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Fears Verified

August 23, 2014 by Belghast

Death Visits

It is shaping up to be a bad week. I realize at this point it is Saturday and the week is technically over, but bear with me. Thursday I got a text from my father telling me that my Aunt Inez had passed away. Technically she is a Great Aunt and the sister of my Grandmother that passed away close to a decade ago now. So given her age it is not terribly shocking news, but I feel horrible that she lived roughly two hours away… and I have not seen her since my Grandmothers funeral. At the least I think she attended the funeral, but that day was such a blur that I can’t really be certain. I know she was not at my Grandfathers funeral a few years ago, because she wasn’t well enough to travel. I don’t know the details of when the service will be, but I was figuring I likely should make the trip.

That was at least until last night I got a call from my mother. Another Aunt has been in and out of the hospital more times than I can count over the last few years. I say Aunt but again that is a bit of a misnomer since she is technically my second cousin… but she treated me like a nephew pretty much all of my life and I was too young to realize that my cousins and I did not have the same relationship to her. She has been in final stage renal failure for quite some time and having to take eight hour dialysis pretty much every other day. In fact when my Grandmother on my moms side passed away earlier this year, I had thought my Aunt would go before her. Last night on the phone my mother said that she had been given a terminal diagnosis and was being transferred to hospice. Yesterday they stopped dialysis which gives her a prognosis of two to four days at the most.

As at peace as I thought I would be with this… it turns out I really am not. In fact my mother called my cell phone at 7 am this morning…. and I am scared to death to return it. My wife and I had planned to come visit her today, since we couldn’t go together last night. My fear is that I am going to pick up the phone and call my mother back and find out that she passed in the night. I have a complex mix of feelings about how exactly I am with this possible event. So long as I don’t call her back, it is like it hasn’t happened yet… and for all I know it might not have. There is part of me that thinks it is a blessing, because she has not had any semblance of a qualitative life in the last six years or so. The single solitary joy she had was mealtime, and if that is the happiest you are all day long… then it tells me life is pretty horrible. Another part of me deeply mourns the fun and interesting aunt that she was for most of my life, and that she hasn’t been able to be for the last decade. I know that once I finish my blog post, I will call my mother back and whatever it is that has happened will not longer be sitting out in a buffer somewhere… but will be very real. This mornings post I guess is a way of psyching myself up to receive the news.

Fears Verified

I did not actually make it through my post this morning before receiving another call from my mother. It was in fact what I had feared, that my aunt passed away over night. She drifted off to sleep and never woke up and passed early this morning around 2 am. I guess they had known about this for longer than they had told me. She found out sometime on Wednesday, and at that point her and my mother went into planning mode, planning all of the elements of her funeral. Apparently she also threw all of her renal diet measures out the window and ate the things she had been craving. The one that I found the oddest was the fact that apparently she had been craving a snickers bar. So much so that she asked my mother to go out and get her one right then. By some quirk of fate my mother had purchased a snickers bar that morning and it was sitting there in her purse just waiting for the request.

My aunt was one of people that when she made up her mind she did it whatever it was. If she decided she wanted to go to a craft show, she would show up at the house early that morning and say “get in the car, we are going to a craft show”. More often than not my mother would tag along for whatever adventure it was that they were off to, be it going to a movie or going on a road trip. When I was younger there were many weekends she would decide that we were going off together to visit my cousins, and me and my Aunt would go off on an adventure where I am sure I would talk her ear off about whatever thing I happened to be into at the time. It turns out that when she realized there was no getting better, she set her mind to planning on her passing. It sounded like during the day yesterday she had set all of her affairs in order, making sure my mother had transferred enough to her own account to pay for the funeral. After that it seems like she decided she was done with everything that needed to be done and simply drifted off peacefully.

