Uncategorized – Page 142

Bel’s 2015 Game Awards

January 1, 2016 by Belghast

Year in Review

First off let me start this post by wishing all of you my readers a Happy New Year. During the course of this past year nearly 70,000 of you have visited my blog, and I am still scratching my head as to why. Whatever I am doing, I guess I will keep doing that in the next year. I do have some cool ideas for things to keep me moving forward, but I don’t really want to go into those right now…. mostly because it will involve some programming on my part to make it function. The thing I have learned over the years of blogging and this coming year will make seven… is that I am really really bad at columns. I will start a feature and then after a few weeks to months it peters out. The MMOs Worth Playing feature was one of my favorite so far, but it was also one of the more time consuming. That said in the coming year I would really like to bring it back, and maybe change its focus to be a little big more manageable…. sort of a MMO of the Month Club type thing. Each week during the MWP thing I was trying to log into that game, play it a bit to remember the things I liked about it… take fresh screenshots and get up a post every single Friday. As we got into the pre-Holiday crunch time it failed miserably. Maybe an MMO of the Month will work better because it gives me more time…. though honestly if the AggroChat Game Club is any evidence I will probably just end up waiting until the week before we record the show before attempting to play the game.

This morning the idea is to do my Awards for the year, since we have officially wrapped up a year now. These are not exactly your normal awards and more like the back of a high school year book… most likely to succeed etc. Though from what I understand…. there are a lot of schools who are no longer doing that for sake of potentially damaging students self esteem. More than anything I want to thank all of you for joining me on this continued journey. The last few months of the year were pretty rough on this side of the equation, but you all kept with me and kept supporting me, and for that I am immensely appreciative. Without further rambling… here is the inaugural edition of “Bel’s Game Awards”.

Biggest Surprise

Bel’s 2015 Game Awards — Hatoful Boyfriend – Feel the Birblove!

I absolutely did not expect to like this game, and in truth I probably never would have played it were not for the fact that my good friend Grace chose this as her aggrochat game of the month. I expected it to be largely played on a goof, and even went to the extreme of recording my first game play session because I expected it would be a maddening experience for me. The end result however was something I did not expect, I really enjoyed it. I laughed more while playing this game than I have laughed in a long time while playing any game…. maybe since initially playing Sam and Max Hit the Road. What is even more shocking is that I continued on after the initial play through and ended up getting six or seven different endings by the time we had recorded the AggroChat show. There has been a whole side discussion since about whether or not Hatoful Boyfriend is actually representative of Otome and Visual Novels in general…. or if it just lampoons the genre. I think more than anything it opened my eyes to the fact that this sort of “non-action” game can be extremely fun, and would make me at least try some other games. So kinda like WoW is an ice breaker for MMOs… this might be that sort of Icebreaker for Otome.

Biggest Disappointment

I remember when I first saw this game… it seemed like this amazing callback to the Super Nintendo era of RPGs where you had such oddball genre bending hits like Mario RPG and Earthbound. The problem is that in application… the game ended up as this soulless hull that simply was not fun to play. This was our very first AggroChat game club game… and none of us really liked it. This was the game that essentially we all unanimously voted that we wanted to play… and was also the game that caused us to change gears and start letting individual members pick a game for us to play, rather than trying to all decided together what the next game we would play might be. The game was frustrating from a technical level, but the level of grind needed to get very far just made the experience simply not enjoyable. The idea of being able to recruit hundreds of potential party members was amazing… until you realized that not a single one of them was interesting at all. The part that ruined it for most people was the fact that the main character, the mayor was so completely unlikable. I think it was Kodra that said that the game would have been salvageable if you could simply leave him at home and go off adventuring without him. The stereotypes were caricatures were humorous for the first fifteen minutes, and then quickly became painful to keep playing.

