playstation vita Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

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!

On Exclusivity and Microsoft

August 13, 2014 by Belghast

GamesCom Bombshell

Yesterday was the first day of the GamesCom conference in Cologne Germany, and generally speaking during past conferences we have for the most part seen a repeat of what was just announced at E3 a few months before. This year however we got quite the bomb shell dropped during the Microsoft press conference, in the form that they claim that Rise of the Tomb Raider is going to be an Xbox One exclusive title. This of course caused a wave of outrage through the community in part because up until this point all signs pointed to this being yet another Square Enix multiplatform title. In fact during the E3 event, this appeared as part of the Sony PS4 press conference and was not even shown during the Microsoft event. The outrage that I see so far is far less about Xbone vs PS4 but the fact that at least on initial pass it seemed like it would not be coming to PC either.

If you dissect the message that was delivered you can see something subtle happening. Every single time they mentioned that this was exclusive they played with the words a bit. They kept repeating the carefully constructed phrase “coming exclusive for holiday 2015”. Over and over at least four separate times they used that exact same wording. So that screams to me that they are putting a lot of hype behind something that may or may not be the case. There are always a number of 100% platform dependant titles on a console. The best example of these are the classic titles that you can only get on a Nintendo console like Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Kirby and Kid Icarus to make a few. Then there are titles that come out first one a given console, but later on ship on every other console.

On Exclusivity and Microsoft

This is after all a card Microsoft has played for years, trumping the supposed exclusivity of a given title that then not only comes out but in part becomes far more famous on another platform. If you remember both Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect were XBox exclusives, yet in both cases the franchises came out on the PC and with Mass Effect it now exists on all of the consoles and was a massive sales juggernaut. Similarly even during this generation both Dead Rising 3 and Ryse: Son of Rome were supposedly platform exclusive titles but in both cases they are being released on the PC. There was even the situation of Ninja Gaiden II that was a platform exclusive, and then later Tecmo released the game as Ninja Gaiden Sigma II so that they could break their exclusivity agreement. All of this leads me to believe that this is just more marketing chicanery from Microsoft and not actually a platform exclusive title.

Ultimately games are developed to make money, and right now with 5 million Xbox One units being dwarfed by 10 million Playstation 4 units, it simply does not make sense to ignore the larger platform. Ultimately this was a master stroke on the part of Microsoft however if they manage to pull it off. I wouldn’t exactly call Rise of the Tomb Raider a platform selling title, but it certainly helps to buff up a console that has floundered a bit in its first year. A good friend of mine has this rule that he refuses to buy a console before there are five titles that he wants to play on it that he cannot get anywhere else. I personally have found this to be a pretty good rule so far, and ultimately this lead me to purchase my PS4. If I reached a point where I had five titles for the Xbox One… I would consider getting one, but for the time being I just don’t have any interest.

Results of Poor Messaging

Microsoft has reached this point out of some phenomenally poor messaging. When the console was announced they made a series of blunders in trying to guess exactly what their console buyers would want. All of the touting of its television features really lost me in the process. I barely watch television, and when I do it tends to be for a specific purpose… to watch one show and then move on to the next thing. The only channel I watch with any frequency is Cartoon Network, more specifically Adult Swim. Even then the last time I sat down in front of the television to actually watch television on purpose was well over a week ago. So the focus on the initial marketing message of the console by demonstrating all of the admittedly interesting things it can do with television… really landed off in left field.

Since then he has been struggling to out message Sony who has quite frankly dominated the news cycle with some pretty innovative features. For sake of fairness I personally own right now 2 Xbox 360s, a Playstation 3, a Playstation Vita and a Playstation 4. So I am not exactly an unbiased observer here. I have clearly chosen the Sony Platform over the Microsoft one in part because all of these consoles work so well together. The other thing is that Sony has focused in with laser precision on a very specific message. “This is a console about video gaming, and we want to provide you an awesome gaming experience.” So far this message has worked and resounded with folks looking for a next generation gaming console and not necessarily a next generation media pc.

It’s About the Value

The primary reason why I jumped allegiance during the last generation is admittedly just how amazing of a value Playstation Plus is, or more so how disappointing a value Xbox Gold was. PS Plus is a $50 dollar a year subscription that gives you tons of free content as a result. I just made a list of titles I have gotten in the two years I have been subscribed to the program.

