aggrochat Archives - Page 19 of 35 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Everybirdie Knows!

August 22, 2015 by Belghast

The Hunter Gatherer

This morning I am getting a bit of a late start because the weather is dreary out and everything seems to distract me. I’ve had to contend with the kitten knocking all manner of things onto the ground from the cabinets, and the other two cats intent upon pinning my arms down so that I can’t effectively type. As a result I am getting a later than usual start on composing my morning blog post. This mornings post is going to be inspired by the sheer madness that Grace has bestowed upon me. What I am saying.. is everything is her fault. For those who have been following me over the last few days, you will know that the August AggroChat Game of the month is the bizarre bird dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend. I had been avoiding playing it so that I could stream my first moments, and finally the stars aligned for me having enough time to devote my attention to doing just that. Since this is a largely text based game, I figured I would act out the dialog as best I could. I set a time for 6pm last night, and I had an awesome audience of friends joining in the fun. I only actually made it through one play through however because by the end of all of that talking… my throat was killing me.

What can I say about Hatoful Boyfriend that has not already been said. The game is completely insane. You play the role of a “Hunter-Gatherer” human girl, having to fit into bird society and attending Saint Pidgeonations a prestigious school…. for you know… Birds. If that premise itself was not insane enough… in order to make progress in the game you have to develop a relationship with one of a cast of different birds. From what I understand if you have failed to gain the attention of at least one suitor by a certain point… the game just ends. From start to finish it takes about an hour to play, and last nights play through ended up running about a hour and twelve minutes in total. The game while short… has a lot of replay-ability as apparently there are secret endings that you can only unlock through repeated plays of the game. Having done this or that ending unlocks new options, and at this point I have completed the game three times and unlocked a total of three different endings as well as a bonus romance of sorts.

Birb Boyfriend

While absolutely none of this sounds like a game I would be interested in… there is something quirky and infectious about the game that makes you want to keep playing to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. One of the nice features of the game is that there is a fast forward of sorts that lets you skip through some of the often long sequences of dialog that require no player action. In truth you are only really making a few choices per game session, and watching the events of those decisions play out before you. In many ways some aspects of it remind me of Persona 4 Golden, which is a game I need to return to playing at some point. I keep hearing there is an actual “bad” ending, but I have yet to find it. In many ways playing this game feels like the first time I watched the movie Brazil, with even stranger and more surreal experiences the longer I kept playing. In fact this morning I actually got up and started playing again, so maybe I am not hooked on the insanity?

If nothing else it is going to make for a very interesting AggroChat in a few weeks when we record that episode. I feel like so far maybe Grace has done the best job of picking a game title that generates conversation. I feel like There Came an Echo probably would have as well if I did not suffer so many technical problems that kept me from finishing the game. Thalen also has an interesting game picked for us, so I think the next few months are going to be a blast as far as the Game Club goes. I had a lot of fun recording the play through of this game, and it was so damned bizarre trying to act out the different birds. I stumbled pretty massively on some of the names and had to rely on some assistance from Ashgar a few times. However I made it through and now at least have some fodder to talk about for the show. I am not sure how many more endings I will try and unlock before we record but I still have some time. The gameplay goes fast enough, and in many ways it is like a train wreck… you just can’t help but keep watching it. As someone who went into “Birb Boyfriend” as deeply skeptical, I highly suggest everyone pick this title up and give it a chance. It is just too damned strange not to experience it for yourself. If you want to watch my play through if you missed the live stream I embedded the video below.

Spending Time with Carby

August 9, 2015 by Belghast

Sleep Hates Me

I am getting a fairly late start this morning because insomnia is a pain in the ass. Last night we recorded an episode of AggroChat like normal, and ran around two hours in total recording time. By the time I did my initial edit pass and exported the show to MP3, it was already midnight. I decided to save my progress and finish things up this morning instead, and my hope beyond hope was that I would get a good nights sleep. The problem being that the moment my head hit the pillow I was awake. I kept thinking that if I laid there long enough I would eventually drift off to sleep, but as 2 am came and passed I was really wishing I had just stayed up long enough to publish the post last night. This is the worst part about insomnia is not necessarily the inability to get back to sleep, but the feeling that you are wasting your time by TRYING to sleep. Had I gotten up I could have done any number of things until sleep finally claimed me… but the harder you attempt to sleep the harder it seems to be to finally have it happen.

