Tales of the Aggronaut – Page 761

Go Team Blaugust

August 25, 2015 by Belghast

Words of Encouragement

Hang in there #Blaugust-ians! If @belghast can do it every. single. day. we can do it for a month. At this point surely reading = writing

— Ysharros (@ysharros) August 25, 2015

I woke up this morning to see the above tweet in my timeline… and it is absolutely true. There are days I still think I am the least likely herald of regular posting. Most of you only know me as the guy who posts every day, but in truth that only represents about half of my time blogging. Before that I was the most flaky and least prolific blogger out there. I would go through streaks of posting 10-20 posts in a given month… to having months where I only have one post at all. Between August 2012 and late April 2013 there was complete and total radio silence. It was by will alone that I set myself down the journey of posting something, no matter how stupid it is… every single day. Now several years later, there is part of me that still cannot fully comprehend the madness that I started, but I also have this strong drive to keep the ball from ever touching the ground.

While this might sound counter intuitive… for me at least regular posting is much easier than sporadic posting. Namely because of the pressure that I would put on myself. When I would go through a big lapse, I felt like I couldn’t just start writing again with a simple post. Instead I would have to write the most epic post ever to make up for the fact that I had been gone so long. I felt like I had to prove something to my readers, that I was somehow worthy of them leaving me in their RSS reader all this time. As time passed, the guilt that I felt grew and the measure of that “epic comeback post” kept growing as well ultimately leading me to wait longer before posting it. When I write something every day I am much more open with my readers. I talk about what is going on in my world, and how it is effecting me. I talk about what I am enjoying and what I am not enjoying, and the whole process ends up being much more fluid. So when I agree that if I can do it, you can to… because quite frankly all of you are far more talented than I am.

I started the Blaugust thing selfishly as a way of getting more content from the bloggers I care about. I never expect anyone to follow me in this “damned fool crusade”. Instead from the first year I had people coming out of the woodwork and signing up for the challenge. Even though I keep stats and assign awards… every single person who attempts this is a hero to me. They are actively doing something to keep pumping out more content into our community and that is huge. I can keep doing what I do because there are people like you out there sharing the journey with me. We are all in this together, and I know you can finish this month and get your name in the “winner” column. I believe in all of you fine Blaugustians, and even though the month is coming to an end… I will still be here in September and October to support you all. We are actively making this community we have stronger, and there is a certain magic in that. Now go write some kick ass posts!

Waltz of Doom

Last night we were able to pull together the raid without any real issue and set our sights on clearing Alexander Normal. It is amazing just how fast you can burn through all four wings when you have a team that works well together. Even though I am essentially done gearing out my Warrior with Alexander items, I am always down for helping a full guild group knock it out. It is extremely noticeable that our folks have been improving their gear because on turn one for example I think the bosses only actually made it up into the air twice. Similarly we pushed the living liquid boss into the final phase before the second hands phase. I know Kodra for example walked away with three pieces of gear that he had been building towards, and I think several others got pieces as well. I was pretty slackerly this past week and these were actually my first Alexander runs. I had every intention to work on getting the dragoon gear but this past week was just one where I was not in the mood to play any MMO at all. Instead I largely played single player experiences… or Diablo 3 AS a single player experience. I did not even cap Esoterics and for that I am feeling a little sorry. I could have easily had my chest piece this week, but I guess I will maybe wrap that up tonight.

After Alexander we put more attempts in on Ravana Extreme and I think we are getting to the point where we might be able to finish it up next week. We have now seen the entire fight and survived through the various phases, we just need to put the dance together and repeat it all successfully. The hard part is still the phase after the swords, which means we have to spread out so that only two people are in each corner. We didn’t quite do this and as a result we lost a handful of people. Luckily we had a healer limit break three available so we were able to essentially push the reset button and keep on trying. That is not exactly the way we want to beat it the first time, but if we have to I will take it. The fight is just so much more complicated than Bismarck Extreme was, and I am anxious to get it down and farmable so we can start clearing it and Bismarck in the same night. I want pretty weapons dammit! In all honesty I am pretty happy with my Esoterics axe for the time being, and my retainers are once again packed full of gear. However I will never turn down unique weapon graphics.

