Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 632

Docks and Bellowbacks

March 9, 2017 by Belghast

I believe I have talked about one of my side projects before, but for those who are un-indoctrinated… I have been charged with setting up a gaming space at work. For the first pass we decided to go with a Wii U given that it is sort of a universal middle ground between folks who self identify as gamers… and those who do not. Everyone has played at least one round of Wii Bowling, and already since installing folks I never thought would sit down for a game of Mario Kart have done so. Part of the build out involved picking out controller docks because we did not want a bunch of wayward cables. For the Wii U pro controllers I chose the above dock by Nyko… admittedly more on price than anything. However after getting it and setting everything up… I am absolutely in love with the design. Each controller has a boot of sorts that you plug into the USB port, and it fits relatively snugly. Then on the backside is a magnet that holds the controller in place on the dock itself. It just works amazingly well and the magnet is strong enough to not only hold the controller but also serve as a guiding mechanism to make sure that the controller gets docked successfully. Which made me start to wonder… does Nyko make these docks for any other console system? My challenge is that in my office I have a PS3, PS4, Xbox 360, Xbox One, and am contemplating moving my Wii U back upstairs. That is five different styles of controllers that need to be charged and cradled in a reasonable manner to keep from getting a whole slew of cords tangled.

The tragedy however is that while Nyko makes controller docks for pretty much every system available… none of them work like this one. In a perfect world you could simply buy one base dock tree and then a bunch of connectors for the various controller types that you have. After a few hours of frantic googling… it seems like no one really has a system that works like this. There was however one apparently for the previous console generation that had support for the Wii, PS3 and Xbox 360… but for whatever reason never carried forth into this generation. What I would love is for Nyko to simply just release versions of this docking system for all of the platforms, or in truth… just sell me docks and then controller boots individually and allow me to mix and match my own system. In part I am writing about this problem today, because often times as soon as I complain about an issue… one of my readers comes out of the woodwork to present a solution. So if you have any ideas… that does not involve access to a 3D printer because I am already thinking along those lines… I would love to hear it. It is honestly the magnets that make this system work so amazingly well and quite honestly… I don’t have the electrical chops to make a magnetic USB connection work. I think part of the problem is that the Wii U pro controller uses the USB connector that the previous generation used… so mini instead of micro. That said… this feels like money left on the table because I know a lot of people like me with multiple console systems all with controllers that need charging.

Last night I returned to the cursed lands and continued my process of roaming around aimlessly. I went a completely different direction than the one I had been heading in… and encountered the Fire Bellowback… or as I think of them Fire Beetles. I ran into a trio roaming around some ruins… and after scanning them a few times to sort out how I was going to attack I went after them with gusto. The thing I didn’t expect was the fact that they essentially throw napalm at you, and have an insane range. I was well into the fields on the far side of the river and they were still lobbing fireballs at me. Essentially I got damned good at dodging while fighting them, and eventually whittled them down using my bow kitted out with extra tear damage. As you can see in the above screenshot they each rewarded an insane 1050 experience, but also provided a hefty amount of salvage. Other than that I actually started working on quests… namely the “Revenge of the Nora” story line. I have been playing this game in short spurts, and prior to last night it largely meant just roaming around and taking down machines. I cannot underline just how much fun that is… and how perfect the game play feels as you bulls-eye a watcher in the eye and watch it explode.

I really like that Horizon seems to reward you equally for aimless roaming and focused gameplay. I essentially had looked at the direction that the game was suggesting I go… and went in the opposite direction and largely… that was a completely fine decision. It was not really until last night that I finally sat down and started following the quests… and that too was a perfect fine decision. I am broke once more however because I bought a purple set of armor, and decided to go with the version that has balanced resistances since… more often than not I end up in melee range before fights are finished. Probably a lot of my success with the fire beetles is due to the fact that I had fairly decent resists going on. What I really want now is some upgraded weapons, because I am still using the Carja bow that you get from either collectors edition or the pre-order bonus. I got a whole slew of items and I am not completely sure which ones came from which thing. I’ve heard that the hunter trials reward items, so in theory I need to focus on doing some of those now. Regardless this game is still freaking amazing… and it serves as part of the reason why I have struggled to get into Breath of the Wild. In many ways the newest Zelda game just feels awkward and cludgy… whereas Horizon absolutely nails smooth and flawless gameplay.

