Tales of the Aggronaut

Making Horrible Choices

June 5, 2013 by Belghast

This morning I sit here typing as a truly insane torrent of rain pours down on our house. Apparently over night this massive storm system has blown in, and the deluge we are experiencing is the end result. Luckily the “T” word has not been mentioned at all, just lots of rain and the potential for flash flooding. Still instinctually I turned to channel 6 or on digital cable… 706 and have been watching it as I get ready this morning. This is a reaction to weather that is just engrained in Oklahomans from a little age… and even though I rarely if ever watch the evening news… when weather happens I am glued to it.

Unplanned Adventure

Yesterday I was just feeling absolutely horrible, and while I made it into work… by noon I was wishing I had not. I was suffering from what I tend to term “giblet” problems… everything just felt all wrong. So I took a half sick day, and went home after I got out of an important series of meetings. When home I pretty much went to bed, or at least laid down. I ended up falling asleep and sleeping roughly three hours, and when I woke up I was feeling a bit better.

I got up and around and checked email… remoted into work and did a few things. At this point my wife who is on summer break tells me that one of her coordinators called, and as a result she would need to go back to school this evening to pick up a text book. Summer School starts today, and she would no longer have access to her room to grab it. At first I groggily agreed, thinking man that sucks for her… then she informed me that she was wanting me to go with her.

I quickly saw my evening going to absolute crap before my eyes. I already felt horrible, but the thought of having to leave the house and go off on a jaunt just felt almost unbearable. To her credit, we had a stack of errands that needed running… and her thought process was that we could just do them on the way to or from the house. The negative part however is that her school is 45 minutes away on the exact opposite end of Tulsa. She said we would do it later, but as time ticked past… I ended up insisting that we leave as not to wreck the entire night.

Making Horrible Choices

This timing and path we ended up taking was a bad call on my part all around. We ended up venturing out into the tail end of rush hour and wading knee deep into bumper to bumper traffic. It turns out there had been a wreck in the middle lane of 169 at 51st street, and as a result traffic was backed up past 11th street. What should have been an hour and a half trip at most, ended up being a three and a half hour slog. All the while I am fuming that I even have to be doing this in the first place. My wife gets an unbelievable amount of credit for dealing with me last night at all. We bickered back and forth during the whole trip, but it could have gotten so much worse.

I was very much an asshole about the whole ordeal. I felt like crap, my migraines have been getting worse, work has been stressing me out… and adding on top of that was getting drug back into the world for something that didn’t really involve me. Had I needed to run get something from work, I would have just run in by myself and gotten it, I didn’t understand why I needed to be tagging along in the process. All of this snowballed together to turn me into a bundle of unfettered rage… or at least angry sulking. I was an absolute bear to deal with all of last night, and I greatly apologize for it. Her thought process made absolute sense, but she is the logical one… I tend to be the one driven by my passions.

Making everything worse was the fact that we were both pretty hungry at this point. She had not had any lunch at all, and the combination of both of us lead to a pretty crappy car ride. The one glowing silver lining is the fact that we got to eat at Ron’s. For those not native to Tulsa, Ron’s is this awesome chain of hamburger joints. They specialize in several things, including the sausage hamburger… but my absolute favorites are their hot and spicy chicken and cheese tots. Figuring it would put both of us in a better mood that is exactly where we went, and at the end of all the frustration it was truly glorious. I had way more calories than I would have liked, but enjoyed every bite of the buffalo flavored ambrosia.

Defiance

Between waking up from my nap and after doing some work that had stacked up while sleeping, and our horrible jaunt out into the real world I sat around on our amazingly comfy sofa trying to get “ungroggy”. As a result I decided to boot up defiance and give it a spin for a few. I have been sitting on a copy for awhile thanks to my early alpha testing ways, but have not really spent much time playing the game. Honestly I had created my engineer, and gotten him to the Earth Defense force base… and that was just about it.

Yesterday I decided to start working through the first few quests. I remember thinking in alpha that this was really not “my game”. While there are definitely elements I like about it, I am just not much of a shooter person any more… and in fantasy MMOs I very rarely if ever play a ranged class. All of that said there is something undeniably enjoyable about the game. It seems to tweak what ever section of my brain that loves the Fallout series. I feel like in order to really tap into this I need to find myself a shotgun, since essentially I play every Fallout game wielding a Combat Shotgun, or whatever equivalent that game has.

