Featuring: Ammo, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Just a heads up, Bel had a bit of technical difficulty and the humm that he has been trying to isolate and get rid of is way worse than normal. He has however ordered some expensive usb power isolation nonsense that is hopefully going to help with this in the coming weeks. Tonight we are still living in Pandemia so we talk a brief bit about that. From there Bel talks a bit about Doom Eternal and the tweaks it has made to the formula of Doom 2016. Kodra has now beaten Ori and the Will of the Wisps and is now sad as a result. We talk about the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Demo and how we are generally excited for the upcoming game. While on the topic of demos we talk about the newly released Trials of Mana demo and how Ash and Bel are really looking forward to this game. We finish out the show with a discussion about Animal Crossing New Horizon and how apparently it is a cultural phenomenon already and we are mostly on board with doing nonsense for Tom Nook.
Good morning everyone. Welcome to the end of my first week of remoting, and the beginning of a weekend that suddenly means significantly less. I had originally taken today off, but I cancelled my vacation because in theory we are not going to go anywhere due to trying to do our part and social distancing. I had been following a routine of going to the corner convenience store and this morning I even stopped that because we officially have community spread. So I am like so many and just trying not to freak out about everything and live what passes as a normal life. Thankfully I like my house and I like my spouse and we’ve spent over twenty years of coexisting in the same place without fighting so I think I am better off than a lot of people.
Since my last Diablo 3 related post I have “finished” the four chapter seasonal journey and have the 6 piece Natalya set, which allows me to comfortably run through Torment IX without much issue. I’ve done a solo 45 Greater Rift, and I ultimately NEED to get it to the point of being able to do a 55 for the seasonal conquest. So far I plan on doing a solo 75 which should be easy when I get my multi-shot build working, and last night Grace and I did the achievement to kill over 300 critters during a cursed chest event… we got something silly like 450 which admittedly was mostly her because I don’t kill that fast yet. So the last of the three conquests is likely going to be getting through a GR55 on 6 different class sets, which should work because we plan on running up a pair of Witchdoctors as well.
On the home front I wanted to share a little innovation I had with you, pardon the shadow and the adhesive residue from what used to be hanging on the back of the door. Ultimately I have a large number of controllers and wanted a good way of storing them to get them out of the way and keep their cords from getting tangled. My wife has used over the door shoe storage for various purposes and it gave me the idea to try and use it for controllers and other gaming kitch. So far it seems to work beautifully and all of those controllers for systems I don’t use regularly are neatly hanging behind the door with only the Xbox 360 and its enormous cord looking a little unseemly. For reference I am using this 24 pocket organizer from Dollar General, but I am sure you can find something similar at pretty much any other store.
Another thing that I have been playing around with quite a bit is my RG350 emulator console. This is of course a publicity shot and not my actual unit, but I did get it in the same color scheme because it reminded me more or less of a gameboy. There are a bunch of different versions of these custom emulator consoles running OpenDingux coming out of China and originally I was just looking for one that would play Super Nintendo and Gameboy Advance titles, which caused me to land on the PocketGo. However at the time I placed my order it was out of stock and I was given the option to upgrade for $5 to the RG350 which was capable of emulating way more systems including pretty flawless PSX games. Since then I have been spending a bunch of time poking around in Nintendo, Super Nintendo, TurborGrafx, Gensis and Playstation games. Playing Legend of Dragoon on a handheld is pretty freaking awesome, and this gives me a good system for Four Job Fiesta this summer. Additionally it gets roughly six hours of constant play out of a battery and charges quickly off USB Type C.
Lastly we have the significance of today. I will be adventuring off on an island getaway and playing a core Animal Crossing game for the first time. I mean I also have the other big release which is Doom Eternal, but more than anything I am interested in getting engaged with and seeing how the Animal Crossing fans live. I may or may not have it running in the background while I am typing up this post and am getting lulled to sleep by the Nook Inc island music. I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and stay safe out there. Again I am reminded that I should keep telling folks that I love them, so I love all of you out there who are my regular readers. Writing this blog is mostly therapy for me, and you reading it means you are playing a part in that process. I hope we all make it out of this weird time we are living in safely and can tell stories about it on the other side.
It is the beginning of my third day of remote work and I already have no clue what day of the week it is. In theory this should mean that it is Thursday, but I am also deeply skeptical that time still moves in the same fashion that it used to. The weirdest part about working from home is how phenomenally busy I seem to stay, because I am having to exert so much effort to keep tabs on everything that is going on as opposed to news just finding me randomly. I spent most of yesterday on conference calls for various reasons and I think for the most part things are working as intended. My crew, also working remotely appears to be successfully knocking out things so I think the experiment is more or less working.
My evenings on the gaming front have been completely all over the place. Yesterday during the day I saw that Trials of Mana released a demo, and more important than that one that allows you to continue your progress in the full game. I have been exceptionally excited for the release of the remake of this game, largely because I have been waiting to play this game for legitimately decades. Back during the Super Nintendo era there were two games that made me want to learn Japanese so that I could play them. The first of these was Final Fantasy V, which I have played through several times now as part of the four job fiesta and attempted to play an early fan sub during the late 90s on an emulator. The other of these was Seiken Densetsu 3 or as we eventually came to know it in the west Trials of Mana.
The fan subs for this game were always lagging behind because the game proceeds in a manner that isn’t exactly like its predecessors in the “mana” series. Instead of having a fixed party you choose three characters to focus on and then that dictates what sort of quests and content you experience along the way. I remember there being a “golden” path translation that allows you to play specific characters, but even then… the game required way too much horsepower to be able to run on a Super Nintendo emulator at the time I was messing around with such things circa 1997/98. After that it was filed away in my brain as a game I would love to play if I ever got the chance and was quickly forgotten about as I transitioned mostly into PC gaming.
