January 2016 – Page 7

Embargo Over

January 19, 2016 by Belghast

Finally Time

On December 18th I walked into a theater, and had my faith in my favorite childhood memories restored. So powerful was this restoration that I had to talk about it immediately… so I went onto slack and joined a channel that we had created just for this purpose. Similarly powerful was my desire not to spoil the experience for anyone else. So after some thrashing about, I declared over twitter in the above tweet that I would give it a month…. that on January 18th I would feel able to finally talk about Star Wars Force Awakens in the open. Today is January 19th, the day after my self proposed embargo ended, and I am ready to talk. This however it is a bit of a lackluster statement, given that it seems like the global internet embargo was something along the lines of “any time after the first of the year”. While we recorded the AggroChat spoiler show a few weeks back, I kept to my original stated date. Now the floodgates can open and you can expect me to be less measured about information regarding the movie. Essentially my theory is that if you cared at all about this movie… you had a month to go see it relatively unscathed… any spoilers are now on your own damned head.

For starters…. I love this film. I love so much about it. Largely because it made me realize how much I really did love Star Wars after all. In the post Phantom Menace era I spent much of my time suppressing my joy about the franchise even though there were really awesome offshoots like Star Wars Rebels and the Clone Wars cartoons that absolutely redeemed just how frustratingly bad at times the prequels were. I guess part of me didn’t want to get hurt again, and while I started off trying to fight the hype… by the time Force Awakens launched…. I was a gibbering mess of fandom. The most awesome part of all of it, was sitting in the theater and listening to the entire place erupt in applause when the opening scroll came on screen. I did find it funny that in my theater a few people booed when they saw the Lucasfilm logo, but that quickly gave way to much cheering. Then at various moments, like BB8 flipping the thumbs up… made everyone laugh and cheer as well. I am so happy that I got to see it on opening night, because I feel like the energy was so amazing that it would have been painful to have missed that. Now to delve into some of my characters and thoughts about them.

Rey

Rey for me is the Star Wars equivalent of Amy Pond… the girl who waited. The question is who exactly was she waiting for. Right now there are two competing camps in fandom… that peg her at either being the daughter of Luke Skywalker or the grand daughter of Obi-Wan Kenobi. There is another group of people who seem to think she is the lost child of Han and Leia… but I seriously think that someone might have known about this before now and maybe just maybe they would have recognized her. I mean this is the universe where a Senator can go from pregnancy through delivery without receiving any prenatal care and be completely baffled by the fact that there are twins. So maybe they lose babies all the time. Part of me wants it to be as simple as Luke’s kid, because Disney talked about how the “Saga” movies centered around the Skywalker legacy. If Rey is not a Skywalker… that means that the focus of the movie according to Disney has to be on a Skywalker… and the only one of those that we know is Kylo Ren. I want this movie to be about Rey, because she is hands down the best character we have seen. Part of me still hopes that Mara Jade gets brought back from the now destroyed Expanded Universe… and we end up seeing Rey as the child of Luke and Mara. I could see Mara having to hide her on a backwater planet. Going to go into more about the staff she carries around all the time…. but mostly I love Rey with all of my heart and she is the sort of character we need to carry forward the franchise for the next generation.

Finn

Finn is super awesome… and I think his story arc of how the reluctant Stormtrooper escaped to join the Rebellion is great. I fully expected him to be the new Han Solo in that he is the one that is super reluctant to “do the right thing”. This over reaching desire is to get as far as humanly possible away from the First Order, and rightly so… given that he was abducted as a child and placed into their creepy mind control scheme for breeding perfect warriors. I need to actually read the novel related to Finn, but enough of a summary was that basically the other Stormtroopers you see him interact with… were all in his four member pod that he trained with. He served as the captain.. and the guy who plants the bloody hand on his helmet is suggested to be the “screw up” of that team named Slip. When Finn is confronted by TR-8R the shock baton trooper… it seems super personal… which makes us think that maybe he was either Zero or Nines one of the other two members of that team. The Finn story arc is one of redemption, but he comes across as such a likable character from the moment we meet him. Like there was part of me that wanted Rey and Finn go to off into the sunset having amazing adventures together. As far as how he works into the trilogy… there are folks that seem to think he is going to be Lando’s kid but that would just cheapen the character of Finn. If anything I think Finn might somehow end up being related to Sana Starros, a character introduced in the “in canon” comic book series. I just keep thinking that the various characters that have been carefully introduced in those comics will eventually make their way into the movies in one form or another.

