A Long Time Ago

… in a Galaxy Far Far Away there was a game that was beloved by a group of players for the sort of things that it allowed them to do. I was not one of those players. While I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, I somehow missed actually playing the game when it was in its heyday. At the time it came out I was somewhere between my pre-World of Warcraft scrawl of games which were Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon: Empire if Istaria, and City of Heroes. The return to what seemed like a more Everquest experience and combat system did not seem at all interesting to me, and I was buffered by the fact that none of my active gaming group at the time were playing it either. However in the years since I feel like I missed a pivotal gaming experience.
Some years back I heard about an emulator server called SWG Legends, but at the time it was a less than retail experience and one largely that required you to know what you were doing before really being able to mess with it properly. Seeing as I never played retail I was completely unaware of how best to get in and experience the game, so as a result I bounced pretty heavily off of it. However in the several years that have passed SWG Legends has turned into what appears to be a full retail experience, even including in game events like Life Day. Recently my friend Tam went on a journey back into this game, and last night for some reason I decided to follow in his footsteps and give it a proper try.
The first challenge is getting Star Wars Galaxies up and running because it has not been online or available for purchase for quite some time. Essentially you have a few options in front of you, the option that the server operators would like you to take is to go onto ebay and purchase a set of the original discs. I did this years ago and picked up a set for $5, but the popularity of this emulator server has seemingly driven the price up to somewhere in the $50-$150 price range. The SWG Reddit has some links in the sidebar to a few options which will allow you to download the three isos directly. After acquiring and installing the original Client, you will have to grab the SWG Legends Launcher pictured above which will patch your client up to the correct version as well as allow you to patch in some upgraded assets. Your first step however should probably be going onto the SWG Legends forums and signing up for an account, because there will be some lead time before one of the volunteer admins authorizes your account which allows you to log in and play the game.
What follows is a fairly modern tutorial driven experience walking you through the first ten levels of your character while exploring a space station. The interface took some getting used to, namely the swapping in and out of mouse-look mode while hitting the alt key. I did some research looking into the combat class that was the easiest to solo, and most of the sources lead me towards a Commando, and as such Belghast Dorgastu the Mon Calamari Commando was born. I am not entirely certain how to play the game to be honest, but left click fires my primary attack and right click fires a charged bolt and with those two things I managed to limp my way to level 10 while following the quest chain and get off of the station.
The piece that was not down my alley at all however was space flight, and as such I plan on taking shuttles wherever I need to go even though the tutorial gave me a perfectly reasonable ship. The end result is more flight sim than I care to experience, so if you have long played that style of game then it might be your jam. Tamrielo grew up playing flight sims so it was absolutely his style, whereas for me anything more realistic than Star Fox is not going to be for me when it comes to space combat. Realistically you need some sort of a controller because the keyboard controls were nonsense trying to do the dog fighting quest against the black sun pirates.
I’ve now allowed myself to get mixed up with the Hutt Cartel and am aligned to the rebels which I am assuming is following a different path than had I chosen to work with the Empire. The first planet is Tatooine and Han Solo unceremoniously deposited me there. I have a speeder though which is cool and am tooling around the dunes completing objectives. All in all it is a pretty fun experience and it is very interesting to see the missing link between what SOE was doing with Everquest and the decisions they ultimately made with Everquest 2. The only bad bits are that the game is native 4:3 resolution and as a result wants to run at 1024×768. I will have to do some research to see if there are ways to mod that up to something more modern. My evening exploring Star Wars Galaxies Legends server was most definitely time well wasted.

A Long Time Ago

… in a Galaxy Far Far Away there was a game that was beloved by a group of players for the sort of things that it allowed them to do. I was not one of those players. While I beta tested Star Wars Galaxies, I somehow missed actually playing the game when it was in its heyday. At the time it came out I was somewhere between my pre-World of Warcraft scrawl of games which were Dark Age of Camelot, Horizon: Empire if Istaria, and City of Heroes. The return to what seemed like a more Everquest experience and combat system did not seem at all interesting to me, and I was buffered by the fact that none of my active gaming group at the time were playing it either. However in the years since I feel like I missed a pivotal gaming experience.
Some years back I heard about an emulator server called SWG Legends, but at the time it was a less than retail experience and one largely that required you to know what you were doing before really being able to mess with it properly. Seeing as I never played retail I was completely unaware of how best to get in and experience the game, so as a result I bounced pretty heavily off of it. However in the several years that have passed SWG Legends has turned into what appears to be a full retail experience, even including in game events like Life Day. Recently my friend Tam went on a journey back into this game, and last night for some reason I decided to follow in his footsteps and give it a proper try.
The first challenge is getting Star Wars Galaxies up and running because it has not been online or available for purchase for quite some time. Essentially you have a few options in front of you, the option that the server operators would like you to take is to go onto ebay and purchase a set of the original discs. I did this years ago and picked up a set for $5, but the popularity of this emulator server has seemingly driven the price up to somewhere in the $50-$150 price range. The SWG Reddit has some links in the sidebar to a few options which will allow you to download the three isos directly. After acquiring and installing the original Client, you will have to grab the SWG Legends Launcher pictured above which will patch your client up to the correct version as well as allow you to patch in some upgraded assets. Your first step however should probably be going onto the SWG Legends forums and signing up for an account, because there will be some lead time before one of the volunteer admins authorizes your account which allows you to log in and play the game.
What follows is a fairly modern tutorial driven experience walking you through the first ten levels of your character while exploring a space station. The interface took some getting used to, namely the swapping in and out of mouse-look mode while hitting the alt key. I did some research looking into the combat class that was the easiest to solo, and most of the sources lead me towards a Commando, and as such Belghast Dorgastu the Mon Calamari Commando was born. I am not entirely certain how to play the game to be honest, but left click fires my primary attack and right click fires a charged bolt and with those two things I managed to limp my way to level 10 while following the quest chain and get off of the station.
The piece that was not down my alley at all however was space flight, and as such I plan on taking shuttles wherever I need to go even though the tutorial gave me a perfectly reasonable ship. The end result is more flight sim than I care to experience, so if you have long played that style of game then it might be your jam. Tamrielo grew up playing flight sims so it was absolutely his style, whereas for me anything more realistic than Star Fox is not going to be for me when it comes to space combat. Realistically you need some sort of a controller because the keyboard controls were nonsense trying to do the dog fighting quest against the black sun pirates.
I’ve now allowed myself to get mixed up with the Hutt Cartel and am aligned to the rebels which I am assuming is following a different path than had I chosen to work with the Empire. The first planet is Tatooine and Han Solo unceremoniously deposited me there. I have a speeder though which is cool and am tooling around the dunes completing objectives. All in all it is a pretty fun experience and it is very interesting to see the missing link between what SOE was doing with Everquest and the decisions they ultimately made with Everquest 2. The only bad bits are that the game is native 4:3 resolution and as a result wants to run at 1024×768. I will have to do some research to see if there are ways to mod that up to something more modern. My evening exploring Star Wars Galaxies Legends server was most definitely time well wasted.

