not in any circumstance think of a reason why I would need that many.  The design was done by Rae and was originally intended to be our Pax Prime cards, but since we were denied media access to that convention they never actually got made.  I resurrected the idea because I thought it was pretty slick.  In the original design each of the hosts has their own color, and given that I love green I latched onto that one.  As far as a back design I went with something simple because I felt like it needed something on the back….  and in truth that is the crux of our thing…  daily posts, weekly cast.  If you are also going to be at Pax South let me know, I would love to meet up with everyone that I can while I am there.

Undertale

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I have some mixed feelings about Undertale so far.  On one level I really like the game and it feels like something that is going to be an interesting experience.  The negative is I absolutely HATE the combat system.  I hate mini-games, and while I was corrected last night on the podcast…. I am sorry but that isn’t a real combat system.  Part of me just wants to run away from every single fight so that I don’t have to do it.  I mean granted I was using arrow keys and maybe that makes it worse than it actually is, but I just hate the concept of breaking out of an otherwise fun old school RPG style game….  and having to deal with move the heart to avoid shit.  For now I have essentially abandoned the game, in the hopes that some distance will in fact make the heart grow fond.  Essentially I love everything else about the game… other than the combat system.  This might be one of those games that is more enjoyable to watch.

Victor Vran

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I’ve already talked about this game quite a bit throughout the week but I feel like it still deserves additional mention.  The only negative about this game is that I started playing it essentially the week before a bunch of other things that I wanted to play happened.  My hope is that once the recent infatuation with Warframe and Diablo 3 Season 5 have calmed down, I can return to this and play my way through the main story some more.  I really want to see what multiplayer feels like in the end game experience.  Playing it was fine for me… but essentially locked the other players that I was dragging along with me… out of some of the experience of interacting with the voice floating around in your head.  If you are not partaking of the Diablo 3 Season 5 madness…. and still want a ARPG fix… I highly suggest you check it out.

Warframe

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This game….  is so good and I am kinda kicking myself for never really giving it a proper attempt at playing.  I have downloaded this game numerous times in the past on the PC, PS3 and PS4 when I saw other folks in my various social media timelines talking about it… but never actually tried it.  I guess in my head I had this absolutely misrepresented as to what sort of game it was.  With a super generic name like Warframe… I kept getting it jumbled up with the other game Warface.  Warface being a super generic Call of Duty/Counterstrike style PVP shooter.  So in my head I equated Warframe to a PVP experience… not this deeply nuanced cooperative PVE experience.  There are so many aspects of this game that remind me of an MMO, but not necessarily in the traditional sense.  The game as a whole feels like this amalgam of Destiny, Phantasy Star Online and Tribes.  If that combination sounds like something you would be interesting, I highly suggest you check it out.  I think I was largely luckier than most in that one of the freebie mechs, the Excalibur is right down my alley.  I am slashing everything with my space ninja ways, and really enjoying myself.  For those curious, I have pretty much set down roots on the PC, and while I might give it a shot later on the PS4, I have no real intention of moving at the moment as the AggroChat crew seem to all be playing it.

Diablo 3

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The floodgates for Diablo 3 Season 5 opened on Friday at 7pm and from that point until 10:30 or so my time I was running around in a group leveling like mad.  At this point I have managed to get to 68, which puts me behind the curve of folks like Grace that are 70 with over 150 paragon levels.  That however is fine by me, because I am just happy I am almost to the cap with at least one character.  I am going to be interested in seeing what the various challenges are that unlock the various seasonal rewards.  What makes the season play so addictive to me is the fact that it mimics a MMO launch.  Everyone on your friends list for a period of time is playing Diablo 3 and excited about it, as though they were playing a brand new game.  So you have a few weeks of focused play, and then don’t feel guilty at all when you shift back to playing other games until the launch of the next season.  This focused excitement is really fun to experience, and this is technically my third season so far.  There is part of me that wishes I had gotten on board with the concept earlier.  My goal today is to finish up my Crusader and then probably focus on some more Warframe.  Hopefully all of you readers out there have had an equally fun week, and Pax South seriously could not get here soon enough.

Malfunctions and Malthael

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Technological Betrayal

Yesterday was a really strange day, for several reasons.  Firstly I opted to take the day off since the week as a whole had been one of the worst in a very long time.  The summary can be that the project from hell…  went to hell.  During the course of the last two years, it has been common place that the vendor has invented new requirements on a regular basis.  For example in a meeting on Wednesday they produced a network diagram of how the system should be designed…  that would have been nice to see roughly two years ago when the project started.  As a result it was once again up to us to save the day and try desperately to make things function.  Over the course of 45 minutes I threw up a brand new reverse proxy server and configured a dozen or so redirects to get things functional again.  It was all for naught however… because even with things configured their application was still failing to function at an acceptable level.  So as a result the big launch was scrapped and we are now trying to regroup and decide when exactly the vendor application is working well enough to try this again.  Essentially I know exactly how the Healthcare.gov team felt when vendors failed to provide a fully functional product.

