MMORPG Archives - Page 377 of 399 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Corruption of My Youth

February 20, 2014 by Belghast

Confusing Dialog

For the last week or so I have been having an odd issue connecting to steam on my desktop. For random periods of time, steam cannot connect. However if I wait an hour or so… it connects in just fine. So far the online wisdom is that this has something to do with bad network drivers, but unfortunately nothing has changed on the system in the time it has occurred. So right now I am at a complete loss for this intermittent behavior. Would greatly appreciate any suggestions, especially if some of you have had this issue firing up the steam client… and better yet have found a solution. At this point my plan is to try and dig up the reference driver for my network card and install that, wondering if maybe a windows patch jacked something up.

The odd thing is, steam only hates me sometimes. Last night when I could connect I re-downloaded The Secret World and it was coming down at a peak of 10.5 megabytes per second. It seemed like the download was only being throttled by my disk I/O. Of note… I am really going to have to manually throttle steam because my system was really mostly unusable when it was downloading that fast. The hard drive was going through periods of being busied out by it. Games were completely unplayable during this time, so I am hoping that somewhere in steam there is a maximum speed setting I can ratchet down a bit. It was nice to download 18 gig in 30 minutes though.

Black Screen Blue Logo

Last night the wild goose chase in search of bottles continued, and on the way home I had to hit both Michaels and Hobby Lobby to finish getting the last few of them. So by the time I made it home I was just feeling out of it. I had a bit of trouble with my gaming desktop, and then a bout of the reoccurring steam issues, and by that time I was just mentally drained. I found out the hard way that Cyberpower PC, does the same bullshit that every manufacturer does. Namely tries to put a 350 watt power supply in a PC designed for gaming. I went to install a new video card, and noticed the size of the power supply, and didn’t even bother getting into the case. I did however at that point unhook everything.

After connecting everything back up again, I went to boot the machine and it hung indefinitely on the black screen with the blue windows logo. Thankfully I have a second machine beside this one, and I started furiously googling. Internet consensus is that something was up with the power supply. I had literally not doing anything other than unhook things… so after making sure the power cord was seated well a few times I got another idea. I unhooked absolutely everything from the machine again. This time only hooking up the monitor, mouse, keyboard, network cable and power cord. Sure enough it booted up happily… apparently in the processes I had hooked one too many things to a usb jack on the machine and it did not have enough power to boot.

So the power supply issue is not only critical to getting this newer video card installed, but seemingly for day to day usage as well. I realize it is a numbers game for companies, they try and put the smallest thing in a machine they can get away with. I just don’t understand however why anyone would put something smaller than a 500W supply in a new machine. Ultimately like it did me, it will bite the owner in the ass. Long story short, I have a new Corsair power supply on the way and it should be here on Friday. So I will be playing the swap power supplies game this weekend. Generally speaking I like to pull one power supply with all the wires connected, then disconnect the PSU one connector at a time, replacing it with a connecter from the new one. That way I am certain that nothing gets missed.

All Over the Map

By the time I finally got to where I could start playing games last night… I was like a toddler desperately in need of a nap. Nothing really seemed right, and in truth I should have just gone on to bed. I played a little bit of everything last night, but only a few minutes of each. I mined three or four resource nodes in Landmark, killed Onyxia and did Crown Chemicals in World of Warcraft, fired up Rift long enough to collect the weekly patron gift, played some of “that space game”, and finally spent the most amount of time playing some of “that elder game”. But like Goldilocks, everything was either too this or too that. I should have grabbed my 3DS and went to bed playing some Bravely Default.

The highlight of the evening was the fact that I picked up Chicken Tikka Masala on the way home from my errands from our favorite Indian place… Desi Wok. Even that just didn’t seem right, and I was only able to finish like half of mine. Nights like that suck, where you don’t like the world and you are pretty sure that it doesn’t like you either. Hopefully tonight I won’t have a bunch of running around to do before heading home. I think that combined with the power supply issues are what put me in that mood. What sucks is… I knew I was “in a mood” but I didn’t really know what I could do to snap myself back out of it. I have yet to find my personal slider that allows me to back off on the “pissy” setting.

