I’m stealing one of my own topic ideas here, and talking about how games left an impression on me from my earliest childhood.
I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember, really. My uncle bought an Atari and kept it at my grandmother’s house for all his nieces and nephews to play when they came to visit. I was quite young at the time, and my favorite game was the Smurfs. My fond memories of that console are tied up with family: The smell of my grandmother’s cooking, the sound of my uncles and aunts telling stories, the burning desire to be as cool as my older cousins. Even though I can barely remember the games themselves, the nostalgia I feel from just looking at this photo is strong.
I am in this really weird place because I am both disconnected and connected to World of Warcraft at the same time right now. I am disconnected from the storyline because of the events of arsonist Sylvanas, but I am also finding myself enjoying the simple act of leveling. On the alliance side I have one of every class up in the 100-110 range, but on the horde side I am severely lacking in a bunch of columns. As of right now I have a stable of 110s on The Scryers in the form of my Warrior, Paladin, Demon Hunter and Warlock and then a 110 Deathknight over on Eonar. That said there are a bunch of spots left in my roster to level something and with the introduction of the prestige races I thought it would be really funny to make a High Mountain Tauren Monk.
So lately I have been spending most of my time in game rolling around… figuratively and literally… on the Monk. The highlight of the weekend was when I found out that I had a one handed shovel graphic in my transmog collection and that if I turned both of my weapons into them… they would sling across my back. This only really works because monks don’t actually use weapons at all and they just sit there strapped across my back as I punch and kick things. Now I am also just realizing that I can probably do a shovel knight transmog of some sort on a heavy armor character.
I’ve always found the leveling game to be one of the stronger points for World of Warcraft and as screwed up as the 60-80 leveling bracket seems to be right now… I do feel like them slowing things down a bit and blunting the effect of heirlooms was probably a good idea. Sure it means I can no longer solo world bosses, but it also means that I can have an experience that feels a little closer to what it actually felt like to level something originally. I am still flying through the levels however, but the ability to sit down and finish an entire zone without the need to move on in order to satisfy the part of me that wants to be “optimal” is a good thing.
It had been years since I had finished the entire Hillsbrad>Arathi>Hinterlands crawl always dropping out of each zone at some point as soon as the next zone lit up as having a quest available. Now I am doing the Plaguelands which honestly I feel like is one of the zones that benefits the most from Cataclysm. However on the podcast this weekend we largely talked about the big problems with World of Warcraft storytelling… and eventually drew a conclusion that Cataclysm was the expansion that derailed what seemed to be an arc of really solid story. If you are curious the above embedded video is that show… but be warned we bash Warcraft pretty hard.
In other news… I appear to no longer be allergic to casters in video games. I recently started playing my Warlock a lot and have even been considering maining it in Battle for Azeroth. This weekend I started a brand new Nightborne Shadow Priest and spent a few hours really enjoying myself leveling it through the Ashenvale content. I am not sure what snapped inside my head but I actually sorta find casters relaxing. I’ve always said that “me and finger wigglers don’t get along”, and that was sort of my shtick. The truth however is that I never really enjoyed that style of game-play and recently something changed. I find myself enjoying this game of “can I kill it before it touches me” that I have never really gotten into before.
I think we can blame Final Fantasy XIV for this because that is really the game I first seemed to get into the caster thing, or at least the gameplay style of “dot all the things”. I had a shockingly enjoyable time leveling Arcanist and then Summoner, and put quite a few levels into my Thaumaturge/Black Mage as well. I went through this thing where I leveled every single class to 50 just to help get rid of a bunch of gear, and in doing that… I arrived at a sort of truce with playing a caster. Recently however that truce has turned into a comfort level that I have never really experienced before. I don’t necessarily get it myself and my friend Grace thinks I must be ill… but whatever the case I had a lot of fun running around on the new babby Shadow Priest this weekend.
Lastly… my friend Chestnut had this idea as part of Blaugust to do a bunch of mini podcasts asking some questions about how we got started. It took me awhile but I sat down yesterday after editing AggroChat and before I editing the weekly sermon podcast from the church my wife attends. I tried very hard to keep it under 10 minutes and managed to do so… which is a miracle in itself since AggroChat is sort of known for long shows. I thought I would share it here and I believe Chestnut has a master plan for some other use for these as well. Hopefully you have an awesome week and I am sure I will get back on doing some Blaugust related topics tomorrow.
I’ve been playing in the beta of Steambirds Alliance this weekend. I got on Spry Fox’s mailing list back when I was playing a ton of AlphaBear, and signed up to try out new stuff as it came out. Steambirds Alliance isn’t anything at all like AlphaBear, but it is right up my alley.
This game is a MMO shmup (aka bullet hell), which is not something I’ve ever heard of or tried before. From what I’ve seen so far it is quite fun! I especially like the fact that they are intentionally trying to design this game to promote co-op play rather than competitive. There’s no friendly fire, and all loot is “personal loot” so trolling has been at a minimum. There is perma-death, which is sometimes a turn-off for me, but so far it hasn’t been too onerous. I believe they are still handing out some beta keys for folks on their mailing list or for people watching them stream. Their release date is listed as “sometime in 2018 (probably)”, so if it seems interesting I suggest you try to snag a key or at least put it on your Steam wishlist!
It’s as much a surprise to me as anyone else that I’m getting into Warhammer Fantasy (now called Age of Sigmar). It’s also a surprise that the first faction I took an interest in wasn’t Lizardmen (now called Seraphon); this one actually caused someone else to lose a bet. Instead I decided to jump in with the start Collecting box that looked most interesting to me. I tend to favor large things, and the Beastclaw Raiders box is just 5 big things, so that’s what I ended up with. The majority of the units in this faction are mounted ogres (now called Ogors) and they’re large and hard to kill and it’s a faction definitely suited to my playstyle.
Branching out into other things in this faction, one of the options to field is a hunter and some frost sabres. This would add a few more bodies on the table for me and enable the faction to attempt some strategies that aren’t “rush forward as fast as possible”, so I ordered some. These come in the form of what Games workshop calls “Finely Cast Resin Miniatures” and everyone else calls Finecast if they’re being polite.
To date, I have never heard anyone say anything good about Finecast. I’ve assembled lots of plastic in the past, and I’ve had metal minis too, but this was a first for me. Getting these to a reasonable state involved a lot of cleaning, other work I’m not completely used to. In the process, I learned a few things.
Resin is soft, and cuts with a sharp knife much easier than plastic. Care should be used when dealing with these.
Resin warps in shipping/storage. The tip I got was to use hot water to bend them into shape, and then cold water to set them into that shape.
Resin pieces don’t always fit together that well. I found it was okay to just hack bits off until they did fit, but keeping in mind point 1.
I’ve now filed this material away as “something to be avoided” and am factoring that into list construction. At least it’s good to be informed?
I’m stealing one of my own topic ideas here, and talking about how games left an impression on me from my earliest childhood.
