My world is still very much in a fucked up state right now, but occasionally I get home early enough in the evening to play a little bit of something before falling asleep and starting the process all over again. Right now I am leaning heavily on two experiences, one of which I know EXTREMELY well at this point and with the recent release of the “Legendary” edition it Mass Effect 1 has represented the majority of my game time. I’ve played through the game a number of times at this point including playthroughs where I link all three games up together like I am doing right now. I am still in the first title but I am in that spiral of events that leads towards the end right now.
The key differentiator this time however is that I am playing as “FemShep” or the female version of Commander Shepard voiced by the very excellent Jennifer Hale. I opted to go with Vanilla Shepard because if given my druthers I am almost always going to create a red headed character when I am creating female characters. I know from past experiences with the character creator… that it is very easy to create something that looks kinda fucked up in cinematics.. my first Shepard appearance was this way so I thought it safest just to go with what the experts created for me.
The weird part for me right now with this playthrough, is that for the last decade I have been told by friends that I trust and admire… that I chose the wrong Shepard to play in picking the male Mark Meer voiced version. So I had this built up in my head to be this earth shattering experience that was going to change my perspective on the franchise. The truth is… it feels almost exactly the same to me? I notice the better graphics with the Legendary edition and better mechanics, but the voice actor doesn’t seem to really matter that much to me. I still find myself hitting space to speed up the dialog because I can read so much faster than the actor can deliver the dialog. I still have that general feeling of “yeah yeah, lets get back to the fighting” that I did with Mark Meer at the helm.
I’ve also been told that I would appreciate Kaidan Alenko more as a female character… but no he still annoys the fuck out of me. I think I might just hate Raphael Sbarge because I also hate Carth Onasi. Incoming spoilers if you have never played this game… skip the rest of this paragraph. Last night I played through Virmire and I already feel like I chose the wrong choice. Like Ashley Williams is racist as fuck but I take pleasure it telling her to shut the fuck up about it and stop being so horrible when the game gives me the option. Kaidan on the other hand never stops being this wet blanket character that I actively want to push out the airlock, and mistakes basic human decency as me wanting to snuggle up with him. Mass Effect is a game about me hanging out with a bunch of interesting Aliens and as a result I NEVER use any of the human characters in ME1. In ME2 we get Jacob and Jack which are both awesome… but still I mostly run around with a bunch of Aliens.
The Mako is much better than it was in the original release of this game… but the Mako levels are still the worst thing about the experience. Legendary edition significantly helped Mass Effect 1 feeling more in line with the rest of the franchise, but it still feels clunky but a more reasonable version of clunky. Instead of feeling like an odd throwback to an earlier time… it just sorta feels like playing a game from a B Tier studio like Spiders. The pretty is appreciated but I guess there was only so much they could do with the way the game felt and performed mechanically without doing a port to one of the newer engines.
I did apply a field of view mod to the game and you can see the difference between this screenshot and the one earlier. This game defaults to a FOV that is zoomed in way the hell too close and makes me feel claustrophobic. If you are interested the mod supports all three games, which should allow me to have a similar FOV in each of them. My basic takeaway is that I am having a lot of fun playing the game again and experience it all over with a fresh coat of paint. The sub summary is that apparently the voice actor and gender of the protagonist doesn’t matter that much to my overall experience. I couldn’t have a decent beard with “HimShep” so I really didn’t have much attachment to that version of the character or at least no more or less than I have so far with “FemmeShep”. Both were very much me playing someone else in a video game and not me creating a character that represented me.
The post Mass Effect Legendary Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. It has been quite a long time at this point since we last spoke. My world more or less turned upside down on on the 6th of May and I still have yet to really recover from it. This is one of those work crisis sort of situations, but the longer it grinds on the more of my personal sanity it takes with it. As of this morning I will be on fifteen days without a break other than coming home and crashing before getting up and starting it all over again. During this time I have just not been taking any time to sit down and write to you all, and that means last week I missed my first Mixtape Monday in this series. It was at that point that I decided that even if I make no other posts during the week I am going to do this one because the whole act of creating and fine tuning mixtapes is important to me for reasons I can’t fully explain.
