March 2016 – Page 3

100th Episode Mishap

March 27, 2016 by Belghast

Things Happened

This morning I am blogging a bit out of sequence, because things happened. Normally speaking on Sunday mornings I go through a little ritual. Traditionally I manage to get what I think of as my first pass edit done on Saturday night, so that Aggrochat mostly resembles its final form by the time I go to bed. I get up in the morning and mash it all together and do the final pass, before posting it all over the place. Last night however… when I listened to the show my heart fell in my chest as I noticed that it was significantly screwed up. All it took was for me to see the waveform to realize that something just wasn’t right, and I thought it was pretty much going to be an entire loss. This morning however I screwed with the audio until I reached a point where… it is still very much screwed up but it is salvageable. Essentially for whatever reason on the new Teamspeak setup my recording is completely jacked an sounds like trying to watch Cinemax in the 80s when you didn’t have it added to your subscription. Admit it guys… we all tried to sneak a peak at stuff we shouldn’t be seeing through the constant mechanical hum. The original pass this morning sounded pretty much exactly like that with me being shifted to a higher pitch than normal… dubbing it Chipmunk Bel.

After a few hours of trying various things I managed to isolate a lot of the hum, and now instead it just sounds like I am in the witness protection program and disguising my voice with a really horrible modulator. I think the show might be salvageable, and I am getting a push by our fans on witter to go ahead and post what exists. The thing that shocks me is just how little I have freaked out over this. The worse case scenario was that we lost a show… and in the the grand scheme of things it is pretty much a miracle that this… show 100 is the first time we have really had major issue. Sure there have been times we have gotten disconnected in the middle of recording and that I have had to knit together a show out of two pieces. However overall we have had really good luck, so much so that we never even thought about having more than one person try and do a recording at the same time. In the future however I think we are going to have a bot hanging out doing nothing but recording the channel with the hopes that it catches everything in one nice constant volume stream.

Stuff Went Wrong

Additionally on the positive side everyone OTHER than me last night sounded amazing. So the new set up seems to be great…. once I can sort out what the hell went wrong with my side of things. That is what is so screwy is that while talking everyone else said I sounded great too, however when it came to actually recording my own voice it went horribly wrong. If nothing else doing the bot recording thing should take care of that problem, but I still think there is some setting somewhere that is wrong… given that teamspeak saves audio settings on a server by server basis and even at times a channel by channel basis. The plan is to do a bunch of testing between today and next weekend and will hopefully sort out which magical setting unscrews my voice. In the meantime however I am pretty damned proud of how much I managed to minimize the effect. Granted things are still screwed up… but they are in a much less screwed up state than they were this morning. One of these days I really need to take some lessons in audio engineering because it would help if I had a damned clue what I was doing.

Done with Undertale

March 26, 2016 by Belghast

Making My Own Finish

Last night I finished Undertale… and what I mean by that is that I reached a point where I am just finished caring about the game. I have so many conflicted feelings about this title. On one hand I really do enjoy the story that is being told, and I made my best attempt to go pacifist. The problem I have however is that there is a whole lot about the “game” that I simply hate. For me it feels like I am very much playing two vastly different games. One of which is this awesome console RPG where I wander around and talk to interesting people and do the occasional puzzle. Then there is a completely different game that is the often times bullet hell shooter that is the combat system. The combat system is the game that I hate, and the loner I had to play it the more I loathed its existence. The strange part about it is that I love JRPGs and I love Bullet Hell shooters… they are awesome separate genres but there is something about the hybridization of this game that offends my sensibilities.

When I play a bullet hell shooter, it feels like there is nothing on the line. Sure I might lose a ship or I might have to start back at the beginning of the game, but there is nothing that I deeply care about on the game. When it comes to an RPG… adding that bullet hell aspect feels too punishing for me. If I fucked and forgot to save, a single screw-up might cost me hours of retracing my steps to try and reach the point where I have to try that fight all over again. In a bullet hell title you often get some avenue for rapid trial and error as you figure things out on the fly. I am very much a learn by doing person, and no amount of prep work ahead of time is going to get me through a fight until I reach my own internal click moment where I grok the mechanics at a purely muscle memory level.