Dust 514, DC Universe Online, Ratchet and Clank Collection, Dead Nation, Unit 13, Gravity Rush, Wipeout 2048, Uncharted: Golden Abyss, Hitman: Absolution, Outlast, Resogun, Pinball Arcade, Infamous 2 , Little Big Planet 2, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Ratchet & Clank: All 4 One, Malicious, LIttle Big Planet Karting, Uncharted 3, Mod Nation Racers: Road Trip, Thomas Was Alone, Stealth Inc: A Clone in the Dark, Lone Survivor: The Directors Cut, Zen Pinball 2, Worms: Battle Island, Labrynth Legends, Zombie Tycoon II, Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee HD, Hotline Miami, Grid 2, Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, Payday 2, Metro: Last Light, Closure, Knytt Underground, Dyad, Bioshock Infinite, Darksiders, Saints Row: The Third, Batman: Arkham City, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift Extend, Poker Night 2, Joe Danger 2: The Movie, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Borderlands 2, Soul Calibur: Broken Destiny, Tekken 6, Galaga Legions, Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed, Castle of Illusion, Jet Set Radio, Binary Domain, Vanquish, The Cave, Monster Hunter Freedom Unite, Street Fighter X Tekken, Dragon’s Dogman: Dark Arisen, Remember Me, DmC Devil May Cry, Resident Evil Chronicles HD Collection, Mega Man 9&10 Combo, Tomb Raider, Pro Evolution Soccer 2014, Battlefield 3, Sleeping Dogs, Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Trine 2, PixelJunk Shooter, PIxelJunk Monsters , Velocity Ultra, Soul Sacrifice, Stick it to the Man, Limbo, Puppeteer, Surge Deluxe, NBA 2K14, Warframe, Flower, Strider, Towerfall Ascension, Doki-Doki Universe, Terraria, Muramasa Rebirth, Vessel, Dead Space 3, Fez, Dragon’s Crown, Metrico, Rogue Legacy, Proteus, Road Not Taken, Crysis 3

That is 94 individual titles that I have gotten for free through either the console itself or the Playstation Plus service. In many cases those titles are available on multiple platforms and as a result I get a copy for every platform it is avaialble for. This is a huge deal for me, and not only do most of the titles have what Sony calls “cross buy” where if you buy a copy for any platform you get it on ALL platforms… you also get “cross save” on the newer games. Lately I have been playing quite a bit of Rogue Legacy, and I can start a game on my Vita and then pick it up later upstairs on my Playstation 4. On top of that if I have a game I want to play on my PS4 I can pick up the Vita and use it as a remote screen and even play it remotely. Admittedly playing from your PS4 while not on the same network is a bit laggy, but the simple fact that it exists is mind boggling to me.

Now I realize that “Games With Gold” is a thing that exists now and they have been fighting to catch up, but at this point there have been 35 titles to Playstation Plus that has released 148 PS3 titles, 14 PS4 titles, 48 PS Vita titles and 87 psp/psone/minis titles. I am admittedly bitter however for having paid for years of Xbox Gold subscription for what amounted to the permission to play games online and watch Netflix. Since then they have reversed this decision and made Netflix a free software, but when I initially got my Xbox 360 you had to have the full gold subscription to use it. Sony is just as much of a corporate monstrosity as Microsoft, but they have been doing a much better job of disguising that fact and giving me warm fuzzies along the way. Since I still have all three of their most recent platforms, and even a PSP if we want to go back that far… they are doing an awesome job of giving me reasons to care about each and every platform and more specifically the interoperability between them.

Share Play

Hands down the most interesting thing to come out of GamesCom for me was the announcement of Share Play. The Playstation Now game streaming service has been announced for some time, and it is currently happening playable in beta, but for the time being it just is a poor value. What Share Play does is take that same game streaming technology but flip it around to make it extremely useful. Right now if you want to play with a friend, you both have to own the same game and log into it at the same time to meet up and play. What Share Play proposes is that you can be sitting on your couch and your friend on theirs, but be virtually playing the same copy of the game together. The idea is that you send your PlayStation network friend an invite to join your current game session. At this point the game is then streamed to their console and you are playing together in the same session.