Most Improved

What can I say about Destiny the Taken King that I have not already said. I had no real hopes for this expansion because for the most part I had abandoned all hope for Destiny before the time the first expansion patch landed. Year one was a grindy mess whose light leveling system left me scratching my head and simply not caring anymore about trying to progress. I believe I managed to get to Light 26 before hitting a wall of resource gathering, that I simply lacked the desire to keep pushing through. In year one engrams in general felt few and far between, and you were constantly having to judge whether or not an item provided enough light to make it worth swapping it in, even if in other ways the item might be superior. Year two fixed a lot of this in the same way that the Diablo 3 2.0 patch just magically fixed that game, or at least made it FEEL better. That is the thing with me and games, the moment to moment game play has to feel good and also feel like I am getting something for my time spent. While I could say that technically there is way more grind in Year 2, it feels like you are at least getting something for your time…. even if it is just weapon and armor parts. I would rather see things drop… and all of those things be crap rather than never seeing a drop… and when you finally do it decodes into a lower level than the face value of the engram. The biggest change however is the fact that the Taken King has a story… and it is actually a cool one. Through both the quest narrative and the item descriptions that can be found on the website for each of the items you pick up… the game has started to tell this epic tale of both the Traveller and the Darkness, and how the two have battled through countless races and star systems since time began. For me, I patched up my game and tried the year 2 experience long before picking up the expansion…. and I highly suggest anyone who has not given it another shot do the same.

Game I Still Can’t Get Into

I love the Dragon Age franchise…. or at least I did. I’ve been a fan since Dragon Age: Origins… and I have beaten at least six different endings of that game. Which as a person who rarely if ever finishes video games… that should tell you something. I even managed to play through Dragon Age 2 a few different times, and largely enjoyed my experience. However when confronted with Dragon Age: Inquisition it feels like this insurmountable wall. Firstly I think the game just looks ugly out of the gate with its overuse of object shine and its strange playdough hair. The other big problem I have is that generally speaking I play roleplaying games on the sofa, where it is nice and comfy… and none of the laptops that I own are capable of playing this game with decent settings, or at least good enough settings to make it look not like shit. Recently I have picked it up for the Playstation 4 over the recent sales and it is my hope to maybe try playing it on the vita. The first statement anyone ever seems to make to me when I talk about my problems with the game… is that I need to leave the hinterlands. I promise I have left the Hinterlands… but the main storyline is just boring to me. It is nothing as awesome as Dragon Age Origins was…. and I think that’s because I just don’t like the Inquisition. I could get 100% behind the Grey Wardens… I believed in their cause and was ready to go into battle for them. I could give a flying fuck about being the Herald of Andraste. I hate this green shit that comes out of my hand… and I hate the feeling that I am constantly fiddling with the magic of the world… and my key goal in life seems to be to close rifts full of annoying demons. I like some of the characters that I interact with, but some of my favorite characters so far are characters you can’t take with you on missions like Scout Harding. My party of choice would be Cassandra, Sera, and Harding…. but instead I tend to go with Cassandra, Sera and Dorian. I wish I knew why this game is just so not enjoyable for me…. but I want to play it… I really do.

Lived Up to the Hype

The game this year that I was the most hyped about has to be Fallout 4, and that hype cycle started from the moment it was officially announced at E3. This game did so many things right, and really it was starting with the way it was announced. They held off to show any information on the game until it was already pretty damned polished, and then they hit it out of the part by saying that it would be in our grubby little hands only a few months later. In the meantime they gave us a pretty fun mobile game to keep us interested…. which I will talk about later. Fallout is one of those franchises that I place up on a pedestal for always giving me exactly what I wanted out of the game. A big open world with lots of little things to keep me interested, and a complete inability to ever truly “finish” the game. There is more content in Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas and now Fallout 4 than I will ever have time to see. Hell in the few days ahead of the launch… I played some more Fallout New Vegas and was still finding things that I had never seen before… and I considered that game pretty damned well trodden. As far as Fallout 4… everything about the game makes me happy… apart from maybe the main storyline. The thing is… I don’t play Fallout games for the story… I play them to go off and inhabit the wasteland and weave my own storyline around me as I go. I thought the voiced protagonist would annoy me… but for the most part I have been able to ignore it. I really like some of the companions this time as well…. namely Piper and Nick. I wish so much that I could adventure together with Piper, Nick and Dogmeat at the same time because I love them all. The biggest moment for me though was when I realized that in this game through the settlement system I could finally make the world a better place. I have a dozen or so different settlements at this point, and I have spent time building on each of them. I feel like I am making things work…. and improving live as I go. As far as the Storyline… I find parts of it frustrating namely that I did not see a good option to broker peace between the three main factions. I would have loved a “Can’t We All Just Get Along” ending option… and maybe it is there but I just have not found it.

