Good morning folks. I thought I would continue this morning with some of my discussion about titles that I have been playing over on Microsoft Game Pass. I think one of the great things about that service is that it serves to breathe new life into titles that maybe got lost in the mix. For example I remember Super Luckys Tale coming out, but I also don’t remember much press positive or negative about it. Out of curiosity the other night I decided to give it a spin, because with the Game Pass it is super easy to dip my toes into new experiences. Much to my surprise this is a really freaking fun game, and I think it deserves a lot more attention than it has gotten.
You play as Lucky, a fox that got sucked into another realm by an evil wizard and you ultimately need to collect all of the pages of a magical book in order to return home to your family. Structurally the game works a lot like Mario 64 with its stars mechanic, but instead of stars you are collecting pages of the magic book. Once you have enough pages you can use the book to unlock the door to the boss of a given zone which will then allow you to progress to the next zone. In any given level there are multiple objectives which also might remind you of that Mario 64 formula.
Mechanically you have a tail whip similar to the Raccoon suit from Mario 3, and the ability to burrow in the ground to move faster and avoid certain combat situations. Popping up under something knocks the target up into the air. The game has a pretty broad mix of 2D style side scrolling levels and more open world 3D levels. I think for me what makes the game work is how freaking well animated everything is and who good it feels to run around as this cute fox. The levels are not exactly challenging, but the fun and pacing makes it a really enjoyable lighthearted game experience. This would be the ideal platformer for a kid just getting used to the controller because it is extremely forgiving with plenty of lives to be found.
Similar to the Koopa Kids, each world that you encounter is controlled by a member of the “Kitty Litter”. So far I have fought a Ninja, a Mad Scientist, and the realm that I just started is seemingly controlled by a Kitty version of Napoleon and his giant oafish companion. The end of zone fights feel more like a Sonic the hedgehog encounter than that of Mario, where you are trying to interact with the zone in order to defeat the enemy more than stomping on their head three times. In one case I had to fling enemies back at the boss by burrowing under them and popping up, and in another case I had to interact with a number of switches to make something happen. Easy to figure out puzzles in general but still enjoyable.
Scattered through the levels are also a number of hidden secret areas. This zone for example had a number of these puzzles where you had to move pieces in such a way as to land the fox statue on the green plus sign. None of them were terribly complex but still fun to solve. Essentially this is not a frustration side-scroller, so if you crave that sort of interaction then maybe look elsewhere. Over the last few years there are a number of games that have come out that are really wallowing in that “nintendo hard” games model. This is more something you play casually for awhile for enjoyment rather than something that you fight with to feel pride in surviving the battle. Seeing as I play games for the escape that they give me, rather than as an achievement… I am perfectly fine with this style of experience.
If you already have Game Pass then I highly suggest you give this game a spin, especially if you have younger gamers in your midst. For those who don’t have game pass and are still curious, this was released widely and is I believe available on pretty much every platform. I’m three zones in and have been playing this as my wind down game each night. Having a lot of fun doing so.
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Good Morning Friends. One of the negative effects of posting as early as I do each morning and only writing a single post each day… is that occasionally I miss some big story and end up digesting it a day later. In some aspects this is a good thing, because often times as the day goes on more details are released. This was absolutely the case for the news that broke yesterday moments after hitting the publish button that Microsoft would be acquiring Activision/Blizzard/King in an almost $70 billion dollar deal. There is so much to unpack in this once you get over the initial shock of hearing it. Quite frankly I was shocked when I heard that Microsoft had acquired Zenimax in September of 2020, but this really is a whole new level of surprise.
After the cards fell to the table yesterday, I have to say my current reaction still matches my initial reaction. I have a lot of hope about this merger. On one hand the last thing we need are more mega corporations controlling the media that we consume. On the other hand however, so far Microsoft has been a really good steward of the properties that they have acquired. I look at those initial studios that were consumed beginning in 2018, and I see a bunch of thriving studios with seemingly happy employees. I’ve been following Undead Labs for quite some time and they continue to tinker away on State of Decay 2, releasing free content updates while working on the third game and generally seem to be having a good time of it. Double Fine studios just released Psychonauts 2, and by most accounts it is the best release in that series and one of the better games to come out of that studio period.
