In my fumbling around this morning for something to talk about, I remembered a tweet that I responded to yesterday from Charlotte McGrath of the larger FunHaus gaming ecosystem. Returnal is a game from Housemarque that seems to be blending a bunch of genres… namely the rogue-lite, bullet hell shooter and maybe a little dark souls mixed in for good measure since everything wants to be the dark souls of something. Generally speaking this is not the sort of game that would garner a ton of attention, other than the fact that it is one of a scant number of PlayStation 5 exclusive titles. This is sorta like the people who were all about Snipperclips when they had five games to play on their shiny new Switch.
I am going to admit there are times I regret the purchase of my PlayStation 5. While I did not get mine on launch day, I did manage to get a preorder that arrived five days later than expected. I have been able to count myself lucky among the folks who physically have a unit in hand… but unfortunately said console mostly sits there unused. There isn’t really a game that has made me want to play it over something I already have on my PC. I think that is the key difference for me as compared to a lot of folks that end up buying a console… it is the system of last choice. I got my PlayStation 5 because my PlayStation 4 was barely holding in there. I never went through the process of upgrading to a pro model and as such I had sorta been plotting the upgrade to PS5 since it was first announced.
I think the key difference between my experience with the PS5 and my experience when I first got my hands on the PS4 is we are in this weird moment that there really aren’t that many games on the platform that I don’t already have access to in other forms. Sony is known for being the console of exclusives but right now there is just nothing pushing me to really be playing the console. I got my PS4 with the Alpha for Destiny was announced and I managed to acquire a console and get into that alpha program with those being my very first experiences on the platform. Past that there were a number of games that were sitting there waiting on me like Infamous Second Son and Resogun that I just couldn’t experience somewhere else.
The truth is, most of the games that I am playing on my PlayStation 5 are all titles that I could be playing on my PlayStation 4. However given how much better those games play… said PS4 has mostly just been mothballed since November 17th. I did add an external hard drive so that I could play more PS4 games, but given that I went with an SSD based model I still get better performance out of those games than I did on the original console. I guess for that and that alone the upgrade was worth it for me personally, but if I had a PlayStation 4 Pro… I am not sure it would have been. I have not really done much with my console since getting it that I could not have continued doing on the older hardware.
I guess lets run down the exclusives that I am aware of on the platform so far.
Astro’s Playroom – Pack in title, really great. Deserves more attention than it probably gets because it is Mario quality.
Demon’s Souls – I actually played quite a bit of this game when the console was new, because it was essentially my justification for owning the big white tower.
Destruction AllStars – was a free game through PlayStation Plus and I have it installed but have never even booted it up. eSports nonsense is not my jam.
Then you have some upcoming releases
Returnal – Comes out today, and I already talked about it above. As per the original tweet I think this is a game a lot of folks will pick up only because they have nothing exclusive to play.
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart – this launches on June 11th and honestly is probably the reason why I bought my console if we are being completely honest. I wanted to own a PS5 by the time this game came out. I expected it to launch sooner… but it is what it is.
The challenge however is that if ANY of those games came out on the PC, I would buy them on that platform in a heartbeat. That is my platform of choice and unfortunately it is also the platform that is going through the most painful growing pains as it is nigh impossible to get a graphics card. Of the hotly sought out preorders of November, I feel like maybe I bet on the wrong horse. Had I put the same amount of effort into trying to lock down a RTX 3080 that I did into attempting to lock a PlayStation 5, I feel like I would ultimately be happier today. If there is any buyers remorse it is largely over that issue rather than the console itself. I know in June I will be thankful I have a PlayStation 5 because I love Ratchet and Clank, and will ultimately want to play Horizon Forbidden West on day one as well rather than waiting for the eventual PC launch.
I realize if we are being completely honest, we went through the same sluggish release schedule with the Nintendo Switch. As I stated earlier this console came out on March 3rd of 2017 and by March 31st I had managed to get my hands on one. The key difference however is that the Nintendo Switch had the massive juggernaut of Breath of the Wild to carry it forward. Sure that game was not exclusive to the platform… but no one actually owned a WiiU so it might as well have been exclusive? The same is not true with the PlayStation 4, which has sold around 116 million units to the roughly 13 million Wii U. It has been a little over 5 months since the launch of the PS5 and we have far less to show for it.
Nintendo had two things on their side, the first that they spaced out the big exclusive titles with Splatoon landing in July (roughly 3 months), and Super Mario Odyssey landing in October (roughly 6 months). The other thing is because of the relative lack of play of those Wii U titles, they could re-release a number of them for the new console and they would still feel fresh like Mario Kart 8 Deluxe landing around a month after the console release. The other big difference between these platforms is that the Nintendo Switch gave you new ways to play on the go, so it made sense to maybe rebuy some of your favorite third party games because the convertible nature of the platform.