Hype That Didn’t Last

If I had to pick a game of the year based on sheer amount of time I played it during this year…. the award would go to Final Fantasy XIV. It has been my constant companion… that is until the last quarter of the year when I started to lose interest. I can’t say I am disappointed in the game, because the content leading up to Heavensward… and the launch content was really amazing. The problem I have had is like after the launch of A Realm Reborn there just doesn’t seem to be that much to do to keep me engaged. I guess in truth the game has always been this way… because I remember us running into the same wall a few months after the launch of 2.0, that ended up leading us to un-subscribe shortly after. Coming back when we did July of 2014 meant we had roughly a year worth of content waiting for us to progress through. This content kept us busy up until the point of the Heavensward launch, with us not actually defeating Bahamut until we did it unsynchronized. With Heavensward we lack that backlog of fun older content to work through, and our casual gameplay style just does not really fit with the Final Fantasy XIV bleeding edge. So we managed to down Bismarck Extreme, Alexander normal, and made some pretty good progress on Ravana Extreme before we petered out and started to lose interest. What is making it extra hard is the fact that there are only two max level dungeons at a time this go around. Previous expansion each content patch came with three new dungeons…. and having to run experts by only alternating between the same two dungeons gets old really really fast. I am sure at some time I will get the bug and go back to playing this as my primary game…. but for now I am just basically only playing the new story and holiday content as it arrives and the rest of the time…. simply not logging in.

Shocked I am Playing

At the beginning of the year, I had quite a bit of fun raiding in World of Warcraft, but as Blackrock Foundry drug on…. and the launch of Heavensward loomed I simply lacked the care to keep playing like I have done so many times. In June I quit playing as the chart at the end of this post shows and focused solely upon Final Fantasy XIV, and I think maybe it is this single minded focus that caused me to burn out of that game so quickly. Blizzcon is a primal force of nature that no one can avoid… and I have to say it got me started down this nostalgia trip that ended with me playing the free version of the game on my sub 20 horde characters on The Scryers server. This ultimately ended up with me resubbing to the game and I have to say I am really enjoying myself. I am playing the game in a much more casual fashion than I am used to, and while I am raiding every single week…. I am doing so with a group that only raids on Sunday nights, and during a time slot when I am normally downstairs watching television anyways. I know there is technically no new content, but what can I say… I am having fun. Playing Horde has breathed new life into the game because it is allowing me to not only play with friends I never really got the chance to play with… but also see the world from a slightly different perspective. No clue how long this will hold out but I think so long as I am playing it and OTHER games at the same time… it might just hold for awhile. I think the key for me not getting burnt out is to allow myself the freedom to play whatever I feel like playing in a given moment and not really forcing myself to keep playing something that feels stale.

Made Me Almost Care About Mobile

As I said above, one of the things that Bethesda did right with the launch of Fallout 4, is that they gave us a fun app to play with in the meantime. Fallout Shelter is essentially Sim Tower or the later Tiny Tower mobile game…. set in a Fallout Vault. This was actually a lot of fun for a few weeks and gave me a reason to play games on my phone. The problem is I eventually got bored with it the same way I seem to get bored with all mobile apps. There were a lot of times I thought that I would keep playing it, were it for the ability to play on my desktop while doing something else. But for a brief period of time I found myself caring about a mobile game, and that deserves some recognition. My lifestyle just doesn’t really support mobile gaming, in that if I am going somewhere… I tend to be the one driving. Then when I am at work… I should be you know… working and not playing games. When I am out shopping… most games simple require too much to get into them and do a few moves before you need to move on to the next area. Then when I am home…. I would far rather be using my laptop, gaming desktop, or one of several different consoles than spending time on a mobile device. The one thing that might change this is the fact that I have started spending some time on my new Kindle Fire before going to sleep. Right now that time is mostly occupied with reading comic books… but I could see eventually playing a game like Fallout Shelter while trying to fall soundly asleep.

