Good Morning, Folks! One of the artifacts of the 80s and 90s that I find near and dear to my heart is the Mixtape. Yes, I know there is a brand new video game by the same name, but I have been slow getting around to playing it. Essentially, Baby Bel used to make these for himself and his friends because I was constantly trying to achieve a perfect listen-through blend of music that flowed from one song into the others. I was forever annoyed by albums that had one or two good songs, and the rest was trash, so that I could not simply throw it in the cassette deck and listen without needing to navigate around. As I developed hormones, I even attempted to use Mixtapes as a sort of mating ritual, and it never actually worked. No girl that I ever gave a Mixtape to truly appreciated the effort and thought process that I went into crafting a sequence of songs that blended together into a greater whole. Now I make them for you, my readers, and each time I make one… I am essentially handing you a piece of my soul, because they all mean something deep to me. If you have ever wondered, I also almost exclusively listen to my mixtapes while driving in lieu of the radio.
29 – Road Rash Rail
This one, my friends, is admittedly going to be a bit of an acquired taste. A few weeks back, I was listening to Tapedeck Held Alot, and marveled about how positive all of that music was, and how even if the lyrics were sad… There was still a note of hopefulness. I attempted to reason why this was, and then it hit me suddenly that this was probably just the last era when I actually listened to traditional pop music. Once I graduated from the Euro Invasion 80s music, I pretty much went straight into skater rock. Middle School era, Bel was a little skater punk, and I have written about this, and the feelings that a Tony Hawk Pro Skater documentary brought up in me. The thing is, my Skater era pre-dates Tony Hawk Pro Skater by at least a decade, and since we had no access to authentic skate culture… Thrasher Magazine became our bible. Right or wrong, we used it to influence everything from the lingo we were using, the fashion we were wearing, and the music we were listening to. Those albums were hard as hell to find, because none of it was available at the local Walmart. So when we got something… we cherished it and dubbed off copies for pretty much everyone. This mix is an ode to that era, and these are the songs that we used to skate to. I have been listening to it all week since creating it, and I personally think it is rather good, but like I said… thrashcore is not going to be for everyone.
When I created my last MixTape, I was in the holding pattern before Chemo started. I had been scheduled to get my port installed, but had not gone through with anything. Tomorrow represents the start of my 4th cycle of Chemo, and the halfway point. I think maybe I have reached a point where I do, in fact, believe that there is an end to this madness. Round three was a bit of a bear, and I am still having the cold reaction symptoms because they never faded this time. They are supposedly additive each round, so they are only going to get worse from here. I’ve made it this far; I can make it a bit further. As for the mix, this one was fun to assemble, but as I said, I am not expecting many to actually enjoy it. There was one band that I specifically avoided because no one wants to listen to an album that is effectively 40 1 minute long songs. That was most definitely a thing with a lot of the indie punk bands that skaters gravitated towards. It was way more about the tempo than anything else.
Last night, my sibling Ace unintentionally hit me with a challenge. We were talking about bands, and we got off on a tangent about how They Might Be Giants is effectively its own genre of music. Sure, I added Ana Ng to Push Me, Punch You, but that song has specific punk vibes to it. But how does one effectively craft an entire Mixtape that fits the greater catalog… without it simply being nothing but They Might Be Giant Songs? I have no clue if I am actually up to this Challenge that Ace never actually gave me.
The post Mixtape Mondays: Road Rash Rail appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks! If you follow any of the ARPG YouTubers or Streamers you will have probably heard of Dwarven Realms. This game is a very indie very alpha passion project from two brothers, that wanted to do something new for the ARPG genre. Essentially the game is this blend of Vampire Survivors mixed with the controls of what sort of feels like an action combat World of Warcraft. The graphics in general and the model work are nothing to write home about, but the gameplay falls in the “big dumb fun” category. For scale expectations… the game recently hit a peak concurrency of 780 players so this is still very much a niche thing but something that I’ve been playing around a bit with. I had so much fun that I bought copies for all of the AggroChat crew over the weekend when the price was dropped from $5 to $3.74 on a promotion that lasts until the 21st of March.
The setup of the game is pretty straightforward. You have a home camp that over time gains some crafting benches and other resources that you can access. The most important aspect of the home camp is the big green portal, which gives you access to the ruptures which are the core gameplay loop of the game. I’ve been told that the first 34 Ruptures unlock all of the side systems of the game, and then after that point, it is just an endless mechanical loop to see how high you can push up your level and how many ruptures you can clear.
