Sickly Weekend
This weekend really didn’t turn out how I had hoped. I’ve picked up this crud in my chest and the amount of general lousy feeling seems to vary heavily. Today for example I feel like death warmed over. Sunday however I was feeling fairly decent and hopeful for the start of a new week. I think maybe I simply did too much and should have rested, because I fell for the traditional trap of “feeling a little better” and then starting to try and behave like a normal human being. I am not sure if this is an actual illness or just allergy overload, because both could be going on. However my boss did complain of having a big of a cold that he brought home from London, and I am thinking that maybe he passed that on to me. In any case I spent a good chunk of the weekend sitting around and playing games… badly. I also spent a good deal of time sitting on the back porch watching the birds and flowers. A few days ago I wrote about the nest of baby robins that we had found in our bush. It turns out that as my friend Thalen suggested, they were just about to leave the nest because as of yesterday morning they were completely gone with no trace. I keep hoping that we will see baby robins hopping around and looking for worms, but have not so far.
A good chunk of my weekend gaming was spent replaying Dishonored, which was the May AggroChat Game Club game. You can listen to our discussion of the game over here. I remembered this game fondly but upon a second playing there were a lot of details that I either overlooked or simply forgotten. Primarily it was the games setting that stood out, because everything we know going into it… makes it seem like the Empress Jessamine Kaldwin was a fair and just ruler. However if you look at the sort of kingdom she ruled… it makes you wonder just how just and fair it really was. I mean why would someone need the Arc Pylons or Walls of Light…. or the spooky mask wearing Overseers if the world the game inhabits was a good one? We don’t get to see much of the world before the assassination of the Empress, so I guess in theory depending on how long you were imprisoned all of the police state trappings could have sprung up afterwards when the slightly more evil forces too power. My first play through I thought I was doing the right thing by quickly dispatching everyone I happened to come up against… however when I got the “bad” ending it made me completely rethink things. This time around I managed to complete the low chaos ending, which simply means I didn’t kill that many people in the process. The ending felt much more fitting for the sort of person I was trying to be. I had thought I was bringing justice to this broken world, when in truth I was just inadvertently killing a bunch of civilians whose day job just happened to be the City Watch.
Spreading the Madness
The other interesting happening of the weekend is that I convinced my friend and fellow AggroChatter to play some Destiny. Not surprisingly she is playing a warlock, and at first she tried out being an Exo… but has since re-rolled to Awoken. That was honestly the class and race combo that I assumed she would play, but I have been trying to keep at least a step behind in this process. I want to make sure she actually is enjoying the game, rather than me trying to force it upon her. Yesterday was pretty fun however with us tag teaming a lot of her missions. The big takeaway from yesterday however is that I had forgotten just how bad that first strike was. Both the Fallen Walker and Sepiks Prime feel like the most bullet spongey of bosses especially compared to the missions that I am used to on a regular basis. I walked into the strike with my level 40 and 333 light hunter… and even then it took forever for me to push down the walker. I actually ran out of ammo on several occasions and had to go running around the map hunting for ammunition. That feels like it is not the best possible way to introduce someone to Destiny strikes, considering the later ones are way more enjoyable and have more moving parts.
We have also been working on the recruit a friends quests, but it seems that it has abruptly ended with a quest telling her to level to 40. I think after that the quest continues with a Heroic Daily, or a Nightfall or some of the harder content. I’ve picked up several doodads along the way, but I am not sure if Grace has actually seen anything from it yet. I am going to be supremely disappointed if the rewards are only for the mentor. That has always been my frustration with these programs, because it always feels sketchy if all the rewards go to the person who is being recruited. The other thing I played this weekend was Chroma Squad which is the June AggroChat Game Club title, and was a pick by Thalen. Essentially this game is a tongue and cheek take on the Power Rangers, and involves a group of stunt people leaving their crappy studio to go off and found their own. This is a bit of a cross between a tactical combat game and a “tycoon” game in that you control both the action of the “episodes” that are being recorded, and the layout and crafting of your studio as you fight to gain viewers. A lot of the dialog is really funny, especially if you were like me and a little too old to fully get into the demographic of the Power Rangers. It is definitely worth looking into, but at this point I have not played a ton of it.