I am still not feeling amazing, so once again I am going to lean upon the nostalgia that has been feeding me currently. One of the things that I mourn a little bit in this age of cable television, is the absence of specific dense blocks of cartoons. Saturday mornings for example started some time around 7 am and ended around 11 am with a solid block of new and exciting cartoons swapping every thirty minutes. Something similar occurred before and after school, and one of these blocks will have a special place in my heart.
Growing up we had three UHF channels, 23 which would eventually become a Fox Affiliate, 41 which eventually became a UPN Affiliate and 47 which was a weird religious channel. 41 especially was a magical place that tended to play the sorts of cartoons that I was really into at the time. I remember a very specific line up that included both Robotech and M.A.S.K. back to back… then if I kept watching got progressively stranger with Beverly Hills Teens and then for some reason Jim Baker’s PTL Club show.
I have a deep love of Robotech, but at the very least the Macross portion of that is a very well acknowledged and respected fandom. What effectively was one cohesive show to us kids as actually an edited and dubbed amalgam of Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross and Genesis Climber MOSPEADA. We instead understood them as three time periods of the same battle in Macross Saga, The Masters and The New Generation. Of the three the third part was my favorite because of Cyclone armor.
However if I am being completely truthful my favorite of these cartoons was M.A.S.K. and sadly it is a really hard thing to track down. For starters M.A.S.K. has one of the best theme songs of any of the 80s cartoons. I’ve linked it above for your own benefit, because I still get all sorts of happy tingles when I hear it today. The toys were also freaking amazing, and in truth were sort of a weird spin off of transformers. Instead of vehicles that transform into robots… they are vehicles that change up in some way to enter a sort of battle mode with weapons that pop out. In the cartoon the Masks themselves played a role granting the wearer a special power that was never really explained how any of that worked.
There is also something weird going on with the logo that never really made sense. I think the “Mask” shown is supposed to be that of Matt Trakker, because the color scheme fits. However it obviously looks nothing like either the mask from the animation or the mask from the toy. I think instead it was likely supposed to make us THINK of Optimus Prime, and maybe confuse kids who were already into Transformers into maybe buying this other toy line of vehicles that transformed. I mean to be truthful being a fan of both… I was probably way more into M.A.S.K. than I was the Transformers.
I’ve talked about my “cool aunt” before that somehow managed to figure out the toy trends long before we even knew the toys exist. She was the one who got my Optimus Prime for Christmas the year before the cartoon really took off at least on our affiliate stations. The same was true with M.A.S.K. because if my fuzzy memory is correct I believe I got it as a birthday gift and was completely blown away by how cool the toy was. I’ve always been partial to the color green, and given my love of Cyclone Armor from Robotech, I was super on board with this motorcycle that transformed into a helicopter.
Around this same time there was a building toy by Fisher Price called Construx that was, while not hte same scale in the general range of the Mask Figures. I remember as I got more of the toys I built these elaborate bases for the figures and garages for their vehicles. There were many a “defend the base” scenario as Venom attacked, and later when StarCom was a thing… everything got sorta mixed together given they were both around the same scale.
I loved the cartoon for Mask so much, and I was super into the central conceit that they were this group of secret agents and anytime there was a mission they would call upon the specific team members that had the powers needed to solve the problem. Unfortunately that was never really how it worked, because recently I have been watching the show again and I am noticing that for the most part Matt Trakker the leader and Bruce Sato and Alex Sector the team that drives the vehicle Rhino are pretty much on every single mission.
I think looking back, why the cartoon felt so good to watch and why it hooked me in such a significant way is that it had a self insert character in the form of Scott Trakker. So often in the cartoons of the 80s… if there are kids involved they are the ones that are constantly getting into trouble and needing to be rescued. If that is not the case then they serve as the comic relief character, which also feels odd at times. Sure Scott got into plenty of trouble, but they gave him T-Bob a robotic companion that serves as this the Orko or Snarf of this series, allowing Scott to be the brave one that often times saves the day through his misadventures. It was super easy to transplant yourself in the role of this character while still being able to play along as the various team members.
Lately I have really been wanting to watch the cartoon, but the problem is… there are seemingly issues with the distribution. It has been released in two forms so far, a 12 disc dvd set and a “volume one” DVD release that never got any follow up releases. In both cases there are issues, the 12 Disc set claims to be the complete series but includes only 65 episodes and is missing the 10 episode short run season 2. This has also been out of print for some time and I have seen it going on ebay for upwards of $250. The “volume one” is available but only includes 11 episodes, and without any subsequent releases it kinda makes it a useless product.
