Well folks, it is that time. The first running of Blapril has closed and all of the posts have been tallied. Before I get into the reason why you are all here, I wanted to talk a little bit about Blapril. This came together on the spur of the moment because of the situation we find ourselves in, and the goal was to give bloggers something to focus on while our own personal lives might be in a state of disarray. I think in some ways it absolutely did just that, because it gave us six weeks of focus. We had slightly lower participation than what would be a normal Blaugust, but of those who participated… we had what felt like significantly more output. During the entire series run of March 29th through May 9th we had 48 total participants and they crafted 1124 blog posts. This works out to be an average of roughly 23 posts per participant. Of course the grading period being extended over the full six week run caused a bit of mudflation in the numbers for those who are the most prolific.
Before we get any further in the process I just want to take a moment to thank all of the participants who joined me in this nonsense. While I have doubts at times about the process, I never once have doubted the absolute wonderfulness of this community that seems to magically appear each year. Lets take a moment to see the full list of everyone who signed up to join in this event.
Regardless of amount of content posted, each and every person who signed up and joined in this process gets to proudly wear the Blapril Particpation badge. It is colored blue, like the color participants are given in the discord. I appreciate each and every one of you for the time you took out of what is I am sure a crazy schedule right now dealing with all of the social changes we have experienced thanks to the pandemic.
Newbie Awards
Newbie Blogger Award
This next group of bloggers get to wear a special badge because they are first timers to the Blaugust/Blapril proceedings. Some of them might be brand new to blogging, and others might be new to trying to create content regularly. Whatever the case they have put themselves out there and this is their first time going through this process. As a result they get a bonus badge that is purple, the color of the group on the discord. Join me in congratulating our new players.
From this point forward we are getting into the total post count based awards and while technically everyone that earns a rainbow award also has qualified for bronze, I am only going to list individuals under their highest achievement. This first group are bloggers who managed to get at least five blog posts during the entire event running from March 29th through May 9th.
This last batch of bloggers managed to get at least 31 posts during the entire event running form March 29th through May 9th. This is potentially our highest number of individuals getting to this rank in a Blaugust/Blapril event, because we managed to get 21 bloggers up to this rank. The highest number of posts came from our dear Bhagpuss with 48, and the closest runner up was at 45 for MagiWasTaken who was a Newbie from last Blaugust. I am exceedingly proud at everyone for their accomplishments.
Due to the impromptu nature of Blapril, we had slightly lower participation than the last few years of Blaugust. However I still think we had a pretty fantastic turn out all things considered. There are folks who just didn’t have the cutlery to be able to handle a blogging event right now, and I absolutely get that. We are going through a very scary time, and because of that especially I am thankful to the community we have built here. As always I tabulate all of these results by hand, and am of course fallible. Some blogs are harder to read for the purpose of counting total posts than others, so if you feel I made some mistake in my mathematics, then by all means reach out to me and let me know what the actual count should have been.
August is only a few months away, and I can tell you with all certainty that we will not be doing a full Blaugust this year. However I have been talking with the other mentors and we hope to create some sort of mini-event to take its place. Until then however, just know that I am extremely proud of everyone who steps forward to take on the mantle of this challenge. I am happy to have you all as peers.
Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
We start the show with what has disturbingly become a tradition for us as we talk about what life is like in this weird time we happen to be living. For some of us I believe it is week eleven and for others week nine, but really what exactly is the passage of time anyway. The first topic is a bump from last week as Tam talks about discovering Rampage the Board Game, otherwise known as Terror in Meeple City in its most modern incarnation. This leads down a rabbit hole of talking about classic monster movies and many agreeing that the correct place to start is with the OG Godzilla from 1954. From there Bel dives into a topic from the Aggronaut blog, of if grinding is actually fun. This leads to a whole other discussion of how each of us appear to have a vastly different description of what that even means. For Kodra it means grinding his face off over and over against hard content, but for Grace and Bel it largely means repetition of largely mindless content. Tam on the other hand has to have a purpose and his brain has to be engaged. Finally we talk about the integration of PVP into otherwise PVE games and why developers seem to be stuck on that concept. This leads to some discussion of a recent outing in Sea of Thieves when Tam finally gets people interested enough to try it, but they get griefed over and over by some jerk ruining an otherwise enjoyable experience.
