Tales of the Aggronaut

Media Consumption 9/19/2015

September 19, 2015 by Belghast

Another Thing

One of the things I have found myself doing a lot lately is hanging out downstairs on my laptop and watching a fairly steady feed of television and movies. Now some of this I am consuming from the On Demand service from cable and others from Netflix or Hulu. Over the last few years there is a ton of television content that I have wished I had seen, but never actually got around to seeing. With fall coming on, I tend to spend a lot more time snuggled on the couch, and as such I think I am going to start another weekly feature similar to my Sunday “what I have been playing” column to watch about the media content I have been consuming. One of the big things that has changed over the years is I tend to watch an entire television series over the course of a couple days, instead of letting it drag out over the course of a season. In fact I prefer this method of consumption so much that I will let an entire season of a show record on my DVR before starting in on watching it. I blame Netflix squarely for this tendency and right now quite literally the only shows I watch as they are airing are the Walking Dead series simply because most of my development group is hooked on the show and we discuss it Monday mornings. Hopefully folks will dig me going back and talking about what I have been up to.

iZombie

I started this show on my own a few days ago, but quickly realized that this would actually be something that my wife would enjoy. As a result last night we started in and managed to get about three episodes into the series. Essentially you take the smart and quirky writing of Veronica Mars, mix in a dash or True Calling and Crossing Jordan, and add a dash of Being Human and maybe a sprinkle of a show like Drop Dead Diva… and you end up with the weird mix that is iZombie. The premise is simple… she was a promising surgical resident until she went to a party on a boat… where a designer drug turned people into zombies. She got scratched and wound up as a member of the unliving… completely uprooting her promising career, her engagement and most of the relationships in her life. Instead she now works in the Morgue where she has a ready supply of brains, and a series of misadventures that spring around her ability to see flashes of memory from the brains she consumed. Flat out if you loved Veronia Mars as much as I did… you will love this show. It is more of the same sort of intelligent writing and snarky commentary mixed with crime solving… just of a different sort. I look forward to picking up and continuing watching this show over the weekend.

Black Mirror

This one is available on Netflix, and is a British show which means… short seasons. There are two seasons available currently, which only actually mean six total shows to watch. I tweeted that this show was weird, but there is something infectious about it. I like to think of it as Tales from the Crypt for Futurism and Technology. Essentially they take ideas that folks have always thought might be cool… and take them to really dark extremes. One of the episodes featured a device that you stuck behind your ear, that recorded every single moment in your life allowing you to review them later. But what happens when no one ever forgets anything… and can scrutinize every moment and everything you have ever said in full high definition color? The show makes up a series of disturbing what if’s that bring cautionary tales about our own lust for technology and innovation. I managed to make it through four episodes of the series before finally falling asleep the other night, so at some point I will pick up and finish it. The six episodes make it a quick watch and if you are into dark futurism…. it might be down your alley.

Chappie

This movie combines a bunch of weak spots for me… Artificial Intelligence, Die Antwoord, and Neill Blomkamp. I loved the movie District 9, so when I saw the trailer for Chappie I thought I would probably like it as well. The problem is it just took me a really long time to get around to watching it. The movie is really odd at times… because for most of it, it really just feels like a really long Die Antwoord video. Pretty much every piece of music found in the video is theirs, and it features all of the same odd visuals that you find in their videos. This isn’t a bad thing necessarily, it just makes the movie feel less “movie-like”. I am imagining there will be a Chappie 2, because they left a lot of things unresolved at the end of the movie. As far as Chappie itself… the robot was kinda adorable… and he is voiced by the same actor that played Wikus from District 9. The robot is vulnerable and childlike and extremely impressionable… but at the same time very loyal to its humans. The movie as a whole asks a bunch of trans-humanist questions about what exactly consciousness and sentience is. It will be interesting to see where this goes if there is a sequel.

Star Wars Prequels

Something that I did last weekend and over the course of this week was watch the Star Wars movies. I’ve talked a bit about how Phantom Menace was a massive let down for me… and how I have been afraid to get excited about Force Awakens because of it. In spite of all of my better judgement however… I am infected with full on hype mode when it comes to Force Awakens and Star Wars in general. I grew up loving this series… and in spite of the prequels I am once again in love with anything and everything Star Wars. As a result I thought to myself… maybe I was too hard on the Prequels, so in my rewatch of the movies attempted to go into them with an open mind. The end result is that I don’t necessarily “hate” them, but objectively they are really bad movies. The pacing feels off, and the characters feel forced to act out awkward dialog at every single turn. There is something however that bugs me even more about them. There are times in movies and television shows when the viewers know more about the movie than the characters on screen… and this can be interesting.