In my travels however I came across someone who has ripped all 75 of the episodes and uploaded them to YouTube. The quality is not great, and I hope at some point we get a proper release of this series, but for now I am happy enough. I may or may not have downloaded all of the episodes so I have a local copy, and was able to pull them in 480p. Honestly I spent the other night watching several of these and they mostly still hold up. It is absolutely peak 1980s, but so am I at times. Needless to say it is still very watchable and I legitimately think modern kids would probably even be into it.
In my recent tripping down memory lane, I uncovered that apparently there was an unofficial follow up to mask that took place in 1996 called Vor-Tech. The vehicles even looked like maybe they recycled some pieces from the later Mask toys, specially the Desert Striker looks quite similar to one of the later generation Mask releases. While looking functionally different, the Rattler effectively does the same thing that Gator does so there was at a minimum a recycling of ideas. I was in college during this time and completely missed the existence of this thing, which is sort of a bummer. I was collecting the new releases of Star Wars figures at this time, so I probably would have tried to pick some of these up for sheer nostalgia if for no other reason.
Another thing that I have noticed going back and watching these… I am absolutely certain that Bruce Sato and Alex Sector were a couple. Sure Hondy Maclean and Buddie Hawks were paired up in the Firecracker but that made sense given that there was the Truck and attached Motorcycle, and later in the series/toy line they both got their own unique vehicle in the form of the Hurricane and the Wildcat. Bruce and Alex were always paired up in the Rhino and were never dispatched separately, in a vehicle that in theory only ever needed a single pilot. Alex as the bald bear and Bruce his little twink boy toy, and no one is going to change my mind about that.
Mask toys have always been somewhat of a rarity, and as a result command a premium in the aftermarket. However recently there has been an interesting find. Someone was opening up an old warehouse and stumbled upon a bunch of new in box Kenner merchandise from the 80s including case after case of Mask toys. I remember after the second series it became exceptionally hard to find Mask stuff, and if my memory serves me Walmart and K-Mart stopped carrying it entirely. It makes me wonder if this hoard of product form Chile was just stuff that never made it into the distribution system because a bunch of the vendors backed out on the line. Whatever the case, it is really interesting to see this sort of thing pop up. I doubt I will buy any of it, but still very cool nonetheless.
The post Ma Ma Ma Mask appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning is going to be a bit of an odd post, because yesterday was a bit of an odd day. For the last few days I have felt myself getting sick. I think it is just a combination of ragweed pollen and the smoke blowing in from the fires that have combined to make my lungs feel like hell. When I start to get sick however I start to become significantly more susceptible to nostalgia, and then yesterday the Dune trailer dropped tipping the balance towards reliving segments of my childhood. First off if you have not seen the trailer then you should probably stop whatever you are doing now and watch it. Here for your benefit I will embed it right here.
First off one thing you need to understand is that Dune plays a very pivotal role in my psyche. There are a handful of pieces of fiction that have served to shape my tastes as an adult, and high on that list is the world crafted by Frank Herbert. I live in this weird place of liking pretty much all of the adaptations of Dune to date, but the David Lynch film and its iconography will always have a special place in my heart. I think that is because I saw the movie before I went down the deep rabbit hole that is reading the novels. I was captivated by the visuals I saw on the screen and completely engaged with its amazing soundtrack by Toto. Again if you have never experienced the soundtrack I will embed it here for you to listen to.
I’ve talked about this before, that I grew up without cable television. So as a result my prime motivation when I was anyplace with that magical service was to soak up as much culture as I could in as short of a period of time as possible. In 1986, my aunt was pregnant with my cousin Christopher and this involved us travelling the two hours down to their house a lot during the pregnancy and especially in the months following it as my mom helped out with various things. They had HBO and were perfectly cool with giving me total control of the television, and during one of these binges of culture I stumbled across the movie Dune.
Towards the end of the movie my Uncle Ron ended up on the sofa with me, and at the end he could see that my little ten year old mind was blown. He gave me a little wise nod and said something to the effect of if I liked that, I should really read the book because it is much better. He wandered off into the bedroom for a moment and returned with an extremely tattered copy of the novel Dune. This began a bit of an obsession of mine that honestly still continues to this day. I was completely enthralled by any book that was so arcane that it required a very thick glossary in the back in order to decode it’s magic. I poured over it until I understood every last bit of it and could effectively live within this world.
