Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start the show with Bel talking about Darksiders Genesis and how it doesn’t really fit into the Diablo mold. Bel also talks about his recent experience with the vastly different Wolcen as it nears entering early access. We talk about the large free update to Mario Maker 2 that among other things introduces the Master Sword powerup. We discuss the Turn Based mod for Pathfinder Kingmaker which leads into a discussion about Turn Based and the Pause/Action RPGs. Tam talks about his recent journey into Star Trek Online and Ash talks about One Step from Eden. Finally Bel and Thalen talk a bit about the upcoming Season of Dawn in Destiny 2 and the end of the Season of Undying.
Topics Discussed
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we start the show with Bel talking about Darksiders Genesis and how it doesn’t really fit into the Diablo mold. Bel also talks about his recent experience with the vastly different Wolcen as it nears entering early access. We talk about the large free update to Mario Maker 2 that among other things introduces the Master Sword powerup. We discuss the Turn Based mod for Pathfinder Kingmaker which leads into a discussion about Turn Based and the Pause/Action RPGs. Tam talks about his recent journey into Star Trek Online and Ash talks about One Step from Eden. Finally Bel and Thalen talk a bit about the upcoming Season of Dawn in Destiny 2 and the end of the Season of Undying.
While not my first blog, Tales of the Aggronaut was created back in 2009. This means that the decade of 2010 to 2019 is the first time I am really able to legitimately look back on the last decade of gaming from a blogging standpoint. I’ve gone back and forth over the last several weeks about what sort of form these posts would take. For awhile I contemplated doing one post per day covering 5 games per decade. However at the time I dreamed up this concept it would mean that more or less you would get nothing from me but these posts for the rest of the year.
Instead I scaled things back to a single post per year, but even then I was uncertain of the number of games to talk about in each year. Being the unorganized person that I am, I could not really whittle things down to a clean number each year. So instead what you are getting is a compromise of a compromise, where I just write about the games in each year that were particularly important or noteworthy to me. This is by no means a comprehensive list, and I am sure I will be completely blowing past titles that you my readers feel are super important. If that is the case feel free to leave me comments below with the game I should have included.
Minecraft
Technically Minecraft was available and playable in 2009, but I didn’t pay much attention until August of 2010 when I saw the above video from YouTuber DavidAngel64. The “X Series” as it came to be known was a series of videos where he explored various games, and in it he did a deep dive into those early days of Minecraft. I watched several of these and was hooked, and immediately went out and purchased the game and started doing my own explorations. It was a simple time when we were more or less figuring out the rules of the game and now to get to the sort of resources we wanted. For example the hunt for diamond because an overarching goal that pretty much dominated every waking moment of playing the game when I was not finding uses for the copious amounts of cobblestone that I was dredging from the earth.
The peak of my non-group gameplay was in October when I recorded a series of YouTube videos using Fraps and showing off some of the nonsense I had built. That channel is more or less abandoned and everything is on the “Belghast” channel that I dump our podcast on, and with no real great way or moving them, and no access to the original recordings… they more or less live out their life as they are… poorly done with crappy audio. I still have the original Minecraft files laying around in a zip, because I used to trade my files to other friends playing the game and they would zip up theirs and trade them to me so we could explore each others work in the days before an active Minecraft server. In 2011 the way we interacted with the game shifted significantly as we stood up our first server for the House Stalwart guild to all build together. That said 2010 was the renaissance of the game for me, and that blissful era when everything was new and magical.
Fallout New Vegas
I love the Fallout setting, and I can still remember saving up my pennies to buy the original game when it came out back during college. I’ve always been drawn to post apocalyptic settings, and Fallout is a world that is rich and textured and full of tantalizing bits of lore. While Fallout 3 pushed us into a brand new territory of exploring what happened to the Capitol Wasteland, Fallout New Vegas saw us returning to our roots of Southern California, the setting of the first two games. As a result what follows is a nostalgic ride seeing how the settings you were familiar with evolved in the time between the games.
The game is also a return to being controlled by Obsidian games, which represented a significant portion of the folks from Black Isle Studios that worked on the original two games. Fallout New Vegas is known for a handful of things… but the first being that the game does not start you in a vault and instead gives you what feels like a much more weighty introduction in the form of an attempt on your life. The other thing it is known for, is just how freaking buggy the game was at launch. I personally managed to get around most of these and found myself enjoying it greatly. The game is also significant because it represents one of the first times I wrote a review for a site that was not my own. You can still find my original review up on Polygamerous, though due to shifts in hosting I no longer have an account there… but the byline is still at the bottom.