Game I Wish I Enjoyed More

If you were to write out every single feature that I would want in an MMO on paper… you would pretty much get the feature set of Rift. That said for whatever reason I have struggled to get into this game since the launch of the first expansion. I will come back and play for a bit but find it far too easy to walk away from. I love Trion, and I love the awesome people that work there. I love some of the awesome folks engaged in that community like Kiwi. All of this said… I just struggle to get into the game itself. I think it is several problems, namely that I just don’t have a large friendly and active community to be part of. I mean I have the House Stalwart guild but it has been dead since the last resurgence several years ago that lead me to go found it. For a long time my hope was Machiavelli’s Cat community, but during Storm Legion the Rift contingency pretty much died, and it lead us to merge into Alea Iacta Est…. who then also seemed to die out. During this awkward period I tried a few other guilds, and never found a home… eventually creating House Stalwart on Faeblight. The big problem that Rift has that WoW does not… is the fact that there is no cross account id system that you can use for communicating with friends regardless of what character they happen to be playing. However with the recent “Glyph ID” that is now showing up in the launcher… I am wondering if they are crafting that infrastructure. I feel like I simply have not put in the necessary legwork to find a new home, because it seems like so much effort. That combined with the fact that finding a workable spec itself is a challenge, has left me in this phase of logging in… playing for a bit and then fading out again. I want to love this game, but it has been a struggle.

Most Emotional Experience

This is a strange one for me… because I’ve technically never played this game. The game itself is more of an experience… a visual novel of sorts… than a true game. Sure there are gameplay elements and mechanics… but those remind me of the video game equivalent of one of those pop up books that has levers and such that allow you to move the characters or animate a specific story element. I watched a let’s play video on this game, and in that I pretty much experienced all of it. The end result evoked some of the strangest emotions in me.. and actually lead me to cry at a few points. I think any creative type can understand the emotions that you go through in the experience, and I know for myself…. who tends to suffer from a fairly unhealthy amount of imposter syndrome… it hit incredibly close to home. I am not sure if it was a positive experience, and for all I know given the timing… it might have been the start of my recent funk. The rollercoaster I went through… was not exactly healthy. That said I feel like I have to give the game credit, because it made me feel things… like deeply feel things. Very few video games can do that, and ultimately I ended up purchasing the game as a thank you for the experience…. even though I doubt I will ever actually install it or play it.

Game of the Year

The only thing I can really give you… is a hearty shrug. I don’t know what my game of the year would be. If you judged it on sheer excitement and the eventual execution… it would probably be Fallout 4. If you judged it based on the amount of time I spent playing it through the course of the year, then it would be Final Fantasy XIV. If you based it on the sheer shock that someone got me to play the game in the first place… then Hatoful Boyfriend. Basically every game on my list deserves its recognition, and for the most part that recognition is positive with the exception of Citizens of Earth. I played a lot of games this year… and I hope to play even more next year. Game of the Year is honestly a silly concept… and just like I can’t really give you a firm answer for “Favorite Movie” or “Favorite Song” I could never tell you my absolute favorite Video Game. My mood plays such of a huge role in what I want to play at a given moment…. and if I want mindless destruction right now Destiny is giving me everything that I could ever want. But as soon as my mood changes… so does my preference in games… and I often times fall back on sheer comfort gaming like whatever MMO I happen to be into. So yeah… all of the games on this list… I mentioned because they were important to me, so they are all my Games of the Year.

The Kerfuffle

December 30, 2015 by Belghast

Getting Out

For the last few days we have more or less been stuck in the house. We had quite literally three and a half days of nonstop rain, that then turned into ice, sleet and snow. Yesterday however we were getting to the point of being stir crazy. It is funny how much different you feel about your home when you feel like you can’t or at least shouldn’t leave it. I can happily stay home for days on end without leaving… but the moment I feel like I am trapped there… I start to go stir crazy. So as a result my wife and I had decided that yesterday we would get out regardless of how cold it was. Admittedly cold for me is sub freezing… not necessarily the negative temperatures that the rest of my readers might consider cold. We essentially had one task that needed to get done, and a bunch of other things that we sorted out somewhere in the middle. My wife’s tribal tag was due, so we had to trek out to the small town that has a Cherokee nation tag office, and what I thought was going to take fifteen minutes ended up taking close to an hour because they were short workers due to the holiday break. After that we grabbed a friend and went out looking for post holiday clearance bargains…. and the strange hair stuff my wife uses that no one seems to stock.

