Hey Folks! I was not really feeling it on Friday so I did not make a blog post. This weekend I spent most of my time playing single-player games, and I think that was a good call. In theory, I am prepping myself for the release of Dragon Age at the end of the month and wanted to try and knock out a few games that I had been holding onto for awhile but had not started. While this blog is old enough to have existed in 2011 when the previous game came out… that was during my dry period when I was struggling with blogging. I loved the original Space Marine game, it was a blast and pretty much everything that I had ever wanted in a Warhammer 40k game. When the original Space Hulk game from EA came out in the 90s… I mostly just wanted Warhammer 40k Doom. It was a great third-person shooter with some interesting systems and enough story to keep the game from falling apart.
What I wanted from Space Marine 2 was more of the same, and I wanted to see more of the Warhammer 40,000 world displayed on the screen. It delivered both admirably and I geeked out every time I passed a new imperial armor mode that I had not seen yet up to this point. I am not as up on my 40k minis as I used to be, but I am pretty sure this is a company of Chimera tanks rendered lovingly in video game form. I am pretty sure during the course of the gameplay I also saw at least one Predator, a Leman Russ, and a Manticore. 40k is a miserable world of constant warfare, but the thing that I dig the most is that this game respected the dignity of the Imperial Guard, who are wildly outgunned in almost every battle but keep pushing forward regardless. The Cadians were an excellent choice here, and I believe they also were the army of choice in the first game.
Probably my single favorite aspect of the game is these loading screens that show the objectives for the mission as dietetic or “in-universe” screens appearing to the NPCs as a holo in the Thunderhawk drop ships. Everything about this game just drips Warhammer 40k lore from the fact that you interface with an Adeptus Mechanicus Magos any time you need to change out your Wargear aka your weapon loadout. I pretty much standardized on the Oculus Bolter, Heavy Bolt Pistol, and the Power Sword throughout as much of the game as would allow me to use them. There are folks out there who like constantly swapping weapons, but I tend to prefer sticking to a loadout that works well for pretty much all situations. Though that said… I did spend a heck of a lot of time doing melee combat because it is just fun to rip through tyranids with a chain sword or power sword.
There were also so many great setpieces in the game that put you in wild situations where complete nonsense was going on in the background. Probably the highlight of these was an orbital drop through the wreckage of Imperial Gunships as you attempt to get into the atmosphere of the planet where it is just too “hot” to get a proper landing. The first game was all about the Orks and this game is a love letter to Tyranids… with of course the “Archenemy” of Chaos always in the background. I’ve never really been that big of a fan of the Ultramarines, but I also understand why they are the poster children for Adeptus Astartes. It sort of hit me this weekend… that they are effectively the “Union Jack” Marines which is probably why they are fairly beloved in the origin country of the game. If I ever got back into the tabletop game I would probably just give up trying to do custom chapters and standardize on the Space Wolves because they have most of the elements that I love going on.
The campaign is pretty short as a whole, but it was one hell of a ride. There are so many excellent moments that are pure fanservice for Warhammer 40k folks. Once the campaign is over however there are a number of strike missions that you can venture forth on as well as a whole Online Multiplayer PVP mode in the game. Honestly, the setup of Space Marine 2 reminds me of how the OG Halo games felt. It has a solid campaign and from what I can tell a very solid and fun multiplayer experience, both doing their own things. This is pretty much everything I could have asked for in a shooter. I’ve only played the single-player content, but I have friends who have almost exclusively played co-op and said it was pretty great as well.
If you are looking for a game that throws back to an era before everything was a live service experience… then maybe check out Space Marine 2. It is just a big dumb shooter with lots of really cool vistas in the background as you rip through enemies with awesome weapons. If you also happen to be a fan of the 40k universe, then it is just the icing on top of this delightful cake. I spent most of the game hating one of the two characters that you are grouped up within the story, expecting an imminent betrayal. However, it turns out that it was just another Carth Onasi situation, and was that archetypal character that distrusts you forever until they turn into a loyal friend. I honestly hate that shit every time I encounter it. That however is the single blemish on an otherwise amazing experience.
I rate this game Five Dakkas and a Chainsword Rip.
The post The Emperor Protects! appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I’ve been working on a project lately. (CW: suicide, grief)
In early September, my brother in law Sam lost his battle with mental illness. It was… hard to watch happen, as he descended into a spiral of paranoid delusions, which led him to see hidden assailants that didn’t exist and physically assault people, both in public and in healthcare facilities and ultimately resulted in him taking his own life by jumping in front of a train, an option he specifically took because it meant he wouldn’t be found by his family.
