Tales of the Aggronaut

SteamWorld Dig

January 12, 2014 by Belghast

Steampowered Sunday #1

This is the beginning of a brand new segment for my blog. In truth for awhile now I have been trying to come up with a good way to start this feature. Originally I was going to call it “Sunday Indie Sunday” but that never really got off the ground. The idea behind Steampowered Sunday is really simple. Over the years I have built up a large backlog of titles from steam sales and the various humble bundles that I have never actually played or at the very least not really played enough to feel like I have given the game its due.

My goal is to grab a “new to me” game each Sunday and give it a decent amount of play time. Afterwards of course I will be writing a blog entry about the game. This isn’t necessarily a review, but more my thoughts and impressions about the game play I just experienced. My friends are already talking about griefing me by adding more games to my list. So we will see how far I can actually make a dent and if I can actually keep up with this feature.

Steamworld Dig

The first title to explore seemed like an obvious pick… since the feature is called Steampowered Sunday, then why not delve into a game called Steamworld Dig. This however is a playthrough that almost didn’t happen. It seems that I found a bug in FRAPs, that no one really expected. It seems as though frap is configured to ignore Steam, and instead of correctly searching for steam.exe in memory, they are just ignoring any process with steam in the title. As a result… SteamWorld Dig seems to be incompatible with fraps. Luckily I remembered that you can also take screenshots through the steam overlay with f12. While this is not exactly what I like to do… as I tend to disable screenshot functionality and have fraps do all the work… that way all of my screenshots end up in the same directory… I made do.

I picked up Steamworld Dig some time ago during one of those insane steam sales. Basically if it is a game that I have been wanting and it drops at or below $5 then it is pretty much an instant buy for me. I know sooner or later I will get around to playing it, and especially now with this new Sunday feature. The premises is deceptively simple… Metroid-Vania with Mining. In the game you play a robot miner who is coming to Tumbltown to follow in the footsteps of his uncle. The uncle had the claim on the mine directly below the town, and as such your are exploring the mine looking for resources and upgrades.

The game employs an inventory system that looked deceptively like Minecraft, but in reality at least to the point at which I have played, you can only remove blocks, you cannot ever replace them other than with ladders that can be purchased for 5 coins each. The result is that initially you can only store quantities of three different ores at the same time. This quickly becomes an issue as before getting very deep you are regularly getting half a dozen different ores. This involves a lot of running back and forth to the surface to sell your wares in the little town. Each time you sell you are working towards an upgrade threshold cap. Each time you earn a certain amount of money you unlock additional new upgrades.

The upgrades are then purchased with the coins you are earning from selling ore. Initially you have access to the trading post and Cranky’s upgrade store, but I am assuming much like Bastion that over time other places may open for business. The first upgrade you can get is to your pick axe which similar to upgrades in Minecraft allows you to mine existing ore types faster, and the ability to break new ore blocks that you previously could not. Similarly in the second tier of upgrades you can add an additional bag slot allowing you to carry up to four types of ore at a time. This of course means fewer trips back up to the surface, and more time down below mining.

As you explore, you will uncover caves that shoot off of the main dig. These usually hide power ups and unlock new functionality. For example the waygate above gave me the ability to equip run boots, which means while pressing down X on my 360 controller I can run, and in the style of Super Mario World, jumping while running increases the range and height of the jumps. Additionally there are blocks that disintegrate as you walk over them, so in many of these puzzle caves the only way to get through is to run quickly over top of them. All of this progression will seem extremely familiar to anyone who has played a Metroid of Castlevania game. unlock tools so you can get to new places and unlock more tools.

The game play gets progressively more and more difficult which adds an interesting spin on the Metroidvania genre. Since you cannot replace rock, you are essentially making your own playfield at all times by the choices you make as to what to dig and where to dig it. This means you can make life hell as you remove the wrong block at the wrong time. The game play is more about what you choose to leave standing and less about digging down to a specific objective. Above you can see my first death as I managed to get squashed by a rock that until this point I did not realize would fall down when I mined under it. This is also a decent time to highlight the lamp bar on the upper right corner of the screen.

