The Cutting Room Floor Post

My Appearance in Astral Chain
This morning is technically part of my weekend, and as such I contemplated following “holiday rules” and ignoring a post. However since we are in the middle of Blapril that might set a bad precedent for the various participants. Instead this morning you are going to get a random assortment of blurbs that are sorta left on the cutting room floor. These are things that I don’t necessarily want to devote an entire post to, but still have things to say. For example here is a picture that my friend Storm sent me from Astral Chain because apparently in that universe I am a Toilet Fairy. I can’t say it is a profession that I would have chosen for myself, but I am also not going to fight it terribly hard. I should probably play Astral Chain at some point because it is either going to be right down my alley or I will thoroughly reject it… because I am not sure there will be much of a middle ground.
New Playstation 5 Controller Design
Unlike Microsoft, Sony keeps unveiling their system bit by bit… and up until this point we really didn’t have much to go on as far as stylings for this next generation. However if this controller is any indication for what the final system might look like I am completely on board. This controller reminds me of you took the vibe of Tron Legacy and combined it with the Robotic designs from Portal. It also looks like maybe just maybe they are making a design that is a little bit friendlier to larger hands. There is a problem I have with the Dualshock 4 that my pinky fingers fall asleep when I am gripping the controller because I am sorta having to tuck them back up and under to get all of my fingers on the sides. I’ve written about my favorite large hand controller designs before, but this is definitely a thing for me personally. Thanks to growing up on movies like Bladerunner… this is what I expected the future to look like and I am thankful to Sony for starting to realize that cyberpunk reality. If the new console is inexplicably orb shaped they will even score more points with me.
World of Warcraft Shadowlands Alpha
The Friends and Family Alpha for World of Warcraft Shadowlands started this week, and like I assumed I did not get an invite. There was a time when I was pretty much getting these like clockwork, but I feel like I have said enough bad stuff about the company and the game that I am no longer considered friend nor family. All of that said I am excited it has started because I actually do love World of Warcraft spoiler season. I have a weird stance on spoilers in general, because they actually enhance my enjoyment of the product and hype me up about it. Now I tend to try avoiding some of the story beats, but the various world building products that start leaking out and how the systems are going to work are absolutely candy for me to gobble up. On one hand I have to admit that I would have liked being invited because it would have been fun to test out the various classes. On the other hand I wouldn’t want to burn myself out on a game before it even releases as I have done a few times in the past. I have a lot of hope going into this expansion that it will start to turn the game as a whole around. Having been back the last few weeks I am remembering how fun it is at times, and how much enjoyment I get out of piddling around. The corrupted item system however can die in a freaking fire.
Destiny 2 on Google Stadia Fake Screenshot
Another thing that happened this week that is worth talking about is that Stadia went open to the public. Everyone can sign up for 2 months of free Stadia Pro to get in and kick the tires. The problem I have seen so far is that the tires might fall off. Stadia appears to be actively blocking any third party capture solutions, including even GeForce experience and as such you have to rely on their baked in screenshot functionality accessible by hitting F12. The problem with this is that the above image bears no resemblance to the image that I actually saw on the screen while playing the game. I am guessting that the image is saved on the server side where the fidelity is significantly better. That