March 2018 – Page 7

Moogle Charro Suit

March 8, 2018 by Belghast

Last night I had all of the intent in the world to come home and stream some Monster Hunter World nonsense. Wednesday is likely going to be one of those days I stream because it is a relative dead spot for the rest of the Moogle’s Pom team. When I got home from training however I was just mentally toast and was not sure if I could handle non-streaming interaction… let alone being “on” while playing something. As a result I slipped into the comfortable chill of Final Fantasy XV. As you can see I have decided to go with a completely different outfit for Noct because the Mariachi Charro suit with a Moogle Riding a Chocobo on the back is freaking amazing. I’ve always thought the classic Mariachi attire looked classy as fuck, and since FFXV is sorta this weird homage to the Americas it sorta fits. I also swapped the Regalia paint job for a classic two tone with black/gold rims and the black and white interior.

This is mostly going to not be a post about Final Fantasy XV but I had some screenshots to break up the blocks of text so I am using them. I’ve been in ITILv3 certification classes and it is simply a lot of information to consume and remember. What is making things more difficult is that some of our practices at work go against the norm and even attribute completely different meanings to some of the terms I am going to have to be tested on. Some of my peers talked about just being mentally toast when they got out of class each night and that is precisely what I am going through. We’ve taken six quizzes, a 40 term vocabulary test, a bunch of brain dump review sessions… and today is the day. We have a handful of study activities and a practice test… and then finally at 1:35 to be exact I take the online proctored certification test.

I spent some time reading last night and watched a few study guide videos… but I could tell that no more data was going to fit into my brain that evening. Its almost as though there is some maximum buffer of learning that I have reached each day and only sleep manages to come along and clear it out. At this point we have covered probably well over 100 specific terms that we are going to need to understand and differentiate from other super similar terms. It is not like my job is on the line if I don’t pass… but I will catch massive hell because my predecessor did not when everyone else that went through a giant class together did. So far I have made roughly 80% on all of the quizzes so I am trending to be able to make the minimum of 65% needed to pass the test and get certification. Ultimately I will feel better once I have taken the practice exam and seen how I do on that.

In the meantime… I am ready for some normalcy to return to my week. I’ve been in training each day since Tuesday with my entire focus being absorbing as much raw information as I can. Coming back to work Friday and doing normal tasks is going to feel super odd given that I have been holed up in a classroom for the last three days. It honestly may not be until the weekend that I have decompressed enough from this experience to be able to interact with other human beings on a regular basis. I have stuff that I ultimately want to do in both Final Fantasy XIV and Monster Hunter World, and I have not even had a chance to check in and see what the weeklies are this time around. I know the Wiggler quest ends soon, and then shortly after that the Anjanath Horizon Zero Dawn quest. I need to make sure that everyone I know has the bits from that quest they still need before it poofs.

On the Final Fantasy XIV front I need to burn through the rest of the main story quest so that I can unlock the rest of the dungeons needed for Expert Roulette. I would really like to get into a comfortable pattern of coming home and doing the few daily roulettes for bookrocks in order to catch up gear wise. I would also really love to grab some people I trust and run through Rabanastre so I can get some quick explanations of the fight before I start tanking it on a regular basis. I could in theory run it as Samurai, but I am not sure if my gear is good enough to get in there on that class.

Finally last night I spent a little bit of time downstairs in bed playing around with my 2DS XL. Firstly I have to say how much better I like using this than the 3DS XL. For whatever reason the screen on the 3DS always screwed with my eyes. I could never actually see the 3D paralax effect and as a result everything just looked fuzzy even with the 3D settings flipped all the way to the lowest settings. As a result the 2DS screen looks so much crisper and as a result every game just feels better. The other awesome side effect is the fact that it is so much lighter, and also qualifies as a “New” device meaning I can finally put some of my favorite SNES games on it. I managed to catch Monster Hunter 4U on sale for $8… but sadly at the time of posting this it has gone back up to its full price. I started that game and already like it more than I did Generations, and I managed to defeat the Well-Done Steak boss on my first attempt because of figuring it out from World. These games feel so fresh and new… and I have to think a lot of my reluctance to play them had to have been how much the screen frustrated my eyes.

