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Week in Gaming 1/17/2016

January 17, 2016 by Belghast

It has been awhile since I have done one of these, and of the various failed columns that I have tried over the years…. I think this one is the best for me personally. Sunday is a rough day in general, in part because I wake up and have to finish up AggroChat and get it out to the various locations. As a result it helps to have a fairly formulaic option I can lean on when I am not feeling super inspired. As a result I am leaning once again on the Week in Gaming series just to talk about a bunch of stuff I played this week.

Pax South Hype!

I am starting to get super excited for Pax South. Last year I had various companies ask me for a business card, and I was somewhat kicking myself for not having any. I mean I guess part of me never really thought that having a business card for a blog and podcast was a good idea. This year however I have gotten my ass in order and if everything works as intended the cards will arrive at the beginning of next week. I only ordered 250 because I could not in any circumstance think of a reason why I would need that many. The design was done by Rae and was originally intended to be our Pax Prime cards, but since we were denied media access to that convention they never actually got made. I resurrected the idea because I thought it was pretty slick. In the original design each of the hosts has their own color, and given that I love green I latched onto that one. As far as a back design I went with something simple because I felt like it needed something on the back…. and in truth that is the crux of our thing… daily posts, weekly cast. If you are also going to be at Pax South let me know, I would love to meet up with everyone that I can while I am there.

Undertale

I have some mixed feelings about Undertale so far. On one level I really like the game and it feels like something that is going to be an interesting experience. The negative is I absolutely HATE the combat system. I hate mini-games, and while I was corrected last night on the podcast…. I am sorry but that isn’t a real combat system. Part of me just wants to run away from every single fight so that I don’t have to do it. I mean granted I was using arrow keys and maybe that makes it worse than it actually is, but I just hate the concept of breaking out of an otherwise fun old school RPG style game…. and having to deal with move the heart to avoid shit. For now I have essentially abandoned the game, in the hopes that some distance will in fact make the heart grow fond. Essentially I love everything else about the game… other than the combat system. This might be one of those games that is more enjoyable to watch.

Victor Vran

I’ve already talked about this game quite a bit throughout the week but I feel like it still deserves additional mention. The only negative about this game is that I started playing it essentially the week before a bunch of other things that I wanted to play happened. My hope is that once the recent infatuation with Warframe and Diablo 3 Season 5 have calmed down, I can return to this and play my way through the main story some more. I really want to see what multiplayer feels like in the end game experience. Playing it was fine for me… but essentially locked the other players that I was dragging along with me… out of some of the experience of interacting with the voice floating around in your head. If you are not partaking of the Diablo 3 Season 5 madness…. and still want a ARPG fix… I highly suggest you check it out.

Warframe

This game…. is so good and I am kinda kicking myself for never really giving it a proper attempt at playing. I have downloaded this game numerous times in the past on the PC, PS3 and PS4 when I saw other folks in my various social media timelines talking about it… but never actually tried it. I guess in my head I had this absolutely misrepresented as to what sort of game it was. With a super generic name like Warframe… I kept getting it jumbled up with the other game Warface. Warface being a super generic Call of Duty/Counterstrike style PVP shooter. So in my head I equated Warframe to a PVP experience… not this deeply nuanced cooperative PVE experience. There are so many aspects of this game that remind me of an MMO, but not necessarily in the traditional sense. The game as a whole feels like this amalgam of Destiny, Phantasy Star Online and Tribes. If that combination sounds like something you would be interesting, I highly suggest you check it out. I think I was largely luckier than most in that one of the freebie mechs, the Excalibur is right down my alley. I am slashing everything with my space ninja ways, and really enjoying myself. For those curious, I have pretty much set down roots on the PC, and while I might give it a shot later on the PS4, I have no real intention of moving at the moment as the AggroChat crew seem to all be playing it.