For those who are not used to this construct yet, the idea is that I create a Mixtape through Spotify and YouTube playlists and approach it like I would have approached creating a physical Mixtape or burning a physical CD for someone back in the day. Various ideas come about that incubate their way into a musical track list. If you view them collectively you can glean a lot of information about my particular musical tastes, but more likely the specific time period they were shaped by. Once upon a time I was a flannel adorned, baggy jeans wearing, chain wallet having kid that was fully enthralled by the grunge music scene. This more or less hit during late high school and early college and shaped who I thought I wanted to be. While not entirely chronologically accurate, this mixtape is somewhat of a lovesong to the way that music felt.
Flannel and Chain Wallet
Like I said above, these are not all of the songs you are going to instantly associate with the grunge era. There is no Smells like Teen Spirit on this list for example and no Even Flow, but what you do have instead are some songs that were favorites of mine that got significantly less air play. The thing for me is that the grunge feel of music continued far longer than those few years when it was in vogue. So you have The Flys which not traditionally a grunge band is drift compatible with the sound. I was listening to Primus long before I adorned my first flannel, but it still mentally gets wrapped up in this same environment for me. So again this is an interpretation of my feelings about that era of music and less an attempt at a greatest hits collection. I mean there are already plenty of those playlists out there.
Big Empty – Stone Temple Pilots
Come As You Are – Nirvana
Winter Song – Screaming Trees
Got You – The Flys
Backwater – Meat Puppets
Rearviewmirror – Pearl Jam
Would? – Alice in Chains
Jesus Built My Hotrod – Ministry
Jerry Was a Race Car Driver – Primus
Cherub Rock – Smashing Pumpkins
Work for Food – Dramarama
Low – Cracker
December – Collective Soul
Jane Says – Jane’s Addiction
Spotify
YouTube
I hope my life settles down a bit and I can maybe just maybe return to regular blogging. In the meantime however since these posts are largely ready to go… I am going to keep doing this thing for now. That is I guess until I run out of playlists to talk about. I hope you are all doing okay out there. I am doing mostly okay but starting to be less okay as this drags on.
The post Mixtape Mondays: Flannel and Chain Wallet appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey friends. This is probably the longest lapse I have had in my blog and it isn’t over yet. I just figured I should probably poke my head out for a moment to let everyone know that I am mostly fine. I am going through something right now that is exceptionally stressful and having to just keep my eyes focused on what has to get done right now. Blogging while awesome and often times a relief valve, is just going to go away for awhile until I can come out on the other side of this.
I am extremely appreciative of the comments that I have gotten through various social platforms, but also I just don’t have the “cutlery” to respond right now. I am functional, still showering each morning and all of that. Essentially I am in a mode where it is consuming all of me. Not even able to come home and blow off steam through gaming because the games themselves seem somehow tarnished by the experience.
I hope you are all doing okay, and I look forward to reaching a point where I can tread water instead of drowning like I am right now.
The post I’m Still Okay appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good morning friends. Today is my Friday because I took tomorrow off and depending on my mood may be calling it part of the weekend. I am not sure which one of you commented that remembering random things is a sign of a midlife crisis, because lord is it hitting me with a vengeance right now. While getting ready this morning I remembered this one story from my childhood which is dumb but I am still going to share it. My entire life my father had the side hustle of a portrait photographer, this is in part why I tend to take those sort of things for granted because I effectively grew up in the darkroom and one of my first jobs was helping him photograph weddings. My dad gave his business a pretty generic name “Bill’s Photography”, and paid a local calligrapher to create a good clean masthead for him.
During the 90s when direct mail started to computerize some weirdness began happening. Always in the past he would get mail addressed to himself and mail addressed to his business, because a human being was effectively interpreting that business name correctly. However at some point this shifted and he started receiving mail for the mythical being known as “Bill S. Photography” which at the time I thought was the funniest thing that had ever happened on the face of the planet. On very rare occasions it would come through as “Bill S. Photograph” which was even better. So here I am this morning giggling like a madman as I am remembering this, and I am sure my wife thought I had completely lost it.
