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Good Morning Friends! I had a rather busy weekend and I am still sorta feeling out of it as a result. I had to run up and help my dad with a few things, including getting several items that are too heavy to lift solo off to the city dump. The last few times I have been up there I have made friends with Fang. Either through battle damage or birth defect, Fang has a permanently exposed canine too and snarled lip. It makes him look rather fearsome but he is one of the sweetest cats. He now follows me around because he knows that eventually, I will stop to give him head scratches. This makes actually doing work with my dad a little challenging because the last thing I want to do is kick him when we are carrying something heavy and my visibility is limited.

I am pretty sure that Fang is the evolved form of one of these three pokemon taken from 2016. The problem with barn cats is that they sorta come and go over time and we have no clue what happened to two of the three. Fang however has grown up to be my dad’s buddy. He apparently comes into the shop with him and hangs out while my dad putters around tinkering on things. He also occasionally comes into the house but from the sound of it, he doesn’t really like being indoors. During the winter months, dad leaves the heater on in his shop so I think Fang more or less lives there. I’ve not gotten a picture of it but apparently, my dad also has a pet turtle that sometimes keeps him company. Driving down the dirt lane I had to carefully straddle a few massive terapins, which were more or less a common order growing up as well.

Lately, I have not consumed media as fast as I used to, and there was a time when I would have ravenously consumed Stranger Things as soon as it was released. This weekend I finally got around to starting the season and only made it four episodes in before taking a quick break. One of the problems of being “of” the era pictured in the show is that sometimes an anachronism stands out. For example, this bag was zoomed in close during an airport scene… and we very much did not have these in 1986. My wife was the first to notice it and this led to doing some research. Sure enough, this style of bag was invented in 1987 but did not really reach mass market adoption until the mid to late 90s. I know we did not really have fancy luggage like this until the 2000s, but mostly because we had to wait for it to get cheap. Season 4 is set in March of 1986, and I would have been 9 years old at that point, so I deeply remember some aspects of the show but was quite a bit younger than the cast of characters.

As far as gaming goes this weekend, I ended up missing Tequatl both Saturday and Sunday because life was happening. I did get in some co-op gaming with my friend Grace and we played some Gunfire Reborn. The game is very much Borderlands 2 meets Roguelike experience with really interesting weapons and some fun powers for your classes. Over time you unlock more of a cast of anthropomorphic animal friends. This is honestly the only complaint I would have for the game is that maybe it would have been better to just let players pick from a wide cast of characters, rather than having to unlock them through grinding it out.

Some of the weapons are deeply entertaining. Grace found this weapon that was essentially a firebreathing lizard and in order to reload the game you had to sort of smack it. I am running around with an exploding kunai. There are times when the runs go extremely smoothly and you get good picks from the additional perks. Then there were runs where everything went wrong and you might as well just start over. Regardless of your choice, you want to finish the run because this gives you experience points that you can then spend on a talent tree system that carries over between runs. Definitely a fun little game and extremely cheap if you are looking for some co-op nonsense with friends. The post Fang, Bags, and Fire Lizards appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Diablo Immortal potentially has one of the worst game announcements I have ever experienced. Fans like me were hoping to see the next chapter in the storied Diablo PC franchise and instead got a mobile game. That said while I was disappointed… I remember talking on Twitter about how I was interested in a phone-based Diablo game. The app stores are chock full of Diablo clones, some of which are actually really good. The thing is… none of them really FEEL like Diablo and I hoped that Immortal would package up the gameplay that I really enjoyed on Diablo 3 into a handheld format. Then all of the bullshit happened over the last two years with Blizzard and it made me significantly less interested in playing any of their games. In fact, I had not touched anything Blizzard-related since April of 2021 until yesterday when I gave Diablo Immortal a spin because I figured at some point I would want to talk about it based on what I had been reading.

If you want my 500 ft view of the game… it looks like Diablo and sounds like Diablo, but does not FEEL like Diablo. There is just something missing about the way the game functions that pushes it into this uncanny valley of not really feeling like the game I was looking for. It is little things like breaking objects… if they are breakable at all… doesn’t really do anything. I’ve been smashing barrels for fun and profit since Diablo 1, and while there are a handful of breakables early in the game… there seem to be way more vases and jars that are untouchable. That is by no means a fatal flaw, but just indicative of the sort of thing that I am talking about here. Something just feels off about the game and I will dive a bit further into that.