Yesterday was supposed to be a chill day that I stayed at home, worked a little bit… and overall relaxed but that was not apparently in the cards.  I woke up to find my cellphone locked beyond reason.  I pulled the battery and it began a pattern of locking up after 10-15 minutes of usage.  I tried uninstalling everything that was not critical, but the error message I kept getting was that TouchWiz was failing, that being the default shell of Samsung phones.  I tried booting into recovery mode and clearing the application cache, and eventually I was left with only the thermonuclear option of resetting to factory settings.  So I hurriedly started shifting all of my authenticators to running off of another device, and in several spurts of pulling the battery to reset the device I managed to use it long enough to do that.  I held my breath, and hit the button resetting the device….  which actually took far less time than I would have thought.  The thing is… all of the important stuff on the device other than the applications gets backed up to google drive, and all of my pictures to the google photos site.  In theory I didn’t lose anything, and the moment I logged into my google account it started downloading everything that I had on my device before and restoring the application states.  In any case… resetting a phone is not something I would want to do often because it caused more anxiety than just about anything I have done period.  There are basically three devices that need to function for me to be happy…  my phone, my laptop, and my gaming machine.

More Adulting

The other major problem of the day was our primary cable box.  We have the in home networking thing where all of the cable boxes are supposed to talk to each other, allowing us to record programs and watch content from the DVR from any room with a box.  This has not always worked as intended, but lately it just hasn’t worked at all.  The first symptoms were that we could no longer access the DVR remotely, then could no longer schedule something to record.  There have been a few situations where the box itself did not come up cleanly after a power spike… and I had to hard reboot it a few times.  Yesterday I attempted another one of these reboots hoping to clear up the problems, and what I got instead was a dead box.  I am extremely lucky in that I have a friend that I have known for years, that is a developer for the cable company.  So with his help we tried a bunch of different things to troubleshoot the problem.  The behavior that was happening is that after a hard boot it would throw two error codes Er:54 and Er:55 then start counting from H0:01 to H8:00 ish, and repeat that over and over forever.  This happened once before and I let it sit like this for an entire day and it never recovered on its own.

Essentially what this is a sign of if you ever see this on your own cable box is that apparently it is trying desperately to dial back home.  The H001-H800 is it cycling through frequencies from 1 mhz to 800 mhz trying to find a channel to communicate on.  It has to dial home for it to be able to do a health check and make sure that the software is up to date.  So until it finds a signal it won’t actually boot into the cable box software.  Now on the cable side my box was showing as being a “non-responder” so for whatever reason, the communication framework inside the box was unable to talk… and essentially the box itself was dead.  I unhooked the box and brought it to the local office, roughly a mile from the house and I have to say I am super impressed.  They scanned the barcode on the back of the unit and walked into the back and handed me a new one with really no questions asked.  Took it home, hooked it up… and at first I was only seeing the standard definition channels.  I had to call into the main office and they sent some signal to my box that caused a reboot and after that everything was back to normal.  I guess the box had been dying for awhile, because everything is much more responsive on this one with relatively no menu lag.  I seriously think I am one of the few people in the country who actually loves my cable company, because I have had almost nothing but good experiences with them.  At the very least I have had nothing like the horror stories I have heard about Charter, Comcast or Time Warner.

Diablo Day

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The focus of yesterday however was that Diablo 3 Season 5 started at 5pm pst, and that was pretty much the only thing on my mind all day long.  I am not sure what it is about Diablo season play, but it makes the entire experience more enjoyable for me.  It gives us all a reason to start from scratch and re-experience all of the aspects of gearing up and learning everything all over again.  There were a few hiccups at the beginning of the evening, right around the official launch time… but I assume those were all related to server load.  I was able to use the new Rebirth function on my Crusader, but I had to log out and back in for it to take.  Once we all managed to get in game four of us started a group and spend the majority of the evening rolling around together in a glorious murderball.  At some point Ashgar dropped out and a little bit later Mor did was well, which ended up changing the group comp to include Carthuun and Grace’s “Precious”…  otherwise known as the Kraken by the AggroChat folks.  It was awesome to get to meet him and have him on voice with us.