The PlayStation 5 however is just a bigger and better version of the same thing you already had on your shelf. Reposting this picture as a reminder of just how damned massive it actually is. It doesn’t really allow anything to do something new that they were not already doing before. With the Nintendo Switch it became an interesting console that I often took to bed with me to play until I was falling asleep. The PS5 however is still operating in the same parameters that a dedicated console always has. Seeing as my preference will always lean towards mouse and keyboard on a PC, it serves the same role that consoles always do for me… allowing me to play games that I can’t get in any other way.
The other major change for me that happened this year is that I have been entirely remote. Seeing as I use consoles differently, that means they are all hooked up in my office so that I can easily capture video footage from them. I am finding it harder and harder to be upstairs at night seeing as it is my office all throughout the day. You might think… but Bel isn’t your gaming machine in your office? Sure it absolutely is, but I also have a laptop downstairs and am regularly playing remotely through Parsec streaming everything to that small screen in 1080p 60fps. Sure PlayStation technically has remote play, but they also have not really put the R&D work required to really make that optimized. There used to be a third party remote play client that was awesome… but Sony set out to crush its existence and kept making attempts to permanently break its ability to do interesting things. Essentially as it stands… the remote play experience is so much worse than the on box experience that it doesn’t really feel right to be streaming it.
So to answer the question posed in the topic of this post. Do I regret my PlayStation 5? Yeah a little bit, but not really for the reasons you might think. I regret that I took one of the market that could have gone into the hands of someone who would use it better. I regret not putting the same effort into trying to snag a 3080 and putting the money that I would have spent towards that goal instead. I don’t regret having the console however because eventually I will encounter a game that I really want to play that I can’t play through some other means. They are still hard to get so it isn’t like there is that reliable “I could have waited until X released” option. We had really bad ice storms in February… and it was only last week that I realized I had left my PS5 unplugged since then in an attempt to reduce power drain. That is a good illustration for how infrequently it gets used.
The post Do I Regret my PS5? appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This is going to be a bit of an odd post but it is something that has been on my mind. Steel yourself for a rather melancholic romp through my childhood. I have to physically go into the office this morning, and I don’t really have any other content ideas staged so we are going to go with this one. It is also going to be somewhat difficult to write because I want to speak in generalities to protect the innocent. If you have been reading this blog for some time you might know that I grew up in a very small town. The town was so small that it largely did not have much in the way of the infrastructure required to survive from day to day. I live an hour south from the small town that I grew up in, but about twenty minutes west was a medium sized town that we were in constantly because that is where the closest Walmart was, along with various sundry other amenities like the nearest hospital.
Recently I have been spending a good deal of time in this medium sized town because with my father breaking his hip then having a hernia surgery and various assorted doctors visits… have pushed me to drive its streets once again. I would say that honestly this medium sized down holds more memories for me than probably even my home town because we spent so much time there. During the summers I would take part in this Arts Enrichment camp at their performing arts center that is this giant art deco adjacent building. I would spend four or five weeks each year going eight plus hours a day to this camp, some of which was completely unstructured time roaming the facility and in a way it almost feels like a home that I once lived in. Each time I pass the building waves of half remembered memories wash over me and it was one of these that I am going to focus on this morning.
There are so many faces that I remember vividly, but I am awful with names. However in all of these fragmented bits of my databanks, one specific name stood out. I have no clue WHY I specifically remember their name but as one does when you are bored one night… I googled it. Seems as though it is a pretty unique name because everything that I was able to pull up from Google seemed to be linked to this individual. In part this is why I am not using names because I have a feeling that they might just be the only person named this on the internet. Among the links I found was one to an Art Portfolio website that included a contact form. It took me a few days but I finally cobbled together a message that I am certain sounded like the murmurings of a madman and hit send.
A lot of the memories of this time blend together because I went to the Art Camp a number of different times under different disciplines. The first time I attended was in the band program, the second time I think was for traditional art, the third time for photography and the last time was for creative writing. Everything is pretty clear other than those middle two times… not sure which one came first but in any one of these disciplines there are roughly ten to fifteen kids that go along with one or two instructors. The person in question I remember in association with the traditional art program. I remember hanging out with them quite a bit that summer, eating lunches in the same pod of folks and even hanging out at a dance that was associated with the program. I remember them being extremely agitated that night over something but I don’t remember what.