Diablo 3

The floodgates for Diablo 3 Season 5 opened on Friday at 7pm and from that point until 10:30 or so my time I was running around in a group leveling like mad. At this point I have managed to get to 68, which puts me behind the curve of folks like Grace that are 70 with over 150 paragon levels. That however is fine by me, because I am just happy I am almost to the cap with at least one character. I am going to be interested in seeing what the various challenges are that unlock the various seasonal rewards. What makes the season play so addictive to me is the fact that it mimics a MMO launch. Everyone on your friends list for a period of time is playing Diablo 3 and excited about it, as though they were playing a brand new game. So you have a few weeks of focused play, and then don’t feel guilty at all when you shift back to playing other games until the launch of the next season. This focused excitement is really fun to experience, and this is technically my third season so far. There is part of me that wishes I had gotten on board with the concept earlier. My goal today is to finish up my Crusader and then probably focus on some more Warframe. Hopefully all of you readers out there have had an equally fun week, and Pax South seriously could not get here soon enough.

Pumpkin King

January 13, 2016 by Belghast

The Hammer

All day long yesterday I had been craving some more Victor Vran, so when I got home last night… I fed the animals… fed myself… and plunked down on the couch to play some more. Firstly I have to say how nice it runs on my aging gaming laptop. For many games that I would want to play downstairs… like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4… they simply do not run well on the dual 650 video cards that the laptop has in it. This game however looks gorgeous and runs at a solid 60 fps, which makes me happy. Granted graphically it is a much more simple game than the ones I rattled off, but nonetheless it makes me happy. While roaming around last night I found this crazy boss fight, that spawned after taking down several other bosses in an area. Upon defeating the specter it announced that if I would only spare him… I could have access to his truly rare wares. When I opened up the vendor window I saw my very first purple weapon…. the Pumpkin Hammer. So I proceeded to liquidate everything in my inventory except my handful of favorite weapons… and was barely able to afford it.

It is every bit as cool as you might imagine. Firstly you are running around with a giant jack-o-lantern on a stick which in itself has a cool factor. To add to the effect however, when you hit anything… it spawns a pumpkin bomb on the ground… which moments later then explodes taking out more stuff. The only negative here is it actually cost me an objective last night. The objective was to take out a handful of monsters with the hammer… problem being that in one case at least the pumpkin bomb went off and finished off the monster and as a result it did not count. So that is something to watch, but what I like about it is the fact that the attack animation seems much faster than the standard hammer. It hits for slightly less than my previous hammer, but since I am able to hit more often it balances out in the end. Other than the hammer the ghost sold a few spells, that also looked pretty great… but after bankrupting myself I could not afford anything else. From the sound of the message it seems like the creature appears at random in various levels, so hopefully I can build back up my gold reserves by the time I see him again.

Guyver Time

Warframe and I have this strange relationship… where I have downloaded it for PC, PS3 and PS4… but never actually played it. I’ve seen friends on my various social media timelines playing it for ages, and been intrigued. The problem being that I apparently had the wrong impression of what sort of game it actually was. In my head I had this filed away as some sort of PVP experience, when in truth it is largely a PVE team based experience. Over the weekend Ashgar and Tamrielo discovered the game, and Monday night I was going to join them. Unfortunately there were some complications…. namely that for whatever reason my ISP could not connect to Warframe.com or any of the game servers for a period of time. As a result I instead spent the entire night playing Victor Vran and had a blast doing so. Since I spent the evening on the sofa, it meant that I needed to download the client again, and about half way through the evening I switched games.

So far I have to say I am pretty impressed. I am only running the game at 720p because I didn’t want to have any possible frame rate issues on the laptop, however the game itself looks gorgeous. In many way its missions remind me of the missions from Mass Effect 2 and 3. The most fun I had was this mission we did as a group where we entered a ship, triggered an alarm and then tried to hold out as long as we could. We managed to make it up until the point that the ship started spawning in waves of level 5 mobs… at which point we retreated to the extraction zone and held that tunnel for as long as we could before making a break for it. Towards the end these firebombing mobs started coming in and we damned near lost Ashgar. I myself came precariously close to dying a few times, only to get revived in a similar fashion to how you can players in Destiny. All in all it was a really good experience, and I think honestly the Excaliber warframe suits me pretty well. I like the blade, and for my main weapon I ended up choosing a bow. Later I spent a little money on the game and got some upgrades and now my secondary weapon is a heavy double firing pistol called the Kraken. I also spent some time making the suit look more “me”. Look forward to playing more over the coming weeks.