Just Dance

As not to end this mornings post on a somber note, I thought I would mention something that warms my heart. Final Fantasy XIV is a very charming game, and as such it seems to attract a certain type of gamer that is more than willing to stop and smell the roses. When I go idle I am notorious for starting up one of the many dances that I have been collecting in game. Often times when I return to the keyboard I will be joined by one or more people who have decided to take up dancing beside me. This happens as an almost nightly ritual in the housing ward our guild has a plot in. I will go down to the market board, and while checking out what has been posted I will start up a dance. Before I know it Naine one of the neighbors will have joined me, and on occasion others will as well. The community is weird like that, and I am growing to love it.

The above screenshot is of me and a new friend going through our little dance ritual while waiting on something to spawn. I feel like if you stop to dance with a Lalafell, you are destined to become instant friends. So the next time you happen upon someone dancing in whatever game you happen to be playing… take a moment to join in. It is moments like this that make the virtual world seem so much closer than just an assemblage of pixels. On a side note I am extremely happy to see so many friends either renewing their accounts or starting new ones to come hang out on Cactuar with us all. I am really hoping this will be a game I set down roots in for a long while. We are already involved in a bunch of different active link shells and it feels like we have connections far deeper than just our immediate circle of friends. I have not felt that way in any game since the early days of Warcraft, and I have to say it feels really awesome.

Cannot Be Tamed Questionnaire: Part 1

August 20, 2014 by Belghast

Packaged with a Bow

I am not sure if this was intended to draw out posts during Blaugust or not, but yesterday Jasyla over at Cannot Be Tamed posted a survey. I seem to be able to rattle on every morning without much issue, but I am always thankful when a ready made post is handed to me so neatly. In part my hope is that through my own blog post and Liore’s (who turned me onto this) we will get this one spread through out the Blaugust community and get Jasyla a bunch of responses. I am really not sure how far I will make it into the survey in a single post, but we will see.

Cannot Be Tamed Gaming Questionnaire

You can see the full text of the survey here, but I will attempt to answer all of the questions

1. When did you start playing video games?

I honestly do not remember a time when I was NOT playing video games. I would have to say age three or four maybe? The earliest memory I had of video games was that my parents owned a Sears and Roebuck Pong clone. More than actually playing it… I remember the desire to play it. Like from the moment it got hooked up to the television I wanted my hands on it. Though being as young as I was, my parents were super reluctant to let me play. It was finally my Uncle Billy who I think let me play for the first time, and I remember losing almost immediately. The thing is it intrigued me so much that I kept wanting to try over and over. That early experience pretty much imprinted my brain for video games permanently.

2. What is the first game you remember playing?

Well like I said in the above answer the first game I remember playing is Pong. The first game I remember absolutely loving however was probably Ms Pacman. My aunt was the first to get an Atari 2600 and all of us cousins played it nonstop over most of our formative years. I ended up getting a second hand Atari system not too long after that. The game I can remember playing the most of however was Seaquest a game where you rescued drivers from sharks in a little sub that could fire a weapon. It was also the first game I can remember playing that didn’t have just a constant repetition of levels. As you progressed through levels the colors would change and new enemies would be added, and we wove a complex storyline through these simple transitions.

3. PC or Console?

I am primarily a PC gamer, but it hasn’t always been that way. In fact I have a ton of rare console systems stored away in my closet including an 3DO, a NeoGeo and a TurboDuo. In fact during the years before I got hooked on MMOs I had a video game loft with all of my consoles hooked up and “on tap” through a complex series of A/B switches. I have spent large swaths of my time shifting back and forth between them. Prior to 1992 I was a hardcore console gamer and mostly an Super Nintendo JRPG fan. Then we got a PC and I got hooked on Wolfenstein, Doom and Civilization. As I went through college the 3D graphics changes were happening and I was all about playing everything in “GL”. It was during this time that I played Warcraft, Diablo, Starcraft, Fallout, Quake, Baldur’s Gate and pretty much anything i could get my hands on.