It’s been hard to process my thoughts, especially because I’d only met him a few years ago when I met my wife, and he’d already had the edges of his fraying mental state then. His friends and family talk about him prior to his struggles, and it’s a person I don’t know and never met. The Sam I knew was an artist and musician who felt haunted by internal demons, whose creative works and whose devotion to helping communities and especially working in libraries and with people who most needed help reflected a person trying to do good, possibly because they were afraid of themselves.\
I’d talked with Sam a couple of times about painting miniatures, and he’d expressed interest. I never got a chance to teach him, but we’d talk about painting and he had been interested enough before things went severely downhill that I’d been eyeing a army to pick up for him as a starting point.
Near the end of September, a friend of mine sent me a starter pack of Blood Angels, part of a longstanding back and forth and a semi-joke gift he sent me intentionally to hit my buttons, because for decades I’ve made fun of Blood Angels, all the way back to the original Angels of Death codex where I played the cool Dark Angels and made fun of my friend who played the lame vampires. The gift came with the book Dante which I promised I’d read before deciding what to do with the army, and something clicked for me when I read it.
The Blood Angels are a faction of superhuman space marines, instilled with genetic code to push them well past human capability. They’re notable for their continuing struggle with being, well, vampires. To some extent they’re a meditation on the monster within, and they stave off their internal monster via art, creativity, and about as much community service as exists within the dark setting of Warhammer 40k. They all struggle with “the Flaw”, an affliction that both causes them to hunger for blood but also to see visions of an old battle, one in which their progenitor was killed and whose death haunts the entire group.
Some of them get lost in the visions, seeing enemies where there are none or mistaking friends or innocents for foes. They are often beyond saving, and are given special armor and treatment and transferred to a unit called the Death Company. They’re sent to places where their delusions can be turned against real enemies, where they can meet their end in honorable combat, which the Blood Angels value highly. They are remembered for who they were when they were lucid, and their loss of connection to reality is considered a reminder of how even the best of the Blood Angels are vulnerable.
It’s not… hard to make the connection. Sam was a musician, an artist, and a servant of the community. While when we’d talked about what he might play, Blood Angels weren’t on my list, but as a memorial they seemed apt.
I’ve got a handful of minis left for this project, most notably a Captain and a Death Company Dreadnought. The Captain, with some effort, has a look that’s roughly analogous to Sam’s curly hair, and I want to deck him out in ornate, gorgeous armor. The Dreadnought is a large mech, according to the lore a sort of walking casket for mortally wounded or even technically slain space marines. It’s fairly common in miniatures games to have a particular character represented in more than one way, reflecting different aspects of them or simply different points in time. I’m planning to represent Sam in both of these, golden armor and a halo in one, and a walking memorial to the dead in the other.
I’m sort of hoping it can be a way to keep a bit of Sam around for me. He can be there for the games I never got to teach him and play. My fondest wish when I eventually die is to be, somehow, made into dice so that I can continue to be a part of people’s games, their stories, joys, and memories with their friends, and that I can continue to play even past the end of my body’s limit.
I do a lot of processing my feelings through my creative work– miniatures and tabletop campaigns generally, and this is the third time I’ve done a project like this as a reflection of grief. I wish I’d gotten to get Sam into minis, and see the kinds of things he’d chosen and how he would have expressed himself through the medium. Maybe it would’ve been Warhammer, maybe Infinity or Battletech, maybe historical ship battles or Star Wars, I don’t know, but I would’ve liked to help him get started.
This is not the army I would’ve gotten him, no.
This is just a tribute.
I’ve been working on a project lately. (CW: suicide, grief)
In early September, my brother in law Sam lost his battle with mental illness. It was… hard to watch happen, as he descended into a spiral of paranoid delusions, which led him to see hidden assailants that didn’t exist and physically assault people, both in public and in healthcare facilities and ultimately resulted in him taking his own life by jumping in front of a train, an option he specifically took because it meant he wouldn’t be found by his family.
It’s been hard to process my thoughts, especially because I’d only met him a few years ago when I met my wife, and he’d already had the edges of his fraying mental state then. His friends and family talk about him prior to his struggles, and it’s a person I don’t know and never met. The Sam I knew was an artist and musician who felt haunted by internal demons, whose creative works and whose devotion to helping communities and especially working in libraries and with people who most needed help reflected a person trying to do good, possibly because they were afraid of themselves.\
I’d talked with Sam a couple of times about painting miniatures, and he’d expressed interest. I never got a chance to teach him, but we’d talk about painting and he had been interested enough before things went severely downhill that I’d been eyeing a army to pick up for him as a starting point.