Each Rupture starts out pretty slowly as you are placed on a map with some sparse destructible terrain and some monster spawns themed to that area. However, every few seconds more waves of monsters spawn eventually reaching a point where you are completely surrounded by spawns. Each Rupture has a time limit in the upper left corner showing you how much time you have left, and after killing a fixed amount of monsters you will be notified that you can unlock the boss chamber to finish out the Rupture. I keep wanting to call these Rifts because they remind me quite a bit of the Greater Rifts from Diablo III, so if I slip up and swap terms in the middle of this post hopefully you can reason what I meant. Killing monsters grants essence that you can then use to unlock objectives that spawn into the map and give you resources or gear. Additionally, all of the things you kill will have a chance of spawning loot that goes directly into your inventory.
Once you enter the Bosses Arena the door will lock behind you. This point of no return has led me to spend a good deal of time farming the map before moving on to the boss just to get a good deal more resources. The bosses are pretty straightforward and have some sort of pattern to them. Canuckmeat the Boar for example will charge you and knock you back, with the real danger coming when it knocks you into the lava that surrounds the arena. Others may attack in a fixed pattern that you need to avoid while dealing as much damage as you can. After you unlock your dragon companion that follows you around green circles will spawn throughout the map allowing you to regenerate your life and stamina, so most of the fights become a matter of avoiding the bad circles while standing in the good ones.
There are a lot of different weapons that you can unlock and an entire magic system that I have spent zero time exploring. Staves and Wands allow you to cast spells, Bows allow you to fire off arrow volleys, and all of the martial weapons have some form of bit sweep attack that takes out multiple things at once. I’ve lately been using the two-handed maul quite a bit and I’ve managed to get a unique version of that weapon with a bunch of stats and abilities associated with it. The game pretty much has every mechanic that you would expect from an ARPG, for example I have been trying to focus on LIfe Steal so that I can regen some health while dealing damage and increasing my chance of survival when surrounded.
Using a specific weapon type will begin to unlock various traits. The first few will be active abilities tied to either your Q or R button and then after that they are passive bonuses that increase your effectiveness in combat. This feels a little odd at first because when you swap weapons you will go back down to only having the default attack tied to your Left Mouse Click. However, it does not seem to take very long before you open up the first few abilities and can start taking out large groups of enemies at a time.
There are magic items that you can equip in totem slots that will cause your attacks to spawn specific behaviors. For example, I have an item that causes a rain of meteors that will deal damage to everything around me. I have another item that causes totems to spawn around me that explode whenever I or the enemies walk over them. These magic items honestly deal most of the damage during combat allowing me to sort of kite the enemies around until I have a giant pack and then explode them all at once.
As you level up you get skill points to improve your base stats and talent points to spend on a skill tree. I’ve been working on buffing my survival, damage output, and have decided to pour a bunch of my resources into fire damage to buff my magic items of choice. I figured it was probably beneficial to limit my scope to a single element, but this does mean I am passing up some seemingly powerful items that might cast lightning bolts or something like that instead. For such a simple game… it really does seem to have a lot of interesting nuances. It is nothing like a Last Epoch or Path of Exile, but still allows you some leverage in how you want to build your character.
When you first launch the game you are greeted with this screen that is a note from the developers. It is very important to keep this in mind as you play the game because it is pretty janky at times. However that said I have had a heck of a lot of fun making things explode and I think if you limit your expectations you will as well. I’ve played a lot of $100 games that were nowhere near as much fun as this simple $5 one, so if anything I have said interests you in the least… throw them a few bucks and check it out for yourself.
There is a hardcore mode that might interest those who are into such things. I am largely a “softcore” player, but given how easy it is to get started and how random the items you end up getting are… I could see hardcore being enjoyable. There are leaderboards that track progress, but honestly… I am never likely to mainline this game hard enough to get on them. I am impressed though at how generally fleshed out the game is for this early in development. The initial release date was December of 2022 and it already feels like it is a fairly substantial game. Legitimately I am not sure I can describe it any better than I did at the start of this post. Dwarven Realms is Big Dumb Fun.
The post Dwarven Realms Alpha Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we talk about a bunch of things that have been sitting in our list as well as a quick revisit of Anthem and how much difference a week can make. We all for the most part struggled last weekend but things have gone extremely smoothly this weekend. From there we talk about the revelations from Fanfest Paris… and the new Gunbreaker class giving us Gunblade Tanks! We talk a bit about the various titles coming out for the Switch in the near future and close up with a postmortem of Octopath Traveller.
Featuring: Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Tonight we talk about our April AggroChat Game Club Game… Moon Hunters. This was an Ashgar pick, and bills itself as a Co-Op Personality Test. We talk about whether or not this title actually is fitting as well as our experiences playing a game designed to be replayed over and over. We discuss the storytelling, artwork and music of the game and our general thoughts and feelings about the experience. Additionally we announce the May AggroChat Game Club Game that is definitely going to provide some interesting discussion.