One Big Download

March 7, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was mostly an evening filled with frustration… at least the tail end of the night. I’ve talked about this before but I have a slightly different setup from most people in that all of my gaming stuff is upstairs in my office with both consoles and my real gaming pc hooked up to my 4k television up there. My wife needed to grade last night which is traditionally a downstairs activity and after about an hour and some change I felt sorta bad being upstairs while she was downstairs… when I was technically playing something I could play on the laptop. So I stopped the stream and headed downstairs to in theory chill on the sofa.

The core problem with that idea is that FFXV is a 75 gigabyte download which took legitimately a couple of hours to download over the wireless. However once we reached what I thought would be the end of the download… it stalled out for thirty minutes with zero activity. In the past when this has happened I have paused downloads in steam and restarted… and then things wake the hell up and finish up. That was not at all what happened this time however and the game decided to start downloading everything again. So when I finally gave up last night we were about 40 gb into download number two… and I have zero clue if it actually finished over night.

According to Steam I have spent 72 minutes playing Final Fantasy XV and for the most part it feels great and looks amazing as a PC game. There are some weird hiccups where the game would freeze but I was not sure if that was part of the whole combat engine or not. It would always happen after I did a big attack so maybe this is something that also happened on the PS4 that I am simply not remembering. As far as the actual feel of controlling the game with mouse and keyboard… it feels amazing other than the menu interactions. What it seems like you would logically do is select the menu item with your mouse, but that is not at all what happens. Instead you have to sort of scroll through the menus with WASD or a super awkward move the mouse in a general direction to pick an option scheme.

Combat however feels way more fluid for me using a mouse and keyboard than a controller which is ultimately the mode of the game I am going to be interacting with the most. This is one of those times that I am super thankful that the game is constantly prompting you which button you should push when, because it allowed me to drop right into the game and start playing rather than trying to memorize the keybindings. The biggest thing that just feels instantly better thought is basic sword attacks because I always felt like I was never quite dexterous enough with my fingers to do all of the interactions I needed to do. I was constantly missing blocks and parries which are things that I just sorta now do instinctively with a mouse.

I didn’t make it super far into the game because of the nonsense I tried to do with the laptop, but I did make it to Gauldin Quay which moves the story forward a tiny bit. That said I was absolutely more into doing the side quests than I ever cared about the main story. All in all I am happy I wound up picking this up for PC and look forward to making it further than I did on the console. This is mostly going to be a downstairs and chilling game for me, and the demo performed well on my laptop. Sure it lost a lot of detail that I get on the full gaming rig, but it will be fine for running around and slashing things to death.

Wiggle Wiggle Wiggle

March 6, 2018 by Belghast

Last night was all about Monster Hunter World as I had made plans ahead of time to run around with Grace and do the various events. First out of the gate we worked on the Wiggler quest that grants this truly questionable helm. It truly is the stuff of nightmares and honestly would have been a pain in the butt had we not realized that you could register multiple wiggler catches at once. We quickly fell into a pattern of sneaking up on the wigglers and getting one in our sights… then coordinating over voice a 3, 2, 1, GO! to capture both at the same time. Sure it took three shots at the quest to get all of the tickets needed to craft this monstrosity but here we go… I have a goofy helm that I wasted some zenny on crafting and will likely never actually use.

From there we spent some time doing the “The Proving” quest that involves killing a fairly beefy high rank Anjanath. We ran into all sorts of problems with PSN connectivity which made it significantly more challenging than normal. Throughout the night I kept getting disconnected from the quest with a “Left Quest” message. At first Ash suggested that Grace was just going off and leaving us… but I think it was more than that considering Ash and Mor both got punted out of the mission after having successfully joined with no ability to get back in. We struggled through two kills and called the process done for the moment moving on to other things.

Grace is in that awkward in-between step where she is officially a High Rank player… but still is using a significant amount of low rank gear. Considering her next quest is the Pink Rathian, that is probably something she needs to fix and as a result we farmed Zorah Magdaros a bit for parts. I am still to this day wearing the Zorah gloves for the hidden element ability, and honestly its an easy farm considering the event mostly just finishes itself. Now when I was farming this I SOS Rouletted my way into full groups that allowed us to quickly complete the event which for those who need Zorah bits is a completely viable option. The biggest challenge I ran into… and why I kept running it was that Zorah is super stingy with gems which are unfortunately needed for the gauntlets.

