Belghast

Chris Pratt: Raptor Whisperer

Yesterday I did something fairly uncharacteristic for me and took off a half day from work, just because I felt like it.  It was shortly after turning in the paperwork that I realized I should really use this opportunity to go see Jurassic World.  So I got my ticket for the 1 pm and settled into the theater expecting it to be largely empty.  I was completely wrong, the theater was absolutely packed, so I am guessing I was not the only person with this idea.  As far as the movie, I have to say I liked it quite a bit.  My initial review was not as good as the original, but better than the sequels, but shortly realized that it sounded like I didn’t like the movie.  I actually enjoyed the sequels quite a bit, just nowhere near as much as the original.  I remember seeing the original in the theater and being enthralled, and that kind of magic just can’t be captured again.

The movie was enjoyable, but mostly once things started going to shit.  The best moments in the movie involved Chris Pratt.  He has become this loveable goofball of an action hero, and in many ways he reminds me of he way Harrison Ford played a lot of his action roles.  The movie is kind of a big dumb action movie romp through dinosaur land, and I am perfectly fine with this.  There were a lot of call backs to the original movie, which played well for a nostalgia factor, but also gave certain aspects of the movie a “been there done that” feel.  It was well worth the $5 for the matinee ticket and hell it was probably worth a full priced ticket as well.  I have a feeling we will see a reboot of the franchise considering that they left things open in the end for sequels.  No one seems to make a one off movie anymore, they have to leave things open to make a desperate ploy for more money later in the form of a sequel.

Sequels that were Better

My initial reaction to Jurassic World being better than the original sequels got me thinking.  The concept of a sequel is such that we immediately expect it to be worse than the original.  So today I am going to delve into some direct sequels that worked surpassed the original games.  Now there are some ground rules here.  For example Castlevania Symphony of the Night is a sequel in theory to the original Castlevania…  problem being decades passed between those two games so it is a no brainer that SOTN surpasses the original.  The same is true for the original Zelda and Link to the Past.  It isn’t really fair to talk about those games, because they are not direct sequels and had a lot more to work with than the original did.  Similarly I am going to ignore games like Doom 2 and Wolfenstein Spear of Destiny…  because they are quite simply the original game with more features added onto it.  I feel like in order to declare something a sequel that surpassed the original, it needs to actually go past what the original game offered.  I am looking at you Fallout and Fallout 2…  because while I enjoyed the second game a lot, it probably should have just been an expansion pack since the engine was essentially the same.

Master of Orion II

I loved the original Master of Orion game, but when the sequel came out it just did everything better.  The graphics were higher fidelity, and you could delve into things at a much higher level of detail.  The game kept my favorite race the Silicoids and seemed to make them even more badass.  Additionally you had the ability to design your own ships, which gave me the fantasy fulfillment of rolling  into a star system with a death star and destroying it.  The game was far more evolutionary than revolutionary but it surpassed the original in a way that it completely took it off the map.  The funny thing is that this game still holds up, and I can still lose an entire afternoon playing it through the GOG galaxy client.

Castlevania II: Simon’s Quest

This is probably going to be the most controversial pick that I make, because people either seem to love this game or absolutely hate it.  For me it took a game that I already liked and simply made it matter more.  By the time this game came out I was already heavily leaning towards roleplaying games as my primary source of enjoyment.  Simon’s Quest took the Castlevania game that I loved and added a persistent component that let me improve over time as I explored the world.  Now there were moments in the gameplay where it was not terribly obvious how you should proceed, and these got frustrating apparently in tracking down a couple of draculas parts, but for me at least this is the game that really cemented “Metroidvania”.  It was part Castlevania, part Metroid and part Adventure of Link, and melded together in a way that I enjoyed immensely.  The critics at the time bashed it because it was not enough like the original Castlevania, and ultimately the third game in the series became more popular, but I still feel like Simon’s Quest was the best of the 8 bit Castlevania games.

Warcraft II

When this game originally came out, I for the most part ignored it.  I thought Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans was a boring title, and in truth at the time I would have rather played Dune 2.  It was not until the first Battlechest existed that I finally gave this game a chance, and I spent the next three months obsessed with it.  The gameplay felt much more responsive and you had so many more options of things that you could build.  I’ve always been a base builder when playing an RTS and this game allowed me to go to stupid lengths to build impenetrable fortresses.  What really extended the life of the game past the original release however was the fact that you could download all of these user created maps in the form of “PUD” files, which in itself was a bit of a play on the Doom “WAD” file format.  After a few months I spent as much time designing new maps for the game as I did playing them.  Warcraft 3 really gets credited for the birth of World of Warcraft, but I think this is the game that made us first give a damn about the setting.