This lead me down a path of tracking down copies of all of the other novels in the series. These are not my copies, but are each as I remember them… minus the copy of Dune. My original tattered copy was a significantly older printing. The thing is Dune not only became a thing that I was obsessed by, but also a point of reference between me and my father. He had always been a fan of science fiction, and he is the one that first introduced me to Doctor Who. I however was the gateway to him experiencing the worlds of Dune, and he voraciously tore through all of the novels. He and I both sorta have this proclivity for digging in when we find something we like and consuming every bit of content that is available on the subject.
So now we arrive at the trailer reveal yesterday. As I have said before I have enjoyed all of the Dune releases to date. My ultimately blend would be the story telling of the SyFy miniseries blended with the visuals from the David Lynch film. I think my ultimate struggle with the miniseries is that it felt at times that they tried entirely too hard to look nothing like the movie. As we approach this new rendition, it is very much feeling like it is a movie that is aware of everything that has come before it, and that it is cherry picking the best elements of all of the above. I realize I could be setting myself up for supreme disappointment, but I am choosing to be hopeful.
The casting choices so far are just brilliant. I am so on board with David Bautista as Glossu Rabban. I am also completely on board with the overall style they are going for the Harkonnen aesthetic. I would not have thought of Jason Momoa as Duncan Idaho but it absolutely works, as does Josh Brolin as Gurney Hallek. However that said my heart will always belong to Patrick Stewart and his nine stringed Baliset. I am I think most into Zendaya as Chani and the gender flipped Liet-Kynes. Though again I will always have a deep love and appreciation for Max von Sydow, but I am fully on board with a reinterpretation of the character. Piter De Vries was always one of my favorite characters, and I am hoping that the new rendition can hold a candle to how amazing Brad Dourif was in the Lynch film.
One interesting note that my friend Jason pointed out, is that in many of the scenes it seems like inspiration was taken for vehicle designs from the DOS games. Once again like I said this movie seems to be picking and choosing the best bits to craft together into an homage to everything. I am hoping it works, and I am hoping that the whole is better than the sum of the parts. Based on everything I have read it seems like Denis Villeneuve understands the gravity and difficulty of what he is trying to do. This arrives in the theaters in December and I already have plans with my friend Vernie to go see it at the best theater we have in the posh screening room. I feel like this is going to be a movie that deserves that sort of treatment.
The post The Importance of Dune appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Yesterday after making my blog post there was an extended back and forth that took place on twitter between me and my friend Pete. When I wrote the post yesterday, I largely considered it to be a positive review of Avengers. However Pete latched onto the fact that I said from the start that this was not a “must buy” game. I feel like I need to delve into that statement a bit further, because one of the things that you have to take into account is that I poke my head into a lot of new games. On a pretty regular basis I will have friends ask me, if this is “the one” aka the game that is going to unite the tribes for an extended period of time.
I have disposable income that I can use to purchase games without really impacting my quality of life. That is not the case for a lot of my friends and there are many folks who can’t afford to pick up a game on the day it is released, or in this case the day that the pre-release happened. It may be two or three pay periods before there is enough free cash to be able to purchase a game. So often when that mythical date finally comes around that someone can buy their way into an experience… that the zeitgeist has already moved on past it. So in the case of Avengers, I do not think this game is going to be something that gains permanent traction, at least not without a good deal of content being released.
I have no clue what the case is on consoles, but at least right at this moment it does not have great traction on Steam. The all time peak was 4 days ago when the game had just over 31k active users. The 24 hour peak was 19,602 so a fall off in concurrency of 37% since launch and the game is effectively nine days old. I’ve not played multiplayer, as I am largely focused on the core single player gameplay loop with bots, but based on the experiences of friends it seems that maybe everyone is doing this thing? The queue times are rough, so unless you are bringing your own team with you, fast groups are not a thing that is going to happen.
All of these things are why I am saying that if you are looking for the next big MMO, then this probably isn’t going to be it. That does not discount the fact that I think the main story is extremely good and that I am still enjoying myself. Honestly based on the conversation with Pete it comes down to a difference in perspectives. I tend to latch super hard onto a single game and play the shit out of it until I reach a point where I disengage because I ran out of content. I’ve already begun to encounter the frayed edges of that now, because as of last night I have collected what is effectively an end game set of gear. I will likely jump around to some other characters in the coming days, but I am not sure how much alting I am going to be down for given that I have clear favorites and then heroes that I cannot stand playing as like Iron Man.
