Month: February 2016

Solo Mode

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I’ve had a bit of self-imposed isolation over the last couple weeks. Work/school has been stressful and my brain tends to make me shy away from human contact when I get like this. Coincidentally, I’ve been reading Wolfy‘s great posts in response to Syl‘s comments about solo players asking for solo content in MMOs. For me personally, I like MMOs to have compelling and rewarding solo content so that I can get through these mental down times. Sure, I might be hiding from my friends list and avoiding group content like the plague right now, but solo content lets me still make some sort of progress on my characters. It also helps me stay connected to the world, and feel a little less alone just by seeing random strangers going about their business in-game. Without solo activities, I’d be more likely to completely take a break from the game when I feel like this. Instead, I’m still around and still invested, and ready to slide back in fully once I get over my mental funk. So I’ll happily “demand” (ok maybe politely request) that devs keep providing solo content for me and folks like me, who might waffle from time to time about how much they want to engage socially.

In any case, I can feel the isolationist fog starting to lift. I’ve started getting the urge to run dungeons again. Over the next few days I want to get back into the swing of things in WildStar. I also suspect it is only a matter of time before I fire FFXIV back up so I can heal butts. The cycle of introvert life marches onward.

 

 


Solo Mode

Relearning to Fight

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Nostalgia vs Reality

Relearning to Fight

I feel like I grew up at exactly the right time to be a fan of fighting games.  For the most part these were what consumed my High School game playing years, well apart from a healthy dose of pen and paper role-playing and miniatures.  I remember when the local Circle K got in the original Street Fighter back in middle school, my friend and I were completely enamored with it.  Sure we had played fighting games before, but there was just something different about this one.  Then when Street Fighter II started showing up in Arcades during early 1991… it was quite literally all we could talk about.  Electronic Gaming Monthly had become our bible, and when it released full move sheets for each character, my friend Wade and I practically memorized them.  We were set on course for a wild ride over the next several years, as a new game would come along and dethrone the previous king.  I spent so much money in the arcades playing Street Fighter II derivatives, Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, Samurai Showdown, Mortal Kombat 1 and 2….  and finally culminating for me at least with Killer Instinct.  I went off to college…. got poor…  so I missed a whole generation of the early Tekken games, finally re-entering the fighting game world with Soul Edge in the basement of the university center.  I stayed engaged for most of the original Playstation and for the first bit of the Playstation 2…  and then thanks to my addiction to MMOs…  checked out of the scene once more.

From that point onwards I have tried to poke my head in, every now and then…  even purchasing the original release of Street Fighter IV on my fairly new Xbox 360.  There is still very much a will in me to play these games… but I have had to realize that I am not nearly as good as my nostalgia believes me to be.  Generally speaking I get my ass kicked and get it kicked extremely hard when I try and play anyone with much skill.  I also have completely killed any of those key callouses that we used to need to keep from getting a nasty case of “raw thumb”.  There is something about Street Fighter V however that has reinvigorated my desire to try and learn to play Fighting games once more.  At almost 40… I simply don’t have the reflexes to ever really be “great”, not that I ever was in the first place.  I could dominate an arcade cabinet for a few hours on a single quarter during my prime, but that part of me is just no longer around.  Gone is most of that competitive spirit, and instead I just want to have some fun playing a fighting game.  So much has been added to the genre since I last played, that it feels like I will be simply starting from scratch again.  We will have to see how long the drive stays with me, but as of right now I have every intent of sitting at home tonight and trying to remember how to play a Street Fighter game.  I ended up picking it up on PS4, so my PSN id is Belghast as is my Capcom fighter tag, though I don’t expect to play against anyone for a long while.  I wish I had ordered that Hori Fight Commander in preparation of this…. because I am not sure if I can get used to hitting shoulder buttons for heavy attacks.

Goodbye Grahtwood

Relearning to Fight

In other news… I have now finished the bulk of the quests in Grahtwood and am moving forward to Greenshade.  There are I am certain a few points of interest that I did not take care of while I was in Grahtwood, but a lot of them are simply going to wait for another level… and a fresh infusion of gear.  So many of the world bosses that I encountered were actually two separate boss mobs that interacted with each other.  I can absolutely whittle down one world boss, by simply out surviving it and self healing….  but when it comes to two at the same time my damage output is lacking.  So my hope is that when I hit Veteran 4 and can craft a whole new set of gear… that I will be able to return and kick their ass.  Right now I am largely wearing a crafted set of Veteran 1 gear… and at this point it is starting to feel a bit dated.  In other news I got this installed once again on my upstairs gaming rig, so my hope is to maybe start streaming some of my evening shenanigans.  I am not sure what it is about playing Elder Scrolls Online, but it very much feels like returning home.  Its like the world waited there quietly for me to return, and has thus far welcomed me back with open arms.  If you ever played this game in the past… you might take the bit to patch up your client and give it a shot.  I know a few people recently have restarted after not enjoying the beta testing at all… and are enjoying themselves.  The game certainly feels more polished now than it was at launch.

