July 2015 – Page 14

The Ancient Library

July 8, 2015July 4, 2015 by Belghast

Land of Lost Cables

This morning I feel like the world is angry at me. Namely we spent the last two days doing some hardcore cleaning and rearranging of both my and my wife’s offices. This involved taking loads of stuff to good will, and even more loads of stuff out to the dumpster we rented. However it feels like maybe the end is in sight. The funny thing about this process is I am finding things that I did not remember existed. Like for example… wedding pictures… I did not remember we had a book of wedding pictures. I realize that statement sounds weird… because everyone remembers photos at their wedding right? Well for us… we eloped and there was a pretty limited group of people that COULD have taken photos. I am guessing my cousin Sarah took the photos because she does not appear in any of them, but it was still kinda cool…. and god did we look young.

We also found a stack of photos from our college graduation… and apparently overall shorts were a big thing in 1998… because both my wife and my niece were wearing them. The other awesome thing about cleaning is finding all the things I have bought and re-bought a dozen times. Like right now I have bins labeled video, audio, usb and network… and all of them are overflowing with cables. I seriously should not need to get any form of a USB cable for example for life. I have every possible connector save for maybe USB 3. In addition I found more iPhone/iPad cables than I remember us ever having. So as I dismantle my office today to do the final leg of this process I should have more than enough cables to hook things up however I want to in the final configuration.

The Ancient Library

Since we are expected to participate in the Four Job Fiesta every single year… our circle of friends has developed a deep understanding of the content contained within Final Fantasy V… in part because Ashgar has such a deep understanding of said content. So when it was leaked that Heavensward would include the Library of Ancients needless to say we were a little excited. Thursday night I managed to get up to the appropriate level to do the dungeon, and last night after all of the cleaning I sat down and managed to get a guild group to run it. I have to say I am really damned impressed with the experience and this might be my favorite dungeon yet… which is a pretty mighty feat considering I really really love The Vault, with its Scarlet Monastery 2.0 feel. What is best is the way that many of the mobs pop out of books just like they did in Final Fantasy V. In fact one of the mobs that you run into over and over is good ole page 64.

As you might suspect it has the ability to cast level 5 doom… which apparently plays by the rules set forth in Final Fantasy V. This means players who are 59 are unaffected, but those level 60 players have to get the hell out or they straight up die. Granted we have not actually tested this, so it might just be a rumor. Once again I streamed my run of the dungeon so that I could capture it in video form. The absolute best part of the dungeon is of course Byblos which takes the place of the middle boss. The best part is when you kill him he says “Soon, the seal of the master will be open.” I love it when Final Fantasy XIV does some fan service and so accurately depicts a mob from another game in this one. One thing I learned is that the Gale Cut attack can be completely avoided if you just move from out of front of him when he is casting it. So far every dungeon in Heavensward has been better than the last, so I am completely amped to see what the end game dungeons are going to be like.

The Road to Sixty

The library finally paid off and I started to get some warrior drops. The set that comes from the Library is one that I am going to have to farm up because I either look like a Sherlock Holmes era inspector or a refugee from Diagon Alley. In either case I am a fan of it, and it looks pretty adorable when I run around like this. Tam is going to be quick to point out that this is not a plate set of armor… and I will give him that. It is very much not plate, but instead a cloth robe… but it looks adorable so I am just going with it for the time being. The only thing that I have yet to see at all this expansion is a weapon drop. Every single dungeon seems to drop a nice weapon, but in all cases I have seen zero axes. As a result I am struggling through on the HQ white weapons that you get through the storyline. I figure soon enough I will be able to purchase a nice end game weapon as after last nights shenanigans I am roughly a sixth of a level away from sixty.

