Good Morning Friends. This has been a bit of a weird week and I am not feeling super awesome. I am uncertain if I actually talked about it on the blog but I did something very stupid last week and ended up with several second degree burns. Thankfully however at this point they have all healed minus one spot on my forefinger. As far as gaming goes I have been alternating between wrapping up my play-through of Witcher 3 on the PC and playing the Xbox Series X. I am getting close to the end of the main campaign and am hoping I am on the right track for a very specific ending. In theory tonight or Saturday I should finish this up.
Apart from that I am spending quite a bit of time dinking around with Forza Horizon 5. I am not sure why the game is bringing me so much joy, especially since I seem to spend most of my time just driving around aimlessly. I’m installing it on my PC just to test a theory… but I am guessing I share everything between my XSX play sessions and PC play sessions. I have a handful of vehicles that I really enjoy, and managed to pull an orange rarity vehicle that allows me to fully customize the paint job. So I have this slick car with a two tone paint job that is purple fading to navy. Unfortunately I have been caught up in the moment and been forgetting to press the share button so you get this screenshot again.
This weekend Dad of War arrives on the PC, and I am probably going to be spending quite a bit of time playing that. I have it on the PlayStation but I remember playing it initially and thinking… that I really wish I could play it with a keyboard and mouse. We will see if it magically makes everything better for me, but regardless it is a game that I would love to play through fully. Forza has become my quick drop in and drop out game when I need a break from whatever epic saga I happen to be working on.
Apart from that I don’t have an awful lot to talk about this morning. I hope you are having a great week and end up having a phenomenal weekend.
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This morning’s post is going to be a little different from my usual fare. I’ve shared a bunch of details about my life over the course of the almost thirteen years of this blog. One that I am certain I have talked about before is the fact that in High School I worked for Sports Card and Comic shop owned by a friend of mine. The store was founded in 1989 which is a fortuitous year when it comes to sports card collecting, because in 1989 the Upper Deck Company released it’s very first trading card set and ultimately changed the entire industry. Over the course of the next few years until the crash began in 1992 we saw the average price of a pack of cards go from around $0.50 to around $3 as manufacturers stumbled over themselves to create newer and flashier sets to attract what seemed like a bottomless market of collectors.
If you are curious about this era you can check out this excellent article, but effectively two things happened. The first was extremely high print runs to attempt to meet the ravenous demand of all of these new “collectors”. The second thing was the fact that said demand was not legitimate. Most of this massive increase of collecting was brought on by speculators and those who got caught up in the wave of hype. For awhile baseball cards were considered to be a better investment than gold, and the crowd wisdom spawned countless weekend card shows where mom and pop stores like the one I worked at sold and traded huge volumes of cards. My weekends during this era were spent going to roadside ramadas and camping out a makeshift tradeshow floors looking for anything that could be bought cheaply or vendors that we could flip our own merchandise to.
When the market began crashing in sports card, so many people pivoted to another market that had been long overlooked… comic books. We were in the middle of some events happening in comics that were somewhat unique as well. We were well in the “hero artist” era of comics, where big name artists sold books more than the stories or characters that were in them. In late 1991 Tod McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio broke away from Marvel Comics to form their own imprint Image Comics. On February 1st a press release was sent out announcing the formation of the group and then follows a sequence of first issues that caused panic and frenzy in comic collectors.
Youngblood #1 – April 1992
Spawn #1 – May 1992
Shadowhawk #1 – June 1992
Savage Dragon #1 – July 1992
Wildcats #1 – August 1992
Cyber Force #1 – October 1992
Since our sports card business was failing… the shop pivoted hard along with the rest of the collectables market into comic books. Everything became valuable and rare from the insanely sought after Valiant comic first issues to a whole slew of gorgeous books from Dark Horse. What followed however was the same nonsense that happened in sports cards as Marvel, DC, and a slew of smaller imprints fought to capture the same sort of attention these first few Image books did. Before long we were in the era of Diamond Distributors touting another must buy #1 issue every single month and with it the nonsense of multiple chase covers and limited edition lenticular chroma plated covers. By 1993 this spectacle was in free fall brought on by the overwhelming nonsense surrounding the Death of Superman. If you want more detail then check out something like this article that talks a bit more about the crash.