Poe Dameron

Poe is one of those characters that I thought I would end up being annoyed by. In every single pre-release shot had this strutting and preening nature to it… and I guess in theory he does do that. His character however is super likeable and ends up being this awesome character from the moment he hits the screen. Firstly he wins huge points with me by being devoted to his droid… since droids are in essence the pets of the Star Wars universe. The folks that care about them as more than just a walking toaster… always win huge points with me. On top of that he is like the best damned pilot legitimately. I don’t remember what Tam had his kill count at, but it was irrationally high. What makes it even better is the fact that Poe and Finn make such an amazing team. There is talk as to whether or not this is a “bromance” or a romance and I am honestly fine with whatever that ends up being. I don’t necessarily feel the need to ship these two together, but at the same time I wouldn’t mind if that was the direction the movie was going. For me the interactions in the Tie Fighter mimic those of Han and Luke in the Millennium Falcon taking out Tie Fighters. I personally feel like Finn was so interested in seeing that he survived, because he is super loyal to his team members…. and from the moment they escaped together Finn I think considered Poe as part of his “new” team, just like he seemed to have the same instant loyalty to Rey. Supposedly there is a bunch of backstory about his parents in a comic series leading up to Force Awakens and I need to track it down… but the lineage ties back to the Rogue Squadron from what I am hearing. Which makes me wonder if Poe is going to be the star of the Rogue One movie.

BB-8

I had some serious reservations about this droid before the launch of the movie, because it seemed like Disney was setting this character up to be the new Jar Jar. Disney films all have quirky often annoying animal sidekicks… and I think that is precisely what Jar Jar was trying to be… and what BB-8 seemed to be based on the insane amount of merchandising. On top of everything else… the design seemed to make no sense. Like I could not sort out what the robots primary function was, and I guess in theory… they are designed to be small compact astromech droids. Seeing BB-8 on screen however melted all the ice, and made me just simply gush. The thing about BB-8 and its head tilt ability… is that it makes the droid far more emotive than any other to date. Sure R2-D2 could convey a bunch of emotion with his antsy little back and forth dance…. but BB-8 can simply tilt its head to the side or let it drop… to convey curiosity or sadness. From the moment the little guy flipped open the lighter to signal a Thumbs up…. I was completely sold. I think BB-8 is pretty much the best dog ever… and if they ever made an open world Force Awakens game… I would want to run around the wasteland with BB-8 in the same way as I do Dogmeat in Fallout 4.

Kylo Ren

Kylo Ren was exactly the type of bad guy we needed in this film. We had heard before the film released that he was a Vader groupy, and I was not really sure how that would play out on screen. However they made it work… because he is still very much a boy trying to play for the affection of his grandparent. He never fully grew up… and far as much as he wants to be like Vader… he ends up nothing at all like him other than the same taste in clothing. Vader was this stoic force that made you afraid to even be in the same room with him… in part because his emotions were unreadable. Kylo on the other hand lets the entire world know at all times what he is feeling, and throws these temper tantrums anytime something does not go his way. He is a brash child, demanding to be respected…. when in truth no one actually respects him. Any fear they have of him, is not because of his power, but instead because he serves as this loose canon that does more harm to the First Order that he actually seems to do to the Resistance. There was one plot point that I knew would happen somehow… and that was the death of Han Solo. Once we learned the parentage of Kylo it pretty much decided that by the end of the movie he would end up killing his father. While I saw that scene coming… I still thought it did an excellent job of showing just how NOT in control Kylo really was. How he was continuing to struggle with his light side up until the very moment he ignited his saber into his father. I have this feeling that by the time we see Ren in the next movie, he will be more like Vader and be significantly more machine than he is man.

Snoke

The last character that I am going to talk about specifically is Snoke, the enigmatic leader of the First Order. There is a lot of speculation as to who he really is… and I am absolutely putting my hopes in the Darth Plagueis basket. There are so many little things that are either purposefully trying to mislead us… or are there intentinally. Firstly the music that plays when they go talk to Snoke is apparently the same music that plays in Revenge of the Sith during the Tragedy of Darth Plagueis the Wise scene. Also Snoke is referred to as “wise” in the movie, which might also be a bit of foreshadowing. Similarly on the cover of the Darth Plagueis novel he is shown appearing to Palpatine in a hugely inflated hologram much the same way as Snoke does. When you look at his face… there is something going on… almost necrotic which would make you wonder if he is being kept alive through the sheer force of the Dark Side. Now on the other side of things… Plagueis was a Muun apparently at the request of Lucas. However since this series is departing from the Lucas approved universe… he could in theory be brought back and just about any damned thing they wanted to.