Corruption of My Youth

I think I have told at least part of this tale, but I never had a chance to “not” be a geek. One of the cool things about being a teachers kid was that at the end of the school year, we got to rifle through the stuff left in kids lockers. The janitors would come through and dump everything out into the hall, and if it was not gone by that evening they would come through with a big dumpster and pitch it all. I felt this was a bit of a consolation prize for being stuck there as my mom cleaned her own room to get ready for summer. Over the years I found many prizes, but none of them were as life changing for me as stumbling across a Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook. Mind you this was when I was in first grade, and upon receiving that book I absolutely obsessed about it. While I didn’t fully understand much of it at the time, I started building games around the things that I found between its covers.

I wanted nothing more than to play a real D&D session… but I grew up deep in the bible belt and the popular consensus was that “D&D” would somehow make you into a mass murderer. So all through elementary school I collected everything I could get my hands on, but had never really played any of it. My parents obviously did not care, but the parents of my best friends at the time were absolute bible thumpers. It was mid way through elementary school that I found another option. Marvel Super Heroes by TSR was in reality a pretty damned crappy game system, but it was completely benign and with the little paper foldouts made it look like a board game and not something akin to D&D. I kept all of the dice and such at my house, and for the most part their parents never questioned what they were doing. I mean funny shaped dice would have been a dead give away… and something worthy of shunning.

As I moved into my High School years I found friends with whom we could pretty much play anything… and we did, so many different systems. While we didn’t really go back and play much D&D other than at conventions… we did play an absolutely silly amount of the Palladium system. The above image is a quick picture I snapped this morning of just a small sampling of the various palladium books I have accumulated. The thing about that system that drew me to it, was the fact that if I or my friends could dream it up… we could find rules to build it. The Rifts setting at the time completely blew me away, and I played it through most of high school. Even though I don’t really play much anymore, because I don’t have a local circle of people to play with… I still pick up the books anytime I find them out and about.

MMOs for the most part have become my new “D&D night”, and it just honestly fits my schedule better. Occasionally I join in games run by friends over one of the various Google hangout pen and paper mods, but that is about as close as I get to the old tabletop experience these days. So many of the things I have been into over the years, probably started with finding that first players handbook. It got me interested in what that was all about, and got me into Time Warp comics for the first time in search of “more”. It was through this connection that I go into Warhammer, Magic: The Gathering, and so many other geeky things. While the bible thumpers seemed to think it would steal my soul, more than anything it enflamed my curiosity and creativity. Pen and Paper games taught me it was completely okay to create my own reality. That seems like a skill we could use a lot more of.

I Lived Threes Company

February 19, 2014 by Belghast

The Illusive Bottle

Last night went absolutely nothing like I had expected. Well that is a bit of a misnomer in that I knew we would be running errands, but I did not realize it would take quite so long nor be so frantic. My wife is a rock star teacher, this much I have said before. However she is tag-team teaching a forensics science class this year and as a result they are pretty much pulling the curriculum out of their asses as they go. For what they are teaching there really are no textbooks, and as a result no approve lab equipment really either. Enter the empty eye drop bottle on the right. You would think something like this would be relatively easy to find. You would also be completely wrong

She needs these for a faux blood typing lab, since it is against safety regulations to use actual blood. Funny thing is I can remember doing blood typing in freshman biology… odd how things have changed in two decades. We went everywhere we could think that might have little bottles including craft stores, pharmacies, finally we found eight of these at a local medical equipment/compounding pharmacy. Problem is to be useful… she needs 30. We picked up what we could find and proceeded onwards in search of the illusive idea. Finally at Michaels we found some flip top bottles that should also work. The problem is this took the count up to 25… still 5 short of the finish line. Supposedly today that Michaels location is getting some more in a shipment, so that means we will need to make our way back out there tonight to pick some more up. The preference would be to find more of the actual eye drop bottles, so my wife plans on calling around to the various compounding pharmacies today. This is the unknown life of the husband of a rock star teacher… the constant trips out for random things for the classroom.