I wandered around for a bit and managed to knock out one of the quests that was horribly bugged in early testing… the whole rescue men that leads to recover supplies from the hospital mission. During testing this ended up with essentially endless waves of mutants spawning on top of you until you could no longer keep up. This time around, while there were a lot of mutants that spawned… they were definitely a finite number. The gameplay feels better overall, the game less laggy and the controls more responsive.

I hope as I move further through the content that I will find myself caring about it a little more. Having watched the television show, I find myself actually caring about the game world quite a bit more. The only problem I have however is that the starting missions feel extremely uninspired. The mutants you end up fighting, seem like the most generic possible mob you could end up fighting. I don’t care that I am slaughtering them, they are completely meaningless… to fall back on the Fallout analogy… I found myself caring more about killing mole rats and rad scorpions.

There are some neat random side effects that happen, like saving EREP forces from mutants. The only problem is that this loses all sense of urgency when you realize that this spawns in exactly the same place on a pretty regular interval and almost every time you ATV through the area… those damned EREP soldiers have been captured again. I have yet to encounter an Ark Fall, so I am hoping that those will really spice up the gameplay as I love Rifts. All it all it feels like something that I will play every now and then… just like Guild Wars 2, and Neverwinter… but not a game I will likely ever get seriously into.

Reaches of Inner-Outer Space

I will admit that likely a good chunk of my bitchiness earlier, was the fact that I figured I would have lost my chance to continue on in The Secret World. That by the time I managed to get home and watching IM again… that the Elite Dungeon train would have long left the station. I really enjoyed Monday night, and was looking forward to being able to roll around as a prebuilt team of five last night. It turns out that my friends had for the most part been patiently waiting for me to show up. So as soon as I got home and fired up my laptop, they were beckoning me to join them in game. After the ball of frustration I had just experienced, I was in major need for venting it all into killing random bad things.

Much like last night we started running the next few elites all in an attempt to get Rae the achievement needed to unlock the gatekeeper fight. As a result we burned through Hell Fallen and the Facility, making short work of both. We decided to skip Hell Eternal since it is an extremely long dungeon, and make an attempt at the Slaughterhouse since it is comparatively short. I am not sure what it was… either that the fight had changed since we were last in there… or the fact that we were probably getting tired at that point… but for whatever reason we could not push through the NKL-107 encounter.

After doing some research, apparently there is a bug currently in place that causes some of the buffs from nightmare to bleed into the elite version. This also happened to us in the past when they rolled out the nightmare version of The Ankh. We went from being able to roll through that place without issue, to not being able to defeat the final boss at all. It was the same kind of feeling we had with Slaughterhouse in the robot fight. Ultimately we needed a more reliable purge, which was not something we really had at that moment. Both myself and Rae had the ability to do a 33% of the time purge, but this was just not regular enough to keep the tank alive with the nightmare buffs.

It was still a really fun time, and the best part is that once we finish these last two elites… Rae should be geared enough to face the Gatekeeper and hopefully survive. Granted getting past him was a mind numbingly frustrating experience as a DPS, so it might take her awhile to come up with that magic formula that allows her to defeat him. The fact that she picked up her 100% purge should make the fight overall easier, since I did it with only my 33% of the time purge… and it introduced a random element into my success. I really look forward to trying Nightmares again, to see if we are any better equipped to handle them than we were before.

Wrapping Up

The other awesome thing that happened last night is that I finally connected with Rylacus and got his two characters invited to the Outcast Misfits in Rift. I am sure he will appreciate having some “green spam” while he is leveling, and it will definitely be easier to determine if he is actually online… or just playing the scratchers. It is still pouring down insanely outside… and I am not looking forward to making a wild dash out to my car. However the hour is getting later, and I need to be getting on the road. I hope you have a great day… and you also can admit when you are being an asshole… more gracefully than I did last night.

