Readjusting to Console Gaming

I talked briefly about this yesterday, but I very recently got my hands on an Xbox Series X. I’ve had a PlayStation 5 since November of last year thanks to being able to snag a day one pre-order, but the companion console has eluded me. Essentially I had planned on upgrading both given that I had an aging first generation PS4 and Xbox One, but fate and the great console shortage conspired to make that a bigger challenge that I had originally expected. I went for the PS5 thinking it would by far be the harder to get… because going into this console generation it had the greater share of the buzz. In truth however… I have watched as all of the AggroChat podcast has slowly managed to get their hands on PS5s throughout the year while I still came up short each time I went after an Xbox Series X.
Yesterday a friend of mine asked me how I got my hands on it, and in truth it was a lot of diligence and just sheer dumb luck. Ahead of Christmas I managed to get into one of the Walmart stock refreshes and held my mouth just right as it allowed me to actually make it through the check out process. The challenge then was that my unit was not slotted to ship until the new year… so I didn’t want to jinx anything until it was actually in my hands. Ultimately 99.9% of my notifications about when things are back in stock come from either the venerable Wario64 or Cheap Ass Gamer and I highly recommend following both accounts. My good friend Dusty swears by NS_Alerts and more specifically their discord server for getting product stock updates. Another source is NowInStock.net, but to be honest I have yet to actually be notified first by that site and still continue to get most of my deals from Wario or CAG.
Now I am doing what everyone does when they get a new machine of any sort… installing a bunch of games and trying them out. I spent a good chunk of the weekend sitting downstairs on the sofa playing assorted titles. I suck horribly at Forza Horizon 5, but I have to say one of the thing that I really appreciate about it is that it doesn’t make you FEEL like you suck. That announcer has to be one of the most positive voices ever in gaming and I have also since dialed down the difficulty level because quite frankly the only driving games I have played in two decades are Mario Karts. I really dig the huge open world playground feel of the game and that it gave me a new Bronco as one of the starting vehicles.
I spent some time playing the game preview of Anvil Vault Breaker, which sorta feels like if Risk of Rain were a Twinstick shooter with more persistent upgrades. I think that is one of the things that I dig the most about Game Pass is having this huge library of things that I can just try on a whim. One of the more interesting things for me is that I have not used a console in the living room for probably the entire time we have owned our house. I’ve always had a separate gaming space that was either my office or the loft before that, and I guess I finally understand the charm a bit of console gaming… as the rest of the world sees it.
For so many years I have shied away from dominating our main television, because I largely considered that to be communal space. The reality however is that we don’t really watch television apart from tuning in for the news. Generally speaking if we are downstairs, I am on my laptop playing a game remotely from my desktop upstairs and my wife is reading a book on her tablet or surfing the web on her laptop. Often times if the television is on… it is muted. So the truth is unless it is a very specific situation… the television is going unused. I was also a bit concerned about interrupting my wife by making things loud… but then realized that both the XSX and the PS5 have controllers that allow you to pass audio through to a headphone jack in the controller.
For years I kept things in my office, in part so I could capture video off the consoles if I wanted to. The truth is this is actually still a reason why I have been hesitant to move downstairs entirely. I am not sure WHAT I would be recording however. The only time I record videos these days are explaining concepts or showing a farming route… and that tends to be in some game that I am playing on the PC. For consoles I can capture screenshots well enough, and while you have to jump through a number of hoops to make it work… I still can pull those across well enough for blog posts. The other thing that is leading me towards spending most of my free time downstairs is that I have been remote now going on three years. My upstairs is beginning to feel like “work” and as a result when the day is over and I clock out… I tend to gravitate downstairs instead of wanting to spend more time in my office upstairs.
I’ve had an order in for Darkplates 2.0 since November, and in theory I should be getting mine sometime before the end of this month. Since I would be needing to orient my PS5 in the horizontal position… and the darkplates are shown to have greatly improved airflow for the unit… I might wait until then to migrate it downstairs. I think more than anything I am hoping that maybe shifting up things will make me actually start to take advantage more often of my consoles. They have never really fit my gaming life since the Dreamcast era, in part because I have been so focused on MMORPGs. I always have this desire to have the latest console generation… but then spend very little of my time actually using them. We will see what actually happens in the coming months and if this new style of play is just a fluke for me. Last night for example I specifically spent most of the night playing Witcher 3 again on the PC, because I really do want to finish this play through. The post Readjusting to Console Gaming appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