The problem with Phantom Menace is that it somehow pretends that we don’t know that Senator/Chancellor Palpatine is Darth Sidious. Like when we finally find out that he is the Dark Lord of the Sith… the movies act like we should be shocked. Additionally making these movies about Anakin Skywalker just feels wrong. We know from the moment this series starts that he is ultimately going to end up in a fight with Obi Wan and be damaged to the point of needing to go into the suit to survive and become the Darth Vadar we all know. The prequels should have focused on Obi Wan, and told his story… with his failure to steer Anakin away from the Dark Side as being a part of that story. Obi Wan is the interesting character here, not the whiny bullshit of Darth Teen Angst. There are awesome moments scattered among the three films, but I feel like you could make one really awesome movie if you just edited out the bad bits. In fact there is a fan edit that does just this and trims the movie into a 2 hour long epic. The only part of the first film that is shown is the “Duel of the Fates” sequence. I think this would be a much better way to jump start the awesome movies that follow… and really the original movies are awesome. I found myself thinking just how great they were as I watched “A New Hope” and “Empire Strikes Back”. I can still however take or leave “Return of the Jedi”, because I feel like it starts some of the bullshit that George Lucas tried to continue throughout the Prequels.

Fear the Walking Dead

Finally I wanted to talk a bit about Fear the Walking Dead, which this Sunday will show its fourth episode. Last week the shit finally started hitting the fan, as the Zombie infection began to finally get noticed. My wife happened to catch the first two episodes before watching the new episode last week because she happened to be downstairs grading. She made the same sort of comments that I had been making internally about how stupid the characters were acting. At one point she made the comment “Have none of these people ever seen Scream?” as another character put themselves in a really dumb position. Over the first two episodes the series played on the fact that we know how the Walking Dead unvierse works, and placed the characters in compromising positions…. only to have the Zombie NOT jump out of the shadows to get them. That however I think is changing, and this week I expect things to start to get really crazy. I love the way the series is playing on the modern riots as the way the public at large is dealing with the zombie epidemic. When the police put down a zombie, it is seen as police brutality and a huge riot breaks out downtown. The show keeps giving us little clues that things are heating up… like the first few zombies took awhile to turn, but now the virus is mutating and speeding up. In one sequence there is a cop being munched on by a zombie… and then a few scenes later that same police officer is munching on a protester. The only thing that really frustrates me is the fact that at no point do people seem to recognize what is happening. I mean are zombie films not a thing in this universe?

License Portability

September 18, 2015 by Belghast

Golden Age of Ports

MortalKombatVersions

This morning is going to be yet another stunning example of “Bel Wants a Thing that Will Never Happen”, but I am going to roll with it anyways. One of my big frustrations over the last several years is when I end up repurchasing the same game for a different platform. For example I owned Fallout 3 long before Steam existed, but because I wanted the convenience of being able to play that game without having to rummage for discs every single time… I ended up picking the game of the year edition on a steam sale. But more often than this there are games that I have on the PC that I wish I could play on a console, or on a console and wish I could play on a PC. Last night there was a discussion about the new Shovel Knight patch, and one of my immediate thoughts was… man I kinda wish I had that on my 3DS since I have taken recently to bringing that to work to play. Sure it isn’t terribly annoying to repurchase a $20 game, but it certainly feels it when you are talking about a $60 game. Now we get to my wish… portable licensing. What I mean by that is the ability to swap licensing between various game systems that a game is available. Don’t want to play Borderlands 2 on your PC anymore? Fine trade that license in for the PS4 copy, and when you tire of that the Vita copy.

The problem is you are immediately going to tell me… “but Bel this is how game companies make money, by releasing their game on every possible platform in the hopes that you will play pokegame with them and buy them all!” Sure that is how things seem to work currently, but is that really a good model? For years there was a significant amount of work porting games between consoles. The Sega Genesis was a vastly different system than the Super Nintendo… and we constantly saw massive differences between the games that ended up on both platforms. I took the liberty of snagging two screenshots of two different versions of Mortal Kombat II, from the golden age of porting games to multiple platforms. You can see a bunch of graphical differences between the two based on the limitations of each architecture. What has changed is the fact that console manufacturers do not have the same sort of pull that they used to. PC Gaming became a major contender as has handheld platforms, and while console manufacturers still desperately cling to the notion of “exclusivity” this is a dying concept. Systems are designed from the ground up to be essentially easy to port code to, because they know that the keys to their success is a huge library of popular games.