The other thing that I keep coming back to as well is Rey’s staff looks oddly like pretty much every single incarnation of Plagueis’s Staff Lightsaber we have seen in comics and the toys. I think there would be an interesting symmetry if she had this Sith artifact with her all along. Also given that Plagueis was essentially betrayed by the old Sith ways… he would be suspicious of the old “Rule of Two” thing and even the Sith lineage in general. So instead we have the Knights of Ren, which is a group of force users…. that he even talks about have not completed their training, in that he tells Hux to bring Kylo’s body so they can finish. Since he was thought destroyed by Palpatine his apprentice, it would absolutely make sense for him to create an order of a bunch of “less powerful” force users, instead of bestowing all of his knowledge onto a single apprentice that could easily depose him again. If we believe the whole “vergence in the force” stuff from the prequels… it would also mean that Plagueis either intentionally or not… created the Skywalker lineage. This loops back to the whole Saga movies being about the Legacy of Skywalker, which would be a pretty nice bookend especially if Plagueis ends up legitimately destroyed by the end. In any case… I need to wrap this post up because it has gotten pretty long. At another date I will talk about some of my disappointments in the movie, albeit super minor ones.

Have an awesome week.. and May the Force Be With You!

Banking and Bosses

January 18, 2016 by Belghast

Busy Morning

Trying to knock out a really quick blog post, because if I don’t right now I am not entirely certain when I will get the chance. Both my wife and I are off today for the holiday, and as a result we have tried to schedule as much as humanly possible to do today. Largely this means finally getting in to talk to the bank about refinancing our loan. Adulting is frustrating and horrible… and hopefully it will go smoother than I have made it out to be in my head. In a perfect scenario we will be able to do this without much hassle. In theory it should only really be a case of someone from the bank coming to look over the house and appraise it, and after the recent renovations that should go a hell of a lot more smoothly. I mean we have a relatively new roof and very new siding, so the house has looked better than it has in years. All of that said… there is still so much anxiety for me anytime you are dealing with finances and banks and such.

After that I have this feeling that we are going to run around looking at dish washers. For whatever reason… it is suddenly a big deal to my wife that we have a non-functional dish washer. Don’t get me wrong I understand, I hate washing the dishes but for reasons entirely different from probably hers. When you are 6’4″ they simply do not make a sink that is comfortable to stand at, and by the time I finish washing dishes my back is killing me from stooping over the sink. Why it is suddenly a crisis is the part that I am not quite understanding, because the thing has been dead for several years now. All of that said… if she wants a new dishwasher we are getting a new dishwasher. I know she has looked at a couple of them, and I know she wants my input… but basically whatever one she wants I am completely happy with. I just hope this one I can actually figure out how to use…. because the last one… every time I seemed to run a load of dishes something horrible went wrong.

Boss Farming

It was fairly late by the time I finally filtered downstairs and got set down, and by then a bunch of my friends were in Warframe so I decided to join them. We spent the next hour and some change farming a boss mission trying to get myself and Thalen the last pieces of the Mag Warframe that we needed. Unfortunately… we didn’t have much luck. It seems that through killing planetary bosses you have a chance of getting parts to drop to a specific type of warframe. The boss in question was at the end of Mars, and drops all three parts of the Mag frame. I am not really sure why we cared so much about it, other than the fact that we both had all but one part… and it was the same part we were missing. I am in that same position with Rhino, and that is a mech I am far more likely to use. But whatever the case we were wrapped up in the moment of killing stuff for loot, and I have to say… we walked away with a bunch of awesome stuff.

If nothing else… it was a great source of the various crafting materials needed to create mechs. There is a single piece that I am missing for a couple of helmets that I will need to track down at some point. I also had plenty of materials to craft a bunch of weapons, including two new swords, a new bow, and a set of fists for me to use on my Rhino frame. Right now I am really liking the moment to moment feel of this game, and it seems to be the ideal drop in and hang out type co-operative experience. The question will be how long it takes for one of us to get super serious about the game, because this feels like the sort of game that is fun to play casually… but deeply frustrating to play seriously. There is one mission type that I absolutely hate, and that is the sneak up and capture the target type mission. I never can seem to get in close enough to them to keep from triggering them to make a run for the escape vessel. Then when they start running… I am simply not fast enough to take them down before they get away. There is one mission that I tried four or five times yesterday and never seemed to be able to finish successfully. Other than that mild frustration… I am enjoying pretty much every other mission type I have done.

