AggroChat #87 – Villians Super Show

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In the grand scheme of things we have performed a number of experiments over the last few months.  Shifting the format from roundtable to a largely topic based format seems to have largely been appreciated.  Tonight we perform yet another experiment and create what I think will ultimately end up being dubbed the “Super Show”.  The fact that we record every single week with six people… is a bit of a crazy thing in itself, but this evening we are recording with eight… and had everyone been here it would have been a show of ten.  Now juggling that many people in our normal format would end up with an insanely long show.

Instead we decided to shift focus a bit and pick a single large topic.  So for this week we are doing the “Villians” show that we talked about in the last episode.  Since this is a huge topic, and  ends up getting split off in a bunch of different directions we left the floor completely open.  We talked about favorite villians, favorite kind of fights, personalities that we love to hate and some of the problems currently plaguing video games.  Ashgar unfortunately had a really bad week and was unable to attend, but we managed to bring back the always awesome Nephsys, as well as including a couple of first time AggroChatters…  InkyBrushes and Pizzamaid.  It is my hope that we will do more of these in the future as we come up with sufficiently “big topics” and end up recording another super sized show.

AggroChat #86 – High Fidelity Story

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This week we return to the whole topic driven focus, because honestly they seem to work better. We had several topics we wanted to discuss but for the sake of time we pushed a few of them off to another episode. Once again we have the full cast of Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen.

The topics we delve into…

  • Rocket League – how we are apparently late to the party, and any time a game is getting played at the same time by wildly different groups of gamers… it should be checked out.
  • Space Chem – how Kodra falls into a deep hole of trying to create the most perfect engine in this video game that plays more like a really good board game… and also at times a programming simulator.
  • Otome Games – we talk about how our podcast got mentioned recently by Pizza Maid and Suishi Geisha… and how it would be awesome if the games we liked to play had the same level of story fidelity that Otome games do. This spawned an entire side discussion about story drive games in general.
  • Co-Opetitive Games – the games where you are playing co-operatively but also at the same time competing with your friends…. also fertile ground for losing said friendships.
  • Sandbox Games – We talk about the wall that happens in most sandbox experiences where we as players are just “done” with the game long before we have technically completed all of it.

AggroChat #85 – Shoot First Quickload Later

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This week was originally going to be our Fallout 4 halfway point show, however we realized that neither Ashgar nor Belghast have even touched the main storyline.  While Ashgar has the excuse of travel…  Bel is nearly level 20 and still has yet to go to Diamond City.  So instead we opted to do an old fashioned roundtable show, where we talk about what everyone has been playing.

The games we talk about this week…

  • Super Mario 3D Land
  • Downwell
  • Fallout 4
  • Final Fantasy VI
  • Mini Metro
  • Final Fantasy XIV
  • Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon
  • Wildstar
  • World of Warcraft
  • Final Fantasy Pet Battles
  • Cybele
  • Cradle
  • EVE

 

AggroChat #84 – Stealth Luck Cheats

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This week we have a bit of a change in the show.  When we started compiling the list of what we wanted to talk about, it turned out that for the most part they were broader subjects rather than individual game specific ones.  As a result we ended up pushing aside talking about specific games because in those four topics we felt like we had more than a show’s worth.  The end result was us talking about “things” for an hour and a half and I think one of the more interesting shows we have recorded to date.

The topics we discussed

  • Stealth as a game mechanic…  particularly forced stealth versus optional stealth
  • The role of Luck in Board Games and why it is often times frustrating
  • Video Games as a Common Ground when meeting new people
  • Cheating in Video Games to improve your enjoyment

Each of the topics ends up being a pretty lengthy discussion.  Next week we will likely return to the standard way of talking about individual games, but this week…  we were topic focused!