When I got out of college however I had a massive console resurgence with the Sony Playstation, Dreamcast, and Saturn systems. I didn’t really make the journey back into PC exclusivity until I got hopelessly mired in the original Everquest around the release of the Scars of Velious expansion pack. It has been my love of the MMO that has kept me glued to the PC, and while I have dabbled with the PS2, PS3, Xbox 360 and PS4… I still prefer the PC. While until recently it was the MMOs that had kept me there, it is also the fact that I can modify my games freely. Everytime I install a new back of mods in Fallout 3, it makes it a completely new experience for me and I go through another 50 to 100 hour play through running back through all the content with fresh eyes. So when given the chance I will almost always gravitate back to the PC.

4. XBox, PlayStation, or Wii?

I started off my gaming life as a Nintendo Fanboy, but over the years their consoles have gotten less and less practical. All I really want is for them to release a good solid console without a gimmick controller. I don’t want new ways to play my games, I just want new content. I am admittedly these days a Sony Playstation fan. I have owned two different Xbox 360s, but it is really the value of the Playstation Plus subscription that keeps me attached to Sony. Over the last few years they have come off as the good guy in the console wars, and Microsoft coming off as the part of the stodgy corporate power. I realize that both are huge corporations hell bent on parting me from my money, but I feel less horrible about supporting Sony. Right now I have the PS3, PS4 and Vita in my office and they are hooked up so I can livestream the PS3/PS4 so I guess my alignment is pretty clear.

5. What’s the best game you’ve ever played?

The game I constantly keep coming back to over the years is Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. The game represents pretty much my perfectly crafted game. For starters it is lovingly drawn 2D animation and not 3D. It has an amazing soundtrack with awesome rock versions of the Castlevania classics. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for the Castlevania franchise, despite how many false steps it has taken over the years. I love the idea of hunting down Vampires, Werewolves, Ghouls, and all manner of things that go bump in the night. Castlevania is one of the first games I purchased for myself on the original Nintendo. I remember saving up my money and making a trip to Toys R Us to get it… and that was quite the pilgrimage considering the closest one was an hour away. Symphony of the Night was pretty much the pinnacle of “metroidvania” for me. It had roleplaying and leveling elements to keep me hooked, and an awesome world to explore and find all sorts of secrets. I have repurchased this game at least four different times, on various platforms and I have it installed on my Vita at the moment. When I am feeling horrible this is the game I boot up to take me back to a time when everything made sense.

6. What’s the worst game you’ve ever played?

I have played so many games since the days of the Atari 2600, but no game has ever absolutely confounded me as much as E.T. the Extraterrestrial. This game is the game that began my fear of movie tie-ins regardless of what they might be. I was still in elementary school when the movie came out, and absolutely loved it. So when they released it on my favorite console system the Atari, I had to get it right? There was nothing at all about this game that made any sense what so ever, and still to this day I cannot reason what the hell I am supposed to do. You alternated between getting humped by men in trenchcoats, to picking up piles of poo on the ground that were supposed to be Reese’s Pieces… to falling into trenches for no apparent reason. To make things even stranger… sometimes the trenches had things that looked like record players… that gave you credit of some sort for collecting them. But the most frustrating part was trying to get back out of the trenches, which involved extending your neck and levitating out… but you had to do so in exactly the right spot or you fell back down again. This was the first game to ever make me want to throw my controller across the room. After all of these years I still get angry thinking about the disappointment I felt as a kid playing this game. I have to say that the Ghostbusters Atari 2600 game redeemed movie ports somewhat, because I remember that game was really good.

Taking Longer than Expected

So at this point I am only 6 questions in… and there are a total of 21. This is going to take awhile, so hopefully you can bare with me as I answer a few questions each morning. I simply have run out of time this morning so I have to cut this off here. I blame the fact that I just had to look up images to go with each of the paragraphs. In any case tune in tomorrow for the next set of questions, where I hopefully make it through more than six!