Mass Effect 2
We are travelling through a time period when I was not quite as rabid about keeping screenshots for eternity. As a result I don’t have a ready archive of images to draw upon for most of these games. Mass Effect 2 represents my first entry in the series, and I remember buying it digitally on the ill fated Direct2Drive, because some other subscription I had that I am drawing a blank on gave me a significant discount there. This is the game that shaped my view of the Mass Effect setting, and still to this day is probably my favorite game in the series. I loved the characters and the interactions and the “away team mission” nature of the gameplay. In the years between then and now I have played through this game I believe five times in total, often times as part of a full replay of the series.
There are a lot of games out there that hope to be a narrative story that rivals that of Star Wars. Very few manage to pull this goal off, but Mass Effect absolutely did. I still stand by my stance that this series would make one of the absolute best Science Fiction/Fantasy television series out there. I keep hoping that Netflix options the rights, or shit even Disney Plus after seeing how amazing The Mandalorian has been. While I played through as Male Shepard, the canonical version based on all of my friends has to be the Jennifer Hale voiced Female Shepard. I will admit I had a real hang up for a long time about playing female characters in video games. When I play a video game I am essentially playing me in whatever form takes place on screen, and I tried to always make each character as close to “Belghast” as I could. I seemingly have gotten past that… and at some point I need to break this game back out and play it through in the mode that so many people say is the best possible version.
Where Bel Was Mentally in 2010
So those are the games that I was playing behind the scenes, but on this blog… you got a vastly different view of me. It was a time of deep irregularity in my posting schedule. I didn’t really start doing this regular posting thing until 2013, and each time I had a major lapse it was harder and harder to get back into posting again. There are so many sign posts in those early years like this one from April where I find myself apologizing for not feeling up to writing. I was not happy with the end of Wrath of the Lich King, and similarly not super happy with the beginning of Cataclysm. I was also super hung up on this blog being a World of Warcraft Tanking and Raid Leadership blog. That niche no longer really fit me, and as a result I was struggling trying to get the oomph to be writing about what I thought were the topics folks wanted me to write about.
I’m glad I figured this whole thing out at some point, or at least have a working theory about how to progress forward with a blog. I am not sure how often I will be writing these pieces, but I figure I will probably do Monday and Friday or some semblance of that until I get through the years between 2010 and 2019. As I do this, I would love to hear in the comments about your own games of a specific year.
The other day I talked a little bit about my eternal struggling with trying to find a comfortable controller. I have large hands and this is a problem in a world that seems to love making tiny controllers. For reference the above photo is me and a knock off Xbox One controller that I happened to have laying around the house. The problem that I encounter is that most controllers are workable but grossly uncomfortable for long play sessions, and either end up causing me to contort my shoulders or hands into weird positions in order to use them. I mentioned the other day that I should really do a post on my favorite “big hand” controllers, and apparently that day is today. This is by no means a complete list, but since I have a large amount of controllers laying around the house in my eternal struggle for the perfect one… I have some examples that work pretty well.
Power A Fusion Pro 1.0
This is what I would consider to be my “daily driver” PC Gaming controller when a controller is needed. It stays hooked up to my gaming rig 24/7 and most recently I have been spending a lot of time with it while playing Jedi Fallen Order. I am not entirely certain how I came across this controller originally, other than maybe it had something to do with the 4 buttons on the backside of the controller that give you Scuf-like functionality of rebinding face button keys to be pressed with your fingers gripping the underside. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it keeps the general shape of an Xbox One controller and at the same time extends it to be a bigger and more chonky device.
Some positives are that it has really high quality buttons and the finish of the controller is matte and hugs your hand without rubbing oddly against it like a rubberized texture might. The share and menu buttons are placed unobtrusively, and the dpad is extremely nice and feels completely reasonable to do “fireball” motions with. It is wired which is either a positive or a negative depending on your religion about such things… but lacks any sort of a break away cable making it a tripping hazard. It runs on XInput like all Microsoft controllers and as a result it just works flawlessly with Windows 10, but required a bit of plugging it in and out to get it to recognize with Windows 8/8.1. The thumb sticks are nice but have a rough ring that is a little heavier “grit” than the stock controller so if you have very sensitive skin this might be an issue.
The biggest negative I have about the controller is that is is no longer being made. I specifically called this out as the 1.0 controller and that is because there are two other versions in the wild and for some reason Power A decided to change the shape each time. I’ve gotten hands on the other two models and they are nowhere near as comfortable as this one. As a result I have taken to ebay in order to get a spare. I paid somewhere in the vicinity of $20 for each of mine, but this morning I looked around ebay and they seem to have gone up in price finding this one for $34. You may be able to find these still in the wild but it largely depends on how fast the stock changes out in whatever store you happen to be shopping.
