Tales of the Aggronaut

King of Monsters

May 26, 2014 by Belghast

An Odd Day

Sometimes on the weekends you have days that feel like they last significantly longer than they should, and then you have days like yesterday that feel like they are over in a blink of an eye. I guess in theory what made yesterday feel so odd is because the entire day was planned around hanging out with some friends and meeting them for lunch at 1:30. So by the time I got up, grabbed breakfast, wrote a blog post… it was pretty much time to shower and get ready to go out. None of this is to say that yesterday was not a really fun day, but it was just over in a flash.

We ate lunch at a trendy restaurant downtown called the Rusty Crane… which for as trendy as it is, was extremely reasonably priced. My wife and I ate for $16, but then again we ate off the brunch menu. I had this weird breakfast enchilada thing, that while tasty is not likely something I would order again. It was a tortilla filled with egg, sausage, avocado and what was billed as grilled onions and peppers. So that to me made it sound like they would be nice and soft and caramelized, but in reality they were mostly raw and maybe spent a few minutes on the grill lightly singing the edges. Had they been like the veggies inside of a Chimichanga it would have been awesome… but me and crunchy veggies tend to disagree.

But the food overall was tasty and cheap… and the company was the important part. We had not seen our friends in several months, and normally we like to see them at least once a month to hang out and get dinner and a movie or something of the sort. The hard part about being non-parents is finding other couples that don’t have kids in tow to go out and do things with. As a result we tend to hang out with a lot of older couples, and this pair is a really odd situation. He is the very first “pimp” I had, aka the guy who first recruited me into the dark art of consulting. She is a teacher at the same school as my wife. We only realized the connection one year at a back to school barbeque, and ever since we’ve kind of integrated into each others families.

King of Monsters

After we ate we decided to go see a movie. Since my wife and the other two had not seen all of the X-Men films leading up to Days of Future Past, they opted against that one. In reality right now there just isn’t much on at the theatre that is not a comic book-y type film. In the end we decided to go see the new Godzilla film as it aligned up time wise better than almost anything else. Just a heads up… I am not sure you can call them spoilers, but be warned this section is going to have something vaguely resembling them. If you want to be surprised when you see the new Godzilla… feel free to skip ahead, but unfortunately if you have seen ANY Godzilla movie, you have also seen this one which is part of the problem I have.

I am not sure exactly what I was expecting, but this movie literally plays out like every Godzilla movie… or in truth damned near every Anime story as well. Mankind does something stupid > Horrible Monster is spawned > Hero (Godzilla) shows up and is misunderstood and attacked by mankind > Sage/Elder/Scientist explains something about nature balancing itself > We put our fate in the Hero (Godzilla) > Hero gets its ass kicked royally and is defeated > Just when all hope seems lost the Hero rises again using last ounce of strength to defeat the Monster. That is pretty much the template for half of the anime I have seen, not to mention every single Godzilla, Ultraman, Kamen Rider, Power Ranger or anything else in the same “big things battle other big things” genre.

I blame Pacific Rim for giving me hope, that a tired old movie construct like Godzilla could have new and interesting life breathed into it. I love everything about the concept of monsters battling monsters, or giant robots saving the day… it fills my inner thirteen year old with glee. The problem is the 37 year old brain is still there and unable to be detached. There were so many things in the movie that seem to have no explanation and made zero sense. There is a scene where a coal fired train is travelling across the country to deliver a payload of nuclear warheads. It is super foggy, and a bunch of the troops are sent ahead to scout the track to see if it is safe. Next thing we know the train is on fire and coming out of the fog. How exactly did that train catch fire? Sure it looks cool as a special effect but it makes zero sense because the monster attacking doesn’t breathe fire or anything. The train just apparently spontaneously combusted while it was coming across the tracks.

The biggest problem I had with Godzilla is that the movie just felt like it was going through the motions. They so closely followed the template of what a Godzilla movie has to be, that the character actors that participated in the movie just felt like window dressing. There was never a single moment in the movie that I did not feel like I knew the next three scenes that were about to happen. Obviously going into it we know that Godzilla is going to win the day… but if we have that as a fixed ending… sure you can do something to mix up the space between the beginning of the movie and the end. So as much as I am railing on the movie, I do have to give it credit that the monster battles looked good. The monsters were well animated and you can tell they spent large amounts of money trying to make Godzilla feel like the original “man in suit” version without making it look cheesy as hell. If you love the original Godzilla movies and can suspend disbelief and ignore the fact that it is following a very tired template… you might just enjoy this movie.