At the first place we stopped we managed to find both the hair gunk, as well as clearance Legos. At some point I had picked up The Phantom ship from Star Wars Rebels for cheap…. I want to say something in the range of $8-10. Then I had seen The Ghost a handful of times marked down but always passed it up for this reason or that. I had been kicking myself for not snapping it up when I saw the stores start to close it out, but apparently the target we went to somehow managed to still have one after the Christmas rush. Better yet it was marked down by like $40 making it the best deal I had seen on it yet. What I am really curious about is whether or not The Phantom will dock with The Ghost like it does in the television show. Some googling makes it seem like that is the case, so I am really hoping. My big problem with my Legos is finding a place to display them after I build them up. This is one of the big solutions I need to figure out for my office. I thought about some sort of shelving on the walls, but finding a way to make it somehow immune to cats jumping up there and knocking everything around is always going to be a problem. When we went out to eat yesterday I snapped a photo of what was a broken “legal age of drinking” sign in the bar area. Apparently we are super hardcore here in Oklahoma as we seem to allow newborns to drink.

The Kerfuffle

Something is going on in the WoW twitter community, and to be honest I am not entirely sure what is up. I’ve tried to piece things together as best as I can, but the root seems to be that two different groups are fighting… and it somehow is over the #warcraftpositivity hashtag. What has been so damned odd on the outside looking in is just how many people who are apparently not even involved in the initial kerfuffle are getting pulled into the fray. I had things I was going to say, but honestly I am not even sure if it matters. It just really sucks to be on the outskirts and watching two different groups of friends fighting over something that was supposed to be a good thing in the first place. Essentially while the Internet is a huge place… when you are mostly hanging out in a small corner of it there are going to be times when you keep running into people that for whatever reason you do not get along with. At this point you can do one of two things… you can make a big deal of it and get upset or you can just accept that these people still exist in the world and there is nothing you can do about it. Your friends can still be your good and true friends… and still like this other person. Sure it is awkward as hell to be part of a sequence of messages that include this other person… that might have you blocked and as a result you are only seeing part of the conversation… but at the end of the day no matter how much you huff and puff there isn’t much you can really do about it.

All of these things tend to start with a difference of opinion, and then it gets inflated to the point where it is a verbal war. Well meaning people get in the middle of issues that don’t actually involve them, and as a result it becomes a “thing” that seems to leaving everyone scratching their heads as to what exactly happened. I was not even really on social media that much over the holidays, yet I still seem to have gotten wrapped up in it as I got some random un-follows from folks loosely connected to the mess. I’ve used twitter since 2009 and in that time I have found less than a half dozen folks that were not bots getting auto-blocked from reporting spam… that I actually found vile enough to block. There are some folks and hashtags that I have muted in Tweetdeck but that is an entirely different story. Basically it takes a lot to get me to block someone, and I try my damnedest to never act based purely on third or fourth hand knowledge. I am not big on the shunning of people for a reason that are not deeply personal to me… and even then while I will never forgive some people, I can still functional and interact with them in a generally friendly manner. I hold some serious grudges against a few individuals based on my interactions with them in WoW, but I also knew that at some point because of mutual friends I would have to keep interacting with them.

