Well-Executed Nonsense

I lost an entire day this weekend to Rocket League. If you’re not familiar, it’s soccer-like, only you’re driving around in ridiculous cars with rocket boosters. It’s a completely nonsense premise that sounds like the kind of idea a bunch of kids would come up with– “oh man, what if we played soccer but IN CARS but also WITH EXPLOSIONS and the cars COULD FLY?! WOULDN’T THAT BE AWESOME?”

Well-Executed Nonsense

The game defies a no-caps explanation. It gleefully sets up a fantastically arcade-y soccer match between teams of unlikely vehicles, and within a few minutes, the premise melts away and what you have is a very compelling team game with really intuitive controls and a tight, polished physics engine. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t, but it *is* extremely fun; it’s the pure, simple fun of Mariokart in a more streamlined package.

It scales surprisingly well to the number of players you have, from 1v1 to 4v4. I played mainly with Kodra, Eliyon, and Ash, but as our group grew and shrank, it was easy to go from 3v3 to 4v4. We played against the AI, since none of us had played the game before, but the AI gave us a bunch of fun matches. Games last about five to seven minutes, so it’s easy to hop in for a game or two.

Well-Executed Nonsense

It’s also a surprisingly DEEP game. Controls are fairly simple, but the combination of the physics engine and the… liberties the game takes with the laws of physics let you set up some really awesome shots and saves if you’ve got the presence of mind and controller finesse to pull them off. There aren’t different types of handling for different cars, either– every car simply handles more or less identically, turning tightly, accelerating quickly, and having a frankly silly top speed. Without the constraints of a race, there’s no reason for differing levels of imperfection in a car, so Rocket League does away with all of that entirely. All of the car customization is entirely cosmetic, and pretty hilarious. Eliyon won a mariachi hat in our first game and wore it for pretty much the rest of the day. This is a gigantic hat that just goes on the roof of your car. Why? It doesn’t matter!

Well-Executed Nonsense

The best review of Rocket League I’ve heard is “I don’t like driving games or sports games at all, but I like Rocket League.” It pretty much says everything, and the fact that it’s a game where you drive cars around that Ash has fun playing also says a lot (haha I’m just kidding Ash). Seriously, though, it’s a really fun game and worth your time. It is to soccer what mariokart is to racing, which is a title I used to give to Super Mario Strikers, but frankly Rocket League does the same kind of thing better.

Rocket League also became an e-sport in record time and has a ton of youtube and twitch videos. Watching really, really good players is pretty exciting, because they pull off insane stunts. Definitely worth a look. If you like fun and like mariokart, give Rocket League a look.

Hellfire and Horde

Adulting Sucks

This morning I am sitting here trying to eat my oatmeal and drink my coffee… and this Monday guy keeps pestering me and trying to make me adult.  Really freaking annoying.  This weekend was a tale of my wife and I avoiding adulting..  so much so that finally yesterday we had to get out and do things in the world.  Essentially yesterday was the day of doing all of the things we put off the rest of the break.  In the grand scheme of things it wasn’t too bad, but the world was cold and rainy… and when I first set foot outside yesterday morning my first instinct was to rush back inside and swear off breakfast.  Then my tummy kicked in and told me that it was hungry, and it was also sick of the options we had available in the house.  So I ventured out and got breakfast, and realized that I could in fact survive outside of my house shaped bubble with its blanket cocoon.  You can tell the hibernation instinct is strong… because we bought the fixings for a bunch of various crock pot meals…  so we don’t have to leave the house at all once we make it in from work.

Unexpected Activity

Hellfire and Horde

A good chunk of my weekend was spent doing things to get gear for Belgrace my newly 100 Tauren Paladin.  When you boost a character they end up giving you a full set of green 640 gear, which is a significant increase over the sort of gear you end up with by natively leveling.  Also apart from having to get silver in the proving grounds… you are level appropriate for heroics and the first two LFR raids.  I however had pretty crappy luck in Blackrock Foundry with getting upgrades, but I did have a fair amount of luck picking up Baleful drops in the Tanaan Jungle campaign area.  So last night I was sitting at 656 with a decent purple weapon… that was sadly as good if not better than Belghast’s alliance side.  I had settled down into my blanket cocoon on the sofa prepping to watch my Sunday evening television binge of Once Upon a Time > Walking Dead > Into the Badlands > Talking Dead when I got a random invite from my friend Nubzy.