A Good Night

March 8, 2017 by Belghast

Last night was as the post title might give away… a really good night. Lately in Final Fantasy XIV I have been caught up in one of two different grinds. The first being getting everyone to 50 by running floors 51-60 over and over again in Palace of the Dead. The second being leveling crafting through the use of the Ixal beast tribe quests… which is significantly more time consuming that it initially seems. There have been so many nights I have completely squandered the entire evening trying to get that last high quality item needed to turn in a quest. This past evening however we ran group content, and actually had a full team of eight players. Granted at some point during the evening we lost Mor, and Neph is in Iceland and unable to game with us… but we have built back up to a large enough group that we can do things together without queuing in randos. Not that random players in Final Fantasy XIV are ever really a problem… it is just nice to not have to explain that we are hashing things out on a voice chat that they don’t have access to. The prime target of the evening was Zurvan the last of the warring triad. While I was not really a huge fan of Sephirot… I have to say both Sophia and Zurvan are awesome fights. Zurvan is a bit more of a good old fashioned avoid the shit fight… but still very fun to tank at least.

After finishing up Zurvan we got another person keyed for the last part of Alexander by running them all in sequence. I have a feeling we are ultimately going to be doing a lot of this at some point given that both Stormrazor and Muspel are coming up through the ranks. It sounds like at some point we really need to run the early Alex for Storm, which is absolutely a thing we can do. All in all the Alex fights are extremely fun… except for maybe that middle section. There are definitely some memorable encounters, but I simply don’t like it nearly as much as I like the first four and the last four. I actually managed to roll lucky and walked away with an accessory and a belt, which takes my total item level up to 247… which I am simply hoping is high enough to avoid another gear wall during the next batch of content. That has been the problem with Heavensward and one I am hoping they are fixing for Stormblood… the hitting of walls that are not super easy to get to through casual content. I still feel like they need to be doing a round of hunts each item tier to help folks catch up in a solo manner as well as through doing group content. Final Fantasy XIV as a whole is a weird social experiment… of applying pressure in one direction and rewards in another direction to try and influence player behavior. Sometimes it works out perfectly… and other times it feels cludgy as hell. The gear barriers are one of those rare occasions in this game where I feel like they made the wrong choice. That said it was a really great night of running stuff with friends, and now that we seem to have a regular group of eight people… so many other options open up.

Random Screenshots #4

March 7, 2017 by Belghast

This morning is one of those mornings when I am super thankful that I cobbled together the random screenshot tool. Last night I sort of failed at doing any measure of directed content. I tuned into Spiral’s stream as she continued to push forward into Final Fantasy V and spent most of the night alt tabbing between twitch and Final Fantasy XIV. I’ve been on this mission to make sure that I complete the Ixal quests each day, and they take significantly longer than your average quest. In truth the bulk of the slowdown is all of the swapping back and forth between classes and having to craft items over and over until I get X number of high quality baubles for the turn in. Sometimes I just get unlucky, and the higher crafting gets the harder this seems to be. So while I might only need 4 items for the turn in… I might end up with a stack of 15 normal quality items that I had to craft to get those four HQs. Needless to say when I finally finished up with the quests it was around 9 pm last night… and I was feeling largely done with Final Fantasy XIV for the night. So instead I popped into the bedroom where I have my Wii U connected and played some more Zelda. It is growing on me, but I still find a lot about the game frustrating, or at least non-intuitive. As a result I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to talk about this morning, and definitely no screenshots so… once again I crawl back into the vault and do a random sort.