We spent the majority of the night doing bounties and quite honestly that feels like the fastest way to level.  We started playing at 7 pm my time… and I finally tagged out of the group around 10:30 and in that amount of time minus a few breaks I pushed from level 1 to 55ish.  Today once I wrap this blog post up I will be back to working on my Crusader, and trying to decide what abilities I actually want to use.  The problem with running around with three Wizards is that I always feel like I am way too slow to keep up.  As a result I had to generally focus on movement abilities to try and keep ahead of them.  Towards the end of our play session I started focusing on the few ranged abilities that the Crusader has, but regardless of what I do there will be no way I can really compete with the sort of damage that disintegrate throws out.  The other side effect of my build is that I am focusing on some of the crowd control effects that I have like the flail whip that stuns, and judgement that is a big targeted AOE stun effect.  The idea is that I am trying desperately to “tank” the stuff while the wizards burn it to death.  I think the thing I like the most about Diablo seasons is that we hit it hard and heavy for a few weeks, and feel like we accomplished something…  only to move on to other things until the next season comes along.  It gives me the feeling of a new MMO launch, over and over… which for me really is the best part of an new MMO.  That moment when all of your friends are super focused on the exact same thing for a period of time.

Daily Blogging

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The Routine

For awhile now I have thought about breaking the habit of daily blogging, but honestly there is a bit of fear in it.  I got into a small thread on twitter yesterday about this topic and Wilhelm outlines my biggest fear.  If I stopped blogging every single day…  I question if I would ever start back up again.  The irony of this daily blogging thing… is that when I started it I went from being one of the least prolific bloggers to one of the most…  almost over night.  I started doing this daily blogging routine in April of 2013.  My blog however was started in April of 2009, and during those first four years I only managed to make 148 posts.  The largest lapse without any posts was between August of 2012 and April of 2013.  Ultimately my fear is that if I stop the routine… I will go back to that… because of the posts on my blog 1018 happened after I forced myself into this routine.  Ultimately this is part of my schtick, that I tell folks during the Newbie Blogger Initiative and Blaugust is that once upon a time I used to be one of the least regular bloggers out there, but I started down a path….  and quite honestly I am now a bit scared to ever step off of it.

The truth is, my blog started out as a thing largely about gaming but has turned into something more than that.  I never really kept a diary or a journal, but in essence that is what this blog has become.  These are the chronicles of my adventures, mistakes and all of the various things that happen in between.  Over the years I got considerably more personal, and have shared some pretty private stuff with my blog readers.  When something bad has happened in my life, you have been there with me… and often times supporting me.  When there has been a victory…  you have all shared in the glory.  Admittedly there are a lot of details that I leave off the page.  For example I don’t usually mention my wife or family members by name.  In theory I could give a name to her… the way my friend Grace does her husband…  but there is not a nickname that I call her with enough consistency as to make that not feel artificial.  Over the years I’ve created a bit of a rule set that I try and follow.

  • Don’t call people out by name (unless they have called me out first)
  • If something bad happens, focus on the event and not the people
  • If something good happens, talk about the people who made it good
  • Try and remain positive, and not get bogged down in the depression
  • Even though I am filtering…  be honest about my own failures
  • Be humble and thankful that anyone reads my blog at all

The Benefit

I have of course failed at all of them at some point or another, but those are the basic guidelines that I think about when I am writing.  When folks think about this whole daily blogging thing, they tend to focus on the negative.  Sure it is tedious to get up every morning and knock out a blog post before I leave the house.  On the weekends, and when I am taking a day off like I did today I tend to give myself a little more breathing room.  However most of the time like clockwork I can knock out a blog post in thirty minutes to an hour depending on how much I get distracted.  The only day it wears on me is Sundays, when I have to prepare both a podcast episode and knock out a blog post before I can really get on with my day.  For a long time I was staying up until one or two in the morning editing AggroChat but I’ve recently started just heading to bed after the initial first pass.  If I get up at a decent hour I can knock out all of my bloggy/podcasty duties before my wife gets home from church, which gives us a better start to the day.

There is however a lot of benefit to getting up every morning and writing a post.  In many ways the act of writing about something, helps me investigate it further.  I will turn an idea over in my head, and through writing often process my feelings.  There is something about placing words on a page that makes it more “real” for me.  There is also the benefit of having a written log of everything I did during the year.  Each major event, ends up finding its way into my posts in one form or another, so in essence I am externalizing my memory.  So if I wanted to know the weekend I did this, or that… there is almost always a footnote somewhere in my blog about it that I can search later and place specific dates to memories.  Not sure exactly why, but there is something comforting about this… being able to look up with certainty when something happened in the past, and I have three years of my life documented like this now.