image is perfectly fine and if the game looked like that while playing I would consider this a rousing success visually at least. What the game-play instead looks like is more akin to what I remember playing Destiny 1 on the PS3 felt like. The nail in the coffin for me however is how the game performs. I specifically chose Destiny 2 just like I did when I was testing out GeForce Now because it was a game that I have deep experience playing and understand how it is supposed to be performing. I opted not to connect this up to my cross save so that I could experience the New Light intro. In it you pick up the Khvostov auto rifle, a weapon known for its smooth handling and honestly probably the ideal starter weapon. Trying to aim down the sights and take out Fallen felt like my mouse was jumping all over the place constantly. The cursor movement felt exceptionally jerky and random making it near impossible for me to stomach playing through even this first mission. I’ve stopped and restarted it a half dozen times, and for reference I am using the chrome based web client over a wired gigabit connection straight into my router. This machine has full access to my 350 Mbit internet connection, which should be more than cromulent for playing 1080p gaming. Contrast that to my experience with the same game on GeForce Now and I am questioning how viable Stadia is for pretty much any sort of shooter going forward. I am going to play some of the other game that are less demanding on fine motor skill and see how they work out. However in playing GeForce Now it was not that different than playing over Parsec streaming to my desktop upstairs on the same LAN. The sad thing is… I am pretty close to their ideal customer given that I play games remotely all the freaking time. However the end result just did not feel good… and it could be that the server is just overloaded at this point. However it felt the same at 10 pm at night as it did this morning at 8 am… which should have significantly different bandwidth footprints. Not my jam but I am thankful that I did get to play with it in person.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake
Well folks it is finally here, and as I write this I am hearing the soundtrack playing in the background. I am weird and have all of my consoles connected to a capture card instead of directly into the television. So that means while I am playing games I am actually doing so through the Elgato HD Capture software window maximized. It works for me because it allows me to capture footage directly while playing and just hit the print screen key in order to take screenshots. Anyways all of that nonsense aside I have Final Fantasy 7 Remake up and ready to go and a day off work to play it. However I have to admit now that I do… I am thinking about playing other things. Seven was not the pinnacle game for me that it was for so many others. I originally played it on the PC, and really the game that blew me out of the water was Final Fantasy 3/6 depending on when it was released. The first Final Fantasy game I played on the Playstation was the 8th, and as a result I probably have more affinity for it than I do this one. That said I do plan on playing it this weekend, just not sure how far I will make it.
Final Fantasy 7 Remake Soundtrack
With that we bring to a close my random list of topics. I am once again going to spin this around to Blapril for a moment, because quite often you are going to find yourself in this situation where you have a bunch of small bits of content that don’t really fit together. It is perfectly fine to do one of these cutting room floor posts where you clear out a bunch of thoughts that are disconnected. It helps greatly to break things up with images and captions like I have done, or to at least use headings to help the readers shift between them. As time passes and you get more used to creating content on the fly, you can pretty much take any assortment of things and make it work. My readers may however disagree with me and tell me that these sort of posts are crap, but they have always been a crutch that I could fall back on when I didn’t have much else to talk about.

