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Not Exactly AFK Journey

October 1, 2024 by Belghast

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Simulated World

May 29, 2023 by Belghast

Hey Folks! Since today is the Memorial Day holiday I opted not to do a traditional blog post. However, I did decide to record a video. This is another of my bits of nonsense where I talk about some aspect of a video game I am playing. In this case, I have been playing a lot of Honkai Star Rail and I thought I would talk a bit about Simulated Worlds. This Rogue-Lite mini-game within a game does not require any of the limited daily “activity currency”, which means you can effectively farm it forever for at least some amount of resources per run.

Unfortunately, it just takes a significant amount of time to run through a Simulated World, which means this is clocking in at roughly 24 minutes long. If you are curious about the game and have not given it a shot, feel free to watch the video. I am running on autopilot largely because I was trying to keep the size of this video down, and the NPCs can complete battles much faster than I can when I am being more strategic.

Shovels and Shoveltusks

November 27, 2017 by Belghast

I declared Thursday and Friday to be part of the weekend last week and decided to take myself four days off from the blog and one week off from the podcast. I feel super chill going into what is likely going to be an exceedingly stressful week so I think it was probably a good call. Apart of having to help my folks move some furniture yesterday, I mostly had a pretty chill thanksgiving. Both Friday and Saturday my wife and I attempted to avoid the world, and the only shopping we really did was online apart from a mad dash out to Target around 9 pm on Friday. At that point the store was largely sane and wasn’t that much different than a normal trip on any other night. Throughout all of this I have found myself forsaking my normal checking of Pokemon Go in favor of the relatively newly released Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. First off I have to admit I have never played an animal crossing game before so I didn’t have much of a cultural frame of reference going into this. The experience instead reminds me a lot of a mix between the former web based casual MMO Glitch and some flavors of Stardew Valley. Whatever you end up calling it the game is extremely charming and at this point I am level 16 and have a bunch of the animals at my campsite… enough that the last three or four gave me a messaging saying there was no room. Unfortunately I have no clue how you actually determine which ones are at your camp and which ones are not… but for the moment I am rolling with it.

I’ve also seemingly hit whatever the friend cap is because when I try and add anyone it says that combined between my friends list and the few outstanding requests I have run out of room. I have no clue what this cap actually is… I estimated 200 the other day but I am guessing in truth it is closer to 100. The game is maybe bad at messaging some things but I am largely limping along without doing much in the way of research. There is a quarry mini-game that requires you to get help from five of your friends, and I wish they messaged when my friends were needing help a little better. For example if you look at the middle section of the above screenshot you will see a shovel icon out to the side of Kelsey’s name. I wish there was a way to sort these to the top of the list because they are really the ones I am most interested in given I like helping other players, because you appear to get some sort of cut of their profits. After that you attempt to guess which rocks have the most profitable stones… gold nuggets seem to be the best. I still very much feel like I don’t fully grasp a lot of things… like how the hell to make large quantities of Bells that Animal Crossing currency. Right now I have a 30,000 bells loan with the auto place and have never really gotten close to paying it off. Thankfully they don’t seem to be sending anyone to break my kneecaps because of it though, and they still allowed me to customize my RV regardless of having the loan out. I feel like maybe they don’t have the best business model. Regardless if you have not been playing this you should probably check it out because it definitely seems to be addictive as hell given the wide variety of friends that seem to be playing it on a regular basis.

I made a bunch of progress in Destiny 2 but I am likely going to wait until tomorrow to talk about that. Instead I wanted to talk a bit about the other game I played over the break… World of Warcraft. I am still working on my tiny Orc Warrior that is getting less and less tiny as each week goes by. At this point I have completed the Cataclysm content and am on the airship just about to start the invasion of Pandaria. This is something I have never actually done on the horde side given my last several characters I leveled were abusing the shit out of the pre-legion launch invasions. I’ve also not spent much time playing through Warlords of Draenor as a Horde character, so that should be interesting as well. Similarly I have never seen Legion as the Horde… all things I am interested in experiencing first hand. The biggest shock for me is just how fast Cataclysm managed to go given that I started in on Vashj’ir Saturday night and dinged level 85 well before finishing the final section of it Sunday evening. I realize that zone is in theory about the same size as two other zones combined… but I did not expect to be getting quite that much experience from it. Granted I am fully geared out in level 100 heirlooms (minus the rings because I don’t have the patience for that nonsense), but did not partake of any of the experience boosting options. The mission of the day however is to try and figure out how to get a Pandaria flying book… because I do not want to return to land based leveling if I can help it.

