dating sim – AggroChat

Stressed but Still Here

This week turned out to be a shockingly stressful one, but thankfully all of said stress happened at work… and I could more or less leave it there as well. There has been a twinge of sadness as well because months ago I had hoped to be able to attend Pax Prime and get to hang out with friends there. However that didn’t quite work out, and since I lacked tickets to go there… because AggroChat was not apparently qualified as a media outlet, I stopped pushing quite so hard. The beginning of the school year is especially rough on my wife, and it would have been even more stressful to be travelling during this time. As such I am doubting that Pax Prime will ever really be in my cards unless for some reason they decide to move it either earlier or later in the year. I will always have Pax South however, and I fully intend to go this coming year. I am going to be trying to talk as many people into attending as I can, and hopefully can organize a meetup or something while there. There were plenty of people at Pax South last year but I was completely overwhelmed by it being my first real convention, and the internet was pretty horrible… so I missed most of them. Anyways… on with what is I hope becoming a Sunday tradition, where I review the games I played over the past week.

Final Fantasy XIV

Currently “The Rising” event is going on in Final Fantasy XIV that marks the yearly anniversary festival. This year the quest that goes along with it is one of the most touching quests I have experienced in a game before. I don’t want to spoil too many details about it, but suffice to say there is a little bit of fourth wall breaching going on. Diehard Final Fantasy XIV fans have this hero worship for Naoki Yoshida and the rest of the team, and it is absolutely well earned. It feels like there is very much a symbiotic relationship going on there, and they understand fully just how important the loyal fans are to the continued success of the title. The game is in this interesting place where it is extremely humbled by the fact that it launched in 2010 and failed to capture hearts and minds. They are putting everything into the game and leaving nothing on the table, and it shows. Other than the anniversary event we worked on Ravana Extreme attempts, and I have every hope that we will be able to down him this coming Monday. Past that I have honestly been taking a bit of a break from Final Fantasy XIV, or at least not really logging in every day.

Diablo 3

If you are wondering where the bulk of my game time was spent, you can look no further than Diablo 3. I am not sure if it was my time playing Hellgate London, or the fact that I finally pulled my head out of the sand and realized there was such a thing as a “season”. Whatever the combination I have been pumped to be playing Diablo 3 again and have been spending a lot of time with my friend Grace was we worked on pushing up our seasonal characters. At the beginning of the week I managed to get my Crusader from last season to 70 with the help of Grace and her crazy torment farming ways. Then Friday when the new season opened I started work immediately on a female Barbarian. As of last night I am now level 60 and making the final push to 70. That is really what I intend to spend most of my time today working on, and hopefully by tonight I will be sitting at 70 and starting to work on gearing up for doing torment and beyond. I am having a blast, and I am not sure whatever mental block cleared that has allowed me to get involved once more with the click to attack madness.

Wildstar

I can’t say that I have made stellar progress since last week, but I am continuing with my new tradition of trying to play Wildstar Tuesday nights. At this point I am level 25 still in Whitevale but I think maybe I can see the end of the zone. My hope is to move on past it this week and hopefully into something less desolate. I feel about Whitevale the way I feel about most desert zones in MMOs. I have come to realization this week that it is never the biome necessarily that I like or dislike, but instead the zone design. I was warned that Malgrave is coming up, and a desert… but from what I have seen of the imagery inside it seems like something I will enjoy. I want to devote more time to this game, but for now I am going to settle with making it a Tuesday night thing.

Hearthstone

The game that I played that shocked me the most this week was Hearthstone. I have not really spent much time playing it since release, and with the addition of a new expansion of cards I decided to poke my head in. This is where I found a brand new game mode called Tavern Brawl. Apparently you have a different weekly challenge, and this week was essentially playing with a randomized deck. I played hunter and had a good amount of success. Playing with a random assortment of cards, including many of the brand new Grand Tournament cards gave me a nostalgic feeling much like the early days of Magic the Gathering. I used to love the days when I was limited based on the cards I physically owned and as a result made some odd decks to try and weave in my favorite elements. In truth I would probably play Hearthstone more often if this random brawl option thing was a fixed item. I know this coming week there will be a completely different Tavern Brawl, but I will likely poke my head in to see what it is and give it a shot. This might breathe new life into the game for me, and for that I am kinda pumped.

