AggroChat #251 – Release the Melon-Snake

Featuring:  Ammo, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat251

After a week off you can effectively blame Belghast for filling the Trello full of partial topics, and the rest of the show for not replacing them with something meaningful.  As a result we have a fairly fragmented show. In importance news however Ammo is joining the team permanently. The most important thing discussed however is the fact that Tam gave us a new term…  that of the noble Melon-Snake.

Here is a quick rundown of the varied topics discussed:  Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trailer, Xur coming to Fallout 76, Monster Hunter World Iceborne and Bloodstained Ritual of the Night release dates, Unplayable Magic Decks, The madness of Arcade emulation, The sad state of Anthem.

Topics Discussed:

  • Neph’s Wedding
  • Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trailer
  • Bloodstained Ritual of the Night
  • Fallout 76 Purveyor NPC
  • Monster Hunter World Iceborne
    • Capcom Hates PC Gamers
  • Magic the Gathering Arena
    • Kodra has Teferi Problems
  • Madness and Arcade Emulation
    • The joys of finding full mamesets
    • Triggering a bandwidth usage warning
    • Abandoning GameEx Evolution
    • Moving to RetroArch
  • TitanQuest Releasing Expansions 13 Years after its launch
  • Anthem Removing Cosmetic Caches
    • Spaghetti Code Problems
  • Final Fantasy XIV Shadowbringers

AggroChat #240 – The UnHollow Knight

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen

aggrochat240

This evening we discuss the Anthem “Launch” and the spreadsheet that is required to understand it.  We give a quick summary of our experiences and how it is turning out to be really freaking good. From there we dive into Silksong the Hornet DLC that has turned into its own larger than the original Hollow Knight game.  We also talk about the first Nintendo Direct of the new year and all of the games that got announced. Bel tortures Kodra with some brief discussion about Keen Dreams showing up on the Switch. Finally we dive into a topic about playing games for what they are actually good at rather than trying to bend them to our will.

Topics Discussed:

  • Anthem “Launch”
    • Spreadsheet Launches
    • Improvements over Demo
    • Very Much a Bioware Game in a Good Way
  • Hollow Knight:  Silksong Announcement
  • Nintendo Direct
    • Mario Maker 2
    • Link’s Awakening
    • Various Final Fantasy Releases
    • Fire Emblem: Three Houses
    • Captain Toad DLC
    • Tetris 99
      • Did Tetris Need Battle Royale Mode?
    • Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
    • Boxboy + Boxgirl
    • Yoshi’s Crafted World
    • Astral Chain
    • Deltarune
  • Keen Dreams on Switch
  • Playing Games for What They Are Good At
    • The Struggle with MMOs

AggroChat #223 – Freemium Monetization

Featuring:  Ashgar, Belghast and Kodra

aggrochat223

This week we are down half of our show, but weirdly enough ended up very close to our original line up from the first few AggroChat shows…  only missing Rae. We were concerned we might not have enough material for a show, but wound up only about 10 minutes short of our average which seems pretty good.  Tonight we talk about Monetization in Free to Play games and in part why some games it feels good to spend money on, and others it feels exploitative. This explores mobile games and mmorpgs as well.  From there Bel talks a bit about his experiences restarting with Monster Hunter World PC and how weirdly most of the progress was raising his skill and not necessarily his gearing. Kodra talks about his experiences with Mega Man 11 which leads to a discussion of this golden age of modern 2D side scrollers.  Finally we wrap things up with some discussion about Guilds of Ravnica and how it feels in a constructed and sealed environment on MTG Arena.