 

Please Mind Spoilers

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Spoiler Town

Please Mind Spoilers

Last night was the second half premiere of Season 6 of the Walking Dead, and man….  was it a roller coaster.  I am not however going to talk much about the show, because I don’t want to give anything away for those who have yet to see it.  This seems like a sensible position, and it also tends to color my reactions on twitter…  because just like Star Wars Episode VII I didn’t want to be the one to rob the magic of the moment from anyone.  With a big show like this, there is always talk on Twitter about the inconsiderate nature of some, who start emoting about specific events on a show or a game immediately.  For me personally…  spoilers don’t mean that much and if I was going to watch a show or play a game in the first place…  I am still going to play said game/show even if I know the entire plot.  However I realize most people are not like this.  There are a lot of folks who love the thrill of not knowing if our team of stalwart heroes will survive the episode, or if they really can get out of this jam.  For the sake of the people who are not me, I’ve learned over the years how to share my excitement over something… and emote freely…  without actually giving much detail away.  So this largely involves focusing on my feelings, or the overall experience and not necessarily plot details.  Once I got used to it, I honestly find it a much more enjoyable way to share my experiences.

The above tweet is an example of something I said last night while watching the show.  It helped me to get the jitters out that were building up inside of me, but at the same time…  gave away nothing.  What Walking Dead episode doesn’t have a bunch of ups and downs… and while everyone who was also watching knew exactly what I was talking about…  it didn’t do anything to spoil the folks who get the show two full hours behind.  This isn’t just Walking Dead, or Game of Thrones, or whatever else happens to be the hot “It” property.  I would love to see this same logic applied to almost anything.  Games like Final Fantasy XIV, Elder Scrolls Online, and The Secret World all have deep story content… that involves the same sort of ups and downs and plot twists you might expect from a novel.  In the guilds I have been responsible for, I have always tried to stress keeping guild chat as a spoiler free place so nobody had to accidentally log in and get all of that build up spoiled.  Some however are always careless, and while you can scold someone….  once the spoiler is in an open channel it is impossible to remove.  Mostly what I am asking for is for folks to be more considerate about the shared space we have be it Twitter or the chat channels in games themselves.  It is lovely that you don’t mind spoilers…. because largely I am in the same camp as you…  but be thoughtful of the folks who really do.  Is your few minutes of excitement really worth ruining someone else’s entire experience?

RWBY Season 3

 

Please Mind Spoilers

Another event from yesterday that could have been spoilerific… was the public release of the final episode of RWBY Season 3.  There is so much amazing stuff happening in this show right now… and a lot of stuff that also makes me super sad inside.  For similar reasons to Walking Dead, I am not going to go into a bunch of detail since I know folks are still catching up.  Over the last few weeks I have gone through this interesting evolution of not actually knowing what RWBY was really, to getting interested…  to binge watching my way through the entire series run to this point.  This means that I actually got to watch the last three episodes with the rest of the world as they were publicly released around noon on Sunday.  Now for sponsors they get access to the show on Saturday, and I honestly expect that come next season I will be counting myself among this number.  It isn’t often that I find something that I literally want to tell people to stop everything they are doing and “watch this thing now”, but with RWBY it definitely falls into that category.  There is just so much to love here, that it is going to be hard to cram it into a blog post.  Basically RWBY takes all of the parts of Bleach, Fullmetal Alchemist, and Naruto that I truly love…. and gets rid of all of the parts that annoy the fuck out of me. On top of that… it is populated with tons of awesome women characters….  who are not simply there for gratuitous eye candy.

There are a lot of aspects of Anime that are just lost on me, mostly because I don’t understand the Japanese Cultural references… or at least not all of them.  I’ve called RWBY an American Anime… but in truth it is more than that… it is a global internet Anime because in truth… the references and reactions that it draws upon could be understood by pretty much ANYONE using the internet and social media.  The most impressive thing about this show is how watching it compressed like this… has made me realize just how damned impressive the improvement from season to season has been.  The first season… while really good… was cludgy as hell, and it quite literally felt like they were using poser to do this (which they were).  From that point on however… they started to master the tools and by season 2 it was already feeling more like traditional animation.  Season 3 however skyrocketed that quality bar, and I would pretty much put the show up against anything in the air.  I really look forward to seeing just how much improved Season 4, because they are teetering on that edge of what traditional animation can provide…. but with motion capture and 2D rendering.  If you are already indoctrinated into RWBY, we need to talk… because so much shit is going on.  If you are not however… I highly suggest you catch up… this playlist has through S3 E6 but it is the best playlist I was able to find on YouTube.  Once you are hooked then it is time to go to the actual source and the Rooster Teeth RWBY page.  Most of the episodes are 12-16 minutes long, and it is well worth your time even if you squeeze them in between other activities.