I’ve struggled with bouts of insomnia most of my life, and figuring out how to function on a couple of hours of sleep is an unfortunate survival skill I have had to learn along the way. Thankfully this happened on a Saturday night… and not a Sunday night… because I have done the sleep walking my way through work because I couldn’t sleep thing and it sucks. The key fault yesterday was that I ended up taking a nap thinking that it would help me stay up and edit the podcast. My system is wired in such a way that if I get any additional sleep I am screwed. I can take a thirty minute cat nap, and it will completely upset the balance of things can cause my body to think it got a full nights sleep. Granted a “full night” for me is between five and six hours of sleep… and realistically anything more than that causes me to get groggy. Essentially I live my life in a permanent state of sleep deprivation, but unfortunately that seems to simply be the way I am wired to function. All of this aside the show was an extremely enjoyable one to record and we talked about a big umbrella of titles from Final Fantasy XIV, to Wildstar, to Sword Art Online… to the elephant in the room… the World of Warcraft Legion expansion announcement.

AggroChat 69 – Ahk Mourn and Key Limes

Content Density

I have this strong desire to level to the current cap in Wildstar, but the problem I ultimately have is this is an exceptionally content dense game. Normally speaking this is a good quality, but the problem is that I struggle to keep up with the quests before out leveling them entirely. In a game like Final Fantasy XIV it makes sense… so that you can save quests for other jobs, however in a game like Wildstar it just feels daunting when you realize that you are completing less than optimal quests just to dig down to the ones that matter again. I spent a good chunk of time yesterday playing around on my Human Warrior on Evinda yesterday, poking my way through the quests. Right now I am mostly focused on working through my path quests, but unfortunately I have only actually done about half of the ones available for the Galeras zone, and I am already feeling overwhelmed. I have to say this is not really my favorite area of the game, and I am more than ready to push past it… even though I know Whitevale is waiting on me. Whitevale more or less was the zone that killed my progress on my Chua Engineer, because the content was just so tightly packed.. and simply moving around became tedious.

As of yesterday I am sitting at level twenty, and I am considering just pushing through some dungeon runs rather than spending a bunch of more time questing. I had this overwhelming feeling yesterday that I spent a lot of time doing something… but whatever it was didn’t really accomplish much in the grand scheme of things. I did however set up a new outfit which I am pretty happy with. At some point I need to spend time searching the auctioneer for interesting appearances. Right now I don’t have any hats that I really like, so I am going with the cybernetic monocle as the best of the worst. This game so far is reminding me a little too much of Warcraft in the hat department, because I can’t really find any that I like. In World of Warcraft I habitually hit every single hat offering because they all looked stupid, and I am afraid that might also be my fate here. This is so strange since in Final Fantasy XIV I have dozens of hats that I love wearing… including the very awesome Bunny Samurai hat that I have been wearing most recently. Maybe I just have yet to find my way to the really cool threads yet. Right now I plan on leveling some more today and seeing if I can get a group going for a dungeon.

Spending Time with Carby

Arcanist has been the class that has eluded me the most in Final Fantasy XIV. I want to like it, because I adore running around with a giant sparkly carbuncle pet. The problem being it is a “finger wiggler” and quite possibly the “most” finger wiggly of all classes. I however thanks to the help of my AggroChat crew at least “get” how to play one. It is essentially put up dots on all of the things and check to see if it is dead yet. Generally speaking I pick something to play during our podcast and this week that honor fell to playing the Arcanist. I keep telling myself that if I can ever manage to get it to 30, then I will become a Scholar and life will be golden. I get to queue as a healer and see how the other side feels when it comes to dungeon healing, after playing a fair amount of White Mage. As of last night I am sitting at 26, and man does it feel like a really long ways to 30. The problem with dungeoning as an Arcanist is that it just feels so damned awkward. You have this strange mixed bag of tools, but only really end up using your dots and ruin as a spell of last resort. Occasionally I throw a heal if the tank is getting exceptionally low or if I am, but otherwise cycle through the adds… dotting each of them.. then returning to the first one and starting the process all over again (which is rarely needed because they are usually dead by then).