Change is Scary

August 19, 2014 by Belghast

Gatekeeping a Hobby

Yesterday was one of those strange days where a lot of people were talking about the same ideas. I was not privy to the original source that sparked the discussion, but several of my friends over twitter were talking about the definition of a “real gamer”. It seems that someone was spouting off in their lack of knowledge that tablet and mobile gamers were in some way lesser gamers than the those on the console or PC. This once again gets back to the definition of what exactly a gamer is. Over on the Moderate Peril blog he questioned exactly why we need a label at all. In other hobbies, you don’t see the attempt to exclude people the way that we do within gaming.

I am very much one of those people that wants to assemble as many awesome people from as many different points of view around me as I can. As a result I am always open to new interpretations of what exactly gaming is. While I am not a huge fan of mobile and tablet gaming, just because the types of games I enjoy playing do not translate well without physical controls… that doesn’t mean there are not actual gamers there as well. If you boot up bejeweled while waiting on a bus, you are just as much of a gamer as someone who camps a rare spawn for 20 hours. There have been times in the past that I found mobile gaming to be lacking, but at this point there are tons of really detailed games that you simply cannot get on any other platform.

After seeing Hearthstone on a tablet for example, I feel like any other platform is somehow lesser because of just how cleanly it works there. After playing Carcassonne on my phone, it felt so natural and perfect to be playing a turn based board game that way. The big area that I am seeing taking over the mobile markets is the various kinds of simulation games. While it started out with things like Tiny Tower, it has involved into extremely detailed and lengthy games. Similarly I can see a lot of role-playing games flourishing on the mobile markets. All of these things are real games, played by real gamers. Shouldn’t we be including everyone in our big happy family instead of trying to exclude them?

Change is Scary

The cynic in me wants to think that the exclusion comes from a form of gaming Hipsterism. The realist in me however sees that it is pure and simple fear. Change is a scary thing, and we get rooted in our own inertia of the way we think things ought to be. This is the gaming equivalent of “I walked to school uphill both directions and I liked it”. In order to stay a vibrant and interesting market it needs to adapt to trends. While I deeply love the Fallout series for example, I don’t expect every game to be the Fallout series. Additionally while I have certain things that I like to play, it is perfectly okay that things exist that I don’t want to play. Guild Wars 2 has become somewhat of a whipping boy for me over the years as a way of explaining what I don’t want to play. That said I love that it exists because it makes a large number of my friends excited and happy to be playing it.

Expecting everything to be custom tailored for you is the surest way to end up angry in the end. It is like walking into a store and complaining that a red shirt isn’t blue enough for you. If you don’t want to wear a red shirt, don’t buy a red shirt and then expect it to change into the color you want it to be. If you are like me and don’t like sports games… simply ignore the fact that the sports games exist and move on with your life. If you want to spend your nights playing nothing but Japanese Role-Playing games then do that with your free time, but realize that there is still a lot of room for games in even that niche that you may not like. As the video states… it is perfectly okay to not like things, but don’t be a dick about the things you don’t like. There should always be room in our community for folks that don’t look, think, act or experience things in the same way as we do.

Harder Isn’t Better

Similar to all of the above, there was a second topic floating around that Liore specifically wrote about. I guess the old argument had resurfaced that you aren’t a “real gamer” unless you are always playing everything on the hardest settings. For starters I don’t even know what a “real gamer” is, because if you are playing games of any sort you are a gamer. There is no sign that says you must be this tall to ride this ride. Now granted it is perfectly okay for there to be skill checks in order to unlock certain things. These give us challenge and something to push for. That said when a person accomplishes said skill check, it does not immediately make them a better person than someone who didn’t. I find it completely valid that some content be gated behind these skill check mechanics, but the sort of elitism and classism that surrounds them needs to die in a fire.

Similarly playing something on hard mode does not immediately make you a better person. I personally mostly play games on medium to easy mode depending on what exactly I want from an experience. More often than not I am playing a specific game because I want to experience the story, and while I enjoy the moment to moment game play I am not there because I want the rush of excitement from being able to twitch my controls at exactly the right moment over and over enough times to unlock a special achievement. I just want to see the story through the point of view of the experiences of my character. In these cases I absolutely play on easy mode, and I personally love it when a game is like Wolfenstein New Order and allows me to drop the difficulty on the fly in the middle of a game session if I encounter a roadblock.

