Not Exactly AFK Journey

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One of the things that has largely been absent from this blog for the last few years is mobile gaming. It is not necessarily that I lacked the desire to have stupid fun sleepytime nonsense gaming, but more that my hardware could no longer really support it. In 2018 I bought the Razer Phone 2, in large part because it had a ton of features and was being discounted significantly. That phone has been a trooper for me all through the peak pandemic years and finally started to show its significant age starting around 2022. I hate the entire process of upgrading devices and should have taken things like the fingerprint sensor failing on me as a sign that I should go ahead and do it. Instead, I suffered through all of 2023 and most of 2024 with a phone that would crash any time I attempted to launch a game. Recently I upgraded to a OnePlus 12R seen above, and I am pretty happy with that decision.

More importantly though it meant that I could actually indulge in various games that I had heard about for awhile, but did not have the hardware to really enjoy. AFK Journey is one of those “it” games that burned through the AggroChat crew starting in April and continuing on a bit into the summer months. Various Fedifriends have also been into the game so it was enough to make me want to download it as one of my first forays into another round of modern mobile gaming. Generally speaking, these games have a steady burn rate for me where I enjoy the first few weeks of playing… up until the point where I need to spend money to progress. At that point, I uninstalled it and moved on to the next one. What I am mostly looking for is some dumb fun busywork before sleep claims me and so far AFK Journey has excelled at that notion.

I’ve mostly been playing this on my mobile device, where I largely record fancy pulls when I think to press the awkward screenshot key combination of power and volume down. However recently I have installed the desktop client where it is so much more enjoyable to just roam around the world. Essentially the game is a combination of the usual busywork of a gacha game where you have various vents that you are expected to participate in every day in order to move the needle forward. You are rationed enough cash shop equivalent and hero pull currency in order to keep you hanging on to see if the next ten pulls get you something truly interesting.

Then there is this weirdly sprawling open world filled with optional content that you will absolutely miss if you are just clicking the auto movement button to progress you to the next quest item. This is the point where I always think what I think in these situations… that a game like this would be really freaking fun on a proper gaming device like the Nintendo Switch. I am sure I could probably figure out how to shoehorn this onto the Steam Deck… were it not for the fact that it does not appear to have controller support. Sure I could probably install something like ReWASD and map WASD and the assorted keyboard shortcuts to a controller… but that is an awful lot of work for a game that I probably won’t be playing two months from now.

I am running a full party of Graveborn, in part because those were some of the coolest champions that I pulled early on. My inner metalhead edge lord loves the trappings of darkness and death, and these all vibed with that heavily. I mean I am after all a dedicated Golgari player in Magic the Gathering, so this all seems like the right call. There was no team of Dwarves, so it was an easy pick over the assorted cute woodland furries and elves. Unfortunately, I have reached the point in the story where I find out that the Graveborn are kind of the dicks of the story… but MINE aren’t like that. They are mobile and misunderstood anti-heroes dammit!

For a game called “AFK Journey” it is shockingly interactive. Sure there is an autobattle system, and I have autobattled my way through several hundred levels of it because this ultimately gates how much you can progress your characters. This is in large part why I installed it on the PC, so that I could have it autobattling in the background without draining my phone battery. This feels like more of an upkeep chore than anything else, and I had neglected it for far too long allowing my cast of heroes to languish a bit. The actual combat is all non-interactive so I guess maybe that is where the bulk of the AFK nature comes from. You gear and choose your team comp, but after that, it just sort of plays out on its own. I am fine with this because quite honestly controlling anything on a phone is a bit fiddly for my giant sausage fingers.

I did spend $7 on the game, to unlock a cosmetic battlepass track. I figured I needed a costume with an overabundance of belts to match the edge lord nature of my undead team. I am not sure what I think about the whole open-chested nature of the outfit, but sometimes you just sort of have to accept that these things are built for folks who lust after such things. It was an improvement over the general fancy nature of the wizard outfits I had been given up to this point. Since I am effectively playing Merlin… I don’t think the game is ever going to give me proper armor to wear and I just have to accept that.

So far I am having quite a bit of fun with the game and actually enjoy roaming around the world looking for secrets to loot. I’ve yet to hit the upper ceiling where progression is ridiculously slow. I basically get to progress one character each day and they have this whole system where every 10th level up costs way more than the preceding 9 levels. So basically I zoom everyone up to a multiple of 10s, then that next level up I can do one of those each day for a week until I can zoom them again up 9 more levels. I’ve been given a shocking amount of pull currency and have had enough banked to comfortably do a ten-pull every single day on the normal banner since I started playing. The premium pulls also seem to add up and I have a 10 pull banked against the rate-up banner, but given that I have already pulled Nara I am going to hold onto that until the next banner rolls around.

