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Seasons Change

August 24, 2015 by Belghast

Fear and a Little Loathing

Seasons Change — The Full cast of Walking Dead spin-off Fear the Walking Dead

I am a huge fan of The Walking Dead and have been watching the show since the first episode. Well technically that is a bit of a fib, I intended to watch the show… but ultimately bought the first season boxed set and used it as a way to leap frog me into caring about the show in season two. I struggle to get into shows if I do not watch a deluge of episodes, because it takes a good four or five before I start to care about the characters. Zombies have always been that one movie monster that freaked me out, in part because other than twitter I am really not that connected to the media. So a movie opening like Dawn of the Dead where the entire world falls to shit while a couple is having an unplugged “date night” ends up resonating with me. It has never been so much about the zombies, but more about the hopelessness of it all. One bite or scratch and it is just over… and there are so many more of them than there are of you. The Walking Dead started several months after the fall of society, so when AMC announced that there would be a show set in Los Angeles during the fall.. I was on board with it from the start. As the summer drug on I looked forward to the premiere which was set for last night August 23rd.

Now that I have watched the first show… I am decidedly “meh” about the show right now. I guess part of it is that society is falling apart far slower than I had expected it to. Usually in the zombie movie genre the world changes over night, and in this case the show takes place during several days and even at the very end…. the world has not fully woken up to the danger. I expect that in episode two there will be a lot more action as people scurry about and attempt to get someplace safe. Quite honestly I cannot think of a worse place to be than in Los Angeles. The interesting thing about this show is we the viewers… know more about their world than the characters on screen do which causes a strange frustration. You want to take them by the shoulders and shake them and make them realize that the shit is going to hit the fan soon and they need to get the hell out of town. The other strange thing that is going on is that as I am watching I am trying to figure out which character is going to die first. There have been enough people introduced at this point as to assure that at least one of them will not survive the initial fall. I am taking a wait and see attitude on whether or not the show is going to “feel” better.

One part that feels completely wrong however is the fact that there is no “Talking Dead” airing immediately after it. This has become part of the experience for me and my co-workers as we watch the show. It is like this grand after party where you watch other fans of the show hash out the details that were just seen. To be truthful the entire Walking Dead > Talking Dead > Walking Dead rebroadcast thing has become a Sunday ritual for me. I sit on the sofa with my laptop and periodically change the laundry while watching the first two shows, and then fold the laundry during the rebroadcast. So just having Fear the Walking Dead without the Nerdist and friends… left the whole experience feeling hollow. There was a Talking Dead show ahead of “Fear” but it was to show off previews of Season 6 starting in October. On that show he mentioned that there would be a special Talking Dead after the season finale, but I am really hoping that AMC fixes this for Season 2. There was a hashtag going around twitter last night saying as much, so hopefully someone is listening. Chris Hardwick is pivotal to my enjoyment of this series.

Seasons Change

Last night was also the end of Season 3 and I had wondered ahead of time how exactly the transition would work. Starting about thirty minutes before the end of the season we started getting warnings piped across the server, and the strange thing is that when the season actually finished it did not disconnect us from the server. Being curious however I ended my game and went to start a new one and got a message telling me that the season was over. I killed the Diablo 3 client and started it right back up, and immediately my new character was sitting in list of available normal characters. When I logged in I had a bunch of mail messages waiting for me, and in each one was an item that had been in the bank for seasonal characters. So I have to say the transition went extremely smoothly. I knew that I would not hit 70 before the season ended, but I did make it to around 35 before it finished. When season four starts I will absolutely make a brand new character, and it honestly may end up being another Crusader. Right now I am pretty fond of the gameplay, and it mixes some of the things that I loved about the Warrior and Monk together into a more enjoyable package.

Right now I am using a combination of Slash for my main attack which hits multiple targets in an arc in front of me, and Sweep Attack for my secondary which does pretty much the same thing… but just deals a hell of a lot more damage. My favorite ability however is Falling Sword which is an almost Dragoon like jump attack that crashes down on a target location dealing a radius of damage around where you landed. I love the versatility of this ability, that I can use it as a strong AOE attack or just a way to move around the battlefield quickly. It is great for chasing down runners like Treasure Goblins. My original plan was to rush through normal mode and then start cranking up the difficulty, but I only actually made it to act three before things went offline. While I might have had every intent to rush through the levels, I still found myself unable to skip up that option dungeon here or ignore that unexplored bit of map there. In hindsight I should have cranked up the difficulty from the start and just played like normal. I was under the impression that adventure mode did not actually work until you had unlocked all of the story content, but maybe I was wrong there. I’ve honestly not really spent much time exploring the Reaper of Souls features, because my friends and I had a few weeks where we played Diablo 3 hard and heavy… then never touched it again. For the time being I am still focusing on my Crusader because I am having a lot of fun playing it, and it fits my current gaming attention span.

