Month: January 2016

Imposters and Shaman

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Still Adjusting

Imposters and Shaman

The last couple of nights, by the time I got home from work I was so irrationally tired.  I am sure it is largely just me trying to get adjusted to waking up at 5 in the morning again, but whatever the case it is annoying as hell.  Last night I was so out of it, that I didn’t even cook a “real” dinner but instead simply made a peanut butter sandwich and then proceeded to sit on the couch fighting desperately not to fall asleep.  By the time my wife got home around 7ish I had managed to get a second wind and started actually functioning, or at least a mental state closer to functional.  I am hoping by the time I hit the weekend, I will have worked out all of the differences in sleep patterns and next week will be easier.  What does not really help is the fact that upon coming back Monday it has been crisis central at work.  We’ve dealt with a project that is threatening to go off the rails, a virus scare, and processing some crucial year end/beginning of year things.  I guess that is always the case after coming back from Christmas break.  Folks stop really functioning around Thanksgiving and all of that work gets pushed until we all get back that Monday after New Years.  I have a friend that is smart in that he tends to take his vacation after the first instead of connecting the dots between Christmas and New Years like most of us do.  That means he misses most of this insanity.

The only real positive is it feels like everyone else out there is struggling with 2016, so at least we can share the misery together.  Making matters worse is that my boss is fairly sick, and I am now paranoid that I am coming down with it.  The thing is… I would happily go to bed tonight around 8pm if I thought I would actually be able to sleep all the way through the night.  My fear is that I would go to sleep, and then wake up at midnight completely unable to get back to sleep.  There is just too much stuff to do right now so I feel like I cannot afford to get sick.  There are projects that have to be completed, and others that need to get started.  I am dealing with some of the most extreme impostor syndrome I have in a very long time, because I feel like I should be able to juggle all of this madness better.  Its kinda shit walking around for days paranoid that someone is going to find out that you are a fraud, and that you really don’t know anything…  all the while you are very clearly doing complex things that negate the notion that you are a fraud.  Brains are dumb.  If I could figure out how to negate the effects of this… and also the weird panic freak outs that I have been having life would be awesome.  The other solution that I would love to fix is the fact that regardless of how tired I seem to be sitting on the couch, the moment I put head to pillow I am either wide awake or deluged by a panic attack.

Pushing Alts

Imposters and Shaman

Once I finished Draenor Pathfinder, I was hit with this feeling of…  “Hey! You should finish some more alts!”.  As a result I started in pushing up my Draenei Paladin Exeter, and as of last night I managed to hit level 100.  I am honestly shocked at just how fast leveling goes when you can fly.  Now one would think that maybe this would tip me to the other side of the “flying in draenor” discussion, but not really.  When I leveled three characters to 100 without flight, the experience felt more “earned” if that makes sense.  The time spent felt like I was actually living in those zones, rather than just flitting from point to point dropping off this or that item.  Don’t get me wrong, I am grateful now for the ability to level faster…  because three characters was about the right amount of time that I wish to spend in these zones.  The other characters, I just want to push as fast as humanly possible.  Ultimately I started doing this Alliance side again because I needed a break from the Old World Horde leveling path.  After rapidly pushing a druid to 40 over Christmas break, it felt “too soon” when I returned to working on my Orc Warlock.  In theory at some point soon I might just end up transferring that druid to The Scryers so that I can play it with the regular crew of people that I play horde with.  It seems silly to transfer a sub 60 character, but I really don’t want to push a new character through those zones that quickly.  I need to do some more research into the horde potential zones, because in just following the adventure guide it seems to always direct me to the same places.  Mostly I want to sort out how to get down the Grom’gol path and into Stranglethorn Vale.

In the meantime while on this break from Horde, I think I am going to work on my Dwarven Shaman.  I have an army of still to be leveled to 100 post 90 characters… and this one is sitting at 91.  I think in theory I can probably wrap him up quickly and make some movement over the weekend.  Mostly what tipped him over the edge was a discussion with some friends that indirectly influenced me.  Tam was talking about specs that became “better” than others… and mentioned some period of time when Enhancement was the bees knees.  Which made me think about how Enhancement is the only Shaman spec I can really play…  which made me remember how much I actually liked playing it.  So as a result I think I am going to push the dorf for a bit and see how close I get to 100 before getting that urge to play Horde again.  Largely I think it would be kinda awesome if I was able to push all of my characters to 100 before Legion….  but given how many horde characters are not even 20 yet… that is going to be a very tall order.  In the meantime I am trying to do whatever feels the best, and trying to sort out how to stop feeling so damned tired all the time.  Today is better than yesterday… and that was better than Monday….  so I feel like it is a gradual thing.  With time I will get back used to this 5 am crap…  and will continue onward being a super responsible adult type person.