This morning’s post is likely going to be disjointed because I did not get quality sleep last night. Over the last week I have almost rediscovered the practice of farming transmog gear from old raids. Largely I have been focused on the Warlords of Draenor raids, and more specifically Mythic Hellfire Citadel and Mythic Blackrock Foundry. I have two 120 Paladins and 1 120 Warrior that I have been running in an attempt to collect the various cosmetic bits of these raids. The Tier 18 Warrior set for example is one of my favorite designs as it is a call back to the Wrath set from Blackwing Lair. At some point I hope to collect all of the appearance options for it.
The influx of new gear has lead me to craft a new transmog for my Horde Paladin. Largely this came about by finding a really cool mace and a really cool shield and trying to make something that works with it. The funny thing about this transmog is that I don’t believe ANY of the pieces actually are from the same set. Luckily however any time “fel” is involved, it is highly likely that they will also have gold highlights, which effectively glue together a bunch of disparate pieces. We all know the cosmetic game is the real game, and since I have the Transmog Yak, I find myself trying to stay Transmogged as much as humanly possible. Wearing armor that doesn’t look like crap, greatly enhances my enjoyment in the game.
Another thing I noticed in my travels is just how often the Horde still has control of Wintergrasp. Lets talk really quickly about things that frustrate me from the Wrath era. Vault of Archavon is a fun little raid that never actually drops any loot that the character I happen to be farming it on can use. However when I popped open the map earlier I was reminded of how much it bugged me that the layout was not symmetrical. It absolutely looks like there should have been another wing to open up on the upper left hand side. Similarly it bugs me that there are portals underneath Wyrmrest Temple that don’t go anywhere. There are just little areas of the world that FEEL like they should have something going on, but don’t which has always felt like a bit of a lost opportunity.
Another thing that has been floating around the blogosphere during Blapril is the Quantic Foundry gamer motivation profile. If you are so inclined you can check out my full profile here. So there are aspects that surprise me. I would have expected that my social component would be significantly higher, but in truth I spend a lot of time organizing communities… and then spending my actual time in game soloing. In fact soloing is my default stance these days and it is a rarity that I actually group up with another human being, which is partially desire and partially circumstance that voice chat does not work while playing through parsec. I absolutely agree with the Mastery rating because I rarely give a shit if I am actually good at something, and I really don’t have much of a competitive streak. Immersion and Creativity both track I guess, and I do have a pretty strong leaning towards action oriented things.
If we dive into the secondary motivations it feels a little more nuanced. I am absolutely not a completionist, and I rarely finish video games. My community score is real strong, which also makes a lot of sense given my lack of a competitive nature. I also really like feeling strong… see me soloing two expansion old raid content for fun and profit and similarly I could care less about a challenge. The fantasy vs story thing… at first confused me until I read their definitions and again I mostly agree with it. I care more about the lore of a world and being able to create MY character in than world, than the continuity of a story being told with a character that I did not choose. I also really like blowing things up… though I would not necessarily call myself an “agent of chaos and destruction” as they describe it. When playing Mass Effect I only ever choose the renegade option when it is really warranted… like punching reporters.
So the question is then, how good is it at recommending games. When choosing the “Balanced” option It spit out the following list for me. All of these are games that I own and have talked about more than once on this blog. They are also all games that I greatly enjoyed for one reason or another. When flipping things to the “Niche” pick, it again spit out a list of games that I largely already have played and enjoyed including some picks like The Legend of Dragoon, which is one of my favorite PlayStation era RPGs. It also grabbed Grim Dawn, which I have written about at length and is probably one of my favorite Diablo 2 style games. It highly suggests Slime Rancher and Hellblade: Sensua’s Sacrifice which are games I own but have never played, so maybe I need to give them a try soon.
Do I think this is valuable and something I should actually follow? Probably not. Notice that the absolutely highest recommendation is only a 3.3, and there are other games that appear that I am way more into like Diablo III that only ranked 1.7. The problem with trying to boil down a game to a number is the fact that not every person plays every game the same way. You take an MMORPG, and there are dozens if not hundreds of different patterns to follow while playing it, and all of them can bring with them immense enjoyment to the player. I like farming older raids so I can look cool in World of Warcraft, and that isn’t exactly a standard pattern of play for a lot of players, but it also really makes me happy when I am doing it. Games are ultimately to nuanced of an experience to really be boiled down to a set of specific statistics, however I do think this does a reasonable job at giving recommendations in spite of all of this.
