I’ve been playing an exceptional amount of Path of Exile since I last posted, but I am not going to talk about that this morning. Instead, I am going to talk about a few disconnected topics. As payment for passage, however, I am sharing a cute picture of Gracie conked out on a blanket laying on my desk. When we first got her she was hassled quite a bit by our eldest cat Mollie, and as a result, she would scream her head off any time she needed to go potty… and we would walk with her up to the litter box and guard her while she did her business. Thankfully we have moved past this and she comes and goes freely from the upstairs bathroom where the litterboxes are at. However, she has started screaming at us for different reasons.
For example Friday evening I was playing Path of Exile and my wife was exhausted, and as such went to bed early. Apparently, my wife and I going to bed at different times is a capital offense in Gracie-land. I had moved from upstairs on Teamspeak to downstairs chilling on my laptop, and it was not long before Gracie was running around screaming at me. At first, I thought she wanted attention and I tried to coax her into laying on my legs like all of our cats seem to enjoy doing. She was having none of this and continued to scream at me until I agreed to shut down my laptop and head to bed. Then when I got to bed… it wasn’t enough and she took to screaming at me until I finally laid down in the position she wanted me so that she could curl up in the hammock of blanket that forms between my legs.
Last night we had a repeat performance of this whole sequence, as my wife went to bed around 9 pm, and shortly thereafter Gracie was telling me how improper this all was. I held out until around 9:45 when I finally gave up and went to bed. At which point she seemed to be satisfied enough to let me choose my own position in the bed and not demand the leg hammock. However the moment I decided to put down my phone and actually go to sleep… she hopped over to my legs and started purring. This is essentially going to be our life now.
In other news, I watched She-Hulk last week and am looking forward to more episodes this week. We really are living in this golden age of comic book media. The thing is that not every show has to be the literal best thing ever because we get so many different snapshots of the same comic book world. That is not to say that I didn’t enjoy She-Hulk because I absolutely did, but more that the pressure that I am placing on each individual show is a bit lowered because we are getting so many of them. The CGI work was greatly improved from those early trailers that had a deep uncanny valley problem. I think the big thing I am looking forward to in shows like She-Hulk is a fleshing out of the world, and that not everything has to be building towards some major crisis. That is in part why I am looking forward to a lot of the Star Wars series as well because they are putting more content in the world and expanding it.
In other other news… for some reason, I have decided to start watching Bleach again. Well, I know the reason… and it is because the seventeenth season is about to be released after a massive gap. Why I am starting over from the beginning because I could not remember exactly where I left off in the story. To the best of my knowledge, it was somewhere during season 13 of 16… but it had been well over a decade since I last watched bleach and as a result, the rewatch is probably warranted. For those who are curious, the entire series run is now on Hulu of all places. Like so many fighting anime… it had become extremely formulaic in the late seasons but starting from scratch makes me remember why I loved this show so much in the first place.
I think part of why the first three seasons worked so well, is that there was a lot of “emotional payload”. There was this epic adventure that involved a suicide mission to save a friend, and because of this, it felt like there was so much more riding on the line than just fighting baddies. After the third season, it takes a turn into the formula of meeting a new super powerful enemy… that requires learning a new fighting technique in order to defeat. I am wondering how this is going to feel watching it play out in fast forward rather than waiting a week between the encounters. So far the pacing has seemed more enjoyable chain watching the show as opposed to constantly waiting for the next episode to land… and then having it be half retracing what happened the week before. The new show lands in October… but I have no clue if I will be able to watch all 200+ episodes of the series in order to be ready for it.
The post A Loud Cat appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
It is league start day! This will be the first time that I am actually planning on starting a Path of Exile league on time. I am pretty freaking hyped, and even more than that I am hyped that several of my friends from AggroChat are planning on joining in. This is also going to be the first time Grace and I attempt to do a league start as a potential surrogate for our Diablo 3 season start nonsense. For those interested in all things kick off in a little over 7 hours from the time of posting this or 3 pm CDT. I will not personally be starting at exactly that time, but likely a bit later when Grace and I can actually meet up at the same time.
Coming along with the league start are a few more Twitch drops. For an hour of watch time, you get the arcane footprints shown above, and for three hours of watch time, you get an arcane throne decoration for your hideout. Sadly none of these are anywhere near as cool as the wings that we got for the Lake of Kalandra reveal event, but I will of course be farming them nonetheless. More than likely I will be watching the Zizarin stream when the proceedings go live this afternoon. Of the Path of Exile personalities that I have encountered, I would say he and maybe Velyna are my favorites. Not that I really watch much twitch in the first place. I am way more of a YouTube/edited video sort of person.