Distraction by Cute Animals

A Josie Shaped Puddle of Fur
There are going to be times in your blogging career where you need to make a post but have nothing much to talk about. For me this is one of those mornings. It is effectively my Friday after having not really had a weekend last week due to issues arising that caused me to work Friday night, Saturday and Sunday. My brain is fully in tilt mode, and as such my goal is to do as little as humanly possible today. So in honor of “Topic Brainstorming Week” I am going to teach you all a not so well kept secret. Cute animal pictures are a reasonable replacement for actually having something to talk about on a given day. So this morning I am going to more or less ramble about how life has been going for me and share pictures of my cats. The other night I sat down on the couch for a few minutes and this happened.
Kenzie and Her Box and Mollie giving a mean Didgeridoo Solo
I’ve said before that we are living in interesting times, and I am sure in hindsight this will be something we talk about for the rest of our lives. However on other levels we are living in exceptionally dull times. The highlight of my week thus far has been managing to get a grocery pick up slot for tomorrow since there is always competition for those. The cats and my wife are in theory keeping me sane, or at least I hope this is the case because I am not sure I would know otherwise. At first the cats were extremely confused as to why the hell we were never leaving the house. Now I think they have more or less settled into the same routine we have. Side note it has been extremely important that we keep a routine, because without that day and night would sort of blend together. I still get up and go through the same routines as usual, it is just that I never actually leave the house.
Big Boy thinks he belongs to us
We occasionally go around the block and my wife spends a lot of time out on the front porch, where we are constantly visited by this guy. He has a proper name I am sure, but we more or less just refer to him as “big boy”. This is the same cat that I posted photos of earlier giving me headbutts when he wants attention. He always wants attention and he always wants food… because he seems to be a bottomless pit for both of those. He is adorable however and I am super happy that he comes to visit regularly, because if not for me I might never leave the house at all. My wife had been successfully getting me out each day on a walk, but right now I have a puncture wound on the bottom of my foot from stepping on something I shouldn’t have stepped on… and am now waiting on that to heal. It is fairly important to actually leave the house to do something each day however to remember that the sky and fresh air do exist.
Mollie vs the Hairband
The cat that always gets left out of these posts is Mollie, in part because she rarely sits in one place long enough for me to take a photo. She is exceptionally skittish and does not get along well with the other two, but can be sweet and affectionate at times. Mostly in our household she is that weird roommate that keeps to themselves and occasionally comes out to be friendly. I had to dig back a bit in my photos to find some good pictures of her that had yet to be shared. The thing around her neck is an elastic hair band from the dollar store… and Kenzie LOVES playing fetch with them. I came downstairs from my office one day to find her sitting up on our bar with one around her neck. I am guessing Mollie was playing with it, because I have seen her toss them up in the air and catch them when she thinks nobody is watching.
Mollie and the rug
Here is another rare photo of her laying on the rug, and I happened to snap it as I entered the room because I just happened to have my phone in hand. Moments later she darted away because that is a thing that Mollies do. I’ve never actually managed to catch her when she is snuggling, because the slightest movement and she bolts. This is sad because at this point we have had her for I think four years? There are days when it seems like we have made progress with her, and other days she seems just as skittish and crazy as the first day we got her. I take every opportunity however to give her attention, and being around during the day means I am getting a lot of those opportunities. She however is a cat that play bites and as a result I have several battle wounds right now.
Josie conked out behind my monitors
For the most part though things are going fairly well. I wish it was all over tomorrow, but I feel like I am better equipped for this sort of lifestyle than most. I am thankful that we have had a bad habit of buying shelf stable or freezer food and never actually getting around to eating it. This has served as a good opportunity to dig deep into our freezer and find things we had forgotten about. I am also super thankful for delivery services, which gives us the opportunity to feel like things are normal and we are just lazy not too scared to leave the house. I’ve been working remotely for a month now, and there really is no clear end in sight. I expect to be doing this same thing at the end of May as well and then MAYBE just MAYBE we get to go back to normal in June. Maybe leaving my house will be a birthday present. All things considered though we have fallen into a rhythm that is our new normal, and I am exceptionally thankful we are both healthy and still have jobs. It is at this point that I feel like I have to acknowledge those who don’t have one or either of those things. I am scared about how many people I might lose during this event, and if I myself die I want to make sure you all know how much you mean to me. I am thankful that you have all been along on my journey and love you dearly for the interactions that you share with me. Maybe that is too real talk to end a post on, but I have run out of things to say. I hope you all stay safe out there and we all make it through this on the other side. Now that I have bummed everyone out, just go back and look at the adorable cats. So again we loop back to the original lesson… adorable animals are a reasonable replacement for content.