As I talked about yesterday, the highest gear that drops is 130 power level. After that you can raise that gear 10 points if it is epic or legendary, and the Major artifact will add another base 10 points to your power rating. So if I pour a copious amount of materials into the full legendary armor set and then my two minor artifacts and grind out the rest of my Major artifact I will be at 150 the gear cap. This will of course take a really long time, and will be nowhere as enjoyable as actually getting things to drop. However I have effectively reached a point where Captain America is “done for now”, allowing me to shift over to other characters and try bringing them up to level 50.
I thought I would share my farming run with you, because I am absolutely abusing the system in how to get drops. There is a mission called Stark Realities that has a few side objectives that are actually more valuable than completing the mission itself. Avengers uses a check point system, and unless you have completed any objectives you can exit out of the mission and start it again to keep farming the side objectives over and over. Sure this is degenerate gameplay, but it also was a fast way for me to raise my gear level. Lets just say that I did this for science, and for the ability to write about it.
There are three areas on the map that have things that you might be interested in, but after having run this several times I feel that it is best to focus on two specific side objectives for the maximum amount of benefit. The first is the hidden shield vault, and when you drop into the mission you are going to turn left and follow the zone wall around until a tracker appears under the objective on the left hand side of the screen. You could of course play hotter or colder until you find the switch on your own, but it will always be located in the same place so run towards that single solitary tree in near the center of this clearing.
Once you hit the switch the shield bunker will open and inside are two chests, one of which will contain a guaranteed piece of gear and a guaranteed minor artifact. I’ve never seen a legendary minor artifact, so it seems like the best possible thing you can get here is an epic which I have. After this you are going to follow the icon to the mission objective. This route is going to take you in from the side and will end up causing you to miss a bunch of packs, which in this case is a good thing given that you can effectively run all the way to the shield bunker without killing anything.
When you get to the objective a pack of 5 elites are going to spawn in around a bunker. You are going to completely ignore this pack and try and avoid them while going through the bunker gate and then hanging a hard left to go down the path shown in the above image. This will eventually dead end into an area with two side objectives. The first is going to be a single elite that has a guaranteed item drop, and the second is a chest that appears behind one of those destructible walls. Since I have been playing Cap, and there is seemingly no way to break down those walls I have just been farming the mob that has a guaranteed drop.
Once you take out that Elite, it will drop something and will be either a blue, purple or yellow. Once you wrap the pack up you can hit escape and choose the “Return to Quinjet” option allowing you to reset the mission and start it up again. When I was at my peak efficiency, this run was maybe taking two minutes to complete, and technically you can bail as soon as the elite drops. I however preferred mopping up the pack that spawns in with it because I have actually seen a significant number of bonus drops that way. Sure it is repetitive, but it is the sort of activity that is perfect to do while watching something on Netflix because it requires very little focus.
As for leveling other characters… sadly the most efficient way of doing so seems to be repeating the Harm missions over and over. Everything in the game gives you experience, even these tutorial missions. It seems like experience gain is not impacted at all by the difficulty that you are attempting, so that means your best bet is to queue up for anything with a large volume of mob encounters on the lowest possible difficult. You won’t get any gear drops in the Harm challenges, but you will get one to two levels per round until you get fairly high in level. At this point you can bump things up to Harm IV or Harm V which reward more experience, not because of the difficulty but because they spawn in a lot of mini boss type encounters.
I attempted to do some of this on Thor yesterday, and while I was perfectly fine grinding for loot… grinding for experience bored the shit out of me. So I figure I will probably go back to running missions because at least in that way I am getting some gear drops as I continue the leveling process and have a chance of maybe getting wardrobe unlocks through the rare and epic pattern drops. I’ve never seen a legendary pattern drop, but for all I know that might be a thing that exists in super rarity out in the wild. Grinding the levels also gives me a more reliable source of item materials which then can be converted into power level on Cap. For me at least that seems to be the best option, but for sheer speed… those Harm missions cannot be beat.
The post Legendary Farming Run appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I spent a significant amount of my weekend playing Marvel’s Avengers, and this morning I am going to talk about it. Last week I talked a bit about my initial impressions of the launch and getting my hands on the full game, and this morning you are going to get more of a 30 hours in view. Lets start off with a statement that I think folks are probably trying to sort out, and that is is this a must buy game? I can give you an unequivocal no. That does not mean it is a bad game or an un-enjoyable game, but I would never throw this on a list of must experience games ever. If you have limited funds and even more limited time, then you can probably safely give this game a pass for now.