My hope is tonight… in my newly arranged office… I will be able to push the rest of the way into sixty. It seems there is a dungeon that folks are waiting to run that comes at the end of the main storyline. I am more than happy to tank for my friends… I just have to get to max level first. As horrible as 58 was… I have to say so far 59 has been pretty chill. Just through pushing through the main storyline in the final area and then doing some side quests and two dungeon runs… I have been able to conquer most of this level. Had I managed to actually do my clan hunts yesterday rather than getting pulled straight into a dungeon I might have dinged last night before logging. In theory I could do that tonight and hit the cap… then catch up on the last bit of story that leads to the final dungeon. My god… the story… things happen and I want so bad to talk about them, but most of my readers I would assume are not quite there yet.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
The Ancient Library

Taking Things For Granted

July 3, 2015July 3, 2015 by Tamrielo

Sorry about the lack of updates this week; I’ve been sick, and the oppressive heat in my apartment hasn’t helped my energy levels.

TO GO WITH Australia-weather-drought-farming,FEATURE by Glenda KWEK In this photo taken on February 11, 2015, the sun scorches an already cracked earth on a farm in the Australian agricultural town of Walgett, 650 kilometres (404 miles) northwest of Sydney. The Australian agricultural town -- which takes its name from the Aboriginal word meaning the meeting of two rivers -- is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, with disillusioned farmers battling to stay afloat. AFP PHOTO / Peter PARKS

In this photo taken on February 11, 2015, the sun scorches an already cracked earth on a farm in the Australian agricultural town of Walgett, 650 kilometres (404 miles) northwest of Sydney. The Australian agricultural town — which takes its name from the Aboriginal word meaning the meeting of two rivers — is in the grip of the worst drought in a century, with disillusioned farmers battling to stay afloat. AFP PHOTO / Peter PARKS

I’ve never lived in a place that lacks AC despite it being required until now. There’s a pretty strong myth in the Pacific Northwest that air conditioning isn’t necessary or even worthwhile. My 92-degree apartment would strongly disagree. In Maryland, the prevailing wisdom went something like this: “Sure, you might have summers where you don’t need AC at all, but when you need it, it’s important, and sometimes you’ll have months at a time where you need it.”

It’s a mentality I’ve taken for granted, listening to people tell me, even in 90+ degree weather with interiors even higher, that AC is an unnecessary luxury. It very likely is, for someone used to a few sweltering weeks or months out of the year. For myself, I’ve always viewed my home as a place of refuge from whatever’s going on outside, whether that’s people, events, or the weather, and having that taken away makes me realize how much I value it. It’s caused me to think of other things that I take for granted, and evaluate what they mean to me.

One of my classes this quarter is focused around generating creative ideas. I refuse to use the word “ideating” here, though it’s the technically correct one. The first couple of sessions of the class were mind-numbing for me, focusing on building self-confidence in the ideas each person comes up with, and trying to get these ideas to flow. Having worked for years in a creative industry, where I’ve literally had to come up with ten or fifteen original ideas in a twenty-minute meeting, this sort of activity is something I find almost laughably easy. I’ve been surrounded for most of my professional career by people who have a similar skillset, who can generate ideas creatively quickly and on the fly, so it’s something that’s never seemed terribly strange to me.

I spoke to one of the other people in the class the other day. She’s a very no-nonsense kind of person from what I’ve seen, with a hyper-practical response to everything and (what seems like) little time for frivolity. I expected her to share my snide reaction to the class, and I was surprised when she didn’t. She explained to me that she had never been good at coming up with ideas, particularly creative ones, and that she was really excited about the class and, even two sessions in, felt like she’d learned a lot and was getting a lot of value. By the end, she was even repeating some of the affirmation-style comments the class had taught, self-referential apophthegms that I found somewhat childish but that she clearly was getting value from.

this is so I don’t get crap from people later. it’s pronounced AP-oh-them, short e.