“Twitch moments” are absolutely the number one thing that kills my gaming experience. When I encounter a moment that is significantly harder than the rest of the game play surrounding it, that is often a roadblock that keeps me from completing the game. In an MMO or a Role-Playing game I can wander about and level up or get significantly better gear to mitigate the difficulty. In most single player games however I simply have to have faster reflexes. While I realize I can train myself to have faster reflexes, years of not playing twitch games have caused me to dull significantly. The problem is… most games are not worthy the time commitment it would take to improve. I don’t generally find achievement getting fun, nor do I find repeating the same mission over and over until I finally grasp it. One of two things happens, either I lower the difficulty and beat it… or I simply stop playing the game likely to never return to it.

So I ask you the question, am I no longer a gamer because I do this? No and I feel like you would tend to agree or you wouldn’t be wasting your time reading my blog on a regular basis. I am a gamer because I game, not because I live up to some artificial bar set by someone being elitist and exclusionary. Gaming is about having fun, and if in the course of whatever you choose to do you are enjoying yourself… then mission accomplished. While gaming is about the journey and not necessarily about the destination… anything that stalls you out along the path is a bad thing. This is why I love mechanics like the Echo system in Final Fantasy XIV and the system that World of Warcraft has. Where over a series of wipes you are slowly buffed until you can defeat the content, because it maintains bragging rights for the folks who don’t need the buff… but still allows things to be fully accessible by anyone else. At the end of the day I am an easy mode gamer… deal with it.

Whorleater

August 18, 2014 by Belghast

Monday Morning Coming Down

This morning I quite literally could not remember if it was Monday or Sunday. I had to turn on the television just to make sure it really was Monday and that I should be getting up instead of heading back to sleep. This is not the best possible start to the work week, but I am slowly climbing my way to consciousness as I sip this coffee. Not quite certain why this morning is such a struggle, because in theory I got to bed at a decent hour last night. My wife and I both spontaneously decided it was bedtime at roughly 10pm. Ultimately I managed to get to sleep a little bit after that fact, but this morning I am still periodically trying to type with my eyes closed.

I would say it was a medium busy weekend as far as weekends go. We spent a good deal of time attempting to clothing shop for my wife, which means I spent a good deal of time messing about on my phone. Sadly in both our excursion to Muskogee and our outing yesterday afternoon she did not find much of anything. I did however find more severely discounted Legos and added a couple more Lord of the Rings sets to my collection. Other than the shopping excursions and dropping my jeep off to get oil changed and a flat fixed… the bulk of my weekend was spent in Final Fantasy XIV. Overall it was an extremely productive weekend all around.

Whorleater

One of my goals this weekend was to catch up on the main storyline quest to be prepared for the eventual 2.4 patch. So far there have been three major content patches in Final Fantasy XIV and in each they have progressed the main storyline adding a new primal to fight. The first patch added Good King Moggle Mog, the second Leviathan, and the third patch added Ramuh. Before yesterday morning I had caught up in the quest chain to Leviathan, but had limited luck in getting a group. However yesterday I managed to get a group within ten minutes of queuing. The fight takes place out on the ocean. The storyline is that they have built a special platform to help neutralize his abilities and allow you to fight him. So you are towed out into the middle of the ocean and left to fight him off alone.

The fight feels deeply foreboding and the music that plays in the background only serves to reinforce this. They are after all asking you to duel a god. During the fight itself the platform is attacked by the head of Leviathan and his tail. The DPS shifts back and forth between fighting the tail and destroying these globules that spawn up on deck. I am not sure exactly what killing them does, but I know that ignoring them completely wipes the raid. Every so often Leviathan will do this attack where he lays his body across the bow of the platform causing it to rock violently against the waves, and tilting the entire platform to one side dragging everyone there. Seeing this in action looks amazing since the entire horizon shifts slightly as the platform lists in the waves. It took a few tries but we managed to down him without much issue.