However you cannot talk about Activision and Blizzard without talking about the horrible state of the company over the last few years. Essentially there are two problems that I have a very hard time separating. The first obviously is the cavalcade of abuse and toxic behavior that has been sheltered within that company and its subsidiaries that goes all the way to the top. I’ve written about this several times, but effectively 2021 was the year when I just didn’t play Blizzard games because I didn’t feel right about supporting that company in any way. That however is a double edged sword, because if you don’t play the games and buy the products the great employees who are struggling to make the company a better place suffer.
While I am not actively playing any Blizzard games, I still have a lot of friends that work there and as a result I try to amplify messages that I see floating around my timeline and even add my own in from time to time. I cannot see how Microsoft acquiring ActiBlizz is not a net positive for the employees. It was heartwarming seeing random people who work for different branches of Microsoft or studios that they have acquired welcoming the Blizz employees into the family. These were not coming from slick marketing accounts, but instead some random outspoken dev at this company or that company offering resources. My favorite one of these threads was from the Lead of the Accessibility program inviting them the newcomers to join in the conversation about gaming and disability.
I don’t think there is any way that Microsoft will not clean house at Activision Blizzard, and while the initial statements indicated that Bobby Kotick would be remaining on as the CEO, as the day went on it came out that this would be only until the merger was complete. The thing about this merger is that Microsoft is now responsible for the mess that Activision Blizzard made. There is no way that they go into that without having a game-plan on how to improve the situation, and quite honestly in the original announcement there is a paragraph that is very telling. Most specifically that last sentence in the image above is corporate speak for putting everyone on notice that things would be changing. I hope that the end result is a better environment for my friends still at Blizzard, and with it more creative freedoms to take games in directions other than trying to wring value out of a dwindling player base.
The other issue that Blizzard has is that the games themselves are trending in the wrong direction. It has been awhile since I have seen brilliance come out of that studio. There is part of me that desperately wants to believe that in part this lack greatness has been brought on by the awful working conditions and corporate meddling pushing the games towards more “mobile mechanics”. I can’t say that with any certainty, but I can hope. My hope is that Microsoft acquisition will create some breathing room and allow the studio to invest more in quality assurance and support staff and improve the general feel of the environments. I want to care about these games again, and I want to see them turn around and be as fun as they used to be.
This acquisition more than anything I believe is about the intellectual property that these studios hold. Microsoft lost the last generation for a bunch of reasons, but in part because they focused on chasing the non-gamer audience and moved away from exclusives. While I fully expect anything that is currently out and available for the Sony PlayStation will continue to be supported, this merger does put in jeopardy anything new. Starfield for example from Bethesda has already been announced to be coming to Xbox and PC exclusively, and I would not be shocked if the next big Blizzard project after this is complete will release in a similar manner. I am a PC gamer primarily so this console war never really impacted me directly, and additionally recently I have joined team Xbox and picked up a Series X to compliment my PS5. I am in this lucky position to not need to care about exclusivity boundaries, but I know there are folks this will actively harm and that is frustrating.
One top of the bulk acquisition of IP, I think this is also about adding value to Xbox Game Pass. It is already a phenomenal deal, but the fact that big games are releasing to the service on day one means that a lot of folks will be lured into the Xbox ecosystem and its “Netflix for Games” business model. Quite frankly right now Microsoft has the best business strategy going forward in that it meets the gamers where they are currently. If you want high quality 4k gaming then you have the Series X, and if your budget is still in 1080p realms there is the Series S. If you are a PC Gamer then the Game Pass still brings to the table all of the big Microsoft titles and a good number of third parties each month for you to download and play. If all you have is a mobile phone then you have XCloud which does a phenomenal job of streaming back these games in that form factor. I’ve played quite a bit of XCloud laying in bed knowing that my save games are going to be available later on both my XSX console and my gaming PC Upstairs.
What makes Game Pass so damned good for the players though is the availability of titles and the freedom of exploration. For example last night I downloaded and spent most of the night playing New Super Lucky’s Tale, which is a game that had been on my radar but never really made it to purchase territory. It is a delightful game and I would highly recommend it, and quite frankly I am probably going to write an entire post about it. However without Game Pass it is highly likely that I never would have played it. There are so many titles already in my short time with my XSX that I have sampled and found that I really enjoyed. I also played Archvale last night which is a delightful throw back that imagines a blend of Legend of Zelda and a Twin-stick Shooter. I’ve already talked at length about The Gunk, which again I never would have played were it not available on Game Pass.
