Belghast – Page 777

Ultra Combo

January 5, 2016 by Belghast

Waiting on One

For awhile now I have been watching the Xbox One console, wondering if I should try and get one. There are a lot of cool features, not the least of which is the fact that you can stream from your console to a windows PC. There are many nights that I would prefer to sit my butt on the sofa downstairs, but would far rather be playing my PS4 that is hooked up in my office so that I can stream over OBS with it. The truth is… other than my recent foray into Destiny, my Xbox 360 has set pretty much unused for most of the time I have owned it. To make matters worse, I technically have two of them, thinking my first unit was kaput and picking up a second one cheaply… only to realize later that it was simply the power supply. The fact that I just didn’t seem to enjoy playing games on the Xbox 360 really soured my consideration when it came to looking at the Xbox One. This combined with the really poor marketing message at launch, and the fact a good number of my friends were already on team PlayStation ended up pushing me in that direction. When I finally picked up a PS3 late in the game, I experienced somewhat of a renaissance of console gaming… and the more bought into the suite of consoles I got the more rewarded I was. Playing games remotely through a PS Vita is kinda awesome… even though I honestly don’t do it that much.

The justification thus far that I have given myself for not buying into the Xbox One was the fact that most of the console “exclusives” seemed to eventually come out for the PC. Whereas on the other side of the equation, none of the PS4 console exclusives seemed to make it out on the PC or Xbox One for that matter. That said there were always a few games that I considered might be worth picking up a console for, but as it stands… there seems to be only one of those that is truly “console exclusive”. Over the Christmas break it was announced that Rise of the Tomb Raider pc would be hitting in January or at least “Early 2016”. At the announcement of this game I thought it was all too specific that they kept saying the same verbiage of “Exclusive for Holiday 2015”. So this knocked one game off the list of “worth purchasing a console for” and yesterday knocked another one off. Since it was announced I have been pumped about the modern incarnation of Killer Instinct. I thought it was a pipe dream that the game would be coming to the PC, but during the last round of conventions when they talked about Gears of War getting a PC release…. I thought maybe just maybe that the game might jump off console. It seems that Windows is putting all of their eggs in the “Exclusive for Windows 10” basket as well, and I guess in the grand scheme of things I am perfectly fine with this. The problem being… that once again it erodes at any reason for me to shell out money for an Xbox One. Right now the only game that seems firmly landlocked on the console is Halo… and considering the lack of ease I have had getting into those games during my recent attempt at playing them on the 360 tells me that I will be just fine without it.

Yup Ecco

Last night I started work on the January AggroChat Game of the Month, because I wanted to give it enough time to hopefully beat it by the end of the month. This time around Ashgar chose the older Indie game Aquaria, which actually released back in 2007. I remember this game being in one of the very first Humble Bundles that I ever purchased, and it has sat in my steam library waiting there unplayed. When Ash described it on the podcast last weekend, my initial thought was that it sounded quite a bit like Ecco the Dolphin. I mean the game has the similarity that you are a character swimming around an entirely aquatic world, and also shares some metroidvania tendencies, which at the time I felt Ecco did as well. What I did not realize is just how much the experience would feel exactly like my memories of Ecco. The weird thing about Ecco is that I was fond of the game, but at the same time anytime I attempted to play it I felt nothing but sheer confusion. I never knew what I was supposed to do and when exactly I was supposed to do it… and for the most part that is precisely how I am feeling about Aquaria.

The game is gorgeous, and the characters move around the world nicely… even though the main character has a bit of a paper doll thing going on in the way her limbs attach to her body. The control scheme on the other hand is deeply confused. It supports a controller, and for the most part moving around screen feels so much better with an analog stick. However when it comes to inputting song sequences… the controller is almost impossible for this task. The first song ends up alternating between left and right twice… so that one is completely doable… however there is one later used to unlock a gate that involves moving your joystick to a sequence of the minor axis which feels completely impossible to pull off smoothly. So as a result I found myself shifting back and forth between controller and keyboard and mouse giving me an extremely frustrating gameplay experience. I feel like this is a game where I am going to have to either look at some maps or follow a guide to get “started” because I think maybe once I understand what the hell is going on… that I will like it. Even last night Ash talked about having trouble getting started, which tells me that maybe this game is far too esoteric for my tastes.