Topics Discussed

  • Free to Play Monetization
    • Mobile Games
    • Dragalia Lost
    • MMORPGs
    • Elder Scrolls Online
    • Star Wars the Old Republic
    • Neverwinter
  • Monster Hunter World
    • Skill Acquisition vs Gear Acquisition
    • Small but awesome PC community
  • Mega Man 11
    • Hollow Knight
    • Shovel Knight
    • Celeste
    • Bloodstained: Circle of the Moon
    • Retro Feeling Modern Games
  • Guilds of Ravnica
    • MTG Arena
    • Sealed Play
    • Constructed Play

Getting Unstuck

Not-Castlevania

Getting Unstuck

It has been an up and down week for kickstarter games.  Namely I am talking about just how bad Mighty No. 9 has been received.  I own this on the PS4, and while the gameplay itself is not too horrible…  the biggest problem that I have is that it feels like an odd throwback to the GameCube.  Which I guess makes sense given that the game has released on a silly number of systems including the 3DS, which makes me think that quite simply all console versions…  are the 3DS version.  The saddest part about this is at various points during its development cycle the game looked really good, but the end result is this lifeless mess of flat color.  Now earlier in the day I had commented that this whole debacle over the “Not-Megaman” game made me extremely concerned about “Not-Castlevania” which is my not so subtle jab at the fact that so many of these kick-started games are simply recreations of whatever game made the developer famous in the first place.  Almost as summoned from the abyss… I got an email with a key to the E3 version of Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, which I didn’t even remember being part of the funding level I backed the game at.

Getting Unstuck

It was a little late and I only played the demo long enough to get up to the first boss… I failed miserably at even coming close to defeating it namely because I entered the fight after a lot of backtracking.  There are certain things that work extremely well, then there are others that I was largely confused about.  The primary point of confusion is that for whatever reason I could not seem to get the game to do jump attacks… which are of course a staple of the Castlevania gameplay.  I was playing on my PS4 controller which I happened to have hooked up at the time to my PC, and notoriously it tends to map things oddly, so I might give it a shot with the defacto Xbox 360 controller.  As far as every other aspect of gameplay…  this is very much the spiritual successor to Symphony of the Night, but done with cell shaded 3D models instead of 2D pixel art.  It works, and it works well.. and gives you the feeling of the Castlevania art style.  The game has some really strange creatures that you end up fighting, which is cool and something vastly different from the standard zombies and werewolves and vampires oh my genre.  I am assuming that the demo leaves off after the boss fight that is pictured above, but nonetheless I am really happy to see this game at least appears to be still on the rails.

Catching Up

Getting Unstuck

Last night I got drug into Final Fantasy XIV by Ash and Grace… and admittedly they didn’t have to pull too terribly hard.  Largely they wanted to run some Void Ark, which is the thing that I needed to do to get caught up in gear levels.  I am not sure why this was such an impassible obstacle mentally for me, because I had some serious anxiety about solo queuing for it.  Memu had made an offer to help me out, but we failed miserably at coordinating a time to run it together…  mostly because I fell into a Rift shaped hope and wasn’t around all that often over the last week.  In any case all of my concerns were essentially for naught, because Void Ark is extremely easy…. but unfortunately not the gear bonanza I had hoped it would be.  Over the course of the night I ran the Ark three times, two times with Ash and Grace and one time by myself later after getting back from a walk.  In all of those boss kills I managed to get two pieces of gear… only one of which actually replacing a slot I had something lower in.  I did however get plenty of Esoterics which allowed me to keep upgrading jewelry until a combination of the that and the Mhachi Farthings pushed me over the item level 200 barrier.

Getting Unstuck

Ultimately I am probably going to keep running this place until I run out of slots to upgrade, and even then…. it is still a decent source of gear to help pull my Dragoon up in item level.  I guess I am officially off high center, and soon I can pick back up the quest chain and at least be expert viable once more.  My hope is that tonight, I can get together with Grace and run the new dungeons who now also needs them since she too broke the 200 barrier last night.  I feel better about the game in so many ways considering how frustrating it was to hit this gear wall in the questing.  I guess in truth this is something that never happened to me during 2.0, or at least once we got back and started really moving forward.  We were always just good enough to keep pushing into the next set of dungeons, but at the same time I was also spending a ton more time grinding out tomestones to make sure I was the best possible tank I could be at all times.  That is the piece that has been missing, because I really have not been able to push myself to do that the way I once was.  As our little rag tag Tuesday night group is contemplating doing more “Real” content I guess that will start to matter significantly more in the coming weeks and months.  Time to get over the hump and gear up a bit, and for the moment Void Ark seems like an easy place to do just that.