Random Screenshots #4 — Chua Starting Area – Wildstar

While I may have issues with Wildstar… it will always be a gorgeous game. This is I believe a screenshot from the tail end of Crimson Isle, the Chua/Draken starting zone. There are times I miss my little Chua, and I went so far as to create a new one awhile back as a Warrior. The problem is the game of Wildstar itself just never quite clicks. There is just too much going on visually for me, and the style of targeted directional abilities with hotbar combat never seems to feel as good as I think they hoped it would. I feel like the game would feel a lot better on a console where you can bind your main attacks to the triggers and bumpers and control movement and aiming with both analog sticks. In theory you could emulate this… but keyboard to controller emulators never quite work as flawlessly as if you set the controls up for that purpose out of the box. Just like running a console with a mouse and keyboard… you are trying to fake out the hardware while using out another control scheme under the hood.

Funny thing that I get a World of Warcraft image in this search because I really have not talked about the game lately much. I am admittedly on a bit of a break right now, and in part I am simply just not forcing myself to log in when I don’t really want to. For three or four weeks the real world got in the way of my raiding… and then I just got out of the habit of logging in regularly. As it stands I have this meeting on Wednesdays that usually lets out about 6pm which leaves me an hour to get home.. find food and log into the game for the raid which is simply too rushed for my tastes. So for the moment I am on extended leave, until the spirit drives me to start playing again. This image is from me finding the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker… aka the Protection Warrior alternate appearance. This is probably the moment in Legion when I was playing the most intently, and every single day I made a trek out here to see if the shield was up. The day it finally was… I took lots of screenshots and I so happily used this appearance until I got something newer unlocked recently. The Legion launch and the first few patch cycles will always be a happy memory… even if I have sort of fallen out of the habit of playing the game.

Another happy moment in a game… at the end of a long grind is when I finally got Turquoise on my Chocobo in Final Fantasy XIV. For those who are unfamiliar… your base Chocobo can be dyed through an insane process of feeding the chocobo various fruits. What makes the process maddening is that one set of fruit alters the RGB values… and another set of fruit seemed to instead alter CMYK. When we first started doing this it was largely trial and error before the calculators came out… and even when they existed it never really was an exact science. At the time we were doing this… the fruit for dyeing was prohibitively expensive. While we were trying to keep an active stock of seeds growing in the garden… it never quite met up with the desires. If you find yourself interested in this process, check out this calculator because it seems to be the best. I remember towards the end I teetered back and forth between three colors until it finally clicked and gave me the Turquoise that I was hunting for. All of this… was simply to make sure that it matched my Leviathan Barding.

Garula Is Mad

March 3, 2017 by Belghast

Tonight I am sitting down to knock out a blog post because in the morning I will be interrupting my routine. Tomorrow night my wife and I will be going to see the a stage production of the Wizard of Oz and it is going to simply be much handier to have a single vehicle. However this also means that I have to get up and out the door considerably earlier than I normally would. On an average day I leave the house around 7 and tomorrow that deadline is getting pushed up before 6:30. There is no way I can get showered and ready and write a blog post all within that time frame so you are getting something tonight. I was a bit all of the place putting time in Final Fantasy XIV, Horizon Zero Dawn and Final Fantasy XV. All of them were enjoyable in their own way but much like last night… I was never fully committed to any of them. I think I am trying to come down with something, because I have just felt drained and hollow at the end of the day.

The highlight of the night however was hanging out on Spiral/Weiward’s Twitch channel as she played Final Fantasy V. The entire AggroChat crew has a very specific relationship with Final Fantasy V. The game I believe is among Ash’s favorites in the series, and as a result we get roped into participating in the Four Job Fiesta every year. I’ve talked about the charity event numerous times, but the roots are that you play Final Fantasy V with only a randomly chosen set of jobs. The truth is I have never actually played Final Fantasy V legitimately, having only beaten it while doing the Fiesta. That said it was super interesting to watch Spiral struggle with some of the same things we have all struggled with in confronting this game. The best part of the night however is when she started having the same realizations that a lot of us have… about the deep connections between a lot of the Final Fantasy XIV Heavenward content and characters and settings from V. You can be absolutely certain that when the Fiesta time comes around again, we will be pestering Spiral to join in the fun.