Real Life “Mons”

July 15, 2016 by Belghast

Garden Guardian

Yesterday was an interesting day for a bunch of reasons… not the least of which was the massive gale force storm that blew through downtown Tulsa. Over lunch yesterday I decided to go for a walk in Woodward Park in a vague attempt to catch some new Pokemon. Unfortunately the entire time I was there it seemed as though the servers were acting up horribly. The park is littered with a dozen or so stops, and most of them were not loading for me when I attempted to spin them. So I roamed around a bit in the 94 degree heat and humidity and finally wound my way around to the Linneaus garden where I met the adorable cat above. I am guessing it belongs to someone in the neighborhood behind the park because it is very much obviously a pet… and obviously one that has been tagged to roam freely. This is also where I encountered what I believe were my first geohackers. Pokemon Go has had a few unofficial releases as folks have modded it like the somewhat humorously named Pokemon Go Anywhere that lets you click to move. This is obviously a one way trip to ban city because it will be relatively trivial for Niantic to determine these folks are running an unofficial release of the game.

However there is a whole other batch of folks that have installed fake gps tools on their rooted android phones, that allow them to essentially teleport to anywhere in the world. This is the sort of behavior I think I was experiencing yesterday at lunch. The Linnaeus Garden is a Poke Gym and is out of range of any of the nearby parking lots and streets. As a result the only real way to go over there and check on it is to get out of your car and walk up to the path leading into it. While I was there it was just me and this cat, and no one else within range of the Pokestop. When I rolled up on it the stop was Blue so I opted to plop down in a bench and do some battling to increase its prestige levels. The adorable cat came up and was friendly and I managed to add a few hundred prestige points before I got bored and wandered off. As I was walking out of the garden area, the gym flipped from Blue level 3 to Red level 3 instantly… still zero people around. So either someone was registering legitimately wrong on the GPS, or someone was actually geohacking to take over the gym. This makes me wonder just how many gyms are being flipped by folks cheating like this?

After this incident I made my way to the car and was just about to leave the park, when I gave the app one last check. While I had really found nothing of interest the entire time in the park, suddenly there was a Bulbasaur within a single footprint away from my vehicle. So I hopped back out of the car, locked it and began the search. There are lots of supposed methods to make tracking down a Pokemon easier, but I largely just wander around aimlessly until I find it. Within a few minutes of going the wrong direction I finally doubled back and found it rather quickly. After that it was a lot of wasted Pokeballs before I managed to catch the orange border critter and make the trip to the park not a complete failure. I grabbed lunch really quickly and headed back to the office where I was greeted with this giant wall of evil looking storm clouds. As I pulled into the parking garage the tornado siren was blowing… and in true Oklahoma fashion there was some guy out there live streaming the storm rolling into the downtown area from his phone. When I got up to my floor everyone had been told to stay in the central area and away from the windows. Shortly after that they called the all clear on the tornado warning, but the storm still raged on for two and a half hours. From what I hear there is quite a lot of damage in various areas of town from the straight line winds, that can be just as destructive as a tornado.

Big Bunny Returns

I’ve talked about my love of our backyard and all of the critters that show up there periodically. There is one however that I love above all of the rest… and that is big bunny. Yeah I realize it is kinda a stupid name for him, but he is literally a massive bunny as seen above in the phone. After the storms blew through apparently he decided to hang out in our backyard for awhile. A few months back he essentially called our backyard home for a few days… and since then I have seen him all over the neighborhood so I am guessing this is a shared phenomena. Firstly I am shocked and amazed that any rabbit would survive this long in our environment to get that damned big. Secondly… we’ve wondered if he is a pet that someone let loose because he seems super chill around human beings. All of this said… I may or may not have walked over to the grocery store with no purpose other than to buy something to feed the Rabbit. When I got back he was nowhere to be seen, but I set out a pile of lettuce leaves on the deck and then thirty minutes later or so I peered out the window and sure enough… he had chomped down on the pile. Afterwards of course I was told that lettuce was a less than ideal and often times dangerous food for Rabbits so I will have to adjust that. Nonetheless I keep thinking that if we feed him, he might hang out in our yard more often.

Past that I took advantage of the cool evening and went out roaming looking for “mons” with little luck. It was quite literally seventy two degrees last night, so given how often I had walked in near hundred degree temperatures… I figured I could not pass up that opportunity. After striking out in my own neighborhood I hopped in the car and drove to a few parking lots that I have had luck in the past. Not sure if they were scared away by the storm, or if the servers were crapping out again… but I found next to nothing. That is until I pulled into the Aldi parking lot on a whim and found the bane of my existence… the Oddish. I had managed to find one earlier and after a single Pokeball throw it ran away on me. So this time around I was hoping that I would be able to catch it and finally fill that hole in my Pokedex. The truth is the most important part of this game for me personally is catching new stuff, and when I can’t do that I get a little flustered. So I threw a ball and it landed really well… and got two twitches, before the damned Oddish broke out again and ran away. So another close call but still zero luck in actually catching it. As far as new finds for the day I did alright racking up a Bulbasaur, Koffing and Abra taking my total to 58 caught and 61 seen.