Wolfendooms

It was a really bizarro weekend. First off I opted to talk off Friday afternoon, which in itself isn’t too strange other than the fact that I more or less went home and slept for a couple of hours. I normally can’t take naps but I guess it was a week worth of not sleeping super well catching up with me. For those who have read this blog lately you will know that my wife was on a work trip in Portugal. Whenever she is gone the house and most specifically the bed feel very wrong and as a result it greatly impairs my sleep patterns. She flew in safely during the time when I would normally be recording AggroChat, and due to scheduling problems with lots of people we just skipped doing one of those this week. She is safe and sound and past the first day of culture shock seemed to really enjoy the trip. I am enjoying having her back and she has adjusted back to our standard schedule a lot faster than I would have expected. We wound up going to bed around 10:30 on Saturday night after getting her home and a rapid round of unpacking. Then she was up around 6 am and managed to keep it together until around 8 pm last night. Then we were up as per normal around 5:30 am and hopefully she makes it successfully throughout the day without crashing. I have a silly belief in the totemic power of the purple coffee mug that I sent her off to work with, and I hope it shields her throughout the day. We have a lot of bright and colorful mugs, but the purple one is by far the most important.
This weekend there was a test for Phantasy Star Online 2 on the Xbox One and I booted up my console for the sole purpose of participating. As I understand it there will be a later test for the Windows client, and I am mostly just going to have to tide myself over until then. For those who may remember I went through the nonsense process of getting set up to play PSO2 some time back and then proceeded to stop playing it after the initial few weeks. The Japanese client jumped ahead four versions and I felt like I was missing so much stuff and had no clue who any of the characters were. I am hoping that when it finally comes here officially we can play it properly from the very beginning. I didn’t spend a lot of time playing but it did make me realize that I am probably going to go back to my good ole fashioned RAcast instead of the HUmar I was playing during the beta this weekend.
As far as traditional gaming goes, I spent quite a bit of time this weekend playing Mars: War Logs. As I have said before there is just something about the way Spiders makes games that I find appealing. I greatly enjoyed Technomancer and Mars: War Logs comes considerably before that game in a timeline and explores an area of Mars that is mentioned in Technomancer but that you can never quite go to. I am somewhat glad that I played the games in the order that I did because there are some interactions that I would have viewed in completely different light had I known things that transpired in this game. Much like the difference between Witcher 2 and Witcher 3… this game is a much more simplified version of the same formula that I have seen in other games like Greedfall and Technomancer. As a result it is way more streamlined and other than the fact that the game has horrible quest advisement… it is way easier to follow what you need to do in the world.
On the cat front, Josie is pretty bonded with me after having spent a week with me being her only human. I am hoping that over the next several days she starts snuggling with my wife again, but all day yesterday she was pretty much glued to me. I mean I guess it makes sense because not only was I the only human around for a week but I am also the human that provides food twice a day every day. The whole feeding thing goes a long way for an animal friend. It is in part why I keep hoping that someday the outdoor cats will let me pet them. The latest Josie trick is that she has learned how to climb the ferret cage that is still in the kitchen, and has also figured out how to climb halfway up and then parkour her way into the windowsill. She is adorable, which is good for her because it gets her out of trouble for all of the messes that she inherently makes during her manic play sessions.
And now to the title of the post. The above thread is courtesy of Thalen who posted it on the AggroChat staff slack. I am completely on board with calling shooters Wolfendooms. Does that mean that Destiny would be a Wolfendoomtribes though? The whole transition from “Doom Clone” to “FPS” is still one that I find interesting. I’ve been struggling to figure out a term for the Bioware Dragon Age/Mass Effect genre since I have been playing so many Spiders games that are desperately trying to fill that niche. I’m also really curious if there are more games out there like that from smaller studios that I just never encountered. Anyways time to wrap this up and head to work, but if you have any Bioware-esc games that you know of that might not be on my radar drop me a line in the comments.

Bel Folks Stuff – Episode 5

We are still in the process of re-releasing the original episodes of Bel FolksStuff.  This episode in question was originally released on March 2nd of 2015 and features my friend Qelric.  She was probably the first YouTuber that I ever watched with any consistency and while I am sadden that she has since moved on from her extremely excellent update videos, I am excited for all of the changes in her life including becoming a parent.  These days she has returned to her art roots and has an active Patreon to support her adventures in digital painting. It was a great evening sitting down to talk with her and on some level I would love to revisit these chats with a few guests at some point down the line to see how things have changed for them in the time between.