Clearance Lego Haul

Roughly every six months the various store chains jettison one batch of toys to receive new ones. This is my favorite time of the season… because it means I can pick up cheap Legos. I have always loved building with Legos and I likely always will. This desire to build things is exactly why games like Minecraft and Everquest Next Landmark are so sticky to me. They are the dream of every Lego kid, the ability to create things without restrictions of having to have the right pieces. The above image represents the haul of new sets for me to play with over the last several weeks. They have come from a mixture of Target and Wal-mart and for the most part everything was 25-50% off. There is a certain price range that I am willing to snatch things up, and while the Jabba’s Sail Barge that I saw yesterday would have been awesome… it was not $70 worth of awesome.

So instead I play a waiting game to see if it will make a second price cut and drop down into the range which I am willing to buy it for. Last night while we were running around in the mad search for the bottles I managed to pick up the two Galaxy Squad sets above. I might be because I grew up in the “funky space lego” era, but I love new space sets. What was extra cool about this find as a whole is that last year I managed to pick up the Lego Star Wars TIE Fighter really cheaply, so now having an X-Wing to go with it is pretty awesome. I realize I am a big damned kid… but I am okay with this. Getting older is require, growing up and losing the childish wonder at things… is completely optional… and not something I suggest at all.

Boosting for Fun and Profit

I feel like today’s post would be incomplete without mentioning the price leak yesterday for the boost to level 90. I realize ahead of time that my point of view on this is going to be controversial, but it is my point of view anyway. I personally think the boosting to 90 thing is generally going to be bad for the game community, in that dropping a new player into a fully leveled character is a bit of an overload. Honestly I went through this myself when I accepted a scroll of resurrection and decided to boost a character to 80 that I would never actually level otherwise. Dropping directly into a level 80 priest, when I had never actually played a priest past 10 before… was to say the least disorienting. This is coming from someone who has six 90s, and three others waiting in the wings to reach the cap as well. I “grok” warcraft on a pretty deep level and understand how the systems tend to work.

If I was completely at a loss for dropping in the pilot seat of a fully realized character… I can only imagine what it is going to be like for someone who has never played the game, or has not played the game in years. After all this is the reason why Blizzard says they are giving us a boost to 90, so that we can recruit new friends and catch back up old ones. It just seems like a fundamentally bad idea, but like I said I realize I am in the minority as people seem to want the ability to skip the majority of the game. That is honestly the other problem I have with this idea. Fundamentally Warcraft and the MMO genre in general… are about leveling and gaining constant incremental achievements and improvements. If you do not want to level… then maybe you are playing the wrong genre? MMOs are always going to be about leveling in one form or another… be it leveling in actual character level, or grinding away to get the gear to move to the next tier of LFR. There is always a leveling treadmill there, because at its core this is what the genre is all about.

So after all of this… now I feel like maybe you are prepared for my opinion on the price point. I honestly think $60 is rather fair for what you are asking. You are asking for the luxury of being able to skip the majority of the game and jump straight to being inches from the finish line. It is absolutely a luxury, so it should have a luxury price tag associated with it. Understand that this is for additional 90s… we are still getting one for free when we purchase Warlords of Draenor. So the ambiguous planned social benefit of catching people up to the latest content will still be firmly intact… as everyone is going to have to buy the expansion anyway. If you think of it in terms as paying for a Faction and Realm Transfer combo costs $55 right now… then it is not really out of order to expect that creating a brand new 90 character to cost $5 more.

Mentoring Is A Better Answer

I still feel like boosting was a bit of a copout answer to the problem at hand. A much better solution would have been to finally implement a good mentoring system like so many other MMOs have. Rift, EQ2, City of Heroes, and so many others have systems that allow you to drop your level to that of your friends. We we had the bulk of players actively playing Rift this year, we took advantage of this weekly. On Wednesday nights we would gather up and assess what levels we had, then everyone would mentor themselves to the lowest person and we would go do content together that was relevant for that level. It was pretty glorious and my only complaint is that hey really need to make “queue for random mentored dungeon” a thing, because it was always a pain in the butt to do a dungeon together with all the manual mentoring.

The ever awesome @Gypsy_Syl posed this statement when I opened up this line of dialog on twitter last night. While I agree with her that this likely was the intent with the boosts, the question is what exactly are players rushing towards then? Leveling is pretty much the solo game, and all that awaits you when you hit the cap is for the most part group content or leveling another character. Mentoring systems would help with what the stated intent was… to allow you to play with your friends. If that was not their intent, then quite honestly they should stop selling it that way. Mentoring systems go far further for helping you play with your friends, since you and your friends get to experience content the way it was designed to be experienced together.