A Secret to Everybody

June 4, 2013June 4, 2013 by Belghast

So this morning I have fallen prey to one of my least favorite morning time scenarios. I woke up naturally, and after realizing that the alarm had not gone off… I attempted to go back to sleep. Just as I was starting to drift back into slumber… the alarm went off rudely waking me. I should have just gotten up as apparently my body thought my battery was done charging. As a result I am mostly awake but the part of me that was trying to go back to sleep is still groggy and vengeful.

A Secret to Everybody

My evening was absolutely nothing like I had planned… though quite honestly I had not really planned much of anything. My intent was to go upstairs, eat some dinner and then get back into Rift or SWTOR. However upon arriving upstairs I got a message form a friend asking if I wanted to be the 5th in The Secret World. The best part about this concept was the fact that this was the core group that I experienced The Secret World with initially. It felt like getting the band back together as it were.

Basically what has spurred this recent interest in TSW is the fact that they seem to have fixed blood as a healing spec, or at least fixed it enough to where it is enjoyable once more for our healer. Previously we burned through the elites and started banging our heads against the Nightmares before our healer just could not take any more. This is the ultimate Achilles heel of the Secret World experience, it goes from being super open to all possible specs and experimentation with new ideas… to requiring this one certain thing in order to survive in Nightmares.

When I say we got the band back together… this is not entirely true. The original five were nightmare ready and geared up in half purples. This time around we have a Rae in place for Warenwolf, and as a result last night we had to start working through the elites so that she could unlock the Gatekeeper fight… and ultimately unlock Nightmare content. This was a pretty good idea since none of us really know what we are doing anymore. I have played Secret World once or twice a week, but I have limited that to my roflstomp sword/shotgun build.

The problem with higher level content is that melee is just not viable. The Secret World is far too punishing to melee characters, and if you choose to dps as melee you essentially end up harming your group in the long run. As a result I ended up abandoning my beloved blade/shotgun build for favor of shotgun/pistols in order to dps elites and nightmares. Essentially last night was a matter of us all trying to remember what the hell to do with our characters.

Greenshot Down

I am having to swipe images from other websites this morning. Like a tourist without film, I thought I was snapping pictures all night… but not a single one of them turned out. Awhile back I had switched from Fraps to Greenshot… and had pretty good luck with it. However recently I have not gotten a usable picture from it. When I attempt to snap a picture it acts like it is working, but the end result is either a black screen or a picture of my desktop. I have been using Razer Game Booster as a backup… but for whatever reason it does not like The Secret World. The above image is an example of what I am shooting… it seems as though for whatever reason it is alpha transparent.

The long and short apparently is that I am going to have to switch back to fraps and just deal with its idiosyncrasies. The additional takeaway is that I really don’t have pictures from my adventure last night, which is a shame… because in theory I took some good ones. I am completely open to other suggestions if you guys have ideas on a better universal screenshot program. I prefer using fraps or something like that rather than the in game screenshot functionality, because it aggregates all my screenshots into one place. This makes it easier to sort through when I am pulling together a blog post.

All Roads Lead to Rome

We burned through elites last night like a five player wrecking ball. That was another problem we ultimately had with the Secret World end game. You go from absolutely demolishing content in normal and elite mode… to having the bottom completely drop out from under you in Nightmares. However the best thing about their content is the fact that they do not believe in trash… and only place it in front of you if you are supposed to learn a mechanic from it. Teaching players your game through the introduction of trash mobs is a concept that every game needs to take to heart.

I thought after the release of Cataclysm that Blizzard had maybe learned this lesson. During the Baradin Hold fights, you learn the concepts you need from the trash leading up to the bosses. The problem is, this is the one and only place in Cataclysm that they really do this. Introducing players ton concepts with learning trash is far superior every time to throwing an encounter at them, and leading them to google it. I will get off this particular soapbox… as the hour is getting late… but this is seriously a concept that needs to be propagated.

Over the course of the night we cleared Elite Polaris, Hell Fallen, Darkness War and The Ankh. I think we got Rae a few drops, and I myself managed to pick up 347 damage versions of the two weapon slots I did not have a blue for. After all that dungeon grinding however, we decided we needed a break. I thought initially we were going to just break up for the night, but Tam quickly suggested that we grab one of the newer investigation missions. He remembered seeing one in the Haitian Market area of London, so we all headed back that way.