I saw comments from folks off and on throughout the day about what this is going to mean for the blending of properties. Many folks commented about Master Chief showing up in Heroes of the Storm, but I just happened to choose my friend Shirin to screenshot. The thing is… I am so freaking on board with this nonsense. I want to see all of the characters from all of these now Microsoft owned properties blending together in interesting ways. I love game crossovers and I would love to see even characters like Banzo and Kazooie showing up in Heroes of the Storm or Blizzard themed Minecraft packs. There is so much room for stepping out of the lines and creating truly bizarre and interesting connections between the games.
As far as predictions for the future go. I think one of two things is going to happen with World of Warcraft, either we close this game and create a new more console friendly sequel or the original gets retooled to be controller friendly. Microsoft has shown that they are pretty committed to the multi-platform nature of their ecosystem and as a result I am not sure how many “PC Only” titles will continue to exist. I also think that we are going to see a dusting off of properties that were considered “not profitable” by Activision like Starcraft and see modern development that is similarly platform agnostic. I would love to see my beloved Diablo 3 reach a point where there is parity between the console and PC releases and the two can play together freely. That however is probably a pipe dream, but I fully expect that to be the case with Diablo 4.
Honestly more than anything I have this glimmer of hope that maybe this is going to improve the situation at Blizzard. I would love to be able to play Diablo 3 again with my friends in our ritual of starting new characters each season. I miss that camaraderie and there really has not been a game that we have found that captures the feeling in quite the same way. I would love to see World of Warcraft in a state where I am happy to play it again as well. I think maybe that is a bridge too far because honestly I am not on board with the direction the story has gone there, but it would still be nice to see that as an option. I know friend who work for Microsoft and they are happy, and I have seen that the early acquisitions have seemingly thrived under their yoke. I am not sure what the end result of this is going to be and it is almost certain that Kotick will have a golden parachute… but I do have faith that he will be gone and it will be a good thing.
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This morning’s post is going to be a little different from my usual fare. I’ve shared a bunch of details about my life over the course of the almost thirteen years of this blog. One that I am certain I have talked about before is the fact that in High School I worked for Sports Card and Comic shop owned by a friend of mine. The store was founded in 1989 which is a fortuitous year when it comes to sports card collecting, because in 1989 the Upper Deck Company released it’s very first trading card set and ultimately changed the entire industry. Over the course of the next few years until the crash began in 1992 we saw the average price of a pack of cards go from around $0.50 to around $3 as manufacturers stumbled over themselves to create newer and flashier sets to attract what seemed like a bottomless market of collectors.
If you are curious about this era you can check out this excellent article, but effectively two things happened. The first was extremely high print runs to attempt to meet the ravenous demand of all of these new “collectors”. The second thing was the fact that said demand was not legitimate. Most of this massive increase of collecting was brought on by speculators and those who got caught up in the wave of hype. For awhile baseball cards were considered to be a better investment than gold, and the crowd wisdom spawned countless weekend card shows where mom and pop stores like the one I worked at sold and traded huge volumes of cards. My weekends during this era were spent going to roadside ramadas and camping out a makeshift tradeshow floors looking for anything that could be bought cheaply or vendors that we could flip our own merchandise to.
When the market began crashing in sports card, so many people pivoted to another market that had been long overlooked… comic books. We were in the middle of some events happening in comics that were somewhat unique as well. We were well in the “hero artist” era of comics, where big name artists sold books more than the stories or characters that were in them. In late 1991 Tod McFarlane, Jim Lee, Rob Liefeld, Marc Silvestri, Erik Larsen, Jim Valentino, and Whilce Portacio broke away from Marvel Comics to form their own imprint Image Comics. On February 1st a press release was sent out announcing the formation of the group and then follows a sequence of first issues that caused panic and frenzy in comic collectors.
Youngblood #1 – April 1992
Spawn #1 – May 1992
Shadowhawk #1 – June 1992
Savage Dragon #1 – July 1992
Wildcats #1 – August 1992
Cyber Force #1 – October 1992
Since our sports card business was failing… the shop pivoted hard along with the rest of the collectables market into comic books. Everything became valuable and rare from the insanely sought after Valiant comic first issues to a whole slew of gorgeous books from Dark Horse. What followed however was the same nonsense that happened in sports cards as Marvel, DC, and a slew of smaller imprints fought to capture the same sort of attention these first few Image books did. Before long we were in the era of Diamond Distributors touting another must buy #1 issue every single month and with it the nonsense of multiple chase covers and limited edition lenticular chroma plated covers. By 1993 this spectacle was in free fall brought on by the overwhelming nonsense surrounding the Death of Superman. If you want more detail then check out something like this article that talks a bit more about the crash.