WoW Community

The problem is… that due to events like this happening with a frighteningly regular frequency, the WoW Community has developed this reputation of being like a middle school lunch room. At times this is absolutely a fair assessment, but it is also a shallow one. The players who are online and interacting on a regular basis do not represent the bulk of Warcraft players. Most people just want to log in every night, and decompress while killing internet dragons… and don’t really reach out much past their own guild or immediate circle of real life friends. I’ve heard the WoW Community referred to as Toxic, and this is also I think unfair. Sure this particular community has some problems, but those problems are only really noticed…. because it is so insanely huge still. When you are part of the largest MMO community, even single problem is going to be magnified through sheer numbers. Sure there are more assholes in WoW, because there are far more players there to interact with… and the folks that hang out in trade chat and heckle other players… seem more noticeable when you have a hundred on a server… instead of just having two or three in other games. The same goes for the twitter presence, because the wow community as a whole out numbers pretty much every other MMO gaming community I am part of combined.

What gets lost in the noise is all of the positive things that are happening behind the scenes. There are people who are doing a lot of good and putting a lot of actual positivity out in the world. Just because a handful of miscreants takes offense to that, and decides to derail something…. doesn’t mean that it was a bad thing in the first place. The truth is… were it not for the fact that I was on twitter and interacting with a handful of the folks connected to the events… I probably wouldn’t have even known something was going on. Both House Stalwart the guild I founded back in 2004, and Facepull the horde side guild I am finally getting to do awesome things with… are both doing amazingly well and thanks to the holiday break have more smiling faces active and happy to be in game than I have seen in a long time. That is what matters in Warcraft, not the bickering or the name calling that seems to be happening somewhere in the ether above the actual game. I think those of us who are watching things seemingly burn down around us… need to remember that in a couple of weeks time no one will remember what the hell actually happened. Things will keep moving forward the way they have always moved forward, and people will still keep being awesome all around the community. So my hope is that if folks still cannot get along after all of this… that they just quietly disagree in their own corner of the twitterverse, so that the rest of us can continue having a happy place to rest our heads.

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015

December 27, 2015 by Belghast

Holiday Lagged

There are some mornings when trying to think is a struggle… this is one of those mornings. Last night I suffered from a pretty bad bout of insomnia, and instead of just sitting in bed and hoping for sleep to find me… I got up and played PS4. At which point I realized it was 2:30 in the morning and I really needed to try and sort out how to sleep. The day as a whole today is rainy and nasty and the antithesis of just how delightful the holiday was here in Oklahoma. On Christmas day I was running around in a short sleeved shirt, and were it not for the wind I wouldn’t have needed my hoodie. We were warned however that just after the holiday the temperature would drop, and from the sounds of it the panhandle of the state is now getting lots of ice. Thusfar it has been only rain…. but so much of it that sitting upstairs in my office it actually drowned out the sound of all of the various machines whirring away. I finally got up around 8:30 and attempted to start the day, but the problem being… that I have largely just been staring at the screen unable to get a post started. Then suddenly I remembered…. it’s Sunday… the day I have a crutch to fall back on in the form of the week in review posts. So I am hobbling along on this crutch for all that is sacred in the world… otherwise I have no clue what I would write about.

Return of Destiny

Week in Gaming 12/27/2015 — MIDA In Action

I guess Bungie got the message that it sucks when Xur does not have a weapon option during the Friday festivities. The last four or five weeks he has brought some new weapon each time…. and this week was no different with the newly Year-2-ized version of the MIDA Multitool. During this month he has also brought the Monte Carlo, Hardlight, and Telesto. The only problem here is Friday I have to make a decision… do I care enough about getting this weapon to grind out the 23 strange coins needed to purchase it. The Monte Carlo was a no brainer, because I have heard so many good things about this gun… that I just had to play with one myself. Telesto was similarly a no brainer, because I have gotten two of these to drop… so had no need for it. MIDA and Hardlight however I was left with the decision if it was really worth the needed grinding to pick it up. With the Hardlight I decided… that I already have a lot of Auto Rifles that I really like… between my love of the Zarinaea-D, Zhalo Supercell, Monte Carlo and the newly improved Fabian Strategy… I had no real use for a new Auto Rifle to add to the mix. For the MIDA however I crowd sourced my opinion and got messages back from Sig and Squirrel both saying to pick it up… that it was both amazing in PVE and PVP. So far I am liking it, but I am having to get used to using a Scout Rifle again. I have largely just been using Auto and Pulse Rifles for awhile now, so it is taking some adjusting. The truth is… for the most part there are very few weapons that I don’t like in Destiny.