There are certain songs that trigger memories of that dance, namely Never Let Me Down Again by Depeche Mode. I think this is largely because the individual I reached out to, had a friend who was super into Depeche Mode in the Ballet program, and at this dance they kept trying to get whoever was controlling the sound system to play it. I remember the name of the Pottery instructor and that we made Raku which is a kind of pottery where we fired it in a makeshift Kiln that was effectively a trashcan packed with wood and paper… which leads the glaze to crack and the clay to turn black from the soot. I also remember making this nonsense leather mask in the class that was somewhere between Kabuki and Voodoo themed. Each memory is a vignette out of space and time and I’ve sort of woven them into a narrative for lack of other context.
Scanning back forward to today, I thought maybe the Art Portfolio website was unattended and that maybe I was just sending an email out into the void. I set my expectations that I was unlikely to ever hear back from this person, but roughly a day later I had a return response, which lead to a handful of exchanges back and forth. While the recipient was extremely gracious about such a weird interaction, and remembered a number of details about that summer… while they never really said as much I can tell they have no clue at all who I am even when I provided a picture from that era in my life. This person was memorable enough for them to act as an anchor in my memory but whatever recollections they might have had about me were washed away by time. I understand this completely because my parent will dredge up people that I supposedly knew as a child and I cannot with any amount of concentration muster any details about them.
This whole sequence however has had this weird impact on me. It is starting to make me question my own personal narrative about how events in the past went down. Like in this case I remembered hanging out with this person quite a bit in maybe a group of four people total. Maybe I was just the annoying kid that was hanging on trying to find a place to fit in? Maybe I just came across as random white dude number 407 in a sea of other very similar folks that blended into the background radiation? Thinking back I do remember this was likely before my final growth spurt and absolutely before facial hair, and from my high school days onwards the three defining features that people generally recall about me are the beard, being 6’4″ and having a deeper than normal voice. During that summer however, I had none of these on my side.
It does however make me wonder what sort of impression I leave on people now. Am I just a nameless and faceless voice in the chaos of the internet? Am I someone that leaves a mark on those that I have interacted with? I warned you this was going to be a melancholic post, and I don’t really have any answers to these. I am told that I leave a mark on people, but also when confronted with the fact that someone I very clearly remember has zero memory of me… it does sorta make you wonder how tenuous that connection might be.
The post Memories are Fleeting appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Well friends, I am doing a thing that I didn’t intend to do… but it seems like the AggroChat crew has finally realized that Mass Effect Andromeda exists. This game was released in March of 2017 and heavily panned by the most vocal YouTubers. It was so heavily memed that pretty much everyone ignored that it launched, and I am going to tell you that in spite of all of the bad press you probably missed out on a damned good game. The AggroChat crew, specifically failed to engage because following right on the heels of this release was Persona 5 with a lot of folks doing replays of Persona 4 right before that dropped. The end result was that I was the sole member of the crew that ended up playing it, so I never really got to get the discussions about the game out of my system. It was only years later when I found out that my friend @Pixel_One_ was similarly desperate to discuss the game that I finally got that out of my system.
All of that said it seems that Tam at least has finally seen the light and is knee deep in a playthrough, which prompted me to want to re-experience the game as a bit of a refresher. I figure I won’t ACTUALLY beat the game a second time given that Mass Effect Legendary edition is landing on May 14th, but it might get me back into a Mass Effect mindset. I honestly expect the retooled ME Trilogy to feel a bit like Andromeda since Andromeda also feels more than a little bit like Dragon Age Inquisition. So getting back used to the particular quirks of this combat engine might due me well, to at least lower my expectations after the relatively high combat and movement fidelity of the Outriders engine.
I feel like one of the things we need to get out of the way for those that did not play the game are the memes. These very public and very prevalent images almost destroyed the Mass Effect franchise. The game did not launch in a great state, and as I understand it much like with Cyberpunk 2077 these issues were significantly more prevalent on consoles. The very first patch solved most of the glaring issues, including the extremely creepy facial animations that seemed to hit poor Sara Ryder way harder than it did her brother Scott. Bioware was using this game as a test to roll out a new facial animation system and from what I can tell it just needed more time to bake. By the time the time the paper launch date actually rolled around the game was in a pretty solid state.
The problem however is that EA decided to do some fuckery with the release of this game and instead of just launching the title on March 21st when most of the issues had been resolved… they instead ACTUALLY launched the game on March 16th through the Origin Access program. If you were subscribed to their games on demand service, you got the ability to play 10 hours of the full game starting almost a week earlier. It is those five days that seemed to make all of the difference in the world as to the trajectory of this title. Making it even worse it seems that the early release copies that were sent to press outlets were even in a less completed state than the one that came from early access. The memes hit hard and fast and carpet bombed the media landscape to the point that I doubt ANYONE who was even vaguely interested in the game had not heard about them.