The Gunk is Great

Good Morning Friends! I’ve yet to really talk about it but I am now the proud owner of an Xbox Series X, that I acquired after much following of twitter alerts and after six months of this finally lucking into one. You might be asking yourself… but Bel, don’t you already have a PS5 and barely use it? Yes… that is in fact true but the heart wants what the heart wants and also Game Pass is a phenomenal offering and I miss out on a bunch of titles by not having an Xbox console. My old Xbox One 1980s VCR model just was not cutting it anymore and I needed to upgrade it to something more modern and viable. Additionally I am really wanting to play around with developer mode… but that is another story for another day. For those who may not have me on Xbox you can check out my profile here.
After setting up the Xbox this weekend, one of the first things that I started doing was downloading games that were available on Game Pass. One of the ones that I had really been wanting to try out is The Gunk. The tale centers around Rani and Becks a couple of what appears to be purposefully ambiguous terms… who happen to have a mortgage on a starship called the “Bunny” and refuse to each dinner without each other. You play as Rani who acts as the chief explorer and scavenger while Becks effectively is the pilot and maintains it and your robot buddy CuRT. You land on the planet in search of an energy signature which hopefully will lead to a source of fuel that you can scavenge and make some profit off of. What unfolds instead is a pure joyous exploration experience of uncovering a lost civilization and revitalizing this dead rock into a lush planet.
I’ve called this game a love child of Mario Sunshine, No Man’s Sky, and Ratchet and Clank. The first part of that comparison arrives as soon as you land and are confronted with this organic pollution that ends up getting referred to as “The Gunk”. This bubbling semi-sentient oil slick serves as an obstacle preventing you from moving forward. Thankfully you are equipped with your faithful prosthetic arm that happens to have a number of functional modes… one of which serves as a vacuum cleaner allowing you to suck up all of the bad stuff and clear the way. Once you have cleared an area of these pollutants it magically springs back to life and with it brings all sorts of flora and fauna.
All sorts of things happen once the gunk is gone, flowers grow and unfurl into bridges, vines spring forth giving you access to higher or lower areas, and plant life blooms giving you access to things like natural explosives and seeds that you can plant which will allow to to bridge gaps and reach new areas. This creates a really interesting gameplay loop of cleaning up the gunk, and then exploring everything that just opened up. In the above screenshot there is a plant growing that will ultimately flop over and serve as a bridge between two areas giving you access across the river.
While roaming the world you can gather a number of resources… which makes it feel a bit No Man’s Sky in that aspect as you collect metal, fiber, or organic matter with your multi-purpose prosthetic called “Pumpkin”. Scanning new life forms unlocks upgrades that you can then apply to your trusty tool. This is far less of a “talent tree” sort of situation and more of a series of unlocks that improve your efficiency of exploration and ultimately “combat”. The truth is I think over time you will have easily unlocked everything if you are spending any time trying to scan new planets or vacuum up new resources.
I threw combat in quotes because this isn’t a game with much ACTUAL combat. You do have a limited amount of “life” but for the most part any time you take a death you spawn back immediately where you left off. Combat instead serves more as a puzzle to solve with little gunk monsters that come from the larger free roaming gunk globs that you can suck up with pumpkin and then throw at other gunk monsters. Later there are also stationary turrets that you stun and run up on to pull them out of the ground before they wake back up. The game as a whole feels very “puzzle platformer” which is I guess where I get the Ratchet and Clank comparison, because movement and traversal matters and often times involves solving some minor puzzle to unlock a new pathway.
While exploring you can plant beacons in specific locations allowing you to fast travel back and forth between them and your base cap back at the “Bunny”. Generally speaking by the time I unlock a new beacon, I have gathered up enough resources or found enough new scans to unlock new ways to upgrade pumpkin. I can’t say that this is a terribly complicated game, but I do think it would be an ideal experience to play with kids. The game is not terribly demanding with the hardest interaction being to shoot a plant to knock off the part of it that explodes, and then pick it up and throw it to some destination. The game is exceptionally forgiving of death and if you fall from a jump, you start back where you leapt from without any need for backtracking.
Everything I have described is pretty basic, but what really sets this game apart is the interaction between its characters. Becks and Rani are very much committed to each other, and each time you are in danger you can hear the fear in Becks voice. One of the side effects of the Gunk is it keeps causing you two to lose radio communication, and each time you re-establish the link there is a palpable sense of relief. Storytelling through radio chatter is a pretty tried and true mechanic, but this game gets so much impact out of it. You come to love the pair and their robot CuRT… which at some point was programmed to say “You Got Served” but now apparently can ONLY say that…. regardless of the situation.
One of the complaints that I have heard about the game is that it is very short, somewhere in the four to six hour range. There are some that feel that this game was “designed for gamepass” and that it somehow devalues the experience. There are others that are seemingly scared of the very obvious queerness of these characters, and they can rightly fuck off with that noise. For me it is this amazingly heartfelt and charming adventure about two scavengers trying to find something that can make their lives a little less painful, and maybe afford a better meal that gruel. I am having a blast and am in the 5th chapter out of what are apparently 8 in total. I am very happy that I chose this as one of my first XSX gaming experiences.
Right now it is available through Game Pass as part of the subscription or you can buy it outright for $25. Unfortunately at this very moment it seems to be only available through the windows store. My hope is over time it will release on other platforms because this game really does need to get more love. It isn’t a game that will move any consoles, but it absolutely adds a lot of value to that Game Pass subscription. If you have access to it then I highly suggest you check it out. If you can stomach actually downloading something from the Windows Store, then you can check it out here as well. The post The Gunk is Great appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