Last night while dealing with Insomnia I decided to cast aside the Hunter and Titan briefly and instead focus on the Warlock who still need to hit the level cap of 40. I realize I could be leveling through doing the Taken King content, but instead I just ended up clearing out my bounty log. I am finally reaching the point where my Stranger’s Rifle is beginning to show its age, as I finally got some weapon drops that are technically higher than it is. The problem is… I am so damned used to using the Stranger’s Rifle… and the whole fully automatic pulse rifle thing is so overpowered… that I am probably going to keep at it until I hit 40, or at least until I get a purple weapon to replace it with. In the meantime I am left with the decision… do I grind my way to 40 like I am doing in a super chill and enjoyable way… or do I actually start with the quests. On my Hunter I largely waited to do quests until I was at the level cap, so I could revel in the sweet sweet engram drops that seem to happen like candy during missions. I still have all of the House of Wolves and Dark Beyond quests as well… and those in theory won’t be nearly as beneficial gear wise. So I might just start on doing those and see how close to 40 I can get.

Another thing I did this week was get my Ace of Spades exotic on the hunter. I am currently on the First Curse of the step of the Gunsmith quest on my Titan… and I have to say I am simply not looking forward to doing all of the bullshit you have to do to get it. The only problem with Ace of Spades is just how crap hand cannons seem to be right now. I am not sure which I dislike more… the absolute potato range of them… or just how small the magazine and ammunition pool is in general with them. I run out of ammunition while using a hand cannon faster than almost anything else… and I never seem to get enough normal ammo drops to be able to use these in strikes. So instead every now and then I break them out while doing bounties when things don’t matter quite so much. The positive of Ace of Spades however is that it just look bad ass. So in theory it might get some use, but not really likely given all of the other exotics that I have and legendaries that are also equally well stated.

World of Warcraft

The other day I posted about my mission that level a Cat Druid to 40 all so that I could leave the 360NoMount club… and add the Christmas Yeti mount to my collection. It has been two days and I am now getting close to the goal. As of last night when I finally reached the point where I thought it was probably time to attempt going to sleep… I was roughly 2/3rds of a level from 40 and was just now starting Feralas. It has been a fun ride pushing up a new Cow Druid, and went a lot faster than I might had expected. I took a slightly different route than I did with my Warlock and the end result feels like I got a lot more straight forward Kill Ten type quests which I can burn through insanely quickly. The other thing that helped is the fact that my druid is a skinner… and I was constantly jumping random leather bearing animals along the way to level that. Back the in the day all of the leveling guides used to tell you to always be engaged in killing something… like if there was a mob on your way to your objective to always kill it no matter what. Having done that on the Druid and not so much on the Warlock… I have to say that yes in fact that is the superior way to level especially with all of the experience boosted heirlooms that I am wearing. The question is… now that I have almost achieved my goal… do I hit 40 and quit… or do I keep pushing up the druid. I am not a big fan of the server cluster I am on, and the people seem to be insanely rude compared to Argent Dawn so at some point I may transfer the druid over once I finish it. I realize I can cross realm group… but man… some of the stuff I have encountered here I have never run into on AD. That is saying a lot given that I used to always think of Argent Dawn as a pretty horrific place.

The other activity that I spent time this week doing was leveling my Warlock. Basically playing her was my reward for completing my holiday dailies… and in part the only reason why I made so much progress on the druid so quickly, is that I completely started ignoring that holiday dailies existed. At some point I need to go through all of my characters and loot the presents in Orgrimmar and Ironforge before they poof, but I think once I get to 40 on the druid I am going to switch back to playing the Warlock. It is funny how isolating it can be playing on a different server even though you have access to BNet and your friends list. Facepull is just friendly and somewhat active green spam and I love having it around. It is my hope that at some point soon we will get the rumored battlenet channels, which will hopefully let us have guild like chat spanning across multiple games. If there was an addon that existed that gave me access to slack while playing World of Warcraft… I would be in a perfect place.