At the end of the day I tend to align with @MatthewWRossi who put it so poignantly in the above tweet. If a character is a struggle to level, then it won’t be something I play often once I get it to the level cap. Prime example of this was my rogue that I just recently hit 90 on. It was absolute skull drudgery to get it to the level cap, but I forced myself to do it… because I have not had a rogue at cap since burning crusade. Problem is while leveling it and the eventual LFR grind… I came to realize just how much I do not like playing a rogue. I pushed him over this finish line for reasons other than wanting to play the character, namely I wanted a max level transmute specialization alchemist… but each time I log over to the rogue to do something like a holiday instance, it just feels wrong. If you don’t enjoy the process of leveling the character, then to me at least it is highly unlikely you will enjoy the end result either.

I Lived Threes Company

Today’s blog post is going super long, but I guess I had a lot bottled up in me to talk about… no callback to the eye droppers intended. As I have said a few times I started out at a junior college for the first two years of my college education. So when it came time to transfer up to a four year university to finish off, I opted to get an apartment with a high school friend who had been doing the same. For a few months everything was peachy, and we lived pretty blissfully. Then one morning I was woken up by a bunch of strange men moving my roommates stuff out of our apartment. Without warning he decided to move into the “band” frat house, leaving me pretty much high and dry without much explanation.

It turns out that the landlords were coming that afternoon to kick him out of our apartment. When we got the place we had opted to each pay our half of the rent separately. While I had been religiously bringing my envelope down to the landlord on time, it seems as though he had not for the last two months. They were not going to make me catch up his side of the rent, but I just didn’t feel right not doing so. As a result it pretty much burned through all of my available cash, and the burden of keeping a place that I got intending to have a second income to support. At this same time, my wife and her roommate were living in the slums essentially. The place they were renting had literal holes in the floor and a very curious maroon stain creeping through the paint on the ceiling. So we both needed to get out of our current situation.

As a result we did the pragmatic thing, since it was a rarity that my wife and I spent a night a part at that point. We found a place that was ideal for three people, and after spending a few months watching the really nice caretaker renovate the place… we moved in. It was in a quite little trailer park roughly ten miles from town, so it gave us the feeling of having a home… more than a rental. So at that point I was basically living Threes Company, with two female roommates. Essentially my wife and I had the master bedroom together, and our roommate had another large bedroom on the opposite end of the trailer. The computers and consoles were set up in a “vestigial” middle bedroom that while it had a bed, the bed got used more as a couch than anything else.

The funny thing is that my wife’s father refused to admit that we were “living together in sin”. Anytime he needed to talk to my wife, he would not call our phone line at our end of the trailer, but instead he would call the roommates phone at the opposite end. Remember these are the days of dial-up… and since all of us were IRC junkies to boot… we had to have separate phone lines. I have to say the situation was damned near idyllic, and over the time living together the room mate and I developed a loving brother/sister type relationship. She is one of the few people we still keep in contact with from our college days, and while we don’t see her often not a week goes by that we don’t think about her. Our bonding was special, since she has Cystic Fibrosis… and when she was having a bad night it was not unusual that I would get employed to pound on her back to help break up the gunk so she could breathe. After all us respiratory system rejects got to stick together.

Rails Are What You Make of Them

February 18, 2014 by Belghast

Going Off Script

There was a topic yesterday that started with Tobold’s post and wound up in a G+ comment stream. While I believe Tobold’s comments about on rails gaming were initially about a certain game that is still under NDA with a space theme… it eventually wound its way to Elder Scrolls Online. To which I added the information I posted yesterday on my own blog, about the fact that the majority of quests are skippable, and that there are a very few that actually need to be completed to move to the next area. But the root of the problem here I think is that after a decade of playing themeparks… we have gotten extremely good at seeing rails. Moreso I think we are so trained to stay inside of the lines that we are afraid to break out of the little protective cage the themeparks have built for us.