Essentially going forward it is my plan to run a low level roulette each day on the Arcanist because yesterday I managed to get a full level and a half out of it. Doing this should get me to thirty in good pace, and then I can figure out how to scholar heal! If nothing else now that I have gotten in my Carby plushes I have a minion Carby to follow me around. I have to admit that is part of my reluctance to level is the fact that I know going Summoner causes me to loose my Carbuncles. The Egis have grown on me, but they are in no way as cool as the Carbuncle. I can’t believe I am saying this… but I am actually jealous of Alphinaud and his Ruby, Onyx and Obsidian Carbuncles. Part of me hopes that they introduce a quest line that gives you these three Carbys as optional replacements for Garuda, Titan and Ifrit Egis. If they did that… I would absolutely have renewed vigor in my desire to become a summoner. As it stands now I feel like this is a class that has beaten me, and I want to push past any frustration and not let it win. If nothing else I do think the book casting animation looks pretty sweet… you know for a finger wiggler. Yeah… i’m going to go stab something with a sword or hit something with an axe now.

Om Nom Dance

July 26, 2015 by Belghast

A Late Start

I am getting a super late start this morning on my blog post… well because things and reasons. Last night when we finished recording AggroChat, my wife asked if it was time for bed or if I needed to stay up and edit the podcast. I thought to myself… that bed sounded like an amazing idea and just straight up crashed. This meant that this morning however I had to rush around a bit and edit the post while consuming breakfast. Another thing I noticed is that apparently Final Fantasy XIV patched out their idle kick, because I was still standing in there in the middle of the Dravinian Lowlands afk all night long. I was apparently similarly lazy in logging out from Teamspeak, which meant as folks started trying to pull things together… I went ahead and agreed to tank a few things.

Also I finally got around to doing my Minotaur Om Nom Nom Dance video voice over. One of the dungeons that you unlock at 60 is the Fractal Continuum which includes a really strange fight. At face value the Minotaur works just like pretty much all of the Cyclops encounters you have fought to this point. He alternates between doing a frontal cone attack that you need to dodge and a full 360 degree sweep attack that you also should avoid. Where it differs however is he will start channeling a group wipe attack, that you can only break… but essentially feeding him a mob. While doing this he does a goofy little dance of sorts… which I have taken to voicing over when I tank the dungeon. This generally throws Grace into a fit of hysterics laughing… so I decided I should really edit together a video of the “dance”.

AggroChat 67 – The Astebreed Show

This week we record yet another AggroChat Game Club game featuring the game Astebreed, which is an interesting mix of strange Anime Storytelling and Bullet Hell shooter. What makes the game very unique is that you are a mech… with a sword as well as your laser weapons. As far as the story goes, I think several of us were equally confused so we rely on Tam to decode it all for us… because he apparently was able to follow it the entire way. We have a lot of conversation about the tone of the game, the boss fights, the controls that may or may not have worked… and the total package.

Since adding Grace and Thalen to the podcast they were not in the initial rotation of AggroChat picks, so we did the most gamer thing ever… and rolled some dice before the show to graft them into the rotation. That means for the month of August Grace got to pick a title and we will be playing the bird dating sim… Hatoful Boyfriend… and Kodra was happier than I have ever heard him be. He loves this game, and drove us slightly mad with it when he was playing it. Now we are going to get to experience this madness for ourselves, and I am willing to bet that Game Club Seven is going to be one of the more interesting episodes of AggroChat in our history.

In Search of Esoterics

I have been a massive slacker this week when it came to grinding Esoterics, and as such am sitting at around 180. As a result I need a whole bunch today and tomorrow in order for me to have a shot in hell of hitting the 450 weekly cap. Generally speaking if you log in every day and run an expert roulette dungeon… you can cap fairly easily. Guess what I have not been doing at all. Essentially I have just not been up for group content and as a result I have been playing an awful lot of SkyForge in the meantime which is almost entirely a soloing experience for me. However after dropping a bunch of stress last night, and finishing the paperwork on our impending home renovations I am starting to feel a little less “under the gun”. Sure I could stress about it some more, but in my mind the decision process is over and now we just have to wait for everything to happen.

I did however have a nightmare scenario run through my mind this morning, that makes me wonder just how they are going to deal with our cable connection while ripping off the siding. I really hope I will not be without internet for two weeks. This afternoon my plan is to sit here and grind expert dungeons for anyone who is willing to run them with me, and as a result whittle away my missing esoterics. I would really like to be able to get that tasty level 200 weapon within the first three weeks. If not there is always the next two weeks I can cap to make that happen, but preferably I would like to be getting as many as I can at least until I get a few pieces of gear under my belt. The rest of the time however I am still working on pushing my Dragoon higher and at this point I am still roughly 3/4 of the way through 58. It kinda sucks to have dueling priorities, because I would really love to get him at 60 and geared so I have other options than just tanking.