Sleep and Nagrand

January 4, 2016 by Belghast

Struggle Is Real

It is Monday morning after my week and some change holiday break, and I have to tell you… the struggle to exist in the world is real. I am hoping through that yesterday I ultimately went through the worst. As I said yesterday morning, we set an alarm in an attempt to force ourselves to shift vaguely in the direction of a schedule. As a result I pretty much sleep walked through yesterday, and found myself generally staring in the direction of things rather than actually participating. This was doubly awkward since we were having our last “christmas” event of the year with my mom-in-law coming over. I tried desperately to keep up with the conversation, ultimately failing. The small wonder however was the fact that she brought her laptop for me to look at because it wasn’t working. Sure enough the first time it attempted to boot, it hung after login. However on the second shutdown and restart everything went normally, and as a result I busied myself staring at its screen for the remainder of her visit. I did the normal gamut of fiddling… checking her antivirus to make sure it was up to date, and patching as much as I could with windows update. A computer requires significantly less interaction than a human being, and that was ultimately what I was banking on.

The ultimate problem is… that she has no internet connection. What I mean by that is that she does not pay for internet at her house, but instead piggy backs off the wifi of her grand neice. This is perfectly find mind you, it is not like she was war driving one day and hijacked a wifi signal. The problem being that there is roughly a half football field of distance between her house and the nieces house, and our RV pad is smack dab in the middle. It was my hope that either we would put in wifi at our RV eventually, or set up a network of signal boosters to piggyback the signal across. The problem is since she doesn’t really know how technology works, it is hard to explain why her internet connection sometimes works fine and other times not at all. Basically it shouldn’t be working at all, and it is by sheer dumb luck that you can pick up a wifi signal from that sort of distance. The problem also being that she cannot differentiate between telling us something is wrong with her laptop and the software itself and her internet connection. This is the truth with most of our family, they know that facebook isn’t working but are of little to no help to actually diagnose over the phone as to why that is the case.

Paladins Everywhere

The problem with a big goal is once I accomplish it, I end up floundering for a bit trying to find something else to focus my attention on. In the past many of the times when I have left a game it was because I completed some big item that I was grinding my ass off to achieve…. and lost interest after finally getting it. I know it is in my nature to feel let down after finally getting something, and I am trying really hard to not let Draenor Pathfinder be that way as well. Since I finally can fly around, I have been focusing for a bit on trying to push up some of my post 90 characters on Argent Dawn and my highest of those is Exeter my original Alliance Paladin. Over the course of the weekend I took him from 94 to 98 and am now starting Nagrand, where I hope to finish up. I like finishing in Nagrand because gear wise I end up in a fair better position than if I grind the hell out of Spires of Arak. After the initial leveling in Draenor I have followed the pattern of swapping zones every time the game prompted me that the next one was available. So in my case that would be 94 for Talador, 96 for Spires of Arak and 98 for Nagrand. Doing this ends up with me in a mishmash of gear, and a bunch of abandoned quests, but seems to also be the fastest possible way to churn through the content.

Ultimately my goal is not to experience the quest content, because I have already done that several other times. The goal is to level as fast as possible, and I guess in theory I could simply just do the dungeon queue as a tank and be done with it. That is absolutely an option I will consider, but yesterday I absolutely was not competent enough to be responsible for the lives of anyone other than myself… and at times even that part was questionable. I died an awful lot yesterday, and spent probably as much time running back to my corpse as I did actively questing. The problem being that while every fiber in my being told me that I really just wanted to go to sleep, I knew that would only prolong the horribleness and make my first day back at work sheer hell. So I continued trying to busy my mind. While attempting to level the paladin we searched Netflix for something anywhere near as compelling as Making a Murderer, only to strike out multiple times. In the evening we ended up watching a documentary called Dear Zachary which was extremely good.. and moving… but I would not suggest watching unless you are really ready to cry. We ended up closing the evening out watching the Netflix comedy series Master of None because seriously… after that documentary we both needed a laugh. We ended up shutting down around 10 and making it to bed…. only to sit there and talk for awhile as neither of us seemed to be sleepy anymore.