So all of this taken into account… Mass Effect Andromeda was one of my favorite games of 2017 and quite honestly… were it not for some pretty stiff competition in the form of Horizon Zero Dawn and Destiny 2 I could have easily seen it elevating to the top of that list. Coming back and playing the game again has refreshed a lot of these memories. Andromeda was trying to solve some problems most specifically introducing vertical movement into the isometric shooter formula. The end result feels now more like a prototype for some of the things that the Anthem engine absolutely nailed, but the first steps were taken here in Andromeda. The other major takeaway is just how generally likeable the cast of characters is in this game. There is not a single character that I didn’t like… aka I didn’t encounter a Carth/Corso/Kaidan character that I love to hate and desperately want to shove out an airlock.
Unfortunately it took me until this morning to sort out the optimal screenshot settings… and ended up filling a directory full of completely black images so you are not going to get a lot of variety here. The game does a game about exploring hostile terrains extremely well. I have fun checking off the boxes planetside and visiting the various nooks and crannies of each area. Since I have played through the entire game before however… I am already looking at the possibility of trying to some mods to tweak that gameplay experience. Largely I am here for a story refresher so that I can competently talk about my thoughts on the game when we eventually do discuss it again on the podcast.
If you have never played this game and consider yourself a Mass Effect franchise fan, then you really owe it to yourself to give it a shot. It is permanently “value priced” due to its poor reputation, but it was worth every penny of the premium I paid for it when it initially launched.
The post A Defense of Andromeda appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Friends. I normally put an exclamation point at the end of a sentence like that, but forgive me but I am not feeling terribly exuberant. I am not sure if I just slept poorly, or uncomfortably… or simply am generally sleep deprived but all I really want at this very moment is to crawl back into a warm bed and forget the world exists. Mondays being devoted to the Mixtape project… because alliteration… means that now Tuesdays are effectively my first real post of a given week. It is normally in that first post that I catch you up on whatever mischief was managed over the weekend. Probably the highlight is that I managed to ding World Tier 15 now allowing me to run all of the Hunts and Wanted quests at maximum level for theoretically maximum reward.
Or if you just want a more blown up transparent version I have that as well…
I’ve seen multiple versions of this scale, but they have all been exceptionally blurry representations so I decided to just go ahead and make my own version. There is an intentionality of overlap between World Tier and Challenge Tier which are effectively two competing end game systems. World tier will take you up through item level 42 and Challenge tier moves that onwards to 50 which is the current level cap for gear. When I first started attempting the expedition I steam rolled the first one and then got my butt handed to me in the second one I attempted, because it bumped me up to having to deal with level 34 encounters after completing that first one. I was not prepared and as a result I started walking up the World Tier system in an effort to gain gear and prepare for the stark difference in difficulty.
Since capping the World Tier, I have managed to get up to Challenge Tier 9 in the Expedition system. The problem that I have encountered as I go up in tier, the fights become significantly more frenetic. Additionally I have found out that not all expeditions are created equally. Chem Plant for example seems to be pretty easy, and Timeworn Spire on the other hand was 22 minutes of non-stop fighting to stay alive madness. There is a working theory that certain legendary gear is tied to completion of certain expeditions so I am trying to run them all just to make sure I have access to everything. There are reports of folks completing an expedition and then suddenly starting to see legendary weapons they have never encountered before in their loot pool. No clue if this is a real thing or not, because randomizers absolutely seem to get “stuck” on specific items sometimes.
Another thing that I have done is start the campaign over on my Technomancer. I’ve heard really good things about the infection tree for that class. I also wanted to experience what the game is like with a female voice actor, and I have to say if you have the option you might want to go down that route. The game seems significantly less bleak playing as the female character. Her delivery of lines is just more reasonable to what I would be expected in that situation. The male character seems pretty much aloof to the entire situation, and so far the female character seems to be more progressively perturbed by what they are experiencing around them. One massive negative about a replay however is that you don’t get to keep the mods that you have unlocked. Thankfully I had a few trash blues with decent mods on them in the stash allowing me to get a bit of a jump. I might start dumping trash in the bank so that I can deconstruct on my alt and get a boost in resources.
I am still enjoying myself, but I am finding it likely that I really need to try and pull together a group night since we all seem to be coming up against the same expeditions wall. They just end up so freaking stressful as a solo player, especially given that my build is about survival and not killing things quickly. I’ve seen several of us making similar comments and I think it might be fun to do a group play night, but timing is always the challenge. I realistically need to operation on either Central or East Coast times and a lot of the people that I interact with regularly are on West Coast time. Hopefully we can make something happen because I am really enjoying the game, but think it would be even more enjoyable with friends.
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