Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! This week we have Ammo back and talk about Honkai Star Rail or at least our early impressions. Grace talks a bit about Horizon Forbidden West and the Burning Shores expansion. We discuss a better FTL in This Means Warp, and that Vampire Survivors has released a DLC. Kodra and Ash talk about how if everyone dies but the Tank, you can still win with Middara and this leads to some random discussion of MMORPG. Tam is the only one of us who has experienced any Redfall so we talk a bit about it and the community reactions. Lastly we sort of slide into a discussion about Guild Wars 2 without really meaning to.
Topics Discussed:
Honkai Star Rail
Horizon Forbidden West Burning Shores
This Means Warp
Vampire Survivors DLC
If Everyone but the Tank is Dead It’s Still a Win.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Good Morning Friends! Lairs Day has come and gone, but for those of us recording the show… it was still happening and as a result, we talk a bit about that. From there we talk about the repeated death of E3 and why maybe they should just call it quits going forward. Thalen talks about the apparent fact that Crunchyroll is known for killing games. Bel and Kodra talk a bit about the Zelda Direct and how apparently Tears of the Kingdom is going to be even more sandboxy. Super Adventure Festival is going on in Guild Wars 2 and we talk about the quirky new Fashion Wars event happening in Lion’s Arch as well as the test release of World 3 of the Super Adventure Box. This past week the Crucible League announcement stream took place and the patch notes were released… frustrating a good number of players. From there Tam talks about Terra Nill an ecological world-building sim. Finally, we wrap up the show with some talk about the books we have been reading. Thalen talks about the Broken Earth series and Bel talks about Legends and Lattes and the Bloodsworn series.
Good Morning Friends! Happy Super Adventure Box! I have to be honest I am not nearly as nostalgic for the April Fools event in Guild Wars 2 as some folks are, but they did manage to pry some more money from my pocket with this amazing Siege Turtle skin. Really the price of admission is entirely worth it for the 1980s arcade sound effects while using it. I love the aesthetics of this event even if I don’t necessarily love grinding through the world. Essentially I tend to easily get up to the frog boss and then fail miserably. What I did not expect is that apparently unlocks for SAB are character bound instead of account bound, so I had to go through the process of rigging up all of the things like bombs and shovels on my Ranger since I prefer to be playing that character currently even though for the purposes of the Super Adventure Box it does not really matter.
For anyone who has no clue what I am talking about, the Super Adventure Box is this weird original one-off April Fool’s event where players could run around in a vaguely Super Mario 64 inspired map. This was so beloved by the player base that it ultimate became a permanent event coming back each year for a week or so around the beginning of April. I’ve talked about it before in the past and even have some screenshots of the world. Essentially you work your way through a series of challenges in a Mario-esc 1-1, 1-2 etc sequence. There are a number of achievements for you to get like finding green and red baubles and a whole slew of items available for purchase through Bauble Bubbles which you can purchase for every 250 baubles collected in the levels. It uses a Zelda-like mechanic where you keep having to purchase larger wallets in order to hold more Baubles through each trip into the zones.
Super Adventure Box requires a continue coin in order to play, and at the beginning of the festival, you are given five of these. They can then be purchased with baubles or I believe found in chests spread throughout the levels. Since I was already making a purchase, I decided to pick up the Super Adventure Pack which includes a convenience item called the Infinite Continue Coin. Essentially when you hit the game over screen, in lieu of inserting a continue coin… you can use your infinite continue coin which will then give you 99 lives to explore the level making the whole process way less tedious. This is essentially a one-time purchase and is only available during the Super Adventure Festival.
Now this is where we get into the long history of Guild Wars 2, because apparently as I understand it… there was a third world teased at one point but never actually delivered. I believe this is in part because all of Super Adventure Box was essentially a passion project of one of the devs, and when they left the company so left the motivation to keep making Super Adventure Box levels. So all of the achievement hunters are currently slavering over a playable “test” of the third world. Essentially this area is missing some of the final polish but allows folks to go through it and collect some of the achievements. I watched a live stream for a bit yesterday afternoon of one of the OG players hunting for the baubles that they were missing.
While the jumping puzzles are not necessarily my jam… I do love this time of year for the neat skins that you can get. For example yesterday out of one of my daily loot boxes from killing Champions, I got this Retro-Forged Rifle which sorta looks like a giant 8-bit era zapper gun. I’ve got a similar pixelated hammer and Legend of Zelda-looking short bow skin. There are also craftable skins for various bosses in the mini-game. I picked up the infinite continue coin because this year I would really like to finish the entire map, or at least beat all of the bosses. I might need to watch a strategy video because King Toad always kicks my ass. It feels like I should be able to dodge or jump over some of the mechanics but I never seem to be able to do so.
Are you participating in Super Adventure Festival? Were you also swayed by the low polygon turtle mount skin? Have you been anxiously awaiting World Three? Drop me a line below.