AggroChat #372 – 2021 Games of the Year Show – Part One

Featuring:  Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey folks it is that time again, time for the Games of the Year show.  As is often the case we ended up with way too many things to talk about and could in no way fit them into a single show.  As a result I will bring you part one this week and next week it will conclude with part two.  We have nineteen games to discuss this year, which means we left some ten honorable mentions on the cutting room floor just because there was nowhere near enough time.  This is probably the most diverse list of games that we have compiled because as a group there was not a whole lot of overlap in the titles we played this year. Without further waffling I bring you the first round of discussion.

Topics Discussed:

  • How we Choose Games
  • Ghost of Tsushima – Director’s Cut
  • Cozy Grove
  • Boyfriend Dungeon
  • Celeste
  • Chicory a Colorful Tale
  • Deathloop
  • Deltarune
  • Haven
  • Psychonaut 2
  • Subnautica Below Zero
  • Tales of Arise
  • Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries
The post AggroChat #372 – 2021 Games of the Year Show – Part One appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Does Book of Fett Suck?

I am going to warn you my fair readers, today’s post is going to contain spoilery discussion about the latest Disney Plus series The Book of Boba Fett. At this point two episodes have been released, and I have to admit I have some serious doubts about this show. I find myself vacillating wildly between “I am just not feeling this” and thoughts of “Does this actually sucks?”. This morning I am going to talk through my feelings and thoughts, and since I often times use this blog as therapy… will maybe come to some grand conclusion or at least acceptance after writing all of it.
Firstly I feel like we need to talk about how important of a character Boba Fett has been to me throughout the years. My first action figure of Boba Fett was obtained through collecting Kenner purchase seals and mailing away… then waiting what felt like an insane amount of time before finally getting it into my hands. So my fear going into Book of Fett is that I might be a little too close to the source material. While I realize we are in this weird place of Disney officially exiling all of the content that came from before as “Legends”, Dave Filoni is two years older than I am so very much a child of this era and has been cherry picking the best bits. I rabidly consumed everything that I could get my hands on that was Boba Fett related from the Dark Horse comics to Tales of the Bounty Hunters collection of short stories.
I loved seeing Boba Fett return through the Mandalorian series, but also felt no shock in seeing him. In fact from the onset of that series and the moment that we arrived on Tatooine I assumed sooner or later we would see him. Boba Fett escaping from the Sarlacc Pitt is a well trodden story at this point for me, and while I was uncertain exactly HOW they would portray it… I knew that effectively Boba was still active somewhere. I have this very hard time cloistering everything I “know” from the Legends universe and not just expecting the “Saga” universe to play out in the same manner. So far the parts of the extended universe that worked… are starting to make their way into what is ultimately becoming this new Disney Star Wars Canon.
Seeing Boba Fett with the Tusken Raiders really was not a shocking revelation either. Again because of the vast archives of expanded universe… I know a shocking amount about the civilization of the Tusken Raiders through comics, games, and books and there is a big part of me that has just sorta had this “well duh” moment play out as I am watching Fett so far. It made perfect sense that Fett who always seemed like an honor bound bounty hunter… would fit in perfectly with a society of nomadic people who are also extremely honor bound. In the movies I guess up to this point we have had the Tusken’s portrayed as this roaming band of monsters, but they were always more to me personally. The Tusken’s are just the native race of Tatooine and survived the ecological fallout of the world by adapting to living under extreme conditions.