Hunter Taming Luck

I’ve continued to poke around in World of Warcraft over the last few days. As I said yesterday I managed to get Belgrace my formerly-Tauren now Blood Elf Paladin to 120. After that I have begun the process of gearing through abusing the World Quest system to cherry pick rewards until I get my item level up. I started by mailing all of the Benthic gear I had laying around and then buying whatever I happened to be missing. I am still annoyed that there is no catch up mechanic for weapons, rings or trinkets. Thankfully World Quests seem to reward rings fairly often, but Trinkets and weapons still are a constant problem. In theory it even looks like the highest level crafted option I could find is 400, which is fine but also seems like a waste of resources when you are going to ultimately need to push past that. I look like a mess but I also cannot be bothered to spend the gold to fix that until my item level stabilizes a bit.
I’ve been enjoying tooling around by air as I zip between World Quests, and as a result I have been noticing levels of detail that you just can’t see from the ground. Over on the coast of Zuldazar there is an area near Xibala where apparently there is a giant dinosaur skeleton exposed in the side of the mountain. I would have had no clue about this, as from the ground it just looks like a normal hill. I am wondering what other gems can be seen form the air that are not quite visible from the ground. I will say that air travel helps a lot in the end game, but I still find myself mostly moving around on ground while leveling because you end up getting so much experience killing random stuff while you travel between point A and point B.
I had every plan yesterday to pick up and start leveling my Warlock, which ultimately was my next highest in level. However I am finding it sorta hard to get into the swing of leveling a caster right now. I flipped back to Demonology from Affliction and I think it makes me a bit happier. All of the Warlock specs seem super fiddly at the moment, when I am mostly looking for some “mash button, get reward” classes to level. I am sure I will rotate back to the Warlock at some point, but it is going to require a bit more time “back” in the game for me to get to it. I do not love being squishy.
So instead I flipped over to my Hunter which was level 79 and sitting in Netherstorm. I dinged 80 and swapped over to Pandaria over the other option which was Catalcysm. I do not love Cataclysm, and revisiting Pandaria has made me realize how much I actually like that expansion now that some time has passed. However it did not take long before I realized that due to the pet changes in Battle for Azeroth… I don’t actually have a tanky pet anymore. I WISH pets were account bound, so that you could share them among multiple hunters. Instead I decided to make an attempt at taming Arcturis the Spirit Beast bear. I probably spent every last bit of luck I had in the game because by the time I flew over to Grizzly Hills he was just sitting there waiting on me to tame him. I made passes through to see if any of the other Northrend spirit beast were up, and tamed King Krush along the way but came up empty on the others. So at least for now I am going to be in a mode of soaking up the loot from World Quests and then swapping over to the hunter and leveling. Having quite a bit of fun right now, and it has made me realize that I seem to really enjoy the end of expansions. I’ve come back at the tail end of most expansions and had a grand ole time thanks to the various catch up mechanics. I sorta wish I could play this mode of the game indefinitely. However I know an expansion will release and I will get caught up in the race of grinding to the top once more. I did not get an Alpha invite to Shadowlands, because I assume at this point they have gone out. Quite honestly I am not really sure if I would want one at this point, because on some level I kinda want to hit the ground running fresh. That said if I ended up getting one I am not sure I would be able to stop myself from logging in and playing with it. I’ve said enough bad things about Blizzard over the years that I am certain I am no longer on the “friends and family” list.

Regularly Playing: April 2020 Edition

Okay folks, this is Topic Brainstorming week for Blapril 2020, and I thought I would use that as an opportunity to talk about one of the things that I have traditionally done where I update you all on what I have been regularly playing. I use this opportunity as a time to update the sidebar of the blog and talk about my feelings about some of the games that are in heavy rotation. I have been exceptionally bad at keeping this updated over the last few months, but that isn’t really a new thing either because I have gone through serious lapses before. The idea is that you have a dialog with your readers and talk about what has been going on in your gaming life. This topic could be adopted to pretty much any subject, talk about movies you have been watching, music you have been listening to or any number of other hobbies. Since this is mostly a gaming blog I have simply chosen to call that aspect of my life out, and as such I talk about the games that are new to the list, the games that are still in regular rotation and the games that are departing the list. Last edition of this feature I also included the “ships passing in the night” feature where I talk about games that I have been enjoying but that won’t really have much staying power.