I hate my brain so much at times, because through out the day all it did was complain about how tired it was… and begged me to go to sleep… and now that I am finally read for it to shut down it is acting like a spoiled toddler crossing its arms and holding its breath. I wish so much that I had a normal relationship with sleep… that it was just one of those things that happened naturally for me. My entire life it has been a struggle to actually have a normal sleep schedule. Every fiber of my being is wired to be awaken during the night… because I feel far more alive after the sun goes down than at any other part in my existence. The sun and I really do not get along, and I think in theory I could be happy working night shift. The problem being I work the sort of job that happens during the day time, and I have tried for years to become the kind of person that functions during the day. There are all manner of tricks that I play upon myself and an absolutely silly amount of caffeine and energy drinks that I use to force myself to remain viable and cognizant during the hours I am supposed to be. But my brain is a brat and refuses to function like a normal human being, and I get so tired of playing the game where I am laying comfortably in bed… and every neuron is firing wildly trying to keep me from achieving a restful nights sleep. Fuck you brain… you are an asshole. But hopefully I got enough sleep to be mostly functional on this first day back from break.

Frustration and Fallout 4

January 3, 2016 by Belghast

Morning Will Suck

This morning I attempted to get myself back in line for the impending work week, and I have to say the experiment has been a dismal failure. I normally get up for work at 5:30 in the morning, and then get up… do my routine and finally knock out a blog post. Sundays have always been difficult because generally speaking I am up until at least after Midnight and often times 1 am working on the AggroChat podcast that I end up having to finish editing and posting in the morning. Last night I was up until around 1:30 but thought it was probably a good idea to set an alarm. So at 7:30 I at least put toes on the ground…. and sat there teetering on the edge of the bed for a few minutes trying to decide what step came next. I finally realized that hoping in the shower was a good idea, and did that hoping that the water would somehow jog my brain into functioning enough to go through the rest of the morning boot up routine. I had decided yesterday that instead of having a yummy bowl of cereal in my warm home…. I would get out and find something in the cruel cold world to call breakfast. This ultimately meant that I would go outside and scrape the vehicle since apparently over night the temperatures had dropped a bit.

So I consumed my breakfast and a big tall monster zero…. and played the fun game of trying to throw my muffin wrapper away. I say its a game… because my kitten for some reason LOVES muffin wrappers. She will literally go dumpster diving through my trash can trying to get it, only to drag it out from the bottom of the bin…. carefully unwrap the plastic bag I threw it away in and unfold the muffin wrapper so she can lick it. She is a damned determined cat and the second I leave the room and let my guard down…. she strikes and before I know it she has the damned wrapper out again. This will be something that continues over the next several days. The long and short of all of this…. is that tomorrow is going to be pure hell. I am dreading going back, not because there is something there that I dread necessarily… but that twelve days off from work is more than enough time to completely destroy any routines you have had. Many nights it might be two in the morning before I finally get to sleep… which is not exactly conducive to a 5:30 alarm clock. The goal is to have forced myself to get up earlier than normal this morning, and to stay up all day long regardless of how tired I might be…. in the hopes that I will get a nice full night of sleep tonight. I feel like it is not going to go anywhere near as well as I might have hoped.

Making a Murderer

This break has been the one of binge watching content, and while most of it was Star Wars… we did manage to watch a new Netflix series called Making a Murderer over the last few days. Apparently my wife’s friends had been talking about it, and when she said they explained it as “like Serial” I knew I was in for the ride. Serial was one of those things that I got in on late, but I still dutifully listened to the show over the course of a few days while doing other things. The only problem with content like this, is that it does not wrap up neatly in a box at the end of the experience. In a “crime drama” at the end of the show you have some grand exposition that explains how it “really happened”, but real life is never that neat. Serial more or less was a show that made me wonder if this kid did what the police said he did, but it never made me physically angry at the police. I could see their side of the tale and I could see the kids side of the tail… and the end result was you mostly trying to sort out what you personally believed in the mix. “Making a Murderer” on the other hand presents a tale so frustrating that it ended up with me yelling at the screen several times, and my wife having to talk me down.