Assassins Creed II

First off I have to admit that I am not really a fan of the Assassin’s Creed franchise.  I have spent a bit of time piddling around in them but quite frankly they don’t offer the mad hack and slash game play that I really crave.  Ultimately the game is ruined the moment I need to stealth around and complete a mission.  The rest of the time I have a blast killing random guys on rooftops, but that pretty much is ignoring the thing that people seem to like about it the story.  I have to give this game credit however because when the first Assassin’s Creed game came out I played it on a friends console, and found the controls to be some of the most frustratingly cludgy things ever.  I pretty much ignored the game from that point on until at the urging of Tamrielo I finally gave the game a proper shot.  The second game improves on everything that was wrong with the first game and manages to make moving around the world feel natural.  If it weren’t for the fact that the game is largely about assassins that like to stealth about and attack from the shadows… I could probably enjoy it.  That said I have to give this title credit for eclipsing its predecessor and spawning the franchise proper.

Mass Effect 2

Mass Effect 2 took all the bits that worked well in the original Mass Effect and then sanded down all of the bits that never worked that well.  The end result was the best game in the Mass Effect series as far as I am concerned.  The first game was okay, and upon going back and playing it I can appreciate it for what it was.  At the time however I just could not get into it.  The combat in that game was maddening at times, and felt like it wasn’t quite certain how to do turn based third person combat.  The second game however made it feel fun to duck behind objects and snipe things, in the same sort of way that Gears of War did.  The other thing that made the game amazing was the sheer scale of the number of characters you could ultimately recruit into your party.  I still think the Mass Effect series would make an amazing television show, that played out over the course of five or six seasons.  If I have to play one game in the series though, I will always return to playing ME2.  It still has the most enjoyable mission system, because I like the feel of going off on these smaller strikes rather than getting bogged down in the length on rails story missions.  I would seriously kill to have a game that was just a bunch of going off on random strikes forever, that was Mass Effect game play at its finest for me.

I Showed you Mine…

I just scratched the surface on sequels that ultimately trumped the original game.  Now that I have shown you mine, its time for you to show me yours.  What games did you feel outpaced the original, or what games did you not manage to get into the series until the second iteration.  I am curious what games you hold a torch for after all these years.  Not sure why I was feeling particularly nostalgic today, but ultimately I decided to just run with it.  I am hoping that this post spawns other posts or at least some comments below.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Sequels that were Better

Make Numbers Go Bigger

Yesterday morning before I left the house I tried an experiment.  I placed three large chicken breasts cut into strips, some diced carrots, some diced potatoes, some hot curry bullion and chicken broth in the crock pot.  I figured I was either going to end up with chicken curry or a colossal mess.  The truth ended up a little between, when the end result was significantly soupier than I expected.  In theory I could have cooked it on high for a few hours with the crock pot lid off and probably done just fine, but instead I had a bag of frozen noodles in the freezer and dumped those in to make what ultimately was curried chicken noodle soup.  It was “odd” but I have to say once I added some salt, pepper and sriracha it was rather tasty.  So for the next few days I will be eating on the leftovers that are so neatly packed away into some giant tubs from Ikea.  Sometimes these experiments work out, other times not so much, but this is pretty much my preferred method of cooking…  dump a bunch of ingredients together and see what happens.

Another experiment is going on right now on the Steam page as they have officially launched their summer sale.  For those who have not experienced the summer steam sale, it is pretty much Christmas for gamers.  During the sale you can see normally $40 games going for $4 and other ludicrous things.  With the Steam sale there is always some sort of mini-game that happens in the background, that involves collecting cards or voting on this or that item.  This time around it is quite literally a game that you play… essentially by afking.  I think this might be a commentary on a whole series of games that have showed up on steam recently that involve sitting at your keyboard and clicking on things to make the numbers go bigger.  This is essentially what happens with the new Steam Monsters game, either you afk and let your auto cannon do the work for you.. or you click until your heart is content and reduce the health of monsters ultimately clearing waves.  The game I have been in has been going on since yesterday and at the time of writing this we are on level 237 of a seemingly endless wave of monsters.  I have no clue what the point of the game is other than to make the numbers go bigger, but I am participating to find out.