Speculative bubbles are always going to be a thing. For years I have felt like we were on the edge of bursting in Magic the Gathering. This card is Wheel of Fortune, which is both an iconic card… but also one that held little value for a really long time. Specifically I am looking here at the Revised edition of the card… which is a truly massive print run as far as magic cards go. This card has seen its prices go from around $8 in 2013 to now selling for upwards of $300. I point this card out specifically because it has been the subject of several targeted buyouts attempting to raise the price of the card by lowering the available supply on the market. The thing is… it has worked and now what used to be a card I didn’t even bother sleeving is now goes in the “most valuable” storage of my collection.
We are now finally getting to the subject of today’s blog post. We are currently living through a bubble in video games that potentially out scales all of the bubbles I have talked about to this point. I was firmly a child of the 90s era consoles and as a result when I got my first job and started making legitimate money… I begin snapping up all of those consoles that I used to dream about owning. I mean as a kid I was lucky because I had a NES, Gameboy, SNES and eventually a Genesis. However I lusted after all of those fringe consoles that I never had access to and through short succession in the early 2000s I snapped most of them up in those early heady days of Ebay and Yahoo Auctions. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and now most of those systems that I snapped up for a few bucks here and there at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions are priced well out of the reach of folks. My complete Atari Jaguar for example that I think I paid $50-70 for initially now goes for somewhere in the neighborhood of $600.
The height of this nonsense though can be most clearly seen in the prices of loose copies of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember not too terribly long ago you could pick up a refurbished NES for $15 and almost always got a free copy of the original Super Mario Bros thrown in along with it. Now that raw loose copy itself goes for upwards of $20 and you can see on the graph above its rise in price really spiked in 2017. For me at least I collected games because I wanted to play them and get to experience the things that I never did as a child. As a result I ultimately realized that I am perfectly happy playing the games emulated as opposed to having to own a physical copy. However there is a whole other breed of collector that is seeking out the most complete copies of the games they can get their hands on.
Along with these genuine collectors seeking to rebuy chunks of their childhood or the nostalgia of walking through Toys R Us during the heyday of the late 80s, have come the speculators. There is a burgeoning business in trying to flip games for profit. What has added gasoline to this fire is that the lockdowns and the general shit state of the world right now has seemingly spurred on this massive desire to recapture a part of simpler times. Amazon and Ebay as a result have become a hotbed of folks looking to source games cheaply and sell them for ever increasing profits. There are many YouTube channels devoted to this reseller lifestyle of showing folks going out into the “wild” and getting good deals and then flipping them for double the money. The problem is I don’t think any of this is sustainable and I question what permanent damage is going to be wrought when this market crashes like was ultimately done to the sports card and comic markets.
The most disturbing thing about this particular bubble however is that it is being seemingly artificially propped up by a questionable relationship between a grading company and a private auction site. I can’t really do it justice but there are several sources that have reported on the alleged connections between Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and a number of shill bidders that have artificially inflated the price of graded games going up for Auction. The end result is we seem to be in this landrun of folks looking to get rich quick by flipping their old video games and feeling like they have a goldmine. I had noticed a bit of this myself as through my frequent trips to Half Priced Books… I noticed the $5 games turning into $15 games and more recently turning into $50 games. Retro gaming right now is a truly unsustainable mess and as a result I find myself sitting here waiting on the other shoe to drop.
I leave this last image as another cautionary tale. No one really wants video game collecting to be the next Beanie Babies. I will say one of the nice side effects of this bubble however has been an increased interest in emulation and with it better devices coming out to market. Similarly there are also way more affordable flash carts allowing you to easily play roms on the original hardware. Effectively these are all more viable solutions in part because the price of games is such that even if you do own the original game… it feels like you are risking your investment if you actually play it. We live in interesting times.
The post Waiting for the Burst appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
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.
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.