Marvel’s Avengers by Crystal Dynamics is an attempt to take the huge stable of Marvel Comics characters and convert them into a reoccurring service game. The thing is… I have a soft spot for this concept because I loved Marvel Heroes the now long dead Diablo-like game from Gazillion. Really to be truthful I just want that game back, but unfortunately that isn’t in the cards. What you have with Marvel Avengers is a somewhat generic albeit competent hero brawler that sets itself in the general mission structure of a Destiny Strike. You take control of one of the heroes, drop into a “War Zone”, complete a sequence of scripted objectives, and win some loot in the process.
Where the game shines however is in the story content. That is the piece that Destiny never really got right. The first ten to twelve hours of gameplay are spent following a sequence of content through what is effectively the heroes journey of Kamala Khan, aka Ms Marvel. She goes from fangirl to glue that holds the team together and becomes a powerful hero in her own right. I personally think that it is worth the price of admission just to experience this story, but I also buy way more games than the average person so my barrier of entry is somewhat low. The story is essentially a “getting the band back together” experience, as you spend your time effectively rallying the troops. The events of “A Day” caused not only the world to lose faith in the Avengers but for them to lose faith in each other.
After the main story arc is finished, the story continues on a little bit further as you are asked to help Shield and the Inhumans on some side content. I am now working through the last bit of that, which I believe unlocks a new bit of story content. It should be known that I am playing entirely solo and in that mode the game includes a bunch of NPC Avengers to come help you complete missions. However based on my reading and watching of content, it seems like the Single Player and Multiplayer experiences are effectively the same with the insert of more humans rather than bots. Now we are going to get into one of the bad aspects of the game.
While you play through the story it feels like you are visiting a number of fairly unique set pieces. However once you enter the less directed Warzone play portion of the game, you quickly realize that there are something in the neighborhood of a half dozen maps in which every bit content takes place. Sure an individual Warzone might shuffle the elements, but you are going to memorize a good number of the venues quickly. The other challenge is that the mission lengths seem to vary wildly from dropping down a fighting a single elite pack to being lead through a sequence of five or six things. I am sure once I have memorized what every mission entails this will feel a little less weird, but for right now it feels a little jarring and makes it very hard to guesstimate how long something is going to take.
During the mission you do a lot of head hopping between multiple characters, but once I was given control I’ve spent the vast majority of my post story game time playing Captain America, who was my main in Marvel Heroes. As of last night I have hit the level cap of 50, which is the point at which you unlock all of your talent points, and I have my power level up to 136. Based on what I am hearing the power level cap is 150, which is achieved through wearing a full set of 130 yellow gear that you then upgrade to 140 with materials. The last 10 points is gained through the Major Artifact which serves as this games equivalent to the Destiny seasonal artifact and will give you those last 10 points.
I am certain at this point that there will be a limited number of things that will give me light levels… sorry I mean power levels. This very much follows the Destiny template, and it is a grind that I am deeply familiar with. The biggest challenge here however is that there just doesn’t feel like there is a lot of meaningful content to be grinding. Each faction gives you a daily mission to take down a boss, but as of right now there are 2 villains comic book villains in the game and 2 AIM mega robots that you can fight. Combine that with the six or so available map types, and the experience gets to feeling really repetitive really quickly. My hope is that we get a pretty rapid cadence of content drops, because at the moment the content available is feeling fairly threadbare.
At the moment I have spent the most time playing Cap and Kamala, but a close third would be Thor. They all command sufficiently differently to make them interesting, but after having ground Cap to 50… it seems like a big ask to grind them ALL to 50. For reference I had all of the heroes above level 5 by the time I finished the story and I believe had cap to around 15 and Kamala to around 10. So suffice to say that the story is not going to get you anywhere near the level cap, and if you want to do this thing it is going to involve a lot of grinding warzones. The levels come rapidly enough, but at this point I think I am around 30 hours into the game and just now have my first character to 50.
Marvel’s Avengers has some good bones, but I guess time will tell if this turns into a really great game or not. The story is solid and as I said before for me personally that was worth the price of entry. I just question if there is enough there in order to keep players engaged between now and when new content drops. The challenge cards I think were designed to be more of a thing than they really feel like, because you can progress them extremely slowly each day and they ask you to play in a very specific fashion to get that progress. I wish you could effectively grind your way through them, that every activity would add a little bit of progress.
So I spent my weekend playing Avengers, but in my heart I was just wishing that I could be playing New World.
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