September 2015 – Page 21

Bel VS Mobile Gaming

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

The Eureka Moment

I just had a moment of realization while checking on the progress of Vault 816… I am not a mobile gamer. While I really enjoy the idea of playing Fallout Shelter, I always have the same thought I have with any mobile game. “Man I wish I could play this on my desktop or through a web browser.” There are games that I enjoy the idea of playing… like Fallout Shelter, Alphabear, Dragon Coins, or Final Fantasy Record Keeper. The problem is I get frustrated by the imprecise controls. Using your finger to move objects around the screen feels so much more cludgy than doing it with a nice tight mouse pointer. Granted if I were a smaller person I would probably not be having any of these issues.

Sausage-Like Fingers

I am 6’4” and have huge hands… I can palm a basketball. Attached to these huge hands are useless sausage-like fingers that have the fine motor skills of sleepy toddler. The more I think about it… this fact has gotten in the way of my enjoyment of almost every mobile game I have played. At first I thought the bulk of my problems would be resolved were I simply playing on a larger device. However as I graduated from my iPhone 3s to a Samsung Galaxy S2 to a Samsung Galaxy S5… each time the screen size increased sizably but the difficulty never went away. When I finally got my own iPad I still felt like throwing it across the room anytime I was asked to do anything that required a modicum of detailed movement.

I realize there is such a thing as a stylus, but then I am having to fiddle with an awkward device on top of an already awkward control scheme. The problem is… there really are games that I want to enjoy on mobile devices. Fallout Shelter for example takes two things that I have loved in the past… the Fallout Franchise, and Sim Tower like gameplay. During my pre-college and college years I spent silly amounts of my free time playing both of these games. I spent enough time playing Sim Tower to be able to build freaking airports at the top of my towers. I have played each of the Fallout franchise games multiple times, and even though I rarely play the original… I feel like I could pretty safely pick it right back up and meld into the nostalgia nicely. So I am the core demographic of this game… except for the whole control scheme problem.

I honestly have no clue why I felt like I needed to write this post, other than having my own little Eureka moment. For the longest time I thought my dislike of mobile gaming was more about the game experiences that you have on a mobile device. Now I realize that is wrong… there are plenty of “gamerly” experiences available. My problem is that I struggle to get any sense of control while playing a mobile game. Finger based movement against a slick screen always feels chaotic to me. It reminds me of how frustrated I get when trying to use a trackball. I guess I am just accustomed to the mouse, keyboard and controller… and when it finally comes down to relying on my own digits to make things work… I find the experience frustrating. I am wondering if anyone else out there with sausage-like fingers suffers from this same issue? We should totally form a support group or something.

The Value of Pessimism

September 3, 2015 by Thalen

I'm an optimist by nature. In the words of Miles, I like to like things. You're unlikely to see me being negative about things very often on this blog simply because I'd much rather spend my time finding things to be positive about. This isn't to say that I love everything uncritically, I just tend to keep criticism to myself.

With notable exceptions

Sometimes though, you have to be the pessimist. I'm running into this at my day job currently; a project is having some rough patches and I'm finding myself needing to be a critical voice in the face of an optimism that I fear might have us go live with something that doesn't do the job. It may be my fears are unfounded (I certainly hope so), but you have to take the worst case into account along with the best.

I don't enjoy being a downer, but sometimes everyone else is chasing rainbows and I'm the only one left to say 'but what if?' What's the backup plan? How do we recover if this fails? It's something I've had to learn myself over the years after having to scramble when something blew up in my face. Maybe I'm developing wisdom as I age.

Pfft, yeah right.

Learning Japanese: Vocabulary

September 3, 2015 by Tamrielo

I’ve hit the point in my Japanese studies where what I really need to do is build a ton of vocabulary. I have a reasonable grounding of basic grammar and sentence structure, and I need more vocabulary so I can start learning quirks and learning how to put pieces together.

It’s made more difficult by the lack of good resources. Straight translation isn’t necessarily the best, because there are shades of meaning in word use that I don’t yet know. In English, “friend”, “companion”, “partner”, and “teammate” can be used in very similar ways, sometimes interchangeably, but they’re different enough that you can’t just pick one and use it universally. Introducing your lover as a “friend” is a quick route to hurt feelings, and referring to a friend as your “partner” makes a few suggestions that you might not intend.

It’s a severe pitfall when learning a new language, and it’s one of those things that draws a stark line between the fluent and the learner. I’m probably getting a bit ahead of myself by thinking about this sort of thing this early on, but I can’t help but want to know the proper, appropriate way of saying what I want to say, and understanding both how and why it differs from a literal translation. Growing up, I always chuckled a bit at classmates who would scoff at learning multiple words with similar meanings– they would wonder why there needed to be two or three or four words that “meant the same thing”, and I’d wonder what the differences were, and why there were multiple words that meant the same thing.