This is the point at which we remember why we really fell in love with the game in the first place. The content is deep and creative, and leads the characters through a series of imaginative puzzles. This investigation quest personifies why this game works and why players should be playing it. I wont go into too many details… because spoilers. But essentially you retrace the steps of roman explorers through Ancient London. Make sure you brush up on your latin… or at least have a translator handy.

Wrapping Up

Last night made me extremely happy. Returning to grouping in The Secret World was like picking up a familiar book and re-reading it. While the mechanics have changed slightly, it is still the same solid game and story under the cover. I really hope that in the coming weeks we can return to this world as a group more often. I would really like to finish getting Rae geared, and through the Gatekeeper fight so we can get some revenge on all those nightmares. I hope you have a great day, and too discover an old friend.

Dam Impressive

June 3, 2013 by Belghast

Last night was another of my infamous “you no can has sleep” nights as my brain absolutely refused to shut down. I really need to get some melatonin and give it a shot when that sort of thing happens. I was extremely tired, but my brain was spinning on some completely useless project, and like the software you have to manually close when restarting your machine… it kept gumming up the process. As a result I am borderline catatonic, and find myself getting sidetracked by the simplest of things this morning. It is going to be a not so enjoyable day.

General Celes

I spent most of the morning playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6 on my PSP in an attempt to catch up to where I had gotten previously with the native PSN version. Taking screenshots is a bit more of a pain in the ass… so I did not take very many. As a result you get something I found from Google image search of the same basic spot I am at currently. Apparently the above example chose to rename their General Celes to Moghan… for whatever reason I have never really renamed my characters. I prefer to just accept the name they are given by default, since that tends to be how they are referred to out of game.

Yesterday I had encountered an odd glitch, where I was unable to talk to Kekfa and start the “Figaro Submerge” sequence. I had a previous save luckily, so I could load that back up and sure enough the second time it worked just fine. The big negative so far of playing the GBA version, is that you only have 3 save files. As a result you keep having to round robin your way manually through the saves. I pretty much save every time it is possible, and hate saving over whatever my latest game is, so this process just becomes more cumbersome.

I made my way back to the Mog screen that allows you to pick which batch of adventurers you will follow. As a result I picked Locke first, as he is generally my favorite character in FF6. It took me a bit to remember how this whole sequence worked, but after some trial and error I managed to get into the underground passage, rescue Celes and make my way out of South Figaro. When we needed to shower and get ready yesterday, I was standing just ouside South Figaro on the world map. So I will head my way back to Narshe and that should be the end of that sequence. I will likely play the river journey next… for whatever reason I tend to save the Sabin for last always.

Dam Impressive

Yesterday we had plans to eat dinner with my wife’s mother at 4 pm in Grove Oklahoma… which is on the edge of the Grand Lake of the Cherokees about an hour and a half from Tulsa. There are multiple ways to get there, none of which extremely straight… and some of them way more contorted than others. Since we had not really been out on one of our photo jaunts in awhile my wife suggested we take one of the extremely contorted ways so we could look for interesting scenery. As a result we took this hour and a half trip and extended it to be a little over three hours long.

The weatherman said that the day would be clear and sunny.. but the end result lead us to constantly check the weather on our phones as the sky was pretty much filled with rain clouds the entire trip. As a result the lighting was less than favorable, and especially so as we travelled past places we would normally stop. To the weathermans credit, it never did rain… just looked like it was going to at any moment. While we had been along the route at various segments of our planned trip, we had never actually been the totality before.

I am hoping this actually works… because I have never really attempted to create a linkable Google map for something. But this is the route that we ended up taking to get from 169 to Grove via Highway 20. When we got in the Spavinaw hills we encountered the extremely cool Spavinaw lake dam. Basically Spavinaw lake is where the bulk of the water for the City of Tulsa comes from. In the 1920s the City realized it would need to draw water from outside of the immediate area and as a result created this massive waterworks that spans from Lake Spavinaw, through other smaller lakes and ultimately ends of at the water treatment facilities inside of Tulsa. As we drove along the road it took us right beside the extremely cool looking spillway pictured above.