To Those Remaining

Destiny 2 – PC
Destiny sweet Destiny… I am not sure what is going on between us. You right now are hanging by a thread and are just barely making the list. I am not sure what it is about the seasonal format but it actually disincentives me from playing, because deep down I know I won’t have the staying power to unlock everything and squeeze every last drop of good from the season before it expires. I think mostly I just have a problem with expiring content. If the seasonal content allowed me toe work through it at my own pace like something along the lines of Elder Scrolls Online, I would feel significantly better about playing Destiny on a regular basis because it doesn’t feel quite so much like wasted effort. I hope they re-evaluate the seasonal formula and make the additions to the game stick around a little longer. If they maybe give you three seasons to complete the content before it expires that might go a long way towards making this feel like a better experience.
Diablo 3 – PC and Switch
I had an awful lot of fun at the beginning of the season hanging out with Grace and Byx and have since then sorta faded away. Diablo 3 is never really far from my mind however and I am sure at some point I will finish building a reasonable set and push toward the end goal. I did at least get the 4 chapters of the seasonal journey knocked out, but Set Dungeon Mastery right now is what is holding me up because it is the one step I hate doing each season. I end up delaying it until I finally can’t anymore and now it is holding up two separate seasons journey ranks. I just really don’t like being on a timer when I am gaming.

To The New and Returning

Animal Crossing New Horizons – Switch
This is effectively my very first Animal Crossing game, and as a result there has been a mountain of knowledge that I needed to climb in very short order in order to figure out what the hell was going on behind the various mechanics. This is a game that is exceptionally bad at explaining itself, and really this should have been their “Monster Hunter World” moment, because given that the Switch is an extremely popular console makes it attractive to a whole new generation of players. This should have been the title that they added a bit more scaffolding to the game in order to hand hold you through the process of engagement. There are so many things that I have had to take to external sources to figure out, and I feel like maybe some hand holding would have been nice at least to have an option to say “Hey I am a First Timer, Explain to me like I am 5 Years Old”. All of that said it is adorable and while I am not playing with the length I was in those first few days I am at least logging in each day to move the bar forward a bit.
Atom RPG – PC
This one is making this part of the list because I feel like there is a lot more here to explore. I have not finished the game, and I want to spend time once other things calm down a bit getting back in and roaming around. Essentially this poorly named game is “What if Fallout 1 and 2 were Russian themed and came out recently”. It is a re-imagining of the Fallout genre and plays like you remember those games playing, which is to say it plays much better than they do if you were to buy a copy from GOG and play it today. It can be brutally hard, and I seem to have more issue with ammunition than I remember having back in the day, but it did serve for several fun nights of gaming and I want to return to it.
Wolcen – PC
While I have not been playing this a lot recently, there is still a lot of meat on these bones and I want to return to it. Wolcen has released a bunch of patches and tweaks since I last played and it will be interesting to see if my tanky spin to win build is still functional. Wolcen is the best Diablo game we have gotten in recent memory and does a great job of sorta cherry picking the best features of both Diablo 3 and Path of Exile… in a formula that feels closer to D3. Essentially it is a recipe for what I like in an ARPG, but I realize for the folks that hold Diablo 2 up in high esteem it might not be their jam. I wish this was available on the Switch because as much as I like playing D3 from the bedroom… if this supported cross save and allowed me to progress my character while chilling out horizontally… this would become my new sleepy time jam.