At a core level, Diablo for me is about building resources, spending resources, and the interplay of abilities. Diablo Immortal instead is a game about pressing buttons whenever they come off cooldown, which is ultimately the problem with every mobile phone Diablo clone I have experienced. You could have told me that Raziel or Lineage was having a cross-over event with Diablo, and I would have believed you. Essentially Diablo Immortal feels at a fundamental level like every ARPG I have played on a phone. There is something missing in the interplay of the abilities that makes it feel like I am just whacking buttons when they come off cooldown without a larger goal in mind.

The other aspect that makes it feel like every other ARPG on the phone market is the inclusion of ultimate. There is a meter that is slowly building over time through you taking actions, that ultimately unlocks an ultimate ability. When this ability is active you essentially shift into all powerful god mode which allows you to completely decimate any encounter. However, the end result of this is that you feel weak and useless any time the ultimate is not active, making it feel like you need to gain power in order to compete with this borrowed power system. Based on my brief research, there are apparently gems that you can slot that will build this ultimate bar faster allowing you to have this “borrowed power” up more often and burn through things more quickly. To be fair, Diablo has always had borrowed power in the form of the shrines, but I specifically call out ultimate only because they seem to be bog standard for all phone ARPGs and not something I have traditionally associated with Diablo in the past.

Then there is the monetization. Upon clearing the first dungeon and taking down King Leoric yet again in a Diablo game… I unlocked the Mad King’s Breach Trove. This wasn’t something I got as a loot reward but instead something that I can now purchase on the in-game store for only 99 cents. For that low price, you get one legendary crest, two basic crests, six gems, and 60 eternal orbs. It seems like the “crests” are this game’s “gacha” currency and allow you a chance at pulling legendary gems. The orbs are the currency for purchasing more of these crests or the various cosmetic items available in the game store. However when I looked through the store there was nothing that you could actually purchase for 60 orbs, and instead, you would need to add another 60 to that in order to get to the price for the cheapest item… a single legendary crest for 120 orbs.

This sort of thing is what is referred to as “predatory monetization” and I get that it exists in so many forms now. However, the fact that you get an amount of currency in one of their “cheap” packs that they are telling you is a phenomenal deal… but that is not capable of purchasing ANYTHING in the store by itself feels real bad. All cash shops are notorious for doing the thing where the amounts of currency that you can purchase never quite exactly map to anything you can buy in the store so you either have an amount left over or are just short. That sucks too, but this is a case where you are given an amount as part of a bundle and there is absolutely nothing that I could see in the shop that you could actually spend it on. The above video is one that keeps getting referenced over and over by various talking heads discussing this game, and if anything they say is true… it would cost tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to buy your way to a completely maxed out character.

For a very long time, Blizzard games have been riding a line when it comes to monetization. While lots of folks complained about Overwatch loot boxes or Hearthstone card packs, I thought those were mostly fine. Overwatch gave you nothing but cosmetics and Hearthstone more or less modeled the same sort of thing I was used to in purchasing card packs for Magic the Gathering. This however feels like another significant line has been crossed, and in doing so… it takes Blizzard into a whole new category of a games company. Genshin Impact is a DEEPLY predatory game when it comes to monetization, and if there is any truth to the rumors about what the endgame of Diablo Immortal looks like… then Genshin actually seems generous.

If you are enjoying Diablo Immortal however then by all means awesome. The combination of it mostly just feeling like every other phone ARPG I have played combined with the aggressive monetization ended up being a massive turn-off for me. I’ve tried both the Mobile client and the PC client and they feel fine enough. Both mobile and PC feel much better with a controller than they do with touch or keyboard/mouse. Touch screen interfaces still largely feel like garbage to me so I am not going to hold that against this specific game when ALL touch screen games feel like trash to me personally. If you are grabbing it for your phone prepare to have about 2.6 GB of free space all told once the many downloads finish. Other than gameplay problems, I still do not feel great touching anything Blizzard-related right now so long as Kotick is still in power. I am hoping that the Microsoft purchase goes through and that sweeping changes are made within the company.