License Portability

There are certain games out there that you know will ultimately end up on every single platform. Take the example of the new Tomb Raider game that Microsoft claims to have exclusivity over. They have not so subtly chosen their words every single time they have talked about and used the specific phrasing of “exclusive for holiday 2015”. That means a few months after Christmas 2015 you will end up with a new launch for the PS4 and PC and whatever other platforms seem to matter at the time. Essentially what I am proposing is to cut through this bullshit and simply sell licenses that you can move back and forth between the platforms. I can see this going down one of several different ways, but not all of them are terribly easy to implement. The best scenario is simply that if you purchase the game directly from a developer, you can create an account that allows you to log in and get a new license for whatever platform you happen to play the game on. That means you are paying a non-discounted rate for the game, directly to the game developer cutting out the middle man… and for that you gain the privilege of playing that game on whatever platform you happen to desire doing so. There are a lot of logistics with this one, but I could see it working for someone like Ubisoft that already has their own gaming infrastructure in the form of UPlay. That would actually turn that system from being a liability into being a positive for users, because as of right now… there is no reason for UPlay to exist other than to annoy us.

Another option would be some sort of a license swap scenario, where you trade in one license key for a new license key for the system of your choosing. This honestly would work similar to PC software that allows you to install on a fixed number of machines. In these cases there is almost always an online tool that allows you to unbind a license from a specific machine and install it fresh on another to allow for things like system rebuilds. The problem being that right now there is no real way to make sure these licenses are leaving circulation, as in once a game is granted through a system like PSN, it becomes harder to revoke the game since you are having to deal with a third party company doing it for you. The final option I would suggest is probably the easiest. When you own the game on any platform you could purchase heavily discounted copies of the game for other platforms. My theory is that you would ultimately end up paying something along the lines of 15-20% of the cost of the original game to get a new copy of the game for another platform. The problem here is that a system like this would be rife with potential abuse. What is to say that I don’t buy the game on the PS4, and then get a discount key for my friend to play on their Xbox One. The worse case scenario is after market sales of said discount keys. None of these solutions are perfect, but I feel like if someone actually solved this solution… it would be a huge marketing point for any games they produce. I have several PCs, a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Nintendo 3DS, PS Vita, Android device, and iOS device if you limit the search to only the more recent systems. It would be amazing to play the gamesI want to play on whatever systems they are available… without going bankrupt doing so.

Pax South Excitement

September 17, 2015 by Belghast

Excitement Grows

Last year Pax South was quite literally the first gaming convention I had ever been too. Granted I have been to comic conventions and scifi fan conventions over the years… but never a gaming one. I didn’t really know what to expect but Liore gave me some advice… that as soon as you get in the doors the anxiety fades away because you realize that these are “your people”. I didn’t really believe her until the convention was actually underway… and absolutely I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be just fine. I never strike up conversations with strangers, yet I found myself idling chatting with people while standing in the queue room like a pro. There was just this aura of acceptance that I felt, when quite literally anything anyone was into was awesome. The only problem was that it was quite literally an overload on my senses and while I technically knew a bunch of people at the convention, I only actually managed to meet up with the AggroChat folks that I had planned on meeting up with… and Lonrem from Anook. Well I guess that is not entirely true because that Friday I had a bunch of press meetups scheduled to talk with various game devs. At the end of the two days I attended, I was worn out beyond belief… but I was pretty damned happy with my experience. I had originally decided to try and attend as many local conventions as I could… but ultimately that fell through for one reason or another.

After having done a Pax I realized that the highlight for me was not necessarily the show, but getting to hang out with people that I do not normally get to hang out with. It felt like this giant summer camp for gamers and geeks… and it was fairly magical. With this in mind I set my sights on Pax Prime… but nothing really went as I had hoped there. Firstly I missed out on getting tickets, and second we were not accepted for press passes. Then thirdly… August is a really bad time for me. My wife is a school teacher and Pax Prime happens exactly at the beginning of our School year here in Oklahoma. It would have been extremely rough on my wife for me to have been away during those first weeks of school, when she ends up having to rely on me the most because she is simply stressed beyond the point of coping. So while I was sad that I didn’t get to attend, I still had hopes that I could con more people into joining me at Pax South this year. Since I know what is important to me now… I know what to focus on, and that is planning on meeting up with people. The problem we ran into was that on the convention floor the cell service was complete crap. So my theory is that we will need to figure out meet up points ahead of time this year, rather than trying to rely on some sort of impromptu thing.