Cats and Wolves

January 8, 2016 by Belghast

Cattes a Plenty

At some point last year, lots of folks in my feed showed up with this Japanese app on their phones called Neko Atsume. From what I can tell it roughly translates to Cat Collector, and it is one of those passive things that I tend to refer as a “maintenance game”. The thing is…. I like cats. In fact as I write this post I have one on either end of my desk sleeping on their blankets. I for the most part avoided the game until recently when for some strange reason I decided to give it an install. Firstly I’ve talked about my problems with mobile gaming in general. I tend to install a game, play it a few times… and then never touch it again. Largely my life is not exactly mobile friendly, and if I have access to games…. I am generally at home when I can use a more traditional gaming system. This game however… fits that realm of do something… leave it sit for awhile… check back in on progress for a minute or two. I’ve found myself popping it open while waiting on a meeting to start, and the jolt of happy kittehs doing stuff seems to help my mental state.

The concept is really simple. You purchase cat toys, place them in your virtual yard… and the neighborhood cats will come visit you and leave you gifts if they enjoyed themselves. The gifts come in the form of silver or gold fish… with the later also serving as the cash shop currency of the game. As far as advancement… I have zero clue how that works. I know I have seen screenshots of folks with much bigger yards, but I have no idea how that actually occurs yet. The starter yard has a fixed number of mount points for items, and at any point you can pick the items up and replace them with other items from your inventory. I have a pretty simple yard right now, but it seems to draw cats in pretty well. You can play the game completely free and there is a conversion between silver fish and gold fish… but it is pretty painful. You can get 10 Gold fish for every 250 Silver fish, which is doable because over the course of a few days I have earned over 250. Right now it gives me tiny doses of happy especially when I pop over and my yard is completely full of cats doing adorable things. I fully expect that within two weeks time I will have abandoned this mobile game just like I have abandoned so many others.

Slowly Leveling

The other big project I have had over the last several days is working my way through the content in Destiny on my Xbox 360. This has been a somewhat crazy side mission, and I have to say… it has been interesting leveling from scratch for a second time. There were a lot of things I struggled with in Destiny playing through it that very first time, and for the most part none of them are big deals this time. I guess all of the time I have played on the Playstation 4 really has made me significantly better at the game, because swapping consoles has been a non-issue. Sure the 360 controller feels a little strange, but I seem to be able to switch hit between it and the dualshock without much problem. Admittedly I find the dualshock 4 significantly more comfortable, and if there was a way to make it work on the 360 I totally would. I guess you might ask yourself why exactly am I leveling on a last generation console… well I still have friends playing it. I have been really damned impressed at just how well the game plays. I mean admittedly it feels like someone smeared vasoline on the screen because everything feels a little fuzzy… given the lower resolution and with it lower texture detail. However the moment to moment game play is exactly the same… and the weapons and movement all feels just as responsive. I am sure at some point I will pick up an Xbox One, and at that point… in theory my 360 characters get to transfer over so any work I am doing now I can carry forward into the next system.

There are so many lessons that I have learned from playing through the first time. This time around for example I am stockpiling every single blue engram drop that I happen to get. The idea is that if I can wait to open any of them until level 40, I will be able to push up my light level quickly and get to a viable position to start doing content. I am investing a lot of time right now in this platform, but the hope is that eventually it will be the sort of thing I only play when I have people to play with. I still greatly prefer the Playstation 4 version, and those are the characters that I really care about. In theory I could have spent my level 25 boost on my Titan and probably would have been done by now, but there is something fun about doing this legitimately again. At this point I have beaten the main storyline of the original game, and darkness below. I am also a fairly significant way through the House of Wolves storyline, but it was getting late last night and I did not really want to deal with the Vault of Glass mission, so that is where I will pick up next time I play. I’ve reached level 25, which concerns me a bit… given that I have quite a bit to go before I can function very efficiently in the Taken King content. I mean in theory I could already be doing that… but sub 35 some of those later missions are a pain in the ass. Generally speaking on Destiny alts I push all the way to 40 before even really starting Taken King, so that I can burn through it easily. Given I need leveling fuel… I will more than likely start Taken King as soon as I finish up with House of Wolves. I guess I could do some Strike grinding, but I really really hate the Omnighoul strike, and that seems to be all I ever get in the level 20 range.