It struck me that my own creativity is something I take for granted. It’s easy for me, and because it’s not something I necessarily consider a skill that I’ve honed, it’s something I generally believe that other people can do just as easily as I can. I generally don’t describe myself as a creative person, and despite contributing to the creation of art, I staunchly refuse to consider myself an artist. I leave that title for the people I feel have earned it; people who have honed a very visible skill and practice it until they excel. It had never occurred to me that I might be doing both artists and (for lack of a better term) non-creatives a disservice by drawing the line the way I have. Art isn’t necessarily a function of a singular visible skill, and to deny that I’m a creative person must be frustrating for someone who can see me coming up with ideas easily.

I recently put together a lightly-photoshopped picture for my mom for her birthday. She’d forgotten to take a picture of my sister and I when we were both around for Christmas, and since we now live on opposite sides of the country, the opportunity wasn’t likely to come up again soon. I had my sister take a picture of herself with her city’s skyline behind her, and I took a similar one with my own, and I merged them together, a fairly quick and easy photoshop job with a basic color mask to balance things out and a little bit of translation to make everything line up right. All in all, it took about 20 minutes of retouching, and I was almost ashamed to send it to her, because to me it felt like a hack job. A “real artist”, in my mind, would have done something much more impressive.

some amateur work

When I described the process to a friend who rather liked the picture, I commented that I’d just sort of “fiddled with things until it looked right”, which is pretty much perfectly accurate. I didn’t have a good idea of how to make a proper mask, nor did I know what translations and cropping would work best, I just played around until I got something functional. His response was “yeah, that sounds like the kind of creative solution I’d expect from you”.

I hope everyone has a good weekend, particularly those of you who have long weekends. I’m going to work on resting and shaking this illness, so I can go back to taking another thing for granted: my health. Cheers!

Source: Digital Initiative
Taking Things For Granted

On July’s Game of the Month

July 3, 2015July 3, 2015 by Ashgar

For those of you who haven’t listened to the podcast yet, the Game of the Month for July is Astebreed. It’s a Bullet Hell shooter available on PC on a number of services, and recently, also on PS4. I didn’t honestly think I was going to get the members of our podcast to play this game, and I’m still not sure if they’ll like it, but it should be interesting talking about it. Even if you haven’t played a Bullet Hell game before, I think this is a pretty good starting point. I had screenshots of me playing this at one point, but you’ll have to settle for screenshots from Steam for now.

The Game

All I really need to say here is that Astebreed has you controlling a giant robot with lots of guns and a big sword. It’s predominantly a side-scrolling shooter, but there are also times where it plays more like a corridor shooter (i.e. StarFox). As expected from this type of game, you have a significant amount of firepower, as do enemies. In addition to a standard shot, you also have a lock-on shot and a large sword. It’s this last element that changes things up, as the scoring system encourages slicing enemies in half, and swinging your sword can destroy enemy shots. Also unlike a lot of traditional scrolling shooters, you don’t die in one hit, you have a health bar that is somewhat generous, and even regenerates if you go a while without getting hit.

The Presentation

Astebreed is the spiritual successor to a game I’ve never played, Ether Vapor. It has a self-contained story that reuses some characters from the previous game, and pays a lot more attention to story than I’d expect from a shooter. For starters, it has Actual Characters and an ending that isn’t just “Congrats, you blew up the bad guys”. There is voice acting, but none of it is in English. Cutscenes exist between levels to develop the plot.

The Choice

I almost made the Game of the Month for July the Final Fantasy 5 Four Job Fiesta. Kodra even suggested that I should, so we could talk about Final Fantasy (like we don’t do that enough). I went with Astebreed because I wanted us to play something a bit different. We’ve mostly had games of the month that have been a bit methodical, between RPGs, strategy, and puzzle games. We haven’t had any actual action games, and this seems like a good candidate.

I did mention another game, however: Jigoku Kisetsukan is free on steam, and is a “tribute” to the Touhou series. I bring this up because it’s nice to have a comparison to a different style of Bullet Hell, and this is actually a very good example (it’s a better game than a lot of shooters on Steam that are not free). That said, the difficulty curve in this game is more like a brick wall than any actual curve, and the graphics aren’t entirely cohesive. I recommend giving this a shot if you make it through Astebreed before the end of the month, as Astebreed is a very short game.