Un-fun Experience

If I somehow could have turned off the combat system and wound up with a game where I just walk around and talk to interesting people I would unabashedly sing this games praises. Tonight we are recording the AggroChat Game Club show where we talk about Undertale and right now I feel like I am probably going to be the lone voice that did not really enjoy this game. From the moment I first encountered the combat system I felt like I was “taking my medicine” and forcing myself through an experience that I simply was not enjoying. So in many ways it felt like doing homework, and I found myself trying to rush through as fast as I could so I had something to talk about. I don’t want to give too many spoilers in my blog post, and will likely save those for the podcast. However I managed to get to the bullet hell-iest of all bullet hell glitch endings, which apparently means that I did not make enough friends along the way? I did a bunch of research and watched several of the other ending options on YouTube and I have to say… the ending I was heading for feels like a massive slap in the face.

I realize it is a central conceit in a lot of Japanese games that you get a shitty ending the first time… and that is supposed to drive you to play the game again to get a better ending. I’ve always kinda thought this practice was bullshit, and instead of lighting a fire under me to get the better ending… I just tend to chuck that game in the dustbin as a thoroughly disappointing experience. The primary problem with me and this game is that I don’t enjoy the central game mechanics… which are avoid stuff on screen as a a replacement for standard menu driven RPG combat. I can absolutely play a game indefinitely that has a shitty story, but has mechanics that I really enjoy. This is why I mesh so well with skinner box and grindy games… because I am enjoying that core loop enough to keep playing for the promise of something cool in the future. That said I have never been able to struggle through a sub par mechanical experience just because I know there is a good story there somewhere. When I reach a point when I think I would much rather watch a YouTube video of someone else playing… then it is time for me to hang up my controller and cut my losses.

Tentative Excitement: the new Hitman

March 25, 2016 by Tamrielo

I picked up the “intro” pack for the new Hitman recently, and played a bunch of it last night– $15 for the tutorial levels and the first mission of the game. I’ve played through the tutorials and part of the first mission, and I’m really sold, especially for the price I paid.

The structure of the game is interesting– there’ve always been many, many ways to approach a Hitman level, and, in general, few reasons to revisit them. In this iteration of the series, there are still the many ways to approach the levels, but the game nudges you to try different ones, making the replay value of the game a lot more apparent by indicating different ways to approach it. Rather than having to intuit creative solutions on the fly while under pressure, the game messages these solutions to you in the form of NPC conversations, various documents you can find scattered around the level, and other such details.

The game also has a lot more depth as far as the choices you can make. Despite being a game about assassination, killing anyone except your target is considered poor form at best, and mission-compromising at worst. Disguises are key to getting close to your target, and acquiring these takes creativity, patience, and timing if you want to do it well. What I also really like is the emphasis not just on the target, but also getting out.

It’s fascinating to me how much a game whose tagline is “enter a world of assassination” (I still always hear the Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory song when I read that) puts such an emphasis on not killing people. Going in guns blazing is a really, really bad choice here, and while you CAN do it, it’ll get you plastered all over the evening news; not great for a professional ghost. As a result, the game does a lot to humanize even random nonessential NPCs, giving them habits, quirks, and mannerisms that make them feel more convincing.

One of the things that this Hitman game removes is the omniscient map. In its place is an Assassin’s Creed-style sensory mode, which slows time slightly and lets you see people (and identify your target(s)) through walls, but not the actual layouts of the rooms. It makes the game feel more tense, as I can’t simply hide in a closet and watch the map to study patterns anymore, I actually have to mingle and put myself at risk to gather information.

As I write that last sentence, a thought just clicked for me– I talk about wanting more verbs in video games. Hitman gives me a bunch of interesting verbs, but among them is “gather information”. It’s just moving around and looking around and finding opportunities, but in the game that’s interesting, and is an active, fully-featured part of the game. I can look around and see that some parts of a level are guarded by a particular type of NPC, and others are guarded by a different kind. I can intuit what kinds of disguises I’d need to fit in various places, and see how all the moving parts link together to give me openings to be where I need to be.

Like Thief, and to some extent Dishonored, Hitman is a game that I personally love because it really rewards me for being precise, planning, and executing cleanly. I’m rewarded for outsmarting the level, not brute forcing it. I don’t yet know how I feel about it being presented as an episodic game, because I’ve always found the Hitman series’ metastory to be fascinating and I want more of it, but for the $15 entry fee, I’m pretty okay with what I’ve gotten to play. Pretty good odds I purchase the “upgrade pack” to get the full game later on.