Instead of playing Diablo Immortal from the bed as I had originally planned on doing, I decided to use Steam remote play and give Torchlight III another shot. I have to say I kinda dig the ghost captain class so far though I did not make it terribly far before sleep claimed me. I really need to do the whole steam remote play thing far more often because with my phone and the Gamesir controller it was a phenomenal experience. I need to probably sift through my game library and look for more similar controllers/bed-friendly titles. All of this said I really do hope you are enjoying the launch of Diablo Immortal. It was not for me but that does not mean it is not a game you are going to be interested in. The post Diablo Immortal appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Tonight we sit down to record the first “Aggrochat Game Club show”-like experience that we have done in a really long time.  A few weeks back a copy of Citizen Sleeper showed up in our steam libraries courtesy of Tam, and after several played it…  we set forth to eventually have a single show where we talked about it at length.  The major benefit of this is that for the most part, it is a relatively short game, and also has a wide myriad of possible outcomes.  This led to some interestingly varied experiences including one where Bel just played the game wrong entirely and made it out on the other side with a good ending.  This is a full spoiler show about Citizen Sleeper so I highly suggest if you have not played the game…  that you might do so and come back later. Topics Discussed

• Citizen Sleeper

The post AggroChat #390 – The Citizen Sleeper Show appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Good Morning Friends, this is going to be a bit of a weird post but it was spurred in my head by watching a long-form video essay last night, or more so listening to it… while I played a game. First off I feel like I need to begin with a number of disclaimers. This is a blog post from my specific perspective, which is inspired by watching a video from a wildly different perspective. My thoughts come from the place of being a white male gamer born in 1976, which creates specific biases and experiences. If you were not white and not male, you’re experience potentially felt different. The last thing I am trying to do here is sugarcoat an oppressive system or apply a coat of rose-tinted varnish.

Over the years though I have struggled a bit with the terms Geek and Gamer because as time has passed those terms mean far less than they once did as far as describing a particular experience. I am not saying this is a bad thing, and in truth, it is a very good thing because today geeks and gamers have way more opportunities and varied experiences than they ever did before. However it feels different and given that the video above comes from the perspective of someone on the cusp of the millennial and zoomer boundary, and mine comes from a decidedly “Gen X” background I still found the similar but different experiences interesting.

I think one of the pivotal defining aspects of growing up a geek in the 80s and 90s was how rare it was to find a geek property. Lady Hawke for example was effectively a romance movie, but given at the time it was so rare to have access to anything even vaguely fantasy-related… I am pretty certain that geeks of a specific age have watched this film more than once. I think the same is true for a lot of geek adjacent media that came out over the years, which lead to a sort of shared culture and experience brought on by scarcity. I remember being somewhat excited about the completely awful made-for-TV David Hasselhoff Nick Fury movie… because it was Nick Fury… in a movie, something that I never thought I would actually see. My teen mind could not fathom ever getting the Marvel mega-franchise that has taken place over the last few decades.

There is a reason why geeks of a certain age revere certain franchises in the way that they do… because we had to exist on fumes for decades. I know I personally watched a ton of low-budget Horror films because they were exploring the sorts of themes I was interested in, which eldritch horrors coming to life to wreak havoc on the populace. The stuff of science fiction was pushed to sources of low repute, and I gobbled it up in desperation. Every so often we would get thrown a bone in the form of a movie like “The Crow” that drew its roots to comic books or otherwise geek media, but those were truly few and far between. This tapestry of desperation had led most of us to watch a lot of the same things and have a similar shared media landscape. If you lived in a small town like I did, it was escalated by the fact that media was hard to come by, which lead folks to dub off bootleg copies and spread them around among their friends.

The same was true on the video game side of this equation. Gamers of a certain age likely remember playing the gold box series of D&D games from SSI, or the completely nonsensically awful Nintendo Entertainment System ports of those games. I ravenously consumed Ultima, Final Fantasy, Drakkhen, and pretty much anything roleplaying adjacent I could get my hands on. I did not get access to a computer until 1991, but when I did I went through a whole renaissance of discovery of games I missed along the way. I remember the release of Wolfenstein 3D and it completely blew my mind, and when Doom came out… it was an almost life-changing experience.