It is a gacha game, and you sort of have to go into it expecting a specific set of trappings for that experience. That said… it seems to be one of the more enjoyable mobile gacha games that I have played in a while. I will forever mourn the loss of Dragalia, but for the moment this seems to be taking its place as my stable focus for the time being as I wait for sleep to claim me.

Weekend Recap with Frogs

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Good Morning Folks! It is another Monday and here comes another one of my semi-regular weekend recap posts. I am still in a really odd place gaming wise where I am not necessarily hardcore motivated by anything. I thought I might dive into Space Marine 2 or Final Fantasy XVI this weekend… but neither happened because I just did not feel like playing anything that “heavy”. I’m not sure how to explain it, but there are times when I don’t want to play anything that I cannot easily dip out of at a moment’s notice as my mood changes. As a result I am still playing quite a bit of Minecraft because it is easy to pop out of and return to, and one of the major things that I did is create a bunch of dog houses for all of my wolves that I have had hanging out in my base for ages. Of note… that is NOT lava in the back of their cage but instead, a shroom light to keep them warm and safe from baddies.

It has been ages since I made one of my dumb videos, and this weekend I decided to record a bit of a base tour in Minecraft. The Path of Exile league was fun, but didn’t necessarily inspire me to create any videos, similarly, Last Epoch has been more of the same but if I can ever get my build dialed in I might record one of it. This recent foray into Minecraft started by watching this video about a 14-year-old Minecraft mystery while convalescing from Covid. This then made me remember that I have videos from my very first Minecraft world over on another channel, which made me nostalgic for the game and the way in which I used to play it. It has been a lot of fun and while I have entered the “machine building” phase of the game, I am still enjoying myself because it does not ask a lot of me to play it.

Over in Last Epoch, my build is starting to come together and I have picked up a handful of really decent Legendary items. We are in a really weird state of the endgame meta for the game where you either want an item to drop with 2 or more Legendary Potential, or you want an item to drop with NO Legendary Potential so you can feed it to a Nemesis Egg and either get a Legendary or an item with hopefully 2 or more LP on it. Circle of Fortune however makes it so that most Uniques drop with at least 1LP… meaning that 99.9% of what drops for you is useless. What I find myself doing is picking up weapons off the ground and then rolling the dice with a Rune of Ascendance because it does not seem to take into account the Circle of Fortune bonuses and is way more likely to give me a raw zero LP version of the item if I luck my way into it.

There are also some weird growing pains around being in the endgame and crafting items. Last Epoch should be praised for how approachable crafting items is and how easy it is to make decent enough gear while running through the campaign. However, when you hit the endgame… it sort of stops being useful. Glyph of Envy is this really cool item that was recently introduced that lets you take a single good stat and then reroll everything else. I could see this actually being really useful for those items that have a Tier 7 roll of that one stat you care the most about. However, it does not work in this situation because you cannot use this unless an Affix can be upgraded, meaning that you cannot use this on T5, T6, or T7 items. I’ve tried this a few times and when you end up getting as a result is an item that would probably be hidden by your loot filter. There really is no way to craft perfect items in Last Epoch, meaning that after a point you just stop engaging with that system other than randomly trying to reroll a single stat on an item.

Friday while I was off my friend Ace gifted me a copy of Pesticide Not Required and I’ve had a blast playing some of it. Essentially this is a game in the same style as Vampire Survivors but instead you play a cute frog that has inherited a farm Stardew Valley style. You roam around doing chores, planting crops, watering them, and eventually growing new weapons… to help you clear out the bugs that are trying to attack you faster… so you can grow more crops and get more weapons. It has a really fun main gameplay loop and you get to throw a bunch of fun things as weapons like randomly sending lawnmowers off in various directions. Over time you get the ability to buy pets that take care of some of the tasks for you like an Elephant that waters your plants, or a Dog that retrieves loot for you. If you liked Vampire Survivors give it a go, because it is kind of stupidly fun. I do suggest you play it with a controller because originally I tried Keyboard and Mouse and completely missed that you could direct your attacks until I played with dual sticks.

Lastly, The Cure released a new single and it is brilliant. It is hard to explain how much this band means to me, and listening to this was like a visit from an old friend. Fair warning though it is 3 minutes or so into the song before the lyrics start because The Cure has reached a point where they just do not have to give a fuck about pop sensibilities. What is staggering about this track is how much like classical young Robert Smith this sounds like. Whatever he is doing to take care of his voice… it is phenomenal. If you also love The Cure and were not aware of this collaboration with Chvrches from a few years ago, I highly suggest you give it a listen as well.

Anyways! I hope you all have a most wonderful week. Mine is probably going to be busy, but I am had a great weekend.