I think I might be done with Outriders. Recently I started leveling a Technomancer in part so that I could see how the narration and story worked with the female voice actor. I’ve now been through the entire story and I have to say if you are wanting to start the game fresh… absolutely go with the female character because the line delivery just works better. There are so many times when you are playing as the male character, that the line delivery makes it sound like he doesn’t actually understand what he is saying. I was never certain if this was a problem with the audio editing, or the line delivery itself… but after playing through with the female voice actor it seems like maybe it was the later.
Essentially I have reached this place where I don’t feel like going through the world tier grind once again with a second character. I think this is the general problem with the way levels and gearing works in Outriders is that there is zero “catch up” benefit to your alts. Sure I have a vault full of level 42 gear from my main character, but my alts can’t use a single bit of it because they have not “leveled” to the point of being able to use it. In theory this should have worked in a manner like Champion Levels in Elder Scrolls Online, where the World Tier and Challenge Tier are associated with your account and not your character, and once you finished the main story you would zoom forward to whatever your “Account Level” was at that point.
Outriders was an enjoyable but flawed game experience, which I guess is pretty par for the course with outings from companies who are not already seasoned in the looter shooter genre. Then again… I guess I could say the same about most of the other games in the genre as well, they are all sorta flawed experiences. I am hoping that Outriders sold well enough that we might see an Outriders 2 that makes good on the promise of this title, fixes some of the tonal issues of the story, and actually has a proper plan for what to do with players upon completing the final bit of story. They told us in no uncertain terms that this was not a “live service” title and I guess we should have believed them. There are a lot of things that need tweaking but I get the general impression that they are moving on to other game titles and not really that interested in anything that is not strictly a bug fix.
In other news… Fallout 76 is unabashedly a “live service” game and has seemingly found its stride. I have been enjoying myself greatly as I roam around Appalachia, which I really wish was easier to spell. At least with the Commonwealth it was two easy to spell terms jammed together, but maybe over time I will get used to it. That said it took me years to be able to spell shenanigans on the first try… and I LOVE that word. As of last night I am level 8 which means I am rapidly catching up to where I left off with the game the first time. The quests and the NPCs make the entire experience feel more enjoyable. The responder area is more or less intact with it being largely told through audio diaries, but what makes all of that feel more alive is that there are random human NPCs wandering the wastes adding flavor here and there and making it feel less dead.
I’ve built a somewhat nonsense house that cantilevers off the side of the main structure. Given that there is no actual gravity in this game… I didn’t have to do anything to make this more logical but I nonetheless added some support struts because visually it bothered me. Sometimes in a game like this I just keep building in a very “weasley house” manner until I run out of materials. Ultimately what I really need to do is pick up my camp and move it somewhere that works slightly better. For now it has been handy to be next to the Wayward while doing quests, but eventually I can see logic in uprooting it. I wish there was a way to do some terraforming, but you are pretty much stuck with way things are which is what lead me to have the second story wider than the first.
What I really need to do is sort out a more stable method of healing myself and a better source of water and food that don’t irradiate the hell out of me. I mean I have radaway, but I also know that is a fairly limited resource right now. I do pretty well in a stand up fight, but end up needing to heal pretty regularly afterwards. I did find an interesting option for grinding… up at the lighthouse on top of the mountain which seems to have a nigh unlimited number of rad toads. If I hang out in the house I can pretty safely kill those at range. There is also a quest up there for filling up the lighthouse with bioluminescent fluid that I should probably do as well. I wish there was a way to upgrade a piece of gear to the next level range rather than needing to craft a brand new item, but the game is what it is.
All in all however I am having a blast in Fallout 76, so I apparently was away from it the optimal amount of time for it to feel fresh and for the game to have evolved while I was away. Maybe at some point I can return to Outriders and have that same feeling.
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