How to Survive 2 Impressions

March 25, 2016 by Belghast

Sandbox/Mission Hybrid

Roughly a month ago a friend of mine hooked me up with a copy of How to Survive 2, because she knew I was a fan of the whole zombie apocalypse genre and it was a game she was enjoying. I had all of these plans to write up a proper impressions piece, but got sidetracked by all things The Division. This game was a whole lot of the reason why I survived the lead up to the launch of that title, because it gave me something fresh to piddle around with. The basics of the game are that you are a survivor in a world long after everything went to shit thanks to the zombie outbreak. Since I did not play the first title, I feel like there is probably some background story there that I am missing. What I do know however is that this title is set in the coastal region of Louisiana. There are no real recognizable landmarks however, but instead the world simply borrows a swampy feeling Tileset. The game has both single player and multiplayer game modes, but I have largely spent my time playing single player.

Within moments of starting a new game you are introduced to the character of Kovac, a man that at first you only know as a voice coming through some sort of a speaker system. He serves as your guide as he attempts to teach you the basics of surviving in this world. The game itself is divided into two basic chunks, the large open world area that allows you to freely roam and explore, and very tight and controlled missions with specific objectives. The missions themselves are repeatable and you can crank up the difficulty to give you better rewards and experience. One thing of note, and why I am doing an impressions piece is that the game is in early access, and there are a lot of things that are simply not in the game yet. Much of the tutorial that walks the players through how the world works is simply missing, so I had to rely on my friend and what I could google to figure out a few things.

Level Your Camp

One of the big things that I was missing was how one actually levels up. The game has two parallel systems that are designed to level up together, that is your “camp” that you are building in the open world and your character itself. Both of these have levels associated with them that are purchased through the spending of experience gained through doing activities. The fastest way to gain this experience for me at least, seemed to be to repeat one of the early missions with the difficulty slider cranked up as far as I was allowed to. The reason the whole camp leveling thing was a bit confusing at first, was that the character level is locked to the camp level. So in order to level up your character you have to first level the camp, and you will continue to stair step the two progressions from that point on. In addition to raw level however there are numerous perks that you can unlock… some of which are absolutely must haves like the ability to open lock picks. Others are improve the efficiency of using weapons or items, and I assume are also really important once you get a good idea for how you want to build out your character.

The thing I have noticed is that the difficulty of encounters ramps up pretty quickly, especially in the open world. For quite a while all I encountered were the generic slow zombies, however once I got to around level three or four the game started to throw in those “track star” zombies that have become popular in the more modern and edgy zombie films. Around level five I encountered this games version of the boomer… the fat bloated corpse that explodes when you get it low on health. I am sure as the levels continue to ramp up I will keep encountering other mixes of bad guys each one with their own way of dealing with it. The only real problem is that in the bit I have been playing my only ranged option so far is a crafted bow. I am wondering when exactly I will encounter guns, because while I have found a small bit of ammunition.. I have yet to find anything to use it with.

Fallout-Esc

There is a certain nostalgic feeling to playing this game that I have a hard time really putting into words. In many ways the game reminds me of the original Fallout games, in that much of your interaction is happening in smaller closed maps that are tightly designed around a single mission. There is a big of fog of war going on as well as you explore because you can only actually see a small section of the screen at a time. This is magnified as you go into buildings because there is a forced zoom that happens allowing you to see finer detail inside. This also makes it much easier for a zombie to sneak up on you and there have been a few moments especially on the night missions where I genuinely jumped when something lumbered out of a corner that I had not been looking yet. Wandering a cityscape with only your flashlight to see with… is unexpectedly tense given that this is a top down isometric game. I definitely had moments of trying really hard to bait everything out of buildings before actually going in to explore them for the fear of getting overrun especially on higher difficulties.

The game is very much not finished, but what is there was really enjoyable to play and helped to get me through those Division withdrawals. I would really like to play this game with friends because I think it would be extremely awesome to explore larger cities together. The game is targeting PC, PS4, and Xbox One, and I could absolutely see this being an enjoyable console co-op experience because the movement feels like it would translate well to a twin-stick controller setup. The big thing to remember about this game is that it comes with the same early access concerns as always. The game is not finished, but they seem to be updating pretty regularly. They have a beta branch that has more frequent updates, but also likely is in a less polished state… and then the normal branch is largely stable. I had quite a bit of fun playing the game, and I intend to pick it back up again. It is the perfect thing to pop into do a mission, and then exit feeling like you accomplished something or at least moved the experience bar forward. While going through all of my recent home renovations there were many occasions where I simply did not have the time to get into something terribly detailed. Instead I booted up How To Survive 2, and poked around for a bit and got my quick gaming fix before returning to the fray. I liked it and look forward to seeing how this evolves. At some point I feel like I really need to poke my head into the original game since this one doesn’t really provide much backstory.