Speculative bubbles are always going to be a thing. For years I have felt like we were on the edge of bursting in Magic the Gathering. This card is Wheel of Fortune, which is both an iconic card… but also one that held little value for a really long time. Specifically I am looking here at the Revised edition of the card… which is a truly massive print run as far as magic cards go. This card has seen its prices go from around $8 in 2013 to now selling for upwards of $300. I point this card out specifically because it has been the subject of several targeted buyouts attempting to raise the price of the card by lowering the available supply on the market. The thing is… it has worked and now what used to be a card I didn’t even bother sleeving is now goes in the “most valuable” storage of my collection.
We are now finally getting to the subject of today’s blog post. We are currently living through a bubble in video games that potentially out scales all of the bubbles I have talked about to this point. I was firmly a child of the 90s era consoles and as a result when I got my first job and started making legitimate money… I begin snapping up all of those consoles that I used to dream about owning. I mean as a kid I was lucky because I had a NES, Gameboy, SNES and eventually a Genesis. However I lusted after all of those fringe consoles that I never had access to and through short succession in the early 2000s I snapped most of them up in those early heady days of Ebay and Yahoo Auctions. Nostalgia is a powerful drug and now most of those systems that I snapped up for a few bucks here and there at flea markets, garage sales, and auctions are priced well out of the reach of folks. My complete Atari Jaguar for example that I think I paid $50-70 for initially now goes for somewhere in the neighborhood of $600.
The height of this nonsense though can be most clearly seen in the prices of loose copies of Super Mario Bros for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I remember not too terribly long ago you could pick up a refurbished NES for $15 and almost always got a free copy of the original Super Mario Bros thrown in along with it. Now that raw loose copy itself goes for upwards of $20 and you can see on the graph above its rise in price really spiked in 2017. For me at least I collected games because I wanted to play them and get to experience the things that I never did as a child. As a result I ultimately realized that I am perfectly happy playing the games emulated as opposed to having to own a physical copy. However there is a whole other breed of collector that is seeking out the most complete copies of the games they can get their hands on.
Along with these genuine collectors seeking to rebuy chunks of their childhood or the nostalgia of walking through Toys R Us during the heyday of the late 80s, have come the speculators. There is a burgeoning business in trying to flip games for profit. What has added gasoline to this fire is that the lockdowns and the general shit state of the world right now has seemingly spurred on this massive desire to recapture a part of simpler times. Amazon and Ebay as a result have become a hotbed of folks looking to source games cheaply and sell them for ever increasing profits. There are many YouTube channels devoted to this reseller lifestyle of showing folks going out into the “wild” and getting good deals and then flipping them for double the money. The problem is I don’t think any of this is sustainable and I question what permanent damage is going to be wrought when this market crashes like was ultimately done to the sports card and comic markets.
The most disturbing thing about this particular bubble however is that it is being seemingly artificially propped up by a questionable relationship between a grading company and a private auction site. I can’t really do it justice but there are several sources that have reported on the alleged connections between Wata Games, Heritage Auctions, and a number of shill bidders that have artificially inflated the price of graded games going up for Auction. The end result is we seem to be in this landrun of folks looking to get rich quick by flipping their old video games and feeling like they have a goldmine. I had noticed a bit of this myself as through my frequent trips to Half Priced Books… I noticed the $5 games turning into $15 games and more recently turning into $50 games. Retro gaming right now is a truly unsustainable mess and as a result I find myself sitting here waiting on the other shoe to drop.
I leave this last image as another cautionary tale. No one really wants video game collecting to be the next Beanie Babies. I will say one of the nice side effects of this bubble however has been an increased interest in emulation and with it better devices coming out to market. Similarly there are also way more affordable flash carts allowing you to easily play roms on the original hardware. Effectively these are all more viable solutions in part because the price of games is such that even if you do own the original game… it feels like you are risking your investment if you actually play it. We live in interesting times.
