AggroChat

On Fires, Part 1

August 30, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #29

On the recommendation of another, I recently picked up Burning Wheel Gold. This is the most recent version of Burning Wheel, which is so far the only pen-and-paper RPG I’ve taken a glance at and said I’d never want to play. So far my opinion on that hasn’t changed, but it does have some really interesting ideas.

The Catch

Unfortunately, getting a book is somewhat annoying. This edition of Burning Wheel was never released as a PDF. A limited number of stores around the country are even listed as carrying them, and the one closest to me was sold out. Amazon does not have new ones for any reasonable amount of money. The only real option is to order it from the official website, which means another account and all that goes with it.

Wikipedia claims that there’s no PDF because of piracy, but this seems like a ridiculous justification. This is really the iTunes problem again: if something is easy to access in a legal manner, people tend to do it. If the book was on, say, drivethroughrpg.com, then lazy people would just get that instead of pirating it. The people too cheap to do that weren’t going to buy the book anyway, and considering them as a lost sale is fallacious.

On Bug Repellant

August 30, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #28

I didn’t think this was going to happen at the start of this year, but this weekend I find myself in Seattle, attending PAX Prime with Tamrielo and Kodra. I’ve previously been to East (twice) and South, but this is my first time coming to the original venue. It’s also my first time attending any event where there’s been a Final Fantasy 14 Battle Challenge. The enemy for this event is Ravana, normally encountered as part of the Heavensward storyline at level 53. This one’s been scaled up a bit to be an appropriate challenge for level 60 characters.

We met up with another member of our free company, which meant we had 4 people familiar with the fight. Joining us were 3 people who had never played Final Fantasy 14 before, and one who did play, but was not high enough level to have seen the fight. We got through the slaughter phases pretty well, but we had some issues with the defensive phases.

In the end though, we emerged victorious. It was actually kind of satisfying helping people who hadn’t seen it before get through, and we got nice new shirts out of the deal.

On Rocking Out For Real

August 29, 2015 by Ashgar

Blaugust Post #27

The resurrection of Guitar Hero and Rock Band brings to mind the guitar game that came around as they were fading. Rocksmith (also on Steam) requires an actual stringed instrument and a special USB cable. The latest release is almost two years old now, but they just put it on the new consoles, so I suppose it counts as current. Unlike the others, this one is attempting to teach how to actually play guitar in the form of a game. It has an arcadey score attack mode if you miss the Guitar Hero aesthetic. It also now has several years worth of DLC.

Needing an actual guitar or bass makes the buy-in here rather high, but for people like myself who already own one, it’s an interesting experience. It has some major flaws in teaching how to actually play an instrument, but it is pretty good for learning how to play specific songs. It (on the default settings) dynamically adds more notes in as you get more familiar with a given song. Songs you’ve never played before are adjusted for what the game thinks your skill level is.

If you’ve ever thought about learning guitar, this might be a good first step. It makes “practice” entertaining, which helps a lot. You should seek out another resource if you’re serious about it, however.

Second Winds and Diablo

August 29, 2015 by Belghast

Desi Wonderfulness

Last night was a bit unusual as far as our Friday nights go. Generally speaking we come home from work, and I play video games while my wife attempts not to fall asleep… always failing that battle around 9/9:30 ish. Instead we went out for dinner with some friends, and I got to eat at one of my favorite restaurants… Desi Wok. I generally refer to it as an “Indian restaurant” but in truth it is a “Desi” restaurant as the name implies, focusing on an amalgam of traditional Indian cuisine mixed with some more Chinese inspired dishes. My wife got the always tasty Chicken Tikka Masala, and I went with my most recent favorite an ambiguous dish called “Chicken Desi Fried Rice”. The dish comes out bright red and spicy as hell, pretty much the way I like it. The problem is it is way more food than you can eat in one sitting so I always end up taking home about half of it. My wife decided to order a Mango Lassi which she had never actually done from Desi Wok, and in my confusion I wound up getting one for me too… but no actual other drink. This meant I consumed a lot of water in my vague attempt to control the spice of my dish.

By the time we finally got home last night I was drained. We made a stop off at Target, and all the while I was moving around the store at a snails pace. I literally think my wife would have been dragging me through the store if I had a rope tied onto me. She kept having to stop periodically and look back at me to see if I was keeping up. I am guessing it was the beginnings of a tasty food coma. But in all honesty it could simply be the weight of this week crashing down upon me. Each and every day there has been some major crisis that I had to deal with. We had a production database get wiped one day, and another day we were trying to diagnose why a piece of software built in Visual Basic 6 wasn’t working any more. For starters I had no clue that anything built in VB6 would run on a Windows 7 machine. Visual Studio 6 was the brand new technology…. when I was in college almost two decades ago. All the while during each of the issues I acted as the manager and facilitator, which is a bit of a new role for me. I am not used to being the one directing the action rather than the one with my hands buried deep in the guts of the software trying to sort things out manually. Putting your faith in someone else to fix things for you, is way the hell more stressful than being under the gun to fix something yourself.

Second Winds and Diablo

Yesterday was the beginning of the brand new Diablo 3 fourth season, and this time I wanted to get in on the ground floor instead of creating a character a few days from the end. Earlier in the week I had talked about my plans on what exactly to create for this new seasons and I finally settled on rolling a Femme Barbarian. I have an absolute love of Sonya in Heroes of the Storm so any attempt to recreate that character seems amazing to me. However I spent the first half hour or so of gameplay complaining to my friend Grace about her lack of armor. She was awesome about it and I am sure was just patting me on the head as I complained about something that every woman on the planet has complained about at some point… the shitty armor options they give female characters in video games. Yes I realize the male barbarian starts in essentially a furry diaper, but that changes pretty quickly as you find gear and at this point at level 37 I am still wearing a bra of some sort. I finally learned to ignore it mostly and got on with the game play.

Grace had started her traditional Wizard earlier in the night, and was about five levels ahead of me by the time we both managed to get on at the same time. We proceeded to spend the rest of the night running bounties and rather quickly I was able to catch up in levels. I am not sure what it is about Diablo right now but it is really hitting the spot. The only negative being that the Barbarian starts out in a fashion that I don’t really enjoy that much. The first attack and the first secondary attack… are both not really my thing. Thankfully you get Cleave pretty quickly, and before the end of the night I finally was able to pick up whirlwind which serves as not only a great group attack but also a decent way of getting out of things since you seem to ignore slowing effects when you are spinning. My hope is that at some point today we can hook back up and start leveling again. Other than that I am looking forward to tonight’s AggroChat show because we are finally going to talk about Birb boyfriends and why that game is pure madness.