Good Morning Folks. Starting this morning’s post off with a picture of Gracie being super snuggly. It was a good weekend, but a busy weekend. I spent a lot of time working in the garage and set up the first of the storage shelves, and then cleared the room for the next one… which I will hopefully work on today. Essentially I am trying to get all of my wife’s stuff that I just piled in the center of the garage, up on shelves… and get a bunch of stuff that I will never use that has been in the garage for eons, out into a pile to have hauled off. The thing that is fighting against me, is the fact that we are still having 90+ degree days and the garage is a sauna, so I am trying to limit my time out there to hour long bursts of activity. I just noticed I am covered in bruises from wrestling with items that I probably had help putting out there the last time they were moved. I made it work through and got them into the growing pile in my backyard. There is a service we have used before that will haul it off so long as I pile it up for them relatively neatly.
The big move of the weekend however, was setting up a new television… that again was probably too large for me to be handling by myself. One of the last things that we did together was put together this new entertainment center over my birthday weekend back in June. Last week I added to that a riser, that would allow me to put the cable box, and ultimately my Switch 2 and PlayStation 5 under the TV. The entire reason why we swapped out our entertainment center was to eventually upgrade from our 43 inch television to something larger, and I had been shopping off and on for awhile. The problem is… I did not want to ship a television. There is just too much shit that can go wrong in transit, which meant more or less that I was limited to Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, or CostCo for which my membership had lapsed. I was specifically looking for a 120hz 4k 65 inch television… preferably one with Google operating system rather than Amazon Fire. Most of the ones that I had seen were in the $800 range, but I found one on CostCo that was a 4k 144hz panel that also came with a 5 year warranty thrown in… so I renewed my membership and snapped that puppy up.
So as such I spent a good chunk of the weekend enjoying the new larger television. I watched a few movies on Friday and Saturday, and then got reacquainted with both the PlayStation 5 and the Nintendo Switch 2. I bounced around a lot on the PS5, but on Sunday night I settled in for some long sessions of Super Mario Wonder and the upscaled version of Bravely Default. I actually got into the last one quite a bit, and stayed up later than I had intended. When I finally made it to bed… Mollie was rather cross with me for not arriving in the bedroom at the correct time and screamed at me for awhile as she demanded attention. I figured it is just me now… I might as well enjoy my life in whatever ways I can, and upgrading the TV was one of those simple ways to get some more quality of life easily. It was also one of the projects we had on our radar, and it felt like actually accomplishing something that my wife and I had already planned. There are a few more of those projects that I eventually want to take care of… but they will require significantly more than $400.
Over in Diablo IV, I landed on a set of Chaos armor that actually works well enough for my build. Vasily’s Prayer is pretty much a requirement for making the build feel good, and I had picked up Chaos version of it on both the gloves and chest. I figured it would be easier to swap out the gloves and then find some other item that can replace Rampaging Werebeast. For now I am running Fleshrender and it seems to be working pretty well, because it makes it so Debilitating Roar deals damage to poisoned enemies… and my Pulverize is always poisoning enemies. So every time I roar I am not just getting a survival boost, I am also doing over 4 million AOE damage to everyone that has already been poisoned by my Pulverize puddles. Now I just need to do massive amounts of farming to knock out the remaining achievements in the seasons journey.
Over in Destiny Rising, I finally bucked up and knocked out several seven minute legendary quests so that I could bump up my ascension level. Essentially I got Silver Medals on Jolder, Estela, and Umeko and now I am stalled out again at 19 Ascension until I get a Gold Medal. For the moment I am closest to getting there on Jolder, but the thing that is going to hold me back the longest is getting my light level up past 65000. I need to run another Legendary mission on Jolder where I take zero deaths… and in truth my previous 7 minute run was deathless… but it did not count because I did not have the quest yet. Other than that I need to upgrade the exotic sword and then swap her artifacts to all exotics, and my weapon mods to all exotics… and I THINK that might get me over the light hurdle. Having long grinds though is perfectly fine, and it is going to take a bit longer because I was later starting the game.
Ace and I got together Sunday afternoon and did some more all Ikora nonsense again. We are still seeking the Trikora as Ammo called it during the podcast, but we did have a really successful run. Largely we just followed around the Umeko that we were grouped with and provided supporting fire. Ikora is actually somewhat powerful if you happen to catch players unaware while you still have your abilities active. When her abilities are down though… you just do not have the tools to close the deal. We are past the halfway point in this nonsense though and we just need to do four more rounds in order to knock out her lore item. We also ran a Gauntlet Blitz as Ikora and that was honestly better than I expected it to be. On top of that I introduced Ace to the frustration that is the raid, and we managed to get through that twice. However we did have one run where people who had no clue what they were doing kept grabbing the keys and then sitting on them, so they also know the frustration of when things go south.