I think the core problem with a league start is deciding what the heck to play. In Diablo 3 I could easily swap builds halfway through a season if I was not really feeling it. Honestly you never really start with your final build in a Diablo season, and that is just part of the experience. In Path, however, respeccing is deeply punitive so you essentially need to know where you are going from day one to make sure that every point spent in the passive tree is lining up with your end goal. Last go round I really fell in love with my Inquisitor and the “brand” style of gameplay, where you drop a spell and watch it spread damage over time debuff to everything around it. I was originally designing my character to go Righteous Fire, but mostly got stalled out playing Wintertide Brand. I contemplated trying to go “RF” again and actually committing to properly following the build guide but instead decided to go in another direction.
Since so much focus has been placed on lightning this season, I am going to dive into another Inquisitor brand build… but this time instead of Wintertide focus on Storm brand. I am not sure why but I actually enjoyed playing the old man… or at least enjoyed him more than the big dude in the diaper. The truth is I have enough cosmetics that whatever I end up playing is going to look almost nothing like the base class anyway. In theory with this build, I will be dual-wielding wands or scepters which is not exactly my favorite class fantasy but the gameplay of the brand was enjoyable. Running around dropping hatred on the ground the melts enemies felt fun.
Part of this process is going to rely on me running up a Ranger first and muling a few spells. For those not familiar with that terminology it means running a character to the point of reaching the first town and then either selecting a few spells from quest rewards or buying them from the vendor. Because each class starts on a different spot in the tree, they also have access to a different series of spells at the beginning of the game. There are many spells that may not open up for a specific class until you reach Act III and unlock the Library, so it is simply easier to start a throwaway character and take it up to the town. Depositing the spells into your stash will then make them available for your main character.
Rather than create a completely throwaway character though, I figure it is probably better to go ahead and have a spec in mind. Keeping with the seasonal theme of lightning in Lake of Kalandra, I figured I would at least set this character up to be a Lightning Strike Raider. This would give me a backup character if for some reason I do not love the Stormbrand gameplay. Essentially my plan is to get in when the league starts, create a ranger, and run then to the first town. Then if the servers are still functional, go ahead and create my Templar and run them to the first town as well. From there once Grace and I can manage to be on at the same time we can start the acts properly from that vantage point.
If you have ever contemplated playing Path of Exile or tried it in the past and bounced… you might check out the new getting started section on Maxroll.gg. The Maxroll team is largely known for their support of Diablo games but has decided to branch out into Path of Exile with this league. While none of the builds they decided to cover as league starters seemed interesting to me, I have read through some of their information on how to get started in the game and it is pretty excellent. I honestly wish I had a resource this clean and helpful when I was first trying to sort things out. Path of Exile can be very obtuse and almost prides itself on being that way, but once you get engaged the gameplay is exceptionally fun. This legitimately might be the best ARPG on the market and gets a ton of support from the developers… but there are so many systems to learn and the game mostly just dumps you off in the deep end.
If you are planning on starting this league, hit me up and make sure we are friends. You can find me on the BelghastStern account and as soon as the league starts it should show my league characters on the profile page. If everyone does start that had originally talked about it, we should have a dozen or so players running around in Wraeclast. My goal this season is to complete my atlas, with a stretch goal being to knock out all of the objectives to get the league cosmetics. However, I am also going to be okay if I just get to endgame successfully with this new build. It is going to be a bit of a juggling act to keep Path of Exile progressing while also trying to get some daily Tower of Fantasy in.
The post Lake of Kalandra Day appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
The internet can be a really weird place sometimes. This morning’s post is more or less me explaining a rabbit hole I have been going down over the last few days. So some background information… I often times listen to YouTube as though it were a podcast while I do work on the other monitor… and admittedly also spend a fair amount of time reading Twitter. On the second something about MGK aka Machinegun Kelly aka Colson Baker aka Megan Fox’s boyfriend… scrolled across my Twitter feed. Now I have listened to quite a bit of music from him because at face value his newer stuff sounds like a lot of the pop-punk music that I actually dig. However the longer I have listened to it the more it has bothered me… how it is essentially this inch-deep surface-level interpretation of the 90s pop punk and emo genres.
This led to me tweeting that it sounds like the music had been generated by an AI that was trained by feeding it essentially everything from the 90s and early Oughts and having it regurgitate a song. The lyrics are bad, the emotional content is shallow, and ultimately sounds like the most generic version of the music you have already heard before. It is a recreation of a genre without understanding any of the elements that led that genre to come into being in the first place. This is where things take an interesting turn. For years I’ve known that behind the scenes everything we are saying and doing is being linked to some algorithm designed to feed us more relevant content. I cannot count the number of times my wife and I have had a conversation inside our home… and then moments later we are getting fed advertisements related to that conversation. Granted we don’t have any voice assistants but I am pretty sure that both of our phones are reporting back what we are saying.
It was shortly after writing this tweet that I turned around and hit refresh on the YouTube home feed to find the next thing to listen to… that I was served up this video. So some background that I did not know going into this adventure. Pat Finnerty is a musician from Scranton, PA, and a member of a band called Okay Paddy and has toured with other bands and projects. Based on my further journey down this rabbit hole, it seems like his moment of internet fame came during the quarantine era of this pandemic doing Instagram live concerts from his home and eventual rooftop. During one of these he staged a “Grohl-a-thon” where after 9 hours of being on air, Dave Grohl hopped on the feed and joined him for some discussion of Dire Straights of all things.
The other thing that he is known for, and the reason I now know he exists… and have subsequently torn through all of these videos… is a series called “What Makes This Song Stink”. He explains in the first video that he is a fan of a series by Rick Beato called “What Makes This Song Great?”, and wanted to essentially create the counterpoint. At face value that is a reasonable concept, but what carries it forward and makes these videos so damned entertaining is that they go some places. It is not just Pat technically breaking down what is wrong with a given song, they are this entire story journey weaving in bits of his past and a whole cast of characters that grows over the course of the series including “Blinds-to-Go Guy” and a fictitious radio station called “The Moose”.
What is even wilder is during the course of these videos… sometimes he decides he can do it better. So in the MGK video, he creates his own emo/punk pop band called “August is Falling”. During this, he goes to the Mall of America and gets fashion advice from a pair of extremely good nature people at Hot Topic. It doesn’t stop there… because apparently he actually played on stage AS the band.. after finding an Emo rock bassist on Instagram to sit in on the set. Taking the joke even further… you can now listen to Mad This Summer by August is Falling over on Bandcamp. Another video has this entire running gag about Here Comes the Hotstepper rocking… and he convinces the band he rents a studio from to release a cover… which now exists.
Then there is the whole Kravitz Bowl… which is a video parody of the classic era of the Super Bowl pitting American Woman against Fly Away in an attempt to determine which song stinks the worst. Like I said before these videos are a lot and in around 45 minutes each… they go on this wild journey while actually explaining the technical faults with each song covered. The could be a slog to get through at that length were it not for the fact that Pat is legitimately hilarious. I guess one of the traits that musicians and comedians both share are understanding how important timing is… and he nails the delivery of what would otherwise feel like purely video parody.
I think it would be unfair if I did not close by sharing one of his performances. On top of being funny as hell… he is legitimately a deeply talented musician. I’ve always loved Sultans of Swing and this rendition is most excellent. One of the things that have come up multiple times during this most recent Blaugust is whether or not you should stick to a theme with your blog. While Tales of the Aggronaut is for the most part a Video Game blog… I have to leave myself room to talk about other things that interest me. This morning is a prime example because I could not experience this ride… without sharing it with you all.
The post Pat Finnerty Rocks appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
This morning’s post is in part an addendum to yesterday’s post. My opinion on Stray is changing a bit as I get further into the game. Essentially the game seems to be a repeating pattern of miserable alien blob infested “endless runner” segments perforated by moments of exploring adorable robot settlements. I feel like on some level the alien segments are there only to be able to claim that the game has some skill-based gameplay when in reality the studio should have simply embraced the fact that it was a walking simulator. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the game would have been much better if I was just a cat roaming around a dead city talking to cute robot friends and never having to deal with these alien abominations.
In fact, I can outline the exact moment my opinion of this game started to shift. Light spoilers but The Slums is the first settlement that you spend time in, and during your travels, you find out that one of the robots has figured out a way to fight back and went out into the sewers to test this weapon never to return. So you go through a series of events to uncover this technology and when you have it… it is great. The weapon overheats so you have to carefully time your attacks but it works… you have some way of dealing with the alien swarm other than trying to run perfectly without getting captured. Then just as soon as you have the weapon… “story elements” take place and rob you of your only line of defense pushing you back into the “endless runner” territory. This feels so phenomenally bad and only serves to make the next sequence of awful alien-swarm-time feel all that much worse.
I talked briefly yesterday about the “red screen” where you get overwhelmed by the alien blobs and your cat lies down… and the game asks you to reload from a save point. Admittedly I was fine with this the first time I saw it after sorta learning the ropes of how to dodge the blobs. I was less fine with it the several deaths that I took trying to install a transceiver on top of a very tall, very blob-infested tower. Then all the deaths I took trying to get through the sewers… made me significantly not fine at all with it. I crossed that threshold from “it’s okay this is just a game” to “this is a sweet baby cat that I want to protect and I am failing”. This is the danger honestly of including cats or dogs in your games, because if you make our failure cause them to die… it hurts a lot.
So while my opinion yesterday was extremely good in this game, after more play I am starting to create some sort of risk versus reward matrix in my head. The gameplay of me roaming around a settlement and making robot friends is delightful, but at what point does that joy not outweigh the pain of watching a sweet cat die over and over. Granted like I said yesterday the death sequence is tasteful and not graphic… but just knowing that my cat is lying down because I failed them and that they are getting eaten alive… is not cool. Having to continue to confront the blob bullshit while simultaneously being robbed of the only defense I had… is not cool at all.
The post Updated Stray Thoughts appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