Right in the Feels

Now for a game that I will not give any spoilers for… because it really is worthy of cherishing. Last night when we finished with our festivities, I went upstairs, threw my headphones on and sat down with the purpose of getting through Transistor. When we recorded the podcast both Kodra and Ashgar had beaten the game, and I had heard that the ending is really heart wrenching. They were correct… the game got me right in the feels and I think maybe I even bled a little. Everything about this game is wonderful, and if they do not win awards with it… it is a major fucking tragedy. Basically Supergiant Games has a loyal customer now, after loving Bastion and seeing how much more intricate this game is… I have a feeling that anything they could create would turn out phenomenal.

My only disappointment is how generally short the game is. It took me roughly three hours of game play to beat and is the equivalent of I think four areas that you traverse, maybe five. Now one cool thing that happens is when you defeat the game you can play a “recursion” that allows you to play through a second time with all the abilities that you earned the first time… and everything becomes more difficult as well. So instead of Creep 2.0 you start seeing Creep 3.0 etc. I love the way this game embraces code lingo to produce a world that is both Tron and French Noir at the same time. I would love to see a movie made from this game… would be absolutely phenominal. I have to admit as cool as the gameplay is… I mostly wanted to play through this game for the story. I wanted to know what happened and why things were the way they are. The problem is after completing the game it feels like I have more questions than answers.

Beer and Pizza Action

After the emotional rollercoaster that was Transistor, I felt like i needed to play something far more run and gun. So I picked back up on Wolfenstein: New Order, and at the point in which I went to sleep I was roughly three hours into the storyline. There is something compelling about the game, but at the same time something that leaves me completely uneasy about the potential of a fascist future. So far I am loving the game and look forward to playing some more. Oddly enough this game seems to be able to get me to stealth around. There is a sequence where you sneak into a prison, and I loved lurking about and sneaking up on mobs and taking them out with the knife. Normally I do not do stealth at all, but for whatever reason it felt as though I HAD to use stealth. If you fire a gun anywhere near an officer they will sound the alarm and bring on all sorts of really bad shit like these flying robot things that are damned near impossible to take out with anything other than the shotgun. The game is action packed and focused, and precisely what I needed to recover from the case of the feels.

#Godzilla #PacificRim #Transistor #Wolfenstein #NewOrder

Transistor Gushes

May 25, 2014 by Belghast

Good Bye Old Man

Yesterday was a rough day for many reasons, not the least of which was the fact that I had to bury my old man ferret Smokey. In 2009 we got a pair of brothers from a ferret rescue, and at that point they were several years old already. Bandit passed away several years ago from Insulinoma, and it was one of the hardest things I had been through. I feel like maybe him passing quickly was a godsend. For the last several months Smokey had been deteriorating of old age, and it was hard to watch him go through it. For the last couple of months we had kept him in a separate cage in our bedroom, where he could have easy access to food and water since he was not moving around very well at all. His hind legs simply did not obey him any longer and he had developed cataracts in both eyes.

Our goal was to try and keep him as comfortable as we could until he passed. The old man had some fight in him because there were several nights that we were certain he would not make it through til morning. When morning came it was still friendly and very much alive. When we got up yesterday morning we did our normal “check to see if he made it through the night”, and he seemed about as normal as he ever does. Raised his head, sniffed my hand and went back to sleep. While we were out running errands yesterday it seems like he passed in his sleep because he was curled up in the same little ball he always was.

I am thankful at least that it seems as though he went peaceful. He was a good boy and a friendly ferret, even though he never did bond as tightly to us as his brother did. The above photo is of him in much better days, snuggled up with one of our girls Shiloh in the hammock. Bandits passing was so sudden and jarring, but with Smokey we have had months to get used to the idea and just tried to make him as comfortable as we could. So while part of me is definitely sad that he is gone, another part of me is relieved that he no longer has to struggle.

The Big Clean

Pet funeral aside, yesterday was a good but very tiring day. If it tells you anything I managed to hit 10,000 steps on my fitbit before we actually went for our evening walk. As I said before the house needed cleaning badly, and I got up and around yesterday morning and picked most of it up. However there are still a few deep cleaning projects that need to happen. We needed to run to the bank, so we got out and about and did some shopping. The shirts I had been wearing were getting huge on me, and my wife would visibly sigh each time I wore one of them that now hung from my shoulders like a drape. JC Penny was running a door buster sale that we just happened to luck into without really meaning to. I picked up a bunch of new and better fitting shirts and this prompted me to remove a ton of older shirts from the closet.