I knew that they raided on Sunday nights, but I had no clue they planned on dragging me into Hellfire Citadel.  I had told her that I was working on gearing and that I had managed to get to 656, but that did not necessarily mean I was expecting to raid.  They were resetting the instance apparently and were grabbing a ton of other people into what was their largest raid group to date of around sixteen people.  Brerhoof has always been awesome, and he set to making me some upgrades for my remaining 640 green slots.  So before I had even really set foot into the dungeon Brer handed me Gauntlets, Pants and Boots that were significant upgrades.  Then off the very first drop I managed to pick up Shell-Resistant Stompers and luckily I had not bound the boots yet so I equipped the drop and holding onto the BOEs for the time being.  Either I will get an upgrade for them, or pass them on to the next guildie that needs them.  The night as a whole saw me getting a bunch of really nice upgrades…  in addition to the boots I picked up a Helm of Precognition, an Warlord’s Unseeing Eye for offspec… and most importantly a 690 weapon upgrade Fel-Burning Blade.

Old School Feels

Hellfire and Horde

While the gear upgrades were awesome… the real take away from the night was just how much fun I had.  The horde guild is named Facepull, and that should tell you something about the attitude and demeanor.  More than anything running with them… reminded me of the nights raiding with Duranub before Cataclysm.  It was an old school kind of fun, and even when we did something stupid… no one really got pissy about it.  We just kept pushing forward and making progress.  For having a bit of a strange balance we did really well making it up to Gorefiend before hitting a bit of a wall.  At that point we had a few members of the raid have to leave… one of which was a healer leaving us with a fairly unbalanced party.  The big surprise of the evening is I guess I did not realize that Nubzy was now one of the tanks.  I guess I knew her most as a Shadow Priest, so I guess in the back of my head I just assumed she was booming it up on her Druid.  Right now the plan is to gear out my offspec for tanking, but if we continue to need healing… I might change those plans at some point.

Paladin is the only class I have really successfully healed on… but that was back during  Burning Crusade/Wrath of the Lich King.  I know Paladin healing is far less whack-a-mole than it was… and for some people that is probably a good thing.  For me that really has no healing instincts left anymore from my Everquest days…  that is definitely a bad thing.  The only sort of healer I am is really the “mash button faster for more heals” kind.  Granted I did level as a healer in SWTOR on my Scoundrel, but good at healing companions is one thing…  good at healing people is a completely different one.  In Final Fantasy XIV I kinda fail at my Scholar and I am not exactly the sort of healer you really want on my White Mage either.  In any case I had a lot of fun, and the Sunday evening thing is something I could potentially get used to.  They don’t start until almost 8pm EST, which by that time I am always downstairs watching television anyways.  I managed to dps just fine while watching my shows last night, so in theory this is a decent fit.  I have to say I could get used to this raiding as a cow thing…  and the group of people seemed pretty damned cool as well.

 

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

Leak Testing

At this point it has been raining for roughly four days nonstop, and at the same time been hovering near freezing.  This has seriously harmed any desire I had to go out into the world and do anything.  As a result however we have a bunch of errands that we HAVE to do today, in order to return to being fully functional human beings in the real world.  I also cannot believe tomorrow… we have to go exist in the real world again.  This has been one of the most chill holiday weekends we have had in years, but then you realize… the reason why it is so chill.  The last decade has had a horrible cost on our combined families, and quite honestly… we just don’t have the people we used to.  We are doing good to get a single Thanksgiving or Christmas per side of the family, let alone the four or five that we used to have to hit when we first got married.  My mom used to say to us, that we would miss these family get togethers when they were gone… and she was absolutely right.  I miss the people… but I do not miss in any way the stress of feeling like we had to appease everyone.

The other thing that is awesome about this weekend… is it is essentially the first time in a month we have not had strange people banging on our house.  Wednesday day the contractors did the final walkaround, and there are still a few things… but for the most part we are done.  The dumpster has been removed from the driveway, and we can once again park our vehicles in our own damned driveway.  The positive about four days of nonstop rain is I feel like it has thoroughly leak tested the house.  All of the old leaks are gone, and thankfully thus far we have yet to find any “new” leaks.  I like the bedroom with the door in it, because it ends up getting a lot darker during the day which makes taking naps all the more enjoyable.  We still  need to weatherstrip around the edge of the door, but we can already tell that the siding and insulation have made the house significantly more temperature stable.  We set a temperature on the thermostat and the heater rarely kicks on to bring it up to temperature… whereas previously during the winter the heater would almost constantly run making my upstairs office unbearable.  Which means maybe just maybe… my office will be comfortable during the winter months, because last night when I had it shut off completely while podcasting I didn’t really get hot at all.