For the longest time I fought the “quest to level” construct and then over time I managed to get extremely good at mindlessly grinding them. There was a time when I could take a character from 1-85 in less than seven days in World of Warcraft. The problem is… this is a thing I do to level quickly, and not something that comes instinctual. I am constantly deviating from the path, and poking my head into places I shouldn’t be. If I have 10% to go to a level, my instincts are not to grind some quests, but instead to go kill some really high level mobs. You can blame Everquest for this type of “go kill things” upbringing, and I am still happiest when mindlessly slaughtering bad guys. So when I am out questing, skipping that bad guy for the sake of speed is not usually a thing that ever enters into my mind.

So when I was plunked down on Stros M’Kai in the Daggerfall Covenant for the very first time… I willfully and gleefully ignored the quests that were given to me. I wandered off and explored the island, gathered some crafting bits, found lots of treasure chests and leveled happily oblivious to the fact that there was a rail. Sure eventually I reined myself in and did a few quests, but the vast majority of that first couple hour play through was aimlessly exploring. If I found a cave I poked my head in to see what was there. The little voice in the back of our head that says “don’t go there yet, you will have a quest for it later” is something that we end up doing to ourselves.

Rails Are What You Make of Them

For the most part I would agree with Tobold’s assessment of that space game, but since so many people love it I continue trying to give it a second and a third and a fourth chance. I went through this same thing with Guild Wars 2, I kept trying to see what people liked about it… because I honestly didn’t understand it. Over the weekend I maybe landed at how to enjoy it. Once I finished the tutorial, I went completely off the rails, wandering around aimlessly killing lots and lots of things and getting nifty bits in the process. That mode of play made the game enjoyable for me. Quests are a really good way to level, and I think they also do an excellent job of telling the story. However something we have forgotten along the way is that they are mostly optional.

We can blame World of Warcraft for this to be honest, but not in the way you might think. WoW brought quests out into the open, where they had always been something for insiders before. In Everquest you went around /hail-ing every single mob you encountered because maybe just maybe they might have a quest for you. In Dark Age of Camelot, you did the same thing trying to locate the “Kill Task” quest giver for a specific area. City of Heroes gave you specific contacts you needed to talk to that acted as a hub for running future missions. Finally World of Warcraft gave us the now ubiquitous golden exclamation point… taking complete all of the subtlety out of it. Still… even in WoW it was not until Burning Crusade that I really started to lean on quests as the crutch that they are. I got a good number of my levels by going off the beaten path and looking for neat things out in the world.

To some extent it is also the fault of games that have stopped giving us things to find just over the next ridge. There should always be things just out of the way for us to go looking for, because this act reminds us that there is another way to play the game than just mindless questing. This self directed fun is crucial, and is what ends up making a game stay fresh. I tend to cycle through two modes of gameplay… aimless wandering and mindelss questing. I find both to be really enjoyable when I am in the right frame of mind. I think this is why I can return to WoW all these times and still be happy with what it is. That said I am constantly going off script in that game as well. There are so many nooks and crannies that often lead to treasure or at least interesting things to kill. Basically… these rails that we keep seeing, are something we’ve allowed ourselves to see.

Dungeons of Belgrade

With all the talk of ESO lately, I am still very much playing Landmark on a daily basis. Last night I got in and worked on Belgrade Keep for a bit. I tweaked the exterior a bit adding supports to the first balcony and then building out an entirely new balcony from the top of the castle. Additionally I added some more of my custom columns to the corners of the ramparts to tie the visual theme together, as well as adding some to the ground floor to mark the entrances to the ramp leading up to the keep and the entrance to the crafting undercroft. I thought I was nearing a point where I needed to simply grind out the various accoutrements to decorate the keep. I was completely wrong however.

I decided that Belgrade keep needed a proper dungeon, so I spent the majority of the night watching episodes of Arrow on Netflix and hollowing out the basement by hand with the remove tool. One of the things I have noticed that removing large blocks of material with the select tool often ends up leaving weird fragments. So I tend to do it manually simply because I like the results better. After having spent hundreds of hours hollowing out tunnels branch mining for diamonds in Minecraft… I find I have an affinity for that sort of work. The plan is to divide up the sub basement into cells, maybe with a torture area… but that all depends on how creative I am. I am curious if I have enough room for a second sub basement to be honest, because I can seemingly dig down further.

