Good morning folks. The last few days have been pretty hard to get through, and as such I have not blogged. I am still here and I am still okay-ish. I figured we could all use something cute, so I am starting off this post with my snuggling goobers. I’ve spent most of my time downstairs with my kiddos the last two evenings and it is not uncommon for them to arrange themselves in this pattern with Josie snuggled up against my arm and Gracie laying between my arm and over onto my chest. I always feel bad that I end up with two cats where my wife often has zero… but occasionally Mollie will get brave and go snuggle with her… which never lasts terribly long because Mollie is insane. I’ve said a few things on social media, but basically, my faith in humanity right now is non-existent and I am just trying to truck along.
One of the things that has swept through my friend group is Pokemon TCG Pocket, so I have been playing around a bit with that. Effectively this is the Hearthstoneification of Pokemon just like MTG Arena was mostly that for Magic the Gathering. Quite honestly though I feel like this is a more effective port to mobile because it fixes one of the problems that Magic and Pokemon both have. I’ve always hated how Land and Energy cards work mechanically, and I greatly preferred the Hearthstone mechanic of just getting one mana/energy per turn to use as you choose. I feel like Magic would be far better served by having a spells deck and a land deck, and you drew one card from each every turn. Anyway, the thing with Pokemon is that I largely missed out on it. I played a bit of the early WOTC days of it before the fad really hit, and have maybe 1000 cards or so lying around somewhere from those first four sets.
Pokemon was something that my Nieces and Nephews grew up playing, and less so something that I actually experienced myself. I played through Blue on a Gameboy Emulator in 1999 but had not touched another Pokemon anything until the release of X and Y. To this day I have still only ever beaten Blue, because I seem to care more about the acquisition of Pokemon than I actually do the battling system. Right now with Pokemon TCG Pocket for Android and Apple, I mostly seem to care about opening my daily packs. I have however played through enough battles to understand the flow of the game. I’ve made a few custom decks that perform well against the basic AI, but largely get ripped to shreds when I fight human opponents. Building a deck with only twenty cards is a bit odd mechanically, and I feel like I am missing a lot of cards that would allow me to bump things up a notch.
If you are playing around with this as well, you should absolutely friend me. I legitimately don’t fully understand what the benefits are other than you get some sort of currency when you interact with your friend’s stuff. At some point, the game is going to be adding trading support, so I think this will be much more interesting when that happens. For example, I have pulled four Charizard EX cards and I do not need them all. I would rather have Venasaur Ex as I am on the Bulbasaur team all day long. Pulling packs is a bit odd because each of the different package designs has a slightly different distribution of cards so it legitimately matters if you choose the Mewtwo, Charizard, or Pikachu design based on what you are trying to get. I spent a lot of time pulling for Grass Pokemon in the Mewtwo design, and have shifted to trying to get some Electric types out of the Pikachu packs.
Recently I was up at my folk’s house and they had unearthed these two M.U.S.C.L.E figures from the 80s. I am hoping that given time, they might uncover the rest of them because I freaking loved these things. “The Claw” as we referred to it was easily the most sought-after one in my childhood circles, and I am pretty sure there was another one that we referred to as “Human Hand” that was essentially just that. I also remember the Chibi ones being super popular, but mostly I would just love to see them all again. There are so many random artifacts of my childhood that remained in my bedroom… but my folks then mostly piled a bunch of other crap in there. They only had to start removing stuff because the floor literally started collapsing due to water damage. So I have no clue what was lost and what still remains unscathed. I’ve seen my long box of comics, and it seems to largely be intact.
I know I shared this on social media, but I am not sure I ever posted it on the blog. Another thing that I reclaimed was these skate decks. There is one missing from the bunch that I had, but I have no clue what happened to it. It used to be in the back of my Honda Civic, so at some point, someone might have relieved me of it. I would love to have a pristine copy of that Jason Jesse Neptune deck, but they are a bit too rich for my tastes as the re-released copy from a few years ago is rather expensive. It currently goes on eBay for around $700, which seems silly for something I am just going to hang on the wall. Instead, I am going to hang my extremely battered original deck somewhere in my office at some point.
Anyways… I figured two days off was way too long without some sort of a blog post. Not that I had a ton of things to say this morning, but I needed to get back into the rhythm of actually posting things.
The post Too Many Charizards appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! Welcome back to the second part of our yearly “Games of the Year Show”. I have to admit I greatly enjoy this process and probably this year more than many in the past. We had a wildly diverse set of games that the seven of us collectively chose this year. Over the course of these two shows, we talk about twenty-six different games. Often times there are a few big games that most of us played and put on our list, but this year we all had a pretty wild variety of choices.
I also feel like we have set a standard going forward, that we no longer will we do this nonsense where we record for four or five hours and then split it in half. Recording two normal shows seemed to feel much better and produce a better discussion. Hopefully, our listeners will agree. In this show, we tackle the second half of the list and burn through fourteen more games.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Kodra, and Tamrielo
Hey Folks! We have a bit of a short show, maybe the shortest we have recorded in a long time. We start off with our recurring topic of Elon Musk and the Corporate Collapse Speedrun of Twitter. From there we dive into some preliminary discussion of Pokemon Scarlet and Violet. Last week during the show Kodra and Ash spent the entire time playing with a Hollow Knight Randomizer and we talk a bit about that process. From there we dive into the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo of 2952 in Star Citizen. Tam shares a few hardware topics about his new Flight Stick setup and migrating over to an Ultrawide display. Finally, Bel talks a little bit about his adventures in New World and hitting 200 in Armorsmithing.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
This evening we record an entire show where we basically talk about three games. The first of these is Ooblets which came out this week in early access and how it is a blending of Animal Crossing, Stardew Valley, Pokemon and a Card Battler. From there we talk about Ghosts of Tsushima and how it presents Samurai gameplay in a new high fidelity light. Additionally we talk a bit about Kurosawa mode which offers you a unique black and white/film grain way of playing the game. Finally Bel talks about his adventures being a post apocalyptic fedex driver in a world seemingly run on twitter likes… aka Death Stranding. He talks a bit about the odd social aspect of the game where other players can only have a possible positive impact without ever causing any negatives.