Ding 60 Warrior

July 5, 2015 by Belghast

The End is Near

This morning I have places on my body that are sore that I did not even know existed. That said I feel like we have accomplished a lot this extended weekend. Essentially my office and my wife’s office have not seen a major clean and reorganize in over a decade. As a result mine especially was this dysfunctional hell hole, that I simply lacked the oomph or planning to figure out how to fix. I’ve talked about the things I didn’t like about my setup for awhile, and my wife being the master planner that she is came up with a plethora of options… some of which we finally implemented this weekend. Similarly she really has not used her office in a year and a half for various reasons, and really wanted to go into the new school year with the ability to use it as a functional work space. For me I wanted the ability to broadcast easier and simply have just a more comfortable space to hang out in.

Originally the plan was to just work from Friday through Sunday… but on a whim I opted to take Thursday off as well. Quite honestly I have no clue how I would have even come close to finishing were it not for taking Thursday off. That was essentially the day I realized just how deep the rabbit hole went. We’ve taken a lot out to the dumpster we rented, and we are now working on preparing our second load to good will. But last night I managed to get the office essentially configured. Right now there is a lot more organizational stuff to do as I box up all of the miscellaneous cables that I have laying around from tearing down my computers the first time. Similarly there are a few places in my office where I want to add some sort of cabinet or shelving but the above picture I took last night shows the basic layout. So far I am really happy with it, and I think it is going to work well for the long run. The mission for today is to set back up all of my consoles and rewire them to the PC via the Elgato.

Ding 60 Warrior

With all the activity during the day, I have to admit I have been crashing pretty early most evenings during this break. When I logged out Friday night I was roughly a sixth of a level away from 60, and figured a couple of dungeon runs would get me there. Through out the day yesterday there were a few times where I took a break, but didn’t want to talk as much time as a dungeon run would require. As such I started working on my clan hunts, thinking that I could dink my way through a few creatures at a time and get some experience in the process. Clan Hunts are worth a surprising amount of experience, so as you are leveling seriously… do not over look them. By the time I wound down for the night and wrapped up the clan hunts I was within a stones throw of 60. When Thalen asked if I would be willing to tank the Library for him and Solaria… I jumped at the chance because I knew without a doubt I would ding inside of there.

Sure enough on the way to the second boss I dinged and also managed to pick up a few more items including this spiffy helmet… that doesn’t really thematically match its chest piece… but is still cool nonetheless. Upon getting out of the dungeon I did the last few quests that allowed me to unlock the first of the level 60 dungeons, and I am hoping to run that today. It took me almost exactly two weeks to hit the level cap, which is pretty good as far as I am concerned. I did not have the raw time to throw at this game that some of our other free company members did, but I still feel like I moved through the content fairly quickly. Now I can go back and start working on leveling my army of alt jobs, so that I can be multifunctional once again. That is honestly the thing I have missed the most while leveling… is the fact that right now I am “only” a tank. I know I have lamented this several times, but it is my hope to at least get the dragoon up there quickly. Now begins the fun end game gearing process that I obsess over so much.

Moogles are Lazy

Due to the Independence Day holiday we opted to record this show a little early this week, and instead of spending Saturday night talking about games, we spent Friday night. As a result there are several of us who were not quite to level 60 in Final Fantasy XIV but have since caught up and pushed through to the level cap. However we spent a good deal of time not talking about FFXIV. Grace managed to finish the crazy attunement system in Wildstar and attended her very first raid. She gives her opinion of the system and how it compares to WoW and FFXIV raiding. Additionally we go down the rabbit hole that is the Four Job Fiesta and talk Final Fantasy V and the various group compositions fate has given us this year. I apparently was one job off from the legendary group composition that the person who started the event go their first year: Monk, Berserker, Beastmaster and Dancer. Instead the gods saw fit to give me a Samurai so I could quite literally “pay to win”.

We purposefully saved our discussion of Heavensward to the end of the show because I knew that was the one thing we were all playing. It is extremely difficult to discuss this game without going into spoilers, so there are some details that might be spoiled if you have not played up through the Aery dungeon yet. The awkwardness of this show was the fact that Ashgar is quite a ways behind the rest of us, making it extremely difficult to add to discussions… because at least one point during the show he made a conjecture that we knew the truth about, but could not really go into it for fear of spoiling key plot points. My theory is that once we have all finished the 3.0 story arc we will do yet another big “spoil everything” show, like we did for 2.55. The best snippet for me was when Grace decided to talk about her new loathing for Moogles after completing the Churning Mists zone. Moogles are in fact lazy bums.