The post Low Polygon Turtle appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I have this weird superstition when it comes to computers. I will never name the same build the same thing twice. It is almost as though each machine that gets a fresh install is its own “being”, because yes I suffer from the personification of machinery. Generally speaking, the machine gets named after something that I am engaged with at the time. My current gaming desktop is named NormandySR2 and my laptop is named NightCity. My gaming desktop before that was named Serenity, and when I rebuilt the gaming desktop before that into a Plex Server I named it Merigold as I was playing through Witcher 2 and 3 at the time and Triss is legitimately the correct choice. Over the weekend that machine gave up the ghost, and while I could potentially resurrect it with a new system build… I’ve decided to move on. Another proud tradition of mine is to turn my previous gaming desktop into my new “fuck around and find out” system. Merigold was my old AMD FX-6300-based system and when I upgraded to my current i7-10700K-based system a few years ago, I left my previous x99-based i7-5820k system largely sitting there dormant.
The plan is to build this into a Linux Mint based system. Why that distro? Largely it is a case of comfort and familiarity. I’ve built up a few past laptops using it and felt good about it. In theory, I could just run a more server-ly distribution on it, but I often like to use this machine as a secondary desktop. I’ve always built my second machine as a Windows machine, so this is going to be a bit of a first for me. This is going to mean that I will be using Linux a heck of a lot more than I normally do. For decades I’ve had a Linux box as a “toy” machine, that I fiddle with for a few days and then forget about it… and by the time I need it again, I often burn it down and start from scratch. The fediverse however has immersed me more into open source culture… and I am thinking it might be time to test drive actually running one of my primary machines as Linux. I mean I will still likely run Plex on it, but I am also really interested in trying to figure out the best use of it as a remote machine given that I never actually use my second machine with a proper monitor/keyboard/mouse. Previously I had used Parsec as my remote tool of choice, but there is no Linux hosting option for that sadly. In the short term, I will probably use VNC, which I have never loved… but it is functional and easy enough to set up.
I popped in for a little bit yesterday before Diablo IV Beta came to a close and finished leveling to 25, the level cap for that test. I am still a bit “up in my feels” about what I really think about that game. I was honestly not expecting “Blizzard Does Lost Ark” and since I bounced so phenomenally hard from that game I guess I understand the dissonance that I am going through regarding that. Diablo Immortal is also somewhat of a version of that experience, and I liked it just fine because I entered into that with very low expectations. Diablo IV however had been a game I had whether or not I wanted to… been pinning my hopes on as the last chance for Blizzard to really grab me. I’ve always cared far more about the Diablo franchise than anything else that the company has put out, and slowly over the years, I have peeled away from the other franchises. I did not really want to also feel like I had moved on past Diablo as well. I mean I have a copy of it now, so I might sit and watch and see what it evolves into over time.
The experience of the Diablo IV Beta has had the effect of causing me to pour my heart and soul back into Last Epoch. This is honestly the sort of experience I was hoping Diablo IV was going to be. For all of the talk of a return to Diablo 2 from the devs… I sort of expected something that would straddle the gap between Path of Exile and Diablo 3. That is ultimately what Last Epoch feels like, a happy medium between those two games. I got my Sentinel/Paladin up to fairly high levels and while I enjoy it… I also was not really feeling it. So instead this weekend I started pushing up my Necromancer and have now almost gotten up to the same levels that I was sitting at on my Paladin. I’ve not started the Monoliths yet but am working my way through the final chapter of content that is currently in the game. I think I have effectively a fully fleshed-out “kit” at this point and it is just a matter of getting levels and getting better gear.
I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in Guild Wars 2. Here is one of those Legendary bosses that I compared Diablo IV bosses to. I legitimately hate the Legendary rogues that spawn after you have defeated a Champion rogue. I largely stick around to help fight them because they are such pains in the butt… and I know they can wipe an entire field’s worth of unsuspecting open-world players. It always feels like I spend most of my time resurrecting other players. It is more a case that I don’t want to damn anyone to do this horrible encounter alone, as opposed to actually wanting to fight it myself. That is the weird thing about Guild Wars 2… it makes me want to take action to help other players because it seems like it is the right and proper thing to do. I have a post in me about how Guild Wars 2 is the best game that the mainstream isn’t taking seriously… but that is going to have to wait for another day. The annoying thing about Guild Wars 2 is that it is so good… that it turns players into evangelists for it… which only ends up pissing off the unindoctrinated.
So the goal for today is to finish the installation of whatever I end up naming the new box. I spent most of yesterday furiously copying files from a machine that I have not touched in two years… and probably didn’t actually need anything from… but felt like I had to back up “just in case”. I’m currently running it off the bootable image and am just about ready to do the proper install. Linux “live” images are really a godsend, especially given that they just sort of “work” now to let you copy files off an otherwise dead system. That whole world has evolved so far since the first time I installed RedHat in the late 90s.
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