Near the end of September, a friend of mine sent me a starter pack of Blood Angels, part of a longstanding back and forth and a semi-joke gift he sent me intentionally to hit my buttons, because for decades I’ve made fun of Blood Angels, all the way back to the original Angels of Death codex where I played the cool Dark Angels and made fun of my friend who played the lame vampires. The gift came with the book Dante which I promised I’d read before deciding what to do with the army, and something clicked for me when I read it.
The Blood Angels are a faction of superhuman space marines, instilled with genetic code to push them well past human capability. They’re notable for their continuing struggle with being, well, vampires. To some extent they’re a meditation on the monster within, and they stave off their internal monster via art, creativity, and about as much community service as exists within the dark setting of Warhammer 40k. They all struggle with “the Flaw”, an affliction that both causes them to hunger for blood but also to see visions of an old battle, one in which their progenitor was killed and whose death haunts the entire group.
Some of them get lost in the visions, seeing enemies where there are none or mistaking friends or innocents for foes. They are often beyond saving, and are given special armor and treatment and transferred to a unit called the Death Company. They’re sent to places where their delusions can be turned against real enemies, where they can meet their end in honorable combat, which the Blood Angels value highly. They are remembered for who they were when they were lucid, and their loss of connection to reality is considered a reminder of how even the best of the Blood Angels are vulnerable.
It’s not… hard to make the connection. Sam was a musician, an artist, and a servant of the community. While when we’d talked about what he might play, Blood Angels weren’t on my list, but as a memorial they seemed apt.
I’ve got a handful of minis left for this project, most notably a Captain and a Death Company Dreadnought. The Captain, with some effort, has a look that’s roughly analogous to Sam’s curly hair, and I want to deck him out in ornate, gorgeous armor. The Dreadnought is a large mech, according to the lore a sort of walking casket for mortally wounded or even technically slain space marines. It’s fairly common in miniatures games to have a particular character represented in more than one way, reflecting different aspects of them or simply different points in time. I’m planning to represent Sam in both of these, golden armor and a halo in one, and a walking memorial to the dead in the other.
I’m sort of hoping it can be a way to keep a bit of Sam around for me. He can be there for the games I never got to teach him and play. My fondest wish when I eventually die is to be, somehow, made into dice so that I can continue to be a part of people’s games, their stories, joys, and memories with their friends, and that I can continue to play even past the end of my body’s limit.
I do a lot of processing my feelings through my creative work– miniatures and tabletop campaigns generally, and this is the third time I’ve done a project like this as a reflection of grief. I wish I’d gotten to get Sam into minis, and see the kinds of things he’d chosen and how he would have expressed himself through the medium. Maybe it would’ve been Warhammer, maybe Infinity or Battletech, maybe historical ship battles or Star Wars, I don’t know, but I would’ve liked to help him get started.
This is not the army I would’ve gotten him, no.
This is just a tribute.
Good Morning Folks. Often times what you end up seeing here on my blog has at least started in some small part with some random comments here or there or on social media. Not that I expect anyone out there to be hanging on my ramblings, but if you follow me on Gamepad.club especially you might have seen the beginnings of this post. We are nearing the end of the year and there is something about that that ends up making me a bit introspective. This combined with a harmless comment that I read about something I wrote… has made me sort of evaluate what I am producing in the world. Truth be told… there are a lot of times I come across as an angry old man yelling at the clouds.
This is not the person I want to be, but I also feel like I am trapped in a pattern. My world is actually relatively small in truth. I have my wife, my cats, and my home… and then the handful of you out in the world who care enough about me to interact on a regular basis. This is not necessarily pity trip territory, because truth be told… it is the world I have wanted. Social interaction often drains me to the point of brittleness and working remotely for the last four years has been more good than bad. However, this small world also means that I have a bad habit of clinging to things a bit too harshly and placing my hopes and fears in external sources. I should in fact probably “touch grass” more often even though I have always thought that phrase was a bit too dismissive.
Anyways… I really miss the joyful exuberance I used to feel about gaming. I miss being able to feel wholly uncomplicated feelings about a brand-new game. Now everything is tinged with regret and bitterness and I am not sure I know a way to push past that. Either I end up comparing it to games that came before, or I deep dive too critically into the flaws and never end up talking about the positives. Then there is the problem with the social ramifications of gaming, for example, I probably would have enjoyed the Harry Potter open-world game, but refuse to give any more money to that franchise because it ultimately ends up supporting a vicious hatemonger. Nothing is simple anymore, and it feels like it can never be simple… at least not in the way that it used to be.