I have no clue what the ramifications of this technology will be and what sort of internet connection you will need to make it work. Thankfully however most of my friends that I hang out with on a nightly basis also have some pretty beefy internet connections. So I can see us getting a lot of play out of this feature. Want to try out a new game, awesome… pop in my game and play with me and see if you like it. Want to work together on some achievement, awesome… let me send you an invite and we will work on it together. That is the thing I like the best about the PS4 experience so far is that it feels very socially connected as I am constantly able to see what my friends are playing and especially during the Destiny betas we have been able to pop around freely. The only negative I have so far is that the voice chat system is horrible, and as a result I still prefer to use teamspeak.

Wrapping Up

I realize that I am not an unbiased voice about the whole Microsoft versus Sony debate. In truth there really isn’t much of a debate to be had in either direction. Buy whatever console has the games you want to play on it and ignore everyone that is spouting off about your choice. I made my choice based on the fact that it had more games that I wanted to play on it, and with the Playstation Plus service from the day I brought my PS4 home I already had a half dozen titles to play on it that night. PS Plus and all the other consoles do an amazing job justifying the purchase of MORE Sony Consoles. As far as Rise of the Tomb Raider, I am taking a wait and see attitude. I think right now that this exclusive agreement is just a carefully marketed and cleverly worded announcement. Will it ship on Xbox One first? More than likely… but will it be followed up within six months to a year on every other platform? Almost assuredly so, because so far if it is popular and demanded enough most Xbox titles see a PC release… I am looking at your KOTOR, Mass Effect, Fable, Dead Rising and I imagine every other blockbuster that gets released for a Microsoft Console.

#XboxOne #PS4 #RiseoftheTombRaider

Not A Bel Game

July 3, 2014 by Belghast

Thomas Was Not Alone

Two significant things happened last night. First we went out to eat and dinner did not set well with me, causing me to want to go lay down for a bit. The second of which was that I decided to take my new Playstation Vita with me. Now I have done this before with other handhelds, but what was significant here is that thanks to Playstation Plus I had a smorgasbord of games that I could download and play that were already attached to my account. The first game I gave a shot was Terraria, which I have played a truly silly number of hours of on the PC. The game almost translates to the handheld, but not quite making it so much more frustrating of an experience especially when it comes to trying to build anything. When I decided to stop playing that, I opted to boot up a game I have heard so many things about from my friends.

Thomas Was Alone is this deceptively simple game about getting a series of different blocks with different properties through mazes. You start off with the red block Thomas, that can jump quite a bit and thanks to the magic of the narrator we find is a rather cheery fellow. You then add a series of blocks each with their own traits like the ability to float in water, or the ability to bounce other blocks higher that additionally have similar interesting traits that we learn via the narration. The game reminds me in a way of Bastion, in that the game itself is somewhat lackluster but it is the superb narration and voice acting that make it really pop out there. Thankfully this same narration is artfully displayed on screen at the same time allowing for the experience to translate hopefully to the hearing impaired.

Not A Bel Game

This game very much did not seem like a “Bel” game, as in there is no carnage, no body count… and I am forced to solve a series of structured puzzles to get through the levels. The funny thing is… I spent most of my night playing it and next thing I know it is 12:30 and I am forcing myself to stop on the above level rather than “play just one more”. There is something unbelievably charming about this game, and just doesn’t make sense when you approach it from its most simple parts…. that it is a game about a series of blocks. The game tricks us into using that most human of traits, and attributing personalities and feelings to inanimate objects. Even when the narrator is not necessarily talking from the standpoint of a specific character… as you move that block you imagine what that character might be saying in your own head.

If you are like me and a Playstation Vita owner, with a Playstation Plus subscription… I highly suggest you install the game and give it a spin. If you are NOT like me… then I highly suggest you purchase the game because even at $10 for a what is essentially a puzzle platformer… it is money extremely well spent. Nothing about this game makes sense at face value, that you should not want to care about a series of blocks on the screen in the way that you do. As you progress through the levels and are slowly being trained to face new challenges you truly do. The game does an amazing job at introducing concepts slowly and then building upon those concepts in each progressive level. Most of the levels will involve solving a challenge with a subset of blocks and each time there is an often poignant narrative that goes with it explaining how the blocks feel about being split up. I am shocked an amazed that I could feel this way about a series of abstract pixels.

