April 2016 – Page 9

DAW2016 Coming Soon

April 7, 2016 by Belghast

One of the truths of the gamer blogger community that you will realize if you hang around for very long, is that we really like having events. There is the Newbie Blogger Initiative that runs during may, and for some reason a few years back I started Blaugust or at least popularized it. Another one of these events that has happened on a yearly basis is the “Developer Appreciation Week”. As far as I can tell the practice was envisioned by the blogger formerly known as Scarybooster. Back in 2010 he envisioned a week where bloggers posted one or many posts talking about the developers, companies and folks in the games industry that we really appreciate. Unfortunately the Scarybooster blog has been deleted for some time, so the early posts announcing this event are also gone with it. Thankfully through the magic of the internet archive you can still see some of those first posts. With the absence of a Scarybooster blogging presence, the week itself also was a little forgotten this year. Traditionally this happens during the last year of March, and since that seemed to be a crazy time for a lot of us… I suggested we simply reschedule the week for the tail end of April. The theory there is that all of this blogging excitement just might also drum up some excitement for the Newbie Blogger Initiative that will be happening in some form during the month of May.

The concept is simple. During the week of April 24th through April 30th, make one or more posts talking about your love and or appreciation of someone or some group from the games industry responsible for making those games that we love. The concept however is important. The good folks in the games industry enter it because they love video games, and often times have a life long goal of ending up there. The industry itself is a really rough one, and we can all see how caustic the communities can be when they turn against a game or an individual. This has been all the more evident in the last few years with the various “crusades” against this or that that have cycled through the gaming world. I think it is important that we set aside this week to lower our pitchforks, and set down our causes… and marvel in the reality that these folks do for a living what many of us wish that we could. The folks that make are games are not huge monolithic corporations that poop out games… they are folks that had a dream and are fighting really hard to see that dream realized. I maybe have a slightly different spin on things since over the years I have had a lot of friends join the industry… and many of them leave after a few years because it is honestly a largely unappreciated one. It is time for us bloggers to step in and show them some of the love we feel deep down in our hearts beneath the rants and the criticism.

So I ask you all to join me in Developer Appreciation Week. Lets continue this tradition that Scarybooster started long ago. Lets tell all those folks in the industry that we still care, even though we often times have some very serious complaints. At this point I am not sure yet if I will be posting something related to DAW 2016 every day of the week, but even if you only make a single post… it will be appreciated. For those wondering what others have written in the past, I happened to be doing the Blog Bonanza at MMOGames this time last year and wrote up a summary post of the various things folks said during the week. Unfortunately #DAW2016 and every other combination of hashtag I could think of is being used by Dyslexia and Dementia and several other causes… so what really matters I guess is the blog posts.

Official PS4 Remote Play

April 6, 2016 by Belghast

3.50 System Update

Some time ago I wrote a post about the unofficial Twisted Remote Play app. Since that time I have used that thing on a nearly daily basis, if for no reason other than the pull screenshots off of my PS4 without having to play move the thumb drive. It worked well, and honestly offered a level of game play that was nearly indistinguishable from sitting physically at your machine. It worked amazingly smoothly over my laptop downstairs and while I didn’t do anything super serious with it, I did spend quite a bit of time farming resources or doing daily bounties in Destiny through it. When I bought into the Alpha I believe it was $10 and since then he has shifted the pricing scheme to a free/premium structure. As a former paid user I got transitioned to premium, and from what I can tell the paid version just gets newer updates. However around the time I wrote my original post it was confirmed my Sony that they would be releasing an official version of the Remote Play application. For anyone who cares to know, it turns out that Twisted simply reverse engineered the existing Xperia remote play app that had been available on the android and then greatly tweaked and improved the net code. The improvements were not insignificant, and I honestly doubted that the official app release would even come close to the performance of the Twisted client.

I am guessing the existence of this unofficial dark horse client lit a fire under Sony and maybe caused them to improve their product offering to compete. As of this morning the 3.50 system update is available for the PS4 and with it brings the official client that you can download here. Out of the box it honestly performs like shit. The default is 540p 30fps and using your PSN account to find your machine over the internet. However if you kill the client and relaunch it, you will notice a settings box down near the bottom on the left hand side. I found that if I cranked up the resolution to 720p and the frame rate to High it also changed the way the application worked. Instead of finding your machine over the internet, it instead looked for it on your local network and as a result greatly improved the performance. Granted my tests this morning were over a wired connection straight into the same router my PS4 was connected to, but I have to say the performance was reasonable. I am not 100% sure if it is quite as smooth as the Twisted client, but it was absolutely playable. I popped into Destiny and ran around the planet working on some bounties and while it felt like at times there was maybe a tiny bit of lag in the input… it was absolutely playable. If you are doing anything serious at all I would still highly suggest sitting at your machine and just playing like Sony intended… however if you want to chill out from a laptop I have a feeling that the experience will be comparable to the Twisted client.

All of this said… I really hope that the Twisted client updates and gets fixed. There were a lot of interesting things that he was doing that I want to see continued. For example he was doing some work with emulating a Dualshock 4 controller with a Keyboard and Mouse. Now it wasn’t quite there yet but it worked “well enough” to play around with on bounties and such in Destiny. The other thing that I would love is for him to figure out how to pass through the Microphone input to the remote play application allowing folks to hang out and talk on PSN party chat while playing remotely. I also feel like Twisted is going to ultimately support complaints with his client far better than Sony will. PSTV for example is a mess and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of fixing it… given that they officially cancelled the product. I feel like the PC and Mac support here is just to be able to say that they can do this feature that Xbox One has been touting for awhile, and once that check mark has been ticked off they simply won’t devote the resources to making sure it continues to work as well as it could work. All of this makes me hope that they did not permanently break support for the method that Twisted has been connecting, because I really want to see that project succeed.