I grew up in what I consider to be one of the best eras in gaming, namely the mid to late 80s and early 90s. This was the era of the 8 bit and 16 bit juggernauts by Nintendo and Sega, and while it was years later when I first experienced it NEC as well. However there was something else going on that damned near knocked me out of console gaming entirely. In 1991 my family got our very first computer, a no-name 386 16 mhz with a massive 90 mb hard drive and 2 mb of ram. There was no sound card and we were still several years ahead of CD-ROMs being a thing that you would regularly see in a computer. However the same friend of my dad that used to send him home VHS tapes filled with movies from HBO, used to send me floppies loaded with games for me to play on our new computer. Howard was a member of a BBS, an through that he would get all sorts of things some what I would later learn as “Warez” and others something called “Shareware”.
Apogee ASCII Catalog
For those not old enough to remember this era, the idea was simple. A company would release one fully playable level of a game and distribute it freely on Bulletin Board Systems and FTP sites. Folks would download it, play it, and if they liked it you could buy a code that would unlock the full version of the game and let you play the rest of the levels. They also distributed their entire catalog of games in an ASCII text file format along with all of the pertinent information on how to purchase the games. Being a teenager and not having access to a credit card, it would be years before I was able to play the full versions of most of these games. For example I played Spear of Destiny long before I actually played any level of Wolfenstein other than the first one. The same is true with Doom and having played Doom II before the later episodes, in part because in both of these cases they got a physical release stocked at our local Walmart that didn’t require me to convince my parents to give someone a credit card number over the phone.
Duke Nukem II
The first of these titles that I played were the original Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, and I remember at the time not being able to understand why these games were not released for the Nintendo or Super Nintendo. I was completely unaware of the proud history of effectively home brew game development on Computers like the Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 64 because I simply wasn’t exposed to it at the time. All I really knew was the original Atari 2600, and then the 8 bit and 16 bit era consoles. It was after I got access to the internet that I more or less descended into the madness of all of the other options and got heavily into the Amiga scene when I picked up a 3000. At this time however it was extremely common place for ALL major game releases to offer a freely downloadable demo. When CD-Rom entered the scene is was extremely common for a Games magazine to have a pack in CD filled with demos of various products that were either out or coming soon.
Playstation Demo CDs
This wasn’t just a computer thing either. During the PlayStation and Dreamcast era, I remember demo cds for both systems in regular circulation. I used to subscribe to a PlayStation magazine, and each month there would be a CD included that had short demos for a lot of the titles that were just about to release. Once you moved into the PlayStation 2 and Xbox era of game consoles, the demos existed but were significantly less common. When you arrived at the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, the concept of downloading a demo had more or less been forgotten by developers. The era of try before you buy was a thing of the past, and this was also the era of several game releases becoming controversial for not quite living up to expectations.
Nintendo E-Shop with Switch Demos
While none of this is Shareware, I find it interesting that at some point over the last few years something changed. Nintendo Handheld devices have often had downloadable demos to sort of whet your appetite and get you interested in buying the full game. When Nintendo released the Switch I started noticing how many of these first party and major third party games had a fully playable demo that you could download ahead of time. Not only was the game playable, but often times you could pick up where you left off in your save file giving you further incentive to pay some money to continue that gaming experience. For example I absolutely played the Demo for Trials of Mana, and while I decided to start fresh after-all with a different party, I could have easily just picked up where I left off.
Steam Game Demos
This is a trend however that might have been happening under my nose for longer than I realized. Now that I look around it seems like there are many digital storefronts offering demos, and that might be what ultimately changed. Digital distribution, just like in the golden age of shareware, has become more a primary means of getting titles out to the public. It costs money to press a demo cd and distribute it out to the stores, but uploading a demo version to a store front is effectively free. It feels like maybe we are just about to go through a second age of Shareware, and while you are not downloading the games from some University hosted FTP server that you found through Gopher, you are still downloading them freely. So if you are curious what is available in demo form you can check out the following Storefront links that should in theory bring you right to the demo sections.
As someone who often writes impressions of games that he is enjoying, I should start digging up links to see if demos are available for that game. I can write all I want to tell you how cool I think something is, but giving you access to download freely and see for yourself is significantly more powerful.