As you dig down your lamp light decreases at a steady rate. There are various fossils that will wake up when you get close to them and spawn worms. Killing these will drop an item that does two things. Firstly it will refill one bar of your health, and secondly it will add oil to your lamp meter letting you stay down longer. The only problem is it becomes pretty easy to dig deeper than you can possibly return from on a single lamp charge. There really seems to be no penalty for going without lamp other than the fact that you cannot see what you are doing. This means that you cannot identify what type of block you are mining your way into… which is suicide since there are the boulders that can crush you placed throughout the levels at an ever increasing pace.

The Wrap-Up

The game play is extremely fun and I found myself spending an hour or so playing the game before reaching a point at which I thought I could realistically write up this blog post. The only thing lacking with the game seems to be a point. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, but both Metroid and Castlevania and the modern equivalent Guacamelee all have a narrative that drives the pace of the story ahead. SteamWorld Dig on the other hand has a series of small objectives, but I am not sure if I am really building towards anything meaningful. I am digging so that I can get stuff that will let me dig faster. I don’t really care about the cast of robots that inhabit Tumbletown… yet. Over time this might change, but at an hour into the game I really am not feeling like there is some great purpose behind what I am doing.

That is to say, the game is completely enjoyable without this deeper meaning. The game play is fun, the controls are responsible and it has as good of a wall jump implementation as I have seen. The problem is it just feels like there should be something more. I mean I realize you wander into the town and find your dead uncle, but this doesn’t seem to cause much intrigue or story to happen. Hell at this point I would even take a pokemon-esc “I want to be the very best” dialogue sequence to explain why I care about mining. I realize these are robots, but even robots should have a reason why they are doing things.

Would I purchase the game again after having played it? Honestly yeah I would suggest folks picking it up, but only doing so at a deep discount. The game play is fun enough and it seems like a glorious time waster. It is the type of game you can just zone out and enjoy the mechanics of. The animations are cute and the sound design is really nice in places. I just keep hoping that eventually I will uncover something even vaguely resembling a plot.

Comfort Gaming

January 11, 2014 by Belghast

Tamiflu Chasers

Over the last several days I have talked about my own respiratory misery. My focus over this time had been on somehow surviving through to Friday and not making a complete and total ass of myself during my presentation. It seems that I was at least somewhat successful in that mission, however during all of this time I seem to have neglected the fact that my wife had been getting progressively worse. It reached a head last night when at bedtime she was running a 101* temperature. This morning she teetered back and forth on whether or not we should go to urgent care.

For those not familiar with the absolutely fucked up medical system here in the United States… Urgent Care is this weird beast that sits somewhere between your doctors office and the actual emergency room. The idea is to create a construct that allows you to get after hours emergency style treatment for non-life-threatening ailments. In the master plan the insurance providers tend to treat these like doctors office visits, and as such you only have to pay one neat co-pay. The problem is… they are insanely deluged with patients. Our local Urgent Care place opens at 9 am on Saturday, and we were there mere moments after opening… and the waiting room was already completely filled.

I dropped my wife off at her suggestion, and ran around running errands in the meantime. We are both a bit concerned that I will catch something since firstly… I was born with a naturally weakened immune system, and secondly… that my lungs are already in a pretty severely compromised state. I felt like an ass for her waiting alone, but she and I texted back and forth throughout the morning. At roughly 10:30 I picked her up and she was brandishing a prescription for tamiflu. She was in fact diagnosed with the real life full blown Flu, and unfortunately despite my yearly flu shot this puts me in a pretty bad place for likely catching it from her.

As a result I am in the process this morning of trying to get ahold of my own primary care physician to attempt to procure a preventative prescription for tamiflu as well. Needless to say my morning did not go anywhere near planned and as a result I am finally sitting down to write a blog post. With all the excitement I don’t really have a whole lot to say. Or at least nothing more exciting than what has already transpired.