I mean for decades we would have moments where geek and gamer culture would flirt with the mainstream, but never quite break through. The turning point for me was really when Dungeons and Dragons Third Edition was released and the entire D20 system. Living through this was weird because suddenly you saw gigantic kiosks of reasonably priced books everywhere. Prior to the launch of this system, you had to go to either a comic book store or a dedicated game store to get your pen and paper fix, but now in the middle of Barnes and Noble were aisles of prime real estate selling copies of the three core books for $15-20 each instead of the previous $40-50 each. Having survived the Satanic Panic, and the era of having to hide your roleplaying game books from parents… I was completely flabbergasted seeing these things not only in public but prominently advertised.

The video I linked above specifically pointed to The Guild as the origin of the rise of geek culture, but for me by the time that happened the ball had already been rolling. For the first time in my life, I felt truly seen as a geek and gamer. However, it also diluted the potency of what those things meant. For most of my life reading comics, playing video games, reading fantasy novels, and obsessing about science fiction branded me a member of an underclass. I don’t have quite as many harrowing stories of abuse at the hands of peers as some members of my generation do, but I did develop a hearty dislike towards the jock supermen that ran the defacto social structure. Suffice to say though that it was really fucking weird to see the things we practiced in the dark for fear of safety, being drug out into the light for all to see.

However, it also set up this weird dichotomy where if everyone was a geek and interested in geeky things… was anyone really a geek? There had almost developed a tribal language shared among geek culture as a sign that you were “among friends” and could loosen up and talk shop, and the signals started to get a bit confused. In the 90s if you saw someone wearing a Vampire the Masquerade T-Shirt, you knew without a doubt that you had found a member of your tribe. If they had a D&D players handbook or a copy of Shadowrun tucked in their book bag… then you might have just met a brand new lifelong best friend. The shared social fabric was so strong in part because there was so little material for us to consume. Now that geek culture was blowing up… the shared narrative also disappeared and what geek meant to each person was wildly different.

It was admittedly a bit of an adjustment when I realized that this shared experience that I had and that my friends had… was not as “shared” as I thought it was. That this culture that I found safety in, was openly harmful to so many. As Geek culture became mainstream, it to some extent failed to realize that it was becoming mainstream. I know for me personally, growing up feeling like the underdog… made it really hard to reconcile that I was no longer the underdog and in fact held way more power than I ever realized I held. Some folks never got that memo or had that realization and started to weaponize this “sense of oppression” into an exceptionally toxic culture of gatekeeping. It was a ball rolling down the hill gaining momentum and reaching its horrific crescendo with GamerGate.

Somewhere along the way, I stopped “feeling seen” and started “feeling exploited”. It is weird how Funko Pops for me is the focal point of this shift. When they first came into existence I thought they were pretty cool. As a kid, I wanted nothing more than He-Man, GI Joe, and Star Wars to all be on the same scale and be interchangeable so that all of the geek properties that I loved could exist in the same universe. Funko did this and created a ubiquitous look and feel… and happened to gather up all of these properties that I loved. Then over time combined with the deluge of so many figures every single year… I noticed how mass-produced everything felt.

The video specifically calls out Loot Crate, but it is even more than that. Walmart has an entire aisle now with nothing but merchandise tailored towards geek properties. I remember my jaw dropping and hitting the floor the first time when I saw a Dungeons and Dragons boxed set in Target. “Geek” is now the new “Sports” memorabilia and you can get a triforce branded on any item you can imagine. Our passion for these properties we grew up with, and that were the source of deep emotional bonding moments… are now being churned out and mass produced. The industrial machine does what it always does and finds a way to market its products to every generation. We are in the era of video games and geekery, and as a result, everything is applied with a coat of nostalgia to sell to that specific sensibility.

The wake-up call though is this foundational identity that I have carried with me into my soon-to-be late forties… isn’t really a thing. I’ve branded myself a gamer and a geek, and I find myself increasingly questioning what those two titles even mean right now. At a point in the past, they did have specific meanings associated with it but are no longer quite the cultural monolith that I thought them to be. Every gamer and every geek now has wildly different experiences associated with those words. The truth is… I don’t want to rebel against that notion but instead, embrace it. It is maybe time for those labels to die. If everyone is a gamer and everyone is a geek, then no one is really either and we are just people doing the things we love. There should be more people happy to share the things that they love in life. Hopefully, in time the toxicity will also fade and we can be okay with just liking the things we like, and not caring what others think about them. The post Fall of Geek and Gamer appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.