AggroChat #494 – Stardew Survivors

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Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen

Hey Folks! This week we continue to chip away at the massive list of topics from our time off.  We start off the show with an adorable Frog version of Vampire Survivors meets Stardew Valley called Pesticide Not Required.  From there we talk a bit about Pokemon Go and what it is like playing it with your kids.  Ash continues his dive into rhythm games via the Round1 Arcade, this time with Beatmania.  Space Marine 2 has been released and a bunch of the folks on the podcast have been playing Multiplayer Co-Op and have some thoughts.  Kodra has been playing Tactical Breach Wizards and shares his thoughts about it, and we have some very early preliminary thoughts about the brand-new Zelda game Echoes of Wisdom.  Finally, Bel talks a bit about returning to Minecraft during his recent convalescence and how that game feels like chicken soup in gaming form.

Topics Discussed:

  • Pesticide Not Required
    • Vampire Survivors meets Cute Frog Farming Game
  • Pokemon Go With Kids
  • More Rhythm Games
    • Beatmania
    • Round1 Is Great
  • Space Marine 2
  • Tactical Breach Wizards
  • Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom
  • Bel Returns to Minecraft
    • Sick Time Comfort Gaming

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Unlimited Chicken

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Good Morning Folks! Friends… I am swimming in cooked chicken. For years when I have played Minecraft the first thing that I have done is wrangle a bunch of cows… stuff them in a hole and then feed them wheat until they pass the entity cramming limits and start dying off giving me a stable supply of leather and beef. The thing is… I don’t really need much leather… and my chicken operation has been way more productive than I thought it would be. As such I am contemplating tearing down the cow station… and sending them all to that big farm upstate… to free up room for more shenanigans. I just do not need the beef in quite the way that I thought I would and chicken appears to be a perfectly cromulent option.

Chicken solves a lot of other problems like the ability to get a quick safe experience boost to repair items. In theory, if I cared more about it I would relocate the chickens to a place where I could reasonably use them to feed the egg-throwing machine directly. I could do some nonsense with minecart hoppers and bubble elevators, but that seems like “a lot”. Also, minecarts are super noisy, and I am already dealing with the din of a thousand clucks at all hours of the day. There is something primal that I enjoy about loading up a pitching machine and watching it birth chickens into my pen. I’ve created so many lanterns for the nether tunnels that I am going to need to find a more stable source of iron. I’ve gotten most of it from hollowing out areas under my base, but I might be trying to build a Villager breeder soon… and from there an Iron Golem farm since I have Pillagers nearby.

I am still playing quite a bit of Last Epoch and one of the things about Cycle 2.5 that I have to say… is that I don’t think dungeons are quite as much of a waste of time. This is in large part because mapping content that appears in Monoliths, can now appear and does so frequently in dungeons. Better than that, each floor of the dungeon seems to count as a new map meaning that you can find a Nemesis, Treasure Chest, and Exiled Mage on each floor giving you a way to burn through Nemesis so much faster than monoliths. I’ve only really spent much time doing Temporal Sanctum trying to create legendary gear, but then again that tends to be the only dungeon that I do consistently.

I had a dry streak of eggs that I complained about on the blog, and then grouped with Ace and immediately following that have gotten an egg for almost every single Nemesis. This is allowing me to start burning through my stockpile of non-LP copies of Palarus and Firestarter. This actually makes the whole Circle of Fortune thing making it super common to get 1LP uniques a bad thing. I wish you could throw LP uniques in the Eggs and then either get it turned into a completely random legendary or upgrade to higher LP levels. As it stands right now 1LP uniques… feel sorta awful to loot. I upgraded my Palarus this morning significantly keeping the 15 Health on Hit and adding 109% Melee Damage. I will keep trying for a 3 or 4 LP version, but for the time being, I am pretty happy with it.

I have to admit though, I feel like I am starting to wind down a bit on Last Epoch. This is the phase of the game where it always loses me. I am just not motivated by completing all of the bosses, and the worst thing about Last Epoch… is that it isn’t Path of Exile. What I mean by that is POE has quite possibly the most interesting endgame with a lot of player choice in what you want to focus on mechanic-wise. If I could take the player builds from Last Epoch and copy-paste in the Atlas of Worlds and all of the other endgame systems like Heist and Delve over top of the existing endgame… it would be my ultimate experience. The worst thing about Last Epoch is that it just doesn’t have a rich and varied endgame yet. I know over time they will get there, based on what we have seen so far, but it also means for the time being… every cycle has a shelf life.

Anyways Minecraft is giving me plenty of alternative shenanigans to enjoy, and at some point, I want to dive into Final Fantasy XVI now it is on PC, and Space Marine 2. I might try both of those out either today or this weekend.