Magical Moose

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Luck and Friendship

Magical Moose

Over in World of Warcraft, there has been an item that has lovingly started to be referred to as the Friendship Moose…. and there are good reasons behind it.  The mount itself is pretty damned majestic, and makes me feel like Santa Claus when I ride it.  It comes from getting the Ahead of the Curve achievement for Heroic Archimonde….  well in truth Archi drops a quest but same basic difference.  The reason why it has become known as the friendship moose is the fact that there have been an extremely large number of people in the WoW Community who are going out of their way to try and get people the mount.  To the best of my knowledge it was originally @Thomicks that started the #FriendshipMoose hashtag, and then it kinda just went out of control from there.  I know @Zelse007 for example has been really knocking these out and as of last night he has gotten 639 Folks their moose.  I won’t lie that the thought of getting a spiffy mount is partially what drove me back into raiding in World of Warcraft recently, but more than anything it was to be able to hang out with Horde friends that I had never really raided with.  Quite honestly I never expected to get the Reins of the Grove Warden.

Magical Moose

The thing is…  I have some really amazing friends.  Earlier in the week I was pinged by Damai to see if I wanted to join in with his raid for a farm run.  The plan was to clear a bunch of bosses on Thursday and then pop in really quickly early in the evening on Saturday and take down Archimonde.  Generally speaking I cannot participate in this raid because it happens to coincide almost exactly with our podcast recording session.  However this time they planned on being in and out of the raid roughly two hours before our podcast was set to go.  I ultimately had to beg off on Thursday, because I kept going into uncontrollable coughing fits, but I was however able to attend yesterday….  which was good enough to get me a moose.  I was carried extremely hard last night, the above image is of me being the only dead member of the raid…. from when I tried to run my fixate to the edge and happened to run right in between two folks firing their lasers.  Not only did I walk away with a moose but I also picked up a couple of sweet upgrades, one of which is REALLY amazing for my special snowflake Gladiator spec [ Worldbreaker’s Resolve,  World Ender’s Gorget].  I gotta say I am happy beyond reason… because I absolutely thought this was far beyond my reach.  I want to give a special shout out to Damai, Errya, Pugnodeum, and the rest of the Praetorian Guard crew for dragging my but along.

No AggroChat

Magical Moose

So now that the warm and fuzzy bits are out of the way… I have to tell you that right now I am feeling like a complete and total failure.  Sure being the only person to die on Archimonde should have done that already, but this is something different.  We’ve been recording AggroChat for a little over two years now I believe, and during that time we have missed two episodes.  This week being the second episode, and for the most part…. this time is completely because of me.  While raiding last night, I was on listen only mode because I quite honestly had no voice to talk with.  Throughout the day yesterday, as it went on my voice kept getting weaker and weaker until the point where I simply became a squeaky whisper.  On top of this…  Tam is out of pocket this week, Grace is out of pocket this week… and yesterday was Kodra’s birthday…  leaving it up to Thalen and Ashgar to hold up an entire show.  As a result throughout the day we simply decided to call it, and I really hate the fact that it was my fault for doing just that.  This crud that I have picked up is driving me insane… I am so ready to be “better” but as the weeks go by it keeps dragging on.

I know last week when I went ahead and recorded… it was probably a bit of a set back.  Because prior to last weeks show I was feeling a bit better…. and then afterwards I was pretty much dead to the world for a few days.  What is killing me the most is that when I am in this condition I just don’t want to do much of anything.  As a result I have been focused heavily on Elder Scrolls Online, which is a game that I am largely playing by myself.  Sure there are a handful of awesome people playing with me like Ammo and Sol, but even then my interaction is mostly that of answering the sort of questions that new players have…. and not so much active grouping.  I can zone out and zone into the storyline… and as a result I am probably enjoying it more than I have since I first played alpha.  Part of me wants to at least push through the rest of the Aldmeri Dominion content before resigning the game to the back burner again.  Another big thing that I want to do at some point is pick up where I left off in SWTOR, and play through the Reven content that I never actually got around to doing.  I have this feeling at least in the near future that I am going to be focused on story games, less than I am going to be on raiding and grouping activities.  The Final Fantasy XIV 3.2 patch might change that, and in part I hope it does…. because I would love to feel the drive to play that game again.  However in the meantime I am going to quietly be piddling over here without my voice.