My Father the Builder

I really need to sit down and brainstorm out the rest of the month, because when I am not staring at a blank page I am full of ideas with factoids. However when I sit down to write at 6 am, my mind is mush and devoid of any good ideas. So today’s factoid is going to be a little odd, be warned. I am not a terribly handy person, as in I am not a manly man builder type. I can watch a youtube video and figure out most things, but I have a bit of a mental block about things that are mechanical. In part I think it is because my father is so damned amazing at it. I realize he grew up in an era when if you didn’t fix it yourself it stayed broken, and my grandfather was the king of tinkerers. For me however, since I spent most of my childhood sick… I just simply was not exposed to it… apart from getting to be the loyal “flashlight holder”.

At a young age I think I told myself I couldn’t do this. There are things that are well in the realm of my mastery. You give me a few boxes, scissors, magic markers and tape… and I will build for you a GI-Joe base that will make you weep. However you dump a heap of mechanical bits on the table and I cannot see the same possibilities. Growing up with a machinist for a father was a really interesting and awesome thing. When I broke a wheel off one of my hot wheels… he would take it away to a magical land where it would come back with a shiny new wheel better than the previous. He would take it over to work and machine out of scrap aluminum a wheel, then carefully wrap it in electrical tape for traction…finally carefully attaching it back to my hot wheel. My father could make magic happen.

I just wish I appreciated it more at the time. When Star Wars was all the rage, I wanted nothing more than the Death Star play set. I did not grow up with a lot of money, so spending $100 on a cheap plastic and cardboard play set was really out of the question. That Christmas instead my dad hand crafted me a Death Star that was far cooler than anything store bought ever could have been. I am still not sure exactly how he built it, but he had some long screw running down the back of the unit with a crank up top. and a machined elevator that rode up and down on the screw. So that I could crank my action figures up and down between the floors. Now I appreciate just how ingenious it was, but probably at the time I wished I had the “real thing”.

As my father is getting older, I am starting to have to figure these things out on my own. I know at some point he won’t be there to call for advice. Someday I will have to learn the lessons he had to learn. I admit it scares me, to think about a world where a master builder like my father doesn’t exist. I don’t think he really knows how in awe of his abilities I am, and how much I wish I had his natural intuition for how things should go together. I should really remedy that, but my father is a lot like me, and not really great at saying these sorts of things in person. There are times I think that maybe he DID pass on his legacy to me, but that it just changed over the years. I am good at computers and hacking around with software to get it to work the way I want it to work. Then when I can’t find whatever it is that I am looking for, I know that I can crack open Visual Studio and build it myself. So maybe just maybe I have some of that same magic too.

Belghast and The Ark

February 17, 2014 by Belghast

Horribly Sidetracked

Saturday when I wrote my little impressions piece on the Elder Scrolls Online, I managed to get horribly sidetracked in the process of explaining the questing section. At one point I said “Generally speaking the side quests serve two real purposes” but only actually managed to give you a single purpose. I managed to get myself on a tangent and forget what I was saying. So let me take another stab at explaining the questing system. Generally speaking when you go into an area there is a critical path that you can take to go through it with the least number of quests. If you want to piddle around and carve your own path this is a good thing.

For example in Stros M’Kai the Daggerfall Covenant starter zone, you are asked to find one of three crew members before continuing on. You can literally just find one crew member and be just fine, and the game will allow you to continue forward. However you can find all of the crew members, and each one will do something for you in the final quest before leaving the desert island. Additionally your choices matter going forward. If you choose to kill someone, or fail to save someone… they won’t be there later on at a critical time when you could use your assistance.

That is one of the things I like most about the questing system. It works much like Mass Effect or Dragon Age, in that you get introduced to a character that keeps popping back up in later quests and even later zones. Failing to save a character, means they will no longer exist in the later stages. Occasionally the game will force you to make a hard choice, between two sets of NPCs. When this happens one of those paths will forever be sealed from you. I you choose to help this person, the other person will either die or be so infuriated that they will never help you again.

Basically your decisions matter, and they matter a lot. So while it might not seem that the immediate consequences are all that bad, they will have future ramifications. So while the first purpose of side quests is to get gear, the second purpose is to unlock future story points. You never know when a person you have helped will show back up and lend assistance later. Often times this is in the form of making a future quest a little easier as they lend some unique ability to the fight. However in a few cases this means you may have missed out on a really cool quest chain because the NPC was not there to give it.