I had enough resources to craft an exotic engram and I pulled Polaris Lance, which is a pretty solid scout rifle that I might work on upgrading for Tan-2/Umeko. I am not sure if this is the play over an Exotic Sniper or not, but I remember liking the weapon in Destiny, so hopefully it is also a solid bet here too. The only problem is that Exotic weapons are so costly in resources to keep upgraded, and I just do not feel like I have the necessary resources to build out every single one of them, much like there are heroes that I am just going to completely ignore. I wish the higher you got up in Ascension, the more common some resources got. So that you could get Mythic resources for example much easier than you previously could… or some of the early Exotic resources. However anything yellow…. still maintains a lot of time gated grinding behind it.
I am hoping everything is setting up for a really good week. I know this week is also the start for Legion Remix, but I am not entirely certain how much I will be engaging with that. I am kinda digging playing some console games, so I might be doing more of that in the evenings. Hoping by this time next week… I have the garage more under control and have at least been able to schedule the folks to come pick up in the growing pile in the backyard.
The post Irrationally Large Box appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Hey Folks! Yesterday was a big Sony State of Play event revealing a good number of games to be released largely in the remainder of this year. It has been a while since I have done a post where I talk about a game presentation so I thought I would do so this morning and cover my personal highlights. There are some big-name games that I am not going to spend much time on. For example, a remake of Metal Gear Solid 3 was announced… and given that I hate stealth gameplay that series is very much “not for me”. Similarly, a new Assassin’s Creed game was announced that is supposedly a return to the stealthy gameplay form of the original games… but again… not my jam, and I preferred the more Witcher-3-inspired Open World gameplay.
You can watch the full presentation in the above link, without anyone annoyingly talking over it. Maybe this is just Old Man Bel talking here… but I detest the modern tradition of streamers milking these things for content and giving their moment-to-moment commentary. I’m largely frustrated by this because the Streamer SEO is way better than the official companies and it is much harder to find a “clean” stream link than any number of “talking head” ones. Right now Sony is winning the console power struggle… but that might change rapidly as folks shift to more and more cloud gaming options like Gamepass. At the moment… Sony is well behind the curve in their cloud gaming options and needs to rapidly catch up. However, the majority of the show really plays towards their strength of console domination.
Teardown
The show started off with a rather bland heist game called Fairgame$, but what caught my attention was a voxel destruction-based heist game that appeared not that far after it. I know nothing about Teardown but it looks outrageously fun. The idea of rampant voxel destruction combined with smash-and-grab gameplay looks like it would be a heck of a lot of fun to play. One of the games that I remember the most fondly was Midtown Madness 2, and the “capture the gold” gameplay mode where you had to pick up the loot and make it back to your base before someone crashes into you and steals it back. Teardown looks like it might be a similar style of multiplayer gameplay. I’m on board with this particular brand of nonsense.
Tower of Fantasy
I am calling this one out only because I think it is probably good for the longevity of Tower of Fantasy as a whole. I’ve written at length on this blog about how much I enjoyed my time spent playing TOF. It is my hope that I will be able to link my existing PC account to my PS5… which is not a thing I can do with Genshin Impact given that I played it exactly ONCE on the console and as a result cannot undo the fact I have a different account on the console. I personally liked TOF much better than Genshin Impact, and the pull rates and freebie currency were much more beneficial to the players than a Hoyoverse game. If you’ve never played TOF then you might check it out when it launches here.
Granblue Fantasy Relink
I know next to nothing about the Granblue Fantasy universe because while I have downloaded it a few times… I’ve never really gotten into the mobile game. I am just not much of a mobile gamer at the end of the day. That said I think this game looks awesome and I am looking forward to its release. I greatly enjoy the Genshin-Impact-style action combat gameplay, and based on how many people are gaga for this setting… it would be an interesting way to learn about the world of Granblue Fantasy. That said… this game has been teased for years at this point so I have no real confidence that we will actually see it this year.
Dragon’s Dogma II
I feel like I largely missed the boat with Dragon’s Dogma as a franchise. I’ve attempted to play it a few times and largely enjoyed what I played of it. That said the general clunky nature of the original game… made it hard for me to attach. It is my hope that maybe Capcom has learned a thing or two about system design in the intervening years. However… I also played Monster Hunter World and we loved that game in spite of its completely scuffed UI and multiplayer settings. I am somewhat taking a wait-and-see approach for this one. I will have to see what else I am playing at the time to determine if I am going to give it much attention when it ultimately releases.
Spider-Man 2
Okay, this trailer looks really freaking cool, and I am excited to see Symbiote Peter Parker in action. That said I should probably actually play Spider-Man and Spider-Man Miles Morales before getting too excited about this one. I am not sure why but it has never really been the right time for me to dive into these games, and I should fix that. Essentially it feels like I have homework to do before I can look forward to this game. We will see if that actually happens before it launches. Still looks freaking cool and I dig the setup for Kraven. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out given they are blending a bunch of existing storylines.