As a result, I’m very sensitive to the idea that, in Japanese, a single kanji can have multiple meanings, and that clever wordplay and eloquence revolves around using the right word in the right place, seemingly moreso than English. It makes me want to have the same breadth of vocabulary I have in English so that I can be more precise in my speech. I know I want to eventually be an eloquent speaker, and I know I need to have a broader understanding of the language to know what eloquence even means in a language that isn’t English.

To get there, though, I need vocabulary, and I have to learn it somehow. Rote memorization isn’t getting me very far– I’m good at it when it comes to abstractions like the hiragana and katakana, but when it comes to attaching concepts to words I’m a lot weaker. I’ve considered starting to memorize kanji, using the same techniques that I used for hiragana and katakana, but it hasn’t been very successful thus far because I’m not always sure what words to start with and how to use them. I have, for example, picked up 私 (watashi, “I/me”) because it’s extremely useful and relatively straightforward, but I’m continually forgetting 音 (sound, noise, note) because I’m not really sure how to use it properly.

I find myself wishing I could take the opportunity to immerse myself completely in the language and just be lost for a while until I make the connections I need. This would be a uniquely awful experience for me, because communication is so important to me, but it would accelerate my learning a lot, and I’d learn how to use the language properly. I’m not sure there are good opportunities for me to do this, though.

In the meantime, I’m memorizing how to count various things. It’s a process.

Needing Purpose

September 3, 2015 by Belghast

Of Bad Ass Mounts

This morning I suffered some pretty major technical difficulties on the blog. Several months back I had a nasty DDoS attack against my blog from as far as I can tell some nasty video game extremists. It happened the day after I made a post, so I have always linked the two. As a result my ISP threw in a few rules to block access to the guts of my wordpress installation from anyone but me. This morning apparently in the middle of writing a post my IP address changed on me, and I immediately lost access to do any of the things that wordpress does through Ajax… which is apparently nearly everything. My good friend Hiawani however once again is to the rescue and he got me fixed in a matter of moments. I love this man so much, and in truth he is the only reason why I have stayed with my web host for as long as I have. In the coming weeks I need to actually get off my ass and allow them to migrate me to a different server. I mostly wanted to get through August before that happened, because I did not want any potential interruptions during Blaugust.

What you are seeing above however is a bad ass mount I just got in Rift. It is slowly creeping up on Extra Life time, and yesterday I finally went through the paces and created the AggroChat team. Last year we had tag teamed this even through the Alliance of Awesome group, and it was fun… but this year we kinda wanted to do it as AggroChat since we are a fairly large ensemble cast. If we managed to pull in all of the folks who have appeared on the show with any sense of regularity we should be able to get more than enough people to cover all the slots. All of this was pushed into motion however when Liore posted a link saying she was giving away the 4th Anniversary Arclight mount that she got from Pax. She was going to give the mount to the next donation she got on her own Extra Life page. Now while I am doing my own thing, I try and help others out as well, and over an hour had passed since she had posted the link so I figured I was out of luck. Turns out that nope… apparently folks were either feeling stingy yesterday afternoon or I am just lucky because I now have a really amazing mount in Rift. I buzzed around on it for a good hour last night not doing a damned thing other than riding… it is pretty amazing. Absolutely my favorite of the various Arclight rider designs.

Back to Eorzea

The last couple of weeks I have been on a fairly extended vacation as I took a break from Final Fantasy XIV and played lots of other games. Normally I would have been back on Monday but due to Pax that raid didn’t actually happen. Similarly we were down a significant number of people for last nights raid, but instead we opted to help a guild member through Alexander. She had managed to do the first turn only, and we helped her get through the last three. I know at the very least she got a ring from it, but I am hoping she managed to gather up some various bits as well. While waiting around on the raid however I spent time hanging out with guildie Tatafelo Rurufelo, who was doing his best warrior of light dark knight bad ass pose. My biggest problem right now is I am just feeling absolutely no drive to accomplish something. I should be out grinding Esoterics, but I am happy enough with my gear levels… and that is frustrating. I should be striving to get better, but instead I would rather just pop into another game like Diablo and grind there.

I feel like 3.1 is going to jump start my enjoyment of the game, because I am so tired of Neverreap. My biggest concern is that the next set only includes two dungeons… so will we be right back into the situation of always getting one of those two dungeons? My hope is that they make expert roulette be a combination of the first two plus the new two… giving us a pool of four dungeons. One of the biggest selling factors to me to date has been that we got three new dungeons each patch cycle. Them trimming it back to two per patch cycle kinda concerns me a little. Are we just going to see less content as a whole throughout Heavensward? Is this evidence that they are starting to work on a new expansion to follow Heavensward? Listening to Soken this weekend at Pax, it seems like “Hellsward” as they call it took a lot out of the team, so it might simply be that they need a smaller patch to recuperate from the grind that was getting Heavensward out the door. I guess only time will tell if we see a similarly small patch come 3.2. For the time being… I just need to find a new goal in game.