The most recent episode of Aggrochat was our discussion of Tron 2.0, which I had picked as our Game Club game for September. As it turned out, only Kodra and I finished the game, but everybody at least played far enough to form reasoned opinions and we had a good discussion about the game and about the evolution of the FPS genre over the past decade.
Overall I feel like my memories of Tron 2.0 weren't terribly inaccurate. There was a definitely a bit of nostalgia coloring them, but the annoyances I ran into were mostly things that I remembered from playing it when it was new. I do feel like playing Tron 2.0 and Wolfenstein: The New Order back to back highlighted a number of the changes that have taken place over the years in the genre.
Programs can get bored and fidgety too.
There were little things like using the scroll wheel for weapon zoom instead of the right mouse button, but also things that were still common in FPSs a decade ago that no longer are, such as jumping puzzles. There really weren't that many of them, but it's telling that jumping puzzles where what ended up making a couple of the others call it quits. Jumping accurately when you can't see your feet isn't easy. There's a reason you don't see it come up as much in modern games (Portal being the main exception that comes to mind).
I still think the mechanic of memory for your subroutines (weapons, armor, and general power ups) which changes when you enter a new system is pretty clever, especially combined with the ability to upgrade subroutines to both make them more powerful and make them take up less memory space. It's a little disappointing though that you don't get access to some subroutines until it's too late to reasonably upgrade them and use them properly.
Overall, I feel like Tron 2.0 remains a game worth playing both because it's fun and has an entertaining story, and for a look back at the kinds of experimentation that were being done in the FPS genre 12 years ago. I only wish it had a gotten a sequel that could have really polished the systems and made them all fit together just right.
Tonight we celebrate our Eighth Aggrochat Game Club game, Tron 2.0. What makes this week so interesting is the fact that this is a game from 2003. For a point of reference this is the year that the original Call of Duty was released, as well as the PC port of Knights of the Old Republic. This is an era when the Quake 3 engine still reigned as the king of all shooters, and people were branching out to do some interesting things with the FPS model. The results of this week are a bit mixed, and represents the first time we had a few people reach rage quit moments. Listen into the show to see how our group fared and some of the commentary we have about this interesting title.
Last year Pax South was quite literally the first gaming convention I had ever been too. Granted I have been to comic conventions and scifi fan conventions over the years… but never a gaming one. I didn’t really know what to expect but Liore gave me some advice… that as soon as you get in the doors the anxiety fades away because you realize that these are “your people”. I didn’t really believe her until the convention was actually underway… and absolutely I had this overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be just fine. I never strike up conversations with strangers, yet I found myself idling chatting with people while standing in the queue room like a pro. There was just this aura of acceptance that I felt, when quite literally anything anyone was into was awesome. The only problem was that it was quite literally an overload on my senses and while I technically knew a bunch of people at the convention, I only actually managed to meet up with the AggroChat folks that I had planned on meeting up with… and Lonrem from Anook. Well I guess that is not entirely true because that Friday I had a bunch of press meetups scheduled to talk with various game devs. At the end of the two days I attended, I was worn out beyond belief… but I was pretty damned happy with my experience. I had originally decided to try and attend as many local conventions as I could… but ultimately that fell through for one reason or another.
After having done a Pax I realized that the highlight for me was not necessarily the show, but getting to hang out with people that I do not normally get to hang out with. It felt like this giant summer camp for gamers and geeks… and it was fairly magical. With this in mind I set my sights on Pax Prime… but nothing really went as I had hoped there. Firstly I missed out on getting tickets, and second we were not accepted for press passes. Then thirdly… August is a really bad time for me. My wife is a school teacher and Pax Prime happens exactly at the beginning of our School year here in Oklahoma. It would have been extremely rough on my wife for me to have been away during those first weeks of school, when she ends up having to rely on me the most because she is simply stressed beyond the point of coping. So while I was sad that I didn’t get to attend, I still had hopes that I could con more people into joining me at Pax South this year. Since I know what is important to me now… I know what to focus on, and that is planning on meeting up with people. The problem we ran into was that on the convention floor the cell service was complete crap. So my theory is that we will need to figure out meet up points ahead of time this year, rather than trying to rely on some sort of impromptu thing.
More People More Fun
The above picture was hands down the highlight of my Pax experience, not because I we were playing Gigantic really, but more than the three of us were playing together. The gravy on top is just the fact that we happened to be beating a YouTube celebrity in the process. Now we zoom forward to yesterday… they opened the flood gates and started taking sales for the 2016 Pax South in San Antonio Texas. This time I managed to get in on the three day passes, which there are actually still a few left. As of right now I know that myself, Rae, her brother, Ashgar, Thalen, Dallian, Lonrem, and Helkim are confirmed going… or at the very least have their tickets in hand. I am sure in the coming weeks I am going to start hearing of more people going, and I plan on starting up something to keep track of who is going and on what days so that maybe we can meet up and hang out. I need to start doing some research into what eating options are there in the Riverwalk area, because I absolutely do not want to try and go to that Chillis again out of desperation and hunger. I am also hoping we can maybe coordinate hotels, because I really liked the one I stayed in last year… but it was out by the airport. However if there are many of us it would not be an issue at all to carpool into the convention each day. I feel like I have the whole parking situation under control after having done it last year. I have to say I am extremely excited, and hoping this one is going to be bigger and better than last year. I mean this is the only Pax that does not sell out in a matter of minutes… so honestly I am fine with that. The concept of trying to get tickets to any other Pax seems like a stressful situation. I realize it is still months away, but I want to try and make the best of this coming years show.