Buffalo Farming

One of the things I am enjoying the most about ArcheAge is how I feel this sense of accomplishment after only playing a short period of time.  Right now I am averaging one to two hours a night at most, but still feeling like I am making forward progress.  The big change last night is I opted to drop Shadowplay from my Darkrunner build and pick up Occultism turning me into Bloodreaver.  In truth I really was not using much of anything from the Shadowplay tree, and the Occultism tree will eventually support the AOE that I am dealing through Battlerage.  For the moment I am planning on doing an AOE damage and CC build that should be solid as I move forward.  I think one of the things I dig the most is just how easy it is to change things around.  I can go to a Skills trainer or any graveyard and swap my trees around as needed to support the kind of game play that I am needing for a given moment.  The only negative is that each time I do this I need to spend some time catching up that tree.

So last night I spent a good deal of time killing random stuff.  I wandered down into a mine filled with Kobolds which also provided me an ample supply of ore to mine.  For the moment I have not touched any of the crafting in the game, but I am instead stockpiling resources.  At some point I will probably work on weapon-smithing, or whatever the games equivalent is.  In any case I assume a stockpile of ore is going to go a long ways into whatever I need to do to make the crafting numbers go bigger.  At this point I am level 18 and I think significantly higher than the rest of my friends playing the game.   I kind the actual combat enjoyable, so I always end up killing way more stuff to complete a given quest… and this game seems to reward farming mobs over and over.  As the title says, I was hanging out in this field killing the water buffalos over and over because it was enjoyable to leap at my target and whirl around like mad with my two swords.  I have no clue what group content looks like in this game but as Kodra starts a character this weekend hopefully we can start working on groupy bits.

Last Raid

Last night was the final raid night for me for the near future.  As I have said before I am going on a bit of a sabbatical from the game, so that I can fully enjoy the launch of Heavensward.  I don’t plan on doing anything drastic like cancelling my account, and I will probably poke my head back in around the launch of 6.2 but the future of me and raiding is a bit uncertain at the moment.  Quite frankly right now I need a break.  I have enjoyed a lot of my time raiding, but the slog through Blackrock Foundry has taken its toll on many of us.  As a result our raid group as a whole is taking at minimum a two week break starting today, and last night our raid lead cancelled all of the reoccurring raids off the in game calendar.  So there was a sense of finality in last nights events that probably the rest of the raid did not have.  I have called this subsection the way I did because really my future in WoW raiding is uncertain.  I would like to think once things have calmed down I will pick back up and work my way back into the raid group, but honestly that is at least a month away and I cannot determine how I will feel at this point.

The big positive is that we managed to take down three heroic bosses, which should get most of us the ability to start getting mythic loot boxes from our Garrison.  The negative is that we downed Gruul and once again he refused to drop the upgraded version of my sword.  More than any expansion I have felt like I have had to fight tooth and nail to get the meager upgrades I have gotten.  There has never been another time in another game where my fate was determined more by the cruel mistress of RNG than in Warlords.  I have sat and watched as I have won enough rings and cloaks to outfit an army…  but have struggled to get weapon and shield upgrades.  I guess on the positive I did manage to get my four piece bonus faster than a lot of people, but by the same token that four piece bonus is so good for Gladiator that it has been its own albatross around my neck.  I have functionally better items for every single slot that I have a set piece, but I need that bonus so badly.  It reminds me of how overpowered the tier 2 hunter eight piece bonus was, and how no one was willing to give it up once they got it.  So for the time being… I am bidding Warcraft farewell and packing it neatly in a box to be unpacked at a later date.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Last Raid

Flight in Draenor

This mornings post is going to be a little odd, because I have already written it once before.  I sat down at the keyboard like normal this morning and started banging out a post, and within a paragraph of finishing it and hitting publish…  we had a power outage.  Unfortunately I was composing on my local machine, and also unfortunately it seems that LiveWriter only recovers if it crashes… and not the entire computer powering off.  As a result I am composing a second post… in which I am going to attempt to say all the sage things I said before.  This experiment is likely going to fail miserably.  In my original post I got a little salty over the announcement yesterday that Blizzard was adding in a meta-achievement that would allow you to unlock flight in Draenor for all of your 90+ characters.  The problem being I was grumpy for a silly reason, and now upon rewriting this post I have realized that.  Sure it felt good to rant a bit, but overall it was largely meaningless.