Lord of Levin

After defeating Leviathan a large chunk of us from the free company moved on to do Battle of the Big Bridge which is an optional primal like encounter where you face Gilgamesh the samurai. The most awesome thing about this encounter was the fact that we managed to pull it together through the use of several different linkshells. We picked up a person from our housing linkshell and then another person through a social linkshell that Tam was a part of. The fact that people are willing to drop what they are doing and help out with things like this makes me happy. The Big Bridge encounter doesn’t really reward much of anything, and there are no drops to speak of, just a crazy time running around. The best part about it is almost all of the Dialog that Gilgamesh speaks comes directly from encounters with him in Final Fantasy V. Speaking of which… I really need to finish my play through of that game for the four job fiesta.

After finishing the Gilgamesh encounter, I spent much of the afternoon working my way through the main storyline to get caught up and ready to take on the next encounter the Striking Tree. In the Final Fantasy mythos Ramuh tends to be a friend to humanity, helping them along the way. In Final Fantasy V it is Ramuh that teaches your party more or less how to channel the power of the Espers (summons) and call them in battle. In this game his role has shifted slightly, but he still acts with reason and wisdom rather than fury and rage like the other primals. The Striking Tree hard is a battle about proving your worth to this elder god more than defeating him. We failed miserably, or at least did not succeed. Our time ran out before we managed to defeat him.

It seems like when you are dealing with the newest tier of content they completely remove the echo buff system. Meaning that as we wiped, we did not get a stat boost allowing us to slowly overcome the obstacle. I knew this was the case for the various Extreme mode versions of the encounters but I was shocked to find it as the case for Ramuh. Ultimately we simply lacked the DPS to burn through a series of adds. Ramuh has a similar wipe mechanic to Ifrit, in that if you don’t dps down the adds you cannot survive the next attack. We were able to limit break one round of adds, but this was short lived as we lacked the dps to continue on after that fact. Basically I reached a point where I was one of the most geared players in the instance, and could simply not carry the group as a whole. I plan on giving it a shot on a night that is not Sunday, since that tends to be a lousy time for MMO groups in general.

Fully Geared Dragoon

Through all of this running around this weekend I managed to “finish” gearing my dragoon. I say finish in quotes because there are still several things I can get that are upgrades, however they are all much slower prospects and either involve getting lucky drops in Syrcus Tower, joining a Coil of Bahamut raid, or saving up Soldiery bookrocks which the game tends to reward 5 to 10 at a time. At this point I have level 90 gear or better in every single slot, with a level 100 ring from the soldiery vendor and level 100 gloves from Syrcus Tower. I feel like my Dragoon dps is as good as I can get it for the time being, and more than ready for us to begin Coil when we have enough people. Now my focus shifts to gearing out my warrior who right now is sitting in the low 70s, but in part only because of me using some of my DPS jewelry to buff him up a bit.

There was a huge sense of accomplishment last night when I bought the belt that replaced my final sub 90 item. In a few weeks time I have managed to catch up to Cylladora who continued playing the game long after we all left. Last night I also tanked my first dungeon since coming back and overall I think it went smooth enough. I was pulling pretty quickly and trying to figure out how to maintain aggro again. It feels like the win condition as a warrior is the fact that I have steel cyclone, and the goal of every pull was to build up enough rage to be able to start the next fight with this attack. When I managed to do so things stayed fairly glued to me. When I didn’t I struggled to play catch up with overpower. Tam was playing his summoner and there is always going to be a point where I lose control of adds to his dots, however for the most part I was able to mitigate this pretty successfully. I guess the real determination is going to be whether or not I start pugging for duty roulette or not. If they rewarded me extra bookrocks I would do so in heartbeat, but the extra money may or may not be worth the headache.

#FFXIV #Blaugust