The post Waiting for the Burst appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
I talked briefly about this yesterday, but I very recently got my hands on an Xbox Series X. I’ve had a PlayStation 5 since November of last year thanks to being able to snag a day one pre-order, but the companion console has eluded me. Essentially I had planned on upgrading both given that I had an aging first generation PS4 and Xbox One, but fate and the great console shortage conspired to make that a bigger challenge that I had originally expected. I went for the PS5 thinking it would by far be the harder to get… because going into this console generation it had the greater share of the buzz. In truth however… I have watched as all of the AggroChat podcast has slowly managed to get their hands on PS5s throughout the year while I still came up short each time I went after an Xbox Series X.
Yesterday a friend of mine asked me how I got my hands on it, and in truth it was a lot of diligence and just sheer dumb luck. Ahead of Christmas I managed to get into one of the Walmart stock refreshes and held my mouth just right as it allowed me to actually make it through the check out process. The challenge then was that my unit was not slotted to ship until the new year… so I didn’t want to jinx anything until it was actually in my hands. Ultimately 99.9% of my notifications about when things are back in stock come from either the venerable Wario64 or Cheap Ass Gamer and I highly recommend following both accounts. My good friend Dusty swears by NS_Alerts and more specifically their discord server for getting product stock updates. Another source is NowInStock.net, but to be honest I have yet to actually be notified first by that site and still continue to get most of my deals from Wario or CAG.
Now I am doing what everyone does when they get a new machine of any sort… installing a bunch of games and trying them out. I spent a good chunk of the weekend sitting downstairs on the sofa playing assorted titles. I suck horribly at Forza Horizon 5, but I have to say one of the thing that I really appreciate about it is that it doesn’t make you FEEL like you suck. That announcer has to be one of the most positive voices ever in gaming and I have also since dialed down the difficulty level because quite frankly the only driving games I have played in two decades are Mario Karts. I really dig the huge open world playground feel of the game and that it gave me a new Bronco as one of the starting vehicles.
I spent some time playing the game preview of Anvil Vault Breaker, which sorta feels like if Risk of Rain were a Twinstick shooter with more persistent upgrades. I think that is one of the things that I dig the most about Game Pass is having this huge library of things that I can just try on a whim. One of the more interesting things for me is that I have not used a console in the living room for probably the entire time we have owned our house. I’ve always had a separate gaming space that was either my office or the loft before that, and I guess I finally understand the charm a bit of console gaming… as the rest of the world sees it.
For so many years I have shied away from dominating our main television, because I largely considered that to be communal space. The reality however is that we don’t really watch television apart from tuning in for the news. Generally speaking if we are downstairs, I am on my laptop playing a game remotely from my desktop upstairs and my wife is reading a book on her tablet or surfing the web on her laptop. Often times if the television is on… it is muted. So the truth is unless it is a very specific situation… the television is going unused. I was also a bit concerned about interrupting my wife by making things loud… but then realized that both the XSX and the PS5 have controllers that allow you to pass audio through to a headphone jack in the controller.
For years I kept things in my office, in part so I could capture video off the consoles if I wanted to. The truth is this is actually still a reason why I have been hesitant to move downstairs entirely. I am not sure WHAT I would be recording however. The only time I record videos these days are explaining concepts or showing a farming route… and that tends to be in some game that I am playing on the PC. For consoles I can capture screenshots well enough, and while you have to jump through a number of hoops to make it work… I still can pull those across well enough for blog posts. The other thing that is leading me towards spending most of my free time downstairs is that I have been remote now going on three years. My upstairs is beginning to feel like “work” and as a result when the day is over and I clock out… I tend to gravitate downstairs instead of wanting to spend more time in my office upstairs.
I’ve had an order in for Darkplates 2.0 since November, and in theory I should be getting mine sometime before the end of this month. Since I would be needing to orient my PS5 in the horizontal position… and the darkplates are shown to have greatly improved airflow for the unit… I might wait until then to migrate it downstairs. I think more than anything I am hoping that maybe shifting up things will make me actually start to take advantage more often of my consoles. They have never really fit my gaming life since the Dreamcast era, in part because I have been so focused on MMORPGs. I always have this desire to have the latest console generation… but then spend very little of my time actually using them. We will see what actually happens in the coming months and if this new style of play is just a fluke for me.
Last night for example I specifically spent most of the night playing Witcher 3 again on the PC, because I really do want to finish this play through.
The post Readjusting to Console Gaming appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