More People More Fun

The above picture was hands down the highlight of my Pax experience, not because I we were playing Gigantic really, but more than the three of us were playing together. The gravy on top is just the fact that we happened to be beating a YouTube celebrity in the process. Now we zoom forward to yesterday… they opened the flood gates and started taking sales for the 2016 Pax South in San Antonio Texas. This time I managed to get in on the three day passes, which there are actually still a few left. As of right now I know that myself, Rae, her brother, Ashgar, Thalen, Dallian, Lonrem, and Helkim are confirmed going… or at the very least have their tickets in hand. I am sure in the coming weeks I am going to start hearing of more people going, and I plan on starting up something to keep track of who is going and on what days so that maybe we can meet up and hang out. I need to start doing some research into what eating options are there in the Riverwalk area, because I absolutely do not want to try and go to that Chillis again out of desperation and hunger. I am also hoping we can maybe coordinate hotels, because I really liked the one I stayed in last year… but it was out by the airport. However if there are many of us it would not be an issue at all to carpool into the convention each day. I feel like I have the whole parking situation under control after having done it last year. I have to say I am extremely excited, and hoping this one is going to be bigger and better than last year. I mean this is the only Pax that does not sell out in a matter of minutes… so honestly I am fine with that. The concept of trying to get tickets to any other Pax seems like a stressful situation. I realize it is still months away, but I want to try and make the best of this coming years show.

Heading for a Trap

September 16, 2015 by Belghast

Slightly Darker Side

One of the ways I have differed so far from my friends, is that I cannot seem to bring myself to do ONLY the class story line. As a result I am ridiculously over leveling the content, and last night I worked on finishing up Nar Shaddaa. I’ve been enamored with the concept of the vertical city since first experiencing it in Dark Forces. In SWTOR Nar Shaddaa is the darker and more disturbing cousin of Coruscant and provides a very similar leveling experience. You travel through hub sections of the city until you end up in Shadow Town and resolve the central conflict of the story and your class quest. As a Smuggler this setting feels extremely at home, and as you might expect I do in fact get into plenty of trouble with Bounty Hunters and Hutts. Generally speaking when I have played SWTOR in the past, I am extremely light side focused. In fact I generally have trouble not choosing the “blue” option on any quest dialog. As a Smuggler however… I am finding it a little easier to choose that “red” option.

I guess I am ultimately playing my version of Han Solo… the goodnatured lovable scoundrel. When lives of innocents are on the line, I always end up choosing the “right” option and get those light side points. However when I am in a situation where I serve to profit greatly by looking the other way… I find myself “playing the character” and finding it significantly easier to to take those dark side points… and console myself with a pile of credits. Similarly if I have been double crossed… or if someone is doing something truly heinous… I find it oh so satisfying to take that [Attack Them] option. Horrific Imperial Scientist gene splicing people? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! Try and talk my way out of a bounty hunter? Nope! Blaster to the head with you! My weakness seems to be damsels in distress however… because I know right now I am walking into a big trap but I am having to play it off like my character would. It will also likely end up giving me another opportunity for sweet sweet revenge… which I am sure I will be unable to resist taking dark side points for. Thankfully I have diplomacy as a Crew Skill… and even though it is likely at the end of a blaster… it helps to repair all those dark side points.

Cavalcade of Commendations

One of the good changes while not playing the game, is the fact that they standardized the planetary commendation system. Now when you complete anything you have the option of simply taking “basic commendations” instead of the planet specific ones, and at the same time they have increased the total number you get before fifty exponentially. This means that I am constantly swimming in a good supply of them, and I could probably constantly upgrade my moddable gear… but I am finding that I don’t really need to. Since I am using Treek as my tank and she came with a full set of mod gear, and I managed to piece together a workable set from the GTN and the pilot packs… it allows me to pretty much ignore every quest reward and just go for more commendations. Since I am quite overleveled I was 21 before leaving Coruscant, at which point I went to the fleet and kitted out both armor for myself and Treek in the best modifications I could find at the time. This rather easily carried me through until the end of Nar Shadda, at which point I dinged 30 and repeated the same process with level 29 gear. If I can continue this process of upgrading my gear “every other planet” I should be in really good shape to have a pile of commendations for other upgrades.

Last night I spent some of my pile of credits on making myself look cooler. At some point they added in dye slots to the gear, which allows you to “socket” a dye that comes in either single color or dual tone combinations. Most of the really cool combinations are exorbitantly expensive, but I found one I could live with that was black and grey for roughly 40,000 credits. Then I went searching for a really cool gun, and found this one that is originally a cartel item… that folks were selling fairly reasonably on the market. The gun you end up with at the end of the starter zone is functional but not that cool looking… so I was more than happy to cast aside “Flashy”. I dig the fact that it looks like the blaster rifles that some of the troopers have. It fits my shoot first, ask questions later style of playing the “Sawbones” healer. I have long said that “looking cool” makes your character feel cool, and I am pretty happy with my Chiss Smuggler. I am extremely happy that I re-rolled him ages ago as a Chiss instead of yet another human. I am starting to develop this “savior of the aliens” rep in my questing choices, which is kinda awesome since people keep pointing out the fact that I am another “alien scum”. Still having a surprising amount of fun playing through the Smuggler storyline that I ultimately missed at launch.