What I do feel like yesterday’s announcement signals is that Warlords of Draenor has been a testament to the fact that Blizzard does not understand its core demographic at all.  As a friend said last night, Flight is a Genie that you cannot put back in the bottle.  Once it was given to the players they will always crave its freedom.  While I personally agreed with the decision to take flight away, and supported the supposed line in the sand they drew, it seems like the villagers with pitchforks storming the ramparts made Blizzard change their mind.  Warlords as a whole has been a bit of a comedy of errors, with extremely good aspects like the raid encounters… and extremely bad aspects like the facebook game style garrisons and the demolition of crafting.  Ultimately my frustration with the flight move is it seems so rushed, and that they simply drew a card from the Final Fantasy XIV deck on how to deal with it.  Last October Square announced that they would add flight, but through a system that forced the player to explore a zone and learn how to harness the winds.  This meta-achievement seems like a rushed clone of that concept, and while it made me grumpy at first… I realize that every single game draws upon the best parts of every game before it.  I guess next week when Heavensward head start begins we can determine if it really was the good idea that Square hopes it is.

Clockwork Mayhem

I spent a good chunk of my night playing ArcheAge and I have to say the more I play Kitty Belghast the more I enjoy him.  Technically I am not Belghast at all… because apparently someone on Tahyang has my name.  To make matters worse they made an Elf Archer… which is pretty close to being the “anti-belghast”.  However I am getting by just fine with Belgrave the Nuian and Belglaive the Firran.  I finished up my questing in the mines and have moved now into a junkyard of clockwork machines.  I am really enjoying my Darkrunner build, because it just feels awesome to rush headlong into things with two swords drawn.  Everything was going well until I stumbled onto a quest to kill 20 discarded clockworks.  As I wandered through the junkyard I found them sitting there in several clumps of smaller mobs surrounded by an aggressive Harani.  At first I thought these were like the other packs of mobs I had encountered, so I pulled and popped my AOEs… only to get murdered in the most horrible fashion.

It turns out that when ArcheAge says something is an “Elite” quest it means it.  It also turns out that these are part of the Clockwork Rebellion event, which is the mirror of the Oblivion Rift event I had done before on the Nuian side.  These are absolutely scaled for groups to complete them, but instead being the stubborn fool that I am, I tried to solo it.  What I like the most is the fact that this game allowed me to do just this.  Through careful pulls I was able to peel smaller chunks of the large packs off and take care of them in multiple passes.  I found that I could take three or four of the little robots if I absolutely had to, and then would need to regenerate my health and mana back before trying another pass.  In doing this I whittled down the quest until I was able to complete it and get an achievement for doing so.  I have to say this sort of careful and methodical gameplay was extremely rewarding, and reminds me of an older era of gaming.  My hope is that once Kodra gets the ability to play ArcheAge that he too will find the game he had been looking for with Pathfinder Online.  In the meantime, I am having a lot of fun being kitty bel.

Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Several weeks ago I had ordered the Final Fantasy XIV Art Book from the Square Enix store, and last night when I got home it was sitting there waiting on my doorstep.  The coolest part so far is the fact that it has almost all of the weapon and armor designs from the game, and shows the production art behind them.  What makes that even more awesome is that each one of them has a sentence or two of notes below that explains some of their ideas that went into the design.  If it is a weapon with animated parts it explains how the weapon bits actually move and function together and the idea behind them.  If that was not cool enough it also included a tiny Enterprise minion that also has an even tinier Cid sitting on the deck.  I am thinking this is the ideal minion to run around with as a Lalafell, because Tiny Cid actually makes me feel big.

I had logged out of ArcheAge and into Final Fantasy XIV last night because in theory it was the night our second static runs.  Whenever my schedule works with it, I try and offer my services to make sure it can fill.  Last night however after sitting around and waiting for a bit we were standing there with four people.  The leader called the raid, and we instead shifted focus to running Art the bear tank from our WoW raid through some instances.  The most frustrating part about leveling a DPS right now is the fact that the queues are so ridiculously long.  As I have been leveling my Ninja lately my average wait time is around 40 minutes.  So we built a free company group and I got the job of tanking.  I tanked Copperbell as a Warrior, and Halatali as a Paladin and enjoyed both of them.  I like tanking lower level content in part because it makes me realize just how limited my toolbox used to be, and how hard it was to actually hold aggro on mobs.  Was a fun night all around, and I actually look forward to doing more of this as I work on leveling my Dark Knight eventually.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Tiny Bel, Tiny Enterprise, Tiny Cid

Gliders Away

Whatever has a hold of me allergy wise is driving me insane.  I struggled my way to work yesterday only to be not so subtly asked to go home by my boss.  Apparently I sounded fairly horrible.  So I headed to the house and took a breathing treatment and attempted to be productive remotely.  Last night I took several Benadryl before heading to bed so I am hoping that helped get me over whatever hump I was struggling with.  This morning my head feels a lot clearer, but that might all change the moment I open the front door and are exposed to the world again.  My friends have joked that I need a bubble… and there are days that I agree with them.  To make matters worse we are under an Ozone alert day meaning that the air quality levels are already going to be horrible today.  There is a whole list of things that we are not supposed to do during an Ozone alert day, but the show must go on.