The Pathfinder

January 2, 2016 by Belghast

Flying Again

Not being able to fly in Draenor has been an interesting experience, and mostly one that I did not fully realize what I was missing until recently. I had got so used to NOT flying… that it always felt strange when I entered the old would and could suddenly take to the skies again. I would lift off the ground in Stormwind or Ironforge and have this momentary pause where I couldn’t quite remember what I was supposed to do now that I was up above the world. I can’t say I gnashed me teeth wanting flight, in fact I think it was probably a much more enjoyable experience for me because I was forced to be on the ground. I made me actually learn the lay of the land in these zones, and it also got me using the flight point system again. However over the last few weeks I have been working on the final requirements for Draenor Pathfinder, and being shuttled around by one of my friends on her rocket makes me realize just how much easier everything is with flight. Why clear your way through a camp when you can just drop down on top of your objective? But it also has made me realize exactly why they disabled in the first place. Flight is overpowered when it comes to questing, and there is nothing more frustrating than working your way to a treasure chest in Tanaan only to have someone swoop in from above to snatch it from you before you can get to it. When I was wrapping up the last bits of faction yesterday I had this happen three times in the course of a ten minute period.

I honestly don’t so much care about flight for my max level characters, but instead for my characters that I have yet to level further. This means that I can pretty much chain quest my way to 100 by doing ONLY the objectives, and while this means I will be skipping a bunch of content… it is also content I have seen several times. The biggest boon to me is that it will make collecting treasures so much easier, especially the ones that involve a jumping puzzle. The negative is… that I will no longer be cycling through my collection of ground mounts, but in the grand scheme I think I will live. I realize this is months late, but it is still exciting to me to be able to return to the skies. While Draenor Pathfinder was kind of a pain in the ass…. I got lucky and managed to get several medallions from the current Christmas event that helped me leapfrog 1000 faction at a time. The problem is…. now that I am done with this achievement I am not really sure what to do with myself. I could either start pushing the rest of my alliance characters from 90ish to 100…. or I could return to working on my Orc Warlock to hopefully have a second 100 to play with Horde side. In any case… I topped a big goal off of my list and am pretty happy.

Last Gen Destiny

Over the week I have had a friend of mine talking about picking up Destiny now that he realized you could get it for the Xbox 360. I myself have considered picking it up on that console for awhile, especially since I feel bad that my 360 doesn’t see much love. I had been trying to use PSTV to play PS4 downstairs where we have the exercise bike set up, and the lag is just enough that it makes Destiny largely unplayable for me. The answer on all of the forums seems to be to hard wire your PSTV into your network…. but I don’t have the ability to have Ethernet downstairs, and I question how well powerline adapters would work in my house. Which moves me to potentially relocating my Xbox 360 to downstairs and playing some Destiny on it. I ended up picking it up and I have to say… I am pretty impressed. The game for the most part “feels” the same… just at a much lower resolution. To some extent playing on the 360 feels like you are squinting while playing it on the PS4. Everything is just slightly lower resolution, which would make sense considering that Destiny runs at 1080p 30fps on the PlayStation 4 and it runs 720p 30fps on the Xbox 360. The difference is noticeable when you are standing still but for the most part in the heat of the battle I don’t really notice it that much.

The only negative of playing on the Xbox 360 however is that I am starting completely over. I’ve read that apparently you can log your characters in on either Xbox 360 or Xbox One… and the same goes for PS4 and PS3. So if I ever get a Xbox One at some point all of the effort I have done on the 360 will port over. Interestingly enough though that means that I guess I could have picked up a copy for the PS3 and played my existing PS4 characters on it. That said… I have heard some really bad issues with Destiny on the PS3. Everything I had read about the 360 made it sound like it was just a downgraded resolution… but I’ve heard the PS3 version is only running at a strange 624p and also has some framerate dip issues. Mostly I am still amazed at just how well it runs on last generation hardware, and while I won’t have that constant desire to take screenshots because the game is so damned pretty…. it will give me something interesting to do while riding the exercise bike. I have a woefully small number of people on my XBox Live account so feel free to add BelghastStern, and especially if you play Destiny on the 360 please let me know!