Feeling Out Of Things To Say

April 5, 2016 by Tamrielo

Lately my pace on this blog has slowed. I don’t know what (if any) regular readers I have who’ve noticed this, but I figured I’d at least mention it. I’ve done five days a week for a little over a year and dropped to four, then three, than now once or twice a week. Part of this is that work and class picked up and it was hard enough to juggle both while still writing weekly, but part of it is also that I feel like I don’t have a lot to say.

via twolittlefruits on Etsy

I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t really like talking unless I feel like there’s something valuable for me to say, something someone else might hear or read and either think about or disagree with me or be inspired by or understand something better or whatever. I’m similar in person– I generally don’t talk unless I have something to say. Most of my posts (though not all!) have been essentially semi-academic-style essays about various topics, just more opinion-leaning than cited, credible sources. It makes me feel like I’m contributing rather than just talking.

Lately, I’ve been busy with class and haven’t been playing a lot of games– or I haven’t had a lot of Big Ideas about the ones I have been playing. I don’t have anything deep or insightful to say about Stardew Valley or Mini Metro, other than both are really great games and I enjoy them a lot.

I guess a big part of it is that I don’t know what people like to read. If you are reading this, what DO you like to read about? What makes you check this space? I’m honestly curious, because I don’t really know.

The Banner Falls

April 5, 2016 by Belghast

Plans Change

When I left work I had every intent to go home and play Iron Banner on the Titan all night long, in the hopes of getting some really awesome drops. That didn’t exactly happen, but I did end up playing Iron Banner up until the point when I decided to go to bed a little early. The change however was that I ended up playing on my Hunter. There is a clear pecking order between my Destiny characters. The Titan gets all the really good stuff… the Hunter gets the next tier of stuff… and the Warlock survives on scraps from the other two. Since I had already gotten the Titan to Rank 5, I was curious just how fast I could get the Hunter up there in levels. I had heard there was some sort of an alt bonus, that helped to push your second and third characters up faster, as well as now having access to both the rank 5 shader and emblem which also increase reputation gain. I made significant progress and after a half dozen matches I was sitting at Rank 3 staring down the barrel of Rank 4. Had I stayed up a little later I might have been able to hit Rank 5 all in one night. The big part was that I simply did not have the skill or the time to be able to complete the “brown” bounties on the Hunter since they take a lot of repeated effort. In theory next Iron Banner I might work on the daily bounties for both the Titan and the Hunter each day, and by the end of the week I should have enough progress to turn in those weekly bounties.

The huge positive however is that thanks to the gear that managed to drop while running matches, I can now hit 302 on the Hunter. In total I managed to pick up both a chest piece at 306 and a set of arms at 285… the later I will probably push up whenever the infusion changes happen. I really like the Iron Banner armor look, and I have a feeling that before long that is what my characters will be decked out in. However the upcoming taken look stuff, will probably be what I put on my Hunter since of the three looks that is the one I like the best. Honestly of the Taken gear the only one that I really don’t like is the Titan, and that is largely because of the dumb helmet. The horns on that helmet look like the radar array off of a cruise ship or something. This gets into a complaint I have with Destiny as a whole. It is MMOish but only sorta… and the thing I wish it offered was a true cosmetic system where you could actually customize your appearance without changing your gear. That is one of the things I like the most about The Division is the ability to change my look and have it largely be independent of what I happen to be wearing. Sure there your only options are various pieces of clothing, but in Destiny you could create some really unique armor sets. However I guess with the lossless infusion system, it will make customizing your appearance significantly easier.

Ponytail Titan

Tonight is yet another Rookie Raid and it has become that night of the week that I really look forward to. There is of course a certain amount of trepidation as well, namely when it comes to the damned jumping puzzles. As I have said before Destiny manages to trip my vertigo worse than any game since Mirrors Edge. However I push through it in order to be able to get the tasty drops. This go around what I am really hoping for is to be able to walk out of the raid with the machine gun. I realize that I just put a bunch of effort into pushing up my Bretomart’s Stand to make it raid viable… but I just keep hearing that the raid machine gun is pretty much better in every way. You get hooked on guns with the Cocoon perk, and knowing that whenever you swap weapons there will never be an awkward situation where you have to reload. This would definitely make dps time in the light bubble on Oryx more efficient since you could swap weapons and pour shots into him while waiting on the machine gun to load itself. Cosmetically I am going with a sort of White Knight meets Hive Knight look, and I dig it… even though I kinda wish I had the rest of the Iron Banner gear. When the infusion changes go in I will likely be swapping over to the Iron Camelot shoulders that I picked up from Saladin. I am hoping next go round he brings boots so I can finish out the appearance.

The only regret from this past week is that I didn’t actually connect with any of my friends to talk them into helping me finish my sword quest. It is not like I can actually use it in the raid, since on several of the fights I actually need to use an exotic primary. However it would just be nice to know that I am done with it. I also missed another opportunity for the Black Spindle, because I believe that was last Friday night. I was so focused on Iron Banner that I didn’t even notice until I got an email from another friend asking if I was around to make attempts on it. I have a bit of a mental block now about that mission, since I have failed so many times at it. The other side project that I would love to work on is finding someone to recruit, so that I can get those sweet sweet recruit a friend bonus items. I absolutely want a Tron Sparrow, but unfortunately I can’t just do the World of Warcraft thing and set up a second account. A lot of the achievement steps require you to be doing stuff together. I’ve wondered for awhile now what it would take to get my friend Vernie hooked on this game… because I think he would absolutely like it. The only problem is he is a die-hard keyboard and mouse guy… just like I was before the siren song of Destiny. The thing is… all the joy I used to have playing PC shooters when we would do LAN games after work… I am having with Destiny.