Similarly both myself and my wife needed new bathing suits. I found a nice pair of trunks that are far more colorful than anything I have ever bought in the past, and she found a nice one-piece at Old Navy. All of the shopping inspired her to come home and tear apart the closet both figuratively and quite literally. The bedroom for several hours yesterday was a warzone, and among other projects we cleaned out the catch all corner that had jewelry, perfume and lotions on what used to be a typewriter desk. For some time I have been hauling around a cabinet to go into that corner that we picked up on craigslist, but simply lacked the time to do the necessary cleaning to make room for it. It fit in nicely, and honestly could have been a bit bigger.

Similarly she tore apart the bathroom that joins to our bedroom and set up one of those wire divider shelves underneath to segment what is normally just one big space. My biggest contribution was culling my wardrobe by literally half and folding it neatly for a garage sale. As mentioned yesterday in a few weeks we are getting pulled into a garage sale, and I am wondering exactly what else I will be selling. I have tons of compact discs in my office, that I simply never listen to anymore. The idea of listening to a CD just feels foreign, since I stream almost everything thanks to Google Music. I don’t feel the need to own music any longer, I just want access to said music when I want it. As a result I am probably going to get rid of my entire collection, but I seriously doubt any of the regular garage sale fare will want the type of stuff I listen to. Not a single CD could you really classify as “pop”.

Transistor Gushes

Finally last night we recorded our seventh episode of Aggrochat. Once again Rae was travelling, so since Dallian has been so gracious to be a kind of unofficial fifth member of the cast, he stepped in at literally ten minutes notice. I called the episode “Transistor Gushes” because quite literally… that game has hijacked the podcast. For those who don’t know we keep a running shared Google document for the show notes, and during the week we jot down ideas, and recycle ones that we didn’t get to from previous weeks. This week the only thing mentioned is Transistor written in 72 point font, with a much smaller blurb below it that says “things that are not Transistor”.

We successfully covered both, and we discussed Transistor, Wolfenstein: New Order, the Final Fantasy 5 draft, Watchdogs, Dark Souls II, Comics, and a few other things along the way. I feel like it was a really good podcast, and while most of the topics only actually engaged 2-3 of us at a time, the mix of which 3 people were talking was pretty evenly distributed. We plan on having a follow-up show in a few weeks to talk about the actual storyline and elements of Transistor, but for the time being we limited ourselves to just talking about the interesting game play elements. We will of course start giving a massive spoiler warning when we get into discussion of plot points. When talking about Wolf, I tried to limit myself to only discussing things that happen as part of the introduction to the game. Hopefully this works for people, but if not let us know in the comments… hell if it does work let us know… we love feedback.

Farewell to Coldharbor

May 24, 2014 by Belghast

Cleaning Day

Good morning you happy people… I am being forcibly cheery because my body doesn’t seem to want to fully function this morning and I am falling back on the whole “fake it until you make it” methodology. May is a horrible time for me for so many reasons. Firstly the world seems to come alive and fill the air full of pollen and seed pods and all the wonderful things that make life happen. As a result my body tries to kill me as my allergies come into full swing. Additionally with our constant regiment of walking… you would think that at some point I would stop being sore, however that doesn’t seem to be the case. I hit 10,000 steps again yesterday and this morning it feels like every inch of my body hurts. Being fat sucks, but at least I am a much healthier fat that I used to be.

One of the other huge negatives about May is the fact that it is also when the end of the school year happens. Any spouses of educators will agree with me that the two worst times of the year to be their spouse… is the beginning and end of the school year. My wife no matter how much I love her… has been an spastic little monkey in a frantic rush to finish all the things that have to be finished. As a result she is prone to fits of irrationality at 10 pm at night when things are not going like she wants them to, and not much help in taking care of the household chores. Also as a result, I’ve kind of said screw it myself… and our house is a pit right now. So today will be devoted to the cleaning of all the things and trying to get more domicile into a more livable state. Mostly it has been my inner sanctum that has been bothering me… I have been stepping over Amazon boxes for weeks that need to be broken down and taken to the recycling bin. We are considering joining in with a neighbor in a few weeks for a garage sale so some consideration needs to be made about what to actually sell.