Luckily the sky had cleared a bit by the time we got there, so we pulled off into the parking lot and roamed around. Normally I have a no trespassing rule when taking photos… I will not cross any fences or barriers… however if there is a way around said fences that do not involve actually crossing one… I am game. As a result I ended up walking around a fence that was locked over at the power station near the spillway… and this allowed me to get some interesting shots close up to the water flow.

When I go out and take photos I end up uploading them all in bulk to Google+ albums, then create what I call a keepers album for sharing. I had not dumped my memory card in awhile, so I had photos from mothers day, the house work, and then these of Spavinaw… so the end result was that I uploaded 182 photos. After I did my culling and singling out the ones I really liked the most… that became whittled down to the 42 keepers you can see in this album. I think there are some pretty good shots in there, and it has honestly been awhile since I have felt like uploading what I shot… so I think this is a good thing.

Gaming Restlessness

When we got home from our little jaunt, I had to fight with the Google+ photos system for a good deal of time. They have changed something, so that it does not work nearly as well for bulk uploads. As a result I was pretty pissed by the time I finally finished with that mess. I ended up flitting back and forth between several different MMOs… never quite finding the fit for my mood. I played my Melee Mage in Rift for a bit, but ended up getting frustrated because I had not kept up my butchering… and was going to have to go back into Silverwood and grind wolves until I raised it enough to do Gloamwood. This is the negative side effect about leveling through the instant adventures system… you end up in a bad place skill wise.

After logging out frustrated, I went over into SWTOR and tried to play my Sith Warrior. Right now I am knee deep into Imperial Balmorra yet again… and that kind of frustration just made things worse. I managed to complete three or four quests before ultimately logging out again. I patched up Guild Wars 2, because for whatever reason… the fact that I have real internet and can patch things quickly. that would have taken me leaving a game running over night… still amuses me. That more than any other change has meant the most to me… the fact that we have real internet finally! There have been some negative side effects however… I used to host a small web server out of the house, and with Cox blocking port 80… we have lost access to most of that content.

I played GW2 for all of ten minutes before remembering why I don’t really play the game much. The gameplay choices they have made just are not that enjoyable to me. No matter how much I have tried to play it… I still find the lack of quests off putting. So I feel like I am running around aimlessly with nothing of any importance to do. Once that sets in, everything I do feels extremely grindy… since very little of it actually matters other than your world completion score. I wandered around in the 40-50 zone near Hoelbrak but quickly logged as the game almost immediately bored me.

I would have gone upstairs to the loft and played some PS3 or XBOX, but I fear that they would have had the same result. I was just in a restless and frustrated frame of mind… that was only made worse when I actually attempted to go to sleep. For whatever reason my mind latched onto the nettop computer I am building for the loft. I started going over all the things I would need to do, evaluating what the best emulator and video front ends would be… all of which were not at all important. Especially since I have yet to even move the computer out to the loft from my office. I was just restless in every sense of the word… and as a result am paying the price today as I struggle to keep my eyes open.

Wrapping Up

I am hoping that I survive the day as one of the sleep deprived masses. I will be mainlining five hour energy shots in a vague attempt to be alert and responsive. Right now I am honestly not sure what has to get accomplished today, but I am hoping by the end of my web service staff meeting I will be able to determine that. I hope you all have a productive start of the work week… and that you are not going into it nearly as tired as I am right now. Hope you all have great days.

Four Job Fiesta

June 2, 2013 by Belghast

Oh Sunday… that morning in which you think to yourself… crap I have to go to work tomorrow. Today will be pretty much dominated by my wife’s mothers birthday. We are going to drive to grove later this afternoon to meet her for dinner, and are talking about potentially meandering our way there with cameras. So as a result I have no clue when we will actually leave, but there will not be much gaming at all today. Right now I am just trying to barrel through my morning blog post without losing focus.

Riftstraction

I still need to return to my Sith ways, but for whatever reason yesterday I was distracted once more by the lure of rift and my melee mage. I hit level 22 yesterday while still wandering around Silverwood. I ended up getting caught up in a buzz of completionism… something that I am not normally afflicted with. The problem is… I had left a lot of the quests involving the court of Prince Hylas unfinished. One constant for me regardless of the game… is that I love slaughtering elves. So I got caught up in the carnage, and ended up completing all the quests for the zone.

