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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.