Seasons Change

August 24, 2015 by Belghast

Fear and a Little Loathing

Seasons Change — The Full cast of Walking Dead spin-off Fear the Walking Dead

I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead and have been watching the show since the first episode. Well technically that is a bit of a fib, I intended to watch the show… but ultimately bought the first season boxed set and used it as a way to leap frog me into caring about the show in season two. I struggle to get into shows if I do not watch a deluge of episodes, because it takes a good four or five before I start to care about the characters. Zombies have always been that one movie monster that freaked me out, in part because other than twitter I am really not that connected to the media. So a movie opening like Dawn of the Dead where the entire world falls to shit while a couple is having an unplugged “date night” ends up resonating with me. It has never been so much about the zombies, but more about the hopelessness of it all. One bite or scratch and it is just over… and there are so many more of them than there are of you. The Walking Dead started several months after the fall of society, so when AMC announced that there would be a show set in Los Angeles during the fall.. I was on board with it from the start. As the summer drug on I looked forward to the premiere which was set for last night August 23rd.

Now that I have watched the first show… I am decidedly “meh” about the show right now. I guess part of it is that society is falling apart far slower than I had expected it to. Usually in the zombie movie genre the world changes over night, and in this case the show takes place during several days and even at the very end…. the world has not fully woken up to the danger. I expect that in episode two there will be a lot more action as people scurry about and attempt to get someplace safe. Quite honestly I cannot think of a worse place to be than in Los Angeles. The interesting thing about this show is we the viewers… know more about their world than the characters on screen do which causes a strange frustration. You want to take them by the shoulders and shake them and make them realize that the shit is going to hit the fan soon and they need to get the hell out of town. The other strange thing that is going on is that as I am watching I am trying to figure out which character is going to die first. There have been enough people introduced at this point as to assure that at least one of them will not survive the initial fall. I am taking a wait and see attitude on whether or not the show is going to “feel” better.

One part that feels completely wrong however is the fact that there is no “Talking Dead” airing immediately after it. This has become part of the experience for me and my co-workers as we watch the show. It is like this grand after party where you watch other fans of the show hash out the details that were just seen. To be truthful the entire Walking Dead > Talking Dead > Walking Dead rebroadcast thing has become a Sunday ritual for me. I sit on the sofa with my laptop and periodically change the laundry while watching the first two shows, and then fold the laundry during the rebroadcast. So just having Fear the Walking Dead without the Nerdist and friends… left the whole experience feeling hollow. There was a Talking Dead show ahead of “Fear” but it was to show off previews of Season 6 starting in October. On that show he mentioned that there would be a special Talking Dead after the season finale, but I am really hoping that AMC fixes this for Season 2. There was a hashtag going around twitter last night saying as much, so hopefully someone is listening. Chris Hardwick is pivotal to my enjoyment of this series.

Seasons Change

Last night was also the end of Season 3 and I had wondered ahead of time how exactly the transition would work. Starting about thirty minutes before the end of the season we started getting warnings piped across the server, and the strange thing is that when the season actually finished it did not disconnect us from the server. Being curious however I ended my game and went to start a new one and got a message telling me that the season was over. I killed the Diablo 3 client and started it right back up, and immediately my new character was sitting in list of available normal characters. When I logged in I had a bunch of mail messages waiting for me, and in each one was an item that had been in the bank for seasonal characters. So I have to say the transition went extremely smoothly. I knew that I would not hit 70 before the season ended, but I did make it to around 35 before it finished. When season four starts I will absolutely make a brand new character, and it honestly may end up being another Crusader. Right now I am pretty fond of the gameplay, and it mixes some of the things that I loved about the Warrior and Monk together into a more enjoyable package.

Right now I am using a combination of Slash for my main attack which hits multiple targets in an arc in front of me, and Sweep Attack for my secondary which does pretty much the same thing… but just deals a hell of a lot more damage. My favorite ability however is Falling Sword which is an almost Dragoon like jump attack that crashes down on a target location dealing a radius of damage around where you landed. I love the versatility of this ability, that I can use it as a strong AOE attack or just a way to move around the battlefield quickly. It is great for chasing down runners like Treasure Goblins. My original plan was to rush through normal mode and then start cranking up the difficulty, but I only actually made it to act three before things went offline. While I might have had every intent to rush through the levels, I still found myself unable to skip up that option dungeon here or ignore that unexplored bit of map there. In hindsight I should have cranked up the difficulty from the start and just played like normal. I was under the impression that adventure mode did not actually work until you had unlocked all of the story content, but maybe I was wrong there. I’ve honestly not really spent much time exploring the Reaper of Souls features, because my friends and I had a few weeks where we played Diablo 3 hard and heavy… then never touched it again. For the time being I am still focusing on my Crusader because I am having a lot of fun playing it, and it fits my current gaming attention span.