Fallout Shelter

My week in review would not be complete without at least talking a bit about Fallout Shelter. Now I have been technically playing this game for awhile now but since I do not regularly use my iPad, the sessions were limited and I went weeks between opening the app. With the release of Fallout Shelter for android I have been playing it far more often on my phone, and it has now become my default “moment of downtime” game as I check in on my little post apocalyptic ant farm. All things said I learned a lot of lessons playing it on the iPad that I have now applied to this new vault. Where Vault 999 was a relative failure, Vault 861 is pretty damned idyllic. Through a bit of luck of drops, and some careful planning I have managed to create a pretty safe environment that can absolutely shred raider attacks. I had a random person show up at the vault that was fairly warriorly, and once I equipped her with power armor and a plasma pistol she has been roaming the wastes dispensing justice. At the same time she has become a major source of income and the gear she brings back I am slowly outfitting all of my settlers in. I have jokingly started calling the restaurant on the first floor Cafe Death, because the raiders always go there…. only to get shredded by all of my shotgun toting vault dwellers. The only thing that I feel bad about is that I essentially have one couple that is slowly populating my vault. I have left them in the room for weeks now and they have half a dozen offspring roaming around as a result.

Hatoful Boyfriend

The last game that I played a significant amount of this week was of course Hatoful Boyfriend, and last night we recorded the AggroChat game club show for it. This was Grace’s pick and I think a lot of us went into this assuming that we would end up hating the game. We were mostly wrong as the vast majority of us had lots of good things to say about the game. To make it even crazier this is the first game that the majority of us have actually played through more than one… but given that an individual play session tends to only be around the hour long mark that makes sense. If you want to hear our length discussion about dating “Birbs” after the apocalypse you should totally listen into the show.

[AggroChat] [Direct Download] [iTunes] [Stitcher]

The Hunter Gatherer

This morning I am getting a bit of a late start because the weather is dreary out and everything seems to distract me. I’ve had to contend with the kitten knocking all manner of things onto the ground from the cabinets, and the other two cats intent upon pinning my arms down so that I can’t effectively type. As a result I am getting a later than usual start on composing my morning blog post. This mornings post is going to be inspired by the sheer madness that Grace has bestowed upon me. What I am saying.. is everything is her fault. For those who have been following me over the last few days, you will know that the August AggroChat Game of the month is the bizarre bird dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend. I had been avoiding playing it so that I could stream my first moments, and finally the stars aligned for me having enough time to devote my attention to doing just that. Since this is a largely text based game, I figured I would act out the dialog as best I could. I set a time for 6pm last night, and I had an awesome audience of friends joining in the fun. I only actually made it through one play through however because by the end of all of that talking… my throat was killing me.

What can I say about Hatoful Boyfriend that has not already been said. The game is completely insane. You play the role of a “Hunter-Gatherer” human girl, having to fit into bird society and attending Saint Pidgeonations a prestigious school…. for you know… Birds. If that premise itself was not insane enough… in order to make progress in the game you have to develop a relationship with one of a cast of different birds. From what I understand if you have failed to gain the attention of at least one suitor by a certain point… the game just ends. From start to finish it takes about an hour to play, and last nights play through ended up running about a hour and twelve minutes in total. The game while short… has a lot of replay-ability as apparently there are secret endings that you can only unlock through repeated plays of the game. Having done this or that ending unlocks new options, and at this point I have completed the game three times and unlocked a total of three different endings as well as a bonus romance of sorts.

Birb Boyfriend

While absolutely none of this sounds like a game I would be interested in… there is something quirky and infectious about the game that makes you want to keep playing to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. One of the nice features of the game is that there is a fast forward of sorts that lets you skip through some of the often long sequences of dialog that require no player action. In truth you are only really making a few choices per game session, and watching the events of those decisions play out before you. In many ways some aspects of it remind me of Persona 4 Golden, which is a game I need to return to playing at some point. I keep hearing there is an actual “bad” ending, but I have yet to find it. In many ways playing this game feels like the first time I watched the movie Brazil, with even stranger and more surreal experiences the longer I kept playing. In fact this morning I actually got up and started playing again, so maybe I am not hooked on the insanity?

If nothing else it is going to make for a very interesting AggroChat in a few weeks when we record that episode. I feel like so far maybe Grace has done the best job of picking a game title that generates conversation. I feel like There Came an Echo probably would have as well if I did not suffer so many technical problems that kept me from finishing the game. Thalen also has an interesting game picked for us, so I think the next few months are going to be a blast as far as the Game Club goes. I had a lot of fun recording the play through of this game, and it was so damned bizarre trying to act out the different birds. I stumbled pretty massively on some of the names and had to rely on some assistance from Ashgar a few times. However I made it through and now at least have some fodder to talk about for the show. I am not sure how many more endings I will try and unlock before we record but I still have some time. The gameplay goes fast enough, and in many ways it is like a train wreck… you just can’t help but keep watching it. As someone who went into “Birb Boyfriend” as deeply skeptical, I highly suggest everyone pick this title up and give it a chance. It is just too damned strange not to experience it for yourself. If you want to watch my play through if you missed the live stream I embedded the video below.

Week In Gaming 8/30/2015