In June of 2019 the game was re-released as part of the Collection of Mana, but at that same time was announced that a fully 3D remake was on its way. Instead of playing the original 2D sprite based game I decided to bide my time and wait for its eventual release on the Switch in all of its shiny new glory. As a result last night I legitimately played through the entire battery on my switch poking around the demo and I have to say I am fully on board with this game. I legitimately loved the “Mana” series back in the day and Secret of Mana is among my favorite Super Nintendo titles. I even enjoyed the quirky Secret of Evermore that I still think is a hidden gem among the Super Nintendo era titles.
So far I have to say that the transition from traditional 2D Seiken Densetsu gameplay works pretty freaking well. The combat feels good and fluid and the jumping mechanics are functional for both getting to aerial enemies and traversing the 3D set pieces. I am enjoying the scavenger hunt aspect of the world in finding all of the hidden treasure chests, glowing items on the ground and pots to smash. The world map is adequate and combined with the in screen messaging does a good job of directing you towards the objectives you need to be paying attention to. On some level this feels like maybe a throwback to the Playstation 2 era of Action RPGs like Dark Cloud, but with significantly better visuals.
The demo allows players to get to level 7 and I believe through the initial story of each of the characters you have chosen. I fully expect to play my way through all of that and then continue into the full release when it comes out on the Switch on April 24th. My hope is that I can get Animal Crossing out of my system enough to give it some free reign in a month when it officially is available. This game feels like I had been hoping the most recent Dragon Quest game would have felt like, which I realize doesn’t mean anything to anyone other than myself. Since I played the original game with the Sprite as my healer, the girl as a dragoon and the boy as a sword wielder… I figured going for Duran, Charlotte and Riesz was the closest I could get to that sort of a setup.
In other news that absolutely made the world feel better for a little while… we saw Tripod last night. For those who have not followed the blog for long we have a community of neighborhood cats that we feed. We have super original names for each of them, but the most important one to us is the three legged female calico cat that we refer to as “tripod”. We promise we would give her a proper name if we could ever befriend her and get her into the vet. She comes and goes irregularly and is also way the hell too stealthy to get caught on the front porch video camera. This is a horrible quality photo take from my wife’s phone, but after a few months of not seeing her and fearing the worst we saw her up on the porch going for the food dish. It does my heart good to know she is okay and has made it fine through the recent cold snaps. We have a feeling that both her and the cat we refer to as “three” are actually living in our backyard, but any attempts to locate where they are staying have been unsuccessful. I believe however that they might be living way down underneath our slightly elevated wooden deck.
The first day of going on remote protocol was interesting. For the most part the entire day was spent with triage of why various members of the team could not get connected remotely to specific resources. I did however manage to make it through the entire day without finding something I had to drive in for, so I guess that is working as intended? It very much is like raid leadership, but if your raid is acting independently of each other and that you are having to talk to them in tells. The two stand up meetings more or less worked as intended and I limited them just to critical issues. The first one unfortunately was pushed back due to a mandatory meeting, but we managed to get started just fine an hour later than originally planned.
The thing that I am noticing is that while working remotely I tend to put in more hours overall. I tagged in and did my first “work” about 6:30 in the morning and I tagged out for the night around 5 pm, and also ate lunch at the keyboard. So maybe I need to work on setting up a bit of time boxing and only making myself available during my normal 7:30 am to 4:30 pm window. Were it not rainy as hell I would have probably gone out into the backyard to eat lunch just to get a bit of a change of scenery. I have Shin Ramen for days and I wound up eating a cup of that for lunch much like I would have were I sitting in the office. In theory I might partake of Doordash and start ordering in lunch for my wife and I. Yesterday the Tulsa metro escalated its protocols and all restaurants and bars that do not have a delivery or carry out service are closed. As a result we are going to try and order take out from as many small establishments as possible over the next few days to try and keep them in business.
As far as gaming goes when I went downstairs and fixed dinner I eventually settled in and tried to play some more Diablo 3. Firstly I do not really love the Natalya’s set build, but it is functional and I can do Torment 1 pretty easily with only having my 4 piece and none of the other important items needed. My biggest problem still is the fact that I am gold locked in that I need roughly a million gold per attempt to keep trying to socket a weapon so that I can get my 6 piece set and finally start the season properly. The challenge there is that I am just not making that much gold per run and it feels like I am in a super grindy place. I need to catch up with Grace so we can use the Puzzle Ring and I can at least get my Boon of the Hoarder gem.
On a whim I opted to fire up my Playstation 4 remotely and start playing Last of Us. Yes I know I should be branded as a pariah for making it this far into my gaming career without having played this game. I have to admit part of this is spurred on by the fact that there is an HBO series in the work and another part by the fact that the second part should be releasing soon. So far I am really digging it, but I also don’t love aiming guns with a controller so we will see how long this lasts. I would have so much rather played this with a mouse and keyboard and on some level I kept hoping that like Horizon Zero Dawn it would also eventually release on the PC.
I didn’t make it terribly far into the game but I have to say that even on a baseline PS4 it looks gorgeous. I will likely play some more tonight as weirdly games and fiction about post apocalyptic settings calm me when the world is falling apart around my shoulders. I guess it is a way of showing me that “it could be worse”, and really for me it could be very worse. You know when you are wandering around in Silent Hill during the day time and everything feels wrong… but at the same time nothing is really dangerous? That is how living in pandemia feels right now because for the most part things are close to normal… but not quite. I am still hoping we all make it out safely on the other side of this mess. I am a prime candidate for having a bad time of it due to my health problems so I feel like I keep needing to tell everyone around them that I love them just in case things go badly at some point in the future.