Turret Orchestra

After my little write up yesterday about Portal 2… I got a whole lot of responses that amounted to “no wait, you haven’t even gotten to the good part”. Then that they apparently couldn’t tell me about the good part without massive spoilers. Sure enough I managed to play through to the beginning of chapter 5, and the game has changed once again ever so slightly. Now I think I want to know what is going to happen enough to continue playing. I have my assumptions of the end result, but who knows they might be completely wrong. For the most part I have managed to stay blissfully unaware about the ending of the game to this point.

There were a few really annoying levels, but now I am in a part that is more freeform. The coolest thing I have seen to date is the Turret Orchestra. While roaming around in this new free form area, I kept hearing this music playing that sounded kind of like a bunch of accordions. Finally I was able to see what it was, and it was several of the turrets playing in unison. I have a feeling that I will somehow be freeing the various robots under the control of GlaDOS, or at least that seems like a potential subtheme for the game.

Like I said right now I have no real idea where exactly I am heading apart from following what seems like an obvious path carved out for me. I am sure at this point I will plan the game to its conclusion, so it managed to get its hooks into me. While I am not sure if I would call it a truly great game yet, it is enjoyable. I am sure there is some grand reveal to happen down the road, that will make me shift my opinion again. However I stand by my original assessment. Fun game with a cool gimmick.

Belghast and The Ark

It will come as no real surprise to anyone who has ever followed me on the various social media platforms that I use… that I am a pet person. That said there are probably few people who really know how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. As it stands right now, neither my wife nor I plan on having children. My wife swears that teaching high school is the strongest form of birth control known to man. This is not to say we don’t have children, they just happen to be covered in fur. I personally have always had a close affinity with pets, and even if it is something I would not want for myself… I seem to be able to befriend animals quickly. While I would never have a bird, each time I went over to a friends house one of his birds would hop up on my shoulder and stay there until I finally placed him back on his perch.

kitties_sunning Currently we have three cats, all of which are pictured above sunning themselves in the afternoon light of our stairwell. On the left is the mammoth monster cat Chloe, in the back is our mostly black Calico Allie, and if you have been reading these factoids you have already met little shit. Each of them is a rescue, because I believe all animals deserve a second chance at a great home. Each rescue especially has its own personality, and comes with its own quirks. These “quirks” can be frustrating at times, but they make up the complex personality of each animal… so even the annoyances you come to love. Chloe for example obsessively licks anything and everything… which can be sweet at times until she hops up in bed with you at 3 am and licks your arm. Seriously there is nothing freakier than waking up to that. She however is the most amazing snuggler, when you can succeed at the complex game of keeping your arms and hands away from her mouth.

Similarly we also have three ferrets, and they are some of the most adorable animals you could ever have. Here they are snuggled together under a blanket in their playpen. At this point I have woken two of them… and moments later they will be bouncing around the cage like mad. This is the problem with ferret photography… you get one chance to take a shot before they go super sonic. From the left we have our old man… Smokey that came to us as part of a rescue pair of littermates. His sibling Bandit passed away some time ago, and he himself is nearing the end of his journey as well… but we are trying to make him as comfortable and happy as we can while we have him. Next to him is Shiloh, that was a returned to a local pet store and put back up for adoption. I cannot fathom why anyone would ever return her because she is so adorable, and has a little badger face. Finally we have miss “Bella” which is short for Bellatrix, the name her original mommy gave her. She had a much older ferret named Judah that Bela apparently upset regularly, so it was with many tears that she gave her over to us.

Over the years we’ve had lots more animals, including a hamster, a guinea pig, and a pair of sugar gliders. All of them have been our babies while they have been with us, and we have sought to give them the best home we can. Often times it is these little guys that are the reason for me getting a slightly later start than normal. When one is begging for attention… and they are damned good at giving you a guilt trip… how can you possibly say no? The best at begging has to be Bela. She will run over to the edge of the playpen and press her body against the ground sticking out her snout in his pouting “poor pittiful me” look. You would think she NEVER got played with ever. The moment I reach down into the playpen she will bolt over to me and wait to be picked up. All she really seems to want is to be picked up and carried around for a bit before finally going back into the playpen and snuggling up for a nap.