I am not sure how much I can say that won’t give the entire tale away, because I feel like it is probably best to just watch the 10 episode series for yourself. There are however lots of moments that swayed me to the side of the supposed killer. I feel like he was most definitely not given a completely fair chance in this case, and there is a significant amount of bias in the area against him. There were several incidents that occurred that were never explained… like one of the police officers running the tags for the Jeep two days before the victim was reported missing, but after she WOULD HAVE BEEN missing. The recorded dispatch call sounded as though he was staring at the vehicle reading the plates off, and verifying that it was a jeep. Don’t get me wrong… I know a lot of really awesome police officers, but I also know some that probably would not bat an eye at planting evidence to support their case. The thing is… I believe at no point did anyone think they were framing an innocent man… but instead that from the moment his name was mentioned he was already assumed guilty and they began trying to make a case against him work. I think that is probably the worst thing that the show highlights is how non-existence the burden of proof really is. Maybe I am just more questioning of information… but I had more than enough “reasonable doubt”.

The Fallout 4 Show

Last night we recorded our AggroChat podcast devoted to Fallout 4. More or less this was the reason why I pushed through the storyline recently, and I have to say forcing myself to complete this game was one of the more miserable experiences. I wanted to be able to talk about story plots, but part of me thinks i would have been happier if I had just not done that. Bethesda games in general for me are about the little moments, and not the big picture. This is a game that delivers in spades when it comes to little vignettes, but fails to deliver when it comes to giving me a larger story arc that I really cared about. The biggest problem for me at least was the fact that in no way could you complete the game in a fashion that did not end up with completely closing off all of the other options. I hate red versus blue situations… and even though fallout 4 was red vs blue vs orange vs green…. it still set up an artificial conflict that I had no way of mediating. There were no “grand bargain” options but instead a lot of “nope they will hate you now” paths you were forced down.

All of that said… the game itself was really awesome and I highly suggest it. When we finally do the game of the year show, this is more or less going to be my pick. I love the game, but then again I have loved every Fallout game to date…. well except Tactics… we don’t talk about Tactics. It was awesome and interesting hearing everyone elses options on the game as well. When we got to recording the show neither Ashgar or Kodra had managed to beat the storyline… and I think I probably would have been far happier if I had joined them in that club. Dallian on the other end of the spectrum had gotten 100% of the PS4 trophies, meaning that he had quite literally gotten every ending possible I believe. The takeaway is… this is a Bethesda game. If you like those games, then you are absolutely going to love Fallout 4… and more than likely you already own it and are happily playing it. If you don’t like Bethesda games, then this isn’t the departure you are looking for. If you are on the fence… then wait for a sale and try it then. If you’ve never played a Fallout game… I highly suggest you pick up Fallout New Vegas because it pretty much represents some of the best storytelling in the series. The show itself is full spoilers so if you plan on playing Fallout 4 at some point, and if you are one of those people for whom spoilers mean something…. then you probably should skip the show until a later date.

AggroChat 89 – The Fallout 4 Show

AggroChat #89 – The Fallout 4 Show

May 21, 2019January 3, 2016 by AggroChat

In November AggroChat decided to try a new experiment. There was a game coming out that month that all of us wanted to play, so when Tam went to make his choice he opted to go with Fallout 4. That said we all agreed that we would need more than a month to play the game, and ultimately we spend a little over two months with the game. Any Bethesda game is massive, and simply takes a sheer volume of hours to sift through the content… and even then there is pretty much no chance you will ever experience all of it.

For this show we once again pulled in Inkybrushes who we had on the recent Villians show, and called back a regular host from our early days Dallian. The majority of the cast had beaten the game with at least one ending, and a few managed to get multiple endings. The funny thing is… for a game that we all universally liked, we all had a bunch of negative comments as well. I guess that is the nature of our podcast, that we end up focused on the things that frustrated us and often miss some of the things we really enjoyed. This is a full spoiler deep dive into the storyline and various game elements, so if you have not played the game and intend to, I highly suggest you skip this show until a later date.

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