Comfort Gaming

One of the best things I have discovered in the past year is the Alternative Chat podcast. If you are not in fact already an avid listener you should make steps to rectify that. In the latest episode the Godmother of Faff mentions a term that is so uniquely perfect, that I am shocked I had never heard it used before now. “Comfort Gaming” is a concept that is very near and dear to my heart, but I never really had an adequate term for it. There are so many gaming experiences that I can return to time and time again when I am in the need of some solace. Here in Oklahoma we are big on “comfort food” with our heaping piles of mashed potatoes and white gravy and our chicken fried steak. This same concept applied to gaming also makes sense.

I guess in a way WoW is my comfort gaming. I spent so much time trying to move past the game, but in fighting it I was denying the fact that I really did enjoy it and the people who play it. Sure there are so many games out there that do one thing or another so much better than the World of Warcraft. Games like Rift are pinnacles of technical brilliance with their deep systems within systems. However something just gets lost in the translation at times, and in all of my years of wandering between games I have found another game that fullfilled so many of the little high points I have looked for in a single package. Playing wow, questing, farming, exploring, collecting transmoggy bits, soloing old world content… all feels comfy.

Crawling back into the game this time was like breaking out that worn out pair of jeans that just feels amazing. There is nothing new under the sun in wow, and it is not exactly a pinnacle of innovation… but what you have here is a really great mix of fun ways to spend your time. I created my WoW Bucket list as a way to have something to fall back on when I got bored. Thing is with the great number of people I have assembled in my guild… I have yet to really get bored enough to search on the list for some purpose. Purpose seems to find me constantly in either helping someone else out or getting a wild whim that I want to follow.

So as I embrace the year of faff, I am also embracing “comfort gaming”. WoW is by no means the only comfort game I have. I find myself able to crawl back into the Fallout or Elder Scrolls worlds and get lost for an entire afternoon at a time. Similarly I am deeply looking forward to the release of Elder Scrolls Online… because that universe is one I supremely love. However saying that, I have no real intent to abandon the World of Warcraft. It scratches an itch for me, and in part is that way because of the amazing people that are playing it. While I could never play a game only for the people… the mixture of absolute fun activities and amazing folks makes the game as sticky as ever for me.

The Email

January 10, 2014 by Belghast

Something Different

This mornings blog post is going to be a bit out of character for me. Mainly I am going ahead and posting it for a few reasons. Firstly I think there are things to be learned from this, both in the fact that speaking your mind and standing up for something can have a positive effect. Secondly I think it is also a good reminder that your actions can have unintended consequences, and that each of us has more of an effect on others than we really realize on a daily basis. With all of that setup, now I actually have to talk about the meat of the issue.

I am a severe asthmatic, we have known this since the days of my parents racing me to the doctors office late at night to get a cortisone shot to help me breathe. My dad was also a pretty severe asthmatic and he tells tales of having to go to the hospital and sleep in an oxygen tent as a child. This is just one of the many things I have dealt with my entire life, and normally I do just fine. However there are a few things, cigarette smoke and really strong perfume that can have extremely adverse effects on my overall health. I tend to be one of those “chain reaction” people, that once it starts it is really hard to stop and I have ended up in the hospital in the past.

With the frigid conditions, our smokers have been less rigid to smoking where they are supposed to be smoking. Usually when this is outside and well ventilated this is not really a problem. However a group of smokers has been taking to smoking in the 6th floor vestibule in the parking garage. I call it a vestibule because I really have no other words for it. Basically it is a glassed in hut of sorts with no real ventilation that serves to cover the top of the elevators. It looks more like a green house than anything, but as smokers congregate there it fills with smoke and I find myself trying desperately not to breathe while waiting on the elevator. They tend to hang out in the stairwell so going down the stairs would be even worse of an experience.