I think the core problem I am having right now with Book of Fett, is it feels like one of those catch up reels that plays at the beginning of a new season of a Netflix series. Everything that is being shown to me is either well trodden legends content or something that completely makes sense and is a logical sequence of events knowing the characters that are so far involved. What I don’t understand however… is why in the hell Boba Fett has decided that suddenly he wants to be a Crime Lord and thinks that he alone can take on the Hutts. We are spending so much time with flashbacks and covering content that I was more than happy to have hand waved away because it “just made sense” and spending little time so far dealing with what is happening in the here and now. I had hoped that we had dealt with most of the flashbacks in the first episode… but the second episode also largely was comprised with Boba Fett and the Tuskens.
The other core issue I have with Book of Fett is it is missing something that The Mandalorian had. There is this emotional fabric that the Mandalorian had that is just completely gone with Fett. Sure there is a buddy cop sort of relationship going on between he and Fennec Shand, and that is delightful when it is actually allowed to play out. What we instead get is Boba Fett being super confused why no one seems to fear him or respect his authority when he has done nothing really to earn that place of respect. Maybe that is the tale that we are setting up… Fett being overwhelmed and then having to earn his place as the Daimyo. I get the distinct feeling that Fett wants to effectively Unionize the crime syndicate and create this mutually beneficial relationship between him and his vassals. So I can see a redemption arc working if in the next episode he is knocked down hard by the Hutt Twins who arrived at the end of episode two.
I would be lying if I said I was not going to at least finish out this season. Having the appearance of Black Krrsantan was some serious fan service that I did not expect, and I think on some level a lot of this show is just supposed to be Boba Fett looking badass while we drift along on the fumes of “member berries“. I think the problem for me at least is I know Disney is capable of producing great short run series that help flesh out these worlds. Loki and Hawkeye for example were freaking pure brilliance. Similarly I have loved The Mandalorian because it was telling a fresh story in this universe that I love. The problem is so far Boba Fett is not really telling a fresh story but instead reliving bits and pieces of past stories that I already knew. I think Fett should be a lesson to Disney going forward, since they plan on resurrecting pretty much any character that is even vaguely capable of supporting a limited run show. The show has to stand on its own in order to actually be good, and can’t just be the television equivalent of a really cool looking action figure.
I will say Book of Boba Fett gives me serious concerns about how it is going to feel to experience some of these other shows that are coming soon. The Cassian Andor and Obi-Wan Kenobi solo shows are slotted to release at some point during this year for example. I think the core problem with Star Wars has been that unlike Marvel… they don’t have nearly as much source material to mine. For example if you point at any character in the Marvel Universe… and you can find literally thousands of unique story lines from the comics that expand upon that character. For Star Wars you have a few movies and then a string of books… a good number of which were read by old farts like me who were desperate for ANY Star Wars anything during the dark times. With Marvel they could mix and match and lean heavily on the multiverse theory to craft something that while assembled out of bits and pieces of existing story material… felt fresh and new. With Star Wars… my fear is that these solo projects are all going to feel like this one… with a certain measure of rehash required to catch everyone else up before actually crafting new additional stories. If you have made it to this point in my post… what are your thoughts about Book of Boba Fett so far? Are you also having issues with it, or is this just a “you are too close to the source material” issue. Drop me a line below. The post Does Book of Fett Suck? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.