Marathon
So this is the fastest I have gone from excited to uninterested in a long while. I am not and have never been an “Apple Guy” and as a result, Marathon is just a piece of gaming history that I have no real context for. I was absolutely a rabid ID Software fan and Bungie devouts have told me that Marathon was effectively “better than Doom in every way”. So when I saw that this funky trailer I was watching was for a reboot of that franchise… I was admittedly pretty pumped. Then those hopes were immediately dashed when I read some more information about the game and saw that it was a: “sci-fi PvP extraction shooter”. I am just completely uninterested in a PVP-only game full stop, no matter how cool the universe looks. After the recent Overwatch 2 debacle… I won’t hold out hope for a PVE version of the game either. I guess I will follow this one from afar.
Alan Wake II
This was one of my highlights of the show, seeing more footage of the continuation of the Alan Wake story. I’ve become a zealot of the “Remedyverse” and I am so on board with more of this game and more of the funky shared universe they have created across multiple titles. I did not love the flashlight gameplay of the first Alan Wake game, and I am happy to see folks roaming around with more “traditional” weapons in this game. I have so much hope for this title and I am ready to geek out about the deep lore of this series once again. I want even more entangling with Control which is my favorite of the games in this series. I would LOVE it if the agent we see in the trailer crosses paths with the Federal Bureau of Control or even Director Faden herself. So pumped folks!
Revenant Hill
This was the highlight of the show for me. I love beyond love A Night in the Woods, and this is from a studio created by the two remaining creators of that game. The cat that you see in the trailer has deep Mae vibes and there is absolutely a statue from NitW about 10 seconds in. I have no clue if this will actually connect up to that game, or if those are just easter eggs for the faithful… but whatever the case I am here for it. If you have not played A Night in the Woods, please stop whatever you are doing and proceed directly to whatever platform you probably already own it for thanks to copious giveaways. It was a relatively short game and honestly… I kinda hope this one is as well. In reading there are books that I consider a “comfy read” or a “light read” and NitW was sort of the gaming equivalent of that. I really need to mix in more games like that as palette cleansers between my bigger titles.
The Not-Vita-2
On an investor call on Tuesday, CEO Jim Ryan indicated that Sony was about to announce some aggressive plans for cloud gaming. When you combine this with the fact that in the show they announced Project Q a game streaming handheld… my guess is that Sony is about to make a bigger play for the Gamepass/XCloud market share. The biggest problem with that is that right now… their product offering is pretty lousy. I have access to the rebranded PlayStation Now which is now confusingly called PlayStation Plus… and it isn’t that great. The gameplay hitches constantly and there is zero support for auto-resuming your last progress like you can with XCloud. Fundamentally if Sony wants to make a play for this market they need to update their infrastructure and improve their overall product offering.
That is not to say that they can’t do precisely this… and honestly, I HOPE they do. What I want from Sony is the ability to stream every single game that I own on my account over a PC or Mobile device with full access to the latest save state for all of them. That said I likely won’t be buying this device that looks like Earl from R&D sawed a PS5 controller in half and J-B Welded it to an Android Tablet. A device like this needs to come in around $100 for it to really be successful, and knowing Sony we are probably looking at another $300 appendage to an already $500 console. Until then it will just be better to keep buying cheap Android devices for this purpose.
What were your favorites?
I am sure I missed some that were crowd favorites. Like I did not talk about the Destiny 2 expansion trailer that shows the return of Cayde-6. I am not entirely certain how I feel about that one. If they can bring back a character that they spent so much time killing off… maybe they can bring back all of that content that I paid for that is now cut from the game. I’m largely checked out of Destiny 2 so I didn’t spend much time on this one. What were some of the games that I did not talk about that excited you? Drop me a line below. I think for the most part it was a very strong showing for Sony, and with the news coming out that it is likely going to be three or more years before exclusives release on PC… I guess I will have to suck it up and learn to enjoy playing on a console with a controller so I can experience some of these games.
The post May 2023 Sony State of Play appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Tonight we talk about how constructed Kamigawa is a challenge and how effectively there are only so many viable decks that you can build. From there we talk about Vampire Saviors a game that Bel griefed Ashgar with and he has been playing at length. Grace discovers Chronicon, a game that we would consider the perfect diablo clone… if it had reasonable graphics. Finally we dive into a long discussion about our earlier feelings about Horizon Forbidden West, a game that has in large part consumed most of the cast since its release on Friday. There is a weird diatribe about dpads and the importance of a good one as well as a quick blurb about how Psychonauts does not maybe hold up as well from a representation of mental health aspect.
Featuring:Â Ammo, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo and Thalen
Tonight we are down an Ashgar but work our way through a series of topics from the list. First up Bel can in fact confirm that the PlayStation 5 exists and talks about his early experiences. From we talk a bit about Bugsnax and how it is this weird Muppet Pokemon game that also has deeply disturbing Bioshock style undertones going on. Tam talks a bit about puzzle shooter Superliminal and Kodra talks about What Remains of Edith Finch. We talk a bit about parkour ninja game Ghostrunner and Bel shares some of the recent changes to Destiny 2. Finally we wrap up with some extemporaneous viewing suggestions… Duck Tales, Animaniacs, Mandalorian and the Ashens series of movies.
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