I have since moved on to Gloamwood and am busy killing Barghests and Bats. Gloamwood is the only zone that ever made me question my choice of Defiant. I just love the feel of it, so much atmosphere and if they traded the goblins for skeletons… it would have been my perfect zone. Gloamwood Pines so deserves to be the guardian capitol city, it is better in every way than Sanctum. It actually looks like a real town, with plenty of houses to actually support people living there. Whereas Sanctum is a capitol city with no housing at all. This has always been one of the problems I had with the Rift old world… it doesn’t look like people could actually live in it.

The funny thing about my recent venture into melee magery, is that it was intended to be able to play with my friend Rylacus. The only problem with that notion is he has not logged in since late night Friday. Oh well… this game has the best mentoring system I have seen, so I can always drop my level back down to hang out with him. I am purposefully not doing the dungeon finder so I can run the dungeons for the first time on this character with him and hopefully Thalen as well. I love Rift, it is a great game… but the problem has always been that it is pure hell to get other friends to play it. I really hope the free to play conversion makes that problem a bit easier.

Four Job Fiesta

For a few years now, my friend JJ has been trying to get me and some other friends to join in on the Final Fantasy V Four Job Fiesta charity play-a-thon. While I do not fully understand the process… from what I do get the goal is for all of us to try and beat Final Fantasy V and raise money for the Childs Play charity in the process. There are multiple ways to sign up to play but the basic concept is that there are 22 jobs (26 in the Advance version), and at the start of the game… you will be assigned 4 random jobs. Then you have to complete the game using only those jobs you were assigned.

Since it has been years since I have played FFV, and I have never beaten it… I am playing with the least number of possible restrictions. I am praying I get a fairly balanced team, otherwise I will be pretty much screwed. My friend Drathis got a pretty rough combo last year from what I can remember and struggled with it. I will be relying on JJ a lot as this goes forward since he is pretty much the FFV master. I think he can play the game in his sleep, so I am sure he will be a good source of information. Right now my intent is to play the Gameboy Advance variety on my PSP.

I blasted this out over social media, and it got picked up and reshared… so hopefully this helps get the word out. Everyone is welcome to participate, to sign up all you need is a twitter account… as the sign up process involves that. I am assuming that will also be how we get assigned our four jobs on 6/17. The festivities begin the day before my birthday, so I guess I know what I will be doing for my birthday. I have a feeling it is going to take me a long time to beat the game. You guys should all sign up and join in the madness.

Six Advance

Yesterdays post spawned comments from a few friends, namely JJ and Stop that I should really be playing the Gameboy Advance version of Final Fantasy 6. Apparently the PSP native copy is globally considered the worst possible port of the game, and has known lag issues. So I took the advice… found the latest version of gpSP I could for the PSP… and restarted the game on the Advance version. I have a Gameboy Advance SP somewhere… but I have no clue where it is right now. So my best option was to play the game on my PSP via emulator, and the game runs beautifully.

All of the issues I had that I thought I just misremembered… were really issues with the PSP/PSOne native version. The Advance copy plays super fast, and is actually scaled to fit a modern aspect ratio beautifully. The only problem I encountered was a pretty massive bug when Kefka first visits Figaro. I could talk to everyone BUT Kefka… then zoned out to see if it would fix the bug… and now Kefka is no longer there. I am going to have to reload from a previous safe and see if I can fix the bug. I would hate to think it is going to be game breaking.

The one awesome thing about this, is that basically it proves out the theory that I can play Advance games just fine on my PSP, so this will likely be how I end up playing FFV during the Four Job Fiesta event. The PSP battery life is always an annoyance, but I have a spare battery for this reason. I just want something I can play it on that is portable so I can play over lunch etc. I will be trying to dig up actual copies of the GBA carts, so that I don’t feel too dirty emulating them.

Wrapping Up

Okay time to start getting ready to confront the day. Time to leave will be coming sooner than I want it to, and I still need to shower etc. I hope you all have a great Sunday, and a great start of the week. I have no clue what I will be doing today other than the visiting my mom-in-law part. I might try and fix the bug on the FF6 play through so I can keep going, or I might dive back into Rift. In any case I hope you all enjoy your day.