The Readers

The part of the equation that I have not sorted out however, is why the hell I have actual readers that continue to grow over the years.  At this point…  they have to be in this because they care about me, and not necessarily what I happen to be saying.  That proposition in itself is so damned strange.  There is this huge part of me that cannot fathom why more of you have not wandered off in boredom by now.  I do not lead an exciting life, and I tend to fall into the same routines in whatever I happen to be playing.  The truth is I have nothing terribly profound to say, and just represent your average person applying fingers to the keyboard.  I am blessed with some amazing friends, but it still shocks me when I meet someone and they tell me that they have read my blog for a long period of time.  I just want to ask them why?  At some point I stopped doing this because blogging seemed to be what the cool kids were doing.  I guess in truth I do the daily routine for me, and because it makes me feel like I am accomplishing something every morning before I even leave the house.  I get more out of this than I think anyone might realize.  I have this open dialog with the world, but in truth I am mostly talking to myself.  I am putting into print things I need to tell myself, and through the act of writing them out…  I actually take the time to listen.

 

Daydreams and Anger

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Powerball Mania

It seems like the only thing that people have been talking about over the last few days at least locally, is the insanity that is the 1.5 billion dollar powerball jackpot.  This sounds only slightly less impressive when you realize that the cash payout was 900 million… and that the IRS would have claimed at least a third of that before it ever actually got to you.  Still however roughly 600 million dollars is a lot of money, more money that I would ever know what to do with.  Which is a fact that became more clear as the days went on.  I’ve been part of an office pool for years, that I largely look at as “insurance”.  Enough people are in said pool that if they hit the numbers there would be a lot of tendered resignations the next day…. and I feel like I would like to at least have that option.  If all of those folks walked…. work would be a pretty miserable place to be for awhile.  The thing is…  for me it is exactly like paying an extra tax and I never really consider what would happen if they actually did win.  However when the powerball itself was up this high, I had to actually purchase a handful of tickets for myself.

The thing about holding something in your hand that could potentially make you at least on paper a billionaire, starts you daydreaming a little.  However I feel like maybe went in different directions than most people.  Quite honestly the only things I could really think of that I would want to do with the money is buy a new gaming rig and a new gaming laptop.  I mean there is  the usual “lets quit work and do what we want to” pipe dream as well, but that one is probably common among all people.  I have no burning desire to buy a bunch of cars, or buy a new lavish and extravagant house.  In the grand scheme of things… I life a pretty damned charmed life and how “meager” my lottery daydreams were only served to prove that I guess.  Most of the things that I would ultimately end up doing… are already in the realm of possibility for me…  well other than the quitting work thing.  Even though my brain consistently tries to tell me that I am not…  fuck you depression…  I guess I really am fairly happy with life in general.  Now if someone wanted to give me part of their winnings however…. I wouldn’t say no.

Calm Night

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Life affirming message above aside…  yesterday was a really really bad day.  Nothing truly catastrophic mind you, because there are lots of worse things that could have happened.  We have just been dealing with this vendor at work, that seems to keep pulling new requirements out of their ass at the 11th hour.  I get really tired of parachuting in and fixing messes, that never needed to be messes in the first place.  I have some rage issues, and I always have had them.  As a kid I used to push down all the negativity until it eventually erupted and all of that bile and bad blood ended up getting targeted at usually the wrong person.  Over the years I have learned to blow off steam in little bits here and there, rather than letting my problems get big enough to cause a thermonuclear explosion.  Yesterday however… I came precariously close to losing my shit on a conference call.  There was a point at which I just had to stop talking for a little bit…  I am not sure how long…  but I knew if I continued talking a stream of hate would spew forth in a manner that is just not acceptable in the work place.  Within a 45 minute period I had to configure a new reverse proxy server… on the existing application box…  configure it… and all the while keep from trying to break the vendor application sharing the same space.  I got it done… and then a friend took me out to lunch to get me out of the environment long enough to reset the fuse.

So on the way home from work last night, I stopped by the liquor store to get something that would hopefully cause me to chill out and relax the rest of the evening.  I took a red solo cup… because there is just something comforting about them…  filled it up one third buttershots, one third baileys, and the last third with milk.  If you want to chill out… I highly suggest this drink because after that the world felt nice and warm and fuzzy.  After that I had a night where I flitted around games, popping into World of Warcraft and messing with my garrisons and shipyards…. but not really settling on any one character long enough to play much of anything.  I eventually popped into voice chat and logged over into Warframe running a few things with Tam and Ashgar until Tam needed to go to class.  From there Ash and I attempted to do a bunch of things…  the last of which was defeating a planetary boss.  The unfortunate thing is that Ash ran out of resurrections… and I barely finished the boss off… but he didn’t get credit which is kinda bullshit.  As an Excaliber the best thing about me… is my melee abilities, but unfortunately on that boss that seemed useless.  Hopefully when I am not imparied the fight will go a hell of a lot easier, and we can get him through it maybe tonight.