Yesterday I was a little bit spread out in what I ended up playing.  It was of course my World of Warcraft raid night, and at least on some level I was excited about getting in and getting more attempts in on Blackhand.  I spent quite a bit of time last night playing around on Cat Belghast in ArcheAge and honestly the more I play that side of the fence the more charming I find it.  I am naturally drawn the Nuians simply because it is the race I can create the closest facsimile of “Belghast” proper in.  However it is pretty much a bland European fantasy world, with the same vistas and characters we have encountered in essentially every MMO.  What makes Haranya interesting is they combine the tribal Firran with the Harani that are essentially steampunk engineers.  Quite honestly the Harani remind me of the Al Bhed from Final Fantasy X, and doing quests just seem more interesting than the Nuia side of the house.  I know Ashgar has a preference towards the cat people, and I guess I am developing that as well.  In any case I am really enjoying my time spent piddling around in ArcheAge.

Blackhand Down

Last week on Thursday we had made a significant amount of progress on Blackhand.  On our best attempt we managed to get hit to 11%, so it was my hope that after some time away from the fight we could pop back in and pick up where we left off.  What made last Thursday challenging was that we were extremely short on melee so the walls were going down very slowly.  Last night we had some of our normal melee which made that part easier, but we were also down two of our main healers which added its own challenges.  However right out of the gate we managed to push to phase three like it was easy and at least match that 11% progress.  The rest of the night was spent fine tuning things and on our very last attempt of the night our raid leader managed to bring in a additional healer which seemed to push us over the top.  Unfortunately I spent the tail end of that fight in the lava as I managed to get clipped by one of the smashes while trying to execute spam Blackhand.

It feels extremely good to have defeated this raid tier, especially since Heavensward is right around the corner.  This was functionally my last week of raiding in World of Warcraft before going on a bit of a sabbatical.  I had hopes that we would be able to down him at least by Thursday, but now we are in the interesting position of not really knowing what to do with ourselves.  I guess Thursday if we have the people we will venture back into Heroic and see what mischief we can get up to there.  I know several of us are a single kill away from being able to get Mythic gear out of our Garrison loot boxes.  So in theory it would be nice to knock that kill out as well.  Similarly it has been talked about maybe just having a Heroes of the Storm night instead, since several of  the raid are also playing that game.  In any case it feels like I managed to squeak by another milestone fight before the buzzer.  So that is two raid Warlords raid tiers I have managed to defeat in this expansion and I am pretty happy with that.

Closure

Even thought I am not enjoying World of Warcraft fight now as much as I had hoped I absolutely loved getting to raid with the guild again.  Coming back I was in an odd situation where I simply did not know many of the folks that had joined the guild I founded in my absence.  I am so happy to have been welcomed back with open arms and been allowed to get to know so many of them.  I am not saying I am “done” with World of Warcraft, but if I was I would be able to end on a happy note.  In a months time I might be raring to go and begin raiding again and pushing forward into Hellfire Citadel.  Right now however I just know that I need a break from this game.  I don’t want to try and split my attention between the new and shiny Heavensward content and Warcraft that feels very much like a worn in shoe.  It is comfortable, but as you walk down the street you happen to notice every blemish and scuff and remind yourself that you really should buy a new pair of shoes.  I am just thankful for the most part that people seem to “get” why I am taking a break.

I talked with Rylacus the man who wears the crown these days and explained it as this.  If I was forced to play Warcraft, when there was another game I would rather be playing… it would ultimately lead to me quitting the game again.  I think instead of I just back away for awhile, and let myself get Heavensward out of my system…  or at least to a manageable level I will once again be able to juggle multiple games.  The only problem I see is that there are a lot more people than just me that are in desperate need of a break.  Yesterday it was revealed that once again World of Warcraft is timing their next infusion of crack with the launch of a major game.  It seems that the 6.2 patch is going to land right around the time Heavensward officially launches.  The current rumor is June 23rd, and for some that might be just enough to keep them from straying.  For me personally, my heart already belongs to Final Fantasy XIV… I just spend time in Warcraft so that I can hang out with the friends that are still there.

Source: Tales of the Aggronaut
Blackhand Down