Week in Gaming 8/23/2015

August 23, 2015 by Belghast

Stealing Ideas

This morning I am absolutely stealing an idea from Grace who happened to post something today called “What I’m Playing”. Sunday is traditionally a rough day for me as far as posting goes. One of two things has happened, either I have stayed up way late on Saturday night to finish editing and posting the AggroChat podcast, or I am rushing around Sunday morning to finish it. This ends up making the morning feel like a big hassle either way, as my body thinks I just went through this epic struggle to get our podcast posted. My brain is telling me… isn’t that enough? Do I really have to make a blog post too? At which point I tell my brain to shut the hell up and stop being so whiny, and btw give me a topic to write about while you are at it. So now I am latching onto this week in review post idea like a life raft and just going with that.

Final Fantasy XIV

A subtitle for this week could easily be called “failing to accomplish goals” because there is a lot of that going around. Monday night we made solid attempts on Ravana Extreme, and Wednesday we didn’t quite have the people to pull anything together. Other than that I have honestly been pretty scarce in game. I get like this after finishing a grind to accomplish one of my goals, and for awhile now I had been grinding in so many different ways to gear both the Warrior and the Dragoon. I had all intention of capping Esoterics this week, but as of last night I just have seventy five. I could spend my day grinding to play catch up… but I highly doubt that is going to happen. Hopefully we can return to our normally scheduled Final Fantasy XIV play schedule next week.

Wildstar

I am still very much playing Wildstar, but similarly to Final Fantasy XIV I didn’t really spend much time actually playing it this week. I made a minor dent on Whitevale on Tuesday, but I spent more time talking about Wildstar with friends this week than actually playing it. I am not really sure what was up this week but I was overly tired pretty much every day. We had one horrible night where the storms woke me up and I never could get back to sleep fully, and I think this lack of sleep pretty much pushed the rest of the week out of whack. Each night I felt like I lacked the mental fortitude to concentrate on an MMO, so ultimately just ended up playing something else. I want to continue my climb on the Warrior because I am finding the game more enjoyable than I did at launch, and am actually really looking forward to the free to play drop.

Dragon Age Inquisition

I spent an awful lot of time playing this game over the week, but my overarching goal was less about actually playing and more about figuring out how to play it from my laptop. I maybe obsess about stupid shit sometimes. As you can see from the screenshot I finally left the Hinterlands! I am actually enjoying the game quite a bit now, but for whatever reason I am not finding it nearly as “sticky” as the previous Dragon Age games. In Origin and even in 2 I had these moments where every fiber of my being just wanted to see what happened next. It was like turning the pages of a really good novel, and this game doesn’t have that same feel. It very much feels like I am playing levels in a video game and I find I care less about the story than I have in previous games. That is not to say the game is not enjoyable, because I am absolutely having fun… but it is just a different sort of fun.

Diablo III

I apparently worked the Hellgate London out of my system, but instead it has given me a desire to play Diablo III. For most of the week this has been my go to game, as it has just the right amount of friction for my mental state. I don’t have to think about it much, I can just push buttons and kill things… and that works. In the continued theme of setting myself up for failure, I apparently decided that creating a Season 3 character from scratch was apparently a brilliant idea. Now in order to get any of the Seasonal rewards I need to get a character to 70… before 5 pm PST tonight. This is not a thing that is going to happen since I am just now sitting at 27 as the above screenshot shows the ding. The positive is… I am actually really enjoying playing the Crusader. I figure when Season 4 starts I will make another seasonal character and see what I can make it to with a full three months or so of playtime available.

Hatoful Boyfriend

I curse everyone involved for introducing this game into my life. It is so damned crazy, but I can’t seem to stop myself from playing it. At this point I have now seen six different endings for the game. From what I can tell I have yet to actually scratch the surface, but at least I feel like i have a lot to talk about for the upcoming show. I imagine that I will play it some more and go for a few more endings. The ending that I have not seen is the supposed “bad ending”, which I guess means you have to play the game without much thought taking random birds to do things. At this point I have taken the approach of setting my sights on a specific bird during each play session. I have a few more left to do that with, so that is probably going to be my focus in the sessions between now and the aggrochat show.

Heavensward Mega Episode

For awhile now the AggroChat crew has deliberately put off talking about the events of Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward in an attempt to allow folks to catch up on the content. However this week the gloves are coming off and we are dipping into a full spoiler episode where we hash out the events that have occured since the 2.55 patch show. We trace the steps of our characters from setting foot into Ishgard to the final conflict of the expansion, with as much details as we can think about in between. This is a roughly two hour long show because of the truly large amount of content to go over. We considered chopping this into two halves, but figured we would release it uncut. We talk about our favorite characters, our most emotional moments and what we are looking forward to with future content patches.