Jigoku Kisetsukan: boss4 — Sadly, you don’t have a sword to cut through this mess.

Source: Ashs Adventures
On July’s Game of the Month

Bismarck Harpooned

July 3, 2015July 3, 2015 by Belghast

Depths of Madness

As I warned you all, I am writing this the night before I intend to post it… at 11pm after a fairly long day of working on our little side projects. Essentially the offices of both myself and my wife need reorganizing in the worst possible way. Neither has really been torn apart and put back together in a very very long time. In fact a good chunk of today was spent shedding documents… from 2005 or so that we kept for god knows what reason. I had forgotten just how many bills and statements used to pile up from the mail… that are now delivered electronically. So I spent my time alternating between shredding documents until the shredder overheated… and boxing up things I no longer needed or wanted for Goodwill.

The problem being that I feel completely overwhelmed in how much is still left to go through. I am horrible about just boxing things up to get it out of the way… so I have several of these boxes loaded with miscellaneous stuff. So this whole mission is part de-cluttering but even more important a sifting of things back into logical bins. At the same time I am trying to make my computer space more friendly, and have a better option for hooking up my console systems and still being able to capture footage from them through my computer. Another thing I am trying to do is to give myself a workspace where I can fiddle with computers or more importantly assemble the mountain of Lego sets I have. Then I am trying to free up some additional room to have places to display said Legos when I finally get them together. Needless to say the next few days are going to be busy.

Bismarck Harpooned

If you have ready this blog for any period of time, you will know that I am pretty much willing to get drug into anything if a guild member needs it. There are some exceptions that I avoid like the plague… I am looking at you Aurum Vale. However if the need is great enough I can always get my arm twisted enough to run whatever it is. Bismarck on the other hand is an encounter that I truly enjoy, so the moment someone mentions that I almost jump at the chance to run it. What makes Bismarck so interesting is the fact that it is a vastly different style of primal fight. While you are ultimately in a fight against the giant flying whale, you are having to deal with a lot of different elements rather than fighting it directly. The goal is to fire two giant harpoons into the whale that allow you to wench it to the side of the island you are standing on. From there you can dps down its weak spot. To make things more interesting you have to deal with all sorts of weather effects, different sorts of adds, and the whale itself slamming into the platform periodically.

The funny thing about pugging a Primal encounter is that you never fully understand the mechanics at work unless someone actually takes the time to explain them. One of the mechanics that we did not grasp completely was what exactly to do with the water globules during phase three. It took us three attempts to get through Bismarck because we were essentially having to figure out what exactly to do with them. The first time we killed the adds and died to lightning damage, the second time we left the water globs up… and then took a massive burst of damage when they exploded. The real mechanic is a bit more subtle. If there is story weather happening, you leave the water globs up to soak the lightning damage which will ultimately kill them. If the skies are clear however… you kill the adds before they explode. Once we grasped this more clearly we wrecked this primal. I have a pretty nice video of our kill above that I edited out of my stream.

Finally Fifty Nine

The bulk of my evening was spent wandering around trying to find ways of getting experience. After having pretty good luck with Clan Hunts Wednesday night, I started off my evening getting a new set and working through those. It seems like they provide about an eighth of a level upon completing the first two tiers, which is nothing to sneeze at. After finishing these off I went back out to the Hinterlands to do quests for the crazy goblins within. These quests involve more than your normal amount of running around as you help them build their new perfect society. I managed to just have enough quests to push on through to 59 without any further dungeons or fate running. Now I am in the final stretch to 60, and I have heard it goes considerably faster. I also just unlocked the next dungeon, and I have been looking forward to running it since I first heard about it. Hopefully tomorrow before or after the podcast I will be able to pull together a group and run it. In the mean time however… I need to head to bed because we have to get up early tomorrow to deal with more cleaning.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Bismarck Harpooned