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Drunk Dialing

September 23, 2015 by Grace

This past weekend I did something so embarrassing I’m amazed I worked up the courage to even post about it here. The evening started out innocently enough, drinking wine and watching old childhood favorite movies. When the movies were done and I had a mighty buzz going, I sat myself in front of the computer and was faced with the gaming funk I’ve been in lately. Lots of new things are coming down the line, but they aren’t here now and I’ve really been struggling with getting motivated to play any of my staple games.

What have I done? Curse you, delicious booze!

So in my drunken wisdom, in a scenario lamented by many other folks who have drunk-dialed that embarrassing ex, my brain decided to pay for a month of WoW time. Hilariously, I had uninstalled the game when I last “quit,” and so was only able to start the download that night. The following morning I woke up and soberly realized what I had done. And you know what? I’m ok with it. Yes it was a very silly thing to do, but sometimes when we’re drunk and nostalgic we seek out the things that used to make us happy.

Unfortunately, reality rarely holds up to the lens of nostalgia. I decided to roll a brand new alt, and since even drunk me had the wisdom of applying the game time to my 2nd account I had no heirlooms or anything to help me out. I love the familiarity of the game, and it has aged very well, but it still has noticeably aged. I instantly missed the smooth, snappy graphics and combat of WildStar. Soon, when I got high enough level to run dungeons, I missed the dungeon and encounter design of FFXIV. Also, the community is exactly like I remembered. The best runs were the ones where nobody said a word. The worst were abusive, some verbally, and one special group kept attempting to boot the healer because they were new and struggling. At least I had the moral victory of blocking the vote kicks.

My plan is to focus on the good bits and not sweat the crappier parts. It makes sense to just enjoy this trip down memory lane, and it is certainly true that there is something deeply comforting about the familiar embrace of leveling in WoW. The new baby alt is a mage, and I’m glad because it keeps me far away from the mental stress of healing or tanking for group content. I am hoping to see some of the new stuff that’s been added since my last visit, even if that means I need to switch over to my high level character instead of this baby alt. But when the month is up, I don’t see myself sticking around. Nostalgia is nice but sometimes it is nicer to be reminded how good things are right now.

AggroChat #75 – Diamond Jubilee

May 21, 2019September 20, 2015 by AggroChat

This week we had Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra and Thalen. Tam was jet setting around the country but should be back next week. It seems pretty insane that this is already our 75th show. Being our Diamond Jubilee of a sort I am swapping up our introduction a bit in an effort to make it easier to see precisely what games we happen to talk about on a given show. Without further delay here are the games we discussed this week on AggroChat.

Jigoku Kisetsukan
Final Fantasy Record Keeper
Final Fantasy XIV 3.1 Delay
Fallout New Vegas
Mario Maker
Volume
Magic the Gathering: Battle For Zendikar
Wildstar
Diablo 3
Subnautica
LBX
Disney Infinity 3.0
The Force Awakens Hype
Mass Effect 2
Star Wars the Old Republic
Black Mirror

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Off the Deep End

September 15, 2015 by Grace

Gigantic squid creatures? Sold!

I have been filling the time before the next WildStar drop by dabbling in some other games. The one that has suddenly taken up the bulk of my play time the past few days is SubNautica. This game is in Steam early access right now. Usually I avoid games that aren’t released yet, but this one seemed perfect for me, is pretty far along, and seems to be getting regular updates, so I went for it.

SubNautica is a survival/exploration game, with the premise that you’ve crash landed on a water planet and need to manage your food, water, and oxygen while you explore. You start out with just a life pod and a few supplies, but eventually you can craft your own sea base and submarines.

Nighttime in the depths is very dark but also pretty.

The game is supposedly made to work with the Occulus Rift and I bet that would be amazing. The views are beautiful and the motion of swimming and piloting the various watercraft just feels right. I’m not sure how much there will be to do since the game isn’t finished, but I’ve put about 12 hours into it so far and haven’t found the edge of the world or even all the different types of resources or biomes yet. I did finally manage to build the large “Cyclops” submarine, and spent a silly amount of time exploring it and driving it around.

Yes I named my sub after a bioluminescent sea creature. Who wouldn’t?

If you don’t mind taking a chance on an early access game and want to explore an alien ocean and get murdered by alien sea life, you should definitely check it out!

AggroChat #74 – Force Binds Us

May 21, 2019September 13, 2015 by AggroChat

We start of this weeks show by talking about our continued adventures in Diablo 3, and while a some of us have slowed down our progress Grace talks about falling back into the familiar rhythm of chilling out in solo play. With the upcoming September 29th release of Wildstar Free to Play she also talks about spending a lot of time on the test server, and the recent hoverboard racing event testing. Thalen this week spent time venturing into some single player games that had never got around to playing. First we revive our discussion of Wolfenstein New Order and why you should play it for so many different reasons. In a shocker we find out that Thalen never actually played Fallout New Vegas, which spawns a discussion about our appreciation of the game.

Kodra on the other hand spent his week mostly playing a bunch of indie titles and talks about Circa Infinity and The Magic Circle. Magic Circle being the game that he spent a significant amount of time at Pax talking to the Dev about. Additionally we are all jealous of him as he talks about his experience playing Mario Maker, which is essentially Infinite Mario. This spawns a discussion about each of our early attempts at creating content for our friends to play like Excitebike, Wolfenstein, Doom and Descent. Related to Magic Circle, a seperate discussion breaks out about the Stanley Parable and what it says about gamers themselves.

Ashgar is still heavily involved in LBX: Little Battlers Experience and has even gotten in his model kits from last week putting at least one of them together. He helped to clear up some of my confusion that there is in fact a Roleplaying game there, and it is very similar to the style of game that Pokemon is. We also get into a length discussion about Pokemon Go and how the Ingress type game is likely going to change what we are playing next year. There is really no way this is not going to be a huge title, and for the most part we agree that Ingress has been a tech demo leading up to this.

Finally several of us have spontaneously gotten sucked back into Star Wars the Old Republic. Right now it is impossible to go anywhere in the world without being bombarded by Force Awakens merchandise, and after a point I simply could not resist the pull of nostalgia. The best thing about coming back to a game after years of being away is the huge backlog of content available to be played. The current twelve times experience bonus for subscribers helps as well, because you quite literally only have to focus on your class story to get leveled which was always the best part of the game. Ash, Bel and Tam are all caught in the gravity well of this game for the moment, and it sounds like some of our other hosts might have gotten the bug as well. We will have to see next week if we are still talking out it, or if we have gotten it out of our systems.

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