Farewell to Coldharbor

Last night my wife was working late yet again, which has been a regular occurrence for most of the month on Friday nights. She had intended to get home earlyish and we had planned to go for our nightly walk and then walk over to Taco Bueno on the way home. At some point during the evening she messaged me saying that she would be working late and to go ahead and eat without her, but at that point I was so heavily into the storyline of Coldharbor that I figured I would just wait. I’ve been Veteran Rank 1 for most of a week now, and have simply not spent enough time in game to push through the main storyline in Cold Harbor which supposedly unlocked access to moving into the Aldmeri Dominion content. Last night I did just that, by finishing not only the end of the main Cold Harbor story but also finishing up the level 50 harborage quest that gets unlocked immediately after that.

I have to say the “end of the game” is equal parts beautiful and epic, and I am trying really hard not to give any unintentional spoilers for those who have not arrived there yet. I figure Coldharbor screenshots all look blue and brutal, so I am trying to pick ones that don’t exactly give away major plot points. There are some interesting choices that happen as you play through the zone, and the game seems to revel in making you choose between bad options. There is a point where you have to pick between a rogues gallery of formerly vanquished enemies, and I am guessing your options are limited if you did not actually finish the quests in the zones they are involved with. I feel like I made the right choice… but you never really know. I still was dealing with a bad bad person, but overall it did not come back to bite me in the butt like I thought it might.

While I have finished the story, I will still be spending quite a bit more time in Coldharbor as I finish the parts of it I skipped while rushing through the storyline. After a point you get tired of everything being blue, purple and grey. I needed to have the ability to move on, especially since I wasn’t really seeing much veteran experience before the Craglorn patch. It seems as though they shifted things around so you could get veteran experience in Coldharbor. I have technically been to Craglorn, but only long enough to zone in and get the wayshrine. I saw mostly Veteran Rank 10 players there, so I figure I have a very long time to go before I am adequate to kill much of anything there. At this point I have a purple VR1 sword and shield, and a full VR1 blue set of armor, so I am doing okay in the Aldmeri Dominion content. Though even with all of that, getting jumped by too many mobs at once becomes a fight for my life in a way that never happened in Coldharbor. I approve of the ratcheting up of difficulty, and it should be fun experiencing the Aldmeri content.

#ElderScrollsOnline #ESO #ColdHarbor #Daggerfall #Aldmeri

Let There Be Rangers

May 23, 2014 by Belghast

Dabbling with Danger

At work there are a bunch of us who have at one point or another played Magic: The Gathering. I don’t play the game regularly, because I simply do not have the time to commit to going to a shop regularly to play. However I still love playing the game, and it is wrapped up in so much nostalgia for me. My first starter deck was from unlimited, and I dabbled a bit here and there through Arabian Nights, Antiquities, and started getting serious about the time revised came out. I played super actively until the launch of Ice Age and then for one reason or another got out of it. At that point I was really into the World of Darkness games, and was doing far more pen and paper than magic… also I started college and seemed to have far less disposable money.

I flirted with the game again my Senior year, because there was this great culture at the local game shop. I came in at the tail end of Mirage, played through Visions and was super involved with Weatherlight… probably my favorite expansion to date. When I left college I also left the community I liked hanging out with an playing magic regularly, so I stopped playing again. Since then I have picked up the occasional pack of cards to see what was new, but never really got involved with the game again. That was until I found out that we had a bunch of former magic players at work, and I thought it would be awesome to foster a sort of lunchtime M:TG group. Yesterday I got to break this awesome reaper miniature again, as I tutored my friend Rae through her first game of Magic. This could end in madness, but my hopes is that we can just develop a casual magic culture to hang out and enjoy.

The Ancient Library

Last night while waiting on the pizza to arrive and Elder Scrolls Online to patch, I decided to attempt to play some more Final Fantasy 5. I had a near mishap where I thought for a moment I had lost my saved game and had to revert back to a period of time when I was still in white mage hell. However that was not the case, and I managed to restore back and get to where I should have been. I kinda went crazy at one point and ground my way to 19… which means that in order to be safe for the Ancient Library I needed to be at least 21. So most of the time waiting on the Pizza was spent grinding aimlessly trying to get the last two levels so I could start my quest proper. You might ask why I need to be 21?