Game Spaces

January 18, 2016 by Tamrielo

I had a conversation with a friend recently about Infinity tables, and how important layout is when playing that game. As far as tabletop minis games go, Infinity isn’t unique in having a lot of the game hinge on terrain, but it’s a lot more honest about it. The game is obviously unplayable with poor or no terrain, and both players will realize this quickly.

Compare this to a game like 40k or Warmachine. In 40k, Dark Eldar want terrain to hide behind if they aren’t going first. If they are, they run a serious risk of getting shot off the table before getting to do anything. In Warmachine, several factions have a lot of Pathfinder units that benefit from rough terrain or forests or both– a board with none of these suddenly becomes an uphill battle for them, and factions without Pathfinder struggle on boards with a lot of terrain. It’s an unequal distribution which causes issues at the game level and skews the “competitive” selection of units for both games.

Spending a lot of the weekend playing Warframe made me think about Infinity terrain as well. Levels in Warframe are randomized, but they’re highly interactive. Maps are made up of cells (or tiles) which are hand-designed, attached to each other through connectors (hallways) and the occasional smaller room, all put together to form a map for a level. It’s a surprisingly elegant system, and despite how important level design is in the game, it’s still able to put together random maps in a fairly compelling way.

It makes me think of Infinity tables. There are major set pieces (cells) with scatter terrain (connectors) and smaller buildings (rooms), all forming the game board. Mostly, these pieces are hand-placed by one or more players before the game starts, and they then circle the table, eyeballing sight lines and other details, before deciding that the table is fit to play on and starting a game. Because of this, Infinity draws a lot of attention from passersby, because the tables it’s played on are generally very intricate.

Infinity tables that are fun to play on follow a general set of rules:

No unavoidable corridors running the length of the table.
No sniper towers that can cover the entire board.
Plentiful cover and places to hide behind, out of sight.
Good opportunities to use every type of weapon– from short range to long range.
No obvious choke points.
(Advanced) One side should be slightly more advantageous to start on than the other.
(Advanced) Objective locations for the missions to be played on the table should be relatively even.
(Advanced) Multiple tiers of elevation, and ways to reach them.
(Advanced) Multiple exits from points on the board, to prevent getting locked down.
(Advanced) Models of all sizes need to be able to maneuver.

It’s a lot of rules, but a lot of players who are used to the game just sort of internalize them. Very rarely does anyone go down a checklist of the above, but you’ll occasionally see someone look at a table and say “hmm, this is too open” or “this is too crowded”. Playing the game enough, and getting experienced enough, allows you to see the problems with a table once you’re practiced at it. it’s not easy to do– I played a game recently with another very experienced player where we both thought the board looked reasonable until we started playing on it.

The same attention and care goes into level design elsewhere. When League of Legends was first released, people criticized it for “only having one map”, and games are often judged for not having an adequate number of maps to play on. I remember Counter-Strike and Unreal Tournament, and the large number of maps those games had, of which maybe two or three ever got seriously played. The single map of League (and the smaller numbers of maps in other games) tend to have a lot more going on, and are carefully and thoughtfully created.

Game spaces are really important. They need to be functional, navigable, and visually appealing, and varied enough to stay fresh and not get boring. I remember complaints about the original Halo, and its endless samey levels towards the end of the game, and the major complaint of the first Assassin’s Creed that it got too repetitive. It’s telling that some of the biggest changes in those two games were in their level design, with AC going to an entirely new location with new architecture and Halo varying its levels much more in its sequels.

Probably a lot of my care for good level design comes from a childhood playing Thief. That game’s area layouts were the lynchpin of the experience, and made the game in a lot of ways. I pay attention when levels are interesting and matter, as opposed to being irrelevant, or an afterthought.

Week in Gaming 1/17/2016

January 17, 2016 by Belghast

It has been awhile since I have done one of these, and of the various failed columns that I have tried over the years…. I think this one is the best for me personally. Sunday is a rough day in general, in part because I wake up and have to finish up AggroChat and get it out to the various locations. As a result it helps to have a fairly formulaic option I can lean on when I am not feeling super inspired. As a result I am leaning once again on the Week in Gaming series just to talk about a bunch of stuff I played this week.