Ships Passing in the Night

Star Wars Galaxies – Legends Server – PC
In the months since January I have been on a bit of a MMORPG Emulator server binge. The first of these was Star Wars Galaxies because my good friend Tam got into the game heavily, as it was one of his nostalgia jams from the past. For him this was a great experience about space combat in the Star Wars universe. Since I do not really like flight simulators, it was less enjoyable, but I did greatly appreciate the first few levels that felt similar to a WoW or an Everquest 2. Unfortunately once you have finished the first ten levels and the game opens up… this helpful scaffolding falls away and the “real” game was far less enjoyable for me. What was there instead was slow progression and the unpredictable difficulty curves that I remember from Everquest. I was happy that Tam was having so much fun, but I was a bit saddened that I really was not.
City of Heroes – Homecoming Server – PC
This lead me down a path towards one of my nostalgic remembrances… and the game I was likely playing while Tam was playing SWG… City of Heroes. I had so much fun with this game and for the full nostalgia trip, I opted to play a Katana/Regeneration Scrapper. The game itself was way different than I remember it being, but not in a bad way. The homecoming server effectively is picking up where the game left off when it was shuttered, meaning it is several years worth of patches past the point at which I actually left off playing. For the most part the game holds up well unlike SWG or Everquest, and I could see myself maybe returning to it at some point in the future when I am not deluged with other games I want to be playing.
Everquest – EZ Server – PC
Eventually this path of madness lead me back to the progenitor of MMORPG gaming (for me at least), Everquest. I tried a few different server options and eventually landed on EZ Server, which is a super fast progression and super low difficulty Everquest experience that lets me play tourist and revisit areas I loved in the game without having to deal with finding a group. I realize this largely defeats the purpose of Everquest, but I also don’t have the time or patience that I did when I first played this game, and as a result I am down for cheat mode. It was a lot of fun for about a week and then I wandered away like a bored toddler. I might return the next time I get nostalgic about Norrath, given how hard I have found it to ease back into Everquest II.
Mars: War Logs – PC
This is the third game by Spiders that I have played and it suffers from a lot of the same problems. However still like Greedfall and Technomancer there is something about the gameplay that I find compelling. They all sorta play like low rent Bioware titles, but they are doing a thing that Bioware no longer seems to be doing which makes me interested in them nonetheless. Mars: War Logs was the first game in a series that continued with Technomancer, and I could definitely see some merit in playing this game first because it does introduce parts of the Mars setting that never get explored fully in the sequel. That said it is a much more primitive gaming experience, and while I enjoyed it I could see a lot of the awkwardness turning others off. If you want to experience a spiders game and have never done so… probably start with Greedfall and see if it leaves you wanting more before diving in deeper.
The Touryst – Switch
This game was in heavy rotation for me for about a week and then once again as is my usual I wandered away like a bored toddler. It is really charming and interesting, and I liked the pace of feeling like I accomplished something each day. What I did not love about it were how many precision jumps that were required to complete some of the puzzles. The basics of the game is that you are visiting an archipelago and each island has a different them, as well as a central puzzle to solve in how to unlock its shrine. There is no real combat, and if you fail something you start over immediately at the beginning of the room that you are in so it allows you to fail fast and rapidly iterate through ideas. The voxel theme is a lot of what makes the game charming, and the engine that is running it is among the more impressive ones available on the switch. The lighting, the animations, the subtle details all add to the feel of it being a living and breathing world.
Doom (2016) – PC
It only took me four years… but I finally buckled down and finished my play through of Doom 2016 in anticipation of the release of Doom Eternal. It was a fun if nonsensical ride through a world of exploding demon corpses. I had an awful lot of fun pushing through the final bits of the game and would definitely suggest it to anyone who loved the earlier era and arcade shooters. I’ve not really had a chance to dig into Doom Eternal but it also seems to be a similar style of enjoyment. Right now I am buried under a bunch of games and I need to dig out before I really tackle anything else.
World of Warcraft – Retail – PC
During the crisis we currently find ourselves in… I’ve struggled to allow myself to sink into the warm embrace of a video game. I’ve had trouble disconnecting mentally enough to really allow myself to engage fully with another universe. As a result I have been in desperate need of something that I could more or less play while at the same time shutting off my brain and just giving it time to rest. World of Warcraft fits that bill perfectly because all of the patterns of engagement are more or less muscle memory at this point. I’ve been taking advantage of the experience bonus currently going on in game and the speed of leveling is pure nonsense. I took my Horde Paladin from 110-120 in a few days and hit 118 before I had finished the first zone I chose to go through, Zuldazar. Now that I have that character at 120 I am swapping over to pushing up my Warlock, while at the same time dipping my head in periodically to gobble up any upgrades from World Quests. I’ve also leveled my Paladin on Alliance side as well, since it was the closest to the level cap… and am in the process of working my way towards unlocking the allied races.

Summary

When I allow myself to go more than one month without an update it ends up being this mammoth post as I have a bunch of things that I feel like I need to talk about. My hope is that I can get back in the swing of doing these early in each month. I find it helpful to sorta clear the slate each month and talk about what is and is not seeing play time. There are a lot of games that I might play, but ultimately don’t feel like dedicating one of my daily posts to, and this gives me the space to address those.