Hori Pad FPS Plus
This WAS my daily driver Playstation 4 controller for a good long while and I own two of them. I am not a big fan of the stick placement of Playstation controllers and greatly preferred the Xbox style staggered stick design. As such I am always looking for good options that allow me to keep playing with a layout I am more comfortable with on my console platform of choice. I was initially tipped off to this controller by my friend Pam who does an excellent video review of it. It has a lot of positives going for it but also some pretty severe negatives. The layout feels good and the shape of the controller is comfortable in the hand. Unfortunately the angle on the backside lead me to grip it too tightly at times and have the tips of my fingers go numb while playing it. The finish also makes the controller feel slick and hard in the hand and very much like you are holding a chunk of cheap plastic.
The triggers themselves are also odd in that they are basically buttons, which leads to some weirdness anytime you are in a situation where you need the analog functionality like throttling up. However for shooters this works pretty freaking well due to the extremely quick throw time on each and mimics a lot of the functionality that a Scuf or similar “pro” controller would do with adjustable stops. The biggest problem I had with the controller are the thumb sticks are similarly cheap feeling and through excessive play of Destiny, I completely wore out the right stick. Since they are non-standard it isn’t like you can get replacement rubber caps for them. I ultimately modded my controller to replace it with a set of after market xbox pro controller magnetic thumbsticks, which work fine but sorta throw off the balance.
The controller has no rumble support, which is either a positive or a negative depending on your point of view. It ends up making the overall feel in the hand be super light, especially if you have large hands. The other challenge is that the touch pad isn’t a touch pad. It is effectively a button, so you can get any functionality that relied on you clicking it, but nothing that relies on you actually using it as a tactile surface. When I first got mine it required me to import it from Play Asia, but in the meantime it has now been released for the North American market and is readily available on Amazon. Weirdly enough Play Asia appears to be the cheapest source going for $44 and the three color variants on Amazon ranging from $48 to $56 each.
Nacon Revolution Pro
This is my new daily driver Playstation 4 controller, and I have to say… once you get past the really screwed up dpad design… it is an amazingly comfortable controller. The biggest negative that we are going to get out of the way is the price tag. If you were to walk into a store and buy this outright you would be paying somewhere between $150 and $200 retail. I absolutely got mine as a gently used model on Ebay for around $50, and if you can do the same then I say the controller is one hell of a deal. This rode in on the wave of “pro” controllers that released after Microsoft started selling theirs. While the Microsoft Pro Controller has replaceable parts, this one is more or less configured into a static design that includes one scooped left thumb stick, one dome right thumb stick, and a weird “iron cross” for lack of a better thing to call it thumb stick. The face buttons also have some weirdness going on in that they are really big and the O sorta extends off the edge of the controller.
All of that said… playing with it just feels good. The dpad thing still weirds me out a bit, but it also more or less works fine for playing fighting games. Though if I am playing fighting games on my PS4 I am likely going to be hooking up my fight stick, or the Hori fight commander. For most PS4 games it feels great, and pretty much replicates all of the functionality of a stock controller. You have a working touch pad, rumble, and still has a headphone jack which is missing from a lot of third party controllers. I think this is a worthy competitor, but only if you can find it at a greatly reduced cost.
Nintendo Switch Pro Controller
Now we are starting into a section where I am going to hand out some honorable mentions. First off we have the Switch Pro Controller, which in itself is not that big of a controller but still manages to have an ergonomic shape that feels extremely comfortable to play with. I could have done with it being about 30% larger, but for what is there it feels pretty solid in the hand. Again it has the staggered thumb stick design that I like, but its biggest negative has to come in at the cost of being $70. If you can find one on sale, it does benefit from being pretty much a universal controller with the ability to use it wirelessly on any bluetooth platform and the XInput support means it natively supports Windows. I really like it, and this was my default method to play switch until I got the Split Pad Pro.
Xbox 360 Controller
This is effectively the default windows controller and still is a pretty strong contender for a no frills gaming experience. Everything about this controller essentially screams “its fine”, but there is something reliable about that. It feels fairly good in the hand and has “just worked” since Windows 7, and comes in a wide variety of colors. I still have several of these because you can get them dirt cheap and they are essentially bullet proof. If you want a reasonably comfortable controller for the bare minimum amount of money, get the USB connected 360 controller.
Steam Controller
I am not a huge fan of the steam controller. I feel like Valve did a massive disservice to this controller when they attempted to reinvent the wheel. That said… the ergonomics of the controller are amazing. It feels really great in the hand and works nicely for big hands like mine. The downside however is that it has a really jacked up control scheme that you will have to wade through in order to make it work with the games you want to play. It spent too much time trying to be both controller and mouse replacement when had it simply just been a good controller I think I would have had a new favorite. If you can find it… it was going for $5 over Black Friday, but I believe those have all sold out.
What am I missing?
Are you a big handed gamer too? Is there a controller that is just amazing that I am missing? Drop me a line in the comments, because I am always looking for the next slightly more perfect controller experience.