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AggroChat #71 – Heavensward Mega Episode

May 21, 2019August 23, 2015 by AggroChat

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Remote Play Working

August 21, 2015 by Belghast

Remote Play Continued

I am not exactly sure why but I have been obsessing over the whole concept of using my laptop downstairs as a remote thin client for my gaming machine upstairs. My grand hope has always been to be able to devote time and resources to the gaming machine, and just use any laptop in the house to play games remotely. After last night I think maybe I have it working as intended. For the last several days I have been struggling with Splashtop Personal, and in spite of lots of folks reporting good results with it… I never could get anything even vaguely close to playable. Namely the biggest problem was mouse lag, and when you are playing games that require mouse movement… this is a huge problem. I spent time crawling the forums, looking for answers and after trying a series of supposed registry hack fixes… the best I could ever seem to get out of Splashtop was something in the neighborhood of 25 fps which a more common stable 20 fps. Yesterday I installed a brand new AC1200 wireless card in my laptop, so that should literally rule out ANY connectivity issues. I was seeing 650 Mbps stable wireless and did not see any significant improvement in performance as a result. Now on the other hand… web surfing and downloading anything is now absolutely amazing… so I don’t regret the $20 spent on the new usb 3.0 wireless dongle.

Now I said I thought I had solved it… but as to this point have talked nothing about the failures. What finally worked is Steam In Home Streaming… with some hackery. Steam Streaming has worked fine for steam games, but not every game that I want to play is on steam. The biggest elephant in the room is games on Origin, but I think I found a workaround for this one. If you add Dragon Age Inquisition to Steam and attempt to launch it directly, it will fail every single time. However the workaround seems to be that you add the Origin launcher to steam and then remotely launch it… and while that window is up you can launch the game you want to play. The caveat is that you have to completely exit Origin after every game play session or it won’t actually work. As a result Splashtop Personal is coming in handy anyway as a way of making sure I do not have Origin running before heading into game. The same thing seems to work with the Battle.net launcher, and the Final Fantasy XIV launcher. Having steam open those gives you access to the application that you are actually wanting to play over the remote session. As far as performance goes, there was some strangeness with audio that I ultimately solved by setting both the client and “server” machine to 2 channel 16 bit 48000 hz audio. After that I was able to play Dragon Age Inquisition remotely with the exact same frame rate I was seeing sitting at my machine upstairs. I am guessing the new wireless made all the difference in the world because I could feel zero lag input, and it made for a pretty amazing experience. As a final thought if you want to play a steam game that does not have a launcher of its own… I have heard having steam open notepad.exe works the same.

The Heavensward Episode

I just wanted to take a moment to talk about the upcoming episode of AggroChat that we will be recording Saturday night and releasing Sunday morning. After all of us had completed the 2.55 content, we recorded a full spoiler episode where we hashed out out ideas about what just happened and where the game would be heading. This week we plan on doing the same thing for the 3.0 story content to date as a preparation for whenever we receive 3.1. We had put off the show in an attempt to get as many people through the 3.0 story as possible, but at this point we figure the statute of limitations is officially up for these spoilers. I am mainly writing today because we are taking input from the community. There are several ways you can send us your ideas either through the aggrochat email or the aggrochat twitter account. Of if you feel more comfortable you can leave your thoughts below. Our goal is to talk through our own ideas and the ideas that we receive on air Saturday.

There is a lot of stuff that happened between 2.55 and 3.0 and some of it had some pretty major ramifications for the games story. I’ve been extremely careful not to spoil too many details even with the screenshots that I use. That said there are things I just need to talk about. There are characters that we lost along the way, and new characters that we gained… and it is going to be good to finally be able to openly talk about all of this. The final cinematic for 3.0 sets up a brand new villain that we will likely be facing, and I have so many ideas on what that one is going to mean. Also there are less spoiler theories as well like this being the expansion of multiple element primals. If you think of Ravana, he is very clearly a mixture of Fire and Earth. Bismarck similarly is a mixture of wind and water. Would that make the next primal a mixture of Lightning and Ice? I cannot think of any existing summons from other Final Fantasy games that really fits that theme, so I am guessing they would be crafting a brand new one just for FFXIV. That only covers three primals however and I fully expect that each patch will have its own new one. So are we going to start seeing new elements, or are they going to tie directly into the new primary enemy that I mentioned above. Essentially… we have stuff to talk about and would love to have your input.

Of Bird Boyfriends

The AggroChat game club game show is also quickly sneaking up on us, and I think of all of the hosts I am the only one who has yet to touch this months title. Grace picked Hatoful Boyfriend as the game of the month title, and I have to say at first I had a small bit of trepidation about this title. If you remember Kodra has gushed about this title numerous times and even streamed a bunch of his gameplay. I watched some of it… and it seemed like pure madness. At the core this is just not a me game, largely because there is not death and destruction. That said I am actually starting to look forward to finally giving this a try, because it DOES seem like pure madness. I could use a bit of surreal insanity in my life, and some of the possible endings sound so damned bizarre that I have to see them for myself. I’ve been largely putting off starting however because I thought it might be funny to stream my first moments in the game. As such I have been trying to find a time when my streaming would not be too much of a nuisance for my wife who is going through the normal “back to school” frustrations. It seems like tonight however might be an excellent time and right now I am planning on starting my stream at roughly 6 pm CST for anyone who wants to see me attempt to date some “birbs”. I plan on playing on voice activation so you can get all of my subtle responses and not just the ones that I want coming through over push to talk. I am not sure exactly what will happen, but I have a mixture of excitement and dread at the same time.