Maybe this is just a casualty of aging, and viewing the world through more jaded eyes. Maybe I am just suffering from depression that continues to grow while I refuse to do anything substantive about it. Maybe the games really have changed and I am no longer the target audience, or at least not in the same way that I used to be. Nostalgia is a terrible drug, because it makes us wallow in better times… that are themselves false afterimages of what the experience truly felt like in the moment. I can’t play Mass Effect for example without remembering how amazed I was the first time I played through it. That old game is nowhere near as rich as my brain makes it out to be, because I cannot separate the decades of fan service and good feelings towards Bioware from the game that is actually there.
What worries me is that I sometimes feel a sense of betrayal when it comes to a game. For example, I was legitimately angry at the way the story turned out in Diablo IV. Does the game deserve my ire? Probably not. It just wasn’t a good story, much in the way that there are a lot of completely mid movies out there that I seem to be able to consume just fine without getting angry at them. However Diablo as a franchise is a core part of my gaming soul. It was extremely important to me over the years and was a rock that I could lean on when I needed it, as a result, I get frustrated when it goes in directions that I think are poorly planned. I have almost thirty years’ worth of emotional weight being balanced on this franchise… and there is no way in hell it could ever live up to my expectations. Not to mention there is a fair amount of general bitterness that I feel towards Blizzard that is coloring my opinions.
I want to be a Boisterous Buffon Bouncing through life, finding magic in every moment. I want that so badly. I am legitimately jealous of folks who seem to be able to pull that off. I am sure that a lot of it is forced and often toxic positivity, but it still looks really damned appealing when I am wallowing in the depths of malaise at times. I do not want to be the downer that ruins an experience for someone else, because that is just meanspirited even if unintentional. There are a lot of times I hold my tongue and don’t speak… which only serves to cause the bile to well up whenever I do say something. Maybe I don’t come across as negative as I feel like I do, but I certainly feel like I am putting way more of that into the world than I want to. Gaming is supposed to bring us joy after all… not misery.
Why are all of these feelings rising to the surface right now? I was thoroughly disappointed in Diablo IV, which is a game that I waited for over a decade to arrive. At the end of this month, Dragon Age Veilguard releases, and I am deeply concerned that the game will not live up to my hopes. Dragon Age is another one of those really important franchises for me, and everything I see about this… gives me “seeking a different audience” vibes. I am going to play it because of course I have to play it. I did not necessarily love the direction that Inquisition went, but I still eventually came around to really enjoying the experience of playing it. A Games Journalist compared the game to the most recent God of War outing, which weirdly fills me with dread especially given that I actually genuinely enjoyed playing at least the first of the recent games. Similarly, I actually ended up really liking the Final Fantasy Seven Remake in spite of it completely changing the way that the mechanics worked.
Regardless of my attempts at rationalizing my fears away, the other part of my being is telling me that this is not the Bioware that I once loved. Truth be told NONE of these companies… are the company that they used to be. Bioware is a label that was bought and placed on top of an Electronic Arts studio, much in the same way that CompUSA and CircuitCity were once bought to create fake storefronts that all fed content from Tiger Direct. The era of “Studio Magic” is over for many of the names that we once clung to. There are smaller studios that are now taking the mantle of always churning out magic, but my brain still has a really hard time disconnecting decades worth of nostalgia from the reality that in many ways rampant capitalism has ruined these studios that I used to love. I can still feel good about supporting Larian, Supergiant Games, or Eleventh Hour Games… but it is hard to rewire the mental circuitry.
I am also super concerned that on the 15th of November Path of Exile II is going to drop and I won’t really like that either. I’ve spent more than enough on cosmetic items in the first game to likely automatically qualify for early access to the second game. It just feels like everything is “soullike” at the moment, and I am really ready for that design pattern to die in a fucking fire. That has been another growing frustration that makes me feel like I am no longer the target audience for many games. I am just not really interested in “challenge for challenge’s sake” experiences. That is not why I play video games or have ever played video games. I don’t play to prove out good I am at something… I play to escape reality for a while and to feel powerful when so often I feel completely powerless in my own reality.
Legitimately I have no clue why I sat down to write this today, other than occasionally I need to get something out of my head and the easiest way to do so is to commit it to the page. Folks usually end up attaching to one specific piece of what I said when I do one of these giant emotional vomit posts. I am fine… I will be fine as I always have been. I just miss being cheerful and joyous without any bitter fetters attached to it. I guess they call it baggage for a reason… because you carry it with you and can never seem to ever truly leave it behind.
The post A Lament for Uncomplicated Feelings appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