I have a distinctive grumpy this morning. For starters it is raining and storming… and I cannot pull the covers over my head and allow myself to be lulled back to sleep by the rhythmic noise. Secondly I was up far later than I expected last night. but that in itself wasn’t all that out of the ordinary. However roughly 45 minutes before the alarm was set to go off, our kitten using some of her newly discovered jumping abilities caused an avalanche to occur sending a ton of crap falling off of a high perch. Instead of just accepting my fate and getting on up, I did the futile thing and attempted to go back to sleep. So I am going through that sluggish phase when you have attempted to get sleep… but didn’t get enough of it. As such my mental processing is a bit sluggish, but the show must go on. Coffee is being consumed, and hopefully that will fix all the wrongs in the world… or at least lessen them. As to last night… I was up late in part due to a bout of insomnia and in part due to doing things with friends. I wrote the other day about my process of working through the HK-47 storyline, and over the weekend Tam managed to get caught up to the same place I was. As I was folding laundry last night, I got a text asking if I was around but I didn’t actually see it until I was headed upstairs to wait out my insomnia.
There are a whole lot of faffing about that you have to do, which involves going to planets and scanning for HK-47 parts. After that however you have two dungeons… the first one being a normal mode False Emperor and the second being a hard mode Maelstrom Prison. We managed to get four warm bodies, which included a tank and three dps… but unfortunately our only healing option had to go to bed early. Since all of us were between 56 and 57 in level we assumed we would be able to do the normal mode dungeon without much issue. While I managed to get a little low a few places, False Emperor went off without a hitch and we even managed to get a few cool cosmetic pieces. Still feeling brave we decided to go ahead and attempt Hard Mode Maelstrom Prison without a healer… and while I took a few deaths due to my own stupidity… we managed to make it through that dungeon as well. So in theory… we can likely run any of the older content without heals. The cool thing is that while we were running the place we managed to get housing items to drop… which makes the place far more interesting for repeated running. I think tonight I can run the last part of the HK-47 chain, which is a return to the Heroic 2 dungeon from the very first of it. I simply did not have the oomph to remain awake last night and push through it.
A Boy and his Ship
I spent most of yesterday chasing Skavak across Coruscant on my Chiss Scoundrel. I am having quite a bit of fun playing the smuggler right now, and it is really the only class that I did not spend a significant amount of time playing during release. Before leaving the game I had managed to get the Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular and Trooper all to level cap, and had several failed starts and playing the smuggler. This time around I decided to go for the “sawbones” spec, which now does more than it previously did. The Scoundrel subclass was a confusing mess because I personally struggled trying to figure out what abilities I should be using. Previously you got this mix of melee focused and ranged abilities… and it seemed like a horrible idea to be a melee healer in this game. Instead they have taken out all but the crowd control melee abilities and give Sawbones a focus on ranged damage to mix in with their healing. This combined with switching to Treek as my tank over Corso Riggs has ended up making for a much more enjoyable experience. Towards evening I blasted out of the space port on Coruscant headed for the wasteland of Taris.
Now that I have dinged 21, I spent some of my hard earned commendations and kitted out both my armor and that of Treek in full level 21 modifications. I am pretty damned happy that I have orange sets of gear for both, and my theory is that I will upgrade at the end of each planet, hoping to soak up enough commendations while on the planet to be able to kit out my gear each time. The truth is with the experience bonus I am well ahead of the curve. Taris for example is originally intended for level 16-20 players… and I didn’t even make it onto the planet until 21. My hope is this is going to allow me to be able to complete some of the heroic four content, and get more commendations that way. In theory I think the heroics are daily quests, and I could keep going back to Coruscant to do those in order to soak up a few additional commendations. In any case I am really enjoying myself, and this has been a welcome diversion. My hope is that we can muster some grouping again over the next few days and explore some of the flashpoints that we never saw. While this is a long shot, it would be kinda cool to be able to see some of the operations as well. Tonight however… we are going to work on taking down Ravana Extreme.
Something New
Yesterday I decided to try something slightly new, and failed a little bit along the way. I had noticed that many podcasts actually uploaded their shows to YouTube, by simply throwing up a static image with the audio running behind it. I figured this couldn’t hurt, and for some people YouTube might be a more comfortable experience than having to set up podcast software. The first attempt however lacked any audio at all. I was using Adobe Premiere for the first time, and as a result ended up exporting in some strange format that was a combination of a video file and a waveform audio file as well. Windows seemed to know what to do with the file, and when I tested it… it appeared to play just fine. However upon uploading it… I got a really long still image with zero sound kinda defeating the purpose. The second export however made it just fine, and we now have our first YouTube show up. We’ve already gotten a few views so we will see how this compares to the podcast. It might also make an easier format for folks to comment on. Let me know what you think. I doubt we will ever do a video show like Cat Context and The MMO Show… but for the time being it gets our show in another medium.