 

 

 

 

 

Tam Tries: Kingdom

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A friend of mine recommended Kingdom to me, and another sent me a copy of it, so I wound up putting some time into it over the break. It’s a 2D sidescrolling strategy game where you play as a ruler who can collect money and drive construction, and you’re trying to build your kingdom in the wilderness.

Tam Tries: Kingdom

It’s one part Terraria/Starbound, one part Majesty (did anyone besides me play that game?)– essentially, you don’t have any direct influence and act entirely through your subjects. Your subjects can be found at camps and lured into joining you with money. Money comes from archers, who hunt game, and farmers, who tend crops. It appears as coins on the ground which you can pick up, and your subjects will pick them up themselves if you’re not around and hand them over if they see you.

Money is used to equip your subjects– you can spend money to make a tool or weapon and unequipped subjects will gravitate towards it and pick it up. It can also be used to build– upgrades, walls, farms, watchtowers, and so on. These will be staffed by appropriately-equipped subjects, and they’re built by builders, which is another tool type.

Opposing your progress is the Greed, bandits and monsters who continually harry your kingdom from the edges. They look to steal your money and tools, and will attack you and your subjects to get them. As the ruler, you have a crown, and if you’re hit and have no money to drop, your crown will get knocked off– if the Greed steals it or it’s otherwise destroyed, you’re done.

Tam Tries: Kingdom

The Greed comes at night, and in the night all of your subjects will rest and, with the exception of Builders (who will toil through the night heedless of the danger), will sit inside the borders of your kingdom– whatever the outermost wall is. From there, they’ll shoot at and defend your kingdom from the Greed.

Success is about expanding your kingdom while keeping yourself safe from the ever-escalating attacks from the Greed. Overextend and you’ll find yourself spread too thin to fend off the Greed, turtle up too much and you’ll be overrun. It’s important to venture beyond the borders of your kingdom, both to expand and to find important things to help your growth.

The whole game is a really interesting concept, but I ultimately found it somewhat frustrating. It ramps up in difficulty rather quickly if you’re not on top of things, and there are a number of mistakes you can make that will cripple you while seeming like sound decisions. I’ve talked about degenerative strategies before, and Kingdom suffers hugely from them– a lot of the things you can do or build are simply bad choices that you should never make, and since there’s no way to destroy buildings or manually command your units, you can find yourself stuck without realizing it.

Tam Tries: Kingdom

As an example of this, one of the structures you can build is the archer tower. If conveniently located, archers in an archer tower can shoot down at enemies over walls easily and more accurately, helping hold the line. Sounds great, except that your line is always moving, and archer towers don’t. Furthermore, archers won’t leave archer towers. As a result, you can easily get into a situation where your entire defensive force is spread thin, and a concentrated attack will cut a swathe through your entire kingdom where a focused defense would have kept everything safe. I rarely make more than two or three archer towers total in a winning game, usually just to hold against particularly nasty waves. Otherwise, massed archers handle themselves just fine.

In a similar vein, there’s a wandering merchant who, for four gold, will fill up one of your tools (to four); tools being bows to make archers, hammers to make builders, or scythes to make farmers. Considering that putting tools in costs 2-5 gold each, this seems like a good deal, up until you realize that you want a very tight control over the number of builders and farmers you have, and since both of those are likely to get picked up before bows, and you usually want more archers than anything else, that merchant is doing you no favors unless he randomly gives you bows. Again, in games I win, I basically never use the merchant.

Tam Tries: Kingdom

I understand that Kingdom is trying to be an iterative game, where you play it over and over and make better decisions each time. I theoretically like that about it, except that as I’ve gotten better at the game, I’ve mostly realized that the best strategy is the least interesting one and uses as few of the game’s mechanics as possible. I find this frustrating, because it’s already a fairly shallow game as far as complexity– having winning strategies use even fewer of the game’s limited mechanics is somewhat irritating.

That all having been said, it’s a game I had a good bit of fun with until “solving” it, and it’s a game I’m glad I picked up. It’s honestly probably worth it just for the pixel-art style and the music, which are both rather nice.