Week in Gaming 8/23/2015

August 23, 2015 by Belghast

Stealing Ideas

This morning I am absolutely stealing an idea from Grace who happened to post something today called “What I’m Playing”. Sunday is traditionally a rough day for me as far as posting goes. One of two things has happened, either I have stayed up way late on Saturday night to finish editing and posting the AggroChat podcast, or I am rushing around Sunday morning to finish it. This ends up making the morning feel like a big hassle either way, as my body thinks I just went through this epic struggle to get our podcast posted. My brain is telling me… isn’t that enough? Do I really have to make a blog post too? At which point I tell my brain to shut the hell up and stop being so whiny, and btw give me a topic to write about while you are at it. So now I am latching onto this week in review post idea like a life raft and just going with that.

Final Fantasy XIV

A subtitle for this week could easily be called “failing to accomplish goals” because there is a lot of that going around. Monday night we made solid attempts on Ravana Extreme, and Wednesday we didn’t quite have the people to pull anything together. Other than that I have honestly been pretty scarce in game. I get like this after finishing a grind to accomplish one of my goals, and for awhile now I had been grinding in so many different ways to gear both the Warrior and the Dragoon. I had all intention of capping Esoterics this week, but as of last night I just have seventy five. I could spend my day grinding to play catch up… but I highly doubt that is going to happen. Hopefully we can return to our normally scheduled Final Fantasy XIV play schedule next week.

Wildstar

I am still very much playing Wildstar, but similarly to Final Fantasy XIV I didn’t really spend much time actually playing it this week. I made a minor dent on Whitevale on Tuesday, but I spent more time talking about Wildstar with friends this week than actually playing it. I am not really sure what was up this week but I was overly tired pretty much every day. We had one horrible night where the storms woke me up and I never could get back to sleep fully, and I think this lack of sleep pretty much pushed the rest of the week out of whack. Each night I felt like I lacked the mental fortitude to concentrate on an MMO, so ultimately just ended up playing something else. I want to continue my climb on the Warrior because I am finding the game more enjoyable than I did at launch, and am actually really looking forward to the free to play drop.

Dragon Age Inquisition

I spent an awful lot of time playing this game over the week, but my overarching goal was less about actually playing and more about figuring out how to play it from my laptop. I maybe obsess about stupid shit sometimes. As you can see from the screenshot I finally left the Hinterlands! I am actually enjoying the game quite a bit now, but for whatever reason I am not finding it nearly as “sticky” as the previous Dragon Age games. In Origin and even in 2 I had these moments where every fiber of my being just wanted to see what happened next. It was like turning the pages of a really good novel, and this game doesn’t have that same feel. It very much feels like I am playing levels in a video game and I find I care less about the story than I have in previous games. That is not to say the game is not enjoyable, because I am absolutely having fun… but it is just a different sort of fun.

Diablo III

I apparently worked the Hellgate London out of my system, but instead it has given me a desire to play Diablo III. For most of the week this has been my go to game, as it has just the right amount of friction for my mental state. I don’t have to think about it much, I can just push buttons and kill things… and that works. In the continued theme of setting myself up for failure, I apparently decided that creating a Season 3 character from scratch was apparently a brilliant idea. Now in order to get any of the Seasonal rewards I need to get a character to 70… before 5 pm PST tonight. This is not a thing that is going to happen since I am just now sitting at 27 as the above screenshot shows the ding. The positive is… I am actually really enjoying playing the Crusader. I figure when Season 4 starts I will make another seasonal character and see what I can make it to with a full three months or so of playtime available.

Hatoful Boyfriend

I curse everyone involved for introducing this game into my life. It is so damned crazy, but I can’t seem to stop myself from playing it. At this point I have now seen six different endings for the game. From what I can tell I have yet to actually scratch the surface, but at least I feel like i have a lot to talk about for the upcoming show. I imagine that I will play it some more and go for a few more endings. The ending that I have not seen is the supposed “bad ending”, which I guess means you have to play the game without much thought taking random birds to do things. At this point I have taken the approach of setting my sights on a specific bird during each play session. I have a few more left to do that with, so that is probably going to be my focus in the sessions between now and the aggrochat show.