Yesterday I reached a breaking point of sorts. My lungs have been in extremely bad shape thanks to having to breathe all the cold dry air, so I was not really sure how much more I could take before ending up on that downward spiral that leads to hospitalization myself. The two individuals that were smoking when I walked in yesterday morning were both friends of mine or at the very least people I was on very familiar terms. So I thought about how to let them know how their actions were effecting me. I decided upon a quiet email, just to explain the effect that smoke has on me. I could have of course called down the wrath of the HR department on them… since they were not smoking where they were supposed to. Instead of doing something aggressive like that, I wanted to appeal to their humanity.

The Email

Here is the email I wrote to them. I tried my best to just put it out there plainly, and avoid being passive aggressive or anything of the sort. You can be the judge if I actually succeeded.

So normally I am pretty chill about things, and try not to complain, but is there any way you two can smoke someplace other than the level 6 parking garage vestibule? I realize it is frigid outside, but I just wanted to take a moment to explain to you both what your smoking does to me. I’ve struggled with severe asthma my entire life. Most of the time I am able to maintain without much issue, but I have a number of triggers the biggest of them being cigarette smoke. When I breathe in even a few minutes worth of smoke it triggers a chain reaction in my body that may or may not be halted by the use of my inhaler. Right now with the cold weather my lungs are already in pretty bad shape, so as I dart in from my car in the morning I have to try my best not to breathe in at all as I cross through the enclosed 6th floor vestibule.

For me at least it is far more than an inconvenience. I have been hospitalized because I breathed only a little bit of smoke. The neighbors down the street had a house fire, and being good neighbors I went by the house for only long enough to grab their prescriptions so that I could run by Walgreens and pick up replacements for them. That was enough exposure to smoke to send me to the hospital for five days missing the 2005 thanksgiving holiday. Like I said most of the time I can maintain my health, but with the extreme damage the cold does to my lungs… your cigarette smoke may just act as the final straw when my lungs go down into total lockdown mode.

As I said, normally I don’t complain but given the bad condition my lungs are in already… I wanted to take a moment just so that you would realize that your smoking does have an effect on someone other than yourselves.

So I sent the email and waited. I let my boss know I had done so just to make sure he was in the loop in case any fallout occurred from it. There are people on our floor that would have stormed off madder than a hornet that I was somehow trying to impute their rights. However these two individuals I thought would be different.

The Reception

Within thirty minutes of sending the email one of the guys came by my cube. He wanted to express just how sorry he was, and that he would never do that again. Going a step further he said that he would try and keep any of the other local smoker community from going up there. He said that he just honestly had never thought about it, didn’t think it was any different than smoking in the designated area. I really didn’t want to make him feel bad, but I also wanted him to realize that his actions had a much larger reach than he probably realized. For me it comes down to being able to breathe or not.

I feel like the smokers as a whole are pretty put upon, and I don’t want to demand that they stop smoking. It is a personal choice, but it is also a choice that happens to have a pretty severe effect on my well being. I went back and forth as to whether or not to blog about this but I thought it might be worthwhile. Sometimes when you stand up for yourself it can have positive results, and even when it doesn’t at least it clears the air. Over the last few days walking in, there would be quite a bit of frustration building as I saw people smoking in that closed in space that I had to walk in through. If nothing else, venting that frustration would have been worth it. In this situation however it seems like it will also make a positive change to the my environment.

Bad Luck Tokens

January 9, 2014 by Belghast

Feel Bad Inc

This morning I am feeling like absolute crap. Last night was one of those nights where I just could not get into playing anything. I cycled through a bunch of different games, none of them holding my attention enough to keep up with it for long. I am not sure if I am actually “sick” or just that my lungs are not in the best shape. On the lung front it seems to be several things adding up at once. Firstly it is breathing all of this cold dry air coming with the recent cold snap. Secondly everyone seems to be smoking in the parking garage… which if I smoked I likely would as well… but this creates a hanging cloud of death that I have to walk through every morning. Smoke is a nuisance to most people but to a severe asthmatic it keeps me from breathing. Each time I get a whiff of it, I can literally feel my lungs tightening.