If you enter the Library of Ancients, there are various creatures that can cast the dreaded Level 5 Death spell. This will target any character with a level that is a multiple of 5, aka ending in 5 or 0 and pretty much instant kill them. This means in order to be safe you have to enter the library at something OTHER than that. Now if you have a Blue Mage, you want to de-synchronize your party so that you have exactly one party member at a “5” level so you can learn it. Both fortunately and unfortunately I do not have one so I just needed to be safe as I finished the library. The above monster is Byblos the guardian of the library, and I found him pretty easy considering I had ground to a much higher level than you normally need for the encounter. Most people natively get here around 15, so at 21 I was significantly higher.

Goodbye Ship, Hello Chocobo

Final Fantasy 5 is a story about destroying modes of transportation and then curiously finding a new one to replace them. After the library you find new information that allows the fire-powered-ship to start moving again without the power of the fire crystal. Unfortunately as you move to your next destination you encounter an earthquake and the fire-powered-ship gets sucked into a giant whirlpool. Conveniently you just happen to be on an island that just happens to have a Black Chocobo Forest. I know from lore that these are Black Chocobo, but I will be damned if this one is not pink… so you pilot your Pink Chocobo around the world visiting all the destinations that you missed and picking up any gear or spells that you might need.

Let There Be Rangers

The big takeaway from the encounter with the Pink Chocobo, is that it had the last two fire crystal jobs stuck in its gullet. One of which was the Ranger job that I had been waiting patiently for. This means from this point out I must have a White Mage, Mystic Knight and Ranger in the party at all times. I opted to shift Faris and Galuf to rangers in order to teach them the Rapid Fire ability as soon as I could. Basically you enter a period where you can reach most of the world so it is a great time to finish up anything you left unfinished. I headed up to Istory and went ahead and defeated Ramuh for example. Since I do not have a summoner in my party, this was a completely optional step… but Ramuh is generally my favorite of the espers so I figured I would go ahead and fight him.

Once finished messing around the room I proceeded with opening the way to the Tower of Ruin. The desert area is one of my least favorite, mostly because the sandworm fight is a pain in the butt. Considering my party composition, it was not really technically difficult, just annoying in that the Sandworm jumps between one of three holes on the screen. You don’t target the worm itself, but instead the hole it came out of, this means that more often than not you can target a hole and it might have moved before the attack lands. With the white mage, I was able to heal through anything the worm could throw at me, and it was simply a matter of wearing it down. Mostly this just meant that my rangers could not benefit from their !Aim ability, as it took way too long for it to actually resolve the damage.

Airship Go!

Once you complete the Tower of Ruin you get rewarded with access to the airship, and find out that your fire-powered-ship didn’t get destroyed, but instead fell into a chamber underneath crescent isle. Now you have this really awesome base that you can launch either the fire-powered-ship or airship out of. You end up faffing about running several mini missions all in the effort of trying to teach your airship how to flight higher to reach the earth shrine that has been elevated up into the air by the power of yet another crystal draining… and ultimately crystal destroying machine. We are nearing the sequence of events that I hate each time I play this game.

The Earth Shrine is guarded by four missile launchers and the extremely frustrating boss Soul Cannon. This is the point at which I stopped playing for the night. I made an attempt at the missile launcher fights, and while I managed to get through one of them… I didn’t back out and save like I should have. The big problem with the fights are the “rocket punch” attacks that cause your characters to go confused, and the Rocket Launcher that is an insanely nasty percentage based attack. Thing is if I can get enough time to Spellblade, the Rocket Launchers drop fast but I seem to spend my entire time trying to heal up and un-confuse my party. If I am struggling with the Rocket Launchers I have having trouble fathoming just how bad the Soul Cannon encounter will be. I am thinking this might be time to grind again and get a level advantage.

Being 22 has allowed me to just steamroll the encounters leading up to this one, but that level gap has closed on me. So I am thinking I will spend some time over the weekend watching TV and grinding away to build back up a buffer. Additionally I would really like it if most of my characters had Rapidfire as an option for the Soul Cannon encounter. I think I got through it during last years Four Job Fiesta by double casting lightning attacks, so if I can get two Mystic Knights with Rapidfire I might be able to do the same kind of trickery. Spellblade is a super powerful ability, but it sucks in that it takes one turn to cast in which you essentially do nothing. The Soul Cannon sequence is one of the big hurdles that most players get hung up on, so I don’t feel too bad that I am having to rethink my strategy before moving forward. I am sure with the Black Mage/Red Mage combo Kodra was able to just absolutely destroy it. What I really need is a bunch of Ribbons, but I think at this point in the game I only have access to the one I have.

#FF5 #FinalFantasy #MagicTheGathering #MTG