Pax South Hype!

I am starting to get super excited for Pax South. Last year I had various companies ask me for a business card, and I was somewhat kicking myself for not having any. I mean I guess part of me never really thought that having a business card for a blog and podcast was a good idea. This year however I have gotten my ass in order and if everything works as intended the cards will arrive at the beginning of next week. I only ordered 250 because I could not in any circumstance think of a reason why I would need that many. The design was done by Rae and was originally intended to be our Pax Prime cards, but since we were denied media access to that convention they never actually got made. I resurrected the idea because I thought it was pretty slick. In the original design each of the hosts has their own color, and given that I love green I latched onto that one. As far as a back design I went with something simple because I felt like it needed something on the back…. and in truth that is the crux of our thing… daily posts, weekly cast. If you are also going to be at Pax South let me know, I would love to meet up with everyone that I can while I am there.

Undertale

I have some mixed feelings about Undertale so far. On one level I really like the game and it feels like something that is going to be an interesting experience. The negative is I absolutely HATE the combat system. I hate mini-games, and while I was corrected last night on the podcast…. I am sorry but that isn’t a real combat system. Part of me just wants to run away from every single fight so that I don’t have to do it. I mean granted I was using arrow keys and maybe that makes it worse than it actually is, but I just hate the concept of breaking out of an otherwise fun old school RPG style game…. and having to deal with move the heart to avoid shit. For now I have essentially abandoned the game, in the hopes that some distance will in fact make the heart grow fond. Essentially I love everything else about the game… other than the combat system. This might be one of those games that is more enjoyable to watch.

Victor Vran

I’ve already talked about this game quite a bit throughout the week but I feel like it still deserves additional mention. The only negative about this game is that I started playing it essentially the week before a bunch of other things that I wanted to play happened. My hope is that once the recent infatuation with Warframe and Diablo 3 Season 5 have calmed down, I can return to this and play my way through the main story some more. I really want to see what multiplayer feels like in the end game experience. Playing it was fine for me… but essentially locked the other players that I was dragging along with me… out of some of the experience of interacting with the voice floating around in your head. If you are not partaking of the Diablo 3 Season 5 madness…. and still want a ARPG fix… I highly suggest you check it out.

Warframe

This game…. is so good and I am kinda kicking myself for never really giving it a proper attempt at playing. I have downloaded this game numerous times in the past on the PC, PS3 and PS4 when I saw other folks in my various social media timelines talking about it… but never actually tried it. I guess in my head I had this absolutely misrepresented as to what sort of game it was. With a super generic name like Warframe… I kept getting it jumbled up with the other game Warface. Warface being a super generic Call of Duty/Counterstrike style PVP shooter. So in my head I equated Warframe to a PVP experience… not this deeply nuanced cooperative PVE experience. There are so many aspects of this game that remind me of an MMO, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. The game as a whole feels like this amalgam of Destiny, Phantasy Star Online and Tribes. If that combination sounds like something you would be interesting, I highly suggest you check it out. I think I was largely luckier than most in that one of the freebie mechs, the Excalibur is right down my alley. I am slashing everything with my space ninja ways, and really enjoying myself. For those curious, I have pretty much set down roots on the PC, and while I might give it a shot later on the PS4, I have no real intention of moving at the moment as the AggroChat crew seem to all be playing it.

Diablo 3

The floodgates for Diablo 3 Season 5 opened on Friday at 7pm and from that point until 10:30 or so my time I was running around in a group leveling like mad. At this point I have managed to get to 68, which puts me behind the curve of folks like Grace that are 70 with over 150 paragon levels. That however is fine by me, because I am just happy I am almost to the cap with at least one character. I am going to be interested in seeing what the various challenges are that unlock the various seasonal rewards. What makes the season play so addictive to me is the fact that it mimics a MMO launch. Everyone on your friends list for a period of time is playing Diablo 3 and excited about it, as though they were playing a brand new game. So you have a few weeks of focused play, and then don’t feel guilty at all when you shift back to playing other games until the launch of the next season. This focused excitement is really fun to experience, and this is technically my third season so far. There is part of me that wishes I had gotten on board with the concept earlier. My goal today is to finish up my Crusader and then probably focus on some more Warframe. Hopefully all of you readers out there have had an equally fun week, and Pax South seriously could not get here soon enough.