World of Warcraft

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

This week for better or worse has been all about comfort gaming for me… and with that a return to the World of Warcraft.  At this point last week I was mostly fighting the desire to log in… and failing ultimately playing my sub level 20 characters for free.  This week I have dove head first into the timesink, and used my free boost to 100 to create a Tauren Paladin for the purpose of playing with my horde side friends.  I’ve not really played much horde since the early days of Warcraft, and the only time I had a at level cap character was during Wrath of the Lich King when I was raiding a bit with Batteries Not Included… the raid group that would ultimately form the majority of Facepull the horde guild I am in now.  I’ve always said at one point or another I would level another character so I could hang out with some of the excellent people on that side of the fence.  Now after doing so for just a little bit I am kinda kicking myself for not doing it sooner.  I’ve never bought into the Horde versus Alliance rhetoric… but it just feels like people are friendlier Horde side.

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

There have been three separate occasions where I have been out in Tanaan Jungle, and got overwhelmed… only to find another Horde healer dropping down from above and healing me.  One of them I ended up thanking them and having a forty minute conversation about the various people we know from the early days of Argent Dawn.  It always felt like the Horde at least on Argent Dawn was more closely connected than the Alliance side… and I always assumed in part it was due to the fact that they were massively outnumbered.  With the grand merging of realms that feels less true, especially since we are in the same battle group as the Alea Iacta Est horde mega guild.  That said it does feel like people are more willing to help out other players, especially when you are running around as a giant cow.  There is a certain kinship that Tauren seem to have for their other “beefy brethren” as one of the folks that helped me out put it.  I still love my Ally characters, but for once I feel like I have a horde character that feels good and natural to me.  Maybe I see some race changes to Tauren in my future… because there is just something appealing to being an adorable lumbering bull.

EVE

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

As a side project I have been playing some EVE on the free trial.  I was drafted as an EVE virgin, even though I played a bit during the alpha and beta tests eons ago.  My experience so far has not been without issues…  namely there is apparently a known bug that can happen during character creation.  When you are creating your character, you have to have a piece of clothing selected for every slot…  problem being as you can see on the right side bar there is no drop down for “Bottom”.  I did not find this out until I had already spent a significant amount of time sculpting my face.  I also thought it was a little odd that I only had one hairstyle, but I thought maybe that had something to do with the fact that I was a free account, and that when you purchased an account maybe it unlocked additional styles.  However after not being able to move forward I did some digging and this is a bug that has been regularly reported since around 2011.  Somewhat shocking that something like that has been allowed to stick around the game this long.

Week In Gaming 11/29/2015

On attempt number two of creating a character… I made sure that every drop down had something in it before really starting the process.  I ended up going in a completely different direction … namely my own take on Dave Lister from Red Dwarf.  Though I am sure no one would really notice that unless I specifically pointed it out.  I named my character “Bel Ghast” and set out into the world to see how the game had changed.  Ironically the game works pretty much exactly like I remembered it, but the big thing I did not remember was just how slow the pace is.  In many ways it reminds me of the original Everquest where every action has a certain amount of downtime in it.  I immediately fell back into my old habits, which were to upgrade my ship… to carry more ore… to allow me to save up money to buy more interesting things.  The problem being is I have hit the 5 hour wall that Tam has talked about… where you need to pour about ten more hours into the game before you can do anything interesting.  There is a place where the prices for the things you want jump from being 10k isk, to 500k isk… to 2.5m isk.  So now I am in this gulf where I am questioning my will to push through it.  Additionally I am struggling finding new areas to “hunt” in like the Rogue Cloning Facility.  I can oneshot pretty much every ship in that area, but feel like I need to find something bigger to test my weapons on, but not sure where to find it.

 

AggroChat #85 – Shoot First Quickload Later

aggrochat85

This week was originally going to be our Fallout 4 halfway point show, however we realized that neither Ashgar nor Belghast have even touched the main storyline.  While Ashgar has the excuse of travel…  Bel is nearly level 20 and still has yet to go to Diamond City.  So instead we opted to do an old fashioned roundtable show, where we talk about what everyone has been playing.

The games we talk about this week…

  • Super Mario 3D Land
  • Downwell
  • Fallout 4
  • Final Fantasy VI
  • Mini Metro
  • Final Fantasy XIV
  • Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon
  • Wildstar
  • World of Warcraft
  • Final Fantasy Pet Battles
  • Cybele
  • Cradle
  • EVE