Ultra Combo

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Waiting on One

Ultra Combo

For awhile now I have been watching the Xbox One console, wondering if I should try and get one.  There are a lot of cool features, not the least of which is the fact that you can stream from your console to a windows PC.  There are many nights that I would prefer to sit my butt on the sofa downstairs, but would far rather be playing my PS4 that is hooked up in my office so that I can stream over OBS with it.  The truth is…  other than my recent foray into Destiny, my Xbox 360 has set pretty much unused for most of the time I have owned it.  To make matters worse, I technically have two of them, thinking my first unit was kaput and picking up a second one cheaply…  only to realize later that it was simply the power supply.  The fact that I just didn’t seem to enjoy playing games on the Xbox 360 really soured my consideration when it came to looking at the Xbox One.  This combined with the really poor marketing message at launch, and the fact a good number of my friends were already on team PlayStation ended up pushing me in that direction.  When I finally picked up a PS3 late in the game, I experienced somewhat of a renaissance of console gaming… and the more bought into the suite of consoles I got the more rewarded I was.  Playing games remotely through a PS Vita is kinda awesome…  even though I honestly don’t do it that much.

The justification thus far that I have given myself for not buying into the Xbox One was the fact that most of the console “exclusives” seemed to eventually come out for the PC.  Whereas on the other side of the equation, none of the PS4 console exclusives seemed to make it out on the PC or Xbox One for that matter.  That said there were always a few games that I considered might be worth picking up a console for, but as it stands…  there seems to be only one of those that is truly “console exclusive”.  Over the Christmas break it was announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider pc would be hitting in January or at least “Early 2016”.  At the announcement of this game I thought it was all too specific that they kept saying the same verbiage of “Exclusive for Holiday 2015”.  So this knocked one game off the list of “worth purchasing a console for” and yesterday knocked another one off.  Since it was announced I have been pumped about the modern incarnation of Killer Instinct.  I thought it was a pipe dream that the game would be coming to the PC, but during the last round of conventions when they talked about Gears of War getting a PC release….  I thought maybe just maybe that the game might jump off console.  It seems that Windows is putting all of their eggs in the “Exclusive for Windows 10” basket as well, and I guess in the grand scheme of things I am perfectly fine with this.  The problem being…  that once again it erodes at any reason for me to shell out money for an Xbox One.  Right now the only game that seems firmly landlocked on the console is Halo… and considering the lack of ease I have had getting into those games during my recent attempt at playing them on the 360 tells me that I will be just fine without it.

Yup Ecco

Ultra Combo

Last night I started work on the January AggroChat Game of the Month, because I wanted to give it enough time to hopefully beat it by the end of the month.  This time around Ashgar chose the older Indie game Aquaria, which actually released back in 2007.  I remember this game being in one of the very first Humble Bundles that I ever purchased, and it has sat in my steam library waiting there unplayed.  When Ash described it on the podcast last weekend, my initial thought was that it sounded quite a bit like Ecco the Dolphin.  I mean the game has the similarity that you are a character swimming around an entirely aquatic world, and also shares some metroidvania tendencies, which at the time I felt Ecco did as well.  What I did not realize is just how much the experience would feel exactly like my memories of Ecco.  The weird thing about Ecco is that I was fond of the game, but at the same time anytime I attempted to play it I felt nothing but sheer confusion.  I never knew what I was supposed to do and when exactly I was supposed to do it… and for the most part that is precisely how I am feeling about Aquaria.

The game is gorgeous, and the characters move around the world nicely… even though the main character has a bit of a paper doll thing going on in the way her limbs attach to her body.  The control scheme on the other hand is deeply confused.  It supports a controller, and for the most part moving around screen feels so much better with an analog stick.  However when it comes to inputting song sequences…  the controller is almost impossible for this task.  The first song ends up alternating between left and right twice… so that one is completely doable… however there is one later used to unlock a gate that involves moving your joystick to a sequence of the minor axis which feels completely impossible to pull off smoothly.  So as a result I found myself shifting back and forth between controller and keyboard and mouse giving me an extremely frustrating gameplay experience.  I feel like this is a game where I am going to have to either look at some maps or follow a guide to get “started” because I think maybe once I understand what the hell is going on… that I will like it.  Even last night Ash talked about having trouble getting started, which tells me that maybe this game is far too esoteric for my tastes.