Very Bel Game

The other game I played a significant amount of last night was once again Divinity II. At this point it feels like I am getting near the end, considering I am fighting through progressively larger and larger waves of mobs at a given time. This is honestly a bit disappointing, considering the early combat was extremely interesting and involved some interesting boss mechanics, and now the answer seems to be the old tried and true throw more bodies at the screen. That said I am still enjoying myself, but there are lots of things that end up frustrating me, like getting stunned by mobs that are halfway across the screen. As I have progressed through the levels, it feels like playing as anything but an archer is really a sub optimal experience. I’ve noticed that even the “Wizard” and “Healer” type mobs now fire nothing but a bow, and the overall gameplay experience at times devolves into a shooter.

I feel like maybe this is why Divinity: Original Sin did not return this game into the “behind the back” dungeon crawler. The throw waves of mobs at the player thing tends to work fairly well in a Baldur’s Gate type game, but it just feels childish when you do the same mechanic in a first person or over the shoulder style scenario. Thankfully there are still vignettes of smaller scale gameplay that work extremely well, and interesting puzzles to unlock… but the overall depth and granularity of the game seems to have decreased. There are entire zones that are made up of nothing but these giant flying fortresses that you clear first in dragon form and then can clear out on the ground. In all of them so far, it has been a focus on quantity of mobs not necessarily the quality of them. I am somewhat off the rails right now in my play through, but I am wanting to see it to the end.

#DivinityII #ThomasWasAlone

Three Hours Well Spent

July 2, 2014 by Belghast

Kidneys Safe, Vita Obtained

I have a running joke with my friend Rae, that each time I go off to meet someone to make a purchase from Craigslist that I am more than likely going to end up in a ditch somewhere missing a kidney. What can I say… I have a dark sense of humor. Regardless of this eventual fate, I am extremely cheap by nature, or more so I cannot stand paying more for something than I actually have to. As a result there are a handful of things I search Craigslist for a few times a week, one of them is the Playstation Vita. For a long while I have known that sooner or later I would get one, but seeing as I have a pretty lousy track record for playing handheld games… I most certainly did not want to pay much for it. Essentially handheld gaming is awesome if you travel a lot… whereas I actually actively avoid travel. If I am at home, I am more than likely going to be on my PC or one of my consoles rather than milling about on a handheld. That said I am still very much enthralled by handheld gaming, and the since I have a PS3 and a PS4… the Vita remote play functionality even as limited as it might be… seemed intriguing.

So the other day when I found a Vita that had been posted for a few days for $100 that came with two games… both of them something I would play, I honestly thought it was too good to be true. However over the course of a series of text messages I gleaned two things. Firstly that I suspected the person that was selling the unit was female, and that they did in fact seem legitimate. This is my own personal bias at work, but generally I consider women far more trustworthy than men, and potentially less likely to steal my kidney. I could not meet up that day so we scheduled a meeting for yesterday after work. Basically I did not want to mention it on the blog, because I really didn’t want to jinx it. There was a comedy of errors however when it came to actually meeting up. The person lived in a town roughly thirty minutes away from the southern most point of the Tulsa Metro. Since I prefer to meet at QuikTrip for safety sake, and that town did not have one… we decided to meet at one in Glenpool, thinking I had been there multiple times and it would be in the path she had to travel anyways.

Wrong QuikTrip

The only problem is that apparently Glenpool is big enough to actually have two QuikTrips… both of which are apparently across the street from a McDonalds. I must have looked insane walking around the QuikTrip parking lot looking for a pink and grey Chevy cruze. Like I was confused enough at one point that I even googled what a Chevy Cruze looked like on my phone, because I thought maybe I was not remembering which model was which. Once we realized we were at two separate locations she came to me because I had zero clue where she was. Everything checked out, the Vita is pretty awesome and only has a few scratches here and there on the case. It came with the vita unit, 4 gb memory card, charge cable, car charger, soft sided case, rubberized skin for the unit, Injustice Ultimate Edition game and The Walking Dead game. The owner had wiped it back to factory settings so all I had to do when I got home was set the unit up and I was streaming Resogun from my PS4 in a matter of moments.

The main reason why I knew sooner or later that I would get a Vita is that I have been a member of Playstation Plus for awhile. One of the awesome things about Playstation Plus is it is blanket subscription and does not care at all if you actually own the piece of hardware it is giving away games for. So since the moment I started subscribing I have been picking up every Vita game offered through the web storefront. As a result I now have a library of 35 good titles ready to download to my Vita. The only thing I need to pick up really is a bigger memory card, because quite frankly 4 gb will not hold much of anything. All in all this makes for another wildly successful Craigslist purchase. One of the things I am going to have to test out soon is the ability to play across the internet from my PS4 sitting at home. I’ve heard mixed reviews about it, but just the fact that something like that could possibly exist seems awesome. Also if you are on PSN and we are not already friends… look up “Belghast Sternblade”.