Heavensward Mega Episode

For awhile now the AggroChat crew has deliberately put off talking about the events of Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward in an attempt to allow folks to catch up on the content. However this week the gloves are coming off and we are dipping into a full spoiler episode where we hash out the events that have occured since the 2.55 patch show. We trace the steps of our characters from setting foot into Ishgard to the final conflict of the expansion, with as much details as we can think about in between. This is a roughly two hour long show because of the truly large amount of content to go over. We considered chopping this into two halves, but figured we would release it uncut. We talk about our favorite characters, our most emotional moments and what we are looking forward to with future content patches.

[AggroChat] [Direct Download] [iTunes] [Stitcher]

Everybirdie Knows!

August 22, 2015 by Belghast

The Hunter Gatherer

This morning I am getting a bit of a late start because the weather is dreary out and everything seems to distract me. I’ve had to contend with the kitten knocking all manner of things onto the ground from the cabinets, and the other two cats intent upon pinning my arms down so that I can’t effectively type. As a result I am getting a later than usual start on composing my morning blog post. This mornings post is going to be inspired by the sheer madness that Grace has bestowed upon me. What I am saying.. is everything is her fault. For those who have been following me over the last few days, you will know that the August AggroChat Game of the month is the bizarre bird dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend. I had been avoiding playing it so that I could stream my first moments, and finally the stars aligned for me having enough time to devote my attention to doing just that. Since this is a largely text based game, I figured I would act out the dialog as best I could. I set a time for 6pm last night, and I had an awesome audience of friends joining in the fun. I only actually made it through one play through however because by the end of all of that talking… my throat was killing me.

What can I say about Hatoful Boyfriend that has not already been said. The game is completely insane. You play the role of a “Hunter-Gatherer” human girl, having to fit into bird society and attending Saint Pidgeonations a prestigious school…. for you know… Birds. If that premise itself was not insane enough… in order to make progress in the game you have to develop a relationship with one of a cast of different birds. From what I understand if you have failed to gain the attention of at least one suitor by a certain point… the game just ends. From start to finish it takes about an hour to play, and last nights play through ended up running about a hour and twelve minutes in total. The game while short… has a lot of replay-ability as apparently there are secret endings that you can only unlock through repeated plays of the game. Having done this or that ending unlocks new options, and at this point I have completed the game three times and unlocked a total of three different endings as well as a bonus romance of sorts.

Birb Boyfriend

While absolutely none of this sounds like a game I would be interested in… there is something quirky and infectious about the game that makes you want to keep playing to see just how deep the rabbit hole goes. One of the nice features of the game is that there is a fast forward of sorts that lets you skip through some of the often long sequences of dialog that require no player action. In truth you are only really making a few choices per game session, and watching the events of those decisions play out before you. In many ways some aspects of it remind me of Persona 4 Golden, which is a game I need to return to playing at some point. I keep hearing there is an actual “bad” ending, but I have yet to find it. In many ways playing this game feels like the first time I watched the movie Brazil, with even stranger and more surreal experiences the longer I kept playing. In fact this morning I actually got up and started playing again, so maybe I am not hooked on the insanity?

If nothing else it is going to make for a very interesting AggroChat in a few weeks when we record that episode. I feel like so far maybe Grace has done the best job of picking a game title that generates conversation. I feel like There Came an Echo probably would have as well if I did not suffer so many technical problems that kept me from finishing the game. Thalen also has an interesting game picked for us, so I think the next few months are going to be a blast as far as the Game Club goes. I had a lot of fun recording the play through of this game, and it was so damned bizarre trying to act out the different birds. I stumbled pretty massively on some of the names and had to rely on some assistance from Ashgar a few times. However I made it through and now at least have some fodder to talk about for the show. I am not sure how many more endings I will try and unlock before we record but I still have some time. The gameplay goes fast enough, and in many ways it is like a train wreck… you just can’t help but keep watching it. As someone who went into “Birb Boyfriend” as deeply skeptical, I highly suggest everyone pick this title up and give it a chance. It is just too damned strange not to experience it for yourself. If you want to watch my play through if you missed the live stream I embedded the video below.