As far as starter High Rank gear goes… I am way more in favor of the Alpha Bone set because it has a lot of good stuff as well as 10 fire, 10 dragon and I believe 10 lightning resistance. All total to craft the full Bone Armor set you need… 12 Quality Bone, 10 Monster Bone +, 2 Warped Bone, 3 Monster Bone L, 3 Boulder Bone, 3 Coral Bone, and 3 Ancient Bone. Basically you need to kill a few big monsters and run amok harvesting bone piles in most of the zones to get it. The end result gives you a set with Health Boost, 3x Attack Boost, 3x Entomologist, Slugger, Horn Maestro, and Master Fisher. Not all of those are winners… but Entomologist can be super useful if you are farming bug parts. All of that said I still think its a great starter set for High Rank shenanigans.

The highlight of the evening however was getting a Tailrider Safari with Grace’s Neutrino and PizzaMaid’s Aria. Normally I just send Tailriders out from my room back in Asteria, but for this combination I made the trek to the Research Base so I could get the cutscene. I am also realizing that I need to trade cards with Pizza and Grace because neither of them are actually using these outfits anymore. The PS4 always has a bit of a delay when you attempt to take a screenshot so I am super happy that I was able to catch a decent one of this party going out to fight.

Tonight however I am thinking about kicking back and streaming some Final Fantasy XV on the PC… all depending on how well today goes. I will be in training and in theory will have homework tonight because I am going through one of those cram session courses. As a result my brain may be too broken to do anything interesting.

Reading Challenge #81: The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series by Steven Erikson

March 5, 2018 by Grace

It’s time for another book challenge entry, because I read most of this on my flight home from the west coast a few weeks back. The next book on the list is the Malazan Book of the Fallen Series by Steven Erikson. As usual with series on the list, I’m just reading the first book, Gardens of the Moon (published 1999).

As you may know by now, and will surely know if you keep reading these reviews until I finish my challenge, I have a bias against sprawling epic fantasy novels. It’s not that I don’t like them at all, but given the choice between fantasy war and political intrigue, and the exact same story but in space with lasers and spaceships, I’ll choose the spaceships every time. I also put off writing this review for a little while after I finished reading, so my recollection will be slightly fuzzier than usual.

Even with all that said, this book was a solid read. This book follows the expansion of an empire, through the eyes of the people on the ground on several sides. There are more than two sides, because in addition to the loyal imperial forces and those of the territories they seek to annex, there are also outside forces with treaties or vested interest in slowing the expansion, and forces within the empire working against it for their own reasons.

Oh and did I mention the gods? They keep getting involved too. This book has a theme of people losing themselves in service to something bigger, whether by their own choice or not. The loyal hand of the empress has given up her own identity to act as a more pure proxy for the empress. A young fisherman’s daughter is possessed by a god of assassins and also the spirit of a murdered witch. Several different characters are possessed or influenced by the god(s) of luck. It began to feel like nobody in the world was acting under their own volition. Maybe that was the point.

There were a few things that helped me get over my dislike of this style of novel and actually enjoy it. For one thing, unlike many fantasy novels that focus on war and politics, there was still plenty of magic in this world. Not just gods walking on earth like legends, but actual battles with wizards flinging spells at each other. I approve. The other thing that made this novel stand out was the characters. Although one was a bit more of a trope than I could take, on the whole the characters in this book were well-written and well motivated. This was good because there were a lot of characters, and the plot occasionally bounced around between them.

Much of the style and characters seem to build directly off of themes from the Elric stories. It made me very glad I had read those before this one. There are a range of characters here, but they all have their personal baggage that defines their personalities and their actions. This book ends with a few crises averted, and more still looming on the horizon. Overall I enjoyed it but probably not enough to keep reading the series.

TL;DR: A fantasy epic with some interesting thoughts on the nature of fate, chance, and personal responsibility.

The Malazan Book of the Fallen Series by Steven Erikson

Rating: 3/5 stars

Next up: Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, by Gregory Maguire.