Three Hours Well Spent

I have seen the Realm Maintenance podcast a few times before, but never actually sat down to listen to it. I tend to listen to podcasts when I can during the day because it makes the work day go a little faster. Yesterday Godmother of Alternative Chat had linked this weeks episode, which is a special 100th episode that included her. The podcast was rather daunting, in that it was a 3 hour retrospective of a bunch of wow podcasters being interviewed and the results knitted together into a narrative. While it took me literally all of the day to get through it, listening in bursts here and there… I have to say it was three hours well spent. Listening to the collective pet peeves, advice and challenges of all of these extremely successful and popular podcasts was rather inspiring. I would not really put myself or the work we do with Aggrochat in the same league as any of these people, but it was awesome to hear that they had struggled with some of the same issues I had.

One of the most interesting takeaways from the whole show is that for the most part, all of the podcasters list radio and more often than not NPR as being an important influence. I guess to some extent that makes sense, because what is a podcast if not an online radio show. If I am in my car I am pretty much always listening to NPR, and I know personally I wanted to do a podcast out of a sense of awe of everything that radio can be. I’m a huge fan of This American Life and have even gone and seen Ira Glass in person, when he did a lecture here in town. One of the tougher questions the various guests were asked… was who their favorite podcast is. Most of them gave extremely diplomatic answers, but I have to say for me at least there are two podcasts that I pretty much drop everything I am doing to listen to when they are posted. The first of these is Alternative Chat, because Godmother somehow takes the production value of This American Life, and condenses it into a fifteen minute bite sized chunk. It is very easy to listen to because I know, no matter what else I have going on, that I will receive this fifteen minute vignette of awesome.

The other podcast that I listen to as soon as it is posted is that of the Battle Bards. There are two things that make this experience awesome. The first is the chemistry that has evolved between Sypster, MMOGC and Syl. Their tastes in music and games have this weird way of fluttering back and forth between complimenting each other and diverging at the same time. So on a specific topic you might get two of the three to agree, but I have never really seen all three agree on something at exactly the same moment. This chemistry aside, I love the focus of the podcast because I too am extremely passionate about video game music. While I might not know the whys and hows like they do… or even know the composers by name… when I am not listening to podcasts at work, I am listening to soundtracks. Video game music has always stirred my imagination in ways that nothing else quite can. It is this warm blanket of nostalgia that I wrap myself in regularly, and it is always awesome to listen to the Bards as they dissect various tracks that I know and love.

Overly Cerebral Morning

As is the case with so many mornings, I sat down to write with a vague idea of some of the things I might talk about. However as a whole this morning shaped up to be far more cerebral than normal. I wish I had pictures to at least accompany some of my giant walls of text, but alas you are going to have to settle for a really cool shot from Divinity II last night. When I got home from my adventure I piddled around with my vita for a bit, logged into Wildstar to claim another boom box and then after our walk settled into Divinity again for the rest of the night. I find it so odd that I have fallen so in love with a game that is over six years old at this point. Everything about the game still feels fresh and new to me, and I am loving exploring this world. All my of my friends are busy and enthralled with Divinity: Original Sin… but at this point I don’t even want to look at that game until I “finish” this one.

I have a feeling that “finishing” Divinity II is going to be a lot like “finishing” Skyrim. That there will always be something left unfinished and begging for me to wander around and finish at a later time. The only thing that makes me question this, is that already the game has made some significant changes that caused me to lose access to a number of quests. The world keeps getting stranger, and I am not really sure how I feel about the chief antagonist. He keeps showing up to taunt me, and then instead of actually attacking me… sends an army of fodder at me claiming it will “finish me off”. While I am sure I cannot take him down yet… I am level 30 and wondering how long this game actually runs. I am only in the second “area” so far, but not sure just how many more there are. I know of at least one more that is connected to the area I am in currently, but at this point I have put almost twenty hours into the game and feel no closer a finish than I did at the very beginning. I love when a game feels like it could go on forever like that.