Best Gift Ever

December 26, 2015 by Belghast

Star Wars Christmas

There are times when the best gift at Christmas… you are not quite sure if it was intentional or not. I’ve talked about our relatively chill Christmas day plans for the better part of a week, and I have to say after going through it yesterday it was far better than I could have imagined. First off we have all this amazing food… that we will be eating for a week. On the menu….

Chilli-Cheese Rotel Dip
Sausage Cheese Balls
Pulled BBQ Beef
White Chocolate Cranberry Clusters
Chocolate Cashew Clusters
Snickerdoodles
Ranch Pretzels
White and Milk Chocolate dipped Pretzels
Flakey Biscuits to heap the BBQ Beef on

It was not exactly the most conventional meal, but we grazed happily throughout the course of the original three Star Wars movies. You cannot have read my blog over the last few months and somehow missed the fact that Star Wars was a major part of my childhood. I went to see the original when I was roughly 2 years old in the local drive in… and was hooked from that point on. So for Christmas it was a given that I would end up getting a bunch of Star Wars merchandise from my parents. The best gift however was this marathon and the effect it seems to have had on my wife. I am trying to keep my expectations tempered, but maybe just maybe we have another Star Wars fan in the family.

Granted she has always been amazing about my Star Wars thing… and has brought me home various artifacts like Star Wars Legos, or just the other night a cool set of Kylo Ren playing cards. So even though she didn’t get why the movie was important to me… she was always super awesome about putting up with my thing. I remember in college she even used to get into the hunt for new action figures, helping me crawl through the racks of figures to find the one or two that I didn’t already have. The prequels pretty much killed my desire to be surrounded by action figures on my walls… but I do pick up the occasional figure every now and then and on the wall between my monitors I have Dark Jedi Luke, Jedi Leia, Clone Emperor, Mara Jade, Admiral Thrawn, a snow gear Plo Koon, and a badass Savage Opress figure. So yesterday I half expected the desire to watch the three originals and then go see the new one… was at least in part a gift for me. That is until she invited one of her friends along for the journey. After watching the originals and seeing the new one…. she came home with all of these questions that I can’t really answer before she watches the prequels. So right now the plan is to spend today marathoning through those as well… and I am happy as a clam when I say… it was not MY idea to do this.

Keeping it Chill

There are a lot of things I am into that I think she would also like. I mean she was a huge fan of the Harry Potter series and got into it long before I did, and is also a fan of the Star Trek series and has been amped to see the newer movies. So the raw DNA of a Science Fiction and Fantasy fan is there, and I think if I could ever get her interested in say the modern Joss Whedeon Marvel films she would really enjoy them as well. However with those… we would need to start at the very beginning chronologically and do another Marathon since each movie at least in part fleshes out another corner of the Avengers universe. All of this said…. I am trying to keep it super chill and not put any pressure on her to like things more than she actually does. However just having my wife ask me questions about Star Wars… might be quite possibly the best Christmas gift I have ever received. I mean I guess it was impossible to live with me for the last two decades and not have SOME of the Star Wars franchise to imprint on her. She has always liked R2-D2, Chewbacca, The Jawas and the Ewoks… and she used to laugh when I would throw a blanket over my head and say Utini.

One of the awesome things about our marriage has always been that we could have completely different likes… but each of us would be supportive over whatever the other person was into. She has been awesome about the daily blog thing… and the podcast… and this game or that… because I know they really do put dents in our schedule that are theoretically “untouchable” where I need to be at a keyboard. Similarly I am cool with the fact that there are many nights where she works in her classroom until 8pm or has this or that church activity that needs attention. It has always amazed me at just how well we work together, when in truth we don’t have that many shared interests. At the core has always been this willingness to go along with whatever the other person wants to do… because I think we enjoy seeing the other half excited even if we aren’t that excited ourselves. All of this said… I am not expecting a Christmas Miracle… and all of the sudden my wife will be as obsessed with Star Wars as I have been all of these years. I still think its amazing however for her to be asking the same sorts of questions that I pondered all throughout my childhood and even now have nothing more than vague guesses at. I think without a doubt though, there will be no question as to whether or not we will be going to the next several movies because if nothing else… she seems hooked on the new generation of films after watching Force Awakens last night.