Lastly the other night we were trying to clean up a mess and I had to help my wife empty the vacuum bin. The dust managed to get clogged up and she had to work really hard with it to free the jam. As a result this plume of dust came up from the container and while I tried my best not to breathe… I ended up breathing some in anyways. As a result this triple whammy has lead to my lungs trying to close shop on me. Severe Asthma sucks, it really does. While it is better than it has been in years, there is always a chain of events that brings me to my knees and simply unable to function. What sucks about it the most is that Friday I have a huge presentation to give, so I have to somehow manage to get better enough to be clear and understandable without gasping for air.

Bad Luck Tokens

One of the things that happens for everyone at least one time during raiding is that the loot gods frown upon you… for an extended period of time. For me lately this has been in the form of zero weapon drops for my various alts. Yesterday at one point I was talking to a good friend of mine and he said he had been waiting on a trinket to drop for three months. Similarly I can remember running Karazhan for almost a year and never once seeing the necklace of Maiden of Virtue. During the middle of our discussion a “wouldn’t it be cool” thing happened. I do not believe that it is the intent of any game designer for RNG to wreck gear progression. No one in their right mind would ever intend players to simply not ever get the items they need.

The idea arose… that what would happen if you got bad luck tokens. This of course is just a name we came up for them, but you could call them any spiffy thing you want. The idea is that if you entered a dungeon and got no loot drops that you would end up with a special token, potentially mailed to you after the dungeon run. If you save up enough of these… and it would be a large quantity like 50 or so you could turn in your tokens to a special vendor for any one piece of gear “within reason”. Of course this would be standard drops, and nothing akin to a legendary or anything of the sort… though my old world raid would have disagreed with you considering we ran Molten Core for damned near three years never seeing a single binding.

The basic idea is to create a route to the item even if your luck is absolutely horrible. That through sheer diligence and determination you could still get it. Granted the details are a bit fuzzy, but back in the day we used to have a thing called the “bitterness pool”, I am not really remembering the full details to be honest because this was something we did back in vanilla. Essentially each player hunting for something rare would chip in some gold every week. At the end of the raid week anyone who did not get their declared item to drop would get a share of the pot. If you did get your drop your money went to soothe the pains of those who didn’t. It was funny and some people made quite a bit of money from the pool… especially those seeking the Drake Fang Talisman. But at the end of the day the pool got them no closer to getting what they actually wanted… that elusive item.

Late to the Party

When it comes to killing things… I seem to be able to do that for hours upon end without ever really getting bored of it. However when it comes to daily quests or similar reputation farming activities… I usually can’t seem to make myself do it. During Burning Crusade I successfully farmed up a bunch of factions, but one of the ones that had always eluded me was the Netherwing. There was just so much competition for the eggs, and at the time I simply could not be bothered to give up large blocks of my time working on it. Last night however… I really didn’t feel like doing much of anything, so as a result this seemed like a useful thing I could be working towards. The problem with Belghast, the character I was originally working on this with is that he was not a harvester, and being able to harvest the herbs and mine the ore was a quick and easy way to get a faction boost.

Last night I managed to go from neutral to friendly and put a decent dent in that. I need to do some more research to see if there is an easy faction guide to pushing through this. I mostly just want the netherdrake mounts for the total count, since there are a lot of them that you can get. I have never really been a fan of the look of them, and as a result that is partially what kept me from farming up the faction. Oddly enough I did Skyguard, which has the even weirder manta ray thing mount… but I proudly rode that all through BC. Additionally I need to see if there is an addon of mapnotes for the various egg spawn locations. That seems like it will be the fastest route to the faction, to keep doing the